“You didn’t wince getting in. Don’t you feel the cold at all?”
“I feel it. Not as intensely as you, maybe.” She drew up long legs, plopped one on either side of me. “Do you mind? I have to get the cold water into the wounds.”
She scooted under the surface, covering her breasts with crystal shards, hips a jutting island. She got the bemused look again. “What’s the matter, Ed, never seen a natural blonde?”
“I’ve seen plenty, thanks.”
She chuckled. “Sure you have…” eyes lidded, drifting dreamily, “…acres and acres…”
I watched her a long moment: eyes closed, face contented. An angel.
“What about warmth?” I pressed. “Do you feel warmth? Intensely, I mean?”
She didn’t answer, eyes still closed, full lips slightly parted. She might almost have been asleep.
A sudden terror of drowning gripped me.
“Hey!” I panicked, trying fruitlessly to push up. “Clancy? Don’t you fall asleep too!”
Then things went softly dark again.
* * *
Clancy was kissing my mouth. Urgently.
Licking my defrosted and sensitive lips with her warm tongue….
It would have been heaven. Except she stunk.
I opened my eyes and found Mitzi crowding my vision. She gave me another slurp.
“You can stop that anytime!” I gagged. “Your breath smells like dead rats!”
“Squirrels. Hey, I’m a dog. I forage. Especially when no one feeds me!”
I wiped at my face, blinked away sleep. Nothing looked familiar—not the bed or the room around us. “We’re not home, are we?”
“No.”
“Where are we?”
“The bitch’s apartment. Or bed, in your case.”
I was lying on my side on a soft pillow, not very soft mattress. An inner city-looking bedroom, old iron steam heater against the walls, spectacular brick view through the single window, thread bare curtains, single pull-string ceiling lamp.
I tried to arrange my brain, categorized pieces of memory. I looked over at the dog. “Are you okay, Mitz?” I asked with concern.
“Better than you, buster.”
I tried to push up, found no strength in the act. “What’s going on?”
“She’s feeding on you, Einstein. That’s what vampires do, you know. Like a spider slowly sucks the juices from a fly. Welcome to your web.”
I shook my head. It hurt. “No, I don’t buy that. She saved my life.”
“To feed on you.” the dog said in my head. She gave me a hopeless look. “Of all the guys I pick for a partner…What is it with you men and blondes?”
She started to fade. I tried to reach up and touch her. “Are you actually here?” I asked.
“Not really. But she is. Watch yourself, Eddie. I’m working on a plan, but I need a little time. Keep your eyes open, kid…” and she faded away like a movie dissolve.
Things may have gone dark again briefly then, I’m not sure.
In a moment Clancy came through the weathered bedroom door. “Hey.” She was spattered head to foot with blood and mud.
I may have leapt through the single window if I could have gotten up.
She came to the edge of the bed, lifted the blanket a few inches. “Lost the boner, I see.” She looked up expectantly. “Feeling better?”
“Well…physically.”
She smiled through smears of red and brown. “Good. Got to keep you in the pink.”
“In case you want a snack?” It sort of just popped out.
She hesitated a moment. Finally gave me a rueful look, stepped back, and arched a pretty brow. “You’ve been talking to the dog.”
“Where is she?”
Clancy watched me a suspicious moment—then waved a noncommittal hand at the air. “In the other room, I guess. Resting. I made a little box with bedding for her.” She bent and tucked the blanket at my feet dutifully. “Between you and me, Ed, I don’t think she cares for me much.”
No kidding.
“I can’t imagine why. Unless, of course, it’s all the mud and blood spatters.”
She looked down at herself. “Oh, that.”
“Yeah, that. Last victim was a fighter, was he?”
She brushed dried mud from her blouse. “Little bit. I’ve had worse. Actually it was the dog’s fault. Yapping in her sleep. My landlord doesn’t allow pets. He paid me a little visit in the wee hours.”
“So you invited him in and killed him, of course.”
She grinned through her spatters. “Don’t be silly.”
“He isn’t dead? Where is he?”
“He was already dead, Ed. Fortunately I’ve had a bit of practice dealing with fangers, old and young. Now he’s in the basement. Under it, actually. Strong for an old bald guy, I must say. Are you hungry?”
A red clod fell from her cheek.
I swallowed thickly. “Not at the moment.” I looked up with sudden alarm. “Why do you ask? Didn’t you feed?”
She sighed, blew out patient breath. “Eddie, Eddie…I told you, I don’t do that.” She pulled back the covers, bent and got an arm under my shoulders, lifted. “Come on…”
“Wait! W-Where are we going?”
“I’m going to take a shower. You’re coming along for the ride.”
“Why?”
“Because weak as you are, you might be strong enough to get away without me knowing it. And we can’t have that.”
Stronger but still very weak, I tried to push against her. “Wait! You can trust me!”
Her face was close to mine, eyes brimming sarcasm. “Right.”
She already had me in a sitting position. I could feel the strength inside her, doubted I could handle her even if I were up to speed.
“I can carry you if I must, Ed. What’s it going to be?”
I shoved away her arms. “No, thanks,” I dropped by legs over the mattress, “this is humiliating enough.”
She put an arm around my shoulders, helped me back to the bathroom. I looked down at myself. No longer naked. Newly pressed men’s pajamas, cuffs a bit short.
“Old boyfriend,” she said, noting my expression. Or was she reading my mind? Who the hell knew at this point?
“Old ‘boyfriend’, huh? Is he in the basement too?”
She tossed her head, almost laughing. “Oh, Eddie! You are a card!”
* * *
“—your dog’s putting a damper on things!” she called above the drumming water.
I sat huddled on the toilet lid next to the plastic curtain, feeling the blood return to my extremities, enjoying the steaming heat billowing from the shower. Also enjoying the smell of her shampoo. Also enjoying, goddamnit, the smell of her.
“I won’t let you kill Mitzi!” I shouted above the roar. Then, glanced expectantly at Clancy’s slowly revolving shadow against the curtain: we both knew I probably couldn’t stop her from killing both me and the dog.
She didn’t answer for a moment, maybe letting me consider what I’d just said. “The dog hates me, Eddie, not the other way around. Anyway, she’s a valuable ally, or could be. She’s a Reader, remember? That aside, sooner or later someone’s going to notice my landlord’s gone missing. When that gets back to Alicia—and it will—I don’t want to be around when she comes sniffing about. That’s why as soon as I’m done here we start packing, find a new place.”
“How about Hawaii?”
The shower almost drowned her chuckle. “Only a matter of time before they’ve spread to Hawaii too, Ed. No, we’ve got to stay in the vicinity, nip this thing it in the bud, fight the good fight.”
“Yeah? Maybe. Though it would help if I knew who I was fighting for!”
There was a pause and then the faucets squeaked off with finality. Clancy’s shadow remained motionless against the plastic a moment, head down, dripping. Then a slim arm snaked from the curtain, yanked a towel from the rack.
“There isn’t time for distrust, Ed,�
� her silhouette said. “This is a disease, a cancer. The quick-spreading kind. If we don’t act now we’ll miss our window, and it’s already too narrow. You have to be on my side, Ed. Both you and Mitzi. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t convinced. Of anything.
“I understand that you stopped three .38 slugs, Clancy, without as much as a wince. I have the feeling you could throw me through this wall if you wanted to. If you’re not a vampire, what the hell are you? Certainly not human.”
“I’m an animal, Ed.”
I started on my side of the curtain. “Not exactly the answer I was looking for.”
“We’re all animals, more or less. Even vampires. There isn’t time to give you a crash course in vampirism now.”
I remained silent.
“Look, in a nutshell it goes something like this. A few hundred years ago they had a decent foothold in Europe. That’s why the old legends started. Then this other little thing came along that wiped out half the continent.”
“The Black Plague?”
“The Black Plague. Rats and the fleas they carried. It was a nightmare beyond modern comprehension, beyond the worst world war. But like every plague, every kind of disease or influenza, there’s always a few who don’t succumb. A small but immune faction. Some humans survived. But as hard as the plague was on the European’s, it was complete decimation for the vampires. Once bitten by the fleas, they were through.”
“Some irony there.”
“I was wondering when you’d say that. Anyway, the virus that killed the vampires and most of the Europeans had some additional properties before it died out. In very rare cases, in a few very atypical humans, it reacted with a chemical in the frontal lobe of the brain. And created something new.”
“What?”
“Something neither vampire nor completely human.”
“Readers.”
The curtain slid open with a hiss that made me jump. Clancy stood there, towel wrapped and knotted at her sternum, pretty eyes reflective. “Yes, Readers. And the greatest irony of all? You had to be bitten by a vampire first to become one.”
I frowned. “Which makes you a…?”
“Hybrid. Or that’s as good a word as any. We have some of the physical properties of the vampire but none of the bloodlust. We aren’t the undead. But though we don’t have the ability to exist forever like the vampire, the vampire itself is incapable of Reading. It’s one important advantage we have over them.”
I thought about it, brain reeling a little. “How many are you?” I asked her.
Clancy stepped from the tub before the sink mirror, reached up to unwrap the towel, caught my reflection in the glass. “Turn around, please.”
I blinked. “Clancy, we already saw each other in the tub—“
“Turn around please,” more firmly this time.
I turned away on the toilet lid.
“You were delirious before,” she said, and I heard the towel slide up and ruffle her wet hair, “we both were. There wasn’t time for niceties. But now we’re healing.”
“Well,” I muttered, recalling her breasts among the floating ice, “it was nice knowing you.”
“I’m a box-of-candy-and-flowers girl, Ed. If you want to get me in the sack, ask me out on a proper date first. Where were we?”
“How many Readers are out there.”
“Right. Well, that’s a good question. There have been mind-reading acts for centuries, of course, most of them phony, stage tricks. But even today institutions like the FBI and CIA use so-called psychics to help locate victims and perpetrators, solve cases. Ever hear of the Psi Squad?”
“No.”
“It’s a real group of civilian psychics various agencies employ from time to time. There’s no mysticism to it and they aren’t always right, but they don’t charge and they’ve scored high at times. Dorothy Allison is a Psi, probably the most famous. She helps others develop their remote viewing skills.”
“Remote what?”
“The ability to see, in the mind’s eye, beyond what we call the perceived barriers of space-time. It gets pretty technical but it all falls within the realm of Reading. A talent, if you will. Passed down from generation to generation, gene to gene, among a lucky few.”
I was rubbing at my head now. “I’m not so sure it’s lucky.”
“Yes, there’s that side of it, too. But once you get onto it you gain a degree of control, learn to screen out the stuff that’s not pertinent.”
“How come I never knew I had it before?”
“Before Mitzi? Who knows? Some become aware of the talent in childhood, some in middle age. We think it has to be kick-started by a sympathetic counterpart. In your case, the dog.”
“But you just said vampires can’t be Readers.”
“But they can carry the gene. And your dog bit one that carried it. You can turn around now.”
She had her hair turbaned, another towel tucked around her. She leaned back against the sink, arms crossed, all serious. “Now you’re going to ask me about Alicia.”
I waited.
“We’ll have to settle for the short version, we’re running out of time every minute we waste. First off, I’m guessing from my accent you know I’m not from the Midwest.”
“Scottish?”
“Irish. My father was Dr. William Tuttle, a physicist at Heathstead University near Edinburgh. He recognized my talent early on, though neither my parents nor two sisters showed any signs. But my father took my little anomaly seriously, encouraged me to explore rather than fear it. By the time I’d reached high school we began to research the phenomenon together. It was my father who discovered the gene. Could have published papers, maybe won the Nobel Prize if he’d wanted. But he chose to keep it secret.”
“Why?”
“Because the more we researched the closer we got to the source of the original virus—the same one that nearly destroyed Europe in the Middle Ages. And the more we explored that, the more certain other aspects began to add up.”
“People like Alicia. The vampire was alive and well!”
“Never completely died out, to be precise. Just went dormant. How Alicia’s group developed full-blown vampirism we still don’t know, or even how they contacted each other. But my father was certain of one thing. Once it begins to spread, vampirism will be like the Black Plague all over again, only worse. There wasn’t time to wade through the red tape of Irish jurisprudence. It was strike first or be stricken. So he, and a few trusted colleagues, formed a small vigilante group and took matters into their own hands. Even so it took months to trace and track down the few scattered vampires that remained.”
“And murder them.”
“You can only murder the living, Ed. There were just three small covens of vampires then off the Irish coast in the late eighties. Biding their time, growing slowly, cautiously, moving around, disguising their attacks as serial killer crimes. My father’s group, through a series of clandestine tips, finally managed to trap them in a barn early one spring morning, stake and burn them.”
“Jesus.”
“It wasn’t without repercussion. When the police discovered and traced the killings, there was nothing left to prove the ashes were vampires. My father and the vigilantes had nothing to stand on in a modern court. After two years of stays, they were all hanged as criminals.”
“Including your father?”
“No. He died in the barn fire. Stayed behind in the conflagration to make positively sure every last vampire perished. Even so, at least one managed to escape.”
“Alicia.”
Clancy’s jaw muscle tightened. “Alicia.” Her eyes brimmed wetly.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “Me too. The trick now is to make sure we don’t become sorrier yet! Not just so my father and his colleagues won’t have died in vain, but to ensure the work goes on until the disease is eradicated. Forever. With every last vampire staked or beheaded.”
I shivered inwardly. “Soun
ds like a tough job.”
“It gets tougher every time they gain another inch, another foothold in a new community. Every time they’re able to advance their numbers. Once those numbers reach critical mass, the hunters will become the hunted. And for mankind, the game is over.”
She stared at me a quiet moment, eyes narrowing. “What’s the matter, Ed?”
I looked up with genuine surprise. “Nothing! What do you mean?”
“Your expression.”
“No, it’s just…I’m a little…confused is all.”
“A little doubtful too, I think. Believe me, I know how insane it all sounds.”
“Clancy, I was at the party, remember? I was attacked in my own home by my former editor.”
She nodded slowly, not looking convinced. “But still. Vampires. Talking dogs. Mind reading. It all must sound thoroughly alien to you, thoroughly incredulous.”
She watched me closely. Nodding slowly. “You fell down somewhere. Hit your head on something. Got a concussion. You’re momentarily delusional, that’s all. Isn’t that what you’re thinking right now?”
“I never said that.”
“But you’ve thought it, or you’re thinking it now. Ed, listen to me. Please. There’s no time for doubt or ambivalence. How can I convince you? What proof can I offer to assure you this isn’t fantasy, that it’s as real as you and I? How do I convince you I’m not just some goofy broad you met at a party?”
I didn’t know what to say.
We both went silent.
The shower dripped.
Then something slid down her back, dropped from under the towel, bounced and rolled across the tile floor between us. Clancy bent to pick it up.
A .38 slug.
“Finally,” she said, rubbing at her back absently, “there you are.”
TEN
It took us all morning to pack, even with what little Clancy had in her tiny apartment.
A place—any place—always looks little overwhelming until you start stuffing things into boxes.
But the exercise did me a world of good. The bite marks on my thigh were nearly invisible where Clancy had cleansed my wound, and the three bullet holes in her back were mere dimples. By the time we had the U-Haul loaded up I actually felt like a new man.
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