Doctor Nine

Chapter 3

Doctor Nine smiled as the car whisked down the ramp and entered the city. He stretched out with his senses, with perceptions grown old and precise and indefatigable with long, good use. Hearts pumped for him alone, of all the creatures on the window — black streets; minds thought for him, stomachs ached and rumbled with hunger for him, hands groped with lust for him. Eyes searched the shadows for delicious glimpses of him. Tongues tasted waiting lips and flesh ached to be touched. All by him, for him, with him. He knew that; just as he knew that these hearts and minds were few — fewer than in years before, but still there. Still strong and waiting and wanting.

Doctor Nine knew all of this, knew it without the dizzying rush of ego that might taint another creature of less cultured understanding. He licked his lips with a pink tongue-tip.

An SUV came abreast of their car and Doctor Nine turned in his seat to examine it. The Mulatto sensed his desire and shifted lanes occasionally so that Doctor Nine could see each passenger in turn. It was a family car burdened with a roof rack heavy with suitcases and camping tents. Each window of the car was like a picture frame that contained a separate portrait. One showed a wife, a pale creature defined by that label. Just wife. If there had ever been a more definite and individual personality it had either been leeched out of her along with the color of her skin, or she had put it away in some forgotten closet, perhaps with some thought that a life spent in sacrifice and servitude was a life well spent. Doctor Nine fought the urge to yawn.

The driver’s window framed the father. Haggard, bored, distracted, and bitter. A jock-type with a soft jaw and receding hairline. Of no interest at all to Doctor Nine. This one wouldn’t even have fantasies dark enough to be interesting.

The window behind the driver showed the profile of a pretty little girl with pigtails and pink cheeks who was bent over the piss-colored glow of a Game Boy screen, her face screwed up in concentration and her mind distressingly empty.

But then, as the Mulatto slowed the car just a little, Doctor Nine came abreast with the rear window, back where the luggage was usually stored, and there, with her face and hands pressed against the smoked glass, was a pale figure that stirred something old and deep in the Doctor’s heart. She was the same age as the other girl, perhaps nine; but as unlike her twin as two creatures can be, born in same spill of shared blood. Dark unkempt hair and luminous brown eyes, large in the small, pale mask of her face.

Doctor Nine looked at her, totally aware of her. He could feel the intensity of her mind, the sharpness of it, the need of it. Just as he could feel the ache and the pain as she rode through the night surrounded by these meat sacks that pretended to love her and pretended to care for her when in reality they probably feared her.

As they should. He smiled at the thought and tested his senses against the razor sharpness of her need, knowing that she could and would cut, given the chance, given some direction.

Doctor Nine moved his consciousness deeper into the young mind and found that, though young in years, the hunger he encountered was every bit as old as that which coiled and waited within his own soul. Her darkness was too lovely, too profound to be trapped in the cage of meaningless flesh which contained it. Her soul was a screaming thing, locked by circumstance in the fragile shell of the human form. It shrieked for release.

Doctor Nine felt her fear and her need, and measured them against each other. He would not come to her to relieve her fears; nor would he come to satisfy her needs. He might come, however, if her need was strongest of all, stronger than all of the other splintered and badly formed emotions, because to him, need was the only true emotion.

He exerted a fraction more of his will and the little girl lifted her sad eyes toward his window. He made her see him through the dark glass, and as she turned toward him she saw him and she knew him.

From dreams she knew him. From dreams that her parents and her sister would have called nightmares; dreams that, had she been unlucky enough to share them, would have sent them shuddering and screeching into the nearest patch of light. As if light could protect them. He knew — could feel and sense and taste — that this little girl had dreamed of him, that she knew his name as well as she knew her own pain. As well as she knew her own need. Doctor Nine looked into her mind and knew that there were no gods in her dreaming world, just as there were none in her waking hell. When she looked into darkness, whether behind closed eyes or under the bed or into the moonless sky she saw only him. He was always there for her kind. Always.

Doctor Nine smiled at her.

The little girl looked at him for a long time with her owl-brown eyes. When she finally smiled it was a real smile. A smile as hot as blood and as sweet as pain. Her small mouth opened and she spoke a single, silent word, shaping it with her need and her love for him.

“Please.”

The SUV veered suddenly and turned onto a boulevard and headed south toward the smutch and gloom that was clamped down around the heart of this city. It vanished from sight in a moment and the Mulatto rolled to a slow stop at the next corner. Everyone in the car stopped and quietly turned toward Doctor Nine.

Above them the nightbirds wheeled in the sky. Then one by one they peeled off and followed the SUV down the boulevard. Soon only the big roadster was left, alone and waiting.

Without haste Doctor Nine reached forward and touched the Mulatto’s shoulder.

“Follow,” he murmured.

The Mulatto nodded and turned the car around and then turned again to enter the boulevard. Spike and Zasha exchanged a glance.

“Something…?” Zasha asked casually, hiding the interest that brightened her eyes.

Doctor Nine nodded.

“What?” Spike asked. “That car we just passed?”

Another nod.

“Too late, Boss,” muttered the Sage. “We’ll never find it again.”

Zasha jabbed his shoulder with a long fingernail. “Of course we will,” she said, looking to Doctor Nine for approval.

They all looked at Doctor Nine, and he endured their stares mildly. After a long while he said, “We’ve been invited to a coming-out party.”

He smiled at them.

Soon, all of the others laughed.

The night followed them like a pack of dogs.