He slowly pulled the gun out of the holster hidden between shirt and jacket.
“Tut tut.” She shook her head. “That’s a naughty little boy.”
Half a breath later D. I. Madison was gunless, his white shirt torn open down his front, a thin red line tingling uncomfortably from collarbone to belt, on his otherwise absolutely smooth skin. He stared at the long nails of her elegant fingers, speechless. In her hands, he saw his wallet. It had hardly been a blink of an eye, not really enough time for a blurred motion. And his gun, where was his gun now? She was foraging between his cards, pulling them out one by one, scattering them around all over the tarred ground, commenting aloud: “American Express, Barclay, Mastercard! Visa, international of course. A few twenties.” She smiled at him sweetly: “I might need them later,” and inserted them down her cleavage. Went on with the wallet. A small square photo. “Oh!” She cooed mockingly. “What a sweet-looking piece of candy.” It was Madison’s sister, ten years his junior. She had been his sole responsibility for the last nine years, since a car crash had crushed their parents to death. She was a brilliant student currently attending university in Cambridge. If anything happened to him, would she be alright?
She stuffed the photo into his breast pocket. Pulled out the last item: a policeman’s ID card. And then, only then, chose to read his name.
“Ah ah!” She exclaimed subsequently. “D. I. Madison! We meet, at last. It’ll be a brief encounter I’m afraid. I am in a rather bad mood and I just finished my dinner. What am I going to do with you now?”
The dark eyes turned icy. He felt beads of cold sweat trickling down his spine. He thought about his sister. She was his last remaining relative. His life insurance would be a rather neat sum.
“You’ve been pestering my favourite rock band lately,” she started. He felt like someone was walking on his grave. “And you failed solving the mystery of the bloodless corpses. You couldn’t even hypothesise. That makes you a boring, pathetic jerk.”
The next moment, she had his left arm in her right hand. His left arm. It took a few seconds for his brain to analyse the situation and adjust to it. Blood started to thickly drip from his now empty sleeve. A soaring pain flooded the surprised nerve endings at the point of severance. He contemplated the dark blue flannel sleeve hanging miserably on his left side, dribbling red.
“Looking for something?”
His very own left hand slammed across his face. He stumbled, would have fallen down to the hard ground again, a hand-space away from her previous victim, without the vampire’s steady grasp on his right arm. That was: when he still had a right arm attached to his right shoulder with a fully functional joint. He screamed with unbelievable pain and endless terror. She discarded both arms like used matches or empty gum wrappers. She let him wander around a bit. Watched his despair, his head rotating from one side to the other, his wide, pale blue eyes, paler than ever, willing the sleeves crumpling with gushing blood to grow arms again.
Then she purposefully walked to him. She held the collar of his jacket with two hands, thoughtfully, before letting go. With a long nail, she slowly scratched a perfect circle on his chest. She looked at the terror filling his eyes. He vaguely thought her smile was devilish.
Because she had all the time in the world, she pushed her strong fingers at a pace allowing excruciating painful crushing of the ribs, before pulling out Madison’s heart madly pumping blood. With horror he watched the swift rotation of her wrist, severing the various arteries. His last thought went for his sister.
* * * * * * *
Joy scattered the dismembered parts of D. I. Madison all over London, giving dog walkers and gay cruisers equal opportunities for gruesome discoveries (she had always favoured equal opportunities). One arm in Hampstead Heath. A torso in Brockwell Park. A head in the Hackney Marsh. A heart at the very centre of Covent Garden.
Teddy Longhorn’s bloodless corpse? Floating belly up on the Serpentine River.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Joy hadn’t thought about Toni since their last encounter. Maybe last no-encounter was a more appropriate term in that case. It went back to the early nineties, something like barely the day before yesterday for an immortal being. And now, there Joy was, sitting up in her obsolete coffin, feeling the sun still bright and shiny outside, and thinking about the older vampire, twice Joy’s age maybe, give and take a few decades. Joy didn’t think about people once they were out of her existence. She didn’t like people. She roamed among humans, preying on them, drinking the life force out of their veins. Vampires being mostly solitary creatures –of course, she had heard about covens, but that was for weak fledglings–, she had only met a tiny number of her kind, generally keeping the upper hand, and it was enough to know the stories about the ancient vampires easily passing for humans and killing or terrorising younger ones just for fun.
She had noticed Toni at one of the many always crowded gigs she attended back in the last decade of the twentieth century. At the time she used to only haunt the underground music scene, favouring punk bands for their trashed audiences whose individuals hardly anyone missed when they stopped showing up. Of course it was easy for Joy to be liked. Her diminutive outfits always attracted attention. She looked the part of the middle-class, twenty-something young woman in search of a bit of rough and that always turned somebody on. It was a wild and greedy time: up to three meals a night.
It was a notorious indie rock band going by the name of Fireheads and Toni looked like any punk girl: tight, ripped jeans; doc martens; studded leather bike jacket with numerous zips and badges over a cropped, dark T-shirt; spiky, black hair and a few earrings. Tall and skinny, she was an attractive and androgynous-looking scarecrow. Joy immediately liked the green eyes, even if those green eyes were solely focused on the lead guitar of the band, who herself had blonde hair forever flying all over the mad rhythms and always falling over grey eyes lost in another world.
Joy’s attractive prey didn’t look a day beyond her nineteen years. She was dancing in the middle of the mass of writhing bodies, towering over the wimin, eye to eye with the men. Like Joy. Dancing very close to the stage and always staring at the oblivious musician.
Music pounding in her ears, hips swinging with the rhythm, Joy moved her knee-high boots with each beat, inching her way closer and closer to this punk girl, who didn’t seem to sweat in her leather. The song ended and the audience roared. The singer, a scantily-clad female, shouted some obscenities to the crowd who kept on roaring, and the drummer, androgynous and powerful, counted everyone into the next wild number.
The vampire with the long black and white mohican used the sudden movement of a punter on speed to innocently step on her prey’s well-protected feet. Green Eyes looked at her automatically. Joy smiled her apology, made eye contact and weaved her mesmerising spell unto the apparently unsuspecting young woman. Joy kept on smiling, confident in her power, arrogant. Green Eyes looked at the lead guitar who forever ignored her anyway, looked back at the gorgeous creature staring at her and they started dancing together.
It was always easy to guide a victim out of the crowd, into a deserted corner, like the ladies’ loo. Those happened to be relatively clean, having been repainted the previous week, and Joy had no trouble to lead Green Eyes into the graffitted, white room. She even let Toni gently push her against the wall, so sure she was of her dinner. But as she was smiling and smiling wider to slowly reveal her fangs, the glazed look left the green eyes of the scarecrow, who started grinning as widely as Joy, and before Joy really got a glimpse of Toni’s fangs, a sudden rush of energy engulfed her, she read cynicism in the now laughing eyes and truth exploded in her mind, a creeping fear gnawing at her guts. Her smile froze and died. Toni was no innocent human being, she was way older than her looks, she was an ancient vampire and Joy would be lucky if she was not destroyed by morning or not totally insane by the time she reached her coffin, if she ever reached it.
A wild grin lighting her face, her fingers playi
ng in Joy’s silky hair, the ancient vampire buried her nose in Joy’s bare neck, smelling the fragrance of her skin (Joy was into jasmine perfume). The strong, predatory hands with thin and bony fingers slid down to the shoulders and the upper arms, while the face slowly and gently rubbed up the neck, into the soft hair. Too terrified to move and defend herself, Joy felt the wet tip of Toni’s tongue trace her earlobe.
Toni pulled back. Joy hated being played with, hated not being in control, hated the uncertainty of her current predicament. With a voice matching the amusement on her face, Toni said:
“Such a sweet vampire child, more powerful than the number of her years. Your maker must have been mighty. And if I judge right by your arrogance, I would be surprised if you had given him many years to enjoy your company.”
She caressed Joy’s hair dreamily. Joy, still frozen with fear, was expecting her to strike with fangs at any second, even if Toni’s skin looked like she had already nicely fed. Ancient vampire killing for fun would be no novelty. There was almost love in her voice when the mighty predator spoke again:
“I am in a good mood tonight, therefore I let you be and hunt, but remember my power. Remember that I am sparing you because, who knows, I might need you. One night.”
And when the ancient vampire kissed the younger one, it was deep and tender and loving and warm.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really like this band.”
With a mocking bow as mocking as her green eyes, she left Joy still leaning against the wall and wondering about the reality of reality itself. The band was still raging on stage and the sound was actually a lot clearer in the toilets, as she had often noticed. Now alone, she started to relax and slowly regaining control of her emotions, she felt anger and hunger sweep the terror away. She was not stupid. She knew she stood no chance against Green Eyes. It was weird. Since becoming a vampire, since having her maker destroyed, she had always been the mightiest vampire in her vicinity, no one ever challenging her dominion. And tonight, someone had duped her, played a trick on her. But the ancient vampire had not destroyed her, not driven her to insanity. She had merely given her a lesson.
* * * * * * *
The two vampires haunting the same scene, Joy got to meet Toni many times. The older, but more youthful-looking vampire would greet her with a playful hug and sometimes a light nibble on the neck that Joy couldn’t help but long for. She wouldn’t have minded more one-to-one moments but Toni was definitely head over heels for the blonde musician.
They would hunt on the same gigs with no objections from Toni, as long as they wanted different preys. The only time they clashed, Joy bowed down. Her elder was not into sharing. Joy noticed that when the Fireheads were due on stage, Toni had already fed.
She witnessed Toni’s obsessive love for the grey-eyed lead guitar of the Fireheads grow and grow.
When the musician eventually noticed the scarecrow, she stared at her long and hard. Because Toni was the almost perfect doppelganger of her guitar hero, the totally androgynous front person of the seventies’ U. S. iconic rock band Hell For Leather.
Joy witnessed Toni weaving a friendship with the musician named Dee-Dee without the use of any mesmerising power. She witnessed Toni giving the musician a one and only present: a customised electric guitar that Toni had made herself and played back in her seventies’ glorious hay-days. And Dee-Dee knew, from spending many nights on the unofficial Hell For Leather websites, that this was The Guitar of her Hero. Or an uncannily good copy? No, impossible. But how could Toni have come across such a genuine article?
Joy witnessed the friendship take a romantic turn. She witnessed Toni’s growing impatience and the subsequent mistake. Toni made Dee-Dee into a vampire, against the musician’s will, and got rewarded with the new vampire’s hate and immediate disappearance.
In her hour of distress the ancient vampire who was actually not so ancient, only a couple of centuries and a few years old, turned to Joy. Their acquaintance took a very bizarre turn. Very bizarre in Joy’s eyes. She found herself grudgingly sharing her old-fashioned coffin with a distraught and suddenly needy Toni. Joy would go out and hunt every night. Back to her lair before dawn, she would let the recluse Toni bite the tender skin over her jugular and feed in her embrace. Night after night after night.
Given the choice, she would have never let any vampire feed upon her, but she felt so attracted to Toni that she could only comply, never mind the passivity of the role, never mind that Toni could have just drained her, destroyed her, mercilessly.
Joy felt compassion, and even more, for her distraught kin. She found herself really liking Toni. One night, regaining her lair, she discovered the attractive scarecrow had left. Gone. It was like she had never ever been there, never lay in the narrow coffin, never curled up in Joy’s arms, never kissed and bitten Joy’s neck, never cried tears of blood in Joy’s black and white hair.
She felt a sudden emptiness, a sudden despondency clawing at the heart she didn’t really have. Loneliness. Tears came to her eyes but she didn’t cry. She understood Toni somehow. Toni had felt lonely, and at times unbearably lonely. So lonely that when she had so deeply fallen for the Firehead musician, she had let impatience get the best of her. And she had lost. Something was now bitterly amiss in Joy’s existence.
* * * * * * *
Was it why she was now remembering the one person she had wanted to forget. Her attraction to Toni then had been as strong as her attraction for Sid now.
INTERLUDE (By courtesy of the author Sid Wasgo)
ODE TO DEATH
A glimpse at a time you had given me
Coming so close but staying so far
A shadow on the horizon, silhouette on the background
I wanted you with a passion
But you kept saying NO
I desired you with the might of my youth
But you kept sidestepping
Denying me your embrace
Your door was closed to me
Deaf to my anxious knocking
Years riddled my soul
I know you’re standing by
I can feel your presence
I am waiting for your coming
For the light touch of your loving
I am waiting for you
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Not dancing for once, standing on the edge of the crowded official dance floor, just next to the pony-tailed woman selling the band’s paraphernalia, but watching the enthralled audience totally overcome by the powerful voice of the charismatic singer. It was not a song Sid liked but, nonetheless, the number was working wonders with the enthusiastic masses. It was what they wanted to hear. Second Look was a rock band tailoring lyrics especially for their groupies, regardless of the performers’ private lives. It was the secret of their success, and Sid understood it. If she studied the band’s inner workings it was to understand where she had failed. No, it was not failure, it was a different choice. Sid had chosen to write the songs she wanted to hear, unaware of how much of a minority she was. Despite her personal peculiarities, she had tasted power, as much as Terri the other brown-eyed singer now owned. And Sid would never forget how easy it had been. She admired the band. She admired Terri for her voice, her strength, her confidence. She more than admired Dawn the grey-eyed keyboard player for her talent, her quietness and her passion for music. And didn’t mind giving up her own stumbling performing career. Something Second Look had unknowingly taught Sid: never deny yourself who you are, or who you were, always remember and be proud, no matter your next choice. And Sid remembered, she had tasted power, too, and it had felt good.
It had been one of these little ironies Life dealt with such expertise. At the time, five years back, Sid used to haunt a local dive on a weekly basis for a so-called acoustic night where she’d play her electric guitar. The MC, himself a rock singer showcasing his own band, had required from performers to do only love songs for the forthcoming Valentine’s Day. An alcoholic singer, who was quite fond of Sid’s icono
clastic tunes, commented: “Of course, you don’t have any!” It slightly irritated her. It felt like a challenge. Did she need love songs? No. They were too easy. Let’s have a holiday then. As it turned out, no one bothered following the request. But Sid. She chose one of her own: “And The Stars And The Moons”. She chose her favourite by Melissa Etheridge: “You Can Sleep While I Drive”. And she finally chose one of her ancient and dusty numbers: “I Won’t Be The One”. Because she knew she was the best for love songs anyway. Nothing to brag about. It was so easy peasy. No challenge. But there was one thing she didn’t know, one thing she would have never expected because she was so used to people labelling her hard-core punk and heavy metal. She sang as she always did, with her soul and her heart, with her might and her voice. And the audience stood up. Silent, transfixed, bespelled. She had them in the palm of her hand. She owned them. It was power. But not power to take, manipulate, control and twist. It was power at its best. It was real power. It was love.
The name of Doris Day broke into her daydreaming. She grimaced. Please, Terri, not again. But Terri was hell-bent into ending the night with a few corny tunes and Dawn was up for it, too. Sid was not quite sure how it was going to affect her. Two weeks ago she had started reducing her daily dose of antidepressants and she was already feeling more sensitive to her surroundings and the events in her surroundings.
In the middle of Terri’s enthusiastic introduction, Dawn squeezed in that Doris Day loved animals and Terri added that Doris was the mother of s/m. Sid briefly wondered if the “Que Sera, Sera” singer was still alive. Terri kept on talking. About this new friend of hers living near by, who had promised to lend her, her personal whip if she would sing some specific tune whose title the writer didn’t catch in the general din. Terri’s new friend, a leather-clad woman (or was it rubber?), stood up and handed over the aforementioned item. The crowd was already in stitches. Sid felt uncomfortable. She didn’t like the look of the whip. Terri, showing the phallus-shaped handle, declared to the audience:
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