A Drop of Scarlet Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2007 Jemiah Jefferson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477806654

  ISBN-10: 1477806652

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Losing

  I: No Delight and No Mathematics

  II: Abstracts

  III: The Sounds of Scientist

  IV: Sundowning

  V: The Girl Nothing Happens To

  VI: Dosing

  VII: In a Rested Development

  VIII: The Heart of a Dog

  IX: Bold in Her Breeches

  X: Hunting

  XI: Spooky Action at a Distance

  XII: Charm and Strange

  XII: The Day the World Went Away

  XIV: A Subtle Equation

  XV: Deciding

  XVI: Empire Builder

  XVII: You Make It Sound So Clinical

  XVIII: Explaining Darkening

  XIX: Scattering

  XX: A Question of Honor

  XXI: Running

  Epilogue: The Angel in the Graveyard

  This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.

  HIGH PRAISE FOR JEMIAH JEFFERSON!

  FIEND

  Jefferson “follows through on everything Anne Rice tempts us with but never delivers. . . . Jefferson is one of those rare writers whom I would enthusiastically recommend to any genre fan. Her command of language is breathtaking and envy-inducing.”

  —Fangoria

  “Jemiah Jefferson is a fresh and exciting new voice in horror.”

  —Douglas Clegg, Author of The Attraction

  “Jefferson draws her characters so fully they threaten to leap off the page into your living room.”

  —Hellnotes

  “Comparisons to Anne Rice are inevitable, but Jefferson’s writing is simultaneously tougher and more elegant.”

  —Willamette Week

  VOICE OF THE BLOOD

  “Die-hard vampire fans are going to love it!”

  —Hellnotes

  “Jemiah Jefferson has proven herself as an author to watch with this novel. If you let Voice of the Blood get under your skin, you’ll be hooked.”

  —Horror World

  “Jemiah Jefferson [is] a welcome voice in character-driven horror fiction.”

  —Gothic.net

  “Jemiah Jefferson draws us into an erotic, violent and tragic world of vampires. . . . Voice of the Blood delivers all the bittersweet irony and tragedy requisite of modern Gothic horror.”

  —Dark Realms

  ONE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING . . .

  The bus was lit with pink lights like the lobby of a peepshow. A Saturday evening’s trash lay scattered on the floor, including two complete copies of the Sunday newspaper. There were three passengers when we got on, smiled at the bus driver, and sat down without paying. One rider, a thickset Hispanic man with close-cropped hair, began shouting at us. “Hey, y’all don’t get to ride without payin’! I paid my money!”

  “Shut up, dude,” said another rider, a lanky, pale man with glasses, wearing some cobbled-together ensemble of black clothes, leather boots, leather jacket. The female version of him was seated beside him. She had the waxy complexion of someone who had had too much to drink.

  “No, you shut up!” screamed the Latino.

  I stepped over to the Latino man and brought my joined fingers across his neck. Just testing; just seeing what such a thing would do. My claws severed his windpipe and unleashed a bright spray of blood across the seats in front of him.

  He put his hands up to his neck in a vain attempt to stop the blood, and he tried to scream, but I had cut him just below the Adam’s apple, and his voicebox now had nothing to work with but fluid.

  The girl screamed instead. . . .

  Other books by Jemiah Jefferson:

  FIEND

  WOUNDS

  VOICE OF THE BLOOD

  JEMIAH JEFFERSON

  A DROP OF SCARLET

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Wholly inadequate thanks go out to Cecilia Cannon for her invaluable insights, suggestions, encouragement, and countless nights of elegant fun; to Myrlin Hermes for her editing expertise, sympathy, and all those awesome dinners; to Celeste Ramsay for her enduring friendship and support; to Terri Kelly and Autumn Dawley, for believing in me from the beginning; to my editor, Don D’Auria, for his continued enthusiasm and sanity; to Davey and Shawna at Dark Horse, for making me feel at home; to the Vaults of Erowid, for its enormous research resources; to my family, for demonstrating the eternal bonds of love; and to all my friends and fans who always believed that I could do it again.

  PROLOGUE: LOSING

  ARIANE DEMPSEY

  Don’t get me wrong; there were good moments.

  There were together moments, denial moments, lying in bed with limbs braided together, silent and cool, undisturbed but for the slow, silent rise and fall of breathing.

  I could pretend we were just ordinary lovers, just Ariane and John, almost married but still, deliciously, not, snoozing in the beauty of a spectacular Portland spring sunset.

  For a little while, I could forget what I was.

  I could pretend that he had forgotten what he was. Or maybe, that he had suddenly accepted it.

  But the moment was always too brief. Time moved forward, and the sky’s blush began to recede. In the sinking light, I would notice the luminescent, eggshell whiteness of John’s neck, the slight flutter of a pulse visible alongside his dusty curtain of dark hair.

  Blood in him, blood that could be in my mouth, inside my body.

  I tried to resist noticing, knowing that if I felt it, he would get hungry, too. He would, no matter what I did. Like a yawn, the blood hunger was contagious, and nearly impossible to resist.

  I struggled against the urge until it burned through my core like an electric current, running from my mouth through my throat and into the core of my spine, slowly spreading, until my entire body quivered with red-hot electric need.

  Night had fallen, and I needed blood. In a minute, John would too, and nothing would be safe.

  John didn’t think to resist the hunger. He answered his need with the blind desire of a nursing infant. The silk-soft tip of his nose grazed along my arm, joined by the coolness of his lips and his tongue. I tensed in anticipation, and yet still, the stinging, erotic surprise of the points of his teeth piercing my skin made me twitch.

  I tried to block out the bloodlust, replace it with sexual lust. I always twitch when you penetrate me, baby.

  Unfortunately, the two were far too similar.

  We both opened our eyes at once, and there was no mistaking, no disguising, no hiding the thin trickle of dark blood running down my skin. His pupils contracted into tiny deep voids, focusing intently on the sight of the peculiar, inhuman blood. His cheeks moved at the sizzling sensation produced by my blood, his tongue sweeping his suddenly scarlet lips.

  I couldn’t stop my own body’s response of stomach-clenching desire. I wanted to see tides of bright red animal blood, pouring out, pouring into me, leavening my own blood, feeding me.

  I tried not to let the desire overpower me. He’d recognize it, a
nd I wanted us to stay as we were, lying together on the smooth, cool bedsheets.

  But it could never happen, not when blood had been spilled.

  “No,” he whispered, jagged and shaky with voiceless horror. He tore himself away from me, his red lips drawn back from his teeth, the fangs gleaming. I reached out my hands to him, sending him calming thoughts. John clapped his hands over his ears and clenched his eyes shut, shaking his head. Sweat suddenly dampened the hair at his temples. “I can see something—feel something that shouldn’t be there—something not me. Oh, dreadful—I—dreadful! Dreadful!” He clapped his hands to the sides of his neck, thumbs down against his collarbones, like he was trying to hold his head onto his body.

  I watched his agitation helplessly. Even though he had sometimes panicked before at the sight of my blood, or his own, this fear was far more intense than usual. This was different; this was a new form of hell.

  Yes—dreadful!

  An astonishing, searing pain, horrific in its brevity, flickered like lightning through all my nerves, burning away even the thirst for blood.

  Instantly, I was less than I had been. Something had been taken from me, all at once.

  Daniel . . .

  My progenitor. My ex. My enemy. My eternal love.

  His blood in my veins.

  Daniel Blum, dead for real, gone forever. It violated everything that made sense to me. Vampires weren’t supposed to die. I’d always known, in the back of my mind, that it was possible; I had been told that they could. Until that moment, though, I hadn’t really, truly believed it.

  I felt ill. I felt like screaming.

  When I opened my eyes, John wore a vicious grin, his eyes dilated again, and as fathomlessly black as a tar pit. He laughed soundlessly, his bare white chest sinking and expanding. With his long hair hanging down into his face, he looked like the bloodthirsty psychopath that he had become.

  “Is it true?” he whispered, unable to keep the glee from his voice.

  I had to turn my face away.

  I struggled not to hate John for being so fucking happy. He couldn’t help it, and I really couldn’t blame him. Daniel had casually torn out John’s throat, just to inconvenience me. I’d be pissed off, too, if I was John. If it wasn’t for Daniel, John would still be sane and human.

  But it wasn’t all Daniel’s fault.

  It was also, and mostly, mine. I was the one who led John into Daniel’s path, and no one was safe in Daniel’s path.

  But somebody had finally gotten the upper hand, and the nasty cur had given up his eternal life. Daniel would never have died by accident; a vampire’s death, just like his birth, had such specific conditions that it couldn’t just happen.

  It could only be murder, suicide, or, of course, the wretched combination of both.

  John leaped off the bed and let his laughter loose, ugly peals of nasty cackling. “He’s gone!” he crowed. “We did it! We’ve killed him!”

  “He did it himself—don’t flatter yourself,” I said, lightheaded now that the pain had passed, and with it, the living vibration of Daniel Blum, which I had always felt, even thousands of miles apart, with an entire country between us.

  At least, I thought, he didn’t suffer long.

  John curled into a small knot in a corner of the bedroom, underneath the dark wood shelving, his laughter silent now, his smile dissolving, his words degenerating into grunts and moans. He was overwhelmed, churning between the two poles of my pain and grief, and his own vengeful delight. His ability to use verbal language had left him. I had seen this symptom before, almost always triggered by intense feelings of fear, and both blessed and cursed my ability to share his thoughts. Sometimes, I didn’t want to share thoughts.

  Too bad for us both. My blood ran in his veins.

  He rocked himself with his arms clenched around his knees, keening softly to himself.

  I needed a drink, badly.

  I uncapped one of the plastic bottles of blood in the kitchen fridge, and gulped hungrily at the cold fluid. I went into the parlor, an oasis of carpet, hardwoods, and near-total darkness, sat cross-legged on the floor, and pushed my fingers against my temples.

  Orfeo, please come to me. I need you.

  There was, of course, no answer.

  I put on some clothes and shoes, and went to my job. For a few hours, anyway, I could pretend that I was just a bioscience postdoc doing leukemia research, just an ordinary human being with a car and a house and weekend plans. I could pretend that there wasn’t a schizophrenic vampire on my bedroom floor, and that the leukemia research wasn’t just a front for finding something, anything in the world, that could help him put his shattered mind back together.

  I

  NO DELIGHT AND NO MATHEMATICS

  JOHN THURBIS

  This and not this.

  Someone else driving. Night without morning. A color not right, a spectrum of dark, darker, more dark, never the ultimate, never getting there.

  Brickwork, broken cobblestones, a crisps packet. A T-shirt and a glance, an inrushing of air, and not this, but this.

  That’s right. It can’t be right. It can’t be actual.

  Screaming and moaning. My hands dripping blood and slimy green shreds of stomach contents, the moaning coming from me and the screaming coming from some other throat. The electric beast, the heartless white stag, looming above my head, ready to cleave my skull with its hooves, then continuing down, splitting the earth in two like a machete halving a coconut. The earth is like a jawbreaker inside.

  Town. Metal bands linking the halves, a street dividing that, up a hill, a park for the dead. Sometimes a waxed rock.

  There must have been something before this. Someone else driving; we never get to where we’re going.

  “I know you remember. I know you can’t help it.”

  Her soft fingertips caressing my temples, skimming along my sandpaper jaw, light from a candle, the smell of ginger and honey. Who was she, where was I, when was now and then.

  It came apart.

  I had the two ends but I could not put them together. The torn edges would fray and slip apart, and in the scrambling to recover one end, the other would escape . . . gyromagnetic ratio a positive 8.6, but that wasn’t all, I was missing some bits, and then what?

  Annihilation was in there somewhere.

  Licked my fingers, felt stable for a moment.

  Outside the Greyhound bus terminal, watching the moon set over the tree-spiky hills, hidden in the shadows in the parking lot. Ignored the luggage jockeys who yelled at me. They spoke in backwards hieroglyphics, currents of voices broken by the crash and squeak of their carts, the screams and grumbles of the blue whale buses, constantly refreshed, coming and going, swimming into their slots, opening rectangular mouths to consume and disgorge streams of people, baggage, sucking down tangy cola streams of gasoline.

  I would happily drink. Gasoline, coffee, river water, anything. I could eat a crisps packet.

  So thirsty, so hungry, I was sick. Gagging up shreds of plastic. That horrible lack inside me, a fetal tiger, gestating. Waiting it out.

  The tiger would soon be born, leap out of me fully formed, jaws slavering, and I would step aside. Not yet.

  Now was later and before and always.

  The moon had gone and a bright yellow star hung in its place. Mars. Thirty-five million miles away, but I held it between my thumb and forefinger like a shuddering fly. Around me, the metal animals dove and swam smoothly through the concrete ocean, eyes bright or dangerously dim, but all of them blind to the planets above, ignorant of the weak force holding them to the surface of the planet they were on, ignorant of the creature with a tiger growing inside him, tucked away in the ravine between the bridge entrance and the bus station.

  Where the moon dropped away, I knew my wife was there. West. Where the sky was gold and pink and jumbled with clouds and faint stars when I woke up. There was a house of white angles, brown velvet, framed dull prints of green-feathered tropical birds, a
nd it wasn’t my house at all. My house was a narrow dark thing, semi-detached, with a triangular cupboard piled with old newspapers under the stairs. That’s where Mum and Dad and I lived. And then suddenly not Dad. My house was a flat on the third story with books stacked against the walls and a tiny stained glass panel in the kitchen window that spilled a psychedelic pattern of red, blue, and orange across the coffee stains on top of the cooker. That’s where Dr. John the physicist lived. And then suddenly not Dr. John. Dr. John was killed. He wasn’t there anymore. The tiger ate him.

  My wife’s house was in Portland, Oregon, but it was not my house, and she was not my wife. But she was. Dr. John the physicist loved Ariane the biologist. And Ariane loved Dr. John, with a force as omnipresent (and feeling so strong, though it was so weak) as gravity. I could say it or sing it or carve it into someone’s face or into the living skin of an oak, but it would never be enough, because I knew that though what dwelt in that house looked like Ariane, it was not Ariane, the girl I loved. I had fallen in love with a girl—an extraordinary girl, an argumentative spitfire, a dimpled distraction, so infuriatingly literal at times, so unsentimental, always focusing on transcendence, on the impossible. But human. And that human was dead, and a changeling monster had taken its place, with the sheer gall to wear my Ariane’s adorable face and walk about in her kissable body.

  And then there was me, and who was I to talk? I was just as dead as she was, walking around in a body that resembled the brilliant professor, but absolutely wasn’t it. This body, this me, had hands like white spiders and no smell but what I put onto it and eyes that could see the heat rising from living things and skin that fixed itself when I cut it.

  Maybe only the human Dr. John the physicist loved the human Ariane the biologist, and the gestating tiger, now kicking roughly against my throat, had no love for anything.

  I would have to step aside soon and let the tiger tear its way out. It wouldn’t hurt as long as I paid no attention to what it did.