INDIFFERENCE, chapter 49
Ok Vamps, here is another one. Hope you enjoy. The icon is by minion. The images are by Heather. Thanks, Ladies. Brian
THIS ENTRY IS INTENDED FOR ADULTS AGED TWENTY-ONE OR OLDER. DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE AGED TWENTY-ONE OR OLDER. MAY CONTAIN SCENES OF EXPLICIT VIOLENCE OR GRAPHIC SEX.
Vic is still a cipher to me.
What is he, exactly?
Is he a vampire, the original vampire?
Is he of this world at all?
If not, what planet does he call home?
Is he the devil?
What is he and what is his purpose here?
I am irritated by his intrusion, but so wary of him that I am too smart to make a fuss. As he stands by the neon light that flows in through the window from tens of thousands of signs in this city, his young version appears strangely unanimated to me, as if someone suddenly propped a corpse up in my window frame. When he speaks, I am surprised by such a sign of life.
“You think today was a smart display, sonny Jim?” He asks and I shrug.
“I don’t know. Was it? Wasn’t expecting the faerie.”
He chuckles. “No one ever expects the faeries.”
“I’m doing all this without guidance, kindly remember, Vic. If you have great wisdom, why not impart it?”
“I’ve told you, we aren’t allowed to get involved. I’ve already had me hand slapped for being as involved as I did get due to Esrin.”
“Who gives you your orders? God?”
He shakes his head and flops down on my couch, producing a brown wrapped cigarette and torching it with a finger snap. “Don’t be so provincial. And don’t try to work it out. Your poor brain hasn’t the capacity to comprehend.”
“Are you an alien?”
“Aren’t we all?”
I let that rest. If he is an alien, then Earth must be some penal colony. I can’t figure out what other reason he would have to come here and stay. They must have dropped him off eons ago and then forgotten where they left him. Is that what vampirism is? Some alien bug?
“I told you to let it be, you can’t comprehend,” he reminds me as he tromps through my brain. “Look, as this society becomes more advanced I embrace that you have to integrate, but don’t expect this to go smoothly, Devon. At their core, modern man is as superstitious, frightened and unsure as his long ago evolutionary brother. You won’t be perceived as some master race. You will be perceived as a threat.”
He raises a hand and my television switches on and flies through the hundreds of channels at a blinding rate, urged only by a wave of his hand. He settles on one of the many church stations and I see a puffed up looking elderly white man with a dovetail of glossy silver hair shaking a bible at the faithful.
“I tell you brothers and sisters, this is the work of the devil!” My own image is flashed on a screen behind him, stolen from the jacket of my book. “The devil has sent us his ambassador! Don’t be fooled by that handsome face. Wasn’t the devil the most beautiful of God’s angels before the fall? Wasn’t it his pride that done him in? This demon admits and proclaims his shameful practices and then asks for your understanding? I say NO!” They all murmur and groan over that claim. “I say send this demon back to the fiery pit from whence he came! Him and all of his demonic brethren. Stop them now before they can proliferate and cause havoc among us. Join me in my crusade to stop the vampires!”
Vic switches it off and looks at me. I shrug. “Except for Slim’s monks, organized religion has never had much time for our kind.”
“But we were just a legend to them then. Now you have made us corporeal. Now they have a face to hate.”
Slade runs the side of his hand down my cheek and smiles. “Such a pretty face it is.”
Vic shakes his head at that. “All I am saying is be on the alert, vampire. Don’t take your allies at face value. When it suits their political power, they will throw you and all of you to the winds. Those that they can’t destroy, they will drive underground.”
I pick up a glossy fashion magazine and open it to a two page black and white ad featuring pale, pretty humans in menacing dark clothes. “Vampire chic,” I say as he glances at the images. “We’re even in couture now.”
“Like skulls and roses, you too shall fade in impact. Know when the tide is changing, Devon, and take heed. Don’t wait too long and don’t take them on in a direct conflict. You are too far outnumbered. But do what you can while you have the chance, because we won’t let this little world be destroyed by their foolishness. Too much has gone into it for that. It would be a shame to wipe the slate clean and go back to the grasses and the oceans and start over. But if it comes to them or the planet, they lose. And so do you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean so goes the prey, so goes the carnivore.”
“Who is ‘we’, Vic? What grand plan do you reference?”
“That’s past your pay grade, lovey. Just see what you can get done in the time you have, right?”
“You are infuriating in your vagaries.”
“All part of my charm,” he tips his hat and then he is gone and all that remains is the scent of his Turkish smoke. Slade shakes his head.
“I don’t like ‘im.”
“Doesn’t matter what we like. He is his own force. We have to heed what he says. And we have to get with the faeries and the wolves and others and create our own united front.”
“For what good?”
“To enhance our power for as long as we can hold the line.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know, Slade. Does anyone? After all, this is all new to me, outing myself to the masses.”
“Well, they have to get through me to get to you,” he says, pulling me into his embrace. I smile. We both know that would be nothing more than a brief delay if Vic’s grim vision came true, but at least we would leave this path together. That comforts me. I kiss him, but as this does not appear to be our night for romance, the house phone rings an interruption.
“Yes?” I am short with the guard at the desk. He says,
“There are two young men here to see you, Mr. Trueblood.”
“Who are they?”
One grabs the phone and says, “Mr. Trueblood, we want to join you.”
I sigh. Vampire groupies. Normally I would just hang up on him. But tonight I say, “Why?”
“Because,” he replies, “We believe in what you stand for.”
“Give the phone to the guard.” I tell the man to send them up.
“Whatever for?” Slade complains and I smile.
“Because my love, while our number is few, and theirs is large, with each human we swing to our view, their number decreases and ours gets larger.”
“You mean turn them?”
“Of course not. I mean use them.”
“How?”
“As our security, our army, our believers. I see now that it is only by making them part of our culture we can win them from their own.”
He offers me a sad little shake of his head. “You’ve gone daft.”
“Have I? Let’s find out. Don’t do anything to scare the piss out of them, ok?”
He nods as the elevators open and two human strangers enter my home. Slade stays put while I stop them in the corridor and give them a close look to ensure they are not ghoul controlled. They are not. They are both rather scrawny young men in shabby but probably stylish clothes for their age group and they smell heavily of fear tinged with excitement.
I invite them in and switch on a lamp or two, realizing for the first time how dark it is. “How did you find me?”
“We followed your car from the studio. We lost you along the way, but doing a little laptop research put us back on track.”
They seem proud of their exploring, not realizing I have taken few precautions to hide who I am in the acquisition of this site. I sit beside my lover and wave them into chairs. One is white, the other of a blended race. Puerto Rican? Jamaican? I’m not sure.
“What is it you want?”
“Just to be part of all this. We have loved vampire stories and vampire lore since we were kids. We have every book and….”
I hold up a hand to stop him. “Not interested in worship. Not turning you. Not ever. So what’s in it for you?”
The door to the terrace opens and in walks Justinian, eyes aglow. I have no idea how he got up to the terrace from the street or why he didn’t just take the elevator, but I don’t inquire. I assume it was the fire escape that brought him here. He takes in the two boys and hisses at them like a perturbed cat. They shrink back from his silver eyes and slayer cunning, causing me to smile. Not so long ago, he was very much a boy not unlike these two. Now he is something altogether different.
“Invited guests, no worry.”
He glances at Slade, who shrugs, and then retreats to his own room in the back of the penthouse. He obviously thinks Slade and I can handle this potential threat on our own.
“W-who was that?” One of the boys asks and I respond,
“My bodyguard.”
“Then who is….” He nods towards Slade, and I answer,
“My pairing partner.”
“Cool,” the darker boy says and I zero in on him.
“Answer me. What do you get from this?”
“Anything you want us to get. We can do odd jobs, things too menial for you to do. We don’t care. We just want to be part of your coming into the human society.”
“I don’t approve of casual dress in my circle. You’d have to have suits you wear at all times while on the job and neat haircuts and no facial hair and project a certain quality in how you look and how you act. That is of primary importance to me. We are not hooligans. We are not headbangers. We are people of substance.”
“Ok,” they both quickly agree.
“I have a non profit organization. I am going to open an office. I’ll need people to answer phones and set up web sties and other tasks.”
“We can do that.”
“You have to attract others into the clan.”
“How many others?"
There is a scratching at the glass doors leading to the terrace and I turn to see a graceful black wolf with green eyes and a very red tongue. He is seated on his haunches pawing the glass.
“Is that your dog?”
Slade gets up and lets the animal in. He says to the boys, “I advise you to stay as still as stones. Try not to project fear.”
They freeze as the wolf approaches them, burrows his muzzle into their crotches for a sniff, tastes the flesh on their arms with a slow lick and begins to growl in a low, whirring noise, that reminds me of a well tuned engine.
“Teddy, no!” I insist. “Back off and go to your bed.”
The wolf turns to stare at me. I motion to the hallway and he starts in that direction, head held low, tail at half mast, deprived of his treat.
“Fleabag,” Slade tosses an insult at him, gets bared teeth in response and he laughs at that threat.
“W-was that a wolf?” One of the boys asks when the animal is safely gone.
“Only some of the time, the rest of the time, he’s really an annoyance.”
Slade laughs at that. “We need to roll up that fire escape, all manner of trash finds it’s way here.”
“Now, now. Teddy is harmless. Well, in his own way.”
“Werewolf?” One of the boys asks hopefully and I sigh.
“One step at a time.” I write down an address on the back of one of my cards. “This is the address of the space I rented. Here is a key. Tomorrow stop at Barney’s and get some decent clothes. I will leave your names with the store. And then go to this address and start cleaning it up.”
“You want us to get dressed up to clean?”
“At all times, I want you to look fashionable.”
“Ok,” they agree. And give me their names, which I memorize.
“Here’s your first test,” I tell them. “The number one rule is discretion. If you break my trust, if you are less than discrete, if you ride the high horse to your friends without my grant, you will wish you never met me.”
“N-no sir, we….”
I hold up a hand. “No reassurances, please. Just show me with your actions. I’ll be in touch.”
They leave and with that, I have my first two human recruits. For what, you may wonder? I don’t yet know myself. But I want a name for these recruits and I settle on the Shadow Soldiers. Sort of a cross between the do gooders in the Salvation Army and the mercenaries who fight for money, not for nation’s honor. Which way that ax falls is yet to be seen.
“Are we done now?” Slade asks as I walk back to him and sit beside him on the couch, my head on his shoulder.
“No, sadly, we are only starting.”
He lifts my head by resting his fingers under my chin. “Are we done for tonight, ya big fool?”
I smile and reach up to kiss him, answering him without words. After that passionate kiss, he leans back and says, “No, shadow soldiers won’t do.”
“Why not?” I am more interested in his body than in this matter and I prove that with my wandering hands. He smiles and says,
“Because it abbreviates to SS and the humans have had some bad associations with those initials.”
I laugh at that. He’s right. “How about Shadow Society Brigands?”
“Doesn’t brigand mean the same as pirate?”
I turn him around and start him towards our bedroom. We can discuss this naked. “Patriots? Shadow Society Patriots?”
“Sounds like a new country allegiance.”
“Vampire Defense League?”
“Too narrow. Piss off the others.”
“Friends of the Shadow Society.”
“FOSS,” he abbreviates and then smiles, throwing me back on the bed and covering me with his weight. “Yes,” he agrees. “I like it.”
And with that agreement, my clothes come off under his hands and his under mine and we are finally free to do what we have wanted to do for hours.
Fuck each other senseless.
THIS ENTRY IS INTENDED FOR ADULTS AGED TWENTY-ONE OR OLDER. DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE AGED TWENTY-ONE OR OLDER. MAY CONTAIN SCENES OF EXPLICIT VIOLENCE OR GRAPHIC SEX.
Vic is still a cipher to me.
What is he, exactly?
Is he a vampire, the original vampire?
Is he of this world at all?
If not, what planet does he call home?
Is he the devil?
What is he and what is his purpose here?
I am irritated by his intrusion, but so wary of him that I am too smart to make a fuss. As he stands by the neon light that flows in through the window from tens of thousands of signs in this city, his young version appears strangely unanimated to me, as if someone suddenly propped a corpse up in my window frame. When he speaks, I am surprised by such a sign of life.
“You think today was a smart display, sonny Jim?” He asks and I shrug.
“I don’t know. Was it? Wasn’t expecting the faerie.”
He chuckles. “No one ever expects the faeries.”
“I’m doing all this without guidance, kindly remember, Vic. If you have great wisdom, why not impart it?”
“I’ve told you, we aren’t allowed to get involved. I’ve already had me hand slapped for being as involved as I did get due to Esrin.”
“Who gives you your orders? God?”
He shakes his head and flops down on my couch, producing a brown wrapped cigarette and torching it with a finger snap. “Don’t be so provincial. And don’t try to work it out. Your poor brain hasn’t the capacity to comprehend.”
“Are you an alien?”
“Aren’t we all?”
I let that rest. If he is an alien, then Earth must be some penal colony. I can’t figure out what other reason he would have to come here and stay. They must have dropped him off eons ago and then forgotten where they left him. Is that what vampirism is? Some alien bug?
“I told you to let it be, you can’t comprehend,” he reminds me as he tromps through my brain. “Look, as this society becomes more advanced I embrace that you have to integrate, but don’t expect this to go smoothly, Devon. At their core, modern man is as superstitious, frightened and unsure as his long ago evolutionary brother. You won’t be perceived as some master race. You will be perceived as a threat.”
He raises a hand and my television switches on and flies through the hundreds of channels at a blinding rate, urged only by a wave of his hand. He settles on one of the many church stations and I see a puffed up looking elderly white man with a dovetail of glossy silver hair shaking a bible at the faithful.
“I tell you brothers and sisters, this is the work of the devil!” My own image is flashed on a screen behind him, stolen from the jacket of my book. “The devil has sent us his ambassador! Don’t be fooled by that handsome face. Wasn’t the devil the most beautiful of God’s angels before the fall? Wasn’t it his pride that done him in? This demon admits and proclaims his shameful practices and then asks for your understanding? I say NO!” They all murmur and groan over that claim. “I say send this demon back to the fiery pit from whence he came! Him and all of his demonic brethren. Stop them now before they can proliferate and cause havoc among us. Join me in my crusade to stop the vampires!”
Vic switches it off and looks at me. I shrug. “Except for Slim’s monks, organized religion has never had much time for our kind.”
“But we were just a legend to them then. Now you have made us corporeal. Now they have a face to hate.”
Slade runs the side of his hand down my cheek and smiles. “Such a pretty face it is.”
Vic shakes his head at that. “All I am saying is be on the alert, vampire. Don’t take your allies at face value. When it suits their political power, they will throw you and all of you to the winds. Those that they can’t destroy, they will drive underground.”
I pick up a glossy fashion magazine and open it to a two page black and white ad featuring pale, pretty humans in menacing dark clothes. “Vampire chic,” I say as he glances at the images. “We’re even in couture now.”
“Like skulls and roses, you too shall fade in impact. Know when the tide is changing, Devon, and take heed. Don’t wait too long and don’t take them on in a direct conflict. You are too far outnumbered. But do what you can while you have the chance, because we won’t let this little world be destroyed by their foolishness. Too much has gone into it for that. It would be a shame to wipe the slate clean and go back to the grasses and the oceans and start over. But if it comes to them or the planet, they lose. And so do you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean so goes the prey, so goes the carnivore.”
“Who is ‘we’, Vic? What grand plan do you reference?”
“That’s past your pay grade, lovey. Just see what you can get done in the time you have, right?”
“You are infuriating in your vagaries.”
“All part of my charm,” he tips his hat and then he is gone and all that remains is the scent of his Turkish smoke. Slade shakes his head.
“I don’t like ‘im.”
“Doesn’t matter what we like. He is his own force. We have to heed what he says. And we have to get with the faeries and the wolves and others and create our own united front.”
“For what good?”
“To enhance our power for as long as we can hold the line.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know, Slade. Does anyone? After all, this is all new to me, outing myself to the masses.”
“Well, they have to get through me to get to you,” he says, pulling me into his embrace. I smile. We both know that would be nothing more than a brief delay if Vic’s grim vision came true, but at least we would leave this path together. That comforts me. I kiss him, but as this does not appear to be our night for romance, the house phone rings an interruption.
“Yes?” I am short with the guard at the desk. He says,
“There are two young men here to see you, Mr. Trueblood.”
“Who are they?”
One grabs the phone and says, “Mr. Trueblood, we want to join you.”
I sigh. Vampire groupies. Normally I would just hang up on him. But tonight I say, “Why?”
“Because,” he replies, “We believe in what you stand for.”
“Give the phone to the guard.” I tell the man to send them up.
“Whatever for?” Slade complains and I smile.
“Because my love, while our number is few, and theirs is large, with each human we swing to our view, their number decreases and ours gets larger.”
“You mean turn them?”
“Of course not. I mean use them.”
“How?”
“As our security, our army, our believers. I see now that it is only by making them part of our culture we can win them from their own.”
He offers me a sad little shake of his head. “You’ve gone daft.”
“Have I? Let’s find out. Don’t do anything to scare the piss out of them, ok?”
He nods as the elevators open and two human strangers enter my home. Slade stays put while I stop them in the corridor and give them a close look to ensure they are not ghoul controlled. They are not. They are both rather scrawny young men in shabby but probably stylish clothes for their age group and they smell heavily of fear tinged with excitement.
I invite them in and switch on a lamp or two, realizing for the first time how dark it is. “How did you find me?”
“We followed your car from the studio. We lost you along the way, but doing a little laptop research put us back on track.”
They seem proud of their exploring, not realizing I have taken few precautions to hide who I am in the acquisition of this site. I sit beside my lover and wave them into chairs. One is white, the other of a blended race. Puerto Rican? Jamaican? I’m not sure.
“What is it you want?”
“Just to be part of all this. We have loved vampire stories and vampire lore since we were kids. We have every book and….”
I hold up a hand to stop him. “Not interested in worship. Not turning you. Not ever. So what’s in it for you?”
The door to the terrace opens and in walks Justinian, eyes aglow. I have no idea how he got up to the terrace from the street or why he didn’t just take the elevator, but I don’t inquire. I assume it was the fire escape that brought him here. He takes in the two boys and hisses at them like a perturbed cat. They shrink back from his silver eyes and slayer cunning, causing me to smile. Not so long ago, he was very much a boy not unlike these two. Now he is something altogether different.
“Invited guests, no worry.”
He glances at Slade, who shrugs, and then retreats to his own room in the back of the penthouse. He obviously thinks Slade and I can handle this potential threat on our own.
“W-who was that?” One of the boys asks and I respond,
“My bodyguard.”
“Then who is….” He nods towards Slade, and I answer,
“My pairing partner.”
“Cool,” the darker boy says and I zero in on him.
“Answer me. What do you get from this?”
“Anything you want us to get. We can do odd jobs, things too menial for you to do. We don’t care. We just want to be part of your coming into the human society.”
“I don’t approve of casual dress in my circle. You’d have to have suits you wear at all times while on the job and neat haircuts and no facial hair and project a certain quality in how you look and how you act. That is of primary importance to me. We are not hooligans. We are not headbangers. We are people of substance.”
“Ok,” they both quickly agree.
“I have a non profit organization. I am going to open an office. I’ll need people to answer phones and set up web sties and other tasks.”
“We can do that.”
“You have to attract others into the clan.”
“How many others?"
There is a scratching at the glass doors leading to the terrace and I turn to see a graceful black wolf with green eyes and a very red tongue. He is seated on his haunches pawing the glass.
“Is that your dog?”
Slade gets up and lets the animal in. He says to the boys, “I advise you to stay as still as stones. Try not to project fear.”
They freeze as the wolf approaches them, burrows his muzzle into their crotches for a sniff, tastes the flesh on their arms with a slow lick and begins to growl in a low, whirring noise, that reminds me of a well tuned engine.
“Teddy, no!” I insist. “Back off and go to your bed.”
The wolf turns to stare at me. I motion to the hallway and he starts in that direction, head held low, tail at half mast, deprived of his treat.
“Fleabag,” Slade tosses an insult at him, gets bared teeth in response and he laughs at that threat.
“W-was that a wolf?” One of the boys asks when the animal is safely gone.
“Only some of the time, the rest of the time, he’s really an annoyance.”
Slade laughs at that. “We need to roll up that fire escape, all manner of trash finds it’s way here.”
“Now, now. Teddy is harmless. Well, in his own way.”
“Werewolf?” One of the boys asks hopefully and I sigh.
“One step at a time.” I write down an address on the back of one of my cards. “This is the address of the space I rented. Here is a key. Tomorrow stop at Barney’s and get some decent clothes. I will leave your names with the store. And then go to this address and start cleaning it up.”
“You want us to get dressed up to clean?”
“At all times, I want you to look fashionable.”
“Ok,” they agree. And give me their names, which I memorize.
“Here’s your first test,” I tell them. “The number one rule is discretion. If you break my trust, if you are less than discrete, if you ride the high horse to your friends without my grant, you will wish you never met me.”
“N-no sir, we….”
I hold up a hand. “No reassurances, please. Just show me with your actions. I’ll be in touch.”
They leave and with that, I have my first two human recruits. For what, you may wonder? I don’t yet know myself. But I want a name for these recruits and I settle on the Shadow Soldiers. Sort of a cross between the do gooders in the Salvation Army and the mercenaries who fight for money, not for nation’s honor. Which way that ax falls is yet to be seen.
“Are we done now?” Slade asks as I walk back to him and sit beside him on the couch, my head on his shoulder.
“No, sadly, we are only starting.”
He lifts my head by resting his fingers under my chin. “Are we done for tonight, ya big fool?”
I smile and reach up to kiss him, answering him without words. After that passionate kiss, he leans back and says, “No, shadow soldiers won’t do.”
“Why not?” I am more interested in his body than in this matter and I prove that with my wandering hands. He smiles and says,
“Because it abbreviates to SS and the humans have had some bad associations with those initials.”
I laugh at that. He’s right. “How about Shadow Society Brigands?”
“Doesn’t brigand mean the same as pirate?”
I turn him around and start him towards our bedroom. We can discuss this naked. “Patriots? Shadow Society Patriots?”
“Sounds like a new country allegiance.”
“Vampire Defense League?”
“Too narrow. Piss off the others.”
“Friends of the Shadow Society.”
“FOSS,” he abbreviates and then smiles, throwing me back on the bed and covering me with his weight. “Yes,” he agrees. “I like it.”
And with that agreement, my clothes come off under his hands and his under mine and we are finally free to do what we have wanted to do for hours.
Fuck each other senseless.