The Superiors Read online

She kept expecting him to stop the car and kill her. He just didn’t look scary enough to be a bloodsucker. In fact, when he wasn’t smiling, he looked just like anybody else. Pretty even, if he’d been a real person. He was small, not quite skinny, with these big warm eyes the color of his hair and his pale brown skin, like dust. She’d always imagined being bit by a huge scary man with bushy eyebrows and no hair and bulging muscles, that he’d take a big bite out of her. Of course that was just her fear-fantasy. She’d seen lots of bites, and they didn’t look so bad. Her sisters had all been bitten, some of them a lot of times.

  The Superior with the soft-looking hair pulled into the lot in front of the Confinement. She hadn’t taken a lot of time to look at it before she ran, and it had been years since she’d seen the outside. It looked so normal, not like somewhere scary, or happy, or in any way noticeable. It didn’t look alive, like hundreds of live people carried on their busy living inside the walls. And the walls outside hid all the prettiness of the gardens so it looked strange and bare, not like the place she’d lived her whole life.

  “Are you ready?” the Superior asked.

  “I guess.”

  “That’s good. Remember, I didn’t bite you, yes? Don’t tell anyone, and I will make sure you don’t go to the blood bank.”

  “I know, you told me.”

  “I know you’re just a kid, but don’t talk like that to Superiors. Someone else might take offense and punish you for it.”

  “Oh. Thank you, Master. I’m sorry for offensing you.” She had a hard time keeping her manners sometimes. She didn’t have to act any certain way with people, and she’d hardly had contact with Superiors before. Doctors and a few buyers had looked at her, and a lady had bought her once. But Aspen had never talked to one like this. It was strange, almost like he should speak a different language. It didn’t make sense that they could communicate like two people, like they were the same. This Superior sounded so polite and formal all the time, stiff. Even when he was sucking her blood he’d seemed somehow dignified.

  Now he was smiling at her again with that look like he wanted to laugh. She couldn’t imagine a Superior laughing.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Offending,” he said. “You’re sorry for offending me.”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. Master.”

  He smiled and shook his head and led her inside, his hand on the back of her neck again. His fingers were cool against her skin and it felt nice. She’d gotten all covered in sweat and dirt from running in the streets half the night.

  The man Superior talked to a lady Superior for a few minutes, and then the lady came to take Aspen away. She’d seen the lady a few times, but only the Superior guards inside the fence were familiar.

  The man Superior bent down in front of Aspen so his face was right in hers and his curly hair almost touched her forehead. “It was a pleasure to meet you,” he said, that amused smile still on his face. She knew he was smirking at her, thinking he was so much better. So Superior. “Now promise me you’ll keep out of trouble, little sapling. We can’t have you wandering around in the streets getting picked up by criminals. You know some Superiors would bite you if they found you out there.” He smiled at her, and winked, and stood up.

  She fought the urge to giggle as she walked back towards the door that led out to her home in the Confinement. She couldn’t wait to tell her sisters all about her adventure. She’d run away, been brave, and gotten caught. But she hadn’t been punished. She’d been bitten, and she had a secret with a Superior. And he’d winked at her. A Superior really honestly winked at her. Who knew they could be so snarky?

  Chapter Three

  Draven didn’t see Aspen again for over three years. He’d changed jobs, again, and gone back to work with the health department, this time as a restaurant inspector. He had done this job many times over the years, and it was the most enjoyable of the many jobs he’d had. Otherwise, nothing much changed in Draven’s life from year to year.

  “What can we get you tonight?” the hostess asked, the night he would meet Aspen for the second time. The waitress smiled, showing exceptionally long teeth. She had short black hair under her hairnet and a heavy accent.

  “How many do you have on tap tonight?” he asked. He could have flashed his health inspector card, but he preferred to do his work unobtrusively. It was easier to get a true picture of a place by using the amenities first. Like a secret shopper.

  “We have twelve table, but only eight open at the moment. Would you to like have look around, or would you prefer to make this quick stop? We have many varieties at the bar if you’re pressed for time.”

  “Do you have the new flavors?”

  “Of course. Why don’t you come back to bar and our server will help you.”

  He followed the tiny hostess back to the bar where a neon sign filled the glasses with reflected light. The bartender wore a vest with nothing under it, a habit of bartenders that Draven found particularly distasteful.

  “What can I get for you, my man? We got bottles, we got cans,” the bartender called out in a familiar way. Draven regretted that he couldn’t give scores based on poor wardrobe choices and lack of manners.

  “I am undecided. What flavors do you have?”

  “If they make it, we got it, that’s our motto,” the vest-clad man sang out. “We got hot sap, cold sap, old sap, new sap. We got maple sap, caramel, Coca-Cola flavor. We got strawberry, vanilla, cherry-vanilla. You name it, we claim it. You got a thirst, we got the quencher. So what’ll it be?”

  “I may just look at the tables,” Draven said, sliding off the stool. Too many bartenders adopted the pushy air of salesmen, which they were, but Draven didn’t want to listen to the bartender’s yammering while he did his job. He walked around the end of the bar, through the heavy curtain and into the restaurant part of the establishment. He roved through the grove of tables, noting the required six bouncers for twelve tables, their appropriate watchfulness. The most common mark against a restaurant was inattentive bouncers, but these were standing against the walls, watchful if a bit bored. Slow night at Estrella’s.

  Draven noted the clean tables, the sterile atmosphere, the clean trays on the corners of each table. Then he surveyed the sapiens. Their ages varied, but all appeared in good health. He drew in a breath at each table and paused, listening to the thrum and rush of sap through their veins, turning over the scent in his mind, checking for subtleties in their smell that indicated disease. Superiors were not affected by diseases that troubled sapiens, but they could spread them. And spreading a deadly disease to a sapien meant one less food supply in a world already on rationing.

  Draven rarely found anything serious. Restaurant owners stayed diligent, and most of the sapiens with disease had already died off. Draven came to the ninth table and paused. The alluring scent that had wafted through his mind on occasion for the past three years hit him with undeniable force. He looked down at Aspen, and she looked up at him, unblinking. Although the short span of three years had not changed Draven, Aspen had changed in striking and obvious ways. He knew her immediately, despite the shortened hair, the longer limbs, the bored and sullen expression on her still-childlike face.

  He had thought at the time he’d had her that she only smelled so enticing because of his burning hunger, that she only tasted so incredible because he had let his thirst build for too long. Now he knew that wasn’t the case. He would know that scent anywhere, and despite her obvious flaws—too young, thin blood, childish appearance—he would stray from his usual routine for something so irresistible. He preferred the stronger-flowing sap of an active sapien, the complexities in flavor of a female further into her childbearing years or a male of an active inclination. But this willful little sap’s lifeflow drew him like a Siren’s song.

  He checked the last three tables before returning and plucking her place card from the table. Cali Youngblood, the card read. But he’d never forgotten her scent. He handed the card to the bouncer, and slid o
ut his ration card as well.

  Draven sat across from Aspen at the small table and studied her for a moment, noticing the development of her young body, the darkening of the hair, the dulling in the eyes. Restaurant life was hard on the saps. She looked at him, no longer scared or wondering his motive. If she recognized him, she gave no indication, although of course he looked the same. He’d always look the same, just as he had looked the night he evolved.

  She sat with her legs spilling out from under the table, her arms laid out for his choosing. Draven took her right arm and stretched it out in front of him. She was certainly no virgin to a bite anymore. He felt a twinge of pity for her, the wildness gone out of her. He had enjoyed his secret defiant act, had felt a thrill when he’d gotten away with it. In some way he’d connected it with her—his act of lawlessness fit with her defiant personality.

  He touched the inside of her arm, the old white scars and the newer, red puncture wounds. Some of them hadn’t been cauterized fully. One of them didn’t look like it had been sealed at all. It was still fresh and looked tender and a bit swollen, probably as new as a few nights ago or even last night.

  “Does this hurt?” he asked, placing his thumb on the worst of the red welts. Her skin, like that of all saps, held the usual warmth of a warm-blooded species, but here it almost scalded him. He pulled his thumb away partly out of disgust for the heat, something he had grown a bit squeamish of after so many years without it, and partly because she jerked when he touched it. Her eyes went wide and she drew in a quick breath.

  “No,” she said. But Draven had worked with enough saps to know that body language was a more accurate read than words. Most saps, even when they spoke his language, didn’t know themselves. His frustration at their stupidity had caused him to quit a job working at the sap clinic. Most of them reported different symptoms on different days or to different Superiors, or didn’t know answers about their own bodies when asked.

  “I can draw from this arm,” he said, taking her other arm, which looked better. “It won’t hurt as much. Or I can take from this one and close these marks someone left open, but it will hurt quite a bit.”

  She regarded him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. “Why do you care if they hurt?”

  “Because I don’t like to see things suffering. But I’m hungry, so what do you want?”

  “Okay,” she said, and he noted the defiant jutting of her jaw. “Then bite me right here in the open marks where it hurts.”

  He smiled a bit on seeing the emergence of her old personality. He’d drawn a bit too much in his hunger last time he’d had her. She’d been weak when he’d taken her back to the Confinement that night and told them she’d gotten lost in the shuffle. But there was nothing to be done for it now. It happened.

  He rubbed the pale inside of her upper arm. He used a cord when he could to avoid touching the saps too much—their warm slowness made him shudder a bit—but this one’s warmth didn’t bother him as much as some of the others. She wasn’t fleshy like a lot of the females of mating age. Her sap began to flow more quickly where he rubbed, and his hunger mounted. He smelled a subtle difference in her sap, a thicker more complete quality, and he knew she’d reached sexual maturity for a sapien. He couldn’t remember anymore when that normally happened, but it made her scent even more wonderful.

  He took up the towel, still rolled, from the tray and handed it to her. “I’m neat. I won’t waste a drop,” he said. “But you may need to bite on this for the pain.”

  “I don’t scream.”

  “Fine,” he said, putting the towel back. “Suit yourself.”

  He turned her arm and then stopped. “I can get a morphine pill for you after, if you want, but I can’t stand the taste.”

  Before she could answer he aligned his teeth and buried them in the two red wounds inside her arm. Her sap leapt up at him, flowed into him without the slightest pull. At first he could taste the trace of bitter from the previous wound, and then her warm nectar flowed smoothly. He had only a dim awareness that she’d gone rigid, that her feet were digging into the smooth surface of the floor, that she was making a high groaning sound through her nose, and her breath was coming fast.

  It had taken him a long time to become adept at gauging the exact amount of sap to draw, but now he could tell precisely when to stop. He withdrew at the last possible moment, before his ration would expire and he’d have to get a second punch on his card for overdrawing. He was tempted—he’d never tasted anything so full of life and flavor. He pressed his tongue against her arm and held it for three extra beats, letting his saliva seal the wounds. Then, instead of wiping her arm with the clean towel or leaving her to do it, he carefully ran his tongue around the area until every trace of sap was gone. He didn’t want to waste even half a drop. She was too delicious.

  “How many years have you had now, Aspen?” he asked.

  She cleaned her arm with alcohol and a practiced indifference. When he spoke, her eyes darted up, and then back down, but her face didn’t show any reaction. “It’s Cali.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s correct. Cali.”

  “I guess Aspen wasn’t a suitable name for a restaurant worker.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “I’m fifteen.”

  “That’s young for restaurant work, yes?”

  “Everyone has different tastes.”

  “I have a taste for you. Now that I know where you work, I’ll come in often. I’m sorry to hurt you, but a person has to eat.”

  “Right.”

  He had forgotten why he’d come in for a moment, that he had work to do. He leaned across the table. “Unless I can rent you for…personal use.”

  “Use for what?” she asked, watching him more closely now.

  He slid his hand up the inside of her thigh, further than he liked. Now that he’d eaten, touching her was unpleasant. He shouldn’t touch her at all, except to look for a new spot to draw from. The bouncer cleared his throat and Draven took his hand away, but he remained leaning across the table towards Cali. “For…my pleasure.”

  He detected a change in her flat eyes, a withdrawing further, a cold disgust that hadn’t been there before. A strange sense of disappointment settled over him, one he shouldn’t feel over a sap’s reaction to him. He had a moment to briefly regret propositioning her, to think he should have come back and picked another sap next time and tested her instead.

  That was a ridiculous notion. What did it matter what any sap thought of him? They were all the same. And business was business. He had a job to do, and he had found a new favorite, so it made sense to eat and check the restaurant at the same time.

  Cali looked at her bouncer and nodded towards the door. Draven stood and accepted his ration card, punched for one use. The proposition was the most unpleasant thing about his new job. The perks far outweighed the slight discomfort of touching the saps, though. He got to drive around all night listening to music, eating at regular intervals, and sometimes helping a sad sap or two. He liked being able to do something that helped someone, even if it was just a sap. He got a rush from busting a restaurant with diseased saps, or, more often, overdrawn or mistreated ones. Especially when the restaurants served saplings. That in itself disgusted him, although he knew several Superiors who preferred the thin taste of young saps.

  Before leaving, Draven turned back to the bouncer as if in afterthought. “You don’t have any saps who can be, let’s say, borrowed for a bit, do you?”

  The bouncer stared him down with cool distaste. “We’re not that kind of establishment.”

  “Do you happen to know anywhere I can find a sap for rent, perhaps for just an hour or so?”

  “I don’t. I’ve heard things about 28 Flavors, but they close before the other restaurants so you’d have to hurry. And I don’t know anything for sure. That’s just what I’ve heard.”

  “Merci.”

  Draven didn’t care for the looks he got from the bouncers and the reputation that woul
d invariably follow him after asking at all the restaurants. But it was a small price to pay for the luxury of taking the time to choose carefully and the variety he could choose from at every meal—priceless advantages in his routine life. It was almost enough to make him forget the pittance he received at the end of each night’s work.

  He left Estrella’s without looking back, his mind already racing ahead to his next stop, which sounded promising. The prospect of a bust made the job exciting. He pulled away from the curb, his hunger temporarily sated, already having forgotten Cali.

  Chapter Four

  He remembered her the next night, though, and the next, and every night after. Every night he should have visited five different restaurants, but he had to save one of his rations for Cali. He couldn’t bear to miss something so delicious.

  Sometimes Cali appeared drowsy, and she sat relaxed, like she hardly felt his teeth piercing her vein. Sometimes when he came, he found her sleeping, as many of the saps did between customers. When she slept, he didn’t wake her, but took her arm and put it to his mouth and drew on it until he’d had his ration. He knew she was probably awake, except on the nights when he noted the unpleasant aftertaste of drugs in her bloodstream.

  Some of the kinder Superiors used drugs to calm the saps and ease their pain. Some Superiors even preferred the taste, having gotten so used to it that sap without the addition of pharmaceuticals tasted strange to them. Draven had never been able to tolerate the foreign taste, despite his sympathy for saps’ pain. He disliked drugs the same way he disliked the preserved sap sold in stores and at bars. Even warmed, it lacked the taste of life, the fresh vitality of sap direct from the source.