Let The Darkness Lead You Home 2 страница

"He fooled around a little, but mostly he was a fan. Did some promotions stuff. I don't know. I wasn't paying enough attention." Gerard's sleeves tonight are longer than his arms, and he tugs the right one down with his left hand, folding it over his fingertips, then pushing them out through the fold.

He does it again, and a third time, before Frank asks, "So how did you get turned?"

"Smells like the coffee's ready," Gerard says.

Before Gerard can continue waiting on him in his own kitchen, Frank jumps up and pours coffee into the prepared mug. "You made enough for ten people," he says. "Do you want some? Or is it not the same in that way where it's gross?"

"I'll just smell yours." Gerard lifts his nose a little and sniffs in example. It's just a joke, a bit of conversational byplay, but even from the other side of his monitors, Frank recognizes the angle of Gerard's head, the slight movement he makes as he scents his prey.

Frank's fingers are suddenly ice against the heat of the mug, and the skin on his neck and shoulders creeps with goosebumps. Can Gerard taste coffee in the blood of his victims if they've been drinking it? Can he smell it on their skin? Does the caffeine cross over to buzz in his brain?

"Frank?" Gerard says. And he's sniffing again, but not playing this time. Sniffing like he smells something he likes. "Frank? Why are you afraid?"

His habit of threading two fingers through the handle of his mug saves Frank from dropping it, but when he lurches in shock, he splashes coffee down one arm and all over the floor.

"Nothing. I'm not— Ow! Fuck." He's not afraid. Not exactly. Gerard wouldn't—

Faster than Frank can see, Gerard's out of his chair, kneeling at Frank's feet, dropping a towel he got from somewhere onto the spill of coffee, and cradling Frank's burned wrist in both hands. Lifting it toward his—

"What?" Frank says helplessly as Gerard's mouth closes on the reddened flesh.

But there's no prick of fangs, no pain, just a gentle drawing sensation, and the weirdly cool press of a pointed tongue. It soothes the burn, not like ice, but like the good aloe lotion Frank still buys because it was always in the bathroom when he was little. "What?" he says again, his voice shaking badly.

The suction increases, pulling Frank's skin against the smooth, flat surfaces of Gerard's human teeth for just long enough to make Frank's guts twist hot and low, then with a last lick Gerard releases him. Thank fuck he stands after that, so he's not face to face with Frank's totally inappropriate boner.

"Better?" Gerard asks, eyes searching Frank's for something Frank doesn't begin to have the brain power to guess at right now.

"I— What did—" Frank bends his wrist, twisting his hand to pull at the skin, but it doesn't hurt anymore. When he looks, the redness is gone.

"It's an enzyme," Gerard says, taking Frank's mug out of his lax grip, setting it on the counter. "Healing properties. Breaks down almost instantly if you take it out of our mouths though. The US army tried mining vampires for their spit back in the 1960s for use on the battlefields, but all it got them was a bunch of pissed off vamps."

Before Gerard's time—if Mikey was turned in the vampire-trend population swell before the revolution, it's fifteen or twenty years before they were even born—but Gerard is full of anecdotes about vampire history, and probably knows as much about 1950 or 1880 as he does about 2040. "Huh," Frank says, flexing his wrist again. Were the labs like Frank's? Probably not. No computers back then, at least not anything like what he has now. They were probably in bunkers deep underground somewhere, damp walls, flickering lights, vampires chained to metal tables while men in fatigues with short-clipped hair pried their jaws open with steel tools, dripped blood into their mouths to get the juices flowing, sucked—

"Maybe coffee's a bad idea," Gerard interrupts. "Why don't you go to bed. Get some real sleep."

"I'm fine," Frank says. He has questions. Things he wants Gerard to tell him. "I can sleep later."

"Now," Gerard says. His grip on Frank's arm isn't tight, but Frank knows he couldn't break it. "Sleep."

Frank lets Gerard push him toward his bedroom.

**

Frank sleeps for sixteen hours and then eats like he hasn't seen food in a month. He's going to go back to the lab, but he remembers what Gerard said about Mikey being in the music scene back in the days before, and ends up heading for the closet in the hall and pulling out his uncle's old guitar. He never got very good at it, since his life at Rutgers didn't leave him free time to practice and school holidays didn't give him much time to improve, but he plays often enough now that his fingers remember the chords, and playing clears his head, lets circuit designs work themselves out.

After making sure the hall door is bolted in case any insomniac vamps are wandering around, Frank opens his shutters and windows to the day and sits himself in a patch of autumn sunlight, trusting the breeze will keep him cool. His Dad's drums are sitting in the corner, better than the guitar for head-clearing when Frank's frustrated or pissed off, or for making him feel closer to his dad when he needs that, but today Frank wants the precision of the pain in his fingertips, not a full-body workout.

The E string needs replacing, and as Frank removes the old one, fits the new one in its place, he wonders. What did Mikey dabble in? Frank can't see him behind a kit. Maybe guitar. Or keyboards. He and Gerard both have the fingers to play keys. There isn't a keyboard in the compound as far as Frank knows, but they could get one. Frank could build one if he got the right parts. Bob, who comes around sometimes to help Frank with sound effects on the movies, plays the drums, and they've jammed together a few times, but Frank misses the family get togethers where they'd play for hours, until his fingers and wrists protested. His family was always so careful, avoiding the places vamps tended to feed, staying in after sunset whenever they could, Frank always figured they'd be around forever. But his mom never thought to worry about a corner-store at nine-thirty in the morning, and walked right into a robbery. One night they were all together, celebrating Frank's twenty-first birthday, and three days later she was dead. Frank's dad was taken by a vamp outside a bar less than a week after the funeral.

"He didn't want to live without your mother," Frank's uncle told him, like that was supposed to be comforting. Frank was skeptical of the theory, but after that recklessness seemed to run in the family. By the time he turned twenty-three, Frank was the only Iero left.

He thought for a while that he'd never be able to play again, but keeping music locked away didn't make him miss them any less, and eventually his guitar and then the drums made it back into his living space. He should ask Mikey if he wants to play sometime.

Once he's gotten the guitar back in working order, Frank picks out the song his mom used to sing to him when he had trouble sleeping. He doesn't get it quite right, but he does it again, and then again, until it sounds the way he remembers it. The sun is dipping below the tops of the trees when he puts the instrument carefully back in its case. His brain hasn't solved the vision problem, but he's got an idea for a change in the nerve-conduction matrix he's working on.

When his lab door swishes open a few hours later, Frank has his eyes glued to the viewscreen of his spectroscope.

"I brought you something," Gerard says, and Frank spins on his stool.

Gerard is standing just inside the doorway, a small, plump, grey-haired woman limp in his arms. But Frank looks closer, at the raw wound on her neck, the healthy glow of Gerard's skin which is completely absent in hers, and corrects himself. A small, plump, grey-haired body in his arms.

"Oh," Frank says. "Right." He's used to it now, Gerard, or sometimes one of the others, bringing him bodies. But it had been a shock at first. In the post-revolution world, fresh corpses are not hard to come by. The prey doesn't have a choice about their bodies being used for science, though their families can claim them afterwards if they choose. In college, if Frank wanted to dissect an eyeball or plastinate the nerves to the heart, he could go down to cold storage, pull open one of the drawers marked with a new-haul tag, and get what he wanted. Here, they come fresh.

"She didn't have glasses, so I hope her eyes are good enough for what you need," Gerard continues, moving to place the body on Frank's dissecting table.

Even though humans aren't allowed alts, the vamps don't bother policing vision mods as long as they only correct short-sightedness or replace the need for reading glasses. It's not always easy to tell how old a victim was, but this one looks old enough Frank's pretty sure she's had some kind of surgery. Though who knows. Maybe whatever it is will provide him with the key he needs to get the damn feedback to work.

"Thanks. I'm sure she'll be fine."

He expects Gerard to leave then, go meet with his brother or work on one of his many projects, but instead Gerard gestures toward the trio of comfortable chairs in the corner. "Will it bother you if I stay?" he asks.

"I need to finish what I was doing here," Frank says. "Not sure how exciting it'll be."

"That's okay," Gerard answers. He pulls a small pad out of the inside pocket of his jacket, grabs one of the pens off Frank's desk as he passes, and settles himself. "You don't have to entertain me."

It takes a while to get used to having someone else there, but after the third time Frank looks over and finds Gerard engrossed in whatever he's doing in his notebook, he starts to relax a little, and he eventually loses himself again in the maze of axons and dendrites on his viewscreen.

"Yes!" Frank hisses when he finally gets conduction across as well as down his sample matrix, and he jumps when Gerard answers, "Success?"

"Fuck, you scared me." Frank clutches his chest with hands aching from hours of tiny movements.

"So I see." Gerard's nostrils flare under eyes wide with amusement.

Ignoring the way that doesn't exactly make his heart stop racing, Frank turns his gaze to his dissecting table and notices that the body's gone. "Where—?"

"I put her in the refrigerator. You looked busy."

"Sorry," Frank says. It was rude to ignore his gerent's wishes, even if they were only implied by the gift of a body and weren't explicit orders. "I wanted to finish what I was doing before my sample atrophied."

"No rush," Gerard says. "I told them it took four years before you got the infrareds to compensate for a vamp's fluctuating body temperature, but that was totally worth the wait. They aren't expecting miracles."

It feels all backwards to have done live tests first. Usually they're the last step, vamps brought to him in shackles, sentenced to go under his knife for crimes Frank doesn't always understand. It was disconcerting as hell at first, cutting open someone's head while they spit invective in his face, but the supply of criminals is what had allowed him to move from mods to alts: x-ray vision, infrared—move beyond cameras to tech worked into the vampires' brains that changed how they could see.

"I'll get to it tomorrow night," Frank says, letting his eyes settle on the fridge for a moment to fix it in his mental agenda.

"I used her as a model," Gerard tells him, "so it's not like she went to waste."

He was drawing, then, not making lists. "Well, that's—" Frank doesn't know what the expected response is to learning he was manipulating human nerves while a vampire king sat behind him using a freshly drained corpse for life drawing practice, so he trails off. He mostly just wants to see the sketches. He's only ever seen Gerard's art on his monitors.

"I'd better get upstairs," Gerard says, tucking his notebook away.

He doesn't return the next night, but he's back the night after that, and the next one, and then two nights later. If Frank's busy, Gerard mostly stays quiet, but when Frank's just puttering, Gerard asks him questions.

"Is everything okay with— everything?" Frank finally asks when he's seen Gerard more in two weeks than he's seen him in any given two-month time in fifteen years.

"Sure. Mikey's just, he and Pete have been getting to know each other."

Frank doesn't see what that has to do with him.

"He's a good pet apparently."

And oh. Oh. Getting to know each other in the kind of way where Gerard's presence would be cock blocking.

"Have you ever had a pet?" Frank braves asking.

"When I first became Gerent. It was expected. But when someone's in your bed because it's required of them— It's not really my thing."

Frank cannot imagine being in Gerard's bed and not being one-hundred percent enthusiastic about it. But he's a tech, and that's not in a tech's job description, so he can't really put himself in a pet's shoes. Besides which, it's not like he's going to tell Gerard that.

"Right," he says, nodding a little.

"You're more interesting than my empty study," Gerard says. "But if I'm bothering you, I can do something else."

"No," Frank says. Gerard in person is actually less distracting than Gerard on his monitors most nights. "No. It's fine."

Gerard does come down less after a while, three or four nights a week instead of five or six, but Frank doesn't get to go back to watching him via his alts, because half the time he doesn't show, Pete comes down instead.

He and Pete sometimes watch old movies, or Pete drags him up to pester Gerard's mechanic, Ray, into letting them sit in Gerard's cars, where Pete spins elaborate road-trip fantasies peppered with anecdotes from the traveling he's actually done. He makes it sound exciting, and while Frank's in the passenger seat, he feels a longing to see the country. But as soon as he's back in his lab, or on his sofa with his stuff around him, Frank wonders why he'd want to be anywhere else.

**

Despite a promising start with the old woman Gerard brought him, and several other attempts on other corpses, Frank doesn't come up with anything he thinks is worth trying on a vamp, though he does use a vampire Mikey's men brought in to test his nerve matrix. He hasn't found any practical applications yet, but it's satisfying to watch all the muscles in the vamp's back twitch at once when Frank applies a pinpoint electric current. When Mikey tells Frank that the guy is here because he tried to burn another vamp's pet alive, it's even more satisfying to watch him writhe and scream in Mikey's hold when Frank turns the current up to max.

"That worse than having your hand cut off, Karl?" Mikey asks the vamp once he's stopped screeching.

"No!" Karl cries, but from the look of panic in his eyes and the way he barely flinched when Frank lifted the skin off his back to lay the matrix down, Frank suspects he's lying to get out of another round of shocks.

"You okay leaving it in, Frankie?" Mikey asks. "Karl didn't learn much from his last punishment. His hand grew back in a couple of weeks." Mikey looks at Frank's current box. "And have you got a spare one of those?"

"Sure," Frank says. Vampires drain humans to survive. But a burned corpse doesn't yield any blood; that's just killing for fun. Karl needs to learn a lesson.

"If you can't think of any other use for this matrix thing, I think we've got one." Mikey keeps one hand in the restraining harness he brought his prisoner down in, and holds the other out for Frank's current box. "Let me know if I can bring you any other repeat offenders."

All other projects get put on hold when the first infrared video they release gets more downloads in twenty-four hours than any of their other titles have gotten in a week. Frank's working every hour he can making circuits and installing them in the group of vampires they use for hunt vids, though Gerard does come down and threaten to physically carry Frank to bed when he doesn't think he's getting enough rest. Whether it's fortunately or unfortunately Frank can't decide, but he never actually makes good on his threat.

Three weeks gets all the vid vamps upgraded, and then they're working flat-out getting the video processed. Bob comes in to help, and Frank misses having Gerard to himself, asking about Frank's designs, or just sketching quietly in the corner. With Bob around, he's either hovering and demanding constant status updates, or Frank won't see him for days. But when they break for food, Bob will come over to Frank's apartment and kick around on the drums, and sometimes they'll get Pete to come down and play with them, rapping along to Frank's noodling on the guitar, or keeping ragged time on a bass he dug up somewhere, and their company mostly makes up for Gerard's mercurial moods.

Things finally calm down again in January when demand for vids settles back to normal, and Western's gerent, Greta, hires Bob away to work on one of her pet projects. Gerard heads out on a trip around the zone, checking in with his lieutenants, showing his face, reminding the vampires that they have a gerent to answer to. And probably, if other years are anything to go by, adding to his classic car collection along the way. As with his trip to Central in the fall, he doesn't bother recording his kills, so Frank's back to watching his live feed when he's got the lab to himself. Except instead of staring with rapt attention the way he used to, Frank often just has it on in the background, trying to recreate the feeling of having Gerard in the lab with him. Since he can only see what Gerard's seeing and can't actually look at Gerard, though, it's not the same.

**

Winter in Eastern can be cold and snow-bound or grey and wet, but this year is combining the two, leaving the ground a miserable muddy quagmire half the time and slick with black ice the rest. The recordings are coming in with so many slips and falls that Frank asks Gerard if they shouldn't just capitalize on it, try to make the vids funny on purpose.

"There was a show when me and Mikes were little." Gerard closes his eyes and tips his head back, making his throat impossibly long. Frank tries very hard not to think about how much he'd like to bite it. It helps remembering that Gerard is a vampire and could kill him in seconds.

"TV show?" Frank asks when Gerard seems frozen.

"Yeah. These guys would like, punch each other in the nuts 'til they puked. Jackass. That was it. It was really popular. This is kind of the same thing, I guess."

"Kind of?" The video Frank has cued up right now shows a man trying to run across an icy parking lot, his legs flying out from under him, making him skid halfway under a car. The vampire has to pull him out to get to his neck. From the shake in the camera it's clear she's laughing.

"Either way," Gerard says, "do it. You always make the right decisions about this shit."

The comedy vids don't do as well as the infrareds, but they do gain a rabidly loyal following. Frank still prefers the straight-up hunts, though, and is grateful when spring finally arrives.

**

Now that Pete and Mikey are past their honeymoon period and winter's over, Gerard rarely comes to Frank's domain before nine, and more often it's after midnight, but Frank's just pulling his lunch off the stove a little after seven when the alarm on his wrist chimes softly to let him know someone's in his lab. Before he has time to give the voice command to turn on the screen in the corner of the kitchen to see who it is, Gerard's there in the doorway, nostrils flaring, one hand holding a rolled sheaf of papers, the other fluttering excitedly around his face. "Frank," he says, "Frankie. You're here."

Frank doesn't say of course he's here or ask where else he might be—Gerard sometimes forgets his own orders, like that Frank isn't supposed to leave the compound unless accompanied by one of the Ways or any two of the six lieutenants Gerard's decided he trusts with his most valuable human. Frank would never take advantage of his forgetfulness, but he doesn't want to remind him of it, either.

"Yes," Frank says, setting his bowl of soup and toast to the side so he can give Gerard his full attention.

"No, no," Gerard says, when he notices. "Eat. Let me show you what I found." He gestures Frank toward the kitchen table, and sits down across from him.

Frank had assumed Gerard's papers were his own drawings of some new tech he wanted Frank to try, but when he unrolls them, it turns out to be an old magazine of some kind. There's a figure all dressed in red on the cover, and, as best Frank can tell upside down and with Gerard obsessively smoothing his hands over the page, the words The Amazing Spider-Man emblazoned across the top.

"What is it?" Frank asks when Gerard just looks at him expectantly, hands still restless.

"It's a comic book! Spiderman. He has these great web shooters."

So, tech after all. Frank keeps his smile to himself. He can't imagine why a vampire would need to shoot spiderwebs. Probably just because Gerard wants to know if he can. Gerard is flipping through the pages, clearly looking for something. When he finds it, his face lights up. "See?" he says, spinning the book around so Frank can look too, but being careful to keep it out of range of Frank's soup.

"You want me to make you web shooters?" Frank peers at the picture. The red-clad figure is bound to a hulking shape by a silvery thread spreading out into a net, his free hand outstretched with a second thread emerging from his wrist.

"Maybe for Mikey. That seems something more— A captain might find that more useful."

Frank can see how an old-west sheriff like in some of the movies salvaged from his dad's hard drive when Gerard had taken him to get his parents' things would benefit from web shooters, but Mikey has fangs, and hands strong enough to rip out a man's windpipe as easily as Frank lifts his spoon to his mouth. He doesn't need webbing to catch a human. And no matter how clever Frank is with tech, there simply isn't any substance on earth that both can be stored as a liquid and has the tensile strength to contain a vamp that doesn't want to be contained.

"Mmmm," Frank says, using his mouth full of toast to mask his skepticism.

"And look!" Gerard flips to a new page and flashes it at Frank, but then turns it back so he can find something else before Frank's eyes can even register what he's seeing.

Frank shovels food in his mouth as fast as he can in case Gerard wants to decamp to the lab and get started right away, but as he watches, Gerard's page turning slows, and he stops on a double-page spread that seems to be a fight scene, tracing one finger over the lines of ink. "I had so many of these when I was— before," he says softly enough Frank has to strain to hear him. Gerard doesn't look up. "I even drew. Not these, but—"

"But…" Frank says softly when Gerard doesn't continue.

"It was a long time ago." Gerard shuts the book and pushes it aside. "And that wasn't why I came, actually. We can look at that later. Gerent Ulrich wants to hire your services. Infrared mods. Can you be ready in an hour?"

"Infrared's an alt," Frank says. No matter how many times Frank tells him, Gerard doesn't seem to get the distinction between alts and mods. "Alts are wired into your nerves. Mods are like Captain Gabe's music player, or the universal key in Mikey's hand."

"An alt," Gerard murmurs, and then at a more normal volume says, "So, an hour?"

Infrared is getting more popular amongst Gerard's friends, and Frank mentally catalogues the contents of his lab. "I have everything I need," he says once he's sure that's true. "He can come any time."

"We'll have to pack it up," Gerard corrects him. "Gerent Ulrich doesn't leave his compound. I'll send Pete down to help you."

Frank wishes Gerard would stay and help him, or stay and watch, talk to him some more, but Gerard probably has a lot to attend to so soon after sundown, especially if they're going to travel tonight. "I do want to see the—" Frank struggles for a second to recall the word— "comic book," he says. "I'm not sure how practical— But the book itself. Will you show it to me?"

Gerard's face lights up again and he puts the book carefully in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. "We can do it as soon as we're back. I'm not letting Ulrich get his filthy hands on it."

By the time Frank's blinked, Gerard is gone.

Frank keeps his lab meticulously organized, so he would actually rather not have Pete's help with packing, but he doesn't mind the company.

With uncharacteristically wild hair and a huge-ass grin on his face, Pete shows up about fifteen minutes after Gerard disappears. "Gerard said you need me?" he says.

Frank tries not to be jealous that it looks like Gerard had to drag Pete out of bed to get him here. At least Frank is sure the one he dragged him from wasn't Gerard's. Gerard may never have taken Frank to his bed, but Frank has never seen him take any other human there, either.

"You can lay out those cases on the table," Frank says, shaking off all thoughts of beds and bedmates. Pete does as he's told.

Pete's a lot more help than Frank expected, and they get the packing done in just over half an hour. He seems to know quite a lot about tech, and more than a pet has reason to about mods.

"I was in engineering-school for a while," Pete answers when Frank asks him about it. "But before I could qualify for tech status, my dad was killed, and my mom was sick. She needed me. Gerent Travis' scouts found me when I was trying to hitchhike back to campus, and took me to the compound. I was Captain Gabe's for a while, and then they sent me here. So, no more school for me."

Frank files that information away to think about. With a tech-obsessed gerent who doesn't place much stock in the status to be gained by having pets, there might be some kind of apprentice program to be worked out here. "How did I not know this before?" Frank asks.

"More interesting things to talk about than failed dreams," Pete answers, tone suspiciously light.

"But—" Frank says.

"Gotta get back upstairs. Hope you have a good trip south. That's the one zone I've never been to."

That reminds Frank he never got to hear the end of Pete's story about the time Gabe took him to Western Zone to see Gerent Greta, but Pete's gone before Frank can ask for the rest of the tale.

With the twenty minutes or so Frank has left after Pete leaves, he double checks his cases to make sure he hasn't forgotten anything, and packs a bag of snacks, because vamps are notorious for forgetting that humans need actual food to keep them going. Gerard doesn't take offense at being reminded, but Gerent Ulrich is an unknown quantity. There's no time to check Gerard's live feed. He's most likely doing something boring to watch, like organizing things for the trip, and he could come down early to make sure Frank is ready. It's not worth the risk of getting caught. That doesn't stop Frank from imagining him sitting in his favorite chair, or at the desk in his office, looking at his comic book again, his long narrow fingers stroking the pages the way he sometimes strokes Mikey's hair. The way he sometimes touches his own skin after Frank's opened it up, put tech inside, and watched it heal seamlessly.

His eyes closed, lost in thought, Frank doesn't hear Gerard come in.

"Are you ready?"

Gerard's voice is pitched low, in a way Frank suspects is meant to avoid alarming him, but Frank's eyes fly open and his heart starts racing anyway, because there is nothing reassuring about suddenly finding yourself less than arm's reach from a vampire, not even (or perhaps especially) one you're currently envisioning yourself in the arms of.

It's disconcerting seeing the blink-shift into x-ray vision from the outside and not as a change in monitor view, but the trigger mechanism is Frank's design and he'd recognize it anywhere. Whatever Gerard sees—the rush of Frank's blood through the arteries in his neck, the valves of his heart snapping open and closed, something else Frank's never caught on screen because it only makes sense in a vampire's brain maybe—puts a slow, sly smile on Gerard's face. Frank doesn't step back, doesn't tilt his head in supplication, doesn't get to his knees or close his eyes. With every ounce of will he has, he says, "Ready," and holds Gerard's gaze.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-29