Chapter Two
The woman struggled feebly on the rumpled bed.
Her wrists were trapped between the brass bars of the headboard by a pair of handcuffs. Her eyes were half-closed while she panted through a slack and half-open mouth. If she had started her captive state in wild and frantic mode, she seemed to have exhausted herself before my arrival. Her nude body writhed slowly now, undulating across the bunched sheets like a sleepy reptile seeking a warmer spot on an already sunny rock. The light from some three dozen candles scattered about the room honeyed her pale skin and cast shadows that accentuated the curves and crevices of ripened flesh.
My immediate and autonomic response was a reminder that I had reached the stage where differences between food and sex were beginning to blur out of clear definition. In fact, as I paused just outside the doorway I felt a powerful tingling sensation near my groin.
I ran my tongue across my lips to moisten them, trying not to let it snag on my fangs in the process. This whole drinking-blood-for-sustenance thing was kind of pointless when it was your own veiny goodness filling your mouth. The extended canines, curving down between my lateral incisors and first molars, were sharp enough to slice through all three layers of human skin and a quarter inch of fat and muscle to reach the more interesting veins.
I had learned to be very careful of my tongue.
The tingling sensation near my groin repeated itself, turning out to be something more familiar and less disturbing: My hand plunged deep into a front pocket and extracted my cell phone. Set on “vibrate.” Mama Samm D’Arbonne’s name blinked in the display.
I stepped back down the hall and into the greater darkness and took the call. “Not a good time, Sammathea,” I murmured.
“Am I interrupting somet’ing, cher?” Her honeyed alto implied an arch to her eyebrows and her Cajunized endearment came out as “sha.”
“I was just getting ready to eat.”
“Hmmm . . . midnight snack? Or early breakfast?”
I looked at my watch. I had hoped for a banquet but I was behind schedule and it was starting to look like more of a couple of quick bites and home again, home again, jiggity-jig. “What do you want?”
“I want you to get out more, Christopher. You been spendin’ too much time alone. Alone is not good for you.”
Not exactly alone right now. “Why do you care? You haven’t exactly been chummy the last couple of years.”
“I been busy—”
“Admit it: You’ve been keeping your distance ever since that whole nanite-enhancement thing freaked you out.”
“Dat’s ancient history!” she snapped.
“Yes,” I snapped back, “it is history! The EMP wiped out the nanobots in my system over three years ago so you and the rest of the female population of the planet are safe.”
She chuckled. “Maybe it more like you the one who outta danger.”
“Hardy,” I said dryly, “har. So, what’s your excuse? Staying away because I’m irresistible even without the weapons-grade pheromones?”
The hesitation in her response was no more than two seconds but felt more like ten. “Like I tol’ you, I been busy—unlike some folk I could name. I lost most of a lifetime’s worth of mojo wit’ that Cthulhu bidness and I been workin’ on getting it back. Had to travel some . . .” She stopped herself and I could feel her annoyance through the phone. Well, technically, I could detect the subvocal stressors in her voice starting to build, but, since it was inaudible to the human ear, you might as well call it “feeling.”
“I gots a job for you,” she said, getting back on track.
“I have a job,” I said, feeling my own not-so-subvocal stressors start to rise.
There was nothing subvocal about her snort. “What job? You ain’t teaching college Lit, no more. You just living fat and sassy off’n them investments dat your good buddy Vlad set you up wit’.”
It was my turn to snort: She knew how I felt about the guy who had stolen half of my humanity. “You’re not the only one who’s been busy. Staying alive has kind of turned into a full-time job.” That and holding on to the tattered, fraying freak flag of my sanity.
“Yeah, well just staying hunkered down in that big ole empty house only give you the illusion of security seein’ as how everyone dat matter knows where you live now!”
Yeah.
You’d think that saving the world and sending a Great Old One back to its own dread dimension would earn me a break. Maybe even put some second thoughts in the pinched skulls of all of the lesser monsters out there still looking to “make their bones.”
Yeah, not so much . . .
“So, how’s that mojo recharge coming?” I grumped back at her. “You must be filling up and filling out if that awful minstrel-show dialect is any indication. Is the medium becoming an extra-large?”
This time the pause was noticeably longer. “You might do well to remember to whom you are speaking,” she said, sounding uncannily like a Bryn Mawr English professor.
“That’s better. Save the shuck-and-jive act for the honkie rubes.”
“And what do you think you are, then?”
“I’m no rube. Not anymore,” I allowed. “And if I’m a honkie does that make you the honker?”
“Mister Chris, nobody say honkie anymore,” she answered, a hint of the old Cajun flavor slipping back into her accent.
“Cracker?”
“Only really old black folks call white folk cracker anymore.”
“Well, then what—”
“You don’t want to know. Now, about this job—”
“Hey, did you hear about Stephen Hawking saying that we could blow up the entire universe with a particle accelerator? Something about quantum tunneling and catastrophic vacuum decay.”
“Prob’ly because of that supercollider they jus’ finish in Okla . . .” There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the line. “Don’ change the subje—”
“Don’t want a job, don’t need a job,” I interrupted. “I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. And, right now, I’m out and about. So: case closed.”
“What you know ’bout Pandora’s Box?” she asked before I could end the call.
I was hungry and the clock was ticking. And yet I was letting her bait me into an extended conversation, probably hoping to entice me into doing something ill-paying and incredibly risky.
And arguing with her was just going to eat up my phone minutes . . .
“It wasn’t a box, it was a jar,” I answered, surrendering to the inevitable.
“All the legends call it a box,” she argued.
“What’s your source material? The Little Golden Book of Greek Mythology?”
She ignored the gibe and waited, counting on my professional know-it-all temperament to kick in.
I sighed. “The original myth story of Pandora was taken from Hesiod’s Works and Days. The gods gave her a pithos—a large jar—that contained all of the evils of the world. Nice wedding gift, by the way. The whole ‘box’ misunderstanding seems to have started around the sixteenth century—probably with Erasmus of Rotterdam who translated Hesiod into Latin. Pithos was transcribed as pyxis which is Greek for ‘box.’ Then you have Rosetti’s famous painting of Pandora back in the nineteenth century. That probably cemented it.”
“Mister Chris, how you know this stuff?”
I glanced back in at the naked, writhing woman. “I’ve always had an interest in comparative mythology. I taught a course in it a few years back. And ever since the scarier myths started showing up on my doorstep, I’ve tried to keep up on my research.” I shifted the phone to my other ear. “Is this topic germane to anything?”
She hesitated: not a good sign. “I’ll let her tell you that when she finds you.”
The naked, handcuffed woman in the bedroom moaned.
“Uh huh, if whoever she is can find me: I’m not at home right now,” I said. “Gotta run; my food’s getting cold!” I ended the call and then turned my phone off completely for good measure. I didn’t need the distraction and my groin didn’t need any more stimulation. I turned back toward the bedroom and my . . . prey.
First things first. I glided around the room, repositioning the candles that seemed the likeliest fire hazards. I moved one away from the edge of the dresser, another from the drapes adjacent to the windowsill. The stage had been set hastily but the candles were almost more impressive than the handcuffs and the nudity.
Tonight’s meal moaned again, pulling my attention back to the bed. More specifically, to the fleshy writhing that promised a double feast. “Oh my God!” she sighed, “you—you’re a vampire! What are you going to do?”
Unfortunately the question didn’t sound rhetorical and so some sort of response was expected. I fought the urge to do a bad Lugosi version of “I vant to suck your blood!”
“You know what I am going to do,” I answered menacingly as I crawled onto the bed. My timing was off: I was still dressed and that was either going to be messy or inconvenient—whichever way this ended up going first. “Look into my eyes and tell me what is going to happen . . .” I fumbled with the first button on my shirt.
Her eyes grew wide and she did a little lip licking, herself.
“You—you are going to drink my blood!” she gasped.
“Yesss,” I hissed—half at the second button that was proving to be uncooperative.
“You are going to bite my tits!” she moaned.
Um, what?
She was back to panting. “You’re going to sink your teeth into my breasts and suck me until I scream for mercy!” Her labored breathing was turning her perfect bosom into twin, cherry-topped snow cones of delight.
I rocked back on my heels. “Um, okay, Randa.” I took a breath. “They’re very . . . lovely . . . and they look great. But one of the reasons for that is why they’re off-limits.”
She hadn’t given up on the panting and now she was—well—pushing them at me. “I don’t know what you mean,” she whimpered. “I’m helpless! And I cannot stop you from biting me . . . anywhere!”
I growled. Sort of. “You have implants, Miranda. The slightest puncture would be bad news for you. And I know that I certainly wouldn’t enjoy it.”
The panting faltered. “They’re not silicone. They’re saline: It would be safe.”
“No.”
“Please!”
I sighed and pulled the dental appliance holding my “fangs” out of my mouth.
“Please?” she repeated mournfully.
“I don’t believe this . . .”
“You don’t believe this?” She used her thumbs to trigger the safety catches on the steel bracelets. The “novelty” handcuffs popped open and released her wrists. She sat up. “Why can’t you do this for me?”
Why couldn’t I do this for her? “It’s . . . um . . . outside my comfort zone . . . ?” I tried.
“You don’t want me,” she said flatly.
Oh boy.
“I do—uh—want you. Just not in that way . . .”
“Which way?”
“The . . . ah . . . biting. The whole monster-predator dynamic. The Fifty Shades of Red roleplay . . .”
“And the sex? Or am I just a big ole bag of blood to you?”
Wow. Just . . . wow.
She shifted around to better face me. “You understand it’s not the money,” she said. “It’s never been about the money . . .”
“Miranda, I—”
“Don’t you have any feelings for me?”
“Of course I do. I’m very fond—”
“Fond?” The stressors in her voice were anything but subvocal.
“Well, this started as a business arrangement . . . and I’ve come to care about you a great deal?” I was working my way through a verbal minefield, trying to pick my words carefully, and my voice slipped upwards at the end, changing my last sentence from a declarative statement into a question.
She smiled but her eyes showed her hurt. “I’m sorry. I’m just feeling . . . a little . . . used . . . here . . .”
“Oh, Randa; from the very beginning I’ve tried to maintain a clear understanding as to what this was about. We had a deal—”
“In the beginning,” she agreed. “But things change. This isn’t the same as going to the blood bank and getting refrigerated packets to go.”
“Boy, howdy,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck.
“I don’t mean for you. I mean for me!”
I turned away and sat on the edge of the mattress. “Which is why I pay you a great deal more than a blood bank would for making a similar donation.”
She moved to sit next to me. “There’s nothing similar about this!”
I hung my head. “I know.”
“Do you?” she asked. “Do you really?” She huffed. “And don’t say ‘donation.’”
“Okay. Exchange?”
“You mean: you give me money, I give you my blood? That kind of exchange?”
“Well . . . sure. I suppose . . .”
“You suppose.” It was her turn to sigh. “‘Similar.’ There’s nothing similar about this and getting takeout from the local blood bank.”
I flashed an obvious and appreciative leer at her, waggled my eyebrows, and said, “I’ll say!”
She was not amused. Or driven off-topic.
“Look, it’s obvious what this means for you: fresh, hot, living blood instead of that plastic-tasting refrigerated crap nearing the end of its shelf life. But do you know what it means to me?”
“You get paid extremely—”
“I hope you’re not about to suggest that I am some sort of whore!”
I shifted mental and verbal gears. “You get to indulge in the ultimate vampire fetish.”
Her fist smacked against my shoulder. “Well, you are a vampire.”
“I’m not.” Though it felt more and more that my transformation from man into monster was closer to the endgame than from where I started out . . .
“Well, the next best thing! You need blood to survive!”
I looked down to avoid her gaze. “The biting was your idea.” I suddenly realized that I was staring at Miranda’s contentious bosom and looked away.
“You had those . . . those fangy teeth before you met me. They’re not cheap Halloween, costume props.” She moved behind me on the bed and her hands slid up my back to rest on my shoulders. “They’re very real and very sharp and they fit your mouth like a very expensive dental appliance. You’ve used them on others.” It was not a question.
“Our arrangement—”
“Yes, I agreed to the transfusions in the beginning. But it’s not the same for you as it is for me. You’re getting the blood. I’m giving it. The direction it flows makes all of the difference in the world! All you know is that it feels good for you. That it is more life pouring into you. It doesn’t hurt on your end.”
I turned to her. “I’m sorry. I took every precaution with the needles—”
“It isn’t the needle that hurts, you jerk! Have you ever been on the other end of a blood transfusion?”
The memory hit so fast it was like a bolt of lightning, dazzling my vision, chased by rolls of thunder echoing inside my head.
The fire . . .
. . . the barn . . .
. . . the thing in the darkness drawing life from my veins . . .
. . . and infecting me with the darkness from its own . . .
“Yes,” I whispered.
“The first time might be a business arrangement,” she continued, seeming not to have heard. “But, after that, it’s an intimacy! An intimacy that grows each and every time you take something out of me and into yourself.” She reached out and touched the side of my face. “You may think that cold, steel needles and plastic tubing reduce such an exchange to an act of mere mechanics.” She shook her head. “They don’t. They clarify the need for the human touch in such intimacies. Intimacies require an embrace.”
The edge of my mouth quirked. “A vampire embrace?”
The caress turned into a light face smack. “Don’t you mock me. Maybe we started out with your ‘business’ agreement but you’ve accepted my renegotiation of the terms a few months back. I remember you being very enthusiastic on more than one occasion.”
She was right: It was an intimate thing. And taking her blood—separating it from her flesh—only “worked” on the most basic, pragmatic level. In every other way, separating her flesh from her blood didn’t really work at all. Her flesh was very much a part of the exchange: The undead were very clear about this aspect of the hunter-prey gestalt.
I had foolishly thought I could hold onto the remains of my humanity by intellectualizing the process and turning it into a business transaction.
Despite my best efforts, I was still turning into a monster.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It bothers me to fetishize your gift to me like this.”
“It’s not a gift,” she grumbled, “as long as you’re paying me.”
Now I was totally confused: Were we discussing a business transaction or not?
“We need to take the money out of . . . the equation,” she said softly.
And there it was.
Miranda wanted something that I could not give her.
I just couldn’t.
And the clock had just run out for me, for the second time this night. There were only two choices here.
I would either have to strip away any illusions that her feelings might be reciprocated.
Or provide her with a new set of illusions.
Coward that I was, I took the easiest route. “Look at me,” I said. “I want to tell you something very important.”
“What?” Sudden reluctance.
“No, I’m serious.” A little non-corporeal push. “This is important. Look me in the eye.”
She studied my expression. Her eyes met mine. And held.
Now she couldn’t look away.
“Miranda, who is Janos Skorzeny?”
Her brow furrowed. “You are. You are Janos Skorzeny.”
“No,” I said, fighting the impulse to shake my head. It was important to maintain eye contact. “Janos Skorzeny is the name of the vampire in the first Night Stalker movie.”
“Night Stalker?”
“Carl Kolchak.”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” I said. Oops: That might cancel the hypnotic command altogether. “Just remember that Janos Skorzeny is not a real person. Janos Skorzeny doesn’t exist. Except as a character in Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” I paused. “And it was the name of the Chuck Connors character in the Werewolf TV series.”
“Werewolf?”
It took nearly all of my fraying, frazzled willpower to not say, “There wolf; there castle.”
I cleared my throat. “Janos Skorzeny is not a real person.”
“Then who are you?”
“I am no one,” I answered. “I don’t exist. You will forget all about me tonight. Just like you’ve forgotten about me every month until just before my next visit. Only this time there will be no next visit.”
“You—you’re going away—?”
“I was never here to begin with. And all of that money—that cash that’s been mysteriously turning up in your purse? That’s from your luck at the casinos.”
“My gambling wins . . . ?”
“Except that you’ve decided to stop gambling now. You’re feeling like your luck is changing and you don’t want to risk losing after such a lucky streak.”
“No more gambling . . .”
I looked for my reflection in the dresser mirror: If I concentrated, I could almost see it. The dark hair and the slightly Slavic cast to my features.
“And you’re feeling the need for other changes, as well . . .” I instructed.
The whole vampiric mind-control power is a very iffy thing.
It’s not something that every fully transformed undead can pull off. Even the ancient ones who can pass through walls and pour through keyholes like weighted mist find this particular brain mutation to be a rare and unpredictable result in the nosferatu sweepstakes. Given the fact that I was still “technically” alive, I shouldn’t be able to impose my will on another sentient being, but fate, the universe, and undead genetics had a wicked sense of humor. I had been gifted with a “knack” that was spotty, at best. Theresa Kellerman had proven immune to my various attempts to “push” her thoughts while Walter “Spyder” Landon had gone from a scary genius geneticist to a guy who struggled with the complexities of late-night custodial work thanks to my attempts to bend him to my will.
Miranda had been one of my uncertain success stories.
And was becoming a little more uncertain of late.
After carefully researching and selecting Miranda Moore—research librarian, vampire enthusiast, between relationships, clean bloodwork, ninety-minute drive from my home and conveniently near the highway that I took for my monthly assignations with my accountant—I had approached her with the initial proposition of selling her blood. At ten times the reimbursement rate of the Shreveport blood banks. Of course I had also done a little mental manipulation—after her freely given consent—to ensure that I was “out of sight, out of mind” between my monthly visits.
Somehow there had been a bit of slippage over the past few months.
First there was the “let’s do away with the needles and plastic paraphernalia” suggestion on her part. Evolving up to the whole Debbie Does Dracula roleplaying scenario that had spun out of control tonight. The candles, the handcuffs—hell, the nudity and writhing—were unexpected and signs that my control was more than just “slipping.”
So the whole you’ll forget all about me, throw out your vampire romance novels, and start developing an interest in blond, blue-eyed cowboys reboot might be just as destined to fail in the long run.
The smart thing would have been to drain her dry, knock some candles over, and eradicate any possibility of a back trail with an accidental fire.
That was definitely the smart thing.
But the part of me that was still human was trying to hang on to my soul for as long as I could. It was an aspiration that seemed doomed to fail and had already given me a reputation as an idiot in the eyes of the others who shared the Dark Gift. Most of them were surprised I had survived this long. The rest were amazed that I could tie my own shoes.
So, shortly after tucking Miranda into bed for a long night of (hopefully) forgetful sleep, I was headed back down the interstate. Still hungry, more than a little frustrated, and potentially a lot more vulnerable than when the evening started, I was trying to not think about how this meant that I was back to a diet of that plastic-tasting refrigerated crap nearing the end of its blood bank shelf life.
As I pulled into the travel plaza to refuel for the final leg back home, I reminded myself that bad luck usually comes in threes.
Of course, my credit cards were declined and I had left the last of my cash in Miranda’s purse as a farewell gift.