Interlude 1— I'm a Vampire?
Location: Roselli House, Houston, Texas
Time: December 30, Merge Night
Alice Blake was working the night of the Merge as a private duty nurse for Carl Roselli. She was reading a book and Mr. Roselli was watching a Vampire Knight marathon on pay per view, so neither of them was watching the news. Alice was just getting to the climactic scene of the murder mystery she was reading when, for just a moment, the words seemed in a different language.
Alice was not bilingual, but Jane Alexander was. Jane spoke, read, and wrote game world French and Anglish, which were quite similar to Merge world French and English, but different enough to qualify as different languages. Also, the printing style of game world, French especially, was florid and almost script-like. For just a moment Jane Alexander's memories made the print face of Alice's book seem both mechanical and Teutonic.
Then the smells hit her. Alice was inured to the smell of a twenty-first century sick room. Jane Alexander wasn't, and along with Jane came the enhanced senses of the vampire she had become. Alice/Jane smelled the alcohol and disinfectant, the soap, and the blood. Especially the blood.
It was all just too much. In an instant, Alice was standing next to the chair, but she was different. At least three inches taller. She heard a sound and turned to see her body in the chair, head lolling to one side, and the book on the floor. Her body, but not her body. For the body in the chair was Alice Blake's, and the body image was that of Lady Jane Alexander, the Baroness of Petite Lorain. Jane had a body and face that looked a lot like Audrey Hepburn, but with violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor, a body that was a bit more lush than Hepburn's.
Alice/Jane heard a gasp and looked around. Carl Roselli, forty-one, with fourth stage lung cancer was staring at her. His eyes flicked from her to her body in the chair and back again.
Alice could feel his start of fear. It was like a drug, that fear, like crack. Without thinking about it, her mouth opened in a wide hungry smile, and her fangs came out.
He screamed and tried to get out of the bed, but he was tied down by the drip bag of drugs and the progress of his cancer. Then she moved, in the blink of an eye, with all the speed her vampiric abilities provided, across the room to his bed.
It wasn't Alice Blake that caused her to hesitate. It was Jane Alexander. Jane's memories of the blood-drenched months under Roderick's spell, of the months in the Paris sewers, hiding from the world, living on rats, trying to survive, trying to atone for what she'd done under Roderick's control. Her mouth grazed Carl's neck and almost she bit. The fear was so strong so delicious . . . maybe just a little bite.
She bit and energy—life—flowed with the blood, into her projected form. And Alice was reminded that you got more oomph if you were in body when you bled someone. She stopped, lifted her head, patted Carl on the cheek, and went back to her body, ignoring Carl's gibbering terror for the moment.
Back at her body, she examined it. It was five four, stocky by genetics and a bit overweight by a fondness for pasta and bread. The hair was sandy blond going to gray, and the face was a bit jowly. The eyes were closed, but if they were opened they would be blue-gray. She looked again and noticed that her body looked less jowly, and perhaps a bit thinner.
She remembered the pain of her body, the constant agony . . . and she didn't want to go back into it. But those memories were Jane Alexander's, and the body before her was Alice Blake's. Carefully maintaining her separation, she occupied her body, putting it on like an ill-fitting suit. She carefully opened a pathway and felt . . .
Nothing.
No agony of random neural firing, no tasting purple or feeling sour, no burning agony. Just the ordinary sensations of a normal living body. Not even most of the aches and pains of Alice Blake's sixty-two year old body.
She wasn't breathing. She told her body to breathe, and it did. Using her vampire senses, she looked over Alice Blake's body. Its heart wasn't beating. It took a few moments to figure out how to make it beat, but once she did she got a feeling of satiation. She didn't need blood, not right now. This body, her body, was feeding her, even if it didn't feel quite right to her vampiric memories. She stood, taking her body with her, and felt at a distance the protest of a body being moved at greater speed than it was used to.
Alice looked at Carl, who was holding his neck and staring at her. When their eyes met, he asked, "What are you?"
"I'm really not sure," she told him. "But whatever I am, it's probably best if you don't remember that little nip on your neck.” She caught his eyes just as Roderick had taught her and put him into a trance. "You fell asleep and had a dream about vampires. The dream was very realistic. But it was just a dream."
That didn't solve the problem of the bite marks on his neck, but it would hold for now. Meanwhile Alice needed to figure out what happened to her. "Oh, and you won't notice the Band-Aids on your neck." She went back over and bandaged the two puncture marks on his neck, remembering from her undeath under Roderick's control that the wounds left by feeding could be obvious and deadly, but were usually small things, easy to miss. In fact, the vampire should always be careful to keep them small and discreet.
Her memories as Jane and her memories as Alice lined up in her mind. Jane's becoming a vampire. Alice's use of drugs during nurses' training and occasionally after that. Her marriage to Tony, and the two kids, before she realized, well, finally accepted, that she was no more to him than a source of drugs and an occasional booty call. The children that Jane would never have. Alice's son Tony Jr., forty, and daughter Jane, thirty-eight.
Jane was why she named Jane Alexander Jane. And it was Alice who named Jane. She rolled up Jane for a game of WarSpell. The plan was to play Jane as a vampire hunter and amulet wizard, an ally and competitor to Alan Van Helsing, a customer of Sir William Deforest. She started out as the nineteenth-century steampunk version of a valley girl. To let her learn the game, she played a parallel game to Bill and Evan. Then came the night of the bad rolls, when she succumbed, rather than escaped, the vampire Roderick. They called the game for that night, and Leroy Johnson, the game master, promised to come up with a solution.
He did, sort of. He switched from WarSpell’s The Vampire Compendium III to The vampire compendium IV. But Evan Von wasn't willing to play along, and Bill Goldman sided with Evan, so Jane escaped to the sewers of Paris where Leroy said she could play a parallel game again, until she was powerful enough to go up against Alan Van Helsing and Sir William Deforest.
By then Alice was mostly bored by the game and rather pissed off at Evan Von. She didn't go back.
✽✽✽
Back in her Alice Blake body, she wondered if she was the one having the vivid dream. She looked over at Carl Roselli and saw the Band-Aid on his neck. This is real.
She walked back over to Carl and grabbed the remote off his bed. Carl had turned off the TV after his "frightening dream about vampires."
When she picked up the remote, he said, "I don't want any more Vampire Knight tonight."
"I want to check the news."
"That's worse."
Alice took the remote anyway and turned on a news channel, only to see a dragon in Central Park. For several minutes, they just watched. As the reports of magic spread from the northeast across the country, FOX was debating whether this was the beginning of the end times, and MSNBC was sure that aliens had landed and they must be invading or else they would be honest about it.
Alice was engrossed in the reporting and didn't notice when Carl Roselli reached up and touched his neck. "Can you turn me, Alice?"
She turned to look at him and he had his eyes firmly closed and his right hand on his neck over the bandaids. Alice realized that somehow Carl knew. The first thing that popped into her mind popped out of her mouth. "Did you play WarSpell, Carl?"
"No. Never!" Carl said. "Is that what it was that made you a vampire?"
"Open your eyes, Carl." Alice put all the force of will she could into that command. But Carl's eyes stayed stubbornly closed.
Jane Alexander was a very young vampire, and the ability to compel in a WarSpell vampire was a function of two things: age, measured in decades or centuries, and the character stat Mental Toughness. Alice remembered from her character sheet that Jane's mental toughness was eighty-two. The range went from 30 to 190 with average being 110, leaving Jane not quite thirty points below average. It was unlikely she could compel Carl Roselli to have pasta for dinner, much less forget she was a vampire.
Alice sighed loudly. Then turned and carefully went back to the chair and sat. She had to be careful, because she was moving her body at a remove. While she moved carefully, her mind whirled almost out of control, bouncing off walls and memories. Vampires were hunted things and rightly so. They were—in the eyes of humans—blood-sucking killers who were a continuing threat as long as they walked the earth. Granted, this was a different world, but would this one be any different? The world was freaking out over magic starting to work. And it was WarSpell magic. She recognized it from Jane Alexander's memories. So how were they going to react to WarSpell vampires?
She turned back to Carl. "Why on earth would you want me to turn you?"
"Stage four NHL."
Alice nodded. Stage four Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma of the particular version that Carl had was, at this point, about ninety-nine percent fatal. He had from three to six more months, most of that in considerable pain. On the other hand, being turned by a vampire made the pain of death by cancer seem like a gentle breeze across your skin. "Carl, you don't know what pain is!"
"What! How dare you? You've never had cancer."
"No, but I am a registered nurse with almost forty years of experience, and I've had two babies and broken bones. I'm an expert in pain. How much drug this pain needs as treatment, how much drug that pain needs. How pain A compares to pain X. And as of about fifteen minutes ago, I had my whole notion of what pain is reset. Enough pain can kill, Carl. And the pain of being turned goes way beyond the amount of pain that would kill you, because the magic keeps you from dying." She went on to explain about the vampirism of the Compendium IV, based on both her experience and her reading of the booklet on vampires as player characters.
Carl asked intelligent questions. After all, he was an investment banker, or had been one until the cancer. Alice ended up telling him that she—her body—wasn't that constant wellspring of agony that Jane Alexander's had been.
"It sounds like you got the magic part, but not the disease part," Carl said consideringly. "And if that's the case, then you giving me some of your blood wouldn't make me sick. It might or might not transfer the spell part, but it wouldn't give me the disease."
You're guessing," Alice said. "Maybe the disease didn't transfer, but maybe it did, and whatever it was that did this didn't damage my body, my Alice Blake body." She pointed at her chest, "I could have the disease right now and in three days this body will be in just as much agony as Jane Alexander's was when Roderic pulled me from my body in the family crypt in Petite Lorain. You can wait a few days, can't you, Carl? To avoid agony that makes what you're suffering now seem like nothing."
"I'm not convinced that the agony is that bad." He held up a hand that was sprouting needles and tubes. "I'm not saying you're lying. Just that you could be wrong, and it could be worth it, even if you're right. I wouldn't mind being able to leave the pain my body's in right now."
Alice looked at him, seeing the life swirl around him, interrupted and distorted by the wires and leads. And she knew that he was lying, or at least concealing something. "That's not the real reason you want me to turn you now, is it?"
He looked back at her and she knew she was right. She waited.
Finally, he gave in. "No. I'm afraid you'll make a run for it."
Alice thought about that. It was more of the truth but not all of it. Then she had it. "You're afraid I'll decide that killing you is easier than turning you."
The fear spiked. It roiled through his aura. That was it, all right.
"I'm not the only one who knows," he blurted.
"Oh. Who else?"
"Those guys, the ones you played WarSpell with."
"How would they . . ." Then she knew how they'd know. The only game of WarSpell she ever played, the only character she ever played, and she got the memories and the curse. Did they get their character's memories?
He pointed at the TV. It was showing a woman riding a horse through the air fifty feet or so over Loop 610. "You aren't the only one this happened to. Maybe it didn't happen to everyone, but it happened to a lot of people. I don't know how it works, but if you only played one character, that pretty much has to be the one whose memories you got."
He was right. Leroy, Evan, and Bill would know, and if Evan and Bill got the memories and attitudes of Alan van Helsing and Sir William Deforest, they might well be coming after her. She wasn't sure about Leroy. What happened to a game-master, anyway?
"You're going to need allies and money," Carl said. "I have money and good lawyers."
"Okay, Carl, you've made your point. But there's something you should be aware of. The bond between the Master vampire and the new-made vampire is pretty strong and mostly one way. Roderic kept me in a sort of daze almost constantly until he was staked. Do you really want to give anyone that sort of power over you?" But she could tell he didn't believe her.
"I'll chance it," he insisted.
And suddenly she didn't want to argue any more. There comes a point where you stop arguing with a fool who insists in jumping off a cliff and she was past her point. "Fine." She moved then, taking her body with her, and using a fingernail she opened her wrist, then shoved it into his mouth. "Drink!"
He drank, and as he did, something passed from her to him. A tiny seed of the magic. No, not a seed. A line of magic. A thread. The same sort of thread that Roderic had used to control her. It was ancient and subtle and words spilled from her mouth without her willing them. "Corhith inemonak alisa kia." It was old. Older than Greek or Latin. Maybe Sumerian, or maybe even older. Not a language she knew, yet she knew what the words meant. "As I feed you, you are mine." And he was. The magic was sinking into his body even as he drank. She pulled her wrist away and watched as the magic closed the wound.
She stepped back, and using the connection between them, commanded him to sleep. She returned to her chair while she examined the link. This was different from anything she remembered as Jane Alexander. But, then again, Jane had never turned anyone.
She wondered how Jane was doing in that imaginary world that seemed so real in her memories. Was she real at all, or was it just the memories and the magic?
Location: Paris Sewers
Time: August 25, 1878
No, Jane thought as she sat in the sewer. Alice Blake couldn't be a vampire. Magic didn't work in Alice Blake's world. She envied Alice for that. She looked around. She had problems of her own. As much as the thought sickened her, she needed to eat. But the hunger, the need for blood, was still there. Lady Jane started hunting. Not out of hunger, but out of the hard headed practicality of a sixty-two year old private duty nurse named Alice Blake. For she was both of them now, and more. The new whole was greater than the sum of her parts.
Lady Jane Alexander had no idea what had happened to give her the memories of Alice Blake. Whatever it was had also healed much, perhaps all, of the damage the disease and her self-neglect had done her. Also, Alice Blake had sixty-two years of experience and was rather brighter than Lady Jane. The merged person had both sets of life experiences, and with Alice Blake's intelligence, Jane had a greater ability to integrate that experience. Her personality was a combination of Lady Jane Alexander's and Alice Blake's. For the immediate need, Alice Blake had read The Vampire Compendium IV, and knew more about vampirism than most vampires did.
As she hunted, Jane considered. Alice Blake had played her in the game, Bill Goldman had played William Deforest and Evan Von had played Alan van Helsing. If she had Alice's memories, did William Deforest have Bill Goldman's? Did Alan van Helsing have Evan Von's?