Chapter 8: The Commotion

NORI'S POV

His laugh is infectious. I haven’t liked a sound like that, had a visceral reaction to a basic human noise like that, for so long. It makes me feel young and that terrifies me. When you’re young you make mistakes. Emotions feel too big, too urgent. Specialist Perez brings all those long buried things to the surface in me.

I know he knows there’s something different about me, something he can’t quite put a name to. He watches me, my movements and interactions, in a way that makes me wonder if everything I do whispers, “vampire,” in the back of his mind.

I’ve seen the rosary he keeps tucked somewhere on his person at all times. He may not realize he runs them through his fingers when he gets agitated, but I certainly have. I see his lips moving sometimes, silent pleas to the ears of his Lord, especially after one of his many debilitating nightmares. So many of the men have them it’s barely worth mentioning, but I can see it’s not just a struggle in his body. There’s an inner struggle with his beliefs, how he thinks the world should work, that ignites his anger.

There has been no enemy to my kind like the Catholic church. Who fended off the shtriga in Albania? Strigoi in Romania? Who went around digging up graves and searching for bodies showing no signs of decomposition in Serbia? The Catholics. Though that happened in the 1500 and 1600s, vampire memories are long and our list of enemies short because we hunt what frightens us and nullify it. The last time the cauldron banded together? When Pope Benedict XIV decided to start writing about vampirism. That his death was something other than gout has been covered up by the church for eons. However, we that are old enough know the truth.

I wasn’t involved. I’ve tried to avoid killing innocents, if at all possible. But I knew of it. Even from Austria, where I was involved in other cauldron business, I knew of it.

What would my Milo Perez think of that?

This is what I am thinking about as sunrise creeps closer, when I should be preparing for a day of sleep. My bed, down in my suite in the underground mansion, rests on a sprinkling of dirt from my homeland. It’s a thin enough coat to barely be noticeable and yet, only on top of it can I achieve restful slumber. Whoever cursed vampires to be bound to the soil of their motherlands clearly was nearsighted. They didn’t see how easy that dictum was to overcome.

I’m running the Emerati sheets through my hands, feeling the butter softness of the 1,000 threadcount fibers. Aside from convention, I don’t know what the point of them is. I can’t get cold. I don’t get aches and pains. I will never wake to find I’ve tweaked my back. Aside from injuries incurred by violence, sword or stake or stiletto caused, I’m immune from such folksy concerns. I could sleep on a pile of earth and stone and, so long as it came from my homeland, I’d be just as at ease as in this bed of French Regence style upholstered pearwood and embroidered silks from Dubai.

That’s when I smell it. Someone, someone familiar who smells like cauldron, is injured, their blood exposed to the air. There’s two other smells that shouldn’t be wafting down these wood paneled halls either. One is that of a fresh breeze. Dawn is breaking outside, and yet the doors to the above-world are open. The other is something rank that coats the back of my mouth with a foul membrane. I scrape my tongue along my teeth while I throw an old Hollywood tulle and feather robe over my filmy nightdress. The taint of this unwelcome smell in still there, impossible to clear from my nose and throat.

I hurry out into the hall and see several cauldron members huddled in the shadows of their bedroom doors. No one here is young enough to be killed by sunlight, especially the faint glimmers of dawn snaking through, but some are only a century or two old, young enough that they could blister or burn. I, along with Weston, am the eldest of them and their leader. It is up to me to protect them or give them orders that will protect us all.

A shadow falls in behind me. Flora.

“What’s happened?” asks one of the only only vampires I’d allow this close to my back.

“I’m not sure,” I answer, moving at top speed to navigate the corners and get into the office. I can sense the smells are strongest there.

If humans were around, they wouldn’t see me, just a blur out of the corner of their eyes. The other vampires sense me and flatten themselves against the walls as I pass. My bare feet make no noise over the weathered brick and mortar floors.

There’s cursing, a lot of it. Cursing in French, Italian, English, and Arabic. It’d be impressive if it weren’t so foul. Impressively foul? That, perhaps.

When I see Weston, I quickly catalouge his injuries. A good chunk of his side has been taken out, and I can see the shining, wet gleam of his spleen, pancreas, and the bulge of the larger intestine. This is a catastrophic injury for a vampire, and I’m curious what caused it. We can get away from nearly anything before this amount of damage sets in. I smell him, the familiar and reassuring scent I associate with the cauldron, underneath the tang of viscera.

“Ambrose, he’ll need to feed,” I instruct one of the vampires that carried Weston in.

“Yes,” he answers, getting ready to speed out of the room.

“And Ambrose? Unconscious will work best, yes? Two, in fact,” I say while holding eye contact, so he understands this is a command.

“Yes, Princeps Eleanor,” he says, and his use of my title leads me to believe he’ll obey.

There’s more scuffling, and I’m torn between checking it out and attending to Weston.

Weston clears up the dilemma when he shouts, “Take it to the holding cell! Strap it down.”

Grunts answer from the hall, followed by more clanging and scraping against the walls. The smell of something not quite right gets stronger and then fades as the noise of the ruckus quiets. It’s the smell of swampland, of mold taking hold. If all the animals in the zoo were left untended and died, then a rain came to drizzle on the mouldering carcasses, this is what it would smell like.

I know immediately what it is. I’ve never had the chance to scent it at this range, but there’s only one thing in all the universe that smells as such. Aliens.

Another vampire male that came in with Weston, Daichi, is gathering medical supplies to treat Weston’s array of injuries. I go to the bandages and open my wrist over them. Then, Daichi takes them and binds Weston side, closing off the injuries from the open air, treating his wounds with my blood. I too go to Weston and finish ripping the rest of his shirt off. The tatters come away easily in my hands. I can feel him watching me, a routine but unwieldy weight.

“You have been busy, Princeps,” I say, my voice low but not low enough to grant us privacy. With other vampires in the room, that’s not possible.

“I was attacked, Nori. I didn’t go looking for excitement. However, we’ve been talking about finding out more about this alien race, how their anatomy effects ours. I would have liked it to be more a more coordinated effort, but this achieves our ends just as well,” he tells me.

“And you did not think to tell your fellow officer this?” I ask, my voice monotone. If I were a dog, my hackles would be raised. At the very least, it should have crossed my metaphorical desk.