Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [92]
He swallowed. “She looked like you, but not exactly. You look less … you look more … it’s hard to say.” Giving it some thought, he amended the sentiment to say, “If you were really, really sick, maybe.”
“Um. Thanks?”
The hand that wasn’t holding the shovel flapped with frustration. “I could tell, when you came into the dressing room. I knew what you were, but not right away. It took me a minute. It took your eyes—the way they’re black like that, and the way you don’t … you don’t …” He derailed again.
“I don’t move like somebody who’s alive. I know what you mean.”
My beating heart stirs cold, recycled blood around. My skin doesn’t blush or flush unless I’m eating (or unless I’ve freshly eaten); you can’t see my pulse at those little spots on my neck and my wrists. Other people have noticed it before, and been similarly unable to articulate it. Vampires … we move like dolls, all clockwork and hydraulics, but no soul.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s it. But she didn’t look … healthy like you do. She looked like she was strung out on drugs, or starving to death.”
I made a noise that implied I was thinking, and I was. “Did you ask her about it? Did she tell you anything? My kind—we heal up fast, and survive things with, shall we say, aplomb.” I’ve seen hungry biters that looked like skin and bones, and that’s not pretty. But most of us don’t bother with drug abuse because our systems don’t process it well.
“Do your kind … do they ever do drugs?”
“Not most of us. We don’t have much reaction at all to those things.”
Leaning on the shovel, driving it an inch down into the turf, he observed, “But you were drinking last night. It changed the way you looked, and the way you spoke.”
“Did not,” I argued.
“Did too. It definitely had an effect.”
“Okay, fine. Alcohol does, yes. So does caffeine. Look, I can’t give you a list of what does and doesn’t work on us—I haven’t tried much myself. Mostly I’m giving you hearsay. All I can really tell you is that, as far as I know, most young vamps don’t shoot up or snort up. Maybe your sister was an exception.” I cocked my head at her stone. “Or maybe she stumbled into something weirder or worse. I have no idea.”
“I don’t either, and she wouldn’t say. Maybe she looked that bad when she was turned,” he ventured, but it wasn’t likely. Vampirism is like Photoshop for the flesh—it fills out, rounds off, smooths over, and brightens up everything. I’ve seen cancer patients turn into supermodels with a good undead infusion. So if his little sister looked like hell, it must’ve happened after her bite.
Adrian went on. “I asked what had happened and she wouldn’t say. She was frantic, and she kept talking about how her House had turned her over, whatever that means. Then she told me that she needed a place to hide during the day, and she begged me. She begged me …” His voice trailed off.
“What was that about a House?”
“I don’t know. She kept saying they were handing her in, or turning her over. But she didn’t say more than that. What’d she mean by a House, anyway? Is that a vampire thing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a vampire thing. Kind of like a family, only the blood relations are a different sort. Some of them are pretty powerful; some are barely little clans, living out on their own in the middle of nowhere.”
“Like hillbillies?”
“I wouldn’t have thought to put it like that.”
“But like hillbillies,” he said again, more certain this time.
“Fine. Like hillbillies.” Quite the mental image that scared up. I almost laughed.
“In cities I guess it’s different,” he mused. If I’d guessed where he was going in time, I would’ve changed the subject before he could go there, but I was slow, and I didn’t see it coming until he asked, “Is there a House that runs Atlanta?”
Yeah, there was a House running Atlanta. A big one. The biggest in the South, and one of the biggest vampire Houses, period. I swallowed. “Sure.”
“Only one