9. Rules for Surviving a Vampire
Chapter nine
Rules for Surviving a Vampire
Luca
We moved everyone to the ranger station before dawn, because Beau said it was the most defensible structure in the basin and because nobody had a better religion to convert to on short notice.
He wasn’t wrong about the building. The station sat on a rise a half mile from camp: cinderblock, metal roof, steel doors, shutters that actually latched, a radio tower — dead, the repeater was somewhere in the fog — and one big central room with a wood stove and a wall of topographic maps.
Beau moved through it flipping latches and pulling shutters with the economy of a man securing a fire line, and I watched the group arrange itself in the new world order: Grant on a cot by the stove, still gray but holding; Oz wrapped in a blanket, staring; Mateo pacing tight ovals with his hand pressed flat over his own chest like his tattoo hurt; Eli by the window until Beau moved him off the window; Damien in the corner, folded and quiet, watching everything, and being watched right back by me.
And Kenji at the table, methodically backing up footage to three drives, because Kenji’s response to the impossible was redundancy.
And Rhys, seated alone in the center of the room in a metal folding chair, where I’d put him.
Where everyone could see him. Where the shutters could be opened on him if the sun turned out to matter — it didn’t, apparently, he’d walked here under a gray dawn without ceremony, one more childhood rule dead in a ditch.
“Interrogation’s a strong word,” Eli had said nervously.
“Debrief,” Beau had said.
“Q that rule is older than I am and it is the only mercy in this basin’s whole design.
If you ever suspect I am inside your judgment, the answer is no until I am out of it. ”
It went like that for an hour. He answered questions about himself with unsettling completeness — feeding, sunlight (an old vampire’s inconvenience, not a young one’s death sentence), the flare burn (fire is real to us; remember that), what glamour was and his flat statement that he had never used it on anyone in this room, delivered while looking at me.
He answered questions about the ferals, the fog, the crown of tents.
He drew, on Beau’s request, the shape of the twelve sites on the topo map, and the room got quieter as the shape emerged, because a diagram makes a thing true in a way words don’t.
Somewhere in that hour I picked up the grease pencil, cleared a corner of the map board, and started writing, because a scared group holds onto protocols the way a drowning man holds a spar, and because I needed the act of block capitals to keep my own hands busy.
RULES, I wrote, and under it, as they were established and witnessed:
One: nobody alone, ever, anywhere, including the latrine, including “just outside.” Two: after dark, nobody crosses a threshold outward.
Doors open inward only, and only on Beau’s word or mine.
Three: if you hear a voice you love, it is not them.
I wrote that one and had to stand with my back to the room for a second, and nobody said anything, which was its own mercy.
Four: fire works. Flares, the stove, torches — fire is real to them.
Five: no invitations. Rhys had been strangely emphatic on that point — thresholds mean something, he said, old thresholds most of all, don’t invite anything across one, not even joking, especially not joking.
Six: everything gets filmed. Kenji added that one himself, in his own handwriting, smaller and neater than mine.
“Seven,” Rhys said quietly, from his folding chair, the only rule he volunteered all night.
“If it comes down to a choice between any of you and me — spend me. I regenerate. You don’t.
” He said it in the tone of a man reading a maintenance schedule, and I wrote it down, Seven: the guide is expendable, per the guide, and I pressed hard enough to snap the pencil lead, and I did not look at him, and he had the decency not to look at me.
But every road that led to why Luca — to what, precisely, my blood was for — went into fog as thick as the stuff on the roads.
He wasn’t lying, exactly. I’ve been lied to by professionals; lying has a rhythm.
This was curation. He was managing my information environment the way I manage a patient’s family in a hallway, deciding what they could survive hearing, and the realization put a cold wire in my spine, because I knew that move.
I’d invented that move. I did not enjoy the view from the other end of it.
It was Beau who broke it open — Beau, who had been standing at the map wall for twenty minutes, not talking, running his big thumb over the drawn crown, with an expression I recognized from earlier that night at the footprints: tools failing in his hands one by one.
“Rook,” he said suddenly. “Say the other names.”
Rhys went still. “Other names.”
“The families. The involved families.” Beau turned around, and his voice had something in it I hadn’t heard from him yet — the sound of a man walking downstairs into his own basement at night.
“Because my gran had a rhyme. A counting rhyme, for shelling peas. I haven’t thought about it in twenty-five years and I have not stopped hearing it since that flare.
” He recited it slowly, dredging it up phrase by phrase, and the fluorescent lights seemed to recede from the words: “Twelve came to bury and twelve came to keep. Merchant and mason and shepherd of sheep…” He stopped.
His jaw worked. “There are twelve verses. I only remember four. One of them is ‘the tread of the well.’ Treadwell. My whole life I thought it was nonsense about a well.” He looked at Rhys, and he was very calm, the way big men get very calm.
“Another verse is ‘the mercy of the mercer.’ You want to tell me about the mercy of the Mercer, Rhys? Or should I keep shelling peas?”
The room did not breathe. Eli had gone the color of the map paper.
Mateo had stopped pacing, hand flat on his chest. And Damien — I was watching Damien, I had assigned myself Damien the way you assign yourself the quiet corner of a psych ward — Damien leaned forward in his chair, just slightly, lips parted, with the rapt, proprietary attention of a season-ticket holder hearing the overture.
He knew the rhyme. He knew all twelve verses. I’d have bet Grant’s IV bag on it.
“The mercy of the mercer,” Eli repeated, barely audible, and when I looked over, my best friend was staring at me with an expression I’d never seen on him in eight years — not fear for me, which I knew by heart.
Something more like arithmetic. Something like a man checking a figure against a promise.
It was gone in a blink, replaced by the lid, the grin, “—this is insane, obviously, rhymes, come on,” pitched to comfort the room, landing on no one.
Filed. With the pill bottle. The drawer barely shut now.
Rhys looked at Beau for a long moment, and then at me, and I watched him arrive at the edge of something and refuse it, one more time, with what looked — and this is the thing I couldn’t fit anywhere — like anguish, like a man declining to hand over the knife that would be used on him.
“Your grandmother’s rhyme is a roster,” he said finally, quietly.
“Twelve families. Everyone in this room descends from one. That is why you’re here.
That is how the invitations found you — all of you.
The retreat is a net that has been cast six times in thirty years, and this is the first time the whole catch came in.
” His eyes never left mine. “And that is all I will say tonight, and you may set me on fire again if it helps.”
“It might,” Beau said.
That was when Kenji, at the table with his three hard drives and his tripod feed running on a monitor — he’d remounted the infrared camera on the station roof, angled across the clearing, because redundancy — said, in a voice of enforced professional calm:
“Command. You want to see this.”
The monitor showed the station’s clearing in thermal blues and blacks: the gravel apron, the dead radio tower, the tree line.
And standing at the tree line, spaced with terrible regularity, like fence posts, like a dial — cold silhouettes.
Man-shaped absences, ambient temperature, hands loose at their sides, faces toward the station.
I counted. The count took a while, because my eyes kept refusing to continue.
Twelve.
“They walked in over the last ten minutes,” Kenji said. “One at a time. Each one stopped in exactly— I mapped it. They’re equidistant. To the foot.” He swallowed. “We’re at the center of the shape now. The shape came to us.”
Nobody moved. On the cot, Grant whimpered in his sleep.
The stove ticked. Beau reached over without a word and turned the station’s floodlights on, and the twelve silhouettes did not react to the light in any way at all, which was somehow worse than if they’d flinched or advanced — twelve cold fence posts, patient as furniture, marking a shape we were now the center of.
And then the fog outside the shutters — pressed up against the building like a poultice, gray-white in the floodlights — spoke.
It did not whisper. That’s the part I need on the record.
It spoke at conversational volume, clear as a man at your shoulder, in a voice I had last heard seven years ago telling me he’d be back Sunday night, save him some of Mom’s pot roast, don’t touch his truck.
Warm. Easy. Slightly duck-footed, if a voice can be a walk.
It came through steel shutters and cinderblock like they were tissue, and it said, kindly, patiently, to the whole room but only ever to me:
“Luca. Hey, Lu. It’s cold out here, buddy. Come open the door.”