Meanwhile there were the nightmares. There continued, relentlessly, to be the nightmares. They weren’t getting any better or easier or rarer. There’s not that much to tell about them because nightmares are nightmares on account of the way they feel, not necessarily by the mayhem and the body count. These felt bad. Of course they always had vampires in them. Sometimes I was being stared at by dozens of eyes, eyes that I mustn’t look into, except that wherever I looked there were more eyes, and I couldn’t shut my own. Sometimes there was just the knowledge that I was in a horrible place, that I was being contaminated by the horrible place, that even if I seemed to get out of it I would take it with me. The nightmares also always had blood in them, one way or another. Once I thought I had woken up, and my bed was floating in blood. Once I was wearing the cranberry-red dress and it was made of blood. But the worst ones were when I was a vampire myself. I had blood in my mouth and my heart didn’t beat and I had strange awful thoughts about stuff I’d never thought about, that in the dream I would think I couldn’t think about because I was human, and then I’d remember I wasn’t human, I was a vampire. As a vampire I knew the world differently.
I told myself that those two days at the lake were just something that had happened. That’s all. The dreams were like the wound on my breast: my mind was wounded too. The bruises and scratches were the superficial stuff: of course they healed quickly. And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They’re the first and worst monster that lives under everybody’s bed. You do get mad Weres or a demon that’s tired of passing for human and not being able to do the less attractive demon things, but mostly it’s vampires.
I never dreamed about…The funny not ha-ha thing was how hard I was trying to forget about him too. He’d saved my life, sure, but he’d destroyed my world view in the process. The only good vampire was a staked and burned vampire, right? So what if he’d shown a little enlightened self-interest about me—as well as having a sense of honor straight out of some nineteenth-century melodrama with dueling pistols and guys who said things like “begone varlet,” which was how I’d lived long enough to present him with an opportunity to display enlightened self-interest. He was still a vampire. And everybody he’d…my brain wouldn’t go there…was still dead. To put it another way: the loathly lady was still a loathly lady, she hadn’t been cured by whatever, and there was no reason to suppose she wasn’t going to go on eating huntsmen and their horses and hounds, and probably the occasional knight who didn’t give her the right answers as well.
I didn’t think there was a word for a human so sicko as to rescue a vampire, so he could go on being a vampire, because no one had ever done it. Before.
When I woke up out of one of these nightmares I didn’t dare go back to sleep again. And they kept coming. So after a few weeks I segued from being flipped out and exhausted by what had happened to being flipped out and exhausted from being flipped out and exhausted.
During this first time in my life I didn’t want to read lots of news reports about Other activity, there seemed to be more of them around.
Some of it was okay. There was another long heated debate—as a result of some statistical review stating that the numbers of those afflicted were rising—about whether incubi or succubi were living or undead, which is an old argument but no one has ever settled it. The obstacle to scientific study is that the moment the psychic connection is cut your object of investigation disintegrates, and by seizing one of the things for scientific study you are ipso facto severing the link. At least until the global council decides it’s okay to keep a human being as a thing-thrall, which is at present even for purposes of pure research highly illegal, although the official language talks about corporeal and noncorporeal subjugation. The reason it’s such a hot topic is that while incubi and succubi are a relatively small problem, some people think that finding out how they work would give us a handle on vampires, which is absolutely number one on everyone’s list about Others, and the medical guys can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, which isn’t an option with vampire dinners. Well, usually they can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, if they haven’t been one for too long.
There was a project drawn up not too long ago with a list of volunteers to be thing-thralls but that never got off the ground, maybe partly because the ‘ubis like choosing their own prey and bait on a string doesn’t interest them, but mainly because there was this huge public outcry against it. Mind you, you have to wonder about the volunteers. ’Ubis may be a bigger problem than anybody knows because thing-thralls are usually having a very good time and it’s their loving friends and families (sometimes their pissed-off colleagues) that start to wonder why they’re sleeping twelve or fourteen hours a day and spending the rest of the time looking like they just had amazingly terrific sex. Nobody knows whether thing-thralls really are having sex with their things either, or whether they only think they are. But even the best sex your nerve endings can be made to imagine they’re having has to be balanced against the fact that your IQ tends to drop about one point for every month you’re a thing-thrall. The cleverer ubis cut and run before the brain drain gets obvious, and a lot of people aren’t using their brains to begin with and don’t miss them. But sometimes it’s too late for the thrall to have any future more intellectually demanding than night shift shelf restocker. There is a bagger I know at our local Mega Food who had been New Arcadia’s top criminal defense lawyer before an ‘ubi got him. I used to read the reports of his courtroom antics and thought being a thing-thrall had improved his personality beyond recognition, but it had knocked hell out of his career prospects.
There was a series of articles about how many different kinds of Weres there are, another favorite topic. Wolves are the famous one, of course, but they’re actually comparatively rare. There are probably more were-chickens than there are were-wolves, which if you’re asking me explains why comparatively few Weres go rogue as against, say, how many demons. And possibly why the black market in anti-Change drugs is so slick, although the idea of black marketeers with either a sense of humor or of compassion is maybe stretching it a little. More likely the were-chickens will pay anything for the drugs, and do.
But there are were-pumas, for example, and were-bears. Were-coyotes are enough of a scourge that the SOFs go after them and do a horrible sort of mop-up about once a year. Were-raccoons are nasty little beggars and were-skunks are, well, beyond a nightmare. Get a were-skunk mad at you and your life isn’t worth living. There’s a special flying SOF unit for were-skunks. Every city over about a hundred thousand has a SOF were-rat unit, speaking of horrible mop-ups. New Arcadia has one. But according to Pat and Jesse you can stay one jump ahead (so to speak) of all the Weres, even the rats, as long as you don’t get careless. Nobody ever stays a jump ahead of vampires.
Maybe because there was all this other stuff about the Others, and because, of course, I wanted not to be noticing, I ignored for a while that there were more local stories about vampires. Sucker sightings, sucker activity, which is to say fresh desiccated corpses, aka dry guys. As I say, New Arcadia is pretty clean, but nowhere is really clean of vampires. And so I didn’t notice right away—who wants to notice bad stuff happening next door? And even if it was happening, it didn’t mean it had anything to do with my little adventure. I could ignore it if I wanted to.
…That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you—as it does, does it not?—and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner…