Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [146]
“Monsters? Is that what you think? We’re none of us more monstrous than we were before we turned. If you don’t want to believe that, then I won’t make you, but you ought to be kicking yourself, you know. It’s a hell of an opportunity you’ve squandered. You should’ve just recruited some of us on the up-and-up, but now that’s never going to happen. There’s not a vamp on earth who’d have anything to do with you, now.”
One corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer of irony—the worst kind of sneer, in my opinion. “Is that what you think?”
Well, yeah … but I refused to show him that I knew I might be wrong. I asked, “After Bloodshot went belly-up, why’d you start it again?”
“That’s a complicated answer.”
“Break it down for me,” I said, hoping I injected the command with a hearty dose of menace.
“I, personally, didn’t reopen the damn thing. Surely you can understand that, can’t you? I was just a guy collecting a paycheck. I didn’t have the authority or the resources to take it elsewhere.”
It almost made me sad, how calm and cool he was. This was a guy who’d been under fire before—literally, I imagined—and he’d come out the other side as a guy I could almost like, if he weren’t a total fucking maniac. My initial impressions held true. We were more alike than either of us would’ve admitted. I cast a glance at Adrian, still keeping his distance, and still just as tense but calm as the rest of us. I wondered if he was thinking along those same lines, or if he was too angry with the major to identify with him in any way.
As if my glance had given Adrian a nudge, he asked the next question. “Then who did pull the trigger? Who paid to launch it as a civilian operation?”
He smirked. The son of a bitch actually smirked. “I don’t know the whole answer to that,” he flat-out lied. Then he said, directly to me, “But what I do know, you won’t like.”
“There’s not much about you or your program I do like, so whatever you want to spill, I think I can take it,” I replied.
His hands waved casually, idly … like he was trying to remember a recipe for soup. “I never heard the whole story, but I do know he’s one of yours.”
“One of … what?”
“He’s like you. Undead, or whatever.”
“Why would a vampire fund something as bizarre and fucked up as Bloodshot?” I demanded to know. “That doesn’t make any sense—”
“He’s a real self-hater. Didn’t want to become like you. It was forced on him, as a punishment for something—and don’t ask. Because I don’t know what.”
“No.” I shook my head, taking my eyes off him for an instant, then remembering myself and locking down his gaze again. “No, that’s not true. That’s not how it works with my kind. The Houses don’t turn people to punish them. It’s a gift. A reward.”
“It’s not much of a reward if they mutilate you first. Eternal life is pretty shitty if you can’t see, or hear—or taste or smell. Really, honey. That’s my idea of hell.”
He had my interest now and he knew it, but he’d told me more than he meant to—and he didn’t know that. His story had a note of truth.
I only know of that punishment being doled out once every hundred years or so. It isn’t common. And on the rare occasion this terrible sentence is handed down, it’s always given to a ghoul. Vampires consider it a form of high irony, and fitting of only the severest betrayals. It’s used as a bedtime story to keep other ghouls in line. It adds the necessary element of threat to a relationship that’s entirely too important to be left at the mercy of love, or other friendly sentiments.
I said, “You’ve got a point there. It must be a miserable way to spend eternity.” And it would be eternity, too. Other vampires are forbidden from killing such a punished ghoul. Usually, he was kept in a cellar or something—watched like a hawk, to make sure he (or she, there I go again) doesn’t run out into the dawn to end it all.
It’s a serious punishment, intended to last. Vampires are vindictive. And they have very long memories, with plenty of room to hold very long grudges.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.