Black Fall Read online

CHAPTER 11

  “Mom?” Jonas called out, nudging the door with his foot. He could hear water running and was about to poke his head inside, when Phillip barged in. As the door swung fully open, Jonas could see his mother standing in the kitchen, scrubbing her hands in the sink.

  “Everything’s fine, Phillip,” she said, without looking up. I’ll have Jonas clean the door in a minute.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Black,” Phillip said, backing down.

  “Come in, Jonas, and sit down,” she said, blotting her hands and forearms dry with paper towels. There was a bloody pile of them next to the sink.

  “Mom, what—”

  “Shut the door, please, Jonas, and sit down. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  Jonas closed the door, checked the curtains out of habit, and sat at the table. His mother pushed the handle on the faucet down awkwardly, using her wrist instead of gripping it, and sat at the table with him.

  She looked like she’d been skinned alive. Jonas couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. Muscle was showing in various places, and blood seeped from her face and arms, dripping onto the wooden table. Her eyes were solid crimson, with no pupils or whites. He felt sick.

  “Don’t be squeamish, Jonas. You’re not going to last long as a vampire if you get upset at the sight of blood.”

  Jonas swallowed.

  “Now, I’m in a considerable amount of pain, and I’m also blind — temporarily. I’d like to avoid damaging the apartment again so soon after the last time.” She paused.

  “Okay,” he said, trying to keep the horror from his face. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Good. Now, go to my room and pull a blood pack out of the fridge. Get yourself one, too, if you need it. Your pulse is racing, and your barrier is weaker than it should be.”

  Jonas consciously strengthened his outer wall. “I don’t—” he’d started to say he didn’t need one, but realized he was thirsty, the same way he’d been the night before.

  “We’ll discuss why you need one when you get back,” she said, her voice calm, but edgy.

  He hurried to her room and reached for the doorknob, then hesitated at the realization that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in his parents’ room. During his childhood, he’d never slept in their room, even if something scared him; they’d always calmed him, and put him back in his own bed to sleep. After his father disappeared, the room became a sort of fortress for his mother. He didn’t bother her while she was there, and he had no reason to go in when she wasn’t. Not sure what to expect, he turned the knob and entered.

  It looked like a room he’d seen in a home decoration magazine at the dentist’s office. Everything was clean, neatly put away, and color coordinated. The bed was perfectly made up, pillows positioned symmetrically and plumped. Even the wood floor looked as if it had just been varnished and swept. He opened the mini-fridge and saw the blood packs, arranged neatly like a shop display. This is the room of a woman who can talk calmly while her skin bleeds and worry about getting blood on the furniture, he thought, unsure whether he should be impressed or scared. He grabbed two of the aluminum packets, being careful not to move the others, and headed back to the living room.

  “Here, Mom,” he said, holding out one of the pouches.

  “Would you mind…” she raised her blood-slicked hands. They were shaking slightly and curled into claws.

  “Yeah, sorry.” He pulled the tab and poked the straw into it. “Do you want me to—?”

  “You can just put it in front of me.”

  He stood the packet up in front of her and returned to his chair. She leaned forward and sipped from it. Jonas meant to sip on his also, but before he knew it, he was holding an empty packet. “Damn.”

  “Watch your language, please.”

  “Sorry, mom,” he said, staring down at the empty packet. He’d only meant to take a small sip. Going to have to be careful around Amelia if I ever grow fangs. Disturbingly, the thought of biting Amelia made him salivate. It was like lust, hunger, and thirst all mixed together. Eve had mentioned some of the older vampires would only drink directly from humans. He wondered if it was better than the bagged blood.

  He shook his head and tried to stay focused on the bleeding woman across from him. “So, are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “This is what a few minutes of sunlight does to me,” she said. “But you go first. You were late and needed blood, so…”

  Jonas felt his chest tighten. He hadn’t told his mother he’d be late because she usually wasn’t up during the day. “You didn’t do this to yourself while out looking for me, did you?”

  “No,” she said, then looked at the floor and sighed. “Not exactly. You didn’t come home, and I needed to be sure.”

  Jonas felt his mouth go dry. “To be sure of what, Mom?”

  “That this was real. All of this,” she said, making a sweeping motion with her arm. “The apartment, the city… the sun.”

  Jonas frowned. “What do you mean, ‘That this was real’? Are you… is that normal?”

  Alice dabbed at a few drops of blood on the table. “You’ll understand, one day. We all go through it. I’m considered quite stable for my age.”

  Jonas sat back in his chair, stunned at the scale of the statement. “And now you’re convinced?”

  “Of course,” she said, wryly. “The sun is at least as real as I am.” She spoke lightly, as if telling a funny story.

  “You could have died!” Jonas said.

  “I had to know, Jonas.” She looked right at him, her voice level. “I’m not depressed, or crazy. I just… I had to know.” Her façade cracked a little and, for a brief moment, she looked haggard and tired. “No one saw me except Phillip, and he won’t talk.”

  “Why does that matter?” Jonas asked, surprised she would care about such a small thing when she’d nearly burned all the skin off her body.

  “I may have been weakened, Jonas, but my name still carries weight among our kind. Bad things happen out in New Orleans and Portland that don’t happen here. My name — our name, Jonas — keeps the peace. There are still those who think this is all just an act, an elaborate trap to draw my enemies out into the open so I can crush them.”

  “Is it? A trap, I mean. Did you really lose your powers?” He wasn’t sure where the question came from but, he knew one thing for certain: Bert and Phillip were still very afraid of Alice Black.

  She smiled. “Thank you, Jonas. You’re going to make a wonderful vampire, someday.”

  Jonas blushed at the compliment, then realized she hadn’t answered his question. Maybe that meant she could do more than she’d let on. Then again, maybe she was teaching him something, the same way Viviane had with her illusions. Always seem more capable than you are. He wasn’t sure if he agreed. In his recent experience, seeming dangerous and powerful could attract more trouble than a teenage boy was equipped to handle.

  “Now, what happened to you?” she asked, as if everything was completely normal.

  He told her about the attack: the anger and the impatience he’d felt through the conduit, his father under mental attack, the image of Fangston, and fighting back. He was careful to be vague about the exact layout and configuration of his barriers. It felt awkward, stepping around specifics in the conversation, but his mother didn’t seem to mind and he had the feeling it was something he wasn’t supposed to share with anyone.

  “He’s still here,” she said, distantly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Jonas. Just thinking aloud. Did you say Madoc?” she asked.

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  She nodded and clasped her hands together. She’d finished her blood pack, and her skin, while still translucent, wasn’t dripping blood anymore. “I’ve known Madoc longer than I’ve known your father. More of an ‘it,’ really. He’s a specter, works in special operations for the Agency.”

  “Is that like a demon?”

  “No,” she answered. �
��A specter is a kind of immaterial undead, like a ghost, who can absorb and transmit large amounts of information. Some are also pre-cogs: they can see a short time into the future, although they explain it as pattern recognition. They can’t touch physical objects, and they aren’t that powerful, which is why he broke off the connection when you fought back.”

  Her last comment stung a little. Up until now, Jonas was thinking he’d finally fought off something stronger than himself. “So why does the Agency use them? And why special operations?”

  “They’re communication experts. Imagine a team of supernaturals working together at the speed of thought. Words, images, procedures… anyway, that’s what specters bring to the table. They’re useful, and generally benign. They often try to warn people of impending disasters, though it’s hard for them to talk to those who aren’t listening.”

  “Okay,” said Jonas, realizing the more she spoke, the more questions he had. But he remained quiet and listened as she finished.

  “Special operations is a branch the Agency doesn’t like to talk about,” Alice continued. “And one you don’t need to know about yet. They deal in things that are too dangerous for the human, and sometimes even the supernatural, population to handle. Some of the things they do aren’t perfectly ethical, either.” She paused, then added, “Anything on the east coast would fall under Marcus.” She spoke in a small voice, her face slightly turned away from Jonas. It was almost like she was talking to herself.

  “He works for Fangston? But why would—”

  “Don’t worry about that right now,” she said, shaking her head. She was almost healed; just a few scrapes and patches of flaking skin remained.

  Jonas yawned, feeling very tired all of a sudden.

  Alice nodded toward his bedroom. “You should get some sleep now. It’ll get easier as you practice and feed, but you’re going to be tired until your body finishes changing.”

  “Changing?” Jonas asked, followed by another yawn.

  “Library. You can’t keep trusting people to give you the answers,” his mother said. “And Jonas?”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “First, you were right: don’t tell anyone about your barriers, not even me. If you ever find someone special, like I did with your father, that will be different. But you’re never to speak of your defenses openly. Someone might overhear. Even with those precautions, it’s always a good idea to change things around every few decades.”

  Jonas nodded. “What was the second thing?”

  “Not a word about any of this to Marcus. Not about me, or Madoc… don’t even bring it up.”

  Don’t worry, I wouldn’t even know where to start without making you sound like a mental patient, Jonas thought, then said, “Of course,” and headed to his room.

  ♟

  Jonas spent the rest of the week working harder than he’d ever worked in his life. He didn’t listen to music or watch television. Instead, he studied pre-gunpowder castles and read articles on psychics and ghosts. The book on siege-craft was old, but detailed, and contained a good deal of hilarious political incorrectness from men who were long dead and didn’t know their assumptions were assumptions. The information he found online about supernaturals was hit or miss and often seemed made up or impractical; he stopped searching after the first day.

  By Thursday evening, his barrier had turned into something awe inspiring, at least to him and Sam. His outer barrier was made of two stone walls that were ten feet thick and spaced twenty feet apart. They rose one hundred feet above and extended thirty feet below the “ground,” if you could call it that. He’d filled the space between the walls with packed earth, rubble, loose stone, and other stuff that didn’t take much thought to maintain. The walls, which angled out at the base to prevent someone from undermining or tunneling under them, also had towers at regular intervals. Sam helped him with the details; he remembered everything Jonas had read on the subject. It’s like having my own castle-nerd, Jonas thought.

  Sam huffed, being privy to Jonas’ thoughts, and muttered, “Nothing nerdy about paying attention to things that might save our lives, Sir.”

  Sentries walked along the tops of the walls — the parapet — and garrisoned each of the towers, giving them clear lines of sight along the entire length of wall. Keeping all the details in his head — especially the guards, who weren’t as sophisticated as Sam but still part of his consciousness, gave Jonas a headache. For the first few hours he could barely put one foot in front of the other. But he drank more blood, and spent time breaking down and rebuilding the fortifications piece by piece, until it was as automatic as breathing.

  A pleasant side-effect was that he could feel himself getting smarter. Constantly carrying the mental load of his barrier’s architecture and stability made normal academics seem easy by comparison. He found that if he heard something once and wrote it down at the same time, he could remember it perfectly. He also began to pick up on things around him, like what a teacher found interesting and what bored them, which students went out of their way to sit far apart in class, and about the boy who was either playing contact sports — unlikely, from the size of him — or getting beaten on a regular basis, just not where anyone could see. As an experiment, he pushed the thought at the teacher, Mrs. Simmons. She kept the boy back, after class.

  Later, he talked over what he’d learned about castles with Mr. Edwards - no specifics about his barrier, just the theory. The old teacher seemed to enjoy the sessions, bringing up points Jonas hadn’t considered in ways that made him think Mr. Edwards might have lived them.

  “You’re not spending enough time on doors,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t a door be a weakness?”

  “If you don’t have a door, or doors, how are you going to get out? And you’d want several; remember, part of the defender’s advantage is being able to move freely about the fortification, while the attacker has to overcome the obstacles first.”

  “What if…” Jonas tried to think about a way to describe it without seeming crazy or giving too much away. “What if you could open a passage through the wall at will, without the enemy knowing about it?”

  Mr. Edwards frowned and said, “Like a secret passage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, for one, if you don’t have a door, the enemy is going to assume there’s a hidden way in, and if it’s the only way you can get in or out, he’s going to find it. Secondly, you’ve just breached your own wall. It’s good to have a hidden way out, but it should be used only when necessary because it’s also the weakest point of the defense.”

  Jonas nodded. Fangston had told him the thought of invulnerability was important when it came to his barrier. If he could rip holes in his walls at will, how solid could they be?

  “The other thing you’re forgetting is that the purpose of defense is to regroup and attack. Every defense—”

  “Can be overrun,” Jonas finished for him. It was one of the teacher’s catch-phrases.

  “Correct… given enough time and resources,” Edwards said, “However, a visible door — an apparent weakness — will draw the attacker in and let you focus your efforts there.”

  After the meeting, Jonas added three entry points to his walls and started using them when he imagined touring his defenses. The walls did seem more solid to him. He also made sure the gatehouses were the toughest most detailed portions of his fortifications, and assigned more fragments of himself to guard them.

  Amelia wasn’t talking to him. He’d tried sending her a few texts but, while she didn’t completely ignore him, the conversation died after a few lines. She didn’t look for him during lunch or walk home with him, even though he waited.

  “She’ll come around, kid,” said Phillip. “Just needs a little time to process things.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Jonas said, disappointed. It felt like his old life was fading away.

  Friday, after classes, he didn’t wait around for her. He went home, ate, and arrived at the Agency thir
ty minutes early.

  ♟

  He was the first to show up at the training room, so he went to the cafeteria and tried sipping on a blood pack. He managed to control himself for a few seconds, then realized he was holding an empty pouch again, with no idea of how much time had passed. Not quite there yet. He sighed and headed back to the training room. Viviane was waiting for him.

  “You’re feeding?”

  Jonas nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “What have you been learning?”

  He talked about his discussion with Mr. Edwards and, in broad terms, the upgrades to his barriers, discussing the concepts rather than any particular layout.

  “Your teacher is correct. Drawing someone to the place where you want to fight is important.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she said, “I wonder how he knows so much about these things?”

  “He was in the military,” Jonas replied.

  Viviane frowned. It was a tiny movement, just a twitch from the corners of her mouth, but he knew he’d made a mistake. “You asked him this? You’ve seen his records?

  “No, I—” Jonas started to say.

  “Don’t take anything for granted, Jonas. You should be very wary of anyone with these kinds of skills unless you’re absolutely certain of where they acquired them, and that they won’t use them against you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”

  “You should keep talking to him, though. Scan him next time. Not too deeply, you don’t want to hurt him, but take a poke around his head.”

  “We can do that? I mean, we’re allowed to?”

  Viviane shrugged. “It’s in plain sight, Jonas. I’m not telling you to lift his bank account information, just make sure he’s not dangerous. And by the way, I’m glad I didn’t have to tell you not to discuss your barriers — I assume your mother told you. When designing them, though, keep in mind that you’re not limited to human materials, or even the laws of physics. Your imagination is the only limit.”

  Jonas drew his eyebrows together. “Like, what?”

  “Anything you can think of. Turn off gravity, make new species of guardians.” She shrugged and waved her hand in the air, as if she were conjuring a thousand worlds into existence.

  Jonas noted the terms she used, and thought about how he might modify his “guardians” to make them more effective.

  “Just be sure you’re methodical about it,” she continued, “or you’ll end up with walls that float away into space, or your own consciousness attacking you in your sleep.”

  ♟

  “So what do you do during the week?” Jonas said, pushing Eve’s hand aside and striking back. It was more freeform than before. They were now allowed to move around their area of the training room, as well as punch with either hand.

  “Study, do research for enforcers.”

  “What’s an enforcer?” He knew the answer from his talk with Fangston, but the point of the exercise was to avoid getting hit, mentally or physically, while keeping the conversation going.

  “You and me, if we graduate.” Eve replied, taking a swing at his chin. He leaned back reflexively, but she slipped a foot behind his heel and barged into him with her shoulder, making him stumble back. She didn’t pursue him. Instead, she followed up with a mental thrust that rammed into his outer barrier. It shook him, but his fortifications held. “Nice,” she said.

  “Been reading,” Jonas said, smiling. What else do you do? You know… for fun?”

  She seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “I don’t get out much, Jonas. I can only leave after sundown, and it’s not like I have a lot of—”

  He slipped into her mind. Viviane had taught him the basics, but other than with the teacher in class, he’d never done it until today. At first, he had a hard time conceptualizing what Eve’s barrier really was. It was dark, chaotic, full of reflections and smoke. He willed himself in the direction of least resistance but got turned around, feeling like he was—

  “—human friends.” Eve narrowed her eyes as she completed the sentence. Realizing what he’d done, she came after him, aiming straight, hard punches at his face. Jonas backpedaled, deflecting what he could and taking the rest on his arms, shoulders, and abdomen. How does she hit so hard? She was almost his height, maybe five-foot-eight-inches tall, and didn’t have an ounce of fat on her. She looked like she weighed one hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, but she hit like she outweighed him.

  “That will be enough,” Viviane said.

  The two of them stared at each other. Jonas was breathing hard, surprised at how far she’d driven him. Eve wasn’t breathing at all, but had a look in her eyes like she wanted to set him on fire. She’s lonely, Jonas thought, and suddenly saw Eve as a seventeen-year-old girl who spent her days in a basement, surrounded by vampires five-or-more times her age. He suddenly realized that what he’d thought was casual conversation was something deeply personal to her.

  “Kieran will be joining you for the next exercise,” Viviane said, gesturing to a boy who was leaning against the far wall. Eve looked surprised; Jonas felt his throat tighten.

  Kieran was six feet tall and built like a linebacker. His face marked him as being Jonas and Eve’s age, but his body was fully-grown. He pushed off the wall and strode over with a heavy, predatory lumber.

  “He’s a werewolf,” Jonas said, looking at Viviane.

  “Guilty,” Kieran said, grinning and extending his hand. He had friendly brown eyes like Phillip, and Jonas reached out without hesitation. Kieran’s grip was gentle, as if he was afraid of crushing Jonas’ hand and probably could.

  “Kieran is here to learn how to control his wild side. Jonas, you’ll be helping him by trying to project calm and control into his thoughts.”

  Jonas nodded. Thank God I don’t have to—

  “Eve, you’ll be doing the opposite by trying to get Kieran to lash out at Jonas.”

  Jonas’ mouth dropped open, and Eve gave him a malevolent look. It seemed like Kieran was about to protest, but before he could, Viviane said, “Begin.”