Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

Warriors.

And every night, I dreamed—about fighting and flying and rivers running red with blood.

Then, one morning, about a month after Kissy and I had come up with our little theory, she woke me up in the middle of the night, saying my name with all the aplomb of someone announcing she was fixing to drive down to the Sonic for a cherry limeade. “Hey, Jess?” she said, her eyes glowing incandescent green.

“Yeah?” I said, my fingers closing involuntarily around the hilt of my sword and my palm singing with the contact.

Kissy smiled. “We have to go to the Mojave Desert.”

I saw a flash—of a legion of dark-eyed women, dark-eyed men. Heaven and earth and innocents caught in between.

“Seriously, Jess,” Kissy repeated, giddy. “We have to go to the Mojave Desert.”

I sat up in bed, sword at the ready and the fire in my belly spreading out to each and every one of my limbs. A tiny voice inside of me whispered that this was it—the thing I’d been made for, the thing that Kissy and I had always been meant to do, but I didn’t say a word about that out loud. I didn’t say that this was the beginning of the End.

Instead, I fixed Kissy with a look. “Do we have to go to the Mojave Desert now?”

Automatic

by Rachel Caine

here was a new vending machine at the Morganville Blood Bank. In the withdrawal area, not the deposit area. It looked like a Coke machine, only instead of handy ice-cold aluminum cans, there were warm cans labeled o neg and a and b pos—something for everybody. The cans even had nice graphic logos on them.

My girlfriend, Eve, and I were standing in front of the vending machine, marveling at the weirdness, and wondering a lot of things: first, what the hell did they tell the can manufacturers about what was going into those containers? And second, would the blood taste like aluminum? It already had a coppery tone to it, like licking pennies, but . . . would it be any good?

There were twelve vampires in the place, including me, and nobody was making a move to get anything out of the shiny new machine. The withdrawal room itself was clean, efficiently laid out, and not very friendly. Big long counter at one end, with staff in white lab coats. You took a number, you got called to the counter, they gave you your blood bag. You could order it to go, or drink it here; there were some small café-style tables and chairs at the other end, but nobody really liked to linger here. It felt like a doctor’s office, someplace you left in a hurry as soon as you could.

So it was odd how all the tables and chairs were full, and the sofas, and the armchairs. And how there were vamps standing around, watching the machine as if they expected it to actually do something. Or, well, expected me to do something.

“Michael?” Eve said, because I’d been a long time, staring at the glossy plastic of the machine in front of me. “Uh, are we doing this or not?”

“Sure,” I said, resigned. “I guess we have to.” I had actually been asked—well, ordered, really—to lead the way on this particular new Morganville, Texas, initiative. Morganville is—to say the least—un

usual, even for someplace as diverse and weird as our great state: a small, desert-locked town in the middle of nowhere, populated by both humans and vampires. A social experiment, although the vampires really controlled the experiment. As far as I knew, we were the only place in the world vampires lived openly . . . or lived at all.

I was on the side of the vamps, now . . . not through any plan of my own. I was nineteen years old, and looking at eternity, and it was starting to look pretty lonely because the people I cared about, that I loved . . . they weren’t going to be there with me.

Somehow, the machine summed up how impersonal all this eternal life was going to get, and that made it so much more than just another Coke machine full of plasma.

I was still amazed that twelve other vamps had shown up today for the demonstration; I’d expected nobody, really, but in the end, we weren’t so different from humans: novelties attracted us, and the blood dispenser was definitely a novelty. Nobody quite knew what to make of it, but they were fascinated, and repelled.

And they were waiting.

Eve nudged me and looked up into my face, concerned. She wasn’t too much shorter than I was, but enough that even the stacked heels on her big, Goth boots didn’t put us at eye level. She’d gone with subdued paint-up today: white makeup, black lipstick, not a lot of other accessories. We were so different, in so many ways; I wasn’t Goth, for starters. I wasn’t much of anything, fashionwise, except comfortable. And she seemed okay with that, thankfully.

“Swipe?” she said, and tapped my right hand, which held a shiny new plastic card. I looked down at it, frowning. White plastic, with a red stripe, and my name computer-printed at the bottom. glass, michael J. My dates of birth and death (or, as it was called on the vamp side, “transformation”). The cards were new, just like the vending machine—issued about two weeks ago. A lot of the older vampires refused to carry them. I couldn’t really see why, but then I’d grown up modern, where you had to have licenses and ID cards, and accepted that you were going to get photographed and tracked and monitored.

Or maybe it was only the humans who accepted that, and I’d carried it over with me.

It was just a damn glorified Coke machine. Why did it feel so weird?

“So,” Eve said, turning away from me to the not-very-welcoming audience of waiting vampires, “it’s really easy. You’ve all got the cards, right? They’re your ID cards, and they’re loaded up with a certain number of credits for the month. You can come in here any time, swipe the card, and get your, uh, product. And now, Michael Glass is going to demonstrate.”

Oh, that was my cue, accompanied by a not-too-light punch on the arm.

I reached over, slid the card through the swipe bar, and buttons glowed. A cheerful little tone sounded, and a scrolling red banner said make your selection now. I pushed the button—O negative, my favorite—and watched the can ride down in a miniature elevator to the bottom, where it was pushed out for me to take.

I took the can, and was a little surprised to find it was warm, warm as Eve’s skin. Well, of course it was; the signs on the machine said temperature controlled, but that just meant it was kept blood temperature, not Coke temperature. Huh. It felt weird, but attractive, in a way.