“Of course not.”
“So how do you converse with it?”
Paul turns to smile at me. “What do you mean? We’re talking to it right now.”
I’m just about to ask him to explain when I hear a distant voice. “Ryet?”
“Syrsee?” I’m still looking at Paul and he shoots me a big smile. “Now what are you doing?”
“Just helping things along.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, turning me around. “Come on. Let’s go back. Syrsee doesn’t have much time and there is blood to exchange.”
I’m still trying to figure out what all that means when I wake up in bed. Syrsee is here now, climbing over my body to fit herself into a space that Paul has made between us.
“There you go, sweet Syrsee. Get comfortable,” Paul says. “Let’s all have a drink now, shall we?”
But what the three of us do next is not drinking. It’s blood lust. It’s all kinds of lust. I’m inside Syrsee as she drinks from Paul, Paul’s inside Syrsee as she drinks from me. And then she’s between us as we both drink from her.
It’s… sin.
That’s the only word I have to describe what we do to, and with, each other in this bed. Which isn’t even a bed. It’s nothing but a bit of Darkness.
Just like us.
It is pure sin.
I wake.
And when I open my eyes it’s just me, lying in our bed, with a hard-on and covered in blood.Which would be concerning if I hadn’t been waking up this way for weeks now—the part with Paul, at least. Not Syrsee joining in.
I sit up, letting out a long sigh, and look at my body. Is it my blood? Is it his? I’m not sure. It shouldn’t be possible to actually drink in a dreamwalk, but what the hell do I know about dreamwalking anyway? What the hell do I know about anything, actually? Paul never handed me a rule book. It was always just need-to-know. And, as far as I can tell, my name is the last one on the list of who needs to know. Pretty much everyone in Paul’s life knows more about what’s happening to me than I do.
I swing my legs out of bed and get up. There is blood all over this room, not just the sheets. But there’s no way to tell how much of it is from Syrsee and me drinking all night and how much is from… well, whatever it was that just happened.
Housekeeping cleans up after us every morning after I leave, so I just go into the shower, wash off all the blood, and come out pretending that everything’s fine as I put on my clothes, grab my phone, and leave, heading for the lab where I will spend my day.
And when I come home tonight the apartment will be clean, the sheets will be bright white again, and all I will be thinking about is the drink.
This is my life now.
I live, and eat, and breathe…blood.
The first week or so I was here, I would stop at this café near the research center and grab a cup of coffee. I would stand in line, and glance up at the trendy menu board that had everything written in liquid chalk, and I would smile at the Guild people all around me as they talked about their upcoming days or whatever else was on their minds.
It felt like a very Ryet thing to do. I’m not like a coffee fanatic or anything, but in my other life it was a morning habit. And it’s not hard to blend in here. I’m living in my Ryet body. There are no wings. There’s no bruise-colored skin. My eyes aren’t glowing red. I look like every other human around here so I figured… well, carry on, ya know?
But right around week two, when I started to realize that the blood lust was taking over, I just stopped going in. This was also right about the time when the people in the lab stopped being coy about what it was they wanted from me.
The first few days I showed up in the lab they took blood samples. Lots of them. And it felt pretty normal. I mean, the blood is everything to a vampire. It feels like a logical first step. At the very least, it’s something physical. Something scientific.
But they don’t want my blood. It’s dead outside of me anyway. One day—again, right around week two—they left the samples in the room I was in. The room is big, and open, and there are like half a dozen research stations and twice the number of researchers all sharing this one area. There’s nothing private about it. Half walls made up of soapstone lab benches with open shelving above filled with glassware and other science shit.
Usually they hook me up to an EKG machine or whatever it’s called. I might’ve just made that up because I heard it on TV, but it’s the brainwave electrode thingies they put on your head. It’s actually a helmet, but anyway. My point is, they didn’t take the blood. The lab tech got called away and it was just forgotten about until the end of the day when someone finally noticed.
And the blood in the vials wasn’t even liquid anymore. It looked like molasses, or maybe tar. Thick, and black, and gross. It looked like the Darkness, actually. It looked dead and it was tossed into the trash.
That’s when I figured out that they don’t care about my blood. They’re after something else and that something else was far less tangible. That something else turned out to be the thoughts inside my head.
“Ryet,” the lead researcher told me the next morning, “the magic is inside you, but it’s not something physical. It’s your brainwaves. It’s your frequency. It’s your…” Well, he went on and on about this and the words he used got progressively more and more technical. I vaguely remember him saying something about the Doppler effect, but that’s only because everyone’s heard that term. It’s how they track rain.
