Yuki covered her mouth, eyes wide as she looked at me. “You—”
“Please don’t,” I said, my usual baritone coming from the adorable Pembroke corgi I’d assumed the form of. I didn’t know why I could still speak English as a dog, but I was able to become a dog, so I think logic had left the room anyway.
“Are so cute!” Yuki said, clapping her hands together. “You don’t have a tail but a little nub.”
“Laugh it up, Foxy,” I muttered.
“That’s not really an insult,” Yuki said. “Or a very good pun.”
I paused. “Chicken-stealer?”
“Okay, now you’re just embarrassing yourself,” Yuki said, trying not to grin.
“No shit.”
I was a black and white dog with little stubby legs and a pair of long triangle shaped ears. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I was a junkyard dog, a pit bull, a mastiff, or something with a bit of bite. Instead, I was identical to the dog my mother had rescued for me the Christmas my father had stepped out on us. Yes, in addition to the indignity of turning into something that looked like the Queen of England owned me, I looked identical to my own childhood pet.
Charles Barkley.
Yuki shook her head. “Can you turn into anything else?”
“Nope,” I said, sighing. “I’m hella strong, though. I can manipulate time, get visions, summon animals, and fly. It’s an odd assortment of vampire powers but it works for me.”
“You can fly?”
“Badly,” I admitted.
“Have you grown your wings yet?”
I blinked. “Say what?”
“You know, flying is about telekinesis, but eventually it becomes part of shapeshift...” Yuki trailed off. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“I’m going to grow wings?” I asked, horrified.
“Well, how are you going to maneuver otherwise?” Yuki said.
I blinked. “Is that what my problem is?”
Yuki shrugged. “I don’t know that much about vampires.”
“Apparently more than I do and I was a Bloodsworn for a decade,” I said.
“Most vampires don’t turn their slaves, err I mean—”
“Hey, hey,” I interrupted, turning back into a human. “Thoth doesn’t like that word. For obvious reasons. It’s probably why he has contracts with all his servants.”
Yuki got an enigmatic expression on her face. “Do you really think he deserves being helped?”
“He’s probably better than I’ll be in two hundred years,” I said. “What’s the Batman quote? You either die the human or live the vampire?”
“I don’t think Batman said that.”
David honked the horn of my Jeep, clearly telling me to hurry it up.
I looked at her. “Do you have a way to help me remember?”
“Do you think you know what’s going on?”
It was like there was a wall between me and my memories. I knew, in my gut, I was aware of something related to this case. Thoth and Ashura knew the truth of it, too. Perhaps it was why they’d involved me or maybe their lives were so full of crazy that I’d just stumbled over part of it. My gut wasn’t always right. Every major life decision I’d made was testament to that. However, I believed it was my only shot. I also didn’t want to think about Dead Debbie (who might not be dead but probably was). Waking up in a dismembered corpse’s remains.
Or my friends ending up that way.
“Yeah,” I said.
Yuki nodded. “Well, alright. I can maybe turbo-charge your time powers and let you summon the memories related to them.”
“How’s that?” I asked, wondering if werefoxes had a secret vampire upper ability I hadn’t heard of.
“I’m a quarter vampire,” Yuki said. “It’s why I manifested as a werefox even with my demon blood.”
“You’re kind of like if Legolas had a kid with Gimli only to have their child marry a Hobbit.”
“Do you want my help?”
“Sorry,” I said, grimacing. “Really, I used to know this wonderful girl with all sorts of crazy ancestry. Looked like Rosario Dawson only with—”
Yuki shook her head. “Dhampyr blood is the strongest of all and can be used to increase the power of any vampire. Many courts keep dhampyr slaves as part of their voivode’s harem. Even to the point of breeding them.”
“That’s fucking awful.” It certainly wasn’t the case in New Detroit. There were dozens of dhampyrs spread across the city and more being born every day. Ashura had put a death sentence on anyone who harmed one. Enil had chosen to back the decree up for obvious reasons. I wondered if Thoth had also been behind it, since he seemed to have some desire to look after his wives’ progeny. Certainly, if what Yuki was saying was true then there was no other city on Earth that would be safe for Sam’s kids.
“But true,” Yuki said. “My blood can help you do it.”
“Shouldn’t I have already gained it? I mean we, uh, kind of—”
“You didn’t drink my blood last night.”
I blinked. “Really?”
My memories of the experience were kind of hazy, but it was a memory of rapturous bliss combined with a sense of peaceful tranquility.
“Yes,” Yuki said. “I was there.”
“That’s....weird.”
Yuki raised an eyebrow.
I raised my hands. “It’s just, you know, it was really great. Sex without feeding is like sex without climaxing. I mean, I didn’t feed? What kind of weird mind meld did you do to me?”
“I withdraw my offer to let you drink my blood.”
“Sorry!”
“No,” Yuki said. “You’ve made it weird now. All of it.”
“Please,” I said, looking at her with a pitiful gaze. “Don’t make me use the puppy dog eyes.”
David honked the Jeep horn again.
“Alright,” Yuki said, looking at me then up at the full moon over our heads. “But let’s do it someplace private. I don’t want your friends watching.”
“Like in the bathroom of the gas station?”
“Really, Peter?”
I blinked. “The bathroom of the Hardees across the street?”
Yuki closed her eyes. “There’s no way to make this classy, is there?”
“Some hookups are in fancy hotels paid for by serial killer soccer moms, some hookups are in the middle of the streets...or so I’ve heard.”
“You don’t strike me as the street sex type, Peter.”
“I grew up dirt poor after my sleazy lawyer dad married his mistress, but the public library was full of books, comics, and DVDs that spoke of worlds far from my own. Places where a man like me could save the princess and the world. I tried to do that in the Middle East, be the big hero who defeated the big bad terrorists and ended up realizing life isn’t like the stories. So, I’m up for anything now.”
Yuki grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me into the shadows. It was at that moment, the predator inside me let me know how much he wanted to taste her blood. She smelled good and looked good, a quality I attributed to both her genetics as well as the fact she was a badass action girl. I had a type, okay? Women who could throw me around like a ragdoll.
“Do it,” Yuki said.
I didn’t need to be told twice. “Okay.”
Sex and drinking blood were intrinsically linked for vampires. A fact anyone who had seen a vampire movie in the last 100 years probably knew. Well, unless the movie was 30 Days of Night. Seeing the movement of her neck with each breath, hearing the pulse of her heart, and smelling the mixture of excitement with the tiny bit of fear she had at my fangs approaching her throat—well, it was a heady feeling. Put on some Barry White and the moment would have been perfect. For me at least.
Holding the back of her head, I sank my fangs into her carotid artery. I made sure to wet my lips with the saliva and whatever magic inside it that would keep her from dying when I began to drink mouthfuls of her blood.
Her blood...
It was impossible to describe.
I had never done hard drugs. Blood was my first addiction, and it was one I managed to reign in by feeding shallowly, eating animals, and doing my best to be a man rather than a vampire. I’d starved the Need and beaten it down every time it rose to dominate me, except for a few terrible accidents.
I had control.
This? This I couldn’t control. It was like a religious experience. A real one. A shock to my system wasn’t enough of a descriptor. It was like jabbing me directly with a lightning rod before 1 million gigawatts of power ran through my veins. Yuki grabbed me from behind and sunk her claws in my block, which only made the sensation more potent.
Please, Yuki thought to me. Let go.
I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to take her blood into me, take her life, and become stronger as a result. I could read her blood like I did the dumbass in the bathroom. I couldn’t even remember his name despite killing him. He was a fake.
Yuki was the real deal.
I could see her growing up with a loving mother, a distant father, and a sister she cared for more than anything.
I struggled to let go and stop drinking but I couldn’t.
I could see her witness her father, Hideo, causally stand over the butchered body of her mother. His finely pressed suit splattered with blood as people screamed in the middle of Tokyo’s street.
“Why?” Yuki asked, cradling her dead mother’s body. Foxwoman or not.
“Why not?” Magog asked, wearing her father’s face.
I felt overwhelmed by the pain, agony, and shame of the memories that flowed into my brain like a tidal wave of freezing water.
I saw Yuki murdering her father, Hideo when she was fourteen-years-old. Thoth and Lucinda standing over him.
Not Magog, but the man who’d let him in.
I saw her swear allegiance to Moto Yoshi, her Gaki grandfather and one of the pillars of the Yakuza.
I saw the training, the hate, and the desire to protect her sister.
A sister who tried to destroy Magog to rescue her sister and dramatically overestimated her chance of defeating him.
Yuki cradling her dead body, tortured by Magog’s host in horrific ways and left as a gift for his daughter.
The sense of love and loss for her sister was a familiar one, so was the desire for revenge just so you didn’t have to continue thinking about how painful that absence of your sibling was. It caused me to grab her shoulders tight then slow her bleeding. Vampires couldn’t just stop biting someone, especially if they hit an artery, or that was the end of their meal. People bled out in seconds after and you got your food everywhere (really, I didn’t want to phrase it like that, but there’s no other way for a vampire to think about it). You had to heal the injury you left behind, a skill all vampires had for shallow skin-based wounds. It was a magic thing and just one of the very basic powers all vampires possessed.
Yuki stood there, her head down, as I tried to hear her heartbeat. She was still alive, barely. Gradually, though, her shifter healing factor kicked in, and I could hear her heartbeat speed up back to normal. Yuki blinked a few times then took several deep breaths.
“Are you okay?” I asked, feeling giddy and light-headed. My head was bumping and my body trembling with the power inside me. I had felt dead and cold since my creation, same as most vampires felt about everything but the Need, yet now it was like I was alive again. Well, no, but it was as close as I could remember feeling. If this was how drinking from dhampyr felt, I was surprised vampires didn’t eat them all.
Then I realized there were probably a hundred thousand vampires in the world and only a few hundred dhampyr, which indicated they probably did. It was another fucked up quality about our race that underscored we were not the good guys. Not that I’d ever been under any delusions that I was, or we were. Vampires were just my home team now, and you rooted for them whether they sucked, pun intended, or not.Yuki smiled then punched me in the face, sending me flying back about three feet. I was hella strong and could slow down time, so I moved like vampires did in the movies (which seemed a backass way of getting superspeed but whatcha gonna do), but I was comparatively squishy compared to other vampires. Not as squishy as a human, since all vampires could be shot up and not die, but no special immunities besides the basic package.
So, Yuki’s punch hurt.
“Yeah,” Yuki said, pulling her fist back and rubbing it. “I’m fine now. Thank you.”
Well, I had that coming. I wondered what the polite way of saying, ‘Sorry for almost killing you because you tasted so damned good’ was? Oh, right, don’t do it in the first place. Maybe I should put that on a greeting card. I’d make a killing.
“Good to know,” I said, realizing I was sporting a ‘third fang’ between my pants. I immediately covered that up with my hands before looking away and trying to play it cool.
Yeah, this was embarrassing.
“Anything yet?” Yukie asked, looking down.
I frowned then looked up at her. “Listen, it doesn’t work that way.”
Except it did.
One moment I was getting up, the next I was flat on my back, staring up at the sky as my time powers kicked in.
They showed me everything I’d been forced to forget.