Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [13]
I picked at the metal tabs and squeezed the envelope to make its opening gape. Within, there were smaller envelopes, documents with black bars all over them, and something with a CONFIDENTIAL stamp that had been stamped over yet again with a mark that read DECLASSIFIED. I didn’t pull any of it out to examine it then and there. He might have been comfortable with it, but I wasn’t.
He told me, “That’s everything I have, and it ought to be everything you need. The short version is this: A group of animal rights activists used the Freedom of Information Act to release a pile of paperwork that had nothing to do with animal experimentation.” He set his wine off to the left side and started using his hands to gesture in time with his statements. I thought it was kind of cute. He’d been so uptight and controlled when I first arrived, and here he was wiggling his fingers over the table.
Ian continued, “The military had been deliberately tweaking the documents to indicate that the subjects were apes and chimpanzees, though they had an internal shorthand that designates the falsehood.”
“What’s this shorthand look like?”
“For vampires?” He said the word in a normal speaking voice; I doubted we were overheard, but it still made me itchy. “It’s a nine-digit serial number that begins with six-three-six.”
“Okay.” I made a mental note of it and continued to gaze down into the shadow of the envelope. “That’s easy enough to remember.”
“And keep your eyes open for anything relating to Project Bloodshot,” he said.
“Keep my eyes open. Very funny.”
The look on his face told me he hadn’t noticed he’d made a joke, but when he caught up to me he laughed, giving me a flash of teeth. They were nice teeth—picket-fence-straight with good, uniform shapes and a milky blue-white color. I’m something of a connoisseur of teeth, I suppose. You can learn a lot about someone by his teeth. Or her teeth. Especially vampires. For some of us, hygiene goes out the window when our body temperature drops. We might not need much in the way of deodorant, but I swear—a little Listerine never hurt anybody.
I could appreciate the fact that he couldn’t see for shit, but he cared enough to keep himself presentable. That’s dedication, right there. Or maybe it’s vanity. I didn’t know him well enough to say.
“Project Bloodshot,” I mused as his wine-fueled mirth ran its course. “Tacky.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“So they pretended on paper that you were a chimp and tinkered with your eyes, and the animal rights people got hold of the news, and they were incensed on your behalf. Or they would’ve been, if you’d been a monkey. Do they know you’re not a monkey?”
“I hope not. I certainly don’t intend to set them straight. It horrifies me enough that the government knows we’re not a bedtime story; the last thing we need is for well-meaning hippies to declare us an endangered species.”
He was being funny. I liked it. The red wine brought a little color to his face and made him look softer, warmer, and more like an ordinary guy instead of a powerful creature who had been crippled.
“Good point,” I said. “We’re close enough to extinction as it is. But far be it from me to try and bring us back from the brink.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Once in a while I get the feeling that I’m the last of my kind, alone in a godless universe. And then I …” He was hunting for a word. “Detect someone. Or I learn of someone, like you. And I find myself speculating about mysterious characters in the news, thinking that perhaps I’m less alone than I think.”
He said it like it was a pleasant thing to consider. But then again, he was a little drunk.
We chatted that way for the better part of an hour while I waited for him to sober up, or for Cal to return. I didn’t know which would happen first and I didn’t want to leave him to his own devices. Ian Stott might not have been helpless by any stretch of the imagination, but it unsettled me, the way his eyes wouldn’t focus behind those lenses, and I worried for him.
My distress over his condition could