The Bride of Casa Dracula

by Marta Acosta

  He was watching in rapt fascination, the gun wavering in his hand as he tried to keep aim on me. He fired, and one foot from me the dirt kicked up. He fired again, and this time the bullet hit the wolf on her back leg.

  The animal howled in pain and howled again. It was an un-earthly sound and I felt the cry go through her body and reverberate in my own. Then her fur vanished between my fingers and her body lengthened and she was screaming in agony.

  And I knew I really was suffering from mental problems because I was no longer holding a wolf, but a naked, shrieking, wounded woman.

  I was trying to release her, but I couldn’t lift my bound wrists over her head because she was flailing her arms, and then everyone was running across the field calling out my name.

  I head-butted the woman and when she stopped waving her arms, I lifted mine over her shoulders and head. Nixon had dropped the gun and was running toward the road. I tackled him, yelling, “Give me the key! Give me the key!”

  Gabriel and Sam pried me off him and pulled me up.

  “Milagro tried to kill me!” Nixon said. “She’s crazy. She just shot that woman back there.”

  I looked for Oswald and he was crouching by the woman, putting his shirt over her naked body, and saying, “Are you okay? Did she hurt you?”

  “I’m the victim here!” I said. “That thing attacked me.”

  The tiny dark-haired woman was shivering and whimpering, looking up at Oswald with teary moo-cow eyes.

  “Vidalia,” Oswald said softly to her. “It’s a flesh wound. I can take care of it inside.” She was so small that he lifted her easily in his arms. He took one look at me and I saw something then that I’d never seen before in his eyes: fear and revulsion. Then Oswald carried the wounded creature quickly across the field to the house.

  Gabriel had found the gun and said to Nixon, “We’re going to deal with this now.”

  Nixon looked at me and said in astonishment, “So you saw it too?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” Sam asked.

  “Oswald’s new partner is a werewolf,” I said. It was telling that Sam looked shocked, but Gabriel merely looked surprised. “Now will someone please take these handcuffs off me?”

  Gabriel found the key in Nixon’s pocket and threw it to Sam, who unlocked the cuffs. I tossed the fuzzy pink bands to Nixon and said, “Your turn.”

  Once Nixon was cuffed, Sam and Gabriel began marching him toward the house. I took a deep breath and looked back up at the starry sky.

  Laughter, low, rich, and deeply amused, came from a stand of pines on the other side of the pond. I followed the sound to see Ian leaning against a tree trunk.

  “Were you there the whole time?” I asked.

  “I knew Nixon wouldn’t be so easily appeased.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you help me?”

  He stepped close to me and said softly, “Because you don’t need anyone’s help. You’re the heroine, Milagro.”

  “Ian…,” I began, but then I heard the cousins calling me, “Young Lady, are you coming? Young Lady!”

  I turned toward them and shouted, “In a minute!”

  When I turned back, Ian was walking away through the trees toward the road that passed along the ranch’s northern boundary.

  Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He poured a blood cocktail for me and I drank it in a few greedy gulps.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I asked.

  “Oswald is stitching up Vidalia in the study, and Sam is questioning Nixon in the family room. He’s trussed like a pig and not going anywhere. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  I relayed my story to him and his eyes widened when I told him about Vidalia’s transformation. “Have you ever heard anything like that?”

  “Nothing I ever believed.”

  Then I said, “I want to talk to her.”

  When we went to the study, Vidalia was on the sofa, looking like a child in Oswald’s pajamas. Her pink polished toenails peeked out beneath the rolled-up pajama legs and she was clutching a box of Kleenex to her frail chest.

  At the sight of me, her tears began flowing, but I wasn’t feeling particularly sympathetic.

  “Why did you try to kill me?” I asked.

  “Milagro!” Oswald said sharply.

  I looked at him and saw that awful expression again. “I don’t know what she told you, but she attacked me in wolf form and went for my throat.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” she cried. “You stole him from me and we were supposed to be together forever!”

  “Oswald?” I asked, looking at him. “You told me it was just business.”

  “Not Oswald!” Vidalia cried. “Joseph Alfred. He was mine and you brought him up here and I watched how you stole him-with gardening and dancing and your big stupid boobs!”

  “How did you see that…?” And then I noticed her tiny little hands with her sharp little nails, her little sniffy nose, and I said, “You were watching from the trees.”

  “I was his snickerdoodle! But he wasn’t going to get away that easily, especially to be with some low-class slut!”

  Oswald had been watching this exchange in confusion and now he said, “What the hell are you two talking about?”

  I thought he could have shown me a little more sympathy after what I’d just been through, but he remained standing close to Vidalia. I said, “Your new partner was the one who chewed the wiring in the car. She was the one who stole and buried my ring and ruined my wedding dress.”

  “I’ve had about enough of your insane stories for one night.” Oswald spoke so coldly that I was stunned into silence.

  Vidalia saw that she had scored a major point and she looked gratefully at Oswald and said, “Where’s your beautiful fiancйe?”

  “Milagro is my fiancйe,” he answered flatly, swinging out an arm in my direction.

  “I meant the chic woman…who sleeps upstairs with you, not your housemaid.”

  That’s when I began laughing and laughing. I laughed until I was gasping for breath. When I could speak, I said, “This little rodent has been trying to kill the wrong woman.”

  It took us a while to sort out the story and we had to call Joseph to the house so that he could give us his version of things. He brought Cornelia and Edna back with him.

  Vidalia sobbed so much that Oswald gave her Valium, and now she was curled in the corner of the sofa in the study, the rest of us crowding the room.

  Cornelia looked at the petite shape-shifter as if Vidalia was something stuck on the bottom of her pointy-toed Italian boots.

  “Vidalia’s always been obsessed with transformation of the human body,” Joseph told us. “She followed Don Pedro’s teachings and realized that he was full of crap. But she still thought there was truth in shape-shifting myths and that drugs opened the door to those abilities. She hired me to do research on botanical agents that could induce trance states.”

  He’d gene-sliced peyote with other psychotropic plants, including hallucinogenic mushrooms that had traditionally been used by aboriginal peoples. “We experimented on ourselves,” he said. “I discovered I had a real talent for shape-shifting.”

  “You’re my Pal,” I said, stunned.

  “Always will be, sweetpea,” he said and winked one blue eye. “Vidalia learned to transform, but mostly she was stuck to rodents and other small animals.”

  “I was a wolf finally today,” she said proudly. “I couldn’t maintain, though.”

  I looked at Joseph and said, “You called the sheriff when I had my accident.”

  “Yeah, there I was, buck naked on the highway,” he said with a laugh. “I had a hell of a time keeping you in one place long enough for help to come. How’d you manage to survive that crash?”

  “Air bags and I always wear my seat belt,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. Anyway, Vidalia got it into her head that we were mated for life.” He cast a pitying look in her direction and said, “Honey, even in Disney m
ovies, wolves don’t mate for life with moles.”

  “I can’t help what I feel,” she whined.

  “After she sideswiped me, I came up here to get away from her,” he said. “Vidalia, how’d you find me?”

  She stared blankly at him. “I saw you and this slut at the botanical gardens. I followed you here and saw that you’d come to be with her, the maid.”

  “I’m not the maid,” I said.

  She said, “You sleep in the maid’s room and you do the cooking, errands, and gardening and you drive others around. That sounds like a maid to me.”

  Edna had turned her face to the wall, but I could tell that she was laughing by the way her head bobbed.

  “Milagro’s a writer,” Gabriel said. “Please go on, Vidalia.”

  She said, “If I was going to stay here with Joseph, I needed a job. When I found out that Oswald was a plastic surgeon, too…” She turned to my fiancй and gave him a gentle smile. “It seemed only natural to work with him.”

  “Vidalia, what are the mechanics of shape-shifting?” Oswald asked.

  Vidalia didn’t respond since she was staring at Cornelia, who was resting her red-nailed pale hand on Joseph’s thigh.

  Joseph said, “The best I can explain is that it’s got three factors. We shifters can loosen our cartilage and manipulate superficial color and texture changes. At the same time, we’re releasing a compound that stimulates a chemical receptor in the olfactory bulb of others so they see what we’re projecting,” he said.

  “I don’t believe that,” Oswald said.

  “You’re being pretty skeptical for a guy who has a store of animal blood in his barn,” Joseph said, and the vampires looked around at one another. “Okay, the alternate explanation is that we really are harnessing some spiritual energy to transform into animals.”

  Oswald frowned and asked Gabriel and Sam, “What do we do with her now? What do we do with Nixon?”

  Nixon was easier to dispatch. Phone calls were made to the Council; Gabriel would deliver him to the airport and hand him off to the vampire security detail. After Gabriel put Nixon in his truck, he found me in my maid’s room, where I’d been washing my face. He handed the fuzzy pink handcuffs to me and said, “Nixon’s got nowhere to go but back to the Council.”

  “How do we know they didn’t send him to kill me? He told me that they sent Ian to kill me when I was first infected.”

  Gabriel was smiling but serious as he said, “Now you know why they call him the Dark Lord. I’ve never discovered what Ian does for the Council. Some things I don’t want to know-you get me, chica? But Nixon could have just been talking to freak you out.”

  I brushed back his red-gold hair and kissed his cheek. “I miss having you here.”

  The rest of us talked late into the night about what to do with Vidalia. She had tried to kill me, but Joseph claimed that it was her animal self that had made her act so viciously. “If you can keep her from transforming, she’ll be okay,” he said. “She can’t shift without the chemical help, and she should be running low on those meds.”

  Edna said, “I’ll let you young people figure this out. Young Lady, walk me to my cottage.”

  As we went across the field, she took my arm in hers. “Once again you have escaped death. What do you think is just punishment for Nixon and Vidalia?”

  “I’d like to slap them silly, yell at them, and have them apologize and admit the error of their ways. At least I’ve been vindicated. I wasn’t being paranoid.”

  “No, you weren’t. There were people out to get you.”

  I gave her a hug good night and walked back to the house, fighting off a fear that had nothing to do with physical danger. At the car park I met Sam, Joseph, and Cornelia, who were taking Vidalia to her rented house so they could destroy her stash of shape-shifting drugs.

  Oswald and I were by ourselves.

  He looked at me and I looked at him and I said, “Things have changed, haven’t they?”

  twenty-three

  things that rhyme with bride: tried, lied, cried, sighed

  I t was a perfect day for the wedding, overcast and gray at the seaside town, with gentle, ocean-scented breezes. The hotel was filled with the vampire and Normal guests, gussying themselves up in all their finery.

  When it was dark, everyone drove to the small winery, which looked magical. It was just as I’d imagined it would be. Dahlias in rich plum, crimson, and violet decorated every table, and purple grapes dangled heavily on the trellis over the patio. Festive strings of lights hung across the dance floor.

  Then the music started, and the groom took his place beneath the trellis. He was handsome in a black suit and snow white shirt.

  Everyone waited excitedly for the bride’s procession. When Cornelia came up the aisle on her father’s arm, she looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her, wearing a floor-length ivory sheath. A sparkling diamond tiara held an antique lace veil on her dark hair.

  Her father was a distinguished-looking man with iron gray curly hair, wearing tails, with a banner across his chest and medals and ribbons. He moved to stand beside his wife, an attractive woman in an elegant robin’s-egg blue suit dress.

  I wasn’t going to come, but Cornelia had called several times, insisting that I attend since I had introduced her to Joseph. I’d arrived just in time to check in at the oceanside hotel and drive here. I’d taken a seat in the back row. I hadn’t been sure about what to wear to a wedding that was supposed to be my own. So I decided to follow Mrs. Nice’s advice and choose something classic: my white plastic miniskirt and a black-and-white print blouse.

  Now I looked for friends and I saw them everywhere. Edna and Thomas were at the front, as were Sam and his beautiful family. In the row behind them were Gabriel and his guy, and my heart ached as I spotted Oswald with Vidalia. I saw Pepper’s hulking frame, and off to one side was Gigi Barton with her beau, my friend Bernie. Nancy was at the back, directing things and looking fantastically efficient with a clipboard and a headset.

  It wasn’t until the tall man in front of me moved that I saw Ian’s curly head and Ilena’s platinum fall of hair.

  The wedding couple was so happy and in love that their mood cheered the whole party. Tomorrow there would be another ceremony, the private vampire ritual. The Council had lost too much credibility to object to Cornelia’s marriage to Joseph, since they’d been flummoxed by the very existence of werewolves. Among themselves, they dropped Joseph’s name-which happened to be Joseph Alfred Joseph-as if he were a celebrity.

  The couple was pronounced husband and wife, and as they walked back down the aisle, I found myself tearing up. I told myself that it was because I was so happy for them, but my feelings were still tender, and I wished that I hadn’t promised Cornelia that I would come.

  I was trying to slip away unobtrusively when a familiar voice cried, “Milagro!” and Gigi Barton descended on me, the dramatic butterfly sleeves of her fluid dress making her look like an exotic bird.

  “I’m having my next wedding here if I can convince Bernie to tie the knot,” she said excitedly. Bernie was behind her, shaking his head at me, as she pulled me away. “Wasn’t it lovely? Come help me find a real drink.”

  “It was lovely,” I said.

  “And I thought it was going to be you.” She leaned close to my ear. “Don’t be sad, honey. Your time will come. We both need a good belt of scotch.”

  She took my hand in her beringed one and tugged me toward a good-looking young waiter. And despite my efforts to get away, I was somehow lured into mingling with Cornelia’s various relatives and fast-living friends and stylists.

  I saw an opening in Joseph and Cornelia’s circle and went to them. “Congratulations,” I said and kissed the gorgeous groom. I hugged Cornelia, happy for her happiness. “Cornelia, you look radiant.”

  “Young Lady, you made it!” she said. “I’d like you to meet my parents.”

  Before I could make an excuse, Lala and Augustin Ducharme were in fron
t of me and Cornelia was introducing us. I didn’t know how to behave with people who had abused their own child because of an addiction. But Ian’s father said, “A pleasure! A pleasure!” and Lala embraced me and said, “You introduced my little girl to Joseph! You’re just as pretty as I thought you’d be.”

  They seemed so warm and friendly. Even knowing what I did, it was difficult to dislike them. I said, “I know you must be happy today.” I glanced around, looking for someone to rescue me. Our biker buddy Pepper was just off to my left and I said, “If you’ll excuse me, I must say hello to an old friend.”

  Pepper had crammed himself into a suit, and after he gave me a bear hug, the band began playing. “Come on, I can dance fancy. Did you check out the open bar? Nothing but the good stuff. Cornelia’s a class act.”

  I followed Pepper’s steps, surprised that he actually did know how to waltz.

  “How you doing, hon?” he asked.

  “I’ve had better days.”

  “You’re gonna be okay. You need something to smooth out the edges?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.”

  “Yeah, well, I took something myself and the edges are kinda melting.” As I was laughing, he whirled me back against someone.

  And I found myself looking up into Oswald’s face, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

  “Hello, Milagro. You look like you’re having fun.”

  “Oswald.” My throat tightened just gazing into his gray eyes. He looked even paler than usual, and gaunt. His cheekbones stood out sharply, and his charcoal gray suit hung loosely from his shoulders. But he was still fabulous. “How are you?”

  “Busy. We’re opening another clinic for outpatient derma clients. Vidalia’s throwing herself into her pro bono work.” Vidalia was working off her misdeeds to me by spending every weekend providing medical services for the needy.

  “That’s great.”

  “How about you? My grandmother says your loft makes her eyes hurt.”

  “She’s convinced that I’m keeping the pink furniture as a personal affront to her.” I tried to smile, but there seemed to be a disconnect between my brain and my body. “I’m still writing and doing the gardening thing.”