FIVE
1867, FORT WARREN,
GEORGES ISLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
GEORGES ISLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
Cold water stung him, a wet slap against
his face.
He woke up, not knowing how long he had been
asleep.
For one blessed instant, he thought it had all been
a nightmare.
Then he felt the chains on his wrists, and it came
back with terrifying clarity.
He was in a dank stone cell, the floor covered with
the shit and filth of other men. His arms were locked in heavy
manacles above his head. There was a dull ache in his chest, and he
remembered being shot.
He looked down, and saw the bullet wounds healing
on his chest and abdomen. But he couldn’t imagine how that was
possible.
A second later, his mind caught up with his senses.
He was aware of other men in the room.
Four soldiers with rifles, wearing the blue
uniforms of the Union, watched him. One held a bucket, still
dripping with the cold water he’d thrown to wake Cade.
Sitting on a stool between them, an older man.
Barrel-shaped, with a greasy forelock of hair over his thick brow
and nose. He wore a good suit and expensive boots.
Cade realized, with some horror, that he could
smell the man, just like he’d smelled the corpses on the boat, and
it seemed completely natural to him now. Like he’d grown a fifth
limb without questioning it.
He smelled talcum powder, the pomade holding the
forelock in place, and above all of that, whiskey. The man seemed
to be sweating it.
The man in the suit turned to Cade and
smiled.
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t get up.” Then he wheezed
at his own joke. Cade would have been able to smell the whiskey on
his breath even without his new senses.
Cade caught a whiff of the soldiers, too.
Sweat-damp wool, and the already familiar stink of fear. It was
just as vivid to him as the images from his eyes.
The man on the stool spoke again, to one of the
soldiers.
“What’s it called, Corporal?”
“Cade, sir. Nathaniel Cade.”
“Cade, is it? Did you know that means ‘a pet of
unknown origin or species’ in Old English?”
“No, sir. I did not.”
“I never had a proper education, you know, but I
have done a great deal of reading. Never stop trying to improve
yourself, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The man looked at Cade again, eyes narrowed.
“I suppose you are my pet now, Cade. I pardoned
you. Spared your life.”
“What happened?” Cade asked.
“You’ve been asleep for nearly three days,” Johnson
said. “You missed the trial. They intended to hang you at dawn.
While I doubt the hanging would have killed you, the dawn most
certainly would have.”
Cade looked at him, baffled.
“Who are you?”
The man in the suit laughed and then coughed. He
took out a flask and uncapped it. The whiskey scent blotted
everything else as he tipped it back.
“I’m Andrew Johnson, President of these United
States since the death of Abraham Lincoln two years ago.”
As keen as his ears were now, Cade wasn’t sure he’d
heard any of that right.
“The president is dead?”
“Don’t you listen? I’m the president. I’m alive and
well. But, yes, while you were out at sea, someone put a bullet
into poor old Abe’s brain. This bullet, in point of fact.”
He fished a handkerchief from his vest pocket. He
unwrapped it and revealed a round lead ball, stained with
rust-brown powder.
Cade smelled it immediately: blood. Old and dried
but unmistakable.
His mouth watered.
“Please,” he begged. “Please. Let them kill me.” He
searched for the words. “You don’t know—you don’t know what I
am.”
Johnson laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “If
I didn’t know what you were, you’d be dead already.”
That seemed incomprehensible to Cade. “You
know?”
Johnson nodded.
Cade was shocked. “For the love of God, why didn’t
you let them kill me?”
The drunkenness seemed to slide off Johnson, and
his voice was quiet and dark when he spoke.
“There are other nations in this world. Nations
that don’t have names, or borders, but they exist all the same. And
make no mistake—we are at war with them. They would wipe us from
the face of the Earth quicker than any foreign army. Unless we find
a way to strike at them before they gain a foothold inside our own
country.”
Cade barely listened, panic rising inside him. He
was beginning to feel the thirst again. The wounds in his chest
throbbed. He started to see the blood pulsing in the men in the
cell, just beneath their skin.
Cade struggled to lean forward. He had to make the
man see.
“You don’t understand, you have to kill me . .
.”
His chains rattled and pulled taut.
The soldier smashed his rifle butt into Cade’s
face, putting him back onto the floor.
Johnson looked annoyed.
“You owe your life to me, creature,” Johnson said.
“And you’re going to spend the rest of it paying off the
debt.”
He took another swig and then nodded to the
corporal. The soldier ducked outside the cell and returned with a
different bucket. This one was smaller, and stained with red.
“I hate to drink alone,” Johnson said. “Join
me.”
The aroma nearly made Cade pass out. It was not
exactly right—not what the thirst really craved—but it was blood.
He was close to choking on his saliva now, and he felt his canines
growing.
Carefully, the soldier placed the bucket on the
floor in front of Cade, and stepped back quickly.
Pig’s blood. Cade could see it was already starting
to thicken in the cool of the cell.
It took everything he had to clamp his mouth
shut.
They would not make him do this. He might be an
abomination, but that didn’t mean he had to accept it.
He didn’t trust his voice, so he simply shook his
head at Johnson.
“It’s from the finest butcher in Boston. You should
be honored. What’s wrong? Had your fill on the boat?”
Cade shook his head again.
Johnson laughed, belched, and put away his flask.
“You have no say in this, creature.” He turned to the corporal.
“Make sure he drinks all of that. He’s not going to starve. I have
plans for him.”
Johnson exited, and the soldiers turned to Cade.
They regarded him fearfully, but they followed their orders. They
beat him with their rifle butts until he stopped thrashing and then
rolled him onto his back. One man plugged his nostrils, and they
held him down as they emptied the bucket of pig’s blood into his
throat.
And despite all his efforts to resist, Cade
shuddered with pleasure as he drank.
JOHNSON RETURNED SIX DAYS LATER.
Cade watched him enter. He was stronger now. The
soldiers had forced buckets of pig’s blood into him. Until two days
ago, when he learned he didn’t need to breathe anymore. They
couldn’t choke him, so he didn’t have to swallow. Still, he’d
already fed, whether he wanted to or not, and the change was
working in him.
Johnson apparently wanted him presentable. With
their bayonets fixed at his throat, the soldiers had watched Cade
while the garrison’s barber groomed him. It didn’t take much
effort. The hair sloughed off almost by itself His hair came back,
but his beard had not regrown since. The soldiers washed him by
dumping buckets of icy water over and over until the last of the
blood and grime was gone. Then they tossed him a freshly laundered
prison uniform and watched him dress at gunpoint. He noticed
something: aside from the aroma of soap, he had no scent. His body
had stopped sweating—nothing was left to interfere with his ability
to sniff out prey.
After that, he began to hear the other prisoners in
their cells, despite the stone walls.
This morning, the soldiers couldn’t hold him down.
He shook them off like fleas. The last scab flaked off his chest
where the bullet holes had healed, revealing fresh, unmarked
skin.
Cade figured that in another day, two at most, he
could pull the chains out of the wall. If he wanted, he could feed
on the soldiers when they came.
But he wouldn’t. The fact that he even considered
it told him what course of action he had to take. He would do the
only sane thing: he’d end his own life.
He was considering how he’d accomplish this when
the door opened.
Johnson was not alone. In addition to the
blue-uniformed guards, he had a Negro woman with him.
No, not Negro, Cade realized. Mixed race. Her eyes
were almond-shaped, her skin the color of dark gold. She carried a
cloth bag and wore a headscarf, both dyed in bright colors that
shone in the murk of the cell.
Two things struck Cade: he couldn’t tell how old
she was. She could have been anywhere from twenty to fifty years
old.
And she didn’t look the slightest bit afraid of
him.
Cade inhaled, and could name each soldier by his
odor. He smelled Johnson’s hangover like a cloud around the
president’s head.
The woman smelled like nothing he could name. Some
exotic flowers, perhaps. Or a kind of spice he’d never
tasted.
“He’s just a boy,” she said. Cade knew she meant
him.
“He was a boy,” Johnson corrected her. “Now he’s
something other.”
Cade tried to ignore this, as he had the soldiers’
insults and the sounds beyond his own walls. But he was intrigued.
He looked at Johnson.
“Cade, this is the Widow Paris, Mme. Marie Laveau
of New Orleans. I had to go to some expense to bring her to
you.”
The woman—Laveau—had not taken her eyes off Cade
yet.
“You’re certain your Negro hoodoo will be able to
do this?” Johnson asked her.
“It’s called vodou, Mr. President, and I am
Creole,” she said, something of a schoolmarm in her tone. “It will
work.”
Johnson nodded and handed her a piece of paper.
“These are the words. Exactly these, do you understand?”
She nodded.
“You can read, correct?”
She gave him a withering look.
Johnson looked away, almost sheepish.
“You brought it?” Laveau asked him.
Johnson nodded. “It’s never left my side. Though I
still don’t see why you need this.”
“There is a great deal you don’t see, Mr.
President. Please.”
She held out her hand.
Johnson reached into his waistcoat and came out
with the handkerchief, still wrapped around the bullet that killed
Lincoln.
“As you asked,” Johnson said. “Just as it came out
of his skull.”
Mme. Laveau took the bullet and held it in her
palm. She turned away from the president and his guards.
“You need to leave,” she said. “All of you.”
“Impossible,” Johnson said. “We don’t know what he
will do—”
“I do,” she said. “Go.”
Johnson hesitated and then nodded to the
soldiers.
“Very well, then.”
They left the cell, and Cade was alone with Mme.
Laveau.
She set her bag on the ground and began taking
things from it. A small leather pouch. Some bones, and plants. And
then, finally, a long knife.
“Do it,” Cade said.
She looked at him, a question on her face.
“Use the knife. You can end this.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” she said. She was
starting a very small fire, lighting the green plants so they
smoked on the floor of the cell.
“But you could,” Cade insisted. He tried to keep
his voice even. “Please.”
Before he could say anything else, she had the
knife in her hand and pointed at his throat. She had covered the
distance between them too quickly for even Cade, with his new
senses, to see.
Cade flinched back involuntarily.
“Do you really want to die?” she asked.
Suddenly the question was no longer a far-off
possibility. It was right there, at the point of the blade.
“Yes,” Cade said, after hesitating a moment.
“You a Christian, child?” she asked.
He nodded. Carefully. The knife hadn’t moved.
“What makes you think God wants a thing like
you?”
That stopped Cade. He hadn’t considered that. But
it made sense. There was no place in Heaven for what he had become.
His soul was damned. It had to be.
“You still want to die?” she asked.
This time, Cade couldn’t open his mouth. Still,
there was only one answer. Even if he was condemning himself to
Hell, he could not go on. Not like this.
He nodded.
Mme. Laveau looked disappointed. “You are a coward,
then.”
Some remnant of pride surfaced in Cade. “I am not a
coward.”
“It’s easier to die than fight,” she said. “There
is much good you could do, even now.”
“I’m damned,” Cade said. “You just said—”
“Yes, you are damned. There is no chance of
redemption for you. You are a vampire, and you drank the blood of
an innocent. You are an abomination before God.”
“Then what hope is there for me?”
“For you? None,” she said. “But you can still do
good in this world. This man, your president, will ask you to
fight. You are lost to the darkness, but you can still save others
from it.”
“What do you mean?”
Mme. Laveau sat back. “I could use the bokor
paste, and make you a slave. That’s what he wants.” She nodded back
at the door Johnson had exited. “But without free will—without your
mind, your spirit—you would be little more than a club, and you
would fail at any job that required more than simple battering. I
don’t think this world can afford that. You have to be better than
that.”
She paused, an odd look on her face. “Besides,” she
added, “I find the idea of slavery . . . distasteful.”
Cade got the idea they were bargaining, but he
didn’t know what for.
“There is another way,” she said. “The
gris-gris. It ties into you, becomes part of you. But then,
the magic is only as strong as the thing it’s tied to.”
She pointed. While they were talking, she had put
the leather pouch, open, on the floor between them. The herbs were
like a nest for the bullet that had killed President Lincoln. It
sat there, still crusted with his blood.
Cade looked at her, curiosity overcoming his fear
for the first time in days. “What do you want?” he asked.
“I need to know how strong you are.”
Cade didn’t know what to say. To live like this,
with no chance of redemption . . . he didn’t know if he could take
it.
“You don’t know what this is like,” Cade said.
“This hunger, this thirst . . .”
“Is it stronger than your faith?”
Cade had always believed. Always. He learned to
read from the family Bible. He knew that this world didn’t matter,
not the poverty, or the work, or the pain. It was a test on the
path to salvation.
But it was easy for that boy. Those tests were
nothing, that pain barely registered. That boy hadn’t been turned
into this thing. He hadn’t fed on the blood of his friends.
That boy was dead. Cade was all that was left. But
he wouldn’t turn his back on everything he was. He refused.
In the end, there was only one answer.
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
She looked into his eyes—seemed to look even deeper
than that—and took something from the folds of her dress.
Cade looked at it, and winced. It was a small,
rough cross of some base metal, covered in silver.
It felt like needles in his skin, in his
eyes.
She placed it in his hand. Agony shot through his
fingers.
But he didn’t drop it.
She nodded, as if he’d passed some test.
She struck a wooden match on the stone floor and
lit the herbs.
Then she slashed quickly with the knife.
It stung, but the pain of the cross drowned it out.
He saw that she had sliced deeply into his cheek and cut a chunk of
his hair out in one stroke.
His blood pooled in the leather pouch, right where
she had placed it.
It hissed as it extinguished the burning herbs.
Then his blood covered the assassin’s bullet, briefly turning the
brown crust fresh and red.
Mme. Laveau took his hair and knotted it, expertly,
into a tiny doll—arms, legs and head, like a straw man. Then she
waved it through the smoldering herbs, chanting some language Cade
didn’t understand.
When she looked back at him, her eyes were glassy,
and she dragged the hair-doll through his cut—wiping up his blood,
soaking it into the hair.
He noticed that the cell had seemed to shrink, down
to just the two of them. The air thickened with smoke, and
something else, something unnamable. It felt as if there were
another world, crowding in around the edges of his vision, trying
to get his attention.
She spoke in a voice that wasn’t quite her own,
without looking at the paper Johnson had given her, but just
holding it:
“By this blood, you are bound, ” she
intoned. “To the President of the United States; and to the
orders of the officers appointed by him; to support and defend the
nation and its citizens against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
and to serve it faithfully for all the days you walk the Earth.
”
More of the strange language, then the hair-doll
was used to crush out the smoldering embers of the herbs. She
gathered the bloody, sooty doll into the leather pouch, along with
the bullet, and cinched it tightly shut.
Cade could feel the cut on his cheek healing
already. And he felt something else. Like a new spine, growing down
his back. A certainty that had not been there before. He knew what
he had to do. He knew what his unnatural life was for, now: to
protect and to serve.
The smoke dissipated and the cell seemed to snap
back to its normal size.
Mme. Laveau rose and gathered her things, as
matter-of-fact as a woman picking up her knitting.
He still had the cross in his hand. It still hurt.
But the pain helped him focus. Helped him see clearly. It gave him
something other than the thirst.
“What did you do?” he asked, not sure he wanted to
know.
“About your hunger? Nothing,” she told him. “You
will have many chances to take human blood, if you want. Your
president will give you that. But the choice is always
yours.”
She leaned down again, took the cross gently from
his hand. The pain stopped, but Cade found he wanted it back.
She took a length of cord and looped it through a
ring on the cross, then tied it around his neck.
She held his gaze for a long moment.
“You are bound to this man now, and all the ones
who will follow him. You will fight the dark forces. You will have
to fight.
“But you are not a slave,” she said, holding his
hands in her own. “Remember that: no man is a slave.”
She stood quickly and picked up her bag. The
leather pouch was in her other hand.
She knocked on the door, and Johnson and a soldier
reappeared as it opened.
“It’s done,” she said, and gave the pouch to
Johnson. “You may remove those chains.”
“You’re certain?” Johnson asked.
She gave him the same scowl as before. Johnson
gestured to the soldiers to unlock Cade.
Mme. Laveau looked at Cade one last time before she
walked out the door. Her eyes were full of pity.
“I can see your road, child,” she said. “It is not
easy. You might have been better off dead.”