And now … Bird Man.
She knew it would not last. The honest intentions that Bobby Lin had for her were not in this stranger’s way of thinking. This was a one night, wham-bam, love-you-andleave-you kind of deal. It was written all over his pretty face. It was in every nuance of his body language. Which was fine, she thought, although she did hold on to the hope that there would be more. But if not … well, she was going to have some fun anyway. Tonight was dedicated to being free and tasting life, and she was going to do just that.
Moreover, the stranger was perfectly gorgeous. Her first lover’s ostentation could not hold a candle to this, and Bobby’s honest intentions, while sweet, seemed worthless next to such an irresistible quality. The way he looked at her, his eyes so full of … well, she had seen nothing like it before, so could not find the words to fit. But she knew what she was feeling, how it crashed through her in shades of aquamarine and burnt-pink, like a wave in the sunset, and then surged up inside her, shaking her soul and her every womanly need, lava-like, glowing with heat and destruction. Watching him with the birds, caught in the colors of the lanterns, she had felt herself melting. At the mercy of his steady gaze she surrendered, enraptured, like a child before an illusionist. And when he kissed the bird’s wing and offered it—for your smile— she knew that she would let him do whatever he desired with her. She would lay naked before him, open to him, as vulnerable as a petal. He could whisper over her body, as strong and soft as the wind. He could shatter her heart and she would embrace him and whisper Bird Man, oh my Bird Man, and tremble like a lily before falling deathlike into the burnt-pink shades of her satisfaction.
They arrived at her apartment: a tiny space on the eleventh floor of an overpopulated complex, which she made look bigger by having very little furniture: a single bed, a clothes rail, a portable TV mounted to the wall, and a mirror positioned to reflect what scant light made it through the window. She closed the door behind them and without a second to breathe he scooped her into his arms as if she weighed no more than the bird in its cage, and pressed his rough mouth to hers. He carried her to the bed and set her down. His long tongue trailed from her mouth to her chin, down her throat. She groaned and closed her eyes, one hand lost in the black tangles of his hair, the other between her own legs, as if trying to hold in the sensation that wanted to erupt from her. She became aware of a fluttering sound—a faint beat of agitation running beneath the hammer blows of her passion—and realized she had discarded the heart-shaped cage at the foot of the bed. She opened her eyes and looked at the canary. It was banging its wings against the bars and pecking the twine that held its prison together.
“Wait,” she said, his greedy mouth poised, his tongue touching the point of her throat where her pulse pushed against the skin. “Wait, Luca.” She managed to roll out from beneath him. He lay on the bed with his tongue hanging from his mouth, looking like a thirsty hound. There was something else in his eyes—passion or anger—which she calmed by saying, “Don’t worry, I haven’t changed my mind.”
He reached for her. “I need you.”
“And you will have me.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting him somewhere safe.” She recovered the cage and tapped a fingernail against one of the bars. The little bird cocked its head, bright feathers bristling. She walked to where the TV was mounted to the wall and hooked the cage onto a small hole in the bracket.
“Perfect.” She smiled and started to walk back to the bed, but stopped at the window and looked out. “I think I can feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“The storm. But the sky … it’s never been so clear.”
Luca got up from the bed and joined her at the window. Cameron Road ran below them, as busy as a vein even at this late hour. Neon glimmered with the allurement of gold. Garish signs for camera stores, jewelers, guest houses, and restaurants, jutted across the street at various levels. The life down there moved like film on a loop, around and around, always the same. It was like Groundhog Day, only shorter. Groundhog minute, perhaps. In all the bright commotion the night’s sky had lost its depth. The stars—at the Bird Market, away from the neon and the storefronts— had been brilliant punch holes in the satin. Now they were only watery specks. But Mei Ling was right: the sky was clear. You didn’t need the stars to see that. And that feeling of an approaching storm, that oppressive, sulphurous taste in the air, was very real.
“Are you okay?” she asked, seeing the concern on his face. Her fingers brushed over his lips and he flinched, but never took his eyes from the sky. “What? You don’t like storms?”
“It’s not a storm.”
“Then what is it?” She looked out the window again, following his gaze. The aircon from the apartment above dripped steadily, as if there’d just been rain.
“It’s nothing.” He looked at her and his eyes softened, as if he were seeing her for the first time. His mouth opened a little way, and the desire was there again. She felt herself wilting, her body drawn toward him.
Perfectly gorgeous. Their lips came close—so close to touching—but at the last moment she pulled back, short of breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Bathroom call.”
“I can’t wait any longer,” he panted.
“Get yourself ready.” She was already moving away from him.
“I need you now. I’m so thirs—”
“Two seconds,” she promised. She left him standing there, arms wide open, his long tongue hanging over his lower lip. She closed the door to the bathroom and went about her business quickly. As she was finishing she heard the canary make a distressed chirruping sound, and then the aircon started to thump and shudder, enveloping all other sounds, even the hum of activity on Cameron Road. The little bird fluttered from her mind and she started to think about what the night might bring. He was filled with promise. His face, his body, his eyes. If his touch was anything to go by, this could be the night by which all others would be judged.
She didn’t put her underwear back on, and why stop there? She unzipped her skirt and it fell around her ankles in a flowery hoop. She unbuttoned her blouse and unsnapped her bra. She didn’t want to reveal her body to him gradually. Better to have him absorb her nakedness in one bright hit. She would flash in his eyes like a supernova, and his reaction would be immediate and honest. It would be golden.
She came out of the bathroom and the first thing she saw—about three seconds before she would begin screaming—was her reflection in the mirror. The lights on Cameron Road softened her long body. She had never looked so beautiful, she thought. This was exactly how she would want to be remembered—this moment, standing by the bathroom door, ready for his touch. Her pose was caught between shadow and light so that she looked like a model in one of those sullen, chic magazines. The second thing she saw was the heart-shaped cage lying broken on the floor, a swirl of yellow feathers, and Luca standing above this incomprehensible debris. A pencil-line of blood trickled down his chin and the little bird’s leg jutted from the corner of his mouth like a toothpick.
“I tawt I taw a puddy tat,” he sneered, and opened his mouth—dislocating his jaw like a snake—to reveal long, curved incisors.
And Mei Ling Cheung did indeed flash in his eyes, much like a supernova, as he grabbed her by the throat and pulled her close. She started to scream, and the aircon rumbled like a fistfight. And Cameron Road, eleven floors down, continued to run like a vein.
4
Can you feel it?
A faraway force. A powerful reverberation. A shift in the air like a tear in the firmament. All over Hong Kong, from Lamma Island to the New Territories, from Lantau to the cramped high-rises of Central, people were waking from their dreams, suddenly cold. Others regarded the dome of the night with questioning expressions. Why could they feel a storm in the air when there wasn’t a cloud to be seen? What was going on? What was out there?
Luca’s catlike eyes shifted from Mei Ling to the window. She was still alive,
bleeding freely, but struggling, fighting to live. He pulled his mouth from her throat and a fan of blood opened in the air. She had stopped screaming after he had bitten out her tongue and swallowed it whole.
“Can you feel it?” the vampire asked. “Not a storm.”
He got to his feet, leaving Mei Ling to die on the floor. She managed to roll onto her stomach and get to her knees, perhaps thinking, even now, that she could get away from him, that there was still hope. But most of the fight had been drained from her. She had been strong to begin with but now there was nothing left. She crawled a short distance, reaching for the bedpost. It slipped in her bloody palm and she fell heavily—too heavily for someone so light, so like a flower. Her silent mouth opened and closed in a cruel, almost comical way. Her eyes implored him—Help me, please don’t let me die like this—because he was the only person in the room. The only person who could help.
Luca did not see her pain; he was at the window, searching the sky. He tightened his trembling hands into fists. Drips of blood squeezed from the cracks of his fingers. “Can you feel it?” he asked again.
She was red, all red: her hair, her face, her stomach, her breasts. Red … except for a pale smear of skin on her left leg. She reached the wall and ran her hand along it, leaving five thin trails, like an effect for speed.
The vein was running dry on Cameron Road. Most of the lights had been shut out for the night. There were intermittent bursts of neon in storefront displays, like the last few guests at a party. There was a handful of people in the street and they were all looking at the sky. They were all feeling it, but only the vampire knew what it was.
What were.
And they were coming.
He looked at Mei Ling and in the blind double-zero
fear in her eyes he saw his very first kill: a pretty teenage whore, Place Blanche, Paris, 1903. The Vagabond had been there, instructing him: “Drink slowly. Don’t glut yourself. Savor her. She’s beautiful.” And on that same night, as they weighted the whore’s emaciated body and threw it into the Seine, he had given his warning of the others. The Originals: “They are out there, Luca. Be very sure of that. You’ll feel them first, and it will be like that metallic moment before a downpour. And then you’ll hear them—the heavy beat of their wings, the snap of their mouths. If you see them, God help you, it’ll be too late. You’ll never get away.”
Luca had asked, watching the pale shape of the girl sink beneath the dark surface of the river, who they were. What they were.
“ They are vampires, my young friend. No, not like us. They are the Originals. As old as the universe, some say. We are weak next to them, the inferior of the species, and it is an instinct of survival to eradicate the weak. Only the strong survive. This is nature’s truest law. Therefore, we run, and we keep running, just as they keep hunting us down. In order to survive, you understand.”
Mei Ling’s hand dropped to her side and twitched. Her eyes closed, and then opened again. Not so bright now.
Can you feel it?
A tremor in the air, like an avalanche on the other side of a mountain. A shimmer in the atmosphere. A taste, slick as gunmetal. Luca trained his sensitive ears to the sound of their advance, trying to listen over the relentless thumping of the aircon. And yes, he could hear them: the leathery swish of a thousand wings, the abrasive ululation of their endless hunger. He backed away from the window. His fear was pale and cold. How far away were they? How long did he have? He looked at the dying girl on the floor as if she could give him an answer. Her blood had spread in the shape of wings. She made a terrible gurgling sound, eyes fading. He licked his lips and tasted her again.
“I have to go,” he said, and knelt beside her, ran his finger down her cheek. “You were supposed to die dreaming. I’m so sorry.”
One last drink from her—mouth pressed to the hole in her throat where the blood was still warm, but he didn’t drink much; it was more like a kiss. He picked up a single yellow feather and let it fall into her hair. It glimmered there, brilliant against the red, like the last leaf of confetti on a bride’s wedding night.
“From your Bird Man,” he whispered, and then he was gone, leaving smears of her blood and heart-shaped splashes from the hallway to the elevator. He stilled himself as he waited for it to rise to the eleventh floor, and listened again for that shimmer in the atmosphere, that faraway force. It was closer now. Five minutes away, no more. He had to get back to his hole in the earth. He had to go deep, where they couldn’t smell him.
The elevator doors cranked open. He stepped inside.
Can you feel it?
Luca licked his lips. “I can almost taste it.”
5
The Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station was at the end of Cameron Road, near the intersection with Nathan. Only two minutes away, perhaps ninety seconds if he went full-out. It would be closed now, of course; the last train was at one A.M. Luca’s feel for the night—honed over the course of a hundred years—told him that it was somewhere between three-thirty and four A.M. The gates would be locked, but he always found a way. The question was, would he have time to find a way tonight?
He stepped onto the street, already panting: the paradox of fear, draining him of strength yet motivating him to move. He glanced at the sky. That arcane shimmer had more force and he found he didn’t have to listen too hard to hear their determined advance. If he didn’t get moving his promise of eternity would be revoked in less than three minutes.
Luca ran. He moved with superhuman agility, springing over parked cars, dodging the few pedestrians in his path with blur-like movements that left them reeling. He wondered how he appeared to them, dressed in black and covered with blood, moving like a wild dog. Did they believe what they were seeing? And would they associate this vague memory of him with Mei Ling’s murder, her body discovered when the smell of decay alerted neighbors? No doubt about it. Hadn’t the Vagabond taught him to dispose of the bodies? “Don’t draw attention to yourself, Luca,” he had said. “A low profile is the vampire’s key to successful living. Trust me; I’ve been doing this for eight hundred years.” With the Originals on his trail, and with the ruin he had left in Mei Ling’s apartment, the time had come to escape this Far Eastern sprawl. Maybe, to use a figure of speech, he could find a nice place in the sun. The world was open to him, and brimming with taste.
Shimmer: the sound of wings.
He crossed Cameron Road, his arms and legs working furiously. A red city taxi came out of nowhere and almost struck him, but in a split second he leapt—twisting through the air—and came down on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The driver had blinked at the critical moment. All he saw was a whisper of black. He thought it was a bird.
Shimmer: the impatient snap of their mouths, hard as bone.
A rout of drunken British sailors was clustered outside a McDonald’s, jeering loudly and littering the sidewalk with their wrappers. One of them, a stubby Popeye look-alike, staggered into Luca’s path, and Luca knocked him aside as if he were nothing more than a bothersome fly. He felt more than heard something break—the sailor’s jaw, his cheekbone, maybe his nose—and caught the stunned expressions of his seafaring mates before running on, barely breaking stride. His fear crackled. His eyes blazed.
Shimmer: the grinding of a million razor-teeth.
Would he make it? Sanctuary, he thought, imagining the stale hole in the southbound tunnel of the Tsuen Wan line, blistered and black, but at that moment it seemed like heaven. He reproached himself for not following his instincts, for not acknowledging the threat of the Originals when he had felt their storm-like warning in the Bird Market. Everybody had felt it, but he had pushed it to the back of his mind because he had wanted Mei Ling. Because he was thirsty. He doubled his efforts, juking a worker carting crates of bad fruit from his Juice Stop. The worker careened in his wake, spilling the crates and swearing. Spoiled dragon-fruit and rambutans burst across the sidewalk in fabulous color.
Would he make it? The MTR sta
tion was less than fifty yards away, the gates closed and locked. Luca split the distance and heard the darkness scream. It was a sound like two metal edges colliding. It ran through his body with sparks and shudders. His eyes flicked to the sky, huge with fear.
If you see them, God help you, it’ll be too late.
“Non posso crederlo!” Luca said.
And there they were: a drift of grotesque creatures, twisted with age. They were coming from the east, away from the brilliance of morning (that burning arc on the curvature of the world). They moved in a gray/brown swarm, their keen eyes searching, seeking him out. Luca had never been sure that they existed. It was hard to believe what had never been seen. They were legend. The vampire’s Grim Reaper. Despite the Vagabond’s frequent warnings, and even after his mysterious disappearance (shrouded in rumors of shimmer and wings), he was never convinced.
Until now.
Strong wings carving the air. Triangular mouths running, springing like traps. Hairless bodies tense with muscle. Can you feel it, baby? Can you feel that shimmer? Luca could. He hissed in defense (in defiance), reaching the gates of the MTR station. There was still time, he told himself. But he had to be quick. He had to be cool. He pulled the gates with all his brutal, animal strength and broke the lock into useless pieces. He suffered a second’s delay, stupefied at how easily the lock had shattered, and then he was moving again. He slipped into the deserted MTR station, taking another valuable second to push the gates closed behind him. He was aware of the swooping sounds from overhead, the thirsty cries and complaints. He ran like a blur for the stairs and descended without control, tumbling and leaping, regaining his feet and making for the southbound tunnel with the speed of a shock.
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