Laurell Hamilton: Affliction

The silence on the other end of the phone was loud, because I could hear my blood rushing through my ears. My breathing sped up as Micah’s stopped, my pulse thundering while his paused, as if his whole body had taken that breath just before you launch yourself over the cliff.

I couldn’t stand the silence. I said, ‘Micah, did you hear me?’

‘I heard you.’ There was no happy warmth to his voice now. His voice was as empty as he could make it; if there was any emotion it was a cold anger. I’d never heard him like that. It scared me, and that made me angry, because it was stupid to be scared, but it was that emotional scared – when you acknowledge how important someone is to you and your world and yet know that they are a separate person capable of fucking everything up with a few bad decisions. I trusted Micah not to do that, but I also hated being that dependent on anyone emotionally. I allowed myself to love, but part of me was still afraid of it. That part of me tried to make me angry at him in a sort of knee-jerk reaction, a preemptive strike. If I lashed out first it wouldn’t hurt so much, or that had been the idea I’d lived with in my subconscious for years. Now I knew better, but the old habit was still in me. I just had to ignore it and be reasonable. But none of me liked the fact that he was this emotional with just the news that his mother had called me; I hadn’t even gotten to the part about his dad. It didn’t bode well for how he’d take it.

‘What did she want?’ he asked, still in that strange, cold voice.

I took in a breath and let it out slow, counting to help calm all the neurotic impulses I had around this much relationship emotion, and spoke, calmly, in a voice that came out ordinary and a little cold. I wouldn’t be angry as a first strike, but the old habit of preferring anger to being hurt was still a part of me. I was working on it, but something about the whole conversation had hit an issue of mine. I was better than this, damn it. I wasn’t the sad, angry girl he’d first met.

‘Your father is hurt, maybe dying. Probably dying,’ and my voice wasn’t angry now, or cold, but more apologetic. Shit, I so sucked at this.

‘Anita, what are you talking about?’

I started over and told him everything I knew, which seemed like damned little under the circumstances.

‘How bad is he hurt?’

‘I’ve told you what I know.’

‘He’s dying? My dad is dying?’

‘That’s what your mom said; she seemed pretty hysterical about it, actually.’

‘She was always pretty emotional. It kind of balanced Dad’s stoicism out. Anita, I can’t think. I feel stuck.’

‘You want to see your father, right?’

‘If you mean do I want to make peace with him before he dies, then yes.’

‘Okay, then we catch the first plane and get you to his bedside.’

‘Okay,’ he said. He sounded so unsure, so unlike himself.

‘You want company?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Do you want Nathaniel to come?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll call him and let him know. I’ll call Jean-Claude and see if his private plane is available.’

‘Yes, good. Why can’t I think?’ he asked.

‘You’ve just learned your dad is in the hospital and you’re running out of time to make up with him. You’re having to make up with your whole family during a crisis of epic proportions. Give yourself a few minutes to process, Micah.’

‘Good points,’ he said, but he still sounded shell-shocked.

‘Do you need me to stay on the phone?’

‘You can’t call about the plane if you’re talking to me,’ he said. The words were reasonable; the tone was still stunned.

‘True, but you sound like you need me to keep talking to you.’

‘I do, but I need you to arrange the trip more. I’ll give myself a few minutes to process and then I’ll arrange for other people to take the business end here while I’m gone.’

‘I’ll do the same.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you more,’ I said.

‘I love you most.’

‘I love you mostest.’

It was usually something that he, Nathaniel and I said to each other, but sometimes just two of us would do it. Sometimes you just needed it.

It was late enough in the day that the vampires had begun to rise in the underground beneath the Circus of the Damned, so when I called to see if we could borrow the private jet, Jean-Claude was awake enough to take the call himself. His voice held none of that sleepy edge because he didn’t really sleep; he died during the day, so when he woke it was abrupt and instant ‘awake.’ Vampires sleep more like a switch: on, awake; off, dead. His body would even cool over the hours, not as cold as a real corpse, and there was no color change, because the body wasn’t really ‘dead,’ and it wasn’t beginning to rot. If you were really dead, and human, the body began to rot as soon as the heart stopped. It’s like cutting a flower in your garden; you can put it into water, delay the process, but from the moment you pick it, it begins to die. The flower looks pretty for a long time, but it’s just a waiting game, the end is inevitable. Jean-Claude was a vampire, Master of the City of St Louis, and he’d been dead and beautiful for about six hundred years; his end was not inevitable. Theoretically, he could still be fresh as an unblemished rose five billion years from now when our sun finally gave up the ghost, expanded, and ate the planet. Of course, I’d killed enough vampires in my job as a legal vampire executioner to know that even being master of a territory and head of the newly formed American Vampire Council didn’t make him truly immortal, just fucking powerful. That was one of the reasons he was awake with the sun still shining in the sky. If he hadn’t been deep underground in what had begun as a natural cave system but had been carved out decades ago into luxurious rooms, even he would have still been dead to the world.

‘I can feel your anxiety, ma petite . What has happened?’

I told him.

‘I can arrange for you and Micah to go, but I will not be able to follow until I have reassured the master of that territory that we are not coming to take over his lands.’

‘It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d need to clear it with the local vamps to visit Micah’s dad in the hospital.’

‘If you and he were simply a couple, then no, but you are my human servant, one leg of the triumvirate of power that we share with my wolf to call, our reluctant Richard. If it was Richard, two of us heading into another’s territory, they would be certain we were coming to destroy them.’

‘We just need to get Micah to his dad’s bedside before it’s too late, that’s all. Surely they can just check and see that the man is in the hospital.’

‘It is never that simple to cross from one land to another for master vampires or for the leaders of wereanimal groups. Micah and you are the Nimir-Ra and Nimir-Raj, leopard queen and king, of our local pard. Are there wereleopards in Micah’s hometown?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You need to know,’ he said, quietly.

‘Shit,’ I said, and put real feeling into it. ‘This is going to piss me off really soon.’

‘The new vampire council is very new, ma petite ; we cannot afford to be seen as tyrants and bullies. If you enter other territories without at the very least alerting them, then it will be viewed as arrogance. It will seem as if you – we – feel that the entire country is ours to visit and use as we see fit. It will make the lesser leaders nervous and even be used by our enemies to stir up more rebellion against us.’