Let The Darkness Lead You Home 4 страница

"There are no other rooms," Bebe says as though she's told the lie hundreds of times before. "The compound is very popular with visitors this time of year."

"Fine," Gerard says, her bored tone doing more to convince him to back down than any number of angrier arguments would have. "Fine. Just remind your gerent that he is the one who wanted my tech to provide him with alts, and he is the one who refused to come to Frank's lab which is perfectly equipped to perform the procedure, and Frank is not obligated to—"

Frank lays a finger on Gerard's wrist. "It's fine, Gerard." He remembers they're in a house that stands on ceremony. "Sire. It's fine."

Before Gerard can get up another head of steam, there's a tap on the door frame and a lanky boy appears, Frank's overnight bag in one hand, Gerard's valise in the other. In his skinny velvet suit, he looks hardly strong enough to hold them, but when he glances up past the spikes of hair artfully arranged over his eyes, Frank sees he's a vampire, not a pet. From the adoring way he looks at the captain and the fond glance she gives him in return, however, Frank suspects he's even younger in vampire years than he appears in human ones.

When Frank reaches out to take the bags, Ryan flares his nostrils, his look goes cold, but he relinquishes his burden after only a moment's hesitation. Then his head swivels in Gerard's direction, and like a thrown switch his features are the picture of worship. Gerard doesn't seem to notice, but Bebe says, "That will do, Ryan, thank you. We've our own beds to get to before the sun comes up."

Before Frank can say thank you for the bags or anything else, they're gone, leaving Frank and Gerard alone.

"We can leave," Gerard says as soon as the door shuts. "I have to—" he waves a hand at the bed— "obviously, but when the sun sets, we can go. You don't have to—"

"Why would we go?" It's seventy-thousand dollars for infrared alts, and that's if Frank does them in his own lab. He's sure Gerard negotiated traveling fees and whatever else on top. But apparently he's thinking it's not enough.

"He has no respect for you. He can't just— Ugh! No one else can do what you do. He needs to respect you."

"Gee—" Frank takes a step closer to where Gerard is pacing back and forth. Maybe Frank shouldn't use Mikey's nickname for him when he's like this. "Gerard. I'm a human. He's an Ancient." Close enough. "He's never going to respect me. I didn't expect him to."

Gerard veers off the rut he's wearing in the carpet and goes to investigate the fallen log, pulling back the mossy cover and poking around underneath. "This isn't even a bed. He can't expect anyone to sleep on this."

Frank is sure Gerard is exaggerating, but when he goes to look, it is just a canvas tarp stretched across the log's hollow. From the show the gerent and his pet were putting on in the parlor, he doubts Ulrich wants his pets tempted to sleep as far away as his feet, but he just says, "It's fine."

That gets a skeptical look before Gerard's off to wade through the fabric branches to test the situation with the bed. "At least this is a mattress," he mutters more to himself than Frank.

Since he moved into the king's compound, Frank has spent most of his limited socializing time with vamps. But he's only ever seen them during darkness hours, and he doesn't know that much about what they're like as the sun rises. Since Pete's been around he's heard more, but the dude's not that much into the kiss and tell, and they have plenty of other stuff to talk about. He's never mentioned that vamps go a little crazy before bed time, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

"I am totally fine. Seriously, Gerard, I can sleep anywhere." It's not even a lie. When you're six years younger and a foot shorter than most of the guys you're in school with, you learn to adapt.

"You can't, Frank. It's a log. The bed is huge, and there are plenty of pillows. We can make a dividing line with them down the middle and still have enough room."

Frank laughs. Because, seriously? "A line of pillows? Do you sleep bite?" Frank tries not to dwell too much on the fact that his main objection to that would be the sleeping, not the biting. He knows his place and what his parents sacrificed to make sure he never had to feel the slice of a vampire's fangs, feel his heart pumping faster and faster, desperately trying to get blood to his brain, feeding a vampire instead.

Gerard glares at him, but it's the glare he gives to Mikey, not the one he gives someone whose arm he's about to break, so Frank's laugh peters out on a giggle instead of stopping dead in his throat. "I don't want you to feel uncomfortable, Frank," he says, still looking stern, but Frank's pretty sure there's the curl of a smile threatening at one corner of his mouth.

"I don't feel uncomfortable. I don't feel disrespected. I feel tired, and you need to sleep, so let's just do this thing."

"I can't hurt you while the sun is up," Gerard promises.

Frank doesn't know what to say to that, so he gives him his most reassuring smile and takes his bag in the direction of the bathroom. He has stew stuck in his teeth, and he stinks of nervous sweat. If he takes a shower, that gives Gerard enough time to fall asleep without fretting over whether or not he's making his tech genius nervous. One thing Frank does know for a fact about vampires' sleeping habits is that if they don't sleep they can get sick. It happened to Mikey a few years after Frank moved into the compound, and Gerard nearly went 'round the bend with worry. Frank will not be responsible for making Gerard sick this far from home.

When he comes back to the bedroom, the overhead lights are off, but the willow tree is glowing from within. It's crazily beautiful and he wishes he had his goggles so he could record the image to look at later. They're in his cases of equipment wherever those got off to though, so he'll have to just remember it. Assuming Gerard would have left the lamp on at Frank's side of the bed, he heads for where the light is brightest and parts the leafy canopy. He wasn't wrong that this is the side Gerard left for him, though for a moment Frank wonders if maybe Gerard decided to sleep in the log or something. He's so far over that he must be partly hanging off the edge of the mattress, and he's hard to see.

He's not sleeping like an old-fashioned movie vampire—arms crossed over his chest like a corpse at a wake—and Frank's a little surprised to discover that he'd sort of assumed he would be. Which doesn't even make sense. He's always known vamps sleep in beds not coffins, have no problems with garlic, that they're a lot more human than Bram Stoker would suggest. And in a lot of ways less human. That's what Frank notices now.

Carefully, maybe a little afraid Gerard won't know it's him if Frank accidentally wakes him, Frank peels back the covers and slides between the sheets. Gerard doesn't stir. Like, at all. There's no flutter of eyelashes, no hint of movement at his throat, no steady rise and fall of his ribs. The feeding flush is gone from his cheeks and the hand resting on the pillow by his face, so his skin is deathly pale against the leaf-green cotton. Without windows, the room is lacking any air to coax the wisps of hair over his forehead or around his ears into movement, so there's not even that illusion of life. And yet. Whatever it is that makes a vampire clearly a vampire, even with his fangs retracted and a feed flush on his skin, is still there in sleep, and there's no question Frank's sharing a bed with a monster not a corpse.

"Gerard?" Frank says softly, but still there's no response.

Emboldened by the silence, Frank moves a little closer, then a little closer still, until he's almost in the center of the bed where a line of pillows would be if Gerard had had his way. He lies on his side, a mirror image of his bedmate, knees slightly bent, one hand resting on the mattress near his stomach, the other curled up by his chin. Frank's eyes feel grainy, irritated by the hours under the blindfold and the too-warm air in Gerent Ulrich's compound, but he can't bring himself to turn off the light. He doesn't get to watch Gerard very often, and it's hard to look away.

After a while, his eyes close on their own and he slips into sleep.

When he wakes up, the light is still burning over his shoulder, but now only Gerard's ear and the edge of his jaw are glowing because Frank has moved closer as he slept, casting the rest of him in shadow. Before he thinks better of it, Frank pushes the lock of hair that's fallen across Gerard's face behind his ear, his fingers lingering on the cool of Gerard's temple. When he realizes what he's doing, Frank leaps back, but neither his advance nor his retreat garner any response, so he tells his breathing and his heart rate to slow the fuck down, settles back on his pillow. All the commotion made Gerard's hair fall back in his face again, and, more slowly this time, Frank pushes it back.

It's not the first time Frank's touched Gerard's hair, but it's the first time outside his lab, the first time he's done it without the running commentary he gives all the vamps he's working on. He doesn't like to surprise a vampire, especially not when he has a scalpel in his hand.

Frank's heard it said that people look more innocent when they sleep, more childlike. Gerard looks like he's killed a thousand men and women and just happens to be wearing the skin of a twenty-five-year-old. His face is unlined, but no softer in repose than when he's awake.

With a touch light enough not to break even the hair-fine wires on an old-fashioned circuit, Frank traces Gerard's eyebrow, the line of his cheekbone, the edge of his lip. He leaves his fingers there for a moment and only realizes once his chest starts to hurt that he's holding his own breath waiting for Gerard to inhale. Frank looks at the chrono on his wrist cuff. Half past four, which is when he usually gets up if he's gone to bed at sunrise, but he has no idea where the kitchens are here, and doubts Ulrich's hospitality stretches to unknown humans wandering around unsupervised, so he might as well get some more sleep. He figures it will take a while, but somehow he's out again almost as soon as he closes his eyes.

When Frank wakes a second time it's with his heart in his throat. The room is dark the way his own rooms, with screens always glowing, never are, but he can feel someone—something—looming over him. "Gerard?" Frank whispers, but it's barely a croak. Whatever it is in front of him—god he hopes it is Gerard—touches his throat, the hollow where his collar bones meet. Frank's own hand flies to meet the fingers touching him, tracing their shape, feeling for the charcoal-roughened skin Gerard has around his cuticles, the shape of his nails Frank knows as well as his own.

"Your heart beats so slowly when you're sleeping," Gerard says, his voice soft in the darkness. "It's almost twice as fast now."

The charitable might say the sound Frank makes is a laugh, but fear and relief war in his throat, leaving him gasping brokenly. Dislodging Frank's touch, Gerard's fingers trail along his left collar bone and settle over his pulse. "It's so strong."

"Yeah," Frank manages. "Well, I hope so."

"You're redder than usual." Gerard's fingers stroke up and down, up and down the side of Frank's neck. It's sending goosebumps down Frank's spine in waves, distracting him from what the words mean, making him wonder how Gerard can see him blushing in the dark. "So much hotter."

Right. The infrareds. Gerard sounds— He sounds different. Frank wonders if vampires ever wake up hungry. Gerard really didn't have a meal yesterday; it was more like a snack. He doesn't often feed before one or two, and there are nights Frank knows he doesn't feed at all, so he won't, Frank's almost certain, lean in, put his lips where his fingers are rubbing, sink his fangs into Frank's throat.

But he could. He could sip, suckle, feed on Frank's blood thrumming so hot under his skin, just take enough to tide him over until Gerent Ulrich grants him another meal, close the wounds when he's done. Frank wonders how much it hurts when a vampire bites. Is it the pain of the cut on his head when he fell off the wall behind his parents' house, or the pain of tattoo needles pushing ink under his skin? He concentrates on how the darkness feels like something solid so he won't think about how he always goes back to his rooms after a visit to the tattoo artist, takes himself in hand, focuses on the burn of his new tattoo as he jerks himself hard and brutally fast.

"Frank?" Gerard says, his hand stilling, palm flat where the blood rushes closest to the surface. "Are you afraid?"

"Nooo," Frank says carefully. "Yes? Not really afraid." He's scared of the dark after being blindfolded earlier, but mostly he's terrified by how desperate he is for Gerard to bite him, or fuck him, or bite him while he's fucking him, and that's not safe and it's not right and he shouldn't be thinking like that. Not ever, and especially not while Gerard is right there, touching him, in a fucking bed. This isn't vamp vision in HD, Frank tucked up in his lab, Gerard out there somewhere feeding on humans whose lot in life it is to be prey. This isn't risky like stopping to jerk off when he knows Gerard and Mikey are waiting for him to finish editing together the latest videos for upload. Now that he's seen it first hand, heard it, he wants to be a meal, even though that would risk everything he's worked for since he was five years old.

"Your heart doesn't always beat like this when you're awake," Gerard says. "But when I blindfolded you, and in the car, with the guards— Do you want me to turn on the light?"

Frank is pretty sure that's not going to help, except Gerard will have to stop touching him to do it. Probably. He'll need to roll away from where Frank's heart is pounding, get farther from where Frank's cock is thick and heavy in his pajamas, hidden, Frank hopes, in the general pocket of heat he has around his body under the quilts. "Yes," he says. "Yes, please."

Only Gerard doesn't roll away to reach the light on his own side of the bed. He leans over Frank instead, the weight of his chest tipping Frank onto his back, crushing him against the mattress as Gerard leans the last half inch to reach the lamp, and Frank's frozen, his heart not beating at all now.

"There," Gerard says as light floods the willow cave they're in. And now he'll move, let Frank up, let him flee to the other side of the bathroom door. But Gerard stops, still hovering over Frank's body, weight half on one elbow as he brushes Frank's hair back with the other hand. "Better?" He blinks, eyes shooting left to return his vision to normal before examining Frank's face like he's looking at one of his sketches.

Frank nods, not trusting his tongue.

"We can still leave if you want. We don't need Ulrich's money in our coffers."

Gerard's hand is still in his hair, but Frank can't answer that with a yes or no, so he swallows, says, "It would be nice, though. And we don't want to provoke him." The Southern Zone is twice the size of Eastern, and Gerard has much better things to do with his time than deal with a war.

That, finally, gets Gerard moving, settling back on his own side of the bed to glower. "Fucking Ulrich," he grumbles. "I don't know why I ever agreed to this in the first place."

"Because the money would be nice and we don't want to provoke him," Frank repeats. And now that Gerard's a safe distance away, he can't help adding, "And you like having the most in-demand cybertech in all the zones."

Gerard's glower falters and Frank fights his own grin as a smile creeps in at the edges of Gerard's mouth. "I—" Gerard starts. He narrows his eyes, but lets the smile take over the rest of his face. "Well, you are. You're the best. No one else can do what you do."

"Let's get up then, and I can do it, and we can get home."

A gong sounds while Frank's shaking off after his waking piss, making him jump a little. Still skittish then; he's going to have to get that under control before he lets Ulrich under his knife. Worse than walking away without doing the work would be severing the gerent's optic nerve. There's healing and healing, and even when you're a vampire, nerves don't always grow back the same as they were before. The gong's followed by a buzz and a clattering rumble like a hundred electric window shields rolling up at once. Since Frank hasn't seen anything but the parlor, the bedroom suite and the hall between them, he has no idea how many windows the house has, but the workings are enough pull on the power to make the bathroom light dim and flicker for a moment. Frank wonders if they're far enough out Ulrich's running on gennies or if this is just another bit of atmosphere like the creaking front door.

"Ryan is here to take you to breakfast if you're ready." Gerard's voice is muffled by the heavy paneling, but Frank thinks he detects a hint of concern there. "Coming," he calls, even as he's reaching for the door's handle.

The best word to describe Gerard is 'hovering', and it makes Frank glow warmly and feel nervous in equal parts. Ryan is in pinstripes tonight and looks even more frail than he had yestermorning. Frank wonders what Bebe saw when she looked at him that made her turn him, assuming he read the looks right and she's his maker. It's not like back in the days Frank's grandparents told him about, before the revolution, when every bored teenager or desperate housewife begged to be turned, and the vampires' numbers doubled, quadrupled, became great enough that they could no longer be contained. Ryan is the picture his grandmother painted of one of those disaffected youths, but there must be something more about him not obvious on the surface, because nowadays, vampires are much more selective, seeing no need to create more competition for themselves. In fifteen years at the Way's compound, Frank has only known of two turnings by the twenty or so vamps who live on the grounds.

"Is everything alright?" Frank asks Gerard, whose gaze is flickering over Frank's face as though looking for damage.

"Ryan says he'll take you to the kitchen while I join Ulrich for a hunt, but I would like to know where you are while I'm gone."

"I'll be fine," Frank says, wanting to reassure. It would be insanely stupid of Ryan, or any of Ulrich's household, to cause Frank harm after the gerent went to all the trouble of bringing Frank here to work on him. Especially before the work was done. Frank won't mind if Gerard stays as close as he wants once Ulrich has what he's after, but he really isn't worried right now. Still, it warms Frank to the bone that Gerard wants to keep such a close eye on him.

"He'll be fine," Ryan says, sounding bored. "Cook is only allowed to poison people on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

It's a stupid joke, but Frank's lip is twitching regardless, until Gerard's hand shoots out, fastening around Ryan's neck. "It is Thursday," Gerard growls, lifting Ryan an inch off the floor. Ryan doesn't struggle or raise a hand to defend himself. He smiles. A small, satisfied smirk that makes Frank want to punch him right in the mouth. When Gerard sees it, he drops him, making him stumble, but not wiping the glee of having gotten Gerard's attention off his face.

"Your maker may appreciate your insolence," Gerard says, "but I do not."

"My maker appreciates my cock," Ryan drawls, cupping the bulge at his crotch. "She won't mind if you want to appreciate it too."

Forget his mouth, Frank wants to punch him in the nuts. He takes a step toward Ryan, fist clenched, but before he even realizes that he means to follow through on his urge, Gerard has an arm around Frank's waist, pulling him back against Gerard's chest. "I'll come with you to the kitchen," Gerard says, "and then Ryan can take me to the gerent."

The kitchens are at the other end of the house, down two flights of stairs, and are made up of three huge rooms, each of them larger than Frank's whole apartment at home. Ryan leads him to a table set for at least thirty people, and most of the seats are occupied. A dozen or so of them wear a pet's marker on their bare arms, and many of the rest wear uniforms Frank has only seen in old British period movies set in houses with large staffs. Since Ryan seems to be doing the tasks that would usually fall to a butler, Frank wonders what these people do here, though they are all in long sleeves, so perhaps they're just a different kind of pet, their bracelets hidden under their clothes. He doesn't ask. Ryan pulls a chair out for him next to a woman with a mechanic tech's crest on her shirt, her dark red hair done up in tight braids, and across from a sun-wizened man in the dirt-stained clothes of a garden tech. They both nod at Frank and carry on eating what looks like oatmeal drizzled with honey.

"Laura will take you upstairs when you're done," Ryan tells him, gesturing to the woman on the far side of the gardener. She's young, maybe even in her teens, and isn't wearing a pet's marker or a tech's patch on her black sweatshirt. Frank doesn't ask about her, either. She gives Frank a flat stare, narrows her eyes at Ryan, and stuffs nearly a whole piece of toast into her mouth.

"I'll see you later," Gerard says, squeezing Frank's shoulder briefly. His fingers are like ice where they brush Frank's neck at the edge of his collar.

"Happy hunting," Frank says. His words elicit another look from Laura, this one speculative, possibly amused, but still guarded.

Frank eats a bowl of oatmeal, three pieces of toast, and two bowls of fruit before he feels like the unsettled hole in his stomach is filled. He hasn't been around this many humans at once since he left school. At home there's just James and Jarrod—Mikey and Gerard's day guards—Pete, Ray, Christa and her team of four or five people who help her take care of the grounds, and Bob, who comes and goes, only showing up once or twice a year. They're friendly enough, but Frank doesn't spend much time with them. On the rare occasion they share meals, it's outside where Frank has space to breathe, or they'll get together in twos or threes to have a beer, play some cards, watch one of Frank's dad's old films salvaged from the days before. Here, no one is talking, so it's not the cacophony meal times were at college, but Frank can still feel the press of so many breathing, sweating, heart-pumping bodies around him, and he'll be glad if he and Gerard don't have to stay another day.

"You done?" Laura asks as Frank wipes his mouth on the napkin provided with his plate. Her tone walks the fine line between deferent and insolent. That seems to be a theme in Ulrich's compound, and Frank is glad anew that he was hand-picked by Gerard for the Eastern Zone when he finished his schooling. And not just because New Jersey is his home and he doesn't ever want to leave it again.

"I'm done," Frank says.

She doesn't lead him back to the stairs, instead taking him down one long hall then another, past tightly closed doors, old oil paintings, and strange wall hangings Frank would like to look more closely at under other circumstances. It seems Ulrich is a collector. No wonder Gerard didn't want him to get his hands on the comic book he found.

"Here," Laura says eventually, stopping outside a pair of steel swing doors topped with wire-reinforced windows set just above Frank's head height. They are completely incongruous in the stately manor trappings of the rest of the house. Frank detects a whiff of fresh paint and sawdust.

"Did he build an operating theater for this?" he asks.

"Well, you are operating on him, aren't you?"

Technically, Frank supposes he is, but it's not like vampires can get infections and die or anything. When he's not in his lab, he's more used to working on repurposed dining-room tables than in anything like the room straight out of turn-of-the-century medical dramas he sees when Laura pushes open the doors.

No one is there except Ulrich's pet from last night, now wearing pale-green scrubs and a paper hat, washing his hands at a large steel sink in the corner. "Um," Frank says, because, alt installation is not a team sport.

"Vampires have a flair for the dramatic," Laura says quietly. "The pet's here as set dressing. Not to assist you."

Frank can't argue with that dramatic thing, so he says nothing, just heads to the recently vacated sink to wash his own hands. Which is when he realizes that everything in the room is scaled to the gerent's height. The gerent who is probably fifteen inches taller Frank. He's gonna need a fucking stool to work at the operating table in the middle of the room.

Ignoring Laura's giggles as he turns away from the chest-high sink and grabs a handful of paper toweling to dry his hands, Frank casts around the room until he finds his cases arranged on a series of shelves in the corner. To his relief, they haven't been opened.

"Should I fetch Ulrich?" Laura asks.

"I have to get my stuff ready," Frank says. "Give me half an hour?"

Frank breathes deeply for the first time since Ryan came to get him for breakfast when the pet follows Laura out the door.

It only actually takes Frank about fifteen minutes to open all his cases and check that nothing got broken or lost in transit, which gives him time to figure out that the operating table, unlike the sink, is on a hydraulic lift and can be lowered enough that Frank will be able to see what he's doing. He lays out his tools and the circuits, leaving the chip that would give him live feed capabilities in its case. He's seen enough of Ulrich's world to last him. He doesn't want to see it through Ulrich's eyes, even if it might be politically useful someday. He's just examining the wheeled equipment tray, wondering if he wants one for his own lab, when there's a commotion at the door and it bursts open.

Ulrich strides in, arms outstretched, his pet on his heels, and before the doors swing shut behind them, Frank has time to see Gerard struggling on the other side of them, Captain Bebe holding him tight by the arms. "What's going on?" Frank demands before he can think better of it.

"Your master seems to think we're mistreating you," Ulrich drawls. "I assured him you were fine, but he insisted on seeing for himself. Only authorized personnel are allowed in the theatre, so when he wouldn't accept my assurances, it was necessary to restrain him."

Ulrich towers over Frank, whipcord thin but in the way where he'd be strong even if he were only human. As a vampire, he could throw Frank through a wall, or crush him like a bug under his palm. But Gerard wouldn't try to fight off another gerent's captain without a reason, so Frank only hesitates a moment before saying with as much steel as he can muster, "I authorize him."

The pet flinches at Frank's words, but Ulrich just laughs. "Oh, do you?"

"If your pet is going to be here playing nurse, I want my master here, too." Frank is glad he's not holding any of his instruments, so he can put his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking.

"How adorable," Ulrich says. He watches Frank until Frank's starting to wonder if he already has some kind of alt that allows him to see under Frank's skin, but just before Frank drops his gaze, he says, "Fine. Trey, fetch the boy's master for us, will you?"

Trey scowls at Frank from behind his master's back, but does as he's told. Gerard is fuming as he comes in the room, but he doesn't say anything to the other gerent, just heads for Frank and squeezes his shoulders, moving down his arms like he's checking for broken bones. Frank wants to ask what the hell happened on his hunt with Ulrich, but he just murmurs that he's okay, reaching up to give Gerard's hand a squeeze back.

"Shall we get started?" Ulrich says.

The installation itself is anticlimactic after the show leading up to it, though Frank spends the whole time expecting Ulrich to try to leap off the table while Frank's got a probe in his eye socket, or Trey to upset all his carefully organized supplies. Gerard lurks just out of arm's reach in Frank's peripheral vision, Trey sits motionless across the table, clutching Ulrich's hand, and Ulrich lies perfectly still despite all the poking and prodding Frank has to do to get the tech attached to his optic nerves. Frank's never had a patient who was so immune to being worked on, but he's never done alts on a vampire even a tenth of Ulrich's age, which could explain it. Frank's previous record for installing infrareds was three hours, twenty-nine minutes. This time it only takes two hours, fifty-six.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-29