“Wither my soul with your cold, dry lips
So I’ll have no tears to cry—”
The only thing was, he was so isolated. How could his songs get better without real musicians to work with? He was writing his own lines to other people’s tunes, a practice technique that could take him only so far.
He needed to get a move on, to make it to the next level. He was seventeen already! He had so much catching up to do. Nobody breaks out as an old singer-songwriter.
Odette’s profession was perfect: She was a masseuse. She used the Eye to draw customers to her place (a rental on Cardenas) so she never had to go out in the sunlight. Her clients came away feeling totally relaxed (as Josh knew from personal experience). Since that was the whole point of a massage, they recommended her to their friends. Odette apparently needed hardly any sleep; she kept evening hours for working people, rates on a sliding scale (why not? She could always take the difference in blood).
Crystal slept all day or else hung out at the Top of Your Game, an arcade where kids played out fantasy adventures (Odette called the Top “a casino for children”). At night, in Ivan’s office, Crystal browsed antiques sites on the computer for Odette.
He asked once if she missed gossiping and giggling with other girls in school.
“Eww! Do I look crazy? Who wants to be cooped up with a bunch of smelly, spotty, horny adolescents and the teachers who hate them, in a place built like a prison?”
“Is that what you’re thinking when you’re drinking my blood—about how spotty and smelly I am?” (Horny just didn’t come into that experience for Josh.)
“Oh,” she said, “let’s not go there.”
He decided to celebrate his new songwriting energy by getting rid of the pathetic jumble of projects from his arts center classes (the mobile made of hangers and beer tabs, a woodcut of crows fighting), which he had tucked out of sight in a tote bag on the floor of his closet. He might even make a few bucks by farming all this junk out for sale in the mall with whichever dealers were willing to display it. (As they said, “There’s a buyer for everything.”)
When he walked in, two cops were asking for Ivan at the register. Josh made a business of tucking the tote, with a sweatshirt stuffed in on top to keep everything from falling out, into one of the lockers by the front door, so he could listen.
They asked about a well-known local meth head who had come in the day before trying to sell some old coins.
“Stolen, right?” Ivan said.
They nodded, looking meaningfully around the nearby booths.
Ivan braced his thick hands on the glass countertop. “That’s why I never buy off the street—it’s always stolen goods. You won’t find any valuable jewelry for sale by any of my dealers, either; too easy to steal. That kind of thing just attracts thieves.
“So,” he said, relaxing now that he had declared himself totally honest, “did something happen after I kicked that kid out of here?”
“Read the papers,” one of the cops said.
The Journal reported that the kid had been found early that morning out by the old airport, with his throat slashed and the coins gone.
Josh, shivering, ducked into the corner reserved for books and DVDs. “Throat slashed” sounded suspiciously like “disguised vampire bite” to him. He calmed himself down with half an hour of looking at psychedelic sleeve art for old long-playing records.
Crystal showed up at midnight with a puffy, teary look and a bandage wrapped around one hand. He asked if she was okay, but she disappeared into the shadows of the nighttime mall without answering.
In the office, Odette explained in a pissed-off tone.
“A boy accosted us in your parking lot last night, trying to sell us some coins, or mug us, or both. I turned him away. Crystal was in one of her moods; she followed him. I’ve told her a thousand times, we do not drink people dry and then toss them aside like juiced oranges. It’s stupid.”
“She drained that kid?”
“She has a teenager’s appetite,” Odette said. “And poor impulse control.”
“She told me she’s seventy-five years old!”
Impatiently Odette swung the swivel chair around (with Crystal temporarily incapacitated, Odette had to find sites on the computer for herself, which made her cranky). “Years don’t come into it. Crystal isn’t alive the way you are, Josh. She doesn’t mature with time. The parts of her brain that hadn’t developed when she was turned never will. She’s between thirteen and fourteen forever, in her mind as well as her body.”
Imagine never being able to shed your baby fat, your zits, or your adolescent mood swings.
“Wow,” he said.
“Wow indeed.”
“So . . . did the guy have a knife or something? Her hand—”
Odette said, “You need to understand that I provide the only structure she has in her life, and the only security. Sometimes I must be a little harsh with her, but it’s for her own sake. She doesn’t survive by being a clever adult in a permanently childlike body. She’s a child who survives because I protect her.”
“Protect her?” Crystal, who was clearly injured—but who had also just killed someone. “From who?”
“Her own rash nature,” Odette said tartly, “but also older vampires. The Quality don’t like the young ones, for reasons that should be obvious. Recklessness puts us all at risk. Correction helps in the short term, but there is no curing persistently childish behavior in someone who is, essentially, a permanent child.”
Crystal’s prickliness began to make more sense. “Why do you keep her around, then?”
Odette jabbed irritably at the keyboard with one long, iridescent fingernail. “Youngsters are adaptable and good at modernity. She can be very helpful.”
Useful, she meant.
“Well, well!” Odette’s attention was caught by something on the screen. “Axel Hochauer has sold off his Grande Armée figures for a tidy sum, I see.” She smiled. “Goretsky must be livid.”
Josh knew he was dismissed.
He found Crystal crying in the bathroom. Clearing his throat nervously, he asked, “Crystal? Did she do something to you?”
“Made me hold my hand in sunlight,” she blubbed, glaring up at him through her tears. “Look!”
The skin on the back of her hand was scabby and blotched with raw pink skin. She wrapped it up again quickly. “It was worse before; we heal fast. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. I hate that mean old bitch!”
She had killed the meth head, but her own situation was pretty dire. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Not enough to hug her or anything like that, but sorry.
“Hey,” he said, propping his hip against the sink. “Want to hear a new song? It’s not exactly finished yet—I mean, I’m not through working on it—but I think it’s a pretty good start. I’m calling it ‘Love Birds.’ ”
He sang, mezza voce:
“Raven hates her own harsh tone.
She hacks and hawks to spit it out.
Swallow down her razor kiss
Salty, icy, light as bone,
To sweeten Raven’s song.
She’ll be your love, your turtledove,
If you sweeten Raven’s song.”
“ ‘Turtledove?’ ” Crystal mimicked scornfully. “What century do you come from? Makes no sense, either. Well, that’s cool. You can’t eat music, and I’m starving.”
She was always hungry, and she always had to be reminded to stop.
Next time things seemed back to normal. Crystal, Grand Theft Auto champion with a stuffed arcade bear to prove it, was on the monitor again, checking for comparables to Odette’s latest find: a rare Chinese pipe, all delicately curved brass tubing and carved wood. Josh, already tapped by both vampires, dozed in a beat-up armchair on the other side of Ivan’s desk.
“Oh, shit!” Crystal leaned back and yelled, “Odette! MacCardle’s in Dallas!”
Odette swept into the office and tilted the monitor around to see t
he news photo. It featured a scrawny, self-satisfied-looking guy with suspenders holding up his pants, shaking some fancy suit’s hand in an auction showroom.
Odette snarled silently, showing a gleam of fang (Josh looked away; he hated thinking about where those teeth had been). But all she said was “Fine. He’s there, we’re here.”
She went back to inspecting the Chinese pipe.
Crystal whispered fiercely, “Fine my foot! If MacCardle comes sniffing around here, we are so gone.”
Josh was jolted by a stab of realization: He didn’t want them gone—not without him. (God, could he really be thinking like this?)
“He looks harmless,” he observed cautiously. “Not exactly a Van Helsing type.”
“He’s Quality, dummy. He comes sneaking around after Odette trying to snag the good stuff first, which makes her so mad! You won’t like her when she’s mad,” she intoned, wiggling the fingers of her now-unblemished hand.
“What, she turns green and smashes the place up?”
“No joke,” Crystal said.
“Okay, this is for real, right? People who live forever by drinking human blood spend their time fighting over high-priced junk?”
Crystal snorted. “Are you kidding? They love to feud over scraps—ugly old vases, souvenir ashtrays from Atlantic City, dried-up baby shoes. Some of them are addicted to anything from their own time. Mostly, though, it’s about personal pride and protecting their investments.”
“They hunt down enameled kitchenware, just like some retired bus driver desperate for something to do, and that’s about pride and investment?”
“Hey, look around you,” she said. “Even mass-produced trinkets get valuable if they survive long enough. A vampire can wait a century for his tin plates to become rare and then sell them for a bundle. Then there’s the thrill of spotting a trend first and getting in there before anybody else. Odette’s amazing at that. Timing the market is a real competition for them; they bet on each other. Gambling’s always been the favorite pastime of the upper crust. Well, crust doesn’t get any upper than the Quality.”
An idea sparked, then glowed. “Crystal? What does Odette collect for herself?”
“What you want to know for?” She stared at him suspiciously. “Anyway, you’re asking the wrong person.”
“It can’t all be just merchandise to her,” he insisted. “What does she find in a place like this that she won’t resell?”
Crystal absently twisted the ears of the trophy bear as she thought this over. “Odd stuff. One-of-a-kind things: snapshots, carvings, pictures.”
“Art,” he said.
“Art, and artists. If she thinks you have what she calls ‘real creative talent,’ you get a vampire godmother for life—whether you want it or not.”
Odette hadn’t asked to see his drawings again, but . . . “What about my songs?”
“The last music Odette liked was a minuet,” Crystal said, rolling her eyes. “And plus she has the tinnest ear ever and hates poetry.”
He pressed on. “Well, what else? What does she love?” If he could find something special, something to show that he was on Odette’s wavelength—that he was too useful to leave behind—
“Well, there’s this quilt,” Crystal said. “Grubby old thing; pretty hand stitching though—little strips of silk from men’s ties, kimonos, and like that. She paid a lot for it. She still has it.”
“But why? Why that?”
“How should I know?” Crystal scowled, then softened slightly. “I did hear once that her brother was a famous goldsmith, couple centuries back. He had a stroke, so she got to design jewelry, under her brother’s name, for the rich people. It could be a true story, but who knows? She’s not the kind who runs her mouth about her first life, like some of the Quality. Specially the really old ones, trying to hang on to their memories. Anyway, maybe she was talented herself, back in the day.”
Josh nodded, thinking furiously. He was not going to be left behind in flyover country if he could help it.
Two more of the Quality showed up at Ivan’s at the next open evening. One looked the part—tall, pale, and high shouldered like a vulture (an effect undercut by his cowboy boots, ironed jeans, and Western shirt with pearl-snap buttons). There was no mystery about what he was after: Several pounds of Indian fetish necklaces decorated his sunken chest.
The other, a chunky Asian-looking woman with a flat-top haircut, wore chains and bunches of keys jingling from her belt, her boots, her leather vest.
“What’s she looking for, whips and handcuffs?” Josh whispered.
Crystal smirked at him. “Dummy. That’s Alicia Chung. Odette says she has the best collection of nineteenth-century opera ephemera in America.”
“She’s looking for old opera posters around here?”
Crystal shrugged. “You never know. That’s part of the challenge.”
In the workroom after closing, the first thing Odette said was “If Chung is here, it won’t be long before MacCardle arrives. We pack up tonight, Crystal.”
Josh broke an icy sweat. He had no time for finesse.
“Odette?” His voice cracked. “Take me, too.”
“No,” she said. She didn’t even look at him.
“Crystal travels with you!”
“Crystal is Quality, and she has no living family. Shall we kill your mother and father so they won’t come searching for you?”
With Crystal’s voice in his ears (“Ooh, that’s cold, Odette!”), Josh ran into the bathroom and threw up. He drove home without remembering to turn on his headlights and fell asleep in his clothes, dreaming about Annie Frye biting his neck. Later he sat in the dark banging out the blackest chords he could get from his keyboard.
His band was gone, nobody from school wanted to hang with him, and now even the vampires were taking off.
His mom knocked on the bedroom door at seven a.m. and asked if he wanted to “talk about” anything. “Your music sounds so sad, hon.” Like he was writing his songs for her!
“It’s just music.” He hunched over the Casio, waiting for her to leave. How could he stand to live in this house one more day?
She stepped inside. “Josh, I’m picking up signals here. Are you thinking of leaving town with your new friends?”
He panicked, then realized she only meant his imaginary musician pals. “No.”
“All the same, I think it’s time I met them,” she said firmly.
“Why can’t you leave me alone? You’re just making everything worse!”
“You’re doing that brilliantly for yourself,” she retorted. They yelled back and forth, each trying to inflict maximum damage without actually drawing blood, until she clattered off downstairs to finish crating pictures for a gallery show in San Jose. The hammering was fierce.
She was going out there for her show’s opening, naturally.
Everybody could leave flyover country for the real, creative world of accomplishment and success, except Josh.
He slipped into her studio after she’d left. As a kid, he had spent so much time here while his mom worked. The bright array of colors, the bristly and sable-soft brushes, and the rainbow-smeared paint rags had kept him fascinated for hours. There on the windowsill, just as he’d remembered during their argument, sat something that just might convince Odette to take him with her.
Ivan had belonged to a biker gang for a few years. Later on, he’d made a memento of that time in his life and then asked Josh’s mother to keep it for him (his own wife wanted no reminders of those days in her house).
What Ivan had done was to twist silver wire into the form of a gleaming, three-inch-high motorbike, with turquoise-disk beads for wheels. The thing was beautiful as only a lovingly made miniature can be. It looked like a jeweled dragonfly. Visitors had offered Josh’s mother money for it.
Value, uniqueness, handcrafted beauty—it was perfect.
Josh quickly packed it, wrapped in tissues, into a little cardboard box that used to hold a Christmas orna
ment. At work, he stashed it in a drawer of the oak desk in the Victoriana booth, where he sometimes went for naps when the vampires’ snacking wore him out. Odette would come tonight, after her final antiquing run through town, before she took off for good. This would be his one and only chance to persuade her.
After closing time, he dashed out for pizza. When he got back to the darkened mall, he was startled to find Crystal sitting at the oak desk with the little brass lamp turned on.
“How’d you get in?” he asked.
She gave a sullen shrug. The package sat open on the desk in front of her.
“Where’s Odette?” The silent mall floor had never looked so dark.
“She’s late,” Crystal said. “I was tired of waiting, so I hitched a ride over from the Top. This is something of yours, right? What is it, anyway?”
“A going-away present for Odette. I got something for you, too,” he added, trying frantically to think of what he could give to Crystal.
“Yeah?” Her red leather purse, heavy with quarters for the game machines, swung on its thin strap in jerky movements like the tail of an angry cat. “You were gonna give me something? You liar, Josh.”
He wondered, with a shiver, if some of the coins making the little red purse bulge were from the meth head’s haul.
Suddenly she screamed, “You think you can buy Odette with this little shiny piece of trash? You pretend to be my friend, but you just want to take my place!”
She lashed at him with the purse. He dodged, tripped, and toppled helplessly. The back of his head smacked the floor with stunning force.
Crystal threw herself on top of him, guzzling at his throat as he passed out.
He woke up lying on a thirties settee outside Ivan’s office, deep in the heart of the mall. In the office, the computer monitor glowed with light that seemed unnaturally bright, illuminating the little room and the hallway outside it.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 20