Mercy was awake and watching a movie. She was lying on her belly on the bed, head propped up on her hands, feet kicking air. Still in her My Little Pony PJs.
“Evening, Merce,” I said, picking the key off the hook on the wall.
“Hey,” she said, distracted by the bright images on the TV.
Unlocking the cage door I went in and looked at the TV. It was the movie about the Formula 1 racers. I sat on the bed and, because I was feeling a bit sore, stretched my legs out and leaned back against the pillows.
“Why are you watching this?” I asked Mercy.
She shrugged but flipped around so she was sitting next to me. With a little wiggle, she snuggled into my side, still watching cars whiz around a track. I draped an arm over her shoulders and considered her.
What was she thinking while she watched her movies? Were they just a series of bright colours and fast imagery? Or did she follow the story? Could she understand the situations the characters found themselves in? Did she empathise with them, care about what happened? Or did she just like the explosions?
A couple of weeks back, Mercy had nailed me with a pretty accurate accusation and, in between the hurt and bruised pride, it had got me wondering if maybe my vampire was starting to be, well, less my vampire and more of her own vampire. Perhaps she was starting to think for herself, process information and draw her own conclusions. I mean, it’s not like I generally thought of myself as a ‘control freak’, much less a ‘Neanderthal’. So if not from me, where did she get those ideas? I’d been watching her pretty closely ever since, trying to see if it was a growing trend or simply a one-off.
Well, amongst the tantrums and just plain crazy, I was still looking. Maybe I’d miss-read the whole ‘control freak Neanderthal’ thing. Lord knows, I’m not that thuggish.
Regardless, I tried again. “Don’t you prefer action movies?”
Mercy tore her gaze off the TV long enough to glance at me. “You like race cars.”
“I do. Didn’t think you did.”
She shrugged again.
Sometimes I wondered if my inability to understand what went on in her head was the vampire thing, or the female thing.
On the screen, one of the cars crashed and burned spectacularly. I watched Mercy, looking for a bigger response to the carnage than to anything else. Yeah, I couldn’t detect any difference.
All right. No more procrastinating. Time for the talk.
“Can you turn that off? I want to talk to you.”
Mercy scowled at me. “Why?”
“Because I want to know some stuff. Come on, indulge me.”
Fangs flashing momentarily, she turned the TV off, tossing the remote off the end of the bed in a little act of rebellion. I didn’t care. It was her remote. If she broke it and wanted a new one, she’d have to save up for it.
“Thank you.”
Shrugging my arm off, Mercy squirmed away from me. Awesome. This was going swell.
“What did you want to talk about?” she asked petulantly.
“Last night.”
Her eyes sparked silver and I felt a wave of vampire irritation down the link.
“I didn’t run away,” she snapped. “I was going to come home.”
Huh? Oh. Right.
“No, that’s not what I want to talk about. I know you would have come home.” I know I hoped she would have come home.
“Then what?” She seemed truly puzzled.
This was going to be awkward. I just knew it.
“It’s about what I did. When I took over your body. I just wanted to make sure that you were okay with it.”
Mercy looked away from me. “It was okay.”
“Was it? Mercy, look at me.”
Reluctantly, she met my gaze. “It felt weird.”
“How weird?”
She shrugged and got off the bed. “Are we going out? You’re dressed, so we’re going out.”
“We’re not going anywhere until you answer the question.”
“Fine. It felt weird like part of my head was gone.”
I frowned. “How gone?”
Mercy began grabbing clothes out her closet. “Gone gone. Like it wasn’t there anymore.”
Silly me for asking, I suppose. “What part was gone?”
“The part that’s you.”
That stopped me in my interrogation tracks. The part that was me. What the…?
“Do you mean the link?” Which I guess it might be. If my psyche was in her head, there was no need for a link.
“No,” she said, witheringly patient with the dunce. “The part in here—” She waved her hands around her bouncy black curls. “—that is my thoughts and your thoughts and our thoughts. The part that, when you go away, vanishes and all I feel is hungry and like I want to run and chase something and eat it.”
So, basically, the bits that let her rise above the primitive vampire urge to hunt and kill. The humanity I gave her to balance out the soulless creature she’d become.
“What do you mean, when I go away?” I hadn’t left her since rescuing her from the Mentis Institute.
“Like when you go to sleep, but not sleep.” She screwed up her face in concentration. “When you’re unconscious.”
That was news. “Whenever I’m unconscious, you vamp out?”
Mercy shrugged and peeled off her PJs.
Right then, my state of consciousness controlling Mercy’s baser instincts wasn’t something I wanted to get into. Thus…
“I won’t take over your mind like that again, all right?”
She nodded. “Whatevs.”
Maybe the bit I didn’t understand was the teenager bit.
“We’re going hunting, so dress appropriately,” I advised, hauling my arse off the bed.
I got another careless response. At the door, I stopped, recalling what Erin had said.
“Mercy, how did you feel about what happened to Sean?”
“Sean?”
“The guy at dinner last night, the guy Erin’s investigating.”
“Oh. When his head exploded?”
“Yeah, that.” I swallowed hard.
“It was okay.”
“Okay?”
Those brown eyes regarded me like I was a couple of meat pies short a footy grand-final. “I rip the heads off vampires.”
She did. Rather flamboyantly at times. It had never bothered me before, so why did it unsettle me now?
“Whatevs,” I muttered and left her to get dressed.
For once, Mercy took my ‘appropriately’ at face value and appeared in dark jeans and black shirt. It didn’t help that tonight’s slogan was ‘Doesn’t play well with others’. I let it go and grabbed the keys for the Moto Guzzi. While Mercy danced and cheered her way to the garage, I reasoned it was best to leave the injured Goliath at home, where it couldn’t be spotted so easily by interested parties. Namely the cops and Roberts.
Hehe. Cops and Roberts. Say it really fast.
Snickering, I joined Mercy at the bike. She had her hot pink helmet on and was already in prime position, little hand held out for the keys.
I’m a softy. I handed them over.
Still, being the late half of the duo, it was up to me to walk the bike out of the garage and turn it around. Mercy grinned at me, eyes sparkling in glee at getting to be in control, and all my doubts about everything in the world vanished in a puff of stupid delight.
When your vampire is happy, you are happy.
I got on the bike and barely had my helmet secured before she was kicking it into gear and revving the engine. I’m sure, if we hadn’t rocketed past at such a great rate of knots, I would have been able to see the confused look on Sue’s face as she stood at her front door, watching us leave.
It was, I guess, understandable. Two supposedly flu-afflicted people shouldn’t be doing wheelies down the road.
“Tone down the theatrics,” I sent down the link. “We don’t need unnecessary attention tonight.”
Mercy replied with a little snap. “What did you do now?”
Before I could answer, she snaked around my head and caught the action replay while burning down Griffith Road. She unflinchingly wove us through traffic while laughing at the memory of the Colonel chasing Dev and I out of the hospital. She did, however, shiver in sympathy at the rats.
“You should try to be more understated,” she advised while sliding the bike through a gap at the lights Evel Knievel would have cringed over.
Yes, yes I should. I should also have never taught her to ride. There are so many things we come to regret once the results are back.
We made it to New Farm and stopped outside of the Belascos’ apartment building in record time. I showed Mercy where the monkey had been and she spent a while sniffing around.
“Got it,” she announced. Her nose screwed up. “It stinks.”
To be fair to the monkey, any scent Mercy wasn’t familiar with ‘stank’. When I changed cologne she told me for weeks I stank, then she got used to it and when I didn’t wear it, I, once again, stank.
Mercy handed back her helmet. “Be easier if I’m on foot.”
“Right. Just keep to the speed limit, okay? I have to keep up and I can’t track you on the phone while riding.”
Eyes sheened in silver, Mercy nodded and took off. She moved at a sprint and I kicked the bike into gear, following.
Around the corner, Mercy hesitated, then bounced off between two houses. “The monkey went this way. Some of the kids went a different way.”
“Follow the monkey.” I will admit I felt a trifle stupid saying it. At least it wasn’t aloud. “Let me know where you come out.”
I got an affirmative little zig down the internal line.
Cruising down the street I waited for Mercy’s next ping. It came not long later, directing me a couple of streets over.
And so we hunted.
I had to give the Tool Brigade points for distance. We traced them from New Farm through Fortitude Valley and to Queen Street. For the most part, they kept to the bicycle trails, following the bank of the river as it wound its way through the city. What their destination was, I have no clue, because they wandered around Queen Street, the scent trail layering over itself so many times Mercy couldn’t unravel it. Eventually, she found a single path leading out of the mess. They went into the mall, then down George Street and to the city Botanic Gardens.
Mercy lost the scent at the bus stop.
I pulled the bike up and took off my helmet. Mercy came over, frowning.
“The monkey got on the bus,” she said, deadly serious.
Carefully I hid a smile at the thought of the monkey waving a ‘go card’ and taking a seat on a bus.
I wondered where Feeble hid it while on the bus. Walking on the street with a monkey on your shoulder was one thing. Being tolerated on a public transport was another.
“Maybe we could roam around a bit,” I thought aloud. “See if you pick up the trail by chance.”
Mercy nodded, then said, “Or I could follow the other kids’ trail.”
I eyed her patiently. “Yes, or you could do that.”
“They went that way.” She pointed back into the park. “You’re not allowed in there with the bike. I’ll let you know where it goes.”
And with that, she took off again.
And I waited.