by L. J. Smith
“Go ahead and try.” James was going to add, Make my night, but he reconsidered. He let go of Phil, who turned around and regarded him with utter loathing.
“What’s the matter? Run out of girls to jump?” he said, breathing hard.
James gritted his teeth. Trading insults wasn’t going to do any good, but he could already tell it was going to be hard to keep his temper. Phil had that effect on him. “I didn’t bring you out here to fight. I brought you to ask you something. Do you care about Poppy?”
Phil said, “I’ll take stupid questions for five hundred, Alex,” and loosened his shoulder as if getting ready for a punch.
“Because if you do, you’ll get her to talk to me. You were the one who convinced her not to see me, and now you’ve got to convince her that she has to see me.”
Phil looked around the parking lot, as if calling for somebody to witness this insanity.
James spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating each word. “There is something I can do to help her.”
“Because you’re Don Juan, right? You’re gonna heal her with your love.” The words were flippant, but Phil’s voice was shaky with sheer hatred. Not just hatred for James, but for a universe that would give Poppy cancer.
“No. You’ve got it completely wrong. Look, you think I was making out with her, or trifling with her affections or whatever. That’s not what was going on at all. I let you think that because I was tired of getting the third degree from you—and because I didn’t want you to know what we were doing.”
“Sure, sure,” Phil said in a voice filled with equal measures of sarcasm and contempt. “So what were you doing? Drugs?”
“This.”
James had learned something from his first encounter with Poppy in the hospital. Show and tell should be done in that order. This time he didn’t say anything; he just grabbed Phil by the hair and jerked his head back.
There was only a single light behind the store, but it was enough to give Phil a good view of the bared fangs looming over him. And it was more than enough for James, with his night vision, to see Phillip’s green eyes dilate as he stared.
Phillip yelled, then went limp.
Not with fear, James knew. He wasn’t a coward. With the shock of disbelief turning to belief.
Phillip swore. “You’re a…”
“Right.” James let him go.
Phil almost lost his balance. He grabbed at the Dumpster for support. “I don’t believe it.”
“Yes, you do,” James said. He hadn’t retracted his fangs, and he knew that his eyes were shining silver. Phil had to believe it with James standing right in front of him.
Phil apparently had the same idea. He was staring at James as if he wanted to look away, but couldn’t. The color had drained out of his face, and he kept swallowing as if he were going to be sick.
“God,” he said finally. “I knew there was something wrong with you. Weird wrong. I could never figure out why you gave me the creeps. So this is it.”
I disgust him, James realized. It’s not just hatred anymore. He thinks I’m less than human.
It didn’t augur well for the rest of James’s plan.
“Now do you understand how I can help Poppy?”
Phil shook his head slowly. He was leaning against the wall, one hand still on the Dumpster.
James felt impatience rise in his chest. “Poppy has a disease. Vampires don’t get diseases. Do you need a road map?”
Phillip’s expression said he did.
“If,” James said through his teeth, “I exchange enough blood with Poppy to turn her into a vampire, she won’t have cancer anymore. Every cell in her body will change and she’ll end up a perfect specimen: flawless, disease-free. She’ll have powers that humans don’t even dream of. And, incidentally, she’ll be immortal.”
There was a long, long silence as James watched this sink in with Phillip. Phil’s thoughts were too jumbled and kaleidoscopic for James to make anything of them, but Phil’s eyes got wider and his face more ashen.
At last Phil said, “You can’t do that to her.”
It was the way he said it. Not as if he were protesting an idea because it was too radical, too new. Not the knee-jerk overreaction that Poppy had had.
He said it with absolute conviction and utmost horror. As if James were threatening to steal Poppy’s soul.
“It’s the only way to save her life,” James said.
Phil shook his head slowly again, eyes huge and trancelike. “No. No. She wouldn’t want it. Not at that cost.”
“What cost?” James was more than impatient now, he was defensive and exasperated. If he’d realized that this was going to turn into a philosophical debate, he would have picked somewhere less public. As it was, he had to keep all his senses on the alert for possible intruders.
Phil let go of the Dumpster and stood on his own two feet. There was fear mixed with the horror in his eyes, but he faced James squarely.
“It’s just—there are some things that humans think are more important than just staying alive,” he said. “You’ll find that out.”
I don’t believe this, James thought. He sounds like a junior space captain talking to the alien invaders in a B movie. You won’t find Earth people quite the easy mark you imagine.
Aloud, he said, “Are you nuts? Look, Phil, I was born in San Francisco. I’m not some bug-eyed monster from Alpha Centauri. I eat Wheaties for breakfast.”
“And what do you eat for a midnight snack?” Phil asked, his green eyes somber and almost childlike. “Or are the fangs just for decoration?”
Walked right into that one, James’s brain told him.
He looked away. “Okay. Touché. There are some differences. I never said I was a human. But I’m not some kind of—”
“If you’re not a monster, then I don’t know what is.”
Don’t kill him, James counseled himself frantically. You have to convince him. “Phil, we’re not like what you see at the movies. We’re not all-powerful. We can’t dematerialize through walls or travel through time, and we don’t need to kill to feed. We’re not evil, at least not all of us. We’re not damned.”
“You’re unnatural,” Phillip said softly, and James could feel that he meant it from his heart. “You’re wrong. You shouldn’t exist.”
“Because we’re higher up on the food chain than you?”
“Because people weren’t meant to…feed…on other people.”
James didn’t say that his people didn’t think of Phillip’s people as people. He said, “We only do what we have to do to survive. And Poppy’s already agreed.”
Phillip froze. “No. She wouldn’t want to become like you.”
“She wants to stay alive—or at least, she did, before she got mad at me. Now she’s just irrational because she hasn’t got enough of my blood in her to finish changing her. Thanks to you.” He paused, then said deliberately, “Have you ever seen a three-week-old corpse, Phil? Because that’s what she’s going to become if I don’t get to her.”
Phil’s face twisted. He whirled around and slammed a fist into the metal side of the Dumpster. “Don’t you think I know that? I’ve been living with that since Monday night.”
James stood still, heart pounding. Feeling the anguish Phil was giving off and the pain of Phil’s injured hand. It was several seconds before he was able to say calmly, “And you think that’s better than what I can give her?”
“It’s lousy. It stinks. But, yes, it’s better than turning into something that hunts people. That uses people. That’s why all the girlfriends, isn’t it?”
Once again, James couldn’t answer right away. Phil’s problem, he was realizing, was that Phil was far too smart for his own good. He thought too much. “Yeah. That’s why all the girlfriends,” he said at last, tiredly. Trying not to see this from Phil’s point of view.
“Just tell me one thing, Rasmussen.” Phillip straightened and looked him dead in the eye. “Did you”—he stopped and swallowed—“
feed on Poppy—before she got sick?”
“No.”
Phil let out his breath. “That’s good. Because if you had, I’d have killed you.”
James believed him. He was much stronger than Phil, much faster, and he’d never been afraid of a human before. But just at that moment he had no doubt that Phil would somehow have found a way to do it.
“Look, there’s something you don’t understand,” he said. “Poppy did want this, and it’s something we’ve already started. She’s only just beginning to change; if she dies now, she won’t become a vampire. But she might not die all the way, either. She could end up a walking corpse. A zombie, you know? Mindless. Body rotting, but immortal.”
Phil’s mouth quivered with revulsion. “You’re just saying that to scare me.”
James looked away. “I’ve seen it happen.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’ve seen it firsthand!” Dimly James realized he was yelling and that he’d grabbed Phil by the shirt-front. He was out of control—and he didn’t care. “I’ve seen it happen to somebody I cared about, all right?”
And then, because Phil was still shaking his head: “I was only four years old and I had a nanny. All the rich kids in San Francisco have nannies. She was human.”
“Let go,” Phil muttered, pulling at James’s wrist. He was breathing hard—he didn’t want to hear this.
“I was crazy about her. She gave me everything my mom didn’t. Love, attention—she was never too busy. I called her Miss Emma.”
“Let go.”
“But my parents thought I was too attached to her. So they took me on a little vacation—and they didn’t let me feed. Not for three days. By the time they brought me back, I was starving. Then they sent Miss Emma up to put me to bed.”
Phil had stopped fighting now. He stood with his head bowed and turned to one side so he wouldn’t have to look at James. James threw his words at the averted face.
“I was only four. I couldn’t stop myself. And the thing is, I wanted to. If you’d asked me who I’d rather have die, me or Miss Emma, I’d’ve said me. But when you’re starving, you lose control. So I fed on her, and all the time I was crying and trying to stop. And when I finally could stop, I knew it was too late.”
There was a pause. James suddenly realized that his fingers were locked in an agonizing cramp. He let go of Phil’s shirt slowly. Phil said nothing.
“She was just lying there on the floor. I thought, wait, if I give her my own blood she’ll be a vampire, and everything will be okay.” He wasn’t yelling anymore. He wasn’t even really speaking to Phillip, but staring out into the dark parking lot. “So I cut myself and let the blood run into her mouth. She swallowed some of it before my parents came up and stopped me. But not enough.”
A longer pause—and James remembered why he was telling the story. He looked at Phillip.
“She died that night—but not all the way. The two different kinds of blood were fighting inside her. So by morning she was walking around again—but she wasn’t Miss Emma anymore. She drooled and her skin was gray and her eyes were flat like a corpse’s. And when she started to—rot—my dad took her out to Inverness and buried her. He killed her first.” Bile rose in James’s throat and he added almost in a whisper, “I hope he killed her first.”
Phil slowly turned around to look at him. For the first time that evening, there was something other than horror and fear in his face. Something like pity, James thought.
James took a deep breath. After thirteen years of silence he’d finally told the story—to Phillip North, of all people. But it was no good wondering about the absurdity. He had a point to drive home.
“So take my advice. If you don’t convince Poppy to see me, make sure they don’t do an autopsy on her. You don’t want her walking around without her internal organs. And have a wooden stake ready for the time when you can’t stand to look at her anymore.”
The pity was gone from Phil’s eyes. His mouth was a hard, trembling line.
“We won’t let her turn into…some kind of half-alive abomination,” he said. “Or a vampire, either. I’m sorry about what happened to your Miss Emma, but it doesn’t change anything.”
“Poppy should be the one to decide—”
But Phillip had reached his limit, and now he was simply shaking his head. “Just keep away from my sister,” he said. “That’s all I want. If you do, I’ll leave you alone. And if you don’t—”
“What?”
“I’m going to tell everybody in El Camino what you are. I’m going to call the police and the mayor and I’m going to stand in the middle of the street and yell it.”
James felt his hands go icy cold. What Phil didn’t realize was that he’d just made it James’s duty to kill him. It wasn’t just that any human who stumbled on Night World secrets had to die, but that one actively threatening to tell about the Night World had to die immediately, no questions asked, no mercy given.
Suddenly James was so tired he couldn’t see straight.
“Get out of here, Phil,” he said in a voice drained of emotion and vitality both. “Now. And if you really want to protect Poppy, you won’t tell anybody anything. Because they’ll trace it back and find out that Poppy knows the secrets, too. And then they’ll kill her—after bringing her in for questioning. It won’t be fun.”
“Who’re ‘they’? Your parents?”
“The Night People. We’re all around you, Phil. Anybody you know could be one—including the mayor. So keep your mouth shut.”
Phillip looked at him through narrowed eyes. Then he turned and walked to the front of the store.
James couldn’t remember when he’d felt so empty. Everything he’d done had turned out wrong. Poppy was now in more kinds of danger than he could count.
And Phillip North thought he was unnatural and evil. What Phil didn’t know was that most of the time James thought the same thing.
Phillip got halfway home before he remembered that he’d dropped the bag with Poppy’s cranberry juice and wild cherry Popsicles. Poppy had hardly eaten in the last two days, and when she did get hungry, it was for something weird.
No—something red, he realized as he paid for a second time at the 7-Eleven. He felt a sick lurch in his stomach. Everything she wanted lately was red and at least semiliquid.
Did Poppy realize that herself?
He studied her when he went into her bedroom to give her a Popsicle. Poppy spent most of the time in bed now.
And she was so pale and still. Her green eyes were the only alive thing about her. They dominated her face, glittering with an almost savage awareness.
Cliff and Phil’s mother were talking about getting round-the-clock nurses to be with her.
“Don’t like the Popsicle?” Phil asked, dragging a chair to sit beside her bed.
Poppy was eyeing the thing with distaste. She took a tiny lick and grimaced.
Phillip watched her.
Another lick. Then she put the Popsicle into an empty plastic cup on her nightstand. “I don’t know…I just don’t feel hungry,” she said, leaning back against the pillows. “Sorry you had to go out for nothing.”
“No problem.” God, she looks sick, Phil thought. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Eyes shut. Poppy shook her head. A very small motion. “You’re a good brother,” she said distantly.
She used to be so alive, Phil thought. Dad called her Kilowatt or Eveready. She used to radiate energy.
Without in the least meaning to, he found himself saying, “I saw James Rasmussen today.”
Poppy stiffened. Her hands on the bedspread formed not fists, but claws. “He’d better keep away from here!”
There was something subtly wrong about her reaction. Something not-Poppy. Poppy could get fierce, sure, but Phil had never heard that animal tone in her voice before.
A picture flashed through Phil’s mind. A creature from Night of the Living Dead, walking even though its intesti
nes were spilling out. A living corpse like James’s Miss Emma.
Was that really what would happen if Poppy died right now? Was she that much changed already?
“I’ll scratch his eyes out if he comes around here,” Poppy said, her fingers working on the spread like a cat kneading.
“Poppy—he told me the truth about what he really is.”
Strangely, Poppy had no reaction. “He’s scum,” she said. “He’s a reptile.”
Something about her voice made Phillip’s flesh creep. “And I told him you would never want to become something like that.”
“I wouldn’t,” Poppy said shortly. “Not if it meant hanging around with him for eternity. I don’t want to see him ever again.”
Phil stared at her for a long moment. Then he leaned back and shut his eyes, one thumb jammed against his temple where the ache was worst.
Not just subtly wrong. He didn’t want to believe it, but Poppy was strange. Irrational. And now that he thought about it, she’d been getting stranger every hour since James had been thrown out.
So maybe she was in some eerie in-between state. Not a human and not a vampire. And not able to think clearly. Just as James had said.
Poppy should be the one to decide.
There was something he had to ask her.
“Poppy?” He waited until she looked at him, her green eyes large and unblinking. “When we talked, James said that you’d agreed to let him—change you. Before you got mad at him. Is that right?”
Poppy’s eyebrows lifted. “I’m mad at him,” she confirmed, as if this was the only part of the question she’d processed. “And you know why I like you? Because you’ve always hated him. Now we both hate him.”
Phil thought for a moment, then spoke carefully. “Okay. But when you weren’t mad at him, back then, did you want to turn into—what he is?”
Suddenly a gleam of rationality showed in Poppy’s eyes. “I just didn’t want to die,” she said. “I was so scared—and I wanted to live. If the doctors could do anything for me, I’d try that. But they can’t.” She was sitting up now, staring into space as if she saw something terrible there. “You don’t know what it feels like to know you’re going to die,” she whispered.