I left the safety of the Locomotive Deadyards. The Red Man went with me.

I had started calling him, “Red,” and I was beginning to enjoy his company very much. Yes, I was glad that he was by my side. He was a good helper and friend.

Together we flew in his Kharetie spaceship to New Orleans.

It was the season of Mardi Gras. The streets were thronged with parades and beads and Bacchic festivities.

Strangely, I felt right at home.

 

 

 

 

Red parked his spacecraft in a warehouse packed with parade floats. It blended in perfectly.

So did he. We walked up and down the crowded streets of the French Quarter. People put thick beads around his neck and kissed his cheeks because they thought his costume was the best they’d ever seen.

I’d never seen him look so nervous. His red cheeks blushed a deeper shade of purple.

Only his reserve stuck out like a sore thumb.

 

 

 

We spent a few days looking for the right set of people whose blood I should drink and whose Blood Memories I should eat.

We squatted in empty mansions and shot gun houses. And one desperate night we slept in one of the haunted crypts in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

Incidentally, a ghost woke me up that night. She was carrying a ghostly lantern and looking for her lost lover.

I told her to try the next sepulcher over, the one with the stone cherubs over the mantle.

The ghostly woman nodded and thanked me in a wispy voice. Then she left us alone for the rest of the night.

But she had scared Red half out of his wits. He didn’t like the strange ways of human ghosts. And he couldn’t get back to sleep. He was fearful that she would return any moment to shine the ghostly light of her lantern in his face.

I held him all night. I stroked his bald head. My fingernails stroked his red skin. I hummed a human lullaby.

He was so big. I was so tiny.

It was nice to hold in my arm such a reversal of power.

It was nice to hold him too.

 

 

 

 

It took a few days and nights, but soon we made a list of everyone from whom I should drink.

The first person on the list was my personal choice. It was an old homeless man whom I’d seen several times.

Red did not like this choice at all. He had learned through his own Blood Memories that shaking his head was a great way to say, No! without saying a word.

He was shaking his head a lot.

But the old homeless man impressed me, in the same way that Theo’s old man had impressed him, all those months ago – it seemed like centuries by then. Theo had drunk that old man’s blood because he had wanted to drink the blood of someone who might not have been skilled in life, yet was skilled with living.

My old homeless man was like that. He had never been a drunk since he never drank. He begged for money all day and all night, but he used only a little bit of it for himself. He took most of his earnings from begging to a small church that was in disrepair, a church begging for money to fix a hole in the roof, and he put it in the collection box. He did this every day, several times a day too, lest some cowardly thief try to steal that money from him. My beggar was helping other beggars.

I loved him for that!

 

 

 

 

It actually happened on the day I decided to drink his blood. A thief tried to take his money. But I got there right in the nick of time.

Red was following me reluctantly, his arms cross, his head still shaking, No! in disagreement.

I caught the thief right as he drew out his knife. I lifted him off the ground and threw him over the nearest roof.

My old homeless man looked at me the same way he had looked at the thief – with a kind smile and a twinkle in his eye. Most people would have been terrified.

“You’re an angel,” he said to me in an old man’s gravelly tone.

“Maybe I’m a devil,” I said.

“Devils are angels,” he said.

“I need something from you,” I said.

“Will it hurt?” he asked.

“For a second,” I said, “and then there will be happiness.”

“Okay,” he said. “Take what you need from me.”

 

 

 

 

I told him to close his eyes. He did.

I went around behind him. My Probiscus extended from the tip of my tongue. The shadows in my mind would not let me forget the horror of drinking Nell’s black blood. But the determination of my mind to destroy Lowen the Dark Man scattered the terror of those shadows.

“For Theo,” I said as I saw the sweet spot on the back of the old man’s neck. But then, almost as an afterthought, I added, “And for me too.”

 

 

 

 

I pierced the old man’s neck and drank his blood and ate his Blood Memories.

He said, “Oh!” and then he went limp in my arms.

No one else had ever done that before. They usually stumbled way with a euphoric smile on their face, remembering nothing from my pierce, except for a foggy sense of pure pleasure.

The Blood Memories of my old homeless man filled me. I saw the world through his eyes and I realized that the pint that I had swallowed down was the last pint his heart had pumped. It stopped beating the instant the tip of my tongue slipped out from his neck.

My old homeless man died in my arms with a contended smile on his face, but I don’t think it was from my venom. I hadn’t released it.

For a moment I was tempted to believe that I had killed him.

But I knew that that was not true. The early surging of his Blood Memories told me so. His heart simply gave out. It was just his time. It was as if it was meant to be. Call it fate. Call it a Divine Plan. Yet I cannot allow myself to believe that my pierce and his death were some sort of happy accident.

Serendipity exists when only accidents do not hurt. Otherwise it would be called a tragedy.

 

 

 

 

The old man’s Blood Memories went to work in me.

He had been homeless by choice. He had no fear of death, no fear of the future, no fear at all. He took life one day at a time, and when that was too much, he took it one minute at a time because sometimes a whole day can be lived in sixty fleeting seconds.

I knew that I had made the right choice.

The old man’s Blood Memories would be the fire that tempered all the others I would soon swallow down and digest in my photographic memory.

I admit: I had gotten my appetite back for blood.

It really only takes a pint or two.

 

 

 

 

Red and I then went down the list that we had made. It was filled with fighters and thinkers.

Red approved it. He stopped shaking his head.

I drank the blood of seventeen martial artists, each skilled in a different style. There was Kung Fu and T'ai chi and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and Nguni Stick Fighting and West African bare-knuckle boxing, and let’s not forget that wonderful Canadian martial art, Defendo.

I also drank the blood of three chess grand masters.

All those Blood Memories were teeming within me like a perfect storm.

And I was the perfect storm.

I was ready for a fight.