We took only what we could cram into her car and then drove to my aunt’s house, where we would live for a couple of months.
It rained a lot, off and on for days, and our mood remained as dark as the gray skies. When the clouds broke, I borrowed my cousin’s bicycle and sweated my way across town to see what happened to all the stuff we had left behind.
Our belongings had been heaped in front of the duplex: our clothes, mattresses and bed linen, dishes, furniture, photos in broken frames. There wasn’t much grass, so the days of rain had turned the tiny yard into a muddy puddle.
The wet pile stank of mildew. My mom’s Formica table rested there, the chrome legs ripped loose. A dresser lay on its side, the drawers open, disemboweled, with my mom’s bras, panties, and stockings strewn about in the mud. Our frayed and tattered picture books looked like the carcasses of decayed birds.
Our possessions were now garbage. Our hopes and ambitions deserved nothing better than to lie rotting in the sun. The neighbors could gawk at our shame and hopelessness. Had we stayed put, would my mom and sisters be lying out here in pieces, like broken dolls? Would I?
For a week afterward, I felt hollow, like a bottle made of fragile glass. I expected at any moment to be smashed and swept aside. My existence didn’t matter.
Now I felt like that again.
Insignificant.
Impotent.
Helpless.
A failure.
Worse, others depended on me: Carmen, the Araneum, Gilbert Odin, the Earth women, and I had let them all down. I deserved nothing but oblivion.
The sun set and the sea around me turned inky black. Blurry red auras circled close, nibbled my skin, and darted away.
Something grabbed my torso. I couldn’t struggle or resist.
Two hands clasped together over my chest and heaved upward. A silky head with an orange aura pressed against mine. A woman’s soft lips kissed my cheek.
Together we rose from the bottom, ascending in rhythmic jerks as she scissored her legs.
We broke the surface. The clear water rinsed my eyes. Thousands of stars dotted the night sky. A breeze cooled my wet face.
I bobbed on the surface, indifferent to what happened next. My rescuer towed me by my collar. We stopped beside a motorboat floating in the gloom.
“Jack, help me lift him.” It was Carmen.
A second set of hands, belonging to a big man, grasped my coat and hauled me over the gunwale. He slid me onto the deck.
I lay on my belly, too weak to move. A human with his red aura stood beside me. He had a bandanna around his neck. A chalice. Carmen climbed into the boat. She wore a cropped T-shirt and bikini bottoms. Water rained from her hair. She sat on my butt, pressed her hands against my shoulder blades, and pushed.
I puked mouthfuls of water. When I stopped coughing, Carmen rolled me onto my back and pulled my head into her lap.
She smoothed my hair and whispered, “Get a grip, Felix. You can drown later. We’ve got work to do.”
Chapter
34
I bolted upright, gasping, confused.
Where was I?
I sat in a coffin. I smelled formaldehyde and ethanol-embalming fluid. In the middle of the room stood a mortician’s table, a white slab with a trough around the edge and a metal stand on one end to hold the deceased’s head in place. Light shone through a row of frosted-glass windows high along one wall. A Porti-Boy embalming machine-it looked like a big, squat blender with a hose sticking out between the front dials-sat on a steel shelf on the opposite wall. The shelf was crowded with jugs of embalming fluid, autopsy compound, and tissue builder. Under the shelf waited a white porcelain commode for whatever was next to be flushed away. There was an interior door to my right and a wide service door to my left.
I was alone in the morgue. My clothes-a red print Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo pants-were not mine.
I felt queasy.
I had the dim recollection of Carmen and her chalice, Jack, pulling my carcass out of the ocean. They had scrubbed me with soapy water, hosed me off, and brought me here. She had mentioned staying with a chalice couple who owned a mortuary in Bluffton. That must be where I was.
My coffin rested on a workbench. An insulated carafe stood on the table within reach. I tasted a recent blood meal. I didn’t remember drinking the blood nor did I remember being dressed or falling asleep in this coffin.
My wallet, its contents, and an assortment of embalming tools-a big syringe, metal tubes of various lengths, a coil of latex hose, and forceps-lay spread across the workbench. I touched the wallet; the leather was dry. I had to have been here awhile. How long?
Bracing myself against the sides of the coffin, I started to get up. My knees were stiff and they ached, as did my lower back. I ran my hands down along my thighs to my calves. My fingers dragged across the scars where Goodman’s bullets had chewed my leg.
The images and sensations from the ambush returned to torment me in a kaleidoscope of terror. First the bomb detonating, the hot blast heaving me out of the motel lobby, my face riddled with glass, smoke curling from my burned clothes.
Then the sprint through Hilton Head as Goodman and his goons hunted me, their bullets cracking the air inches past my ears.
The warming of my skin, scalding as the spider bite wore off and the sun fried my unprotected flesh.
Nausea flooded through me again. My kundalini noir tightened into a ball, compressing itself in a panicked spasm. I gagged, unable to do anything except fight the impulse to vomit. I clutched my throat as if trying to pull slack into a noose around my neck.
The nausea abated, replaced by an icy fear that twisted through me. I slumped forward and rested my head against the side of the coffin, weakened and spent.
Footsteps approached beyond the door at my right. I sat up again, the nausea returned, and I waited, too crippled by my wretched condition to offer resistance if it was trouble.
The door opened. A woman asked, “Felix?”
Somehow I knew she was Leslie, Jack’s wife, a chalice and co-owner of the mortuary. We must have met when I was first brought here.
Leslie stepped inside and closed the door. Her aura glowed pleasantly, like a candle behind red cellophane. She was in her early forties. A flowered blouse and jeans clothed her voluptuous meatiness-hardly a dainty woman, yet attractive in a nurturing, Earth-mother sort of way.
I felt her heat as she drew close. Her warm hand lay on mine.
“How are you?” Leslie’s blue eyes had the comforting empathy of a nurse. Being among chalices meant I didn’t need vampire hypnosis. I could relax.
“Not so good.” My head felt unsteady and I touched my face. I had a grizzly stubble. A scab outlined a tear on my temple. “Where’s Carmen?”
“With Jack. Running errands.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Since last night.” Leslie removed the scarf from around her neck. She pulled the tails of her blouse from her waistband and undid the buttons. Her aura brightened with a growing lust. “Would you like some fresh blood? You’ll feel better.”
If this was only about providing fresh blood, she could’ve bled herself and replenished the carafe. Chalices weren’t into this exchange of fluids with the undead for charity’s sake. Sex with a vampire was one of the bigger rewards for submission.
Leslie’s blouse fell open and displayed her large bosom in a lacy white brassiere. Wife-husband chalices were not uncommon. They promised debauched recreation in many possible combinations. But I confined my game to females. Chalice couples brought into this arrangement their many perversions, and a favorite among the men was a cuckold fetish. I had no desire to put on a show for Jack. He would have to get his voyeuristic jollies somewhere else.
I ran my tongue across my incisors. My fangs stayed flush with my other teeth. I had no urge for fanging…or for sex. At least she had asked.
“Thanks,” I replied. “Some other time.”
What irony. When I h
ad the tan, women were losing interest in me. Now my tan was gone and I had no interest in them.
Leslie’s aura dimmed from disappointment. She smiled self-consciously and clutched the collar of her blouse. Her hands worked the buttons, top to bottom, and left the tails of the blouse outside her jeans. She tied the scarf around her neck. “You’re not acting particularly vampiric.”
“Let me worry about that.” The queasiness clung to my throat like a greasy scum. Perhaps if I washed it down I’d feel better. “Can you get me a drink? A beer. Wine? Something hard if you’ve got it.”
Leslie crouched beside the workbench and opened a cabinet door. She brought out a bottle of Wild Turkey, a can of Pepsi, and a pair of highball glasses, and set them on the workbench by the embalming tools.
I stared at the booze. “Do you and Jack pickle yourselves while you pickle your clients?”
“It’s from our last Halloween party.” She reached back into the workbench, pulled out a black paper horn, and gave it a toot.
“Cocktails and cadavers,” I said, “what a theme.”
Leslie put away the horn. “I’ll get ice from the kitchen.”
Usually it didn’t take much to get me to drink but my thirst had left me too. The queasiness grew stronger and I realized why I felt this way.
Goodman had chased me to the brink of doom and I couldn’t forget that. Even when I drifted in the water, already safe from Goodman, I had lost the will to resist. When the hands of my rescuer grasped me, I made no attempt to help in my own salvation. I didn’t care. I surrendered to what had seemed inevitable.
I was broken.
I deserved no pleasure. I never wanted to smile again. I had no desire for liquor, or sex, or fanging. What then would be the point of being immortal? I still walked among the living but Goodman had beaten me.
As a detective, I was useless.
As a vampire, I was as good as dead.
Chapter
35
Carmen and I sat on opposite sides of a coffee table in the upstairs office of the mortuary, she in a swiveling desk chair, I in one corner of a leather sofa. She had made drinks: a cosmopolitan for herself, and a manhattan for me.
Carmen sipped from her cocktail. She smiled in an effort to push the worry from her face. “Leslie told me you’re still not feeling well.”
“You didn’t have to ask her. I could’ve told you.”
Carmen wore a black nylon jogging suit-sans bra-with the top unzipped to the bottom of her sternum. She put her glass down. “You look like hell. You need to shave and comb your hair. When are you going to snap out of this?”
It was a question I had asked myself and kept ignoring.
I touched my temple. The scar was almost gone, as were the wounds left by the fish nibbling on my skin. I put pressure on my left foot and felt the lingering throb where the bullets had chewed my leg. But it was remembering how the sun had cooked my skin that brought back the terror.
As vampires, our primordial fear was to be caught in the open and fried by the sun. We undead bloodsuckers have many powers, but God has damned us with one great weakness: our vulnerability to direct sunlight, the source of life on this planet.
The spider bite had fooled me. Its transient protection had made me complacent and that was what had nearly killed me. I could recover from bullet wounds but there was no undoing the memory of getting roasted by sunlight.
Carmen pushed the manhattan across the table toward me. The amber drink looked perfect, the best proof that we were civilized. Condensation frosted the outside of the beveled old-fashioned glass. Two maraschino cherries sat under the ice cubes.
I made no move for the glass. Maybe it was a good thing I wasn’t drinking. If I had a thirst, then I might fill the void inside of me with hootch and wind up homeless, like Earl back in Kansas City. Vampires are immune to many human afflictions but, unfortunately, alcoholism wasn’t one of them, and many vampires found themselves on skid row.
I remembered what a sip of that manhattan tasted like. Almost as refreshing as blood fanged from a neck. But I deserved neither.
Carmen reached over the table and took my left hand. “Look.” She held my hand, palm-side up. “See your aura? It’s milky and dim.”
I shook my hand loose and withdrew my arm. I didn’t need her to tell me my problems.
Carmen lifted a valise that stood on the floor beside her chair. She opened the valise and laid it on the coffee table. She withdrew a glass jelly jar and placed it between us. Inside the jar crouched a chartreuse-pine spider.
“Here,” she said in a stern tone. “Time to finish your convalescence.”
My skin itched where the previous spider had bitten me. My abdomen tightened at the thought of another dose of the venom.
I shook my head. “No. I’m not going through that again.” The benefits of the last bite had worn off abruptly and worsened the effects of Goodman’s attack, so it was pointless to try once more. “If I go outside, I’ll cover myself with makeup.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?” Carmen asked. “Are you going to solve Odin’s case or not? Are you going to let Goodman win? What about the Araneum?”
I wanted to reply “who cares,” but that would only antagonize Carmen. Better that I listen to her bark and say nothing.
Carmen stood and circled the coffee table. Her eyes stayed on me like searchlights. “Answer me. Your wounds have healed, haven’t they? What the hell is wrong with you?” She clasped my shoulders.
Everything. I shrugged her off.
Carmen’s aura blazed like I’d thrown gasoline on her. “Listen to me, we can’t waste time. We have to go after Goodman.”
“He can wait.”
“What do you mean? Wait for what?” Carmen leaned over the armrest of the sofa and grabbed my collar. “You want to sulk? Go ahead. I’ll get Goodman on my own.”
I had underestimated Goodman and barely survived. “Don’t be so sure of yourself.”
Carmen shook me. “Felix, look at me.”
I looked up and fixed my gaze into the vampire sheen of her eyes. What did she want?
Carmen’s right hand moved in a blur. The slap was as hard and crisp as a gunshot. The blow left a lingering burn on my cheek. “See that? If you can’t protect yourself from a bitch slap, how are you going to deal with Goodman? He’ll destroy you.”
Her words raked into me like sharp tines. The humiliating truth salted the wound.
“I’m tired of seeing you like this. Time for tough love.” Her aura flared bright with incandescent fury. She balled my collar in both her fists and ripped my shirt open.
What was she up to? I reacted to fend her off but she moved at full vampire speed, much faster than I could.
Carmen lunged over the sofa armrest and toppled onto me. Her weight kept me off balance and she pushed me flat against the sofa. She seized my wrists. The hard plastic zipper of her sweat top scraped against my chest as she dragged herself across me. Her open mouth, the fangs long and fierce as daggers, approached my neck.
Chapter
36
Carmen’s fangs sank into my throat. The long teeth were like electric probes plugged directly into my spine, short-circuiting my nerves. I trembled in helpless pain. The moist ring of her open mouth worked against my neck, and her warm, wet tongue writhed across my skin.
One of her legs wrapped around my left hip and the other intertwined with my right leg. I tried to wrestle free but her grip on my wrists remained as hard as handcuffs.
Blood dribbled down my throat. Her fangs worked deeper into my flesh and it felt like burning sparks shot from her teeth deep into me. My kundalini noir thrashed in spastic jerks.
Her fangs withdrew. The relief was like a cool compress on a burn and left me in a dreamy state. My skin tingled all over. This was the first time I’d been fanged since becoming a vampire. Vampires don’t feed from one another and the only time they fang like this is to coax la petite mort…or administer the death bite. But this was
neither.
Carmen turned me onto my stomach and sat on my butt. “Felix, I’m tired of your bullshit. Any other vampire and I wouldn’t care. But not you. You’re too important to the undead. To me.”
She used her talons to slice away what remained of my shirt.
I started to sit up when she clasped the back of my neck and pinched the top of my spine. A warm sensation flowed down my backbone. Carmen squeezed harder and her touch became hot, like melted wax dripping on my skin.
She twisted her grip. The vertebrae in my neck cracked. A second wave of luxurious heat coursed through me and I sank against the cushions.
Carmen scooted down my legs. Her hands trekked along my back and kneaded my buttocks. She ran the knife-edge of her hand along the base of my spine. “I can feel how your aura swirls around like it’s tied in a knot. Your psychic force is jammed at the first chakra.”
“What’s this about?”
“Sex. But special sex from The Undead Kama Sutra.” Carmen reached under the sofa and slapped a thick manuscript on the coffee table.
Sex with Carmen? I’d always turned away her advances, thinking that she would screw like a machine. But she had sex with humans and they came back for more.
The truth about my reluctance to mix it up with Carmen? Blame my ego. What if Carmen did me and found me wanting, especially when compared to her human lovers? That humiliation would scar me to the bone.
“I’ve made progress with my research.” Carmen thumbed the pages of the manuscript. “If we do this right, I should be able to help you by manipulating our psychic states during sex. I read the color of our auras. Yellow indicates the next psychic plane. If our auras go from orange to yellow, then bingo. But that won’t happen unless,” Carmen whapped the center of my back, “whatever crap is in here goes away.”
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