On the Hunt

by Alexandra Ivy

  “You did? How’d it go? Did you find something?” I worked to meter my voice so my absolute excitement wouldn’t be too obvious.

  Vlad narrowed his eyes. “You don’t have to sound so absolutely thrilled. It’s not like I found one.”

  Crushed! “Oh no?”

  “No. I hunted. You didn’t expect me to find one right away, did you? Please. I have standards.”

  I felt my lip curling up into an involuntary snarl and cocked my hip out. “Standards? You? Really?”

  Chronologically, Vlad was closing in on a century and thus should have had the grace and maturity not to annoy the crap out of me, to rent his own apartment, and to have actual standards. But, as his body was stuck at a perennial sixteen years old, somewhere along the line, dear old Vlad decided that his mind and maturity level should top out there as well. Which is why he had, once again, taken up couch surfing at my place, dedicated to his stupid Bloodlust video game while wearing socks that hadn’t been washed since we both were in Afros and elevator shoes.

  “Besides,” he said, his eyes not leaving his screen. “You need me.”

  “I do, do I?”

  “Word on the street is that you’re down a model.”

  “And you’re going to step in for her? Fabulous. Lose about ninety pounds, grow out that helmet you call a hairstyle, and practice your catwalk. In stilettos.” I sucked at the little gelatinous pillows of plasma that floated at the bottom of my blood bag while Vlad let out an impressive groan and finally cut his eyes from his precious computer game.

  “I was thinking that I could help you out. I know how busy and stressed out you’ve been. Fashion Week is, what? Two days away? You must have tons to do.”

  I softened. Family—actual bloodline, look-like-each-other family—is rare among vampires and I really was lucky to have Vlad. Granted, I made him. His poor mother, my little sister, had sought me out when Vlad had taken ill. I hadn’t seen my family—actually, they hadn’t seen me—since I’d been changed, but Lucienne came to me, her tiny face drawn and pinched with this little, this little child in her arms. Only he was sixteen years old. The disease had ravaged him so that he looked barely a day over eleven. I remember his dull, flat eyes, clouded by imminent death. The way his gaunt face caved in around his cheekbones, his cracked, swollen lips. And she had begged me.

  “You can make him well,” she had said to me in that small voice of hers. “You can make him live.”

  When Vlad and I outlived our family, all we had was each other. We are family and we need each other, we love each other, we’ll be there for each other—for eternity, should we make it that long. All we’ll ever have is each other.

  “That’s very kind, Vlad, I appreciate that.”

  He shrugged. “I figured you can handle all your sewing or paperwork or ramp building or whatever, and I can interview model replacements.”

  All we’ll ever have is each other.

  Son of a bitch.

  I smacked him hard with a pillow. “Don’t you ever think with anything other than your bloodless little head?”

  “Don’t be gross, Auntie Neen.” He opened his laptop once again, hitting the flashing red RESUME button. “Trust me. You’ll need me.”

  Though I don’t sleep, morning—the earliest, night fading into dawn morning—is easily my favorite time of day in every city that I’ve ever lived. In Paris, when I was new and would wander the streets all night long, fangs stained with the blood of snacks or meals or newfound friends, I would always stop on the Pont au Double and watch the fingers of light break through the city. There was nothing special or particularly beautiful about the view from the bridge, but it was the way the dawn broke and woke the city, a little at a time, that always gave me pleasure or hope or calm. It is these same stirrings of life that still give me pleasure whether it’s the first commuters pushing their way through the San Francisco streets or here in Manhattan, when the night people switch to morning people, the beautiful partygoers scurrying away with the fading darkness, replaced by the smart office workers walking with purpose in the gray light of morning. There is something so fresh about a city, so hopeful in the mornings—which is why I was feeling particularly bright and cheery as I made my way to my studio. Winter was in the air, but fall was hanging on fiercely so snow flurries were still a welcome anomaly and the wool coats weren’t out yet. I was in my mid-thigh-length angora-blend trench with the thick black whipstitch and skipping a little as I went.

  Just because I was dead didn’t mean I couldn’t be happy.

  I paused and admired my logo etched on the smoked glass doors of my studio door—Drop Dead Clothing, Designs by Nina LaShay—before sinking my key into the lock and throwing open the doors with a flourish and possibly a happy working song.

  Except my door wouldn’t open.

  I checked my key and checked the lock—right key, lock rolling—but there was something holding the door shut. I fidgeted and jiggled and finally threw my shoulder against the wooden liner, and voila! The door lurched open a few extra inches only to stop and thud one more time.

  I didn’t need to see it to know what it was because I could smell it.

  Death. Fresh.

  Pinpricks of electricity walked down my vertebrae one by one. Something else hung in the air, too. Faint. Stale.

  Perfume.

  I edged my way into the studio vestibule, carefully allowing just enough wiggle room to sneak in. My breakfast was thrumming through my body, the blood pulsing at a dizzying pace. The hot, sour taste of adrenaline shot through me.

  It was Wendi’s perfume.

  I looked down, and there she was in a pose befitting a supermodel. Eyes open wide, a clear, innocent-looking blue with pink-stained lips pursed in a sexy heart shape. She was bent at her impossibly tiny waist, her thighs pulled up against her, her long legs spread behind her as though she were ready to jump. And her hair . . . her long, honey blond locks still held some of the curl from the photo shoot I had sent her out of, but while the weak tea color flared out behind her, the hair close to her scalp was colored a heady, rusted red. The color of bricks. The color of blood.

  A lesser woman would have trembled. A human who didn’t wear death like a second skin would have screamed cinematically, pressing her palms against her open mouth and lurching backward while ominous music blared behind her. And I wanted to do all those things, really, I did—but this was me, and in more than a century I’d had more than my share of dead bodies (though, admittedly, not all of them this pretty), so I simply sighed and stepped around her, sank down onto the next step, and pulled out my cell phone.

  “Told you you’d need me” was Vlad’s cheeky telephone greeting.

  “I don’t need you,” I huffed into the phone. “Just come down to my studio, would you please?”

  “Do you need me to?”

  “You know, you’re awfully flippant for a guy who could be stopped cold by a vegetable.”

  I could hear Vlad shift on his end of the phone. “Technically, garlic is considered a spice, and have you not checked the mirror lately? Because you have the same nonreflection that I do.”

  “Just get down your butt down here.”

  I stayed seated, thrumming my fingers on the step while I waited for Vlad. My instinct was to run upstairs and finish off the rest of my line; after all, it was now, I checked my phone, less than twenty-four hours from the kick-off of Fashion Week, and if I didn’t get to my sewing machine, my four models—scratch that, three—would be stomping down my debut runway in various forms of haute couture undress.

  I glanced down at Wendi and figured she wasn’t going anywhere, then sprinted upstairs, plopped myself at my sewing machine, and got to work on a three-quarter-length body-con dress with a flouncy little peplum. The ensemble was a near replica of something I had worn back in the early days of jazz and blues in the back-alley clubs of Chicago.

  Decade after decade, I always made a splash.

  “Hey, you know you got a supermodel lyi
ng on the floor downstairs? The least you could do is prop her up with an Open sign in her hands or something.”

  I spun around to face Vlad, my lips pressed together in an unamused pout. He grinned, showing a toothy mouth.

  “You’re hysterical. Now help me. I—I don’t know what to do with her.”

  Vlad followed me down the stairs and we stood over Wendi.

  “I don’t know,” Vlad said, itching his chin as though he had suddenly sprouted a ZZ Top beard. “We could just eat.”

  I stomped one Via Spiga peep-toe bootie. “You know we can’t do that! Not just because of UDA bylaws but because—and may I remind you—we’re trying to fit in here?”

  Vlad, ever the obnoxious and unruly teen, slumped against the door and shot me a look of pure disdain. “Whatever.”

  “I suppose I should call the police.” I pinched my bottom lip, remembering the last time I found myself with the dead and law-enforcing living—it wasn’t pretty. “Look, Vlad, everyone in my studio yesterday heard me fire Wendi, and I’m not sure if the fact that I threatened her with death was as private as I thought it was.”

  This amused Vlad and he glanced back down at the body. “Go, Auntie. Finally got a little bite in your bark.”

  I stomped my foot. “I didn’t kill her! But it could look a lot like I did. I did threaten her and now here she is, dead in my building.” I frowned. “All signs point to me.”

  Now, this is the point in the story where I have to break in and remind you that I’m a vampire. While I don’t have any discernable body weight or a soul and can burst into flames on one overly bright day, I do have a modicum of feeling for the freshly dead—especially if their lives were cut short due to someone else’s whim, and yes, even if the dead at hand was rather vapid and annoying in life. Death is death, and in a lot of cases, it’s forever.

  He snorted. “Talk about fitting in here.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We’ve been here two years, and how many dead bodies have you rolled across?”

  I stepped around Wendi—gingerly, again, my belief in respecting the dead even if I threatened them with death in life. “I didn’t roll across her. I opened my door and she happened to be here.” I pointed down to the body sprawled on my hand-laid vintage subway tiles. “And here.”

  “Just like you opened your sewing cupboard and your biggest rival just happened to fall out on you—wearing your scissors as an ornamental chest plate. Never bothered you before if bodies dropped, whether or not all flesh wounds pointed to you.” Vlad grinned smugly and I felt my nostrils flare.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to grow up, nephew. Now, are you going to help me with this or not?”

  He snapped his jaw. “I told you what I’d do.”

  I was about to fly at Vlad, say something about his dorky new ascot that made him look like Count Chocula on speed, but my cell phone rang, shooting out a tropical little ditty that made Vlad’s smug grin positively glisten. I glowered at him and answered.

  “Hi, Pike.”

  Vlad rolled his eyes and whispered, “Ukulele music for your Hawaiian boyfriend? Isn’t that a little racist?”

  “Piss off,” I mouthed back.

  “Everything okay?” Pike wanted to know.

  Vlad rolled his eyes and waved, then turned on his heel and slunk out the door, a little cold puff of air popping into the vestibule behind him. Then I looked down at the ruined Wendi, her pale skin looking waxy and slightly sallow, her puckered lips rimmed with an icicle blue.

  “Not exactly.” I worried my bottom lip. “Would you mind coming over to the studio? Like, now?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  I did my best to explain about Wendi, then hung up the phone and waited for Pike to arrive. In the interim, I bit the proverbial bullet and dialed 911.

  “Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency.”

  I turned my back on Wendi, not wanting to face her broken body for another second, and started to pace. “Uh, murder?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, what was that?”

  “There’s been a murder. Here, at my studio. A model I work with has been killed.”

  “Is she breathing?”

  I glanced over my shoulder as though I needed the reaffirmation that Wendi was indeed not breathing—and the phone went clattering to the floor.

  “Hello? Hello? Ma’am? Ma’am?” The 911 operator’s nasal voice filled up the vestibule and mingled with Wendi’s ragged breathing as she fought to push herself up. Her hair swung around her and I could see now that the gash at her hairline was topical—certainly not what killed her. No, that would be the gaping flesh wound that started just behind her left ear and ended a half inch above her collarbone.

  “Son of a bitch,” I huffed as Wendi blinked at me, the life in her eyes hazy but relighting.

  She patted her head. “What happened?”

  I clapped a hand to my forehead, feeling something in there start to throb. The only thing worse than supermodels hitting on my boyfriend? Supermodels who’ve had their throats nearly torn out, but not enough to kill them.

  Suddenly, I was dealing with a vampire. Supermodel. A vampire supermodel.

  If I wasn’t damned before, I certainly was now.

  Chapter Two

  “Well, Wendi, it seems that you’ve been . . .” I was picking my words carefully, trying to come up with the best way to let the little half-dead twit know that she was hovering in that odd space between undead and underdead. If I could get a hold of her and just keep her under wraps and out of vein view for the next twenty-four hours, she would lapse into an honest, soul-to-heaven or Buddha or whatever the religion du jour was death. It would be a tragedy for sure; I could already see the headlines blaring, Beautiful Supermodel a Victim of Homicide. But if I let her go and find someone to feed off—or worse yet, gave her the half-second thought of feeding from me—I would have borne a new vampire—one whose obnoxiousness in death could only be compounded in her afterlife.

  I couldn’t let that happen.

  I watched as she straightened. Even flat-footed, she was a whole head taller than me. Her size, combined with even a few drops of the superhuman strength we vamps possess—and she wasn’t full-fledged, not by a long shot—could be enough to put a flush on my cheeks if we came to blows and would be more than enough to overpower a regular human being.

  Wendi opened her mouth and pressed her fingers against her teeth like a kid with a loose tooth. I saw her run the faint point of one of her emerging incisors under her index finger, the skin catching and slicing open neatly. Instinctively, her tongue went to the cut and lapped up the tiny bubble of blood that appeared and instantly, her eyes appeared slightly brighter, her cheeks that much less pale. She was drinking her own blood and she obviously liked the taste. Each sip stole away an inch of her life, but shored up her afterlife. It was an odd, unnatural dance, but it happened this way when a breather became a Halfling—literally a half-bred vampire hovering in the spot between life and death, obsessed with drinking the one thing, the only thing that could save their life. The Halfling becomes a vampire when they choose life force—blood—over their own soul.

  I saw the afterlife twitching in Wendi’s facial features and remembered my own becoming. It was like going to sleep in a black-and-white world and waking up in Technicolor. Everything was brighter and louder and sharper; smells were more pungent, sweet, and engulfing. It was like being a child—all the wonder, the hunger, the lust—while being old enough to appreciate it. At that point, you see the body was a shell: Your skin goes from warm and pink to hard and cold with a marble-like sheen. There’s no heartbeat, no breath, but whatever is inside is thrumming at a frenetic pace, awakened to a plain of—of otherness that didn’t exist before. It was intoxicating—and terrifying—but at some point I envied Wendi, envied her these moments of newness when everything beckoned and thrived. Being damned seemed like a sweet, sweet gift then, but after years, then decades, then centuries
, the colors fade, the smells are sickening constants, the sounds reminders of a life you can emulate but not actually live.

  “I feel so good,” Wendi said, her lips stained strawberry red with her own blood. “Everything seems so different.” She reached out to touch me, as if making sure I was there, but I dodged back.

  “It is different,” I said to her.

  “I feel alive.”

  I moistened my lips and started again. “You’re not alive, Wendi. You’re dead.”

  Her eyes snapped to me and flashed with hard anger. “I’m not dead. I’m standing right here, right here with you.” She paused, suddenly smiling. “You look so bright.”

  I knew her eyes were refocusing, recalibrating the veil that hangs over all breathers. We exist—we vampires, plus all other manner of demon, werewolf, troll, or other—amongst breathers and we always have. It is simply a magical veil and a breather’s logic that makes us “disappear.” You don’t expect to see a Minotaur directing traffic and so you don’t. Your eyes tell you it’s simply a burly police officer and you should lay off the caffeine. Ditto with the paper “boy” whose backward hat and surly disposition hide a pair of horns and the horrific stench of troll.

  Now Wendi was seeing the world for what it truly was.

  “Everything is different,” she breathed again, holding up her own hands, touching her own skin in wonder. “Why is it so different?”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose wondering how I was going to explain the whole thing and toss in the “thanks for playing, but it’s time to go home” phrase when the clatter of the front door stopped me. I spun on my heel and did a mental head slap.

  Pike.

  “What the—?” He paused in the doorway, eyes scanning the pooled blood on the tile, then taking in me and Wendi. She licked her lips, her newfound hunger palpable, throbbing with every audible beat of Pike’s heart.

  “Pike . . .” Wendi’s voice was a near growl, sexy and dripping with want. She took a step toward him and her whole body arched forward, ready to close the distance. I immediately held out my hands, palms pressed outward—one against Pike’s firm, warm chest while his heartbeat thumped against my palm, the other hand on Wendi, her chest lukewarm but hard as granite, her heart struggling to beat from somewhere deep inside, layers under the change.