The Good, The Bad and The Undead. Ким Харрисон

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СКАЧАТЬ and the surface grew smooth. He really was a pretty fish, striking against the black porcelain: all silver, with long, cream fins and that black circle decorating one side to look like a reverse full moon. I dabbled my fingertips in the water, and he darted to the other end of the tub.

      Leaving him, I crossed the hall to my bathroom, got a change of clothes out of the dryer, and started the shower. As I picked the snarls out of my hair while waiting for the water to warm, my eyes fell upon the three tomatoes ripening upon the sill. I winced, glad they hadn’t been anywhere for Glenn to see. A pixy had given them to me as payment for smuggling her across the city as she fled an unwanted marriage. And while tomatoes weren’t illegal anymore, it was in bad taste to have them on display when one had a human guest.

      It had been just over forty years since a quarter of the world’s human population had been killed by a militarygenerated virus that had escaped and spontaneously fastened to a weak spot in a biogenetically engineered tomato. It was shipped out before anyone knew—the virus crossing oceans with the ease of an international traveler—and the Turn began.

      The engineered virus had a varied effect upon the hidden Inderlanders. Witches, undead vampires, and the smaller species such as pixies and fairies, weren’t affected at all. Weres, living vamps, leprechauns, and the like got the flu. Humans died by the droves, taking the elves with them as their practice of bolstering their numbers by hybridizing with humanity backfired.

      The U.S. would have followed the Third World countries into chaos if the hidden Inderlanders hadn’t stepped in to halt the spread of the virus, burn the dead, and keep civilization running until what was left of humanity finished mourning. Our secret was on the verge of coming out by way of the what-makes-these-people-immune question when a charismatic living vamp named Rynn Cormel pointed out that our combined numbers equaled humanity’s. The decision to make our presence known, to live openly among the humans we had been mimicking to keep ourselves safe, was almost unanimous.

      The Turn, as it came to be called, ushered in a nightmarish three years. Humanity took their fear of us out on the world’s surviving bioengineers, murdering them in trials designed to legalize murder. Then they went further, to outlaw all genetically engineered products, along with the science that created them. A second, slower wave of death followed the first once old diseases found new life when the medicines humanity had created to battle everything from Alzheimer’s to cancer no longer existed. Tomatoes are still treated like poison by humans, even though the virus is long gone. If you don’t grow them yourself, you have to go to a specialty store to find them.

      A frown pinched my forehead as I looked at the red fruit beading up with shower fog. If I was smart, I’d put it in the kitchen to see how Glenn would react at Piscary’s. Bringing a human into an Inderland eatery wasn’t a crackerjack idea. If he made a scene, we might not only get no information, we might get banned, or worse.

      Judging that the water was hot enough, I eased into it with little “ow, ow, ows.” Twenty minutes later I was wrapped in a big pink towel, standing before my ugly pressboard dresser with its dozen or so bottles of perfume carefully arranged on top. The blurry picture of the Howlers’ fish was tucked between the glass and the frame. Sure looked like the same fish to me.

      The delighted shrieks of pixy children filtered in through my open window to soften my mood. Very few pixies could manage to raise a family in the city. Jenks was stronger in spirit than most would ever know. He had killed before to keep his garden so his children wouldn’t starve. It was good to hear their voices raised in delight: the sound of family and security.

      “Which scent was it, now?” I murmured, fingers hovering over my perfumes as I tried to remember which one Ivy and I were currently experimenting with. Every so often a new bottle would show up without comment as she found something new for me to try.

      I reached for one, dropping it when Jenks said from right beside my ear, “Not that one.”

      “Jenks!” I clutched my towel closer and spun. “Get the hell out of my room!”

      He darted backward as I made a grab for him. His grin widened as he looked down at the leg I accidentally showed. Laughing, he swooped past me and landed on a bottle. “This one works good,” he said. “And you’re going to need all the help you can get when you tell Ivy you’re going to make a run for Trent again.”

      Scowling, I reached for the bottle. Wings clattering, he rose, pixy dust making temporary sunbeams shimmer through the glittering bottles. “Thanks,” I said sullenly, knowing his nose was better than mine. “Now get out. No, wait.” He hesitated by my small stained-glass window, and I vowed to sew up the pixy hole in the screen. “Who’s watching Glenn?”

      Jenks literally glowed with parental pride. “Jax. They’re in the garden. Glenn is shooting wild cherry pits straight up with a rubber band for my kids to catch before they hit the ground.”

      I was so surprised, I almost could ignore that my hair was dripping wet and I was wearing nothing but a towel. “He’s playing with your kids?”

      “Yeah. He’s not so bad—once you get to know him.” Jenks vaulted through the pixy hole. “I’ll send him inside in about five minutes, okay?” he said through the screen.

      “Make it ten,” I said softly, but he was gone. Frowning, I shut the window, locked it, and checked twice that the curtains hung right. Taking the bottle Jenks had suggested, I gave myself a splash. Cinnamon blossomed. Ivy and I had been working for the last three months to find a perfume that covered her natural scent mixing with mine. This was one of the nicer ones.

      Whether undead or alive, vampires moved by instinct triggered by pheromones and scent, more at the mercy of their hormones than an adolescent. They gave off a largely undetectable smell that lingered where they did, an odoriferous signpost telling other vamps that this was taken territory and to back off. A far cry better than the way dogs did it, but living together the way we were, Ivy’s smell lingered on me. She had once told me it was a survival trait that helped increase a shadow’s life expectancy by preventing poaching. I wasn’t her shadow, but there it was anyway. What it boiled down to was, the smell of our natural scents mingling tended to act like a blood aphrodisiac, making it harder for Ivy to best her instincts, nonpracticing or not.

      One of Nick’s and my few arguments had been over why I put up with her and the constant threat she posed to my free will if she forgot her vow of abstinence one night and I couldn’t fend her off. The truth was, she considered herself my friend, but even more telling was that she had loosened the death grip she kept on her emotions and let me be her friend as well. The honor of that was heady. She was the best runner I’d ever seen, and I was continually flattered that she left a brilliant career at the I.S. to work with me/save my ass.

      Ivy was possessive, domineering, and unpredictable. She also had the strongest will of anyone I had met, fighting a battle in herself that if she won would rob her of her life after death. And she was willing to kill to protect me because I called her my friend. God, how could you walk away from something like that?

      Apart from when we were alone and she felt safe from recrimination, she either held herself with a cool stiffness or fell into a classic vampire mode of sexy domination that I had discovered was her way of divorcing herself from her feelings, afraid that if she showed a softening she would lose control. I think she had pinned her sanity on living vicariously through me as I stumbled through life, enjoying the enthusiasm with which I embraced everything, from finding a pair of red heels on sale to learning a spell to laying a big-bad-ugly out flat. And as my fingers drifted over the perfumes she had bought for me, I wondered again if perhaps Nick was right and our odd relationship might be slipping into an area I didn’t want it to go.

      Dressing quickly, СКАЧАТЬ