Blood Ties Book Two: Possession

“Men can’t resist the lure of shiny new toys,” I reluctantly conceded. “He’s going to freak out, you know.”

“Don’t worry, I know how to handle him. He’s not so tough.” She scrawled something on the paper and stuck it to her computer monitor, then offered to take my bag from me. “It’ll be safe back here,” she said, stowing it beneath her desk. “You sure didn’t bring much.”

I followed her to the doors. “Max packed it. Guess he didn’t plan on staying long. We leave tomorrow night.”

“That’s too bad.” She shrugged and ran her badge through the reader. “The hotel they’ve got you staying in is pretty nice.”

The fact we were staying in a hotel at all surprised me. “I thought you guys would have underground dormitories or something.”

“Oh, we do,” Anne assured me. “But only for the staff who are permanently on call. Like me, for instance, or the doctors who take care of the Oracle. The new assassins in training and their mentors stay here, too, but it’s not permanent.”

A tall, thin man in a frock coat and an Edgar Allen Poe haircut passed us and nodded curtly. Anne gave him a wave and continued on.

“You must be a pretty good receptionist, if they want to keep you on 24/7.” I ran my fingers along the wall as we walked, a horrible habit I’d adopted as a human and had to break when I’d learned exactly how many diseases you could pick up that way. Now that germs were no longer a concern, I didn’t mind it. It drove Nathan crazy, though.

“Actually, I’m not just a receptionist. I’m more like Miguel,” she explained, thankfully taking my mind off my sire.

“Max said Miguel was security. You must have background as an assassin, then?”

She nodded. “Three hundred years. They finally let me retire back in the fifties. Er, the eighteen fifties. Too bad, though. During that whole ‘don’t exercise or your uterus will fall out’ time period, no one would have seen a female assassin coming.”

“Three hundred years? Wait…” I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Nathan told me the Movement was two hundred years old.”

“Yeah, but before we started calling ourselves the Movement, because it made a better acronym, we were the Order of the Brethren. Things were a lot tougher back then, let me tell you.”

We ventured farther into the building than she’d taken us on our previous tour. This area, I noticed, had fewer safe rooms and more security labels. We reached a large set of double doors with a thick, black-and-yellow-striped line around them. Huge red warning signs, printed in several different languages, plastered the doors. In addition to a key card reader, I noticed there was a palm scan device and a keypad on the wall.

“This is the most secure section of headquarters,” Anne explained. “Only high level administrators and security have access. Oh, and the scientists who monitor the Oracle.”

“Scientists?” I chewed my lip nervously as I watched her key in the codes. The English language sticker on the door warned an improper access sequence would result in a security breach alert, and I didn’t remember where I’d seen the last safe room.

“Yeah. She’s got a whole team of doctors and chemists and pharmacists keeping her medicated and fed well and under control.” The same computerized voice from the elevator informed us that the access sequence was accepted, and Anne pushed open the door with a flourish.

“If she’s drugged up, why is Max so afraid of her?” He’s not the kind of guy to be blindly afraid of anything.

Anne made another “pff” sound of dismissal. “He was on the team that moved her to the new facility back in the eighties. Really, he shouldn’t have been assigned, he was too young. He’s too young now. Anyway, her meds didn’t hold, and she twisted one of the team members’ heads off.”

“Twisted?” My guts mimicked the motion implied by my word. “She’s got that kind of power?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s got mad telekinesis. It would be cool, if she didn’t use it so destructively. But that’s why she’s constantly doped up. Ah, here we are!”

We turned left and went through thoroughly unintimidating swinging doors, into a room with black walls like an exhibit in a museum. A dark window the size of a movie screen dominated one wall, separated from us by a brass railing.

“Stand there,” Anne instructed, moving toward the window, where she turned a dial. The lights dimmed slowly on our side of the glass as the other side illuminated.

“This is like the penguin house at Sea World,” I said, my voice sounding way too loud in the quiet room, and Anne snorted in laughter.

Behind the glass, a void of still redness surrounded a murky, suspended shape. It took me a moment to realize what the redness was.

“Is that blood?”

Anne joined me at the rail. “Yup. The Oracle can’t feed in the traditional sense anymore. She requires much more blood to support her tissues. Total immersion allows her to draw the blood in through her lungs and pores as well as her digestive system. The blood cycles through purifying and oxygenating filters continually, to provide optimal nourishment for her.”

“So, you’ve got a giant heart-lung machine back there, pumping blood?” I squinted at the tank.

Anne nodded and shrugged. “Pretty much.”

As the lights grew brighter, the shape came into focus. A figure, nude and obviously female, floated in the blood. What appeared to be intravenous lines and electrode wires connected to her slender limbs and bald head. Her face was relaxed, eyes closed as if in sleep. She was perfect, except for the three pointed horns protruding from her skull.

I thought back to Cyrus’s New Year’s party, and the creatures I’d seen there. “Is she part demon?”

“No. The Oracle is pretty old, one of the oldest we know about. The horns are a natural consequence of the aging process. We get twisted when we age.” Anne held out her arm and pushed her plastic bracelets aside, revealing the faint beginning of what could only be described as a dew claw. She covered it again with a shrug. “She’s also the most psychically gifted vampire we know of.”

“You’ve got that memorized like you work at the Smithsonian,” I said, leaning over the rail. “So, she’s sealed up in there, or what?”

“Yup. She’s been held in various methods of containment since her capture in 1079, Common Era, and was given to the Movement in its first year of inception by King George the II in 1765.”

“The Movement is that old?” I asked, my awe diverted for an instant from the Oracle. “I thought back then it was the Order of the Brethren?”

Before Anne could answer, the blood in the tank surged, pounding the glass with a wave that created a thunderous echo.

“Don’t worry about that,” Anne assured me. “She’s responding to your voice because you’re new.”

Much in the way a big, scary dog is “just playing.”

“She has a staff of round-the-clock caregivers who administer sedatives. That’s why she’s not all vamped out in the face area. The drugs they give her keep her in a light coma. It’s safer, and more conducive to her visions. And her specialists monitor her psychic readouts. We can accurately monitor major world events days in advance with the information she supplies us. You know, if she chooses to supply it.”

It might have been a trick of the changing light, but I could have sworn the Oracle’s eyes opened.

“Weird,” Anne whispered. “I’m gonna page them, let them know she’s awake.”

So, it wasn’t just an eerie illusion. Neither, apparently, was the voice in my head. Carrie, it called softly. The chill tone paralyzed me. Carrie, he has come back.

“Who has?” I asked out loud. But I knew. I knew in my heart who she meant. Two months of horrible nightmares flashed through my mind. No! I shouted back at the Oracle through my mind. Cyrus is dead. No matter what bizarre scenario you try and come up with, nothing can bring him back!