Many Bloody Returns

by Charlaine Harris

  I learned to smile and pretend an interest in the news and the visits of my nieces and nephews. Actually, I was interested in the news. I’d begun to catch glimpses of her in the newscast footage of violent slums, on the dusty roads of the Middle East, and in the mud villages of Central America as a flood swept houses away. She was always there, a half-formed face in the shuddering palm fronds or in a dust devil shifting across the desert. She was there, the Pied Piper of the dying. She’d always been there, but no one looked for her. Except me. I sought her out, gathering the tidbits that would become my arsenal.

  When the doors of West Briar closed behind me, I moved into a lovely old home with screened porches and an acre of yard that Dennis bought for me. He’d remarried and his wife was pregnant. They both came to visit, to include me in the growth of their baby. No two people could have worked harder. So I feigned an interest and began to garden with spectacular results. I had a green thumb. Imagine that. Someone who watched for death could grow anything.

  As the years passed and I waited to see her, my plan took shape. She’d sentenced me to a half life. When she took my children, she took my joy. She wouldn’t let me die. She said it wasn’t my time, as if she could dictate the end of a person’s life by a timetable worked up like a train schedule. Good. I’ve been waiting. I’ve arranged for a little surprise.

  It begins tonight, symbolically enough, on my birthday. I saw his ship in the harbor last night while I walked the midnight streets, unafraid of harm because it “isn’t my time.”

  Tonight I’ll be forty-three, a mother of dead children, a divorcée, a failed suicide. A winner.

  The winter days are short, and I’ve watched the sun wane and the timid appearance of the gibbous moon. Somehow, I thought it might be full—too many superstitions and legends, I suppose.

  My home isn’t far from downtown, which is my destination. Thank goodness it’s a weeknight. On weekends young people crowd Dauphin Street to drink and party and listen to music. Tonight, a Tuesday, the downtown will be quiet. The hunters will be out.

  By the time I park my Volvo beside a meter, which I deliberately don’t feed, dusk has fallen like the soft kiss on a child’s sleeping brow. The Mobile River is only a few blocks away, and I can smell the water. The last, lingering businessmen and-women are hurrying out of downtown. Hurrying home, as out of control of their lives as I used to be.

  Neon lights a few bars, and I go to Barnacle Bill’s. I’ve watched my pirate often enough to know this is where he’ll be. Just as I step to the doorway, a rustle of wind reveals her image. She’s in Bienville Square, a vague outline among the squirrels and homeless people who sleep on the park benches. She walks beside an old man, and he never senses her. I know exactly what she’d say. It isn’t his time.

  I never considered that she might read my mind. Can she squeeze my heart at a distance? Can she send a blood clot streaming through my lungs? I’d always assumed she has to touch me, but I might be wrong. Now that would be a fatal mistake, so to speak.

  I step into the darkness of Barnacle Bill’s and inhale the smell of stale smoke and spilled beer. Old men slouch at the bar, hovering over mugs of beer. I’m the only woman in the place, and that draws interest, for about ten seconds. One look at my face, and all the men turn back to the drinks they’re nursing. I’m not there for company.

  A puff of smoke spirals from a corner so dark I can’t make out the features of the smoker. That’s where I want to be. I walk to the booth and sit, uninvited.

  “I’m Sandra, and it’s my birthday,” I say. “I have a wish.”

  “Fascinating.” The accent is impossible to place, a blend of French and Spanish and old South. Beautiful. Seductive. I hadn’t expected to feel that.

  “Will you grant me a wish?” I have to clear my throat twice before I get the question out. I’m afraid. Fancy that. After all this time, all the planning, I’m afraid.

  “Depends.”

  “I know who you are. I know about you. I’ve done my homework. Mobile Bay, 1823, the ship Esmeralda. You were walking along the docks late one night. You felt a tap on your shoulder and then a bite on your neck. You come back to Mobile to commemorate your making, and to hunt.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes so black I felt as if I were being pulled into bottomless darkness. “And what else do you think you know, cher?”

  “I know you can give me peace. You can take my life and give me immortality.”

  His hand, the fingers chill, brushes my cheek. His touch is sensual and also terrifying. This is the hand of Death that I’ve sought for the last half of my life, but death on my terms.

  “It doesn’t always work that way, cher. This immortality you request comes in degrees and always with a price.”

  When he smiles, I see the points of his fangs. His face is dark-hued, the color of coffee or a nut. His teeth are white and his hair jet-black, long and beautiful. He’s no older than forty-five, or maybe two hundred and forty-five.

  “Death has come for me. She says it’s my time. After twenty years of begging to die, I refuse to do it on her schedule. She took my children. She took my life.” The anger hardens my words into rocks that I hurl at him. “She has her little list with my name at the top, but she won’t win this time.”

  His laughter is sucked into the beer-sodden wood of the bar. I’ve amused him.

  “You think to best Death.”

  “I do.” I don’t hesitate. I stretch out my wrists. “I’ve wanted to die for a long time. Now I refuse—because it suits her.”

  “So you want the bite of immortality. To what end?”

  “You hold the power of life and death. You are her rival. I want you to win.”

  His smile looks haunted, and he doesn’t answer immediately.

  From the table beside us a pile of napkins whirl into the air. She’s here. She’s standing right beside me, her hand reaching out for mine.

  “Help me. Please.” I ignore her and focus all of my powers of persuasion on him. I think that I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute. I should’ve come sooner.

  Before I can blink, he’s swept me into his arms. In a blur of speed we’re out the back door and into the alley.

  “Happy birthday, Sandra,” he says just before his teeth sink into my neck. This time the blood loss is erotic instead of painful. I feel my body grow limp. Soon I will sleep and awaken to a world where Death has no hold on me.

  Fire and Ice and Linguini for Two

  Tate Hallaway

  Tate Hallaway is the author of other works featuring the main characters in this story: Tall, Dark & Dead, published in May 2006, and Dead Sexy, published in May 2007. She’s intimately familiar with Midwest winters, having grown up in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Tate currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with five monochromatic cats and her adorable four-year-old son, Mason.

  Sebastian told me several times that his birthday was cursed. I didn’t really believe him, but when I found myself standing ankle deep in exhaust-smudged snow on the shoulder of County Highway 5 while Sebastian stared glumly at the engine block of our stalled car, I started to reconsider.

  We were stuck. A broken broomstick handle propped open the hood of the ’90 Honda Civic. Sebastian usually drove a mint-condition classic car, but since it had no heater, it wasn’t especially suitable for Wisconsin winters. The Honda was a beater from Jensen’s, the garage where Sebastian worked. He had it on loan for as long as the bad weather lasted.

  Sebastian held the distributor cap in his hands and was doing something to it with a fingernail file he had borrowed from my purse. The way he was dressed, it could be twenty degrees, instead of twenty below—no hat, no scarf, no gloves. In fact, all he had on as protection against the wind was one of those shapeless parkas, broken-in, loose-fitting jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked much more like a car mechanic than a vampire. Of course, he was a car mechanic—it was his day job. That’s right, you heard me, day job. Sebastian had been made by magic instead of by blood, a
nd he could walk in the sunshine.

  Not that there was much of that left.

  The sunset threw pink and blue shadows over the frozen cornfields. In the fading light, icicles glittered from the eaves of a nearby abandoned barn. A dog howled in the distance. It would have been beautiful if it wasn’t so damned cold.

  Despite the below-zero breeze pulling at his long black hair, Sebastian worked unhurriedly, impervious to the cold. The tips of his ears weren’t even red; I could feel mine burning under the fake fur of my hat. His composure in the bitter cold made him seem especially supernatural. When I took in a deep breath of icy air, my jaw clenched in a way that made my teeth actually chatter.

  It must be nice to be dead.

  Meanwhile, I was freezing my butt off. I looked great in my estate sale–find Harris Tweed wool coat, fluffy Russian hat, and fake-fur lined boots, but the skimpy little black number I had underneath everything let the cold seep in to the bone. Normally, a forecast of subzero temperatures suppressed my fashionista tendencies, but it was Sebastian’s birthday, and I’d wanted to glam things up. No doubt I looked absolutely fabulous underneath my winter layers, but a fat lot of good that did me right now. I was shivering so hard that my knees literally knocked together.

  The deep blue shadows stretched in the fading rose-colored light, and above us, a highway light snapped on. Sebastian glanced up in the sudden illumination, and then glared at me for a short moment before going back to the distributor cap.

  Sebastian hadn’t said much since the car sputtered and died twenty minutes ago, and I knew he was brooding. He hadn’t wanted to come out for his birthday. He said he’d never celebrated it in all the thousand-odd years of his life, and he hardly wanted to start now. It had never been a happy occasion for him.

  He believed his birthday caused him to become a vampire.

  Today was Christmas.

  Apparently, the superstition at the time Sebastian was born was that sharing a birthday with Jesus was extremely bad juju—something about your parents engaging in earthly pleasures at the same time of year that the Virgin Mary had been divinely conceiving. Whatever. It made no sense at all to me, not being of a religious persuasion that concerned itself with Jesus’ birthday, but it was important to Sebastian. Plus, he had been reminded of this wickedness every single birthday. He told me once that the curse had become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, since he had pursued the “dark arts” of alchemy and witchcraft partly because people expected him to. If he hadn’t, he would never have discovered the formula that made him a vampire.

  “Try it now, Garnet,” Sebastian shouted from somewhere under the hood. I slipped and slid over the frozen slush to the driver’s side. I scooted into the driver’s seat and shut the door to the wind. Depressing the clutch, I put my hand on the key and made a quick appeal to Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. I closed my eyes and whispered, Give us a spark. Please.

  When the engine turned over, I almost thought my prayers were answered. Then the noise stopped again, and this time, I had the distinct impression that something died—a metal-on-metal, grinding, final death.

  “Nothing,” I shouted back as if he couldn’t tell. Having grown up with Midwestern winters, I couldn’t help but complete the traditional call-and-response of injured vehicles.

  I waited for another word from Sebastian. Instead, he shut the hood with a firm finality, like closing the lid of a coffin.

  I cranked down the window as he came around. I gave him a hopeful smile, but he shook his head. “It’s dead.”

  I tried to remain perky. “It’s still early,” I said. “We could call a cab.”

  Sebastian leaned against the driver’s side door, looking away from me. Crossing his arms in front of his chest despite the bulk of his parka, he stared out into the darkening fields. “Is anyone going to be working today?”

  “The restaurant is open,” I reminded him. “As is the movie theater.” Despite being moderately sized, Madison—a left-leaning, radical, college town—had a large contingent of people for whom Christmas is just another day. In fact, I’d debated long and hard about whether or not to keep open the occult bookstore I managed but had decided to close it in deference to Sebastian’s birthday. It was winter break and my college-age staff was all at home enjoying roast turkey right about now, and I’d have had to staff the store myself. I’d wanted the day off to spend with Sebastian.

  Sebastian fished through his pockets for his cell phone, but came up empty-handed. “Figures,” he sighed as we searched the car. “Benjamin must have walked off with it again.”

  Benjamin was Sebastian’s resident house-ghost—well, poltergeist, really, since he had a tendency to toss things around when riled up. Still, it wasn’t like him to run off with Sebastian’s things. Benjamin was usually very loyal to Sebastian to the point of “defending” the house from all interlopers, even me. “What did you do to piss him off?”

  “I’ve been thinking about rewallpapering Vivian’s room.”

  “Are you insane?” Vivian was Benjamin’s wife, whom we suspected Benjamin had axe-murdered in that very room. Benjamin got especially crazy if anything in her bedroom was altered. In fact, Benjamin was so obsessed with keeping things precisely as they were, Sebastian could sometimes trick him into cleaning the place by moving some of Vivian’s things to other parts of the house.

  Sebastian lifted his shoulders in a shrug barely visible through the thick down of his parka. “Why don’t we just go home?”

  I would have been more excited about his suggestion if he’d sounded more “in the mood.” But I could hear the defeatism oozing from each syllable. Even so, part of me did want to just give up—the exact part being my frozen toes—but I was on a personal crusade to shake Sebastian of his birthday melancholia. He’d been carrying around this hatred of his birthday for a millennium. It was time for an attitude adjustment.

  Sebastian’s farm was just about as far away from us now as Portobello Restaurant, where we had reservations in twenty minutes. We could still make it.

  “I’m sure there’s a farmhouse nearby,” I said, rearranging my hat so it covered more of my ears. “We can call a cab from there.”

  “For home.”

  “For the restaurant.”

  We got into one of those stare-downs where a normal person would just let the vampire win. The look of fierce intensity in those chestnut brown eyes with their eerie golden starburst pattern around the pupil said Back off. I, however, am a pigheaded Witch, and I’m somewhat careless with my sense of self-preservation.

  “Come on.” I pasted a cheery smile on my face, despite the skin-numbing chill. Swinging the car door open, I strolled out into the frozen wasteland with a jaunty step. “It’ll be an adventure.”

  For several steps I wondered if Sebastian was going to let me have this so-called adventure on my own. Then, in that silent way he had, he was suddenly beside me.

  “You’re incorrigible,” he grunted, but there was the hint of a smile in his voice. Victory.

  It didn’t take long for me to regret my pluckiness. Minus twenty was dangerously cold, and I was just not dressed for it. My face felt raw, and my toes had gone way past the tingly phase. I was seriously entertaining the idea of asking Sebastian to turn me into one of the living dead so that I didn’t have to deal with the prospect of freezing to death when we spotted a pickup truck heading in our direction.

  Actually, at first, all I saw were two points of light, like the eyes of some huge animal. Through the still night air, I heard the snarl and spit of a working engine. I waved frantically, hoping to flag the vehicle down. My only thought was: heater.

  Miraculously, it stopped.

  Behind the wheel of the shiny black Ford was a woman in her mid to late fifties. The curls of hair that stuck out from an Elmer Fudd earflap hat were the color of steel wool. Her cheeks were burned red by the wind and cold. One look at her REI arctic-ready parka, insulated gloves, snow pants, and heavy-duty boots, and I knew she was
a farmer.

  The interior of the cab was blessedly hot and smelled faintly of stale coffee and wet dog. “Thanks for stopping,” I said, climbing in gingerly.

  She nodded in that rural way that implied You’re-welcome and I-should-have-my-head-examined-for-this-act-of-kindness all at once.

  “You should really stay with your car on a night like this,” the driver said as I wedged myself into the center of the bench seat. She was right, of course. Beyond the actual temperature, there was the wind chill, which could be considerably lower. A car protected you from that. Plus, out in the elements the cold hemorrhaged heat from your body. Inside a car, at least, you could build up a bit of warmth just from your own breathing. Not to mention the fact that I had no idea how far I would have had to walk to find another farm, and there’s always the risk of getting lost. Cops and snowplow drivers are trained to stop for cars with red flags tied to the antenna to look for people trapped inside.

  As a native Minnesotan, I knew all that. I was about to acknowledge my failure in winter safety rules when she added, “Don’t either of you two have a phone?”

  “No,” I said miserably.

  Sebastian just shook his head. “I don’t suppose you do?”

  She flashed a thin smile that held only a hint of self-righteousness. “Of course.” She pulled a sequin-studded flip case from the interior pocket of her parka. I raised my eyes at the shiny appliqués as I handed it to Sebastian.

  He snapped it open and frowned. “No signal.” Then, “And…now your battery is dead.” Handing it back to me, he mouthed, “Cursed.”

  “That’s strange,” she said when I gave it back to her. “It was working a half hour ago.”

  “I’m cursed,” Sebastian said out loud this time, matter-of-factly.

  The woman gave us a crook of a snow-white eyebrow and pulled back on to the road. “So,” she said, sounding anxious to get rid of us, “where are you headed?”