Once Bitten

by Willis, Clare

  I approached and heard Nicolai say, “Lo siento. Necesitas una nueva transmisión.”

  “Hey Nicolai,” I said, and he backed out abruptly. The young Hispanic man with him looked at me with no curiosity.

  “I didn’t know you could fix cars,” I said stupidly. But don’t all Eastern European vampire hunters speak Spanish?

  Nicolai reached for a greasy towel and rubbed his hands. “We all have to make money somehow. I’m glad to see you again, Angela. There’s still so much more to be said.”

  He turned to his companion and said, “Espérame.” We left the man peering into the engine, perhaps hoping for a miracle.

  We climbed the stairs to his apartment. Nicolai directed me to sit in the same wing chair as before. He sat opposite me on the couch and placed his hands on his thighs, waiting expectantly. Last time I’d been there I’d thought about Sigmund Freud in hell, but now this just felt like hell.

  “I need to know how to get away from him.” The sentence popped unexpectedly, like a burp, out of my mouth.

  Nicolai just sat, waiting for the whole story to come out.

  “He killed Lucy while trying to convert her, and now he’s working on me. I don’t have much time.” I licked my lips, my mouth dry and cottony. “I can only talk to you now because it’s been two days since I’ve seen him. If it happens again I’m sure I won’t have the strength to protect myself.”

  If I saw him again I wouldn’t care what he was or who he had killed. I wouldn’t care if he killed me, as long as I could be embracing him when it happened.

  “Why would you want to get away?”

  I took a moment to decide how to answer that question. The most obvious answer seemed the best. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Aren’t there some things worth dying for?” Nicolai picked up one of his stuffed birds, a pure white little puffball that might have been a dove. He stroked its neck and then looked up at me, his dark eyes glittering like obsidian. “Angela, I am descended from a line of vampires. The first one on record is Vladimir Blaloc, born 1437 in the Carpathian mountains of Romania.” He nodded when I raised my eyebrows. “Yes, Transylvania.”

  He looked at his hands, stained with black grease from the car engine. One of his long fingernails had broken off. “I have traced a family tree that reaches all the way back to that ancestor. The power was lost somewhere in the eighteenth century, along with the money. I have been unable to find any evidence of true vampiric abilities in the last six generations, including my own. The gene appears to have been dissipated.”

  He pulled his chair closer to me. “Angela, take my hand.” I hesitated, but took his cold hand, trying not to recoil from the touch of his dirty, pointed fingernails.

  “I know you have the clairvoyance. Try to read my mind, I beg you.”

  I closed my eyes. At first there was nothing, then a soft buzzing sound, like static on a telephone line, followed by a flash of light. Grainy images appeared in my mind: a tiny kitchen in a dilapidated postwar apartment building. The view from the grimy window was of a row of similar buildings stretching off into infinity. A woman with lank gray hair was sitting in a plastic chair, smoking. A young boy, about four years old, wearing only a grayish undershirt and dirty shorts, sat on the floor, aimlessly pushing a tin truck with three wheels. I could feel his hunger, his exhaustion, his desperation.

  I pulled my hand away from Nicolai.

  “Tell me, Angela, did you see or hear anything, anything at all?”

  I couldn’t meet his eager eyes. “No, Nicolai, nothing. I’m sorry.”

  He pushed his chair away from me, his face sagging with disappointment.

  “You don’t know what you’re wishing for,” I said quietly.

  “And you don’t know what you’re giving up!” Nicolai shouted, jumping up with such violence he knocked over one of his bell jars. “You’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle!”

  He collapsed onto his knees in front of me. “Angela, after the vampire is finished with you, you could convert me, I know it must be possible.” His voice was low and beseeching. “I could show you how to escape from Eric. We could work together. We could use our abilities to create such immense wealth and power that any goal would be within our grasp. Think about it, Angela! Anything you want. Forever and forever!”

  I sat quietly, squeezing my hands together, waiting for Nicolai to calm down. I felt like I had fallen into quicksand and if I didn’t pull myself out soon, it would be too late.

  “Your life may not seem like much to you, Nicolai, but at least you have one.”

  “But you may not die!”

  I leaned forward so that our faces were only inches apart. “You do die, Nicolai, even if you’re converted. You die, and you go to hell, where you spend the rest of eternity. I can’t help you. I can’t give you back what you lost. Eric won’t give you what your family lost. But you can help me.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “You have to. We can’t let him keep killing people!” At this point I lost it. Crying hysterically, I fell onto the couch and curled into a fetal position, clutching hanks of my own hair in each hand. Nicolai sat on the floor next to me and patted my back. He began singing what had to be a Romanian lullaby. The song was sweet and gentle, but sad and full of loss, like “Rockabye Baby,” like all the old Irish tunes my mother used to sing to me, passed down from the times when many babies didn’t live through their first year.

  After I had been calm for a little while, Nicolai got up. Moving stiffly, like a man much older than he was, he left the room. He returned carrying a rectangular wooden box, cracked with age, carved with designs of hunters and dogs. Holding the box on his arm like a fancy bottle of wine, he opened it. Lying on a bed of disintegrating velvet was a dagger.

  Chapter 20

  It was about a foot long, with a handle set with red stones and a blade curved like an elongated S. Nicolai ran his finger along the edge of the blade, and a necklace of blood beads appeared. He put his finger in his mouth and dreamily sucked the blood.

  “This knife has been passed down in my family for generations. According to legend it was used to kill one of my ancestors, a local pest who had been preying on the villagers of Sieghesa for years. It is pure silver, and he was stabbed in the heart with it while he slept. My ancestor’s wife pulled it out of his body and kept it so that it couldn’t be used again.”

  He held the knife up and the blade seemed to catch fire in the reflected candlelight. I wondered about the physics of getting a knife of that shape into a person. Then I shuddered at my own thought.

  Nicolai presented the knife to me with an air of resignation, like an actor who thinks he’s going to win an Academy Award, only to be asked to present it to someone else.

  I whispered, “You stab them while they’re asleep? In the heart? Like in the stories?”

  “You can stab them anytime but when they’re asleep is the only time they won’t see you and kill you first. My grandfather had this lovely case made for it. By then, nobody believed the stories and the knife had become just an attractive family heirloom.”

  Squinting in the sunlight outside Nicolai’s apartment, I fumbled for my sunglasses as passersby jostled for space, nearly knocking me into the street. With no car, my parents’ house was a half-hour climb uphill. With the knife box tucked under my arm I started walking. I imagined sitting in my mother’s lap and having her tell me that it was all a bad dream.

  I opened the front door using the key that was always under the mat. Immediately I thought my mother must not be home, because there was no music playing. I went in anyway and headed up the stairs to my old room. It was now a guest room, but my bed was still there, covered with a pink and green quilt my mother had made for me when I was three. I wanted nothing more than to lie down under that quilt and sleep until my problems disappeared. Then I heard a sound from my parents’ bedroom.

  My mother was sitting in the rocking chair that she used to rock us to sleep when w
e were babies, facing the window over the street. She rubbed her face, but not quickly enough to hide the evidence of tears. I abandoned the idea of climbing into her lap.

  “Mom?” My voice came out as a whisper.

  “I got the results of the biopsy back. It’s positive, and there’s metastasis to the lymph nodes.”

  I could see she was struggling to speak calmly.

  “Have you told Dad?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I keep meaning to pick up the phone, and then I think, ‘Oh, why not wait another hour, another day?’ I sort of wish the doctor had waited to call me. Such a beautiful day, why ruin it.” We both looked out the window at our little front yard, at my father’s rose bushes. A crimson pool of petals surrounded each bush, the last blossoms of the long California season.

  I kneeled in front of my mother and put my arms around her, my face against her neck. I could feel her heart beating against my lips. How much would I be willing to give to save my mother’s life?

  Her voice broke into my desperate reverie. “By the way, Angie, it’s 3 o’clock on a Monday. What are you doing here?”

  “I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She lifted my face and smoothed back my hair. “Go ahead, honey. I want to hear it.”

  I sat back on my haunches and looked out the window. “What’s the hardest decision you ever had to make in your life?”

  She let out a deep sigh. “Okay, here goes. I fell in love with another man.”

  “What? Really? When?”

  “About twenty years ago, when you all were small.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t want to say. You know him.”

  “Did you…” I couldn’t bring myself to ask my mother if she’d slept with someone else.

  “No. But we talked. He felt the same way I did.” She ran her fingers through her beautiful blond hair. “You see, Angie, your father and I married too young. We were kids. How can kids know what they’ll want for the rest of their lives?”

  “Why didn’t you get a divorce? A lot of people were doing it. Are doing it.”

  “Other people were involved, other people’s hearts. I had to do what was right, Angie, and I don’t regret it. I’ve had a wonderful life with your father and you kids…”

  Her voice caught in her throat and she started to cry.

  “It’s not over, Mom.”

  “No, it’s not over.” She gently disengaged my arms so she could look into my face. “Angie, I think what you’re asking me is about choosing between what is right and what you want. Is that right?”

  I nodded.

  “Listen to your heart, it will tell you what to do. Usually when you do what’s right you find out it was what you wanted all along.”

  I stayed with my mom for another hour, until I had convinced her to call my father. As I knew he would, he found someone to take over his shift at the firehouse and came straight home.

  I decided to take the streetcar back to the office and see if Steve could give me a ride home. I sat next to an old man snoring with his head thrown back and put the box Nicolai had given me on my lap. I felt it without looking at it, watching the commuters instead as they read newspapers or stared with bored expressions into the darkness of the tunnel under Market Street. I imagined nudging the old guy next to me. “Hey, mister! Guess what I’ve got in this box?”

  Steve wasn’t in his office when I arrived, so I left him a note and went to my office. There was another manila envelope, with my name printed on a clear label, no postage stamp and no return address. At first the envelope appeared empty, but when I shook it a clipping dropped out. It was from the International Herald Tribune, dated October 1.

  Bangkok—Authorities in Taiwan have discovered three female stowaways packed into a container on the freighter Orient Express, bound for San Francisco. The girls, all Thai nationals, ranged in age from twelve to seventeen. They had been nailed into one of the freight containers with a supply of food and water.

  The girls stated that their parents in Thailand had been given a sum of money and in exchange the girls were to be sent to the United States to work in garment factories until the debt was repaid. They admitted in interviews that they had been made to work as prostitutes in Bangkok while they waited for their ship.

  It is assumed by police that the girls had been sold as prostitutes or slave labor to a connection in the United States, but no arrests have been made in the case. The freighter contained a shipment of athletic shoes and apparel bound for U.S. markets.

  I ran to Theresa’s desk and dangled the envelope in front of her. “Where did this come from?”

  “What is it?” Theresa was typing and she didn’t stop to look up.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking you, Theresa. Will you look at it, please?”

  She glanced at the envelope. “Oh yeah, this was delivered. I had to sign for it.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “Delivered by whom?” I asked.

  Theresa pursed her lips, thinking. “A bike messenger. He was wearing those fingerless gloves.”

  “Which company? Do you remember?”

  “No, sorry.”

  I walked straight to Steve’s office and dropped the article on top of the work he was doing. As he read it his tanned face turned pale.

  When he looked up I said, “It’s time to get rid of Tangento.”

  “I agree,” Steve said, “but there’s no evidence here that directly connects to Tangento.”

  “I don’t think we’re the only ones at HFB who know about this. Let’s go talk to Dick. You can use your neurolinguistic programming stuff to figure out if he’s lying.”

  Steve and I sat in Dick’s office while he examined the photocopies we had made of the newspaper article and the brochure. When he was finished Dick looked up and said politely, “Yes?”

  “What are we going to do about this?” I asked indignantly.

  “About what?”

  “About Tangento owning a prostitution ring!” I was yelling, I couldn’t help it.

  Dick stroked his chin. “Now Angie, I don’t know where you came to that conclusion. These girls on the ship, they had no connection to Tangento that I can discern. As for this other situation in Thailand,” he held the brochure with two fingers like it was a smelly sock, “Steve says that Tangento owns this little company, and he alleges that they’re doing illegal things. Tangento is a huge corporation; they probably have no knowledge of what this travel agency is up to, if indeed it is up to anything.”

  “Surely we should inform them, Dick? And perhaps stop doing business with them until the situation is corrected?” Steve said calmly.

  Dick smiled at us like an indulgent parent. “Angie, Steve, Tangento is one of our biggest clients. The onus of responsibility does not lie on us to investigate these allegations. Enough said?”

  Steve and I just stared at him.

  “Our job is not to interrogate or prosecute. Our job is to sell product. Now, I know both of you have had a difficult time the last few days. I think you should take the rest of the week off, with pay, of course.”

  “Can we have those papers back?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  Dick whisked the papers into his desk drawer. “I’ll keep them, if you don’t mind.”

  “That guy was lying like a Turkish carpet,” Steve announced as we walked toward our offices.

  “Let’s wait to talk until we’re in my office,” I said quietly. “I don’t know who to trust around here anymore.”

  We went to my office and closed the door, then sat on the floor behind my desk so no one walking by would be able to see us through the window.

  “I heard Kimberley talking to Barry at the Bennetts’ party on Saturday night, telling him she’d ‘forget everything’ if he’d do something for her, she didn’t say what. This morning Barry appeared here and announced that the bigwigs at Tangento wanted Kimberle
y to manage the account. Dick went along with this as if it were his idea, even though he’d given Tangento to me last week. He’s Barry’s puppet.”

  “Well, smack me with the reality stick.” Steve scratched his head, a gesture he avoided unless he was really upset, because it put his hair out of alignment.

  “And now he’s giving us both the week off, when we’re already short-staffed. Dick might be doing this just because Barry threatened to take Tangento away, or he may know something more, but it really doesn’t matter, because he wouldn’t do anything different whether he knew about the Thai girls or didn’t.”

  Steve scratched his head again. His hair was starting to look like birds were nesting in it. “I think we need a drink,” he announced.

  “And I need to get out of here. This office is starting to stink. I’ll meet you at the End Up in ten minutes. I’m going to finish up a few things.”

  Steve left and I rummaged under my desk until I found an old shopping bag. I stuck the photocopies of what I was now calling the “Tangento Dirt” into Lucy’s fluorescent Tangento file and put it in the bag along with the wooden knife box wrapped in Lucy’s Eric-scented sweater. With all my problems now mingled together, I left the office.

  The Financial District is full of yuppie bars where brash young titans convene after work to drink away the stress of trading dollar amounts their grandfathers wouldn’t have known how to write. Thankfully, in the midst of it all is the End Up, a bar populated by old-school businessmen and serious alcoholics. No wine and no cosmopolitans are served at the End Up. The women, what few there are, can order manhattans, but the men have to stick to martinis or straight up shots of various lighter fluids chased with beer. Anybody who looks like they’re going to order a mai tai or slap a high five with a comrade is told by Sam, the granite-faced owner, that the place is full, even if there are ten bar stools open. Steve and I had been there so often that Sam was now willing to pour me glasses of the Italian Chianti he kept for his “ladies.”