Chasing Shadows(2)
Vangie sprinted into the shade of the open barn and the horses reacted immediately, shying away and whinnying in fear, their eyes going wide. I grabbed Hasufeld’s halter and held onto it, murmuring soothingly—he was the only one of the four I’d gotten done.
“Can’t you quiet these beasts down?” Vangie complained as she whipped off the scarf and sunglasses.
I narrowed my eyes as I looked at her over my shoulder. “They’re afraid of you, Vangie.”
She snickered. “They should be. I could snap their sweaty necks with one hand.”
Hasufeld and his brother, Brego, as well as their parents Herugrim and Hadhafang, all continued to whinny, stamping their feet restlessly. I could hear Moe and Cissy still barking incessantly from the kennel, and I was suddenly glad the cows were already out to pasture and that the pig pen and chicken coop were separate constructs on the outside of the barn at the far end—the birds and pigs wouldn’t react unless she came near them. I was never going to get the horses calmed while she was standing there, and certainly wouldn’t be able to get them out of their stalls. “Could you please go back out to your car so I can get them to settle down?”
She looked at me with no small amount of incredulity. “Are you kidding me? You know what will happen to me out there,” she whined.
I rolled my eyes at her melodramatic performance. “Vangie, I’m just going to put them outside, but I can’t do that with you standing there.”
It occurred to me that I could just leave them in their stalls and take her into the house, then come back out to them when she had left, but I was already annoyed just by the fact that she was here. Making her wait for me was a little bit of revenge for her interruption of my routine, even if it was a bit juvenile.
Vangie growled, shoving the sunglasses on and jerking the scarf back into place on her head. “Fine, but don’t be too long. I’d like to go home sometime today.”
I shook my head as she sprinted back out to her car and got in—like I was going to be taking orders from her. Still, I did make quick work of getting my four beauties out of their stalls and out the other end of the barn into the pasture. Not because I was doing it for her, but because I was doing it for them…and because I wanted to get rid of her as quickly as possible. I hurried back through the barn after closing the gate behind the last of the horses and knocked on the driver’s side window of her Lexus. Vangie didn’t respond so I knocked again, this time with more force just in case she was ignoring me on purpose. When she didn’t respond to that, I reached for the handle and jerked the door open.
“Shit,” I muttered, then reached in to grab her. Vangie had fallen asleep—and I was surprised by how quickly she had done so, as I couldn’t have been more than ten minutes at my task. This was the real reason vampires didn’t venture out during the day much: RMPC, or Reversed Melatonin Production Cycle. In normal humans, melatonin was a major component of regulating the biological clock; light inhibited production and darkness permitted it, and because increased amounts of melatonin in the system promoted sleepiness, it was known in the human scientific community as the “hormone of darkness.”
In vampires however, the pineal gland—where the hormone was produced—worked backwards, producing more melatonin in the light and less of it in the dark. Medical science eventually revealed the cause of vampires’ nocturnal nature early in the 20 century; our doctors had discovered that not only was melatonin production reversed, but also that a vampire’s pineal gland produced so much of the hormone during daylight hours he could become all but comatose. As many of my father’s kind had found to his or her detriment over the millennia, this deep sleep was a risk to their continued health and safety because it made one vulnerable to all methods of attack. A vampire could be burned alive if caught unawares in the middle of the day, and history showed that humans had pulled that trick more than once on suspected vampires, until they began convincing themselves they weren’t real after all…
…or were beguiled into forgetting.
Grabbing my sister under the arms, I hauled her out of the driver’s seat and threw her over my shoulder. I kicked the door shut, leaving a dusty footprint she was likely to bitch about later, and hurried into the house. Laying Vangie down on the couch, I quickly removed the scarf, gloves and jacket she was wearing and then went into the kitchen. I pulled a bottle of pig’s blood out of the fridge and poured some into a mug, then put that in the microwave and heated it for about a minute. When the microwave dinged, I grabbed a plastic spoon from the silverware drawer and stirred it, then carried it out to the living room. Perching on the edge of the couch, I took Vangie’s head in my free hand and, holding the cup to her slightly parted lips, tipped it and slowly poured some of the hot liquid into her mouth.
Almost immediately she began to swallow, and after a moment or so she opened her eyes. I pulled the cup away and stared down at the frown she was wearing with a raised eyebrow.
“What is that awful stuff?” she asked.
“Pig’s blood. From one of my own animals here on the farm,” I replied, holding the cup out to her as I stood.
She waved it away. “No thank you, it’s disgusting.”
I rolled my eyes as I picked up a limp arm and placed the cup in her hand. “Deal with it. Pig and cow is all I have, and you obviously need the nutrition. When was the last time you fed?”
Drinking blood regularly instead of only when they needed to feed boosted a vampire’s resistance to the backward cycle of their melatonin production, a lot like a human taking caffeine pills to stay up at night. Evangeline knew this as well as I did.
Though she continued to make a sour face, Vangie nevertheless put the mug back to her lips and drank as she slowly sat up. “How can you drink this muck?” she asked me after taking a swallow.
I shrugged as I moved to sit on the other end of the couch. “You get used to it. Better to drink animal blood than be a murderer.”
Vangie narrowed her eyes at me. “Humans murder animals to feed, Saphrona. You murder them to feed.”
I sighed. I’d already had this discussion with her, and it looked like I was going to have to have it yet again. “First of all, certain animals were put on this planet by God specifically to be consumed—”
“If I believed in God, I might say that humans were put here to feed us vampires.”
“—and second,” I went on, ignoring her remark, “I don’t kill my animals. I draw their blood and store it. And you didn’t answer my question: When was the last time you fed? You should have had something before coming out here, at least.”
“I was planning on going out tonight, Mom,” she said snidely. “Been thinking of acquiring myself a vessel.”
Vessels were humans who were regularly used as donors. A vampire could bite a human without injecting draculin and making another vampire, but so few of us had the discipline to keep from killing even to do that. Once we tasted blood during feeding, especially human blood, we almost never stopped.
I refrained from lecturing Vangie on why I thought making some poor human a vessel was wrong. If a vampire was actually strong enough to bite but not kill—and didn’t turn the human—then he or she created what was known as a blood bond with that human. The vampire was connected to the human by a form of extrasensory perception, through which he or she could then find their vessel anywhere the human was. The bond’s strength faded over time to the point of dissolving completely, so the vampire would have to feed from the human regularly to maintain it. To me, this was a practice that was much akin to slavery, and I hated it.
Instead of the tirade I so wanted to fire at her, I swallowed my displeasure and asked her, “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Vangie had made it clear countless times that I was not on her list of favorite people, so despite my annoyance at her arrival, I was, of course, more than a little curious as to why she had shown up on my doorstep. Then again, her coming to see me when she disliked me so much meant that she hadn’t done so of her own accord. Diarmid had probably sent her.
“Father wants to see you,” she said, and I could see the words sat as bitterly on her tongue as the pig’s blood.
“Diarmid could have called,” I replied, even though Vangie probably knew that if he had, I’d have ignored the phone—thank goodness for caller I.D. I also had a cell phone like most people did nowadays, but he had yet to get hold of that number because it was unlisted.
As if reading my thoughts, Vangie frowned. “Father knows you won’t answer if he calls,” she said. “So he asked me to come and plead his case for him.”
And I bet you just loved being made his errand girl, I thought but managed to refrain from saying. “What does he want to see me for?” I asked instead.
Vangie downed the last swallow of pig’s blood, grimaced, and set the mug down on the coffee table. She then gestured toward the copy of Vampire I’d been reading last night. “I believe he wants you to track down that Vivian Drake bitch.”