Blood Vivicanti (9781941240106) by Becket

houses. And one desperate night we slept in
one of the haunted crypts in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
    Incidentally, a ghost woke
me up that night. She was carrying a ghostly lantern and looking
for her lost lover.
    I told her to try the next
sepulcher over, the one with the stone cherubs over the
mantle.
    The ghostly woman nodded
and thanked me in a wispy voice. Then she left us alone for the
rest of the night.
    But she had scared Red half
out of his wits. He didn’t like the strange ways of human ghosts.
And he couldn’t get back to sleep. He was fearful that she would
return any moment to shine the ghostly light of her lantern in his
face.
    I held him all night. I
stroked his bald head. My fingernails stroked his red skin. I
hummed a human lullaby.
    He was so big. I was so
tiny.
    It was nice to hold in my
arm such a reversal of power.
    It was nice to hold him
too.
     
     
     
     
    It took a few days and
nights, but soon we made a list of everyone from whom I should
drink.
    The first person on the
list was my personal choice. It was an old homeless man whom I’d
seen several times.
    Red did not like this
choice at all. He had learned through his own Blood Memories that
shaking his head was a great way to say, No! without saying a
word.
    He was shaking his head a
lot.
    But the old homeless man
impressed me, in the same way that Theo’s old man had impressed
him, all those months ago – it seemed like centuries by then. Theo
had drunk that old man’s blood because he had wanted to drink the
blood of someone who might not have been skilled in life, yet was
skilled with living.
    My old homeless man was
like that. He had never been a drunk since he never drank. He
begged for money all day and all night, but he used only a little
bit of it for himself. He took most of his earnings from begging to
a small church that was in disrepair, a church begging for money to
fix a hole in the roof, and he put it in the collection box. He did
this every day, several times a day too, lest some cowardly thief
try to steal that money from him. My beggar was helping other
beggars.
    I loved him for
that!
     
     
     
     
    It actually happened on the
day I decided to drink his blood. A thief tried to take his money.
But I got there right in the nick of time.
    Red was following me
reluctantly, his arms cross, his head still shaking, No! in
disagreement.
    I caught the thief right as
he drew out his knife. I lifted him off the ground and threw him
over the nearest roof.
    My old homeless man looked
at me the same way he had looked at the thief – with a kind smile
and a twinkle in his eye. Most people would have been
terrified.
    “ You’re an angel,” he said
to me in an old man’s gravelly tone.
    “ Maybe I’m a devil,” I
said.
    “ Devils are angels,” he
said.
    “ I need something from you,”
I said.
    “ Will it hurt?” he
asked.
    “ For a second,” I said, “and
then there will be happiness.”
    “ Okay,” he said. “Take what
you need from me.”
     
     
     
     
    I told him to close his
eyes. He did.
    I went around behind him.
My Probiscus extended from the tip of my tongue. The shadows in my
mind would not let me forget the horror of drinking Nell’s black
blood. But the determination of my mind to destroy Lowen the Dark
Man scattered the terror of those shadows.
    “ For Theo,” I said as I saw
the sweet spot on the back of the old man’s neck. But then, almost
as an afterthought, I added, “And for me too.”
     
     
     
     
    I pierced the old man’s
neck and drank his blood and ate his Blood Memories.
    He said, “Oh!” and then he
went limp in my arms.
    No one else had ever done
that before. They usually stumbled way with a euphoric smile on
their face, remembering nothing from my pierce, except for a foggy
sense of pure pleasure.
    The Blood Memories of my
old homeless man filled me. I saw the world through his eyes and I
realized that the pint that I had swallowed down was the last pint
his heart had pumped. It