All bleeds through, p.16
All Bleeds Through, page 16
part #0.50 of Into Vermilion Series
“If you’ll excuse me, ladies,” Colt said, wrestling with his own smile, “I need to get dressed. After all, scourge isn’t going to cure itself.”
The Wages of Her Sins
I
Everything bad happened in summer. It was a fact of life somewhere between truth and superstition which Lena had long ago come to accept. She still marked the passing of seasons with vigilant caution, for it took only the smallest mistake to bring catastrophe. For whatever reason, hemomancers like her seemed somehow more likely to fall victim to such lapses of discretion when the sun was high and the blood ran hot and bewildering. Even in the mild climate of Seattle’s sprawling suburbs, the curse of summer loomed over her, challenging her to drop her guard and throw everything she’d won away.
The rain had been falling off and on all day, and the afternoon’s close brought with it a new curtain of discontinuous downpours. The frosted glass windows of the kitchen were dark with gloom, though Lena found the pattering of droplets on the roof and walls of the condo soothing. The radio on the countertop buzzed with the dueling sounds of static and The All-American Rejects. The reception was always shit when it rained, but Lena didn’t care. She was only using it as background noise anyway.
Dinner was half-finished when the front door of the condo swung open and a joyful sputter of laughter greeted her. Her heart sang a little song at her fiancé’s return from work. She smiled broadly to herself and listened to the rustling of a raincoat being hung up and boots being pulled off. A moment later, Ben appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. His brown hair was drenched but his suit was dry, save for a few splatters that were probably inflicted by the removal of his raincoat. “Hey, baby,” he said with a grin.
“Help. A strange man is in my kitchen.”
Ben barked a laugh as he made his way over to her. His arms snaked around her hips and pulled her close to him. She giggled as his lips found her neck. “What do you say we have a little dessert before dinner?” he breathed into her ear.
She frowned. “Dammit, you should’ve texted me. I put the gratin in like five minutes ago. After?”
Ben sighed into her skin. “Fine.” His stubble rubbing against her cheek invited her chin upward, and he gave her a brief but deep kiss, infusing the distant taste of cigarettes into her lips. And just like that, he was retreating toward the living room, peeling his suit jacket off.
Lena gagged slightly once he was gone. She wished he’d stop smoking already. Her tongue scraped against her teeth, as though the lingering taste of tobacco and nicotine would come off like a crusty rash. “How was work?” she called after him. He gave back an answer which she couldn’t hear over the radio’s blaring.
Ben was a lucky man. He was barely out of college, but his future had been handed to him on a silver platter. His father, a first-generation Polish immigrant, had built himself a tiny construction empire with no more than a shovel and a handful of coins. An unfortunate heart attack had made Ben the owner of the entire enterprise, turning his father’s American dream into a fitting frame for his bachelor’s in business.
Lena thumbed the radio off, no longer reliant on its company. She cleared the cutting board of the iceberg lettuce before grabbing an onion and a cucumber from the basket of vegetables further back on the counter. Should’ve gone shopping before the rain started. It’s just not salad without carrots.
Ben returned a minute later, sans his formal attire. “Do anything interesting today?”
“Just the usual.” Looking for a job that required zero skills and zero experience was a full-time job in its own right. It was times like this she bitterly wished she’d been financially able to continue college instead of dropping out like the social outcast she secretly was.
“Hmph. I’m telling you, I can give you a secretary position at the office. You could stop stressing yourself out so much, and the pay beats anything you can possibly find in the Recycler’s wanted section.”
“That’s called nepotism. You don’t want to go to jail, do you?” She hacked the end of the cucumber off and began to chop the rest into thin slices. “I don’t want a job I didn’t earn.” If she was going to maintain employment, she at least wanted to feel good about it.
He laughed and sidled up behind her again. “Forget work and jobs for a sec,” he said, once more slipping his arms around her waist. “Here’s what I was thinking. Let’s take a vacation.”
Torn between the comfort of his arms and the tangible obstacle they presented, she struggled slightly against his grip. “Dammit, I’m cutting.”
“You can cut and listen at the same time. I was thinking Italy, maybe. A couple weeks, just the two of us. How does that sound?”
She allowed herself to be taken in by his embrace. She rolled her head back against his chest and considered him from below. She navigated the knife by feel and carefully resumed chopping the cucumber. “Sounds like a lofty idea worth developing into something a bit more concrete.”
“Couple weeks in Italy’s pretty concrete, ain’t it?”
“Remember last time you said we should take a vacation? Like a month ago?”
She could feel him thinking by the subtle rhythm with which his fingers played at the top of her jeans. “Yeah. Guess I kinda forgot that, didn’t I?”
“Ya sure did.” She chopped the last of the cucumber up and pushed it into a pile off to the side with the blade. “Get back to me when you’ve got something likely to actually happen.”
Ben chuckled and kissed her cheek. “Alright, fine, let’s make it happen this time. What do you think? Italy or France?”
She hummed in thought, rocking back into him slightly. She rolled the onion to the center of the cutting board. “I have to be honest. I’m not much of a Europe fan.”
“That’s because you’ve never been there. Once you’ve seen the Rio Grande with your own eyes, you’ll feel like a citizen of Italy.”
“The Rio Grande’s in Mexico.”
“Ouch. Guess I need to polish my sense of humor a bit.” He came in for another kiss on her neck, and Lena’s breath stuttered.
Half-distracted by her fiancé’s appetite, she pressed the knife into the onion. But the skin was too thick. The onion rocked violently, and the knife slipped. All the force she’d put into the slice guided the blade right into the side of her hand, and the pain immediately brought her out of her Ben-induced stupor.
“Ahh, fuck!” she spat, her hand clawing around the pain. A steady stream of blood sputtered from the stab wound onto the counter and cutting board, shining like melted garnets in the incandescent lighting.
Ben released her and leapt away in shock. “Jesus, I’m sorry! I didn’t—”
“It’s fine,” she answered, injecting some calm into her tone. “My fault.” She did not hesitate before letting her mind rustle over the shed droplets and take control of them. In one mental motion, she pulled the blood into a single small puddle and then reabsorbed it into her wound. It was a reflex of singular familiarity, one she had performed a thousand times before without a second thought. She only realized her mistake when she heard Ben’s shock and concern vanish into an awed silence. It took only a second and a half, but it was a second and a half that she immediately knew would change everything.
Her whole body went rigid. The blade danced against the cutting board as the nervous tremors traveled up and down her arm. She dared to exhale and gradually turned to where Ben stood.
His tenseness matched her own, and it was apparent in each sculpted limb. His eyes were wide, his complexion drained of all color. “What. The fuck. Was that.”
Holy shit, she thought to herself, very nearly whispering the words aloud into the thickening air. What was I thinking? All it took was one mistake—as she of all people should’ve known. She’d tried to believe that she had enough self-awareness not to do something so stupid as to use hemomancy in Ben’s presence. But it was too late. She had to diffuse the situation, somehow.
Her mind reeled in a panic, and she hit upon an idea that she knew was moments too late to change anything. Without recourse, she forced herself to discard the ingrained habit that kept her blood flowing safely. It seeped out slowly at first, and then in a torrent that she hoped contained the proper amount of blood for such a wound. The sound of the fluid slopping to the floor filled her stomach with nausea. “Don’t just stand there,” she choked out, trying to contain the warble of helpless terror that overtook her. “I need bandages.”
But Ben’s gaze drilled right through her. His face was wan, and his glistening eyes begged her to deny the truth. His jaw gaped, teeth angled toward a dawning realization that even the fountain of blood splattering against the pristine floor could not distract him from. “Hemo,” he whispered. “You’re a hemo.”
She shook her head. The trembling had moved to her shoulders and hips. “Ben, I…”
“Tell me it’s not true.” His voice shook with loss, as though he’d walked in on her in the midst of a torrid affair with his best friend. Lena would have done anything to soothe him, to convince him that it wasn’t what it looked like. But the sting of her betrayal invaded his features and consumed him from within. The look of supreme pain and vulnerability gave way to a grimace. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he hissed. “I knew there was something fucking wrong with you!” He turned and tore out of the kitchen. “But a fucking verm?!”
“Ben, don’t do this!” Though she meant to say it in a reassuring tone, it came out in the same hysterical warble that ran through each thought. Her legs almost refused to move as she chased his retreating back. The flow of blood stopped and reversed. There was no hiding it anymore. But maybe there was still a way to walk away from it. “I didn’t… I didn’t want you to have to know,” she called at him. “Ben, listen to me. I didn’t mean to trick you. I just… Ben, stop, just talk to me for a minute.”
He didn’t pause for even a second. He rounded the couch and advanced with silent purpose toward the bedroom. Not a single word answered her desperate cry for reason.
“Ben, come on! Wait!” She willed her legs to move her faster, but something was fighting her. On some level, she knew she had only a small window to escape. But love was the gravedigger of logic. She chose instead to stay and chase, and so she pursued him down the hall, crying his name and trying to stop the tears that were already forming.
He disappeared behind the door of the bedroom, and a loud clatter rang from within.
She was almost to the door when it swung back open and he reemerged. In his hand, he held a pistol—and he was pointing it square at her. Tears and sobs transformed his face into something hideous and unrecognizable. “Monster,” he barked, his hands quaking and making the barrel of the gun bob erratically from side to side. “You fucking monster! Give my Lena back to me!”
There was no fear in her heart. Only an ache she knew she deserved. Her own tears came hotter than before, blurring the sight of his face. “Ben. Don’t do this. Please. I love you.”
“Love?” A hysterical, rage-filled sob cut the word to shreds. “You’re a fucking hemo! What do you know about love?!” Clumsily, he racked the slide of the pistol and aimed it straight at her head.
One mistake is all it takes, she heard her father saying again. Quiet indignation, self-loathing, resignation. As she stood there, staring down the barrel of her fiancé’s gun, she was horrified to find Ben’s terror-stricken visage warped unrecognizable by his fear and hatred. It was an expression burned into her brain, one that by its very recollection proved what she knew about love—and about hate. Moments, separated by years of placebos and lies, bled together. The unthinkable happened: the face of her beloved had become the face of Tyler Lamm.
II
Lena had only been seven when she was made to understand her precarious place in the universe. It was a time of enviable innocence, when her parents allowed her and her twin sister Rebecca to run alone through the wild forests of Georgia, on the outskirts of the town of Sonora. Theirs was a small community, one their parents had sheltered them from. It took only a single mistake, her father had ominously warned, for everything to fall apart. Lena didn’t know what was meant by that, but that balmy afternoon would be the last time she could claim such ignorance.
The leaves overhead dripped with syrupy light, making the forest glitter in green and gold. Lena and Rebecca were out playing near the base of Maiden’s Rock, where the maple and holly trees fought for the right to rule the shaded gullies and mulchy groves. It was their own little haunt, a place only they knew about. They’d spent the whole summer playing in those hills, just as they had since as far back as they could remember. It was a place they were free to paint the air with their blood without worry, a place they could cut loose and be free.
On that day, they’d been playing all sorts of blood games that hemo children seemed genetically predisposed to learn to play regardless of upbringing. Rebecca had won the last three games of Red Wine White Wine, as so often she did; for some reason, Lena could never get the edge over her when it came to forming blood hoops without unsightly blemishes. “I’m bored,” Lena complained as she let her airborne designs collapse and swim back into her bitten thumb. “Let’s play hide and seek.”
Rebecca scrunched her face in an exaggerated pout. She always hated changing games when she was winning. “Okay,” she said at last, a playful sparkle coming to her gray eyes. They looked almost gold in the royal glow of the woods. “Loser’s it.”
Lena frowned at her. “No, winner’s it. Remember? That’s the rule.”
Another small pout momentarily obstructed Lena’s view of her mirror image. “Fine,” Rebecca allowed.
The game proceeded as it so often did, the two taking turns dashing beneath bushes and lying as still as possible to avoid detection. Each round lasted only a few minutes before a tag landed and the baton and burden of the seeker were passed. The afternoon grew warm and lurid. The game gradually dragged the twins farther toward the trail leading up to the base of Maiden’s Rock.
It must have been the hundredth round of their game, and the sun was beginning to sink lethargically toward the horizon. With Rebecca’s counting loud in her ears, Lena made her way down a partially cleared slope cutting through an impenetrable wall of trees. There she found a gnarled, pale ash tree that looked like it had once been split apart by lightning. The overgrowth around the tree provided a large amount of cover behind which she could hide while still having a vantage point of most of the area. She clawed her way up the tree until she got to the first branch. She then shifted around and perched on it, ducking down behind the luxuriant curtain of leaves and branchlets from the neighboring vegetation. And there she waited.
Birds flitted and fluttered from tree to tree overhead. The smell of recent rains filled Lena’s lungs with each breath, and the dazzling kaleidoscope of sunlight scattering through the canopy briefly seduced her into a trance. Finally, Rebecca appeared from farther up the trail. She was hopping two steps at a time, pausing, and tilting her head every which way to listen. Lena held her breath and put her mind on vanishing beneath the birdsong and croaking of frogs. The whispering of the breeze rustled over and through her.
“You’re here somewhere,” Rebecca announced confidently into the air. “You can’t hide from me.” With a giggle, she lifted her thumb to her mouth and bit into it, re-opening the wound. A trickle of blood spilled down her hand and then drifted freely into the air. The dark liquid sparkled brilliantly in the blooming, scattered light.
Lena almost choked. You’re going to cheat? Is that how you’ve been finding me? She concentrated on keeping her blood flowing calmly. If Rebecca tried to use hemomancy to find her, she would be ready to camouflage her bloodstream’s reaction. If you wanna find me, you’ll have to do it the real way.
The blood morphed and churned until it formed two long rods of fluid, a childish imagining of dowsing rods. Satisfied with her creation, Rebecca closed her thumb wound and gave a proud, musical laugh. “You’re mine, Lena!”
Rebecca then commenced stumbling to and fro. The blood dowsing rods swung about randomly, with no regard for Lena’s actual position. Lena breathed out a sigh of relief to see that her sister was not actually cheating, but rather playing that she could. She relaxed her focus, and her sister’s dowsing rods didn’t care. Rebecca kept giggling and sputtering as she stumbled closer and then further away.
As Rebecca’s focus gradually came to bob toward Lena’s wounded tree, there came a rustling of branches and leaves uphill. Lena’s attention immediately snapped to the sound, hoping that it would be one of the elusive deer that roamed the forests surrounding Sonora. But from the surrounding thicket of maple, only thirty feet away, a man appeared. He was thin, shirtless, scraggly. He wore khaki shorts and held a bulbous walking stick in one hand. As he emerged, Rebecca’s infectious laughter drew his eyes right to her.
Lena’s blood froze, and time seemed to follow. The man was staring at Rebecca, who had not yet noticed him. Her sanguine dowsing rods swiveled and shook, betraying the power that ran through her veins. And the look of fury on the hiker’s face solidified the terror of discovery their parents had long instilled in them. Lena wanted to cry out to Rebecca, to tell her to drop the blood, to run and hide, to do something, anything. But she was paralyzed.
It all happened in a flash. The hiker broke into a sprint toward Rebecca, lifting his walking stick high above him and bellowing a savage cry that sent the birds scrambling for the air. Rebecca, at last noticing that she was not alone, turned just in time for him to smash her across the head with the wooden rod. She went down, and Lena began to scream.
The man looked up at the sound of her voice. His face went pale, and his eyes darted to and fro. His stance shifted, and he angled his walking stick out defensively. He threw a glance behind him, then gave the girl at his feet another long look. Rebecca was squirming in a crumpled heap, crying, her face and dress mottled with blood. Panic apparent in each motion, the man raised his staff again and brought it down upon her head. Once. Twice. Rebecca’s cries morphed into something horrific, wet, and unrecognizable. On the third strike, there came a loud crack, and her screams went silent.
