By Blood We Live Read Online Free PDF

accent I said: “My name is Remshi and I am the world’s oldest vampire. Radio carbon dates this little Oa around myneck to eighteen thousand BC. I remember watching my father carve it.” This last sentence shed the comedy accent. Again I saw my father in the firelight, my mother digging the offering hole. Two dark-skinned, longhaired people with bright black eyes and thinly muscled bodies. I was sitting between them. Peace. The last time I remembered feeling peace.
    “Or I don’t remember that,” I said. “It’s possible I have a condition. They’re memories or they’re not. Either way I don’t want to die. Not while you’re around.”
    This little speech steadied her. She looked at me with a flash of allegiance.
    And I knew for certain there was something she wasn’t telling me.
    “Granted, I’ve forgotten things,” I said, while The Lash lit the lights of deceit around her head. “But I know we have a life together. I know I care more for you than for anything else on earth. I know
you.
”
    “Do you?”
    “Yes.
    Her finiteness gathered, drew the mortal details together: the small body, the dark-eyed head, the heartbeat. Humans, you have no idea how deeply and finely not living forever is inscribed in your every moment.
    “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said, very quietly.
    “I’m here,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
    “You can’t know that. You could go down there now and not come out again for fifty years. I could be fucking dead.”
    I don’t know what I would have said in reply to that—since she was right—but I never got the chance.
    Something sharp hit me from behind and spectacular pain exploded under my ribs.

6
    I LOOKED DOWN to see seven or eight inches of a precision-pointed wooden javelin protruding from my gut. Lignum vitae. Second in hardness only to Australian buloke. In the moment it took me to turn around, I thought: This fucker isn’t taking any chances, whoever he is. Then I
had
turned around (if someone had been standing next to me I would’ve clouted them with the other end of the thing sticking out of my back, like a slapstick idiot carrying a ladder) to discover it wasn’t a him, but a them, and two of them were female.
    The man was in his early forties, with a large, tough, mongolian head and owlish eyebrows. To his left was a tall young woman with tied-back red hair and green eyes. She was flanked by a dark, taut girl of perhaps twenty with a satiny burn scar disfiguring the lower left quarter of her face. All three wore light combat gear and were heavily armed—I saw what looked like a nail gun, mini-crossbows, cartridges, stakes—but the redhead was wielding a sword.
    “You missed,” she said, to the dark girl, quietly.
    Too much was happening. Pain, first. It wasn’t a stake through the heart but the heart wasn’t stupid; it screamed the nearness of the miss. Its blared panic deafened the nerves, turned up the fire in my gut where the javelin had gone in—in spite of which a big share of consciousness was still staring moronically at whatever it was Justine hadn’t told me, and the dream, and
He lied in every word
, and
What do you remember?
Meanwhile Justine was moving towards me and the redhead had taken two more paces into the room. The study was tropical. The books were in shock.
    “Get out of here,” I said to Justine.
    “Let me pull it out,” she said. But I was ahead of her. I reached around (thinking, in the doolally way of such moments, of a woman reaching around to unhook her bra) and yanked the shaft as hard as I could. Appalling violation. Neurons roared. The weapon came free with a comedysquelch. Followed immediately by the inner hiss of molecular repair, the furious cellular regroup. (Pain? Yes. Fatality? No. Stake in the heart. Beheading. Fire if you get it hot enough. Nothing else. Anything else, you better run.)
    “Get out,” I repeated to Justine. But she didn’t move.
    Everyone else did.
    Contemptuous of