by Alex Bledsoe
Gerry blinked and tried to stay awake. Was that really Fauvette removing her blouse, showing him those sweet little boobs? She came toward him now, tits swaying, her face in shadow. She knelt beside the couch, chilled fingers unbuttoning his shirt, then crawled on top of him. The rest of her was as cold as her hands.
He barely found the strength to put one hand on her ass. “You’re like ice, baby,” he whispered.
“Then warm me up,” she sighed, writhing against him, her lips moving up his chest to his shoulder, and finally his neck. And then a sharp pain, and sudden, deep blackness . . .
Fauvette fed with efficient, rapid ease. She knew Barrister was already weakened by Patience, but it had been two days since Fauvette had taken from him, and she was desperate as well. He was her victim, anyway; like Zginski said, she took only what she needed, whereas Patience had drained as much as she could.
She felt his erection through his slacks as she straddled him, his limp hand resting on her buttocks. Holding back the tide of blood from his neck was the real trick, and she realized with new irony that it forced her to purse and pucker her lips like a kiss.
She broke away from his skin and licked the tiny trickles that escaped before the bite closed up. Would this be the last time she’d have to taste blood, she wondered; was this her final act of will, breaking off before she was glutted like a woman willfully resisting an orgasm?
She quickly dressed and slipped out of the office. Vander the cook would arrive soon to get the kitchen ready for the dinner crowd, and she didn’t want to start any gossip.
“Boss?”
Vander stood in the doorway. He was black, middle-aged, and a veteran of places like the Ringside. Here, at least, he was given the respect his skill deserved, even if Barrister still referred to him as “the colored cook” when talking to people. “Got a bread shipment you need to sign for.”
“Humszah?” Barrister said. He sat up, shaking his head to clear it. “Sorry, boy, can you repeat that?”
Vander sighed. “Bread. Truck. Out. Back.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.” Barrister got to his feet, leaned against the desk until the dizziness passed, and started tucking in his shirt. He was still rock-hard from his recurring dream about Fauvette, and he had to shift himself a couple of times to find a comfortable position that didn’t also make it obvious to anyone looking at him.
He washed his face in his little private bathroom. He found it really strange that the Fauvette of his subconscious was so wanton and uninhibited, while the real one seemed almost virginal. More than once he’d wondered if she actually was a virgin; but virgins didn’t apply for jobs in bars, did they?
He checked himself out in the mirror. He looked exhausted; he would have to give himself more time to rest. After all, he was the public face of the Ringside. And would those two places where he’d nicked himself shaving ever heal?
As the sun set across the Mississippi River, sinking into the distant Arkansas farmland, Zginski parked his new car in the driveway of a big home in Germantown. This area east of Memphis was where the wealthiest people lived, in big houses shaded by old, stately trees. The residents were all white, and many had lived in these houses for two or three generations, a millennium here in the New World.
He sat behind the wheel for a long time, fighting the weakness that had settled on him. He was seldom this active during the day, when the rays of the sun soaked up all his strength and weakened his powers. But buying the car, and then meeting the woman Patience, had distracted him and now he was paying the price.
At last he summoned the strength to leave the car and walk to the door. He unlocked the dead bolt and stepped inside, grateful for the relative darkness. He leaned his back against the door and closed his eyes, which he might have done anyway considering that the wallpaper pattern consisted of two-foot-wide bright red blossoms.
“My goodness,” Alisa Cassidy said with concern. “You look awful.”
He opened his eyes. She stood in the entrance to her study, clad in a sleep shirt and, apparently, nothing else. She was forty, with short brown hair shot through with gray. Her body was youthful and taut; only slight smile lines and crow’s-feet betrayed her age.
And only the distant, haunted look in her eyes gave away the truth that she was dying.
“I am weary,” he agreed. His voice was even weaker when he said, “and I do not wish to wade through the usual preliminaries.”
“All right, if that’s what—”
Before she could finish, Zginski yanked her against him and sank his teeth into her neck. She cried out once, then fell into a swoon as her blood replenished his powers. In her mind she was young again, and healthy, and being taken from behind by a shadowy male who nonetheless hit every spot and brought on wave after wave of orgasm . . .
The moon rose over the old cotton warehouse Leonardo and Fauvette used to call home. Fauvette had originally discovered it, and then more or less allowed the others to move in. There had been five of them then: Fauvette, Leonardo, Olive, Mark, and Toddy. It was Toddy’s inexplicable demise, in fact, that began the chain of events leading to their walking again in daylight.
Leonardo perched on one of the rafters, among the oblivious sleeping pigeons. He had spent untold hours here, contemplating his past and making tentative plans for the future. But any changes he sought to make were brought up short by the reality that he was, in fact, an unchanging revenant, the remains of a man who had once lived. His existence could only be on the fringes of society, where he could pass for human until someone looked too closely. And then inevitably that someone would die, and Leonardo would melt back into the shadows.
His thoughts went back to the girl at the decrepit mansion. In his time he’d known many poor white girls, who often existed on the same socioeconomic level as blacks. Raised with black folks around, some found it difficult to accept the prejudices of their parents and society; some, of course, did not. The Klan, after all, had recruited more poor whites than rich ones. And it had not been gentlemen farmers and bank presidents riding beneath those hoods, at least not in his mortal childhood.
But Clora Crabtree was an enigma. She clearly felt there was a difference based on race, but had gone out of her way to initiate conversation. Was she so isolated out there with her father that any stranger was a welcome relief? Leonardo knew what the typical redneck daddy might do with a nubile young daughter in that kind of solitude, but he got no sense of that, either. So what motivated her?
He dropped from the rafters to the warehouse floor. It was on this spot that Zginski, with no apparent effort, had transformed into a wolf right before his eyes, and moments later changed back. There had been no transition; one moment a man stood there, and the next an enormous, growling canine. Leonardo would not rest until he badgered Zginski into telling him how he accomplished that trick.
But on this night, he decided on another mission. Zginski was always preaching about how it was better—more discreet, more meaningful, more fun—to pick a single long-term victim at a time, gradually seducing them into craving the incremental loss of their own life. He claimed that after a few visits, the use of vampiric powers to sexually fascinate the victim would not even be necessary. They would willingly give themselves up as they grew weaker and weaker. Properly cultivated, a young, healthy victim could last as long as six months, and the victim’s complicity helped insure no unwanted scrutiny.
So Leonardo decided to give it a shot. He would seduce Clora Crabtree, taking only enough blood on each visit to satisfy his immediate needs. And in the process, he might also learn what was at the heart of her paradoxically prejudiced open-mindedness.
CHAPTER 8
CLORA CRABTREE STOOD in the gabled window of her bedroom on the top floor of Dark Willows and looked out at the night. Because of the heat she wore only an old undershirt that hung to her thighs, but was too small for her recently matured bosom. She smoked a cigarette with her wrist bent dramatically, the way she’d seen her la
te mother do. Her reflection greeted her in the sections of glass, and she forced herself to stand up straight. A full-figured gal, her mama had told her, should never slump.
So far this had been the worst summer of her life. Isolated here with her father, it felt as if the world were rushing by in one of the expensive, fast cars her father repaired but never owned. He’d even sold the one her cousin had left to them, depriving her of even the chance to drive it. She knew he didn’t trust her, and she knew he was right to feel that way. But still, he could’ve let her get behind the wheel once, on a hot day when the dust raised by the tires would hover in the air long after she’d roared off down the gravel drive. It wasn’t like she didn’t do things to help ease his loneliness.
The May issue of Tiger Beat lay on her bed, the pages dog-eared and worn. Marie Osmond was in the center of the cover collage, with hair so large Clora wondered just how much hair spray was involved. Her own hair was thin and lanky, much more like the hippie girls from ten years earlier. She would’ve loved that time, she thought bitterly: easy drugs, easy love, and a wide-open sense of the future. Her prospects seemed hemmed in by the doleful woods surrounding Dark Willows.
She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and flopped on the bed, idly turning the magazine pages. Tony De-Franco, dark-haired and big-eyed, took readers on a tour of his family’s new house. Freddie Prinze talked about his unhappy childhood. “Bunch of spic greaseballs,” her father called them, but she liked the way their black hair fell around their soft faces. She imagined they’d smell of cologne and freshly ironed shirts.
She rolled onto her back. The pictures of Brett Hudson sent an intimate shiver through her, and she cupped her breast with her left hand. The itch grew maddening, and she felt her cheeks and neck flush red. She moaned aloud, softly, not wanting to attract her father’s attention but unable to stay completely silent.
She closed her eyes and slid her knees apart. The shirt’s hem crept up her thighs and gathered at her waist. She moved her right hand down her belly.
Then something tapped shave-and-a-haircut against her window.
Face burning, she sat up and yanked the shirt down to her knees. The tapping came again. She grabbed cutoffs from the floor, slid them up her legs, and went to the window.
She opened the glass. The humid night air surged in past her as she leaned out. “Bruce?” she hissed.
“Ain’t Bruce,” an unfamiliar voice said.
She turned toward a figure perched at the edge of the roof. It was crouched almost like one of those gargoyles in that scary movie she’d watched on TV, and she gasped and stepped back. When she did, the room’s light fell on the figure’s face. She recognized Leo, the black boy from that morning. “What the hell are you doing here, boy?” she hissed.
“Came to see you,” he said quietly, and stood up. Despite the roof’s slope, he seemed completely at ease.
His voice sent a tingle through her as strong as the one inspired by Brett Hudson. She had to swallow hard before speaking. “You know my daddy’ll beat the nappy off you if he catches you.”
Leonardo strode up the slanted roof and crouched by the window. “Do you want me to go, then?”
She licked her lips. Her knees trembled as a vast gulf of physical need opened inside her. “Well . . . no. But you gotta be quiet.”
He slipped inside and hit the ground without making the wood creak. “I’m like the wind, baby.”
“Well, the wind’s hot tonight, so close the window before you let all the cool air out.”
As he did so, she pulled out another cigarette and lit it with trembling fingers. If her daddy did find her with a colored boy, he’d kill the boy first, then beat her within an inch of her life. That was as certain as the sunrise. But maybe it was that very danger that had gotten her blood racing. “So how’d you get out here anyway?”
“Drove my friend’s truck,” Leonardo said as he moved slowly around the room, absorbing the details of her life. “Parked it down the highway and snuck through the woods.”
She watched the way his muscles moved. Her voice was raw when she said, “I’m surprised the dog didn’t start barking.”
He smiled. “Dogs love me.”
“How’d you get up on the roof?”
Leonardo turned and stepped close to her. He felt the heat of her body in the air, and could sense the young, surging blood beneath her skin. “You ask a lot of questions,” he said softly. “How about I ask you one? You like coloreds in general, or just me?”
Her hand shook so much the ash fell from the cigarette as soon as it burned. She tried to sound blasé. “I thought you people didn’t like to be called ‘coloreds’ anymore.”
He took a strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear, careful not to touch her skin. She gasped anyway. “What I don’t like,” he said, “is to have my crank yanked by some Goody Two-shoes with jungle fever. Is that what you’re doing?”
She trembled at his nearness, at the knowledge that only the undershirt separated his hands from her skin. He had to have noticed the way her nipples stood out through the fabric. “Wh-what do you want me to do?” she said.
He smiled, showing his teeth but not his fangs. He let his power envelop her, drawing on reservoirs of desire she never knew she possessed, and focusing it all on him. “What do I want? The question is, what do you want?”
She impulsively grabbed his wrist and put his hand against her breast. She gasped in both sensual response and at the chilly touch. “Your hand’s like ice.”
He closed his fingers slightly around her breast. “You want me to stop?”
She shook her head and moved closer, pressing herself against him. His lips were as cold as his hands.
Alisa’s eyes opened suddenly, as if she’d awakened from a nightmare. She lay on the plush settee in her study; the lights were dim, and the windows showed her it was dark outside.
She tried to recall the dream, or what had awoken her from it. But her fuzzy mind couldn’t recover the thoughts.
She looked around the room to orient herself. She had moved her desk into the living room for convenience; after all, with Chad gone, she had no one else to answer to, and no need for a separate workroom. The prevailing color here was green, with leafy floral patterns on the couch, chairs, and curtains. Over the couch, dominating the room like a window onto a giant’s garden, was an enormous painting of a cross-section of broccoli done by an artist named Close. The walls hung with certificates and photos, including many pictures of Chad. She had not been able to look at them for a long time after he died, but now that her own death was imminent they comforted her. She would see him again soon.
She sat up just as Zginski came from the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand. He wore a white shirt and khaki slacks, and his hair was loose. Having recently fed, and now empowered by the night, he radiated confidence and authority. The thought of denying him anything seemed absurd.
She smiled. “I thought you never drank . . . wine.”
“I do not. But it will do you good.”
She nodded and gratefully took the glass. She swung her feet to the floor and waited for the dizziness to pass. “That was intense. How long was I out?”
“Four hours, approximately. My apologies. I had spent too much time in the sun.”
She took a long drink. “I’ve barely seen it. I’ve been hunched over the Festa Maggotta all day. But I think I may have found the sort of thing you were looking for. Would you like to see?”
He lightly brushed her hair. The dark circles under her eyes, usually hidden by her tan, were more prominent now. “Are you sufficiently recovered?”
She smiled wryly. “I’m dying of cancer, Rudy. I am as recovered as I’m ever going to get.”
She walked with his aid over to her desk, where photocopies lay scattered next to spiral notebooks. The facsimiles reproduced pages of the Festa Maggotta, “The Feast of Maggots,” an ancient alchemical tome from the university’s Sir Francis Colby collection. Zg
inski had, in fact, met Alisa thanks to this book: when he requested it, he was told that it was not available for casual lending, but the leading expert on it was in fact working with it at the moment. He introduced himself as a fellow scholar, and knew within fifteen seconds that she was deathly ill. Luckily she knew it, too.
She pointed to the image of a page, with a word in an unknown language at the top as a header. “That word vrykopilo translates as, I believe, ‘vampires.’ ”
“Indeed. In what language?” The Festa Maggotta was notoriously difficult to translate; sections were written in a mishmash of known languages, interspersed with unknown and possibly made-up tongues.
“Two, actually. Greek and Italian. The first two syllables, ‘Vryko,’ are from the Greek word vrylolakes. The last two, ‘piro,’ could be either Italian or Portuguese. I’ll know more when I’ve translated some of the surrounding text. I could be completely off, but it’ll be interesting either way.”
He took the empty wineglass and put it aside. He had taken her that first night, seducing her with his powers and gaining immediate entrance to all aspects of her life. She was a widow, a full professor of linguistics who specialized in ancient and lost tongues. She was also dying of ovarian cancer. “Do you feel strong enough to discuss something with me?”
“As long as it’s not my impending death.”
“I believe we have exhausted that topic. Today I encountered another of my kind who claims she can feed, and survive, on merely the energy she draws from other people. Without touching or injuring them.”
He paused, until she prompted, “And you don’t believe her?”
“I do not know. It seems an absurd thing to lie about, and yet if it were true . . .”
“Then you wouldn’t have to kill people to survive.”
He smiled. She had discerned the truth about him that first night, and despite her initial disbelief had now fully embraced it, and him. He deadened the agonizing pain of her disease, and reawakened the erotic desires that she feared had died with Chad. “I do not kill to survive. I kill when necessary. All creatures do that.”