Bloodbound:
Mind’s Eye
CHASE ERWIN
Bloodbound: Mind’s Eye
By Chase Erwin
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Chase Erwin
This book is also available in print at most online retailers.
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DEDICATION
I’d like to take a moment to thank two people for their support on this project. Thank you to Tammy, for your enthusiasm and encouragement. It means more than you could possibly imagine.
And especially, thank you to Tyler. He is the reason Hunter and (book) Tyler exist in my own mind’s eye.
“AS- goes before AT-.”
“I know how to alphabetize, thank you, hun.”
“I’m just saying, you’re holding a stack of files marked AT that you’re about to mix with the rest of the AS’s.
“Hunter, I love you, but right now, you’re being a pain in my AS-.”
I rolled my eyes and kicked my office chair back to my desk. Powering on my computer, I made sure not to look at Tyler, and ensuring my face looked hurt just enough for him to…
“Grr… I’m sorry, hun,” Tyler said. He slowly limped over and sat in one of the two chairs in front of my desk. “This isn’t where I want to be, and you know that, but I shouldn’t be snapping at you.”
I softened my features and looked back at my lover. “It’s okay. I understand. You can’t go back into the field for another two weeks, but you’ve got to quit forcing yourself. You were very badly injured and even a vampire can’t take that much abuse and bounce right back.”
An uneasy silence spread between us, as the words brought back many foul memories. Several months ago, Tyler and our boss Calhoun had been kidnapped by a man who knew that vampires existed and wanted them all dead, again. The man was the son of the founder of The Crown, a project meant to enslave the vampire race for the benefit of human warfare. Tyler had killed the founder over thirty years ago, and the man—the founder’s son—tried killing Tyler in revenge.
In addition to knocking Calhoun out, he had injected liquid silver into Tyler at random intervals, first to immobilize him, then simply to torture him. Tyler had used telepathy to transmit his location to me. Using my newly-acquired vampire skills, I led a team to find them. After a lengthy struggle, I killed the man. So much caustic silver had been pumped into Tyler I nearly lost him, and it was after nearly a month of hospitalization and secret treatment by vampire-friendly doctors that he was able to regain consciousness.
Since then, he had been on medical leave, and unable to do what he does best: stalk, fight, interrogate, and kill. The Order needed him back in tip-top condition in order to continue helping stop the rise of evil towards humanity. Slave drivers, human traffickers, even genocidal dictators—The Order was employed by several international governments to help eradicate these scourges in ways even their secret agencies couldn’t do. Part of the way The Order did that was by the V-Division: vampires. Ready to acknowledge the existence of vampires way before they would acknowledge aliens, the government recruited vampires from all over the world to work with The Order in whatever way they were needed.
“I’m just no good as a librarian,” Tyler huffed sadly.
“You know that’s not all I am, right?” I folded my arms, only to unfold them as the computer dinged to life. “We’re still finishing the computerization of all the files, sure, but after that…”
“I know,” Tyler continued, “you’ll be able to research and profile targets before we take out scrolls on their heads—that’s great. But I’m better at action than I am in research. I need back out there doing the leg work.”
“Two more weeks,” I intoned, “just two more weeks. And you’re getting stronger every day. It’ll fly by.”
“Speaking of stronger… watch this.” Tyler grinned as he reached over, effortlessly picked up the empty chair by one leg, and slowly turned it 180 degrees with his wrist. I smiled back. He hadn’t been able to do that last week.
“That’s fantastic, babe. See? In two weeks you’ll be able to break anything you want to get to the truth.” I winked.
“Sorry to interrupt!” A voice came from the far end of the office, and within seconds I saw a shaggy bit of red hair jogging towards us. Our friend Albert was instrumental in helping me figure out my new vampire’s telepathy to find Tyler. Albert was also Tyler’s assistant in the Interrogation office. “We have a problem in the library.”
I winced. “Not them again?”
“’Fraid so. They’ve been giving me a headache; I swear they get like this every week!”
Tyler saw this as his cue. “I think I’ll let you two go handle things, I’ll get back to alphabetizing.”
“Let me know when you get to the BE’s,” I said as Albert and I walked to the door.
“How bout I tell you when I get to the FU’s?” I turned and glared at him with a smirk; he blew a kiss at me and winked, then got back to his filing.
Albert led me down the hallway to the new library I had converted from a few empty offices. Once the filing was complete, I could move the archives into the library along with all the resources needed to make a prime intelligence research facility… just as soon as I got rid of the ranting lunatics.
We walked in to a shouting match between a man and woman, for what seemed to be the sixty-seventh time. They could never seem to stop arguing incomprehensibly. One time they would fight about having to work together, and then the next time they’d fight while they were working separately. I swear, I had only worked with them about a month and I felt like they were a married couple.
I tried to stand between them. “Agents Addison and Hayes, please”—
They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hear me. If there’s one thing that really gets me angry it’s being ignored. I knew I had to separate them by force. My eyes went red with rage and I pushed them apart with all my might. Hayes and Addison went flying in opposite directions, slamming against the doors on each wall.
“Enough of this,” I bellowed as my eyes quickly went back to their normal hue. “It seems like every week you two are barking at each other and storming off to your offices, and it ends now.”
They dusted themselves off and then warily walked back towards me. “Now, you’ve been working on the Anselmo case for weeks now, have you made any progress at all on it?
Agent Hayes, whom some might describe as a ‘stunning blonde,’ spoke first. “I keep thinking I do, but Mr. Addison here,” she said his name through gritted teeth, “keeps distracting me by tracking down ludicrous leads that ultimately go nowhere. He’s like a little boy in a schoolyard; all he wants to do is play, play, play!”
“Hey now, I resent that,” said Agent Addison, whose voice was dripping with insincerity. “I’ve had more experience at this than you have, Dollface”—he grinned as she sneered, --“and sometimes you just get a few bad leads. And sometimes after a bad lead, you need to be led to bed.”
They both looked at me.
“I have absolutely no idea what either of you are talking about,” I said, “but I’m convinced I can’t rely on you to work cohesively as a team. Here, Hayes. You take the Anselmo file. Addison, I’m going to send you over to assist Tyler in finishing up the record filing.”
Addison coolly reached in his pocket for a pair of sunglasses. “Sure thing, boss, records are my specialty.”
“It sure isn’t active pursuits,” screeched Hayes as she exited past one set of doors, slamming them shut behind her. Ignoring Hayes’ icy cold remark, Addison continued on past the opposite set of doors. There were a few blissful moments of silence that I indulged in before I bothered to speak again.
“What’s the status on getting the library networked up,” I asked Albert, thumbing through some more files.
“The tech guys say they’ll have the wall outlets wired up by end of the day,” Albert said as he walked towards a table further away from me, “but we’re still waiting on the delivery of the network routers, since they have to be specially encrypted for our purposes. I think the problem is we have to bill them on behalf of the Order’s dummy corporation, and when the purchase orders come in and they’re not linked to the proper bank account…” He sighed and rubbed his temples. “Grr, I need this headache gone.”
Albert continued speaking, but a strange sensation washed over me, preventing me from hearing him. Since meeting Tyler, I’d become accustomed to the physical sensation of our energies flowing between each other. Our vampirism also allowed us to communicate telepathically, either in words or by emotion. But nothing felt like this before; it was almost like the sensation of a cold north wind suddenly blowing past my face. It made my drop my files and look straight ahead.
Whoosh!
Another burst of phantom wind made me spin to face Albert. All I could see was the look of confusion as I faced him… followed by a look of sheer terror as my eyes locked onto his. I tried to ask “what’s going on,” but it was as if my mouth had seized. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think, at first.
My eyes widened as my view of Albert merged with another vision. It was hard to make out at first… a large, spacious room, florescent lighting, much like this library… but a cold linoleum floor lined with racks and shelves. A warehouse? A store. A grocery store. Not the one I used to work at, surely…
We were standing, all of a sudden, inside this grocery store, watching an elderly woman push a basket up to the checkouts. Her face was careworn, creased and wrinkled. She had the faint aroma on her tweed jacket of potpourri spray. I was astounded.
Granny Annie?
This couldn’t be real. Granny Annie died nearly ten years ago. This had to be a memory. I still couldn’t take my eyes off of Albert, nor could he remove his from my gaze, but out of our peripheral vision we could see her browse the checkout’s magazine racks, leaving a small child behind, restlessly wiggling in the cart’s small seat. It was me, aged four.
Oh, God. No…
The moment I realized what I—we—were watching, the action around us slowed down. The four year-old me climbed out of the child seat and straddled the edge of the basket, sitting precariously like Humpty Dumpty on his wall. I was so stupid; I should have known that she’d… No… No, kid, get back in the seat, she is going to…
Even though I had seen this movie before, I was still futilely warning the characters to stop what they were doing. Helplessly, Albert and I watched as Granny Annie returned to the basket as another cashier opened up the next lane and waved for her to drive on up. She turned the basket sharply to the left. The four year-old me toppled to the right.
I could feel the sensation of falling…
I could feel my butt bounce on the floor…
My head… landing on the floor and cracking on the hard surface.
I screamed. Whether or not this was memory or reality lost all meaning. I was scared out of my mind. I could feel every ounce of pain shooting through my head in shockwaves, as if I had cracked my skull all over again. Still staring straight at Albert, I felt a surge of cold rush through me, and the aura around my line of vision lit up bright.
Another thing I had gotten used to since becoming a vampire was color aura. When Tyler and I shared intense emotion, our eyes changed color. When we were calm and serene, our eyes were a stunning azure blue. If we were angry, they’d turn as red as hot coals. When we had to glamour people to keep them calm and quiet during feeds or missions, our eyes would glaze with a bright amber color.
Being as scared as I was, I was expecting a deep emerald green aura to surround my eyes… but I was shocked this time to see a bright, almost neon shade of purple flood my sight. I was even more shocked to see Albert’s eyes fill with the purple light as well.
What in the fuck is going on?!
Suddenly, the memory we were watching around us sped up, like a movie was being set to fast-forward: we watched the child-sized me being rushed into a car to a hospital, being dismissed soon after by a bored-looking doctor, coming home. We watched me writhe in agony in bed, being comforted and held tight by my mother and grandmother, projectile-vomit into a steel bowl, then be rushed right back to the hospital.
Like marionettes being jostled around by the strings, we saw a new doctor talk to my family and more doctors rush back and forth around me, and sedate me. At that point, of course, I had no further memory of the incident. But as if by some wicked magic, I got to see through this weird perception what went on around me. I was placed in an MRI machine, scanned four or five times, put in an ER room. My grandmother chased the first doctor we met down the waiting room and punched him in the face! The vision continued as a rapid-paced blur of motion for several moments…
Then suddenly, I got punched. In reality. I saw a quick burst of light, then blackness.
My fangs slid out of my gums and I hissed in pain. As my sight came back to me, I sighed. The purple aura was gone, and I saw Tyler standing over me, one hand held out towards me, the other clenched into a fist and held back in attack mode.
“Did you just hit me?” I asked in confusion.
His response confused me even further.
“Where the hell did you learn to do that?!”
My face was throbbing. I rubbed my jaw as my vision returned to normal. “What are you talking about; where’d I learn to do… what?”
Tyler gritted his teeth a bit, turned into me and lowered his voice. “What you just did—how did you learn to do that so soon?”
“I still don’t get what you’re talking about.”
Tyler growled softly and stepped away from me, and I looked in front of me. Albert was on the ground, eyes closed, slumped against a man with blond, short-clipped hair, who appeared to be cradling him. It was Noah, a fellow V-Division member. Albert was his love.
“Noah?” I blinked. “When did you…?”
Noah’s fangs spread out, and in the time it took me to blink again, he was over me, gripping my shirt collar with a fist. “You’ve done something to him,” he hissed, “and you better tell me why. Talk!”
If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s being accused of something I know I didn’t do. My fangs came out again and my hand wrenched Noah’s arm off of me. “I wasn’t even close to him, how could I have even touched him?”
Tyler came back towards us. This time his voice was less angered, more concerned. His eyes washed in blue tint as he touched me. The energy he sent me said this is serious. I realize you may not think you did something, but you did. “We need to figure out what happened,” he said evenly. “Just take us through what you remember.”
“O… okay,” I said, now starting to worry that I really had hurt Albert. Noah went back to tend to him. I explained everything as best I could, from the cold wind sensation I felt to seeing the memory of my accident at the grocery store when I was four. The more I spoke, the quicker Tyler paced up and down the room. It was unnerving me.
“You had a color aura, you said?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Purple.”
“Purple…” Tyler murmured the word as his brow furrowed.
“I still don’t understand,” Noah said, resting Albert’s head in his lap. “Why did you inflict this on Albert?”
“I—I didn’t know what I was doing to him,” I cried. “All I was going to do was ask him if he felt the wind, and before I had a chance to say anything, it just… happened.”
“Do you have any idea what this was, Tyler?” Noah looked up at him, absently stroking his boyfriend’s hair. At this point the guilt was really building up inside me, and my eyes went green with worry.
So did Tyler’s; and he turned his back to us both.
“I do.”
We waited. “Well?”
He turned back to us. His face looked gaunt. “We need to see Calhoun.”
---
After bringing Albert to rest in Noah’s office, we made the trek to Calhoun’s office, which was situated in the far reaches of the cavernous complex. The walls and floors went from steel and concrete to black granite and oak paneling. Our shoes clicked and made echoes as we walked down the corridor.
As we approached the door to Calhoun’s office, Tyler took off his ID badge and slid it down a card swipe mechanism. With a hydraulic hiss, the door unsealed and allowed us entry. Noah and I entered the lobby and sat on opposite leather chairs. Tyler went to the vaulted desk where Calhoun’s secretary sat, and told her we were here to see him for an emergency matter. She nodded and spoke into the intercom as Tyler joined us at the seats.
The only thing he said to me as we sat there was telepathic.
I had no idea you’d do this so soon. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you.
My eyes widened; I was about to reply when the secretary told us we could go in. We all stood up and walked into Calhoun’s office.
I went through the incident again, leaving no detail out, up to the moment Tyler hit me to snap me out of my trance.
Calhoun, while looking stern, held his fingertips together as if in deep thought. “How is Albert?”
“I think he’ll be fine,” Noah said. “There was no superficial damage, even when he passed out on the floor.”
“I’m going to get the Med team to examine him, just to be safe,” Calhoun said. Then he turned his gaze to Tyler. “As Hunter’s Maker, I now need to ask you: do you believe this incident is the result of some defect in his vampire DNA? Were there any interruptions or complications when you turned him?”
“No,” said Tyler in a soft voice.
“Very well,” Calhoun began. “We need to get the psych team in to”—
“But,” Tyler continued, “…I can do it too.”
“What?!” The three of our voices combined into one loud dagger aimed at Tyler.
“Since the early 1970s,” Tyler said, staring at the corner of Calhoun’s desk. I could tell from his energy that he couldn’t bear to look at any of us in the face. He felt so ashamed. “It’s a vampire ability.”
Calhoun leaned forward in his chair. In the short time I knew him, Calhoun was known for his brusque, angry tone. Despite the bombshell Tyler just dropped on us, our boss’s voice was calm and steady. “How were you able to determine this?”
“Practice. After several attempts, I was able to finally control the strength and duration of the events. It’s like a form of glamour: instead of coaxing a target into doing or saying what we want…” he gazed to look at me before quickly staring back at the desk, “we can force a traumatic image into the target’s mind to paralyze him with fear.”
“What else does it do?”
“It develops an adrenaline rush in the victim, which radiates panic energy. As long as the stare is maintained with the target, the vampire can sap the target of all that energy.”
“I see.” Calhoun leaned back in his chair. Now his voice started to bubble up with anger. “You have held onto this information for the better part of four decades. Would you explain why you failed to mention this development in your abilities?”
Tyler looked at all of us. His eyes were green again. “The traumatic images that Hunter and I can transmit… they come from our own memories. And as we send those memories out to the victim, we are re-living the memory second by second, action by action. Even any pain we suffered in the event… that pain is felt all over again. And I daresay the victim can feel it too.”
“Though I can’t say for certain,” Tyler added as Noah bristled in his own chair, jaw clenched.
Tyler sighed and continued. “In my case, I’ve had nearly two centuries worth of bad memories and traumatic experiences locked away in my mind. It’s hard enough digging them back up and sharing them with a target, much less having to recount it again in a mission report. My vampire instinct told me to not bring this up… to anyone.”
“Why can’t I do it?” Noah asked. “Why can’t anybody else in the V-Division?”
Tyler slowly shook his head. “I have no idea. But this is a normal vampire ability—my body, my mind tell me so.”
Calhoun rose from his desk. We all stood too in respect. “Clearly, this is something which bears more investigating. In addition to a full physical and mental checkup on Albert, we are going to have to do the same for the two of you. We need to know everything we can about this new ability.
“Very well, Sir,” Tyler said. “When do we need to report for the tests?”
“Immediately. His first experience with this ability was random. It may continue to be random until he learns to control it. I want that happening in the confines of this building, and not out in public.”
Tyler sighed and nodded. He put his arm around my waist as we walked out of the room. I was flabbergasted: here I was, embroiled in yet another flurry of activity that I caused.
The testing room was dark and round, almost a perfect circle. There were four reclining seats, much like those a dentist would use, situated in the center. Next to each seat was a steel folding chair.
Calhoun led Tyler and I to the center of the room. Nonchalantly, he turned on the Bluetooth headset in his right ear and said, “We’re ready.” From the far end of the room came a pair dressed in identical green scrubs and white coats. One, a man, had great features and short black hair. The other, a woman, had a deep brown coloring and a gentle smile that reminded me of my friend from elementary school.
“Tyler, you will be examined by Dr. Ife Samuels,” Calhoun said, allowing the two to shake hands. “Hunter, you will be with Dr. Mario Spirilli.
“You can call me Dr. Mario,” he said, extending his hand.
“I, I, I’d rather not,” I said nervously, trying to block the image of an old video game out of my mind as I shook his hand.
Calhoun began making his way back towards the entrance. “After the tests are complete, the two of you will be free to go home for the weekend. We’ll go over the results on Monday.” We nodded our goodbyes to our boss.
Once the door shut behind Calhoun, everything went quickly. Mario and Ife led us to two of the chairs, and sat us side-by side. They began attaching electrodes with thick pieces of padding—thicker than the ones I’d seen on TV medical shows.
“Have you ever had an electroneurodiagnostic test before?” queried Dr. M, as I’d decided to call him.
“I have,” I replied. I shivered as I tried not to recall the months of check-ups after the grocery store accident.
“Right, well, we’re going to be doing much the same type of test. You’ll notice that the electrodes I’m using are much thicker. They are also going to generate heat. A vampire’s brainwaves are harder to detect due to the different metaphysical process you use. The pads on the electrodes include a little transducer… they will take your impulses and convert them into a format the human machines can read and display.”
“Kinda like a cable box,” I chimed in.
“Exactly like a cable box!” said Ife, as she inclined Tyler in his chair. “Except the only one seeing the pictures will be you. And of course…” She trailed off, hesitant about my response.
I figured they’d already heard all about me, and I knew they had a job to do. “The test subject,” I finished for her. Ife nodded.
“And no need to worry, boys,” Ife continued. “We didn’t just pull two innocent strangers off the street to subject them to this. These two had scrolls out on their heads for running an internet dogfighting network, and they have each been sentenced to this testing facility.”
Tyler gave a solemn nod, which in a strange way comforted me. Even in this bizarre way, we were doing our duty as members of The Order.
“Please try not to speak during the tests,” said Ife as she crossed to a control panel by the far doors. “Only respond to our yes and no questions, and try to use only head movements when possible.” With that, she turned a dial on the panel. A large metallic wall began to descend from the rafters. I looked towards Tyler, who blew a quick kiss before the wall blocked us from each other.
“Before we begin,” Dr. M said to me, “I want to make sure you are as comfortable with me as possible. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Now’s your chance.”
“Are you a vampire, too?”
“No,” said Dr. M, “but Ife is. I’ve been working with her now for almost two years. She’s taught me everything I know about vampire physiology and medicine. I’m fascinated by it, and I’m glad to have a hand in helping you all out.”
“Good to know you’re on our side,” I said with a soft smile. “I’m sure whoever this guy is I’m gonna be tested with won’t feel the same way.”
Dr. M grinned, picking up his clipboard. “Don’t you worry about that. We’re here to help you. Just focus on doing whatever it is you did, and I’ll handle the rest. Let’s do it to it!”
With that, the tests began. Dr. M led a blindfolded man, hands cuffed behind him, and sat him in the chair directly across from me. Releasing the cuffs briefly, the man growled and tried to wriggle away, but the doctor quickly cuffed his arms down to the chair and placed braces around his ankles to keep him completely still. He attached electrodes to his head and heart monitors to his arms as he moved the blindfold down from the man’s eyes to his mouth, muffling his curses..
A long time was spent with me just staring at him and waiting. Lots of waiting. At least an hour passed with no activity on my part. Dr. M just paced between us, writing occasionally on his clipboard. He stopped at me after about the fortieth pace.
“Are you comfortable enough?” I nodded.
“Do you remember what you were doing when the first event occurred?” I nodded.
“Can you recreate those conditions for me?” I shook my head.
Dr. M nodded. “That’s okay, Hunter. I know this is going to be difficult, but to try and jumpstart things a bit I want you to think back to another traumatic event. Think as hard as you can.”
I sagged. I really didn’t want to. It was going to be difficult enough trying to think back to something that hurt me or upset me—
Whoosh!
The cold wind hit my face, and I braced my hands onto the arms of the chair. I turned to look at Dr. M, who averted his gaze from me quickly and began scribbling on his clipboard. I stared at the convict in front of me. He was sweating bullets. My eyes widened. Within seconds, that bright purple aura surrounded my field of vision, and I saw his eyes color in too.
Dr. M faded into the ether as the surroundings around me and the criminal went to pitch black. Suddenly, that background changed. We were out in the bright sunlight, which at first panicked me.
The sun! Wait… this is a memory… okay, I’m back as a kid I guess.
I was in a fenced yard, a white picket fence that could have used a couple new coats.
My home, back in Nebraska.
Instead of seeing myself this time, I could tell that I was myself. I saw I was in a short-sleeved T-shirt and blue denim shorts. I had a cat in my hands, fur white as snow. It was purring very loudly and licking at my right hand.
Penny.
Oh, God. No, no, not this one, I can’t bear this one…
I hadn’t thought about that day in years. I thought it had finally gone away.
I watched Penny’s gaze turn to a grasshopper prancing away from us. I felt the cat jump from my lap and start pouncing after the grasshopper.
Penny, come back here!
With a bound, Penny jumped in between the slats of the fence, chasing after that grasshopper. I went after her, just like I did that day as a young boy, knowing what was going to happen, hoping against hope this time I could change the past, also knowing I wouldn’t.
I knew I would open the gate and run after Penny. I knew I would see the car and continue to run after the cat. I knew my mom would pick me up just in time. And I also knew that when she threw me over her shoulder to run me back into the house, I would see the car speeding past, a white and red mass tumbling and bouncing three times behind it before coming to rest, sprawled and broken and lifeless, on the pavement.
My heart hurt. My undead heart was hurting. It was hurting as bad as the day Penny died. I sobbed and sobbed until sundown. I clutched pillows all night and didn’t come down for dinner. I took a picture off the wall, of Penny as a kitten just a few months earlier, jumping out of a box and into my happy, waiting arms on Christmas morning.
I clutched that picture to my chest and began crying all over again. I held it tighter, and tighter, until the glass cracked. It shredded through my shirt and into my chest.
As soon as I recalled that memory, I could feel the sickening sting of glass slitting into my skin. Owwwww…
My mom tried in vain to wrench the picture away from me, but I was hysterical. “I want my Penny back!” I kept sobbing. “I want my Penny back! It’s not fair!”
By the time I finally let go of the picture, it was too stained in blood for me to ever keep it again…
I miss Penny…
I jolted out of the trance. The purple aura was gone. I was gasping for air I didn’t need. I felt like I had just snapped awake from a bad dream.
“It’s okay, Hunter,” said Dr. M softly. “You’re all right. You’re out of it now.”
I began to cry. I was still confused, half in my vision, half in reality. “I need my Penny… I mean Tyler! Tyler, I need Tyler here now…”
“They’re almost done in there,” Dr. M said, peeling the electrodes off my head. “Just take a few minutes to compose yourself.”
I took a deep inhale, closing my eyes and telling myself it was over. I was okay. I opened my eyes and looked at the man across from me.
His head was slumped into his chest. His skin was as pale as ash, and his wrists, palms up and open, were torn open from the metal handcuffs. Pools of blood lay directly underneath them.
“Did I kill him?”
“He appears to have died from a severe heart attack,” Dr. M said, taking the scroll from his clipboard and untying it. “The convulsions he had during it caused the wrist lacerations, if you were concerned about that.” He began writing at the bottom of the scroll.
“Did I kill him?” I repeated.
“I won’t know for sure until the medical team, Ife and I study the results, but I would venture to say that yes, you did.
“You thought him to death.”
I spent the next night clung tightly to Tyler in our bed back at home. “You should have told me,” I said.
“I know, I know,” Tyler said softly. He looked down at me and brushed some of the hair out of my eye. “I just… remember I told you about Nicholas?”
“The guy you fell in love with back in Boston?”
Tyler nodded, “And the one I accidentally killed trying to turn. I was so upset with myself after that I spent many, many years on my own, turning my back on everyone in The Order.
“They called me The Recluse for a time,” Tyler continued. “Because I was reclusive and because I was vicious. My rage towards myself fueled my strength and my level of violence against my targets.
“One night, while carrying out a scroll, it happened. I caught my target’s eye, and I went into a haze. I saw purple, and all of a sudden I was reliving the night I nearly drowned my last night as a human. I tasted the water; I felt it go into my lungs. When I came to, my target was slumped against a tree, gasping for breath. I realized he saw and felt the same things I did. He was so devoid of energy, he couldn’t even fight me off. I finished him off right there.”
“How’d you know it was a natural power?”
“Sorry?”
I sat up and looked at him. “You told Calhoun that you knew it was a natural vampire power.”
“Honestly, I didn’t at first. I just thought it was another manifestation of my rage. I kept having these visions every so often. Then I got back into mainstream work at The Order, and the visions and the auras stopped, for awhile… Then they picked back up again while I was on missions.
“At that point, I assumed it was just something a vampire develops after time,” Tyler said, hugging me close. “And given how awful some of the memories I had were, I figured no vampire would want to discuss and would have to learn on their own.”
My quizzical nature started to butt in. “So do you think you passed that ability on to me when you turned me? Like heredity?”
Tyler shrugged. “I suppose. But we obviously don’t know enough about it to say for sure; otherwise we wouldn’t have taken all those tests. It just bugs me though.”
“What?”
“A vampire can’t just suddenly have a power. That’s like saying humans just decided to wake up one morning with opposable thumbs. This has to be an evolution of some sort.”
I nodded as I conceded his point. “But how do you prove that? If, as you say, vampires don’t like to talk about traumatic memories, how would there be records of this power?”
“It’s probably buried in ancient lore somewhere.” Tyler grinned, for the first time in days, which was a welcome sight. “I’ve got an idea. Do you have remote access to the databases at Records?”
“Yeah,” I said, “Albert had set that up before…” I stopped myself from saying before I hurt him.
“Good,” Tyler said. “Get my laptop from the office, tap into it, and download the personnel history records. Also, add a sample of the digital scroll database, maybe a third of it? Use my external hard drive if you need.”
“What are we gonna do?”
Tyler smiled wide. “We’re gonna go to a bookstore!”
---
Pages Bookshop was arguably one of the finest of the giant bookstores in the area. They were big to begin with, but the one at the Galleria spanned three floors. They could give the Library of Congress a run for their money if they just got rid of pesky customers like us.
Tyler had set me down in the café with his laptop and hard drive while he popped over to the occult and metaphysical sections. He returned about twenty minutes later with a stack of about eight books.
“I hope you paid for those already,” I chided as I tapped the volumes he held. “Remember, I used to work in retail. Nothing pisses off a bookseller more than seeing you read a bunch of stuff you’ve no intention of buying.”
“No worries, love,” Tyler said with another cute grin. “Bought, paid, transacted. They’re ours now.”
I booted up the computer. “What exactly am I looking for?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Tyler said. “I’m going back into vampire mythology as far as the 1600s, and I’m reading up on psychic vampires as well.”
“Psychic vampires?”
“Not vampires in the ‘you and me’ sense of the word, rather humans who can manipulate people into getting anger or panic energy from them, and know how to use that energy for their own benefit.”
“You think what you and I can do is psychic?”
Tyler nodded, “Got to be. Whatever we’re doing, we’re showing these other people our memories so clearly.”
“Okay. Well, whenever you find something I can reference in the databases, let me know.” I took a book from his stack and began reading.
About half an hour passed without a word between us. “Hunter,” Tyler said, “check the databases for the phrase ‘mental bedlam.’”
I began typing. “What did you find?”
“Maybe nothing,” Tyler said. “There’s a story here in this book of legends about a mysterious man who implanted visual suggestions of chaos and sounds screaming into his victims. Gradually this made them crazy in some sort of schizophrenic way. Then, when they were too far gone to make sense, he’d feed off their ‘essences.’”
The computer beeped. “Nothing under that term,” I said.
Tyler stretched a bit. “Was worth a shot.”
A few minutes later, I found something. “How about this? It’s a poem from the early 1800s about a wandering vampire.”
“Read it.”
“‘Across the fields and valleys he rode, intent on finding one inviting abode. Please, he would ask, might I sleep, I shall work to earn my keep…’”
Tyler put a hand on my wrist. “Skip ahead to the relevant part, hun.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, then found the climax. “‘The evil fiend rose into the night sky, and shared with the poor farmer, his own mind’s eye. Unspeakable acts this farmer saw, who became crazed, and scratched his eyes raw. The dastard supped on the dead man’s blood, and hid the body in the wet, sodden mud.’”
Tyler sat, arms folded. “Not exactly Poe, is it?”
“Tyler, be serious.”
“Sorry,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “It’s something, not too concrete though. Does the poem say anything about this guy’s age?”
I scanned the poem again, “‘The living corpse had seen a hundred ages…’”
“So a couple thousand years,” Tyler said.
“No one that old in the Order database, I imagine,” I said.
“Definitely not.” Tyler looked outside the café window at Downtown Dallas, a busy area even near ten o’clock at night. “But there were some close to that. Check the databases again, and sort the files by age.”
I typed the commands into the computer and waited for the results. The café barista came up to us and I quickly lowered the laptop lid. “Last orders, guys?” she asked sweetly. I looked around; the café was suddenly barren.
“Nothing, thanks,” I smiled back. As soon as she went away, the computer beeped with a result.
“The oldest vampire in the Order was Agent Lippman, aged 876.”
Tyler nodded. “A legend in his own right. I never got to meet him, but he was one of the very first vampires the Order employed.”
“Hm, that’s funny,” I said, scrolling past some pages in the database. “A good number of these records show up in red when I sort them this way.”
“What does red mean?”
“One of two things: Discharged due to mental instability or SBS… Suicide By Sun.”
Tyler looked at me. “Read off some of the ages.”
“480, 397, 451, 455, 363… There’s about twenty-five records here, all red-marked around the same age range.” I showed him the screen for him to study. “You said that sometimes the stress of the Interrogator job led some to go mad or kill themselves; did that always happen around that age?”
Tyler scanned the screen and made a few clicks on the trackpad. “I always thought so… but look here,” he said, pulling up a record for Agent Leo. “‘Position: File Clerk 1980, SBS 1991.’File clerk. He’d have no reason to go mad unless he just really hated his job. And here: ‘Agent Cushing, Position: Research & Studies. 1978, Discharged due to mental instability,’ just two months after joining The Order.”
“The ages seem to be a factor in their conditions, but not their jobs,” I said. “But that doesn’t tell us anything else.”
Tyler closed his books and shut down his laptop. “Well, it’s something at least. We can bring it up on Monday when we go for our test results.”
---
Calhoun’s office looked like the green room for a trashy talk show. Tyler and I sat next to each other on one couch. Albert was leaning gently into Noah’s arms, looking better but not one-hundred percent, and next to them sat Drs. M and Ife.
“I trust you have the results,” Calhoun said to the doctors. “Proceed.”
Ife rose to speak, but Mario touched her arm. “I thought we agreed I’d present.”
“I thought we agreed it would be better if I did,” Ife protested.
I watched them bicker back and forth. It was as if they were brother and sister.
“I had to work harder than anyone on the team to get the computers to process the data correctly,” Mario continued.
“You forget that I was the one who implemented the testing procedure in the first place,” Ife said with annoyance.
“Doctors!” Calhoun barked, causing us all to look at him. “One of you, just please get on with it!”
Ife sighed and motioned for Mario to join her in standing. “The test was conducted in identical conditions: each vampire was placed in front of a convicted felon. The test was simple: allow the vampires to perform their ‘ability,’ and record their brainwaves along with the brain waves and heart rates of the convict.”
Mario turned on the television opposite the sofas, which displayed a slide show from his laptop. The image was of two charts. “The charts you see here each contain three lines. The red line is the vampire’s brain activity. The green line underneath is the convict’s brain activity, and the blue line underneath that is the convict’s heart rate.”
Ife walked to Mario and pointed at the graphs. “Let’s examine Tyler’s test first. Note that in a twenty minute span, the brain activity between him and his convict rise and fall almost in sync with one another. The convict’s heart rate also elevates to a much higher level at the same time the brain activity climaxes.
“This continues until about fifteen minutes into the exercise,” she continued, indicating a slope in both Tyler and the convict’s brain waves. “Once the energy level of the prisoner drops, Tyler is able to slowly ebb back his power and then eventually shut it off immediately.
“Now let’s examine Hunter’s case,” Mario said as he advanced the slide show to focus on my results. “The brain activity in both vampire and convict surges and recedes in time with each other. What is important to note in this case is the heart rate of the convict near the end of the test. It rose to such a high level that the convict suffered a pulmonary embolism—a heart attack—and died before testing was complete.
“Also note,” he said, pointing to our brain scans, “that at no point does Hunter stop transmitting his brain energy at such a high level until he awoke himself from the trance, sometime after the convict expired.”
“There were two theories we wanted to test with this examination,” Ife said, advancing slides again. “This chart demonstrates the level of brain activity between Tyler, Hunter, and a volunteer from V-Division, Agent McCall in Surveillance. McCall was asked to glamour a human for the same amount of time as Hunter and Tyler were. Note the drastic difference in mental stress between the volunteer and our two subjects. What was the main difference?”
Tyler spoke first. “Glamouring just implants an idea, a suggestion and relaxes the human’s mind.”
“The
volunteer wasn’t locked directly onto someone else’s brain,” I
replied, staring at the chart.
“Precisely,” said Mario. “We
think we can conclude that this ability can push the mind of a
vampire to its absolute threshold, using every ounce of its already
high energy level.”
“You said there were two theories,” Calhoun said. “What was the other?”
“For that,” Ife said, “we must ask our subjects a few questions. Tyler, if you would, please summarize the memory you implemented in your test?”
“I recounted the time, shortly after I was made, when I had fled from my Maker’s residence after it had been besieged by villagers. I was on my own for weeks, and not knowing much about being a vampire, I had to hunt what I could. Often that meant deer. I remembered the time I had to decimate an entire family of deer just to stay fed off blood.”
Ife nodded, and then looked at me with that comforting, gentle smile. “And you, Hunter? What did you recall?”
“The day my cat was run over while I watched,” I said hoarsely, almost ashamed at how childish it sounded. I didn’t want to think about it again.
Mario turned off the TV then asked, “Do you remember what we told you those two convicts were found guilty of?”
“Dogfighting.” We both answered, after which a stunned silence filled the room.
“And after you were told so, you both implemented images of animal violence into your victim’s heads,” Ife said with a growing amount of interest.
“Hunter,” Mario continued, “think back to your incident with Albert. What were the last things he said to you before your power took over?”
“Just stuff about the networking team coming into the library to set up the computers,” I said, “and then something about…”
“My headache.” Albert sat up slowly, his eyes widening towards me.
I didn’t get it at first, but then it connected. “And then I envisioned the day I cracked my skull at the supermarket.”
Ife nodded emphatically, nodding to Mario. “We think we can conclude that the power can only initially be used when the vampire can connect a personal traumatic memory to something their target says or does.”
I faced Albert. “I am so sorry. If I had known”—
“But you couldn’t have,” Albert said. “If there’s one thing I remember Coach used to tell the team when I was equipment manager, ‘It’s just pain.’ I’m recovering. The important thing is that you guys know what you’re capable of doing and that you know how to control it.”
“That’s going to take more research,” Tyler said. He rose and spoke to Calhoun. “Hunter and I have a theory of our own.”
The boss leaned back in his chair. “Go on.”
“We cross-checked the employee records in the V-Division against discharges and Suicides by Sun in relation to their age,” Tyler said. “We noticed that a large proportion of the vampires who left The Order in those ways were all around the same age, roughly three to 400 years old.”
As Tyler continued, I looked first at Calhoun, then to Dr. Ife, then Dr. M. They all seemed to know where Tyler was heading with this.
“We’ve all assumed until now that an aging vampire’s mind combined with the high level of ‘dirty work’ we do caused these agents to lose their faculties. But…”
“…What if it were actually due to this power,” Mario said thoughtfully.
“It’s an intriguing hypothesis,” Ife chimed in. “The brain scans alone would be enough to support that; I’ve never seen mental stress levels this high before. If we could prove that these vampires were developing this power around the same time they were incapacitated, it would be an absolute medical breakthrough.”
“It also poses two major questions,” Noah said.
I nodded. “Tyler’s only half those vampires’ age. Why has he developed it so soon?”
Tyler looked at me gravely. “You’ve not even been a vampire for a full year yet. Why did you develop it so soon?”
“Here’s where we go from here,” Calhoun said in his iconic authoritative voice. “Hunter, continue your research into the vampire brethren who left The Order due to medical discharge or SBS. Doctors, I want you to contact our branch offices around the world. I am issuing an order for emergency evaluations on any vampire who knows about or has performed this type of power, regardless of age. Tyler, while that is going on, we have to get back to reinstalling you in the Interrogation Unit. Stay behind so I can brief you on your next assignment.”
“Yes, Sir,” we all replied in unison. Everybody filed out of the office except for Calhoun and Tyler. As I closed the door behind me he gave me another look of apology. I could tell he was beating himself up about all this.