What I saw was a long, Y-shaped incision in my body that had also been sloppily sewn back together.
Someone had cut me open and scooped out my innards which were in a nearby bucket.
I was dead, but somehow I was a live.
Somehow instead of leaving me for dead, Bumpy had left me to be reborn as a vampire.
He’d probably figured I’d be buried or burnt before that transformation could occur and I had to be grateful that no one had burned my body because there was no coming back from the fire.
I sat up on the slab and pondered my options. I wasn’t cold but I was hungry. And I needed clothes. I could hear people moving around in the building and knew that I could solve both of my problems.
That first feeding was messy, and I got blood all over the clothes I stole, but I left my victim alive, and that felt like a victory.
I couldn’t go back to my apartments—couldn’t take the risk someone would see me—but I was not without resources. My youthful skill as a pickpocket came back to me, and at night, I would haunt the streets near the clubs, stealing from drunken patrons and unwary passersby.
My face was unmarked by the bruises of the last beating I had gotten and in crowds, I could pass unnoticed, although occasionally, a pretty girl would notice me and smile. And for a bit of poetry and some kisses, they were willing to let me feed, drowsy and satisfied after, as if they’d just had a good shag.
I found a room in a hotel and took up residence there, sleeping away the says and emerging at night. I broke into houses and stole what I need, and then what I wanted, selling the jewelry and small items. I invested my money with a broker, buying stocks in U.S. Gypsum and Bulova watches, and American Tobacco and Standard Oil. At his insistence, also bought stock in Paramount Pictures and Loew’s Theaters and a soda pop called Coca-Cola. All of them survived the stock market crash, and in the ensuing Depression, I bought up more stocks at bargain-basement prices. I moved into the Dakota and have been there ever since. The apartment I own is managed by my bankers and as far as my neighbors know, I’m merely the most recent heir to the family home. People at the Dakota tend to keep to themselves and be suspicious of strangers. Especially after that deranged boy killed John Lennon.
It’s a solitary life, but I’m rarely lonely.
I read. I listen to music. I’ve taught myself French and Russian and play chess online with a ten-year-old Ukrainian prodigy.
At night I go to the theater.
I patronize certain discreet clubs where my particular needs can be satisfied in a consensual commercial exchange.
I am free to indulge my interests in whatever topic catches my fancy.
I no longer have to worry that my “maker” will somehow catch up to me and unmake me. Bumpy Johnson died in 1968. Officially, he died of a heart attack, but in reality, he was killed by a rival vampire who was operating under cover of the riots that had broken out in the wake of Martin Luther King’s murder. The cops were overwhelmed at the time, and didn’t put too much effort into investigating his demise.
In the last fifty years or so, the city’s criminal vampire clans have infiltrated banking and politics and corporations. No one’s interested in someone like me. So they leave me alone.
And I like it that way.
Except on Christmas Eve.
Chapter 4
You’d think that most people would want to stay home on Christmas Eve—maybe settle in front of television to stream some corny Christmas movie while eating snickerdoodles and drinking hot chocolate or spiked eggnog. Especially when temperatures were hovering jut above zero and it was threatening to snow. It’s beautiful when it snows here—magical even—but it is a bitch to get around. All the big society parties are held earlier in the month and guests have to make hard decisions about which soirees they want to attend. But on Christmas Eve, my mother has the night to herself and nobody ever turns down an invitation to Ariana Crawford’s Christmas fête.
For one thing, the food was spectacular. All the food rules the family lived by the rest of the year were thrown out the window and the appetizers were cheesy and creamy or crispy and bacon-wrapped. There were more food stations than the buffet at the Rio World Carnival buffet in Vegas.
She didn’t stint on liquor either, and hired two bartenders to make sure everyone got their dirty martinis and other mixed drinks without too much of a wait. There was a whole buffet of bottled liquors for people who wanted to try their hand at mixology, and for the last few years, I’d had to keep an eye on Tyler because he got into the Crème de Menthe at the first Christmas Eve party he attended and got puking drunk after drinking a highball glass full of the stuff.
Not that my mother or his father even noticed. He’d gotten sick in my bathroom and I’d been the one to clean him up and put him to bed, watching over him to make sure he didn’t end up doing a rock star and choking on his own vomit while they slept in the master bedroom, secure in the knowledge that a cleaning crew would be by the next day to clean up all traces of the party.
I didn’t want any repeats of that fiasco, though to be fair, Tyler seemed to have been cured of his curiosity about brightly colored liquids.
Unlike me, Tyler wasn’t expected to be in attendance the whole night. He’d be dressed up in his little suit and displayed just long enough for everyone to remark on how adorable he was—like a Maltipoo puppy or something—and then sent off to his room to amuse himself for the rest of the night.
Which was what he did basically every night after dinner.
By nine o’clock the apartment was full and I was getting sick from breathing the cigarette smoke.
I was also getting tired of smiling. Connor and I had officially broken up earlier in the day and I was still hurting from that. He’d come over to the apartment to ask if I wanted to go for a walk, and silly me, I’d thought he planned to apologize to me. Apologize for humiliating me in front of everyone.
Silly. Silly me.
He had a whole speech prepared but he didn’t even bother with the obligatory, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Instead he’d led with his opinion that I wasn’t “keeping up with him” and that I was “holding him back” and by the time he was finished, he’d pretty much taken me apart emotionally.
I’d thrown the beautifully wrapped watch at him then and told him could go eff himself and Myka too,” and that had amused him.
“Oh I will,” he said, and smirked. And just like that I wasn’t even angry anymore, just very, very glad that there were only five more months in the school year and I’d be able to avoid him for the most part because the only class we shared was advanced calculus and I had to work so hard in that class I didn’t have time for distractions.
So I wasn’t sad or angry, but I was tired, and the party was stretching out like an ordeal as I made small talk with the people who wanted to suck up to my mother.
She’d given me an outfit for the occasion, a simple sleeveless top and flowy skirt in a berry-wine color that was pretty. It was a wildly impractical outfit for winter, but the heat was cranked up so high that I was sweating.
“That is a fabulous outfit,” a young woman announced, looking me up and down. “Who dressed you?” she asked. I knew she was a designer because she was wearing a dress with such extreme geometric structure that I worried anyone who got too close to the sharp edges was going to cut themselves.
“I dressed myself,” I said, knowing I sounded like a jerk, so I added, “are you wearing your own design?”
She preened. “It’s from my spring collection,” she said.
“Bold,” I said “Excuse me.” I wandered over to the sweets table and looked for the signature sour cream sugar cookies the caterer had promised. There was only one left, but I took it anyway. As I munched it, I surveyed the crowd. My stepfather was surrounded by a group of Wall Street types, women with razor-cut bobs and near-identical sheath dresses, guys with thousand-dollar suits who looked like clones except for the varying shades of their skin tones. They
looked like they were a separate species from my mother’s “artsy” friends, and it was easy to tell who was who.
As I looked for a place to put the napkin I’d been using, a zaftig redhead cruised up to me. “You must be Ariana’s daughter,” she said.
It took every ounce of my self-control not to answer, “Must I?”
“Hello,” I said, taking in her outfit.
The gray dress she was wearing wasn’t so much a garment as it was a delivery system for her complicated necklace, about twenty pounds of mixed silvery metals—white gold and platinum and something that looked like crushed aluminum foil. It was glittery and festive but way, way, way too much. But then I figure I’m accessorized enough if I actually put on earrings.
“I love your dress,” she said. “I’m Jessi Kovocheck.”
“You don’t have to suck up to me Jessi,” I said. “I have absolutely no influence over my mother’s decisions on who to promote and who to diss.”
She kind of huffed, but then gave me a second look as she took a cigarette out of her nine thousand-dollar vintage Bottega Veneta bag and lit it with a $1.25 Bic lighter.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I hate having to pimp myself out. But a mention from your mother would be huge.”
I got it; I really did. All it would take was one influencer wearing a piece of her jewelry and sales would soar. Look what happened when Michelle Obama wore that “Vote” necklace.
“I like the stuff you used to do with semi-precious stones under your KOVO to GOVO brand,” I said. “I have a pair of your citrine and garnet earrings.”
That was true. My mother had given them to me for my last birthday and I’d actually worn them a couple of times.
“Thanks,” the designer said. “That line did pretty well for me at Target.” She took a hard drag. “But I had a problem with my supplier and –"
“At least you’re not designing handbags,” I said. “Every celebutante in town seems to be doing that.”
“I wish they were just handbag designers,” she said. “But now they’re jewelry designers too. “They start out doing a ‘signature piece’ for some charity and the next thing you know, they’ve got contracts with all the high-end department stores and people who’ve actually studied this stuff are still peddling at home shows and crafts fairs.”
“Is that how you started, at crafts fairs?”
“No, I sold my things on Etsy and eBay. Got a loan to rent out a tiny little closet and started selling out of there.”
“And now you’re here,” I said. “It must be going pretty well. My mother doesn’t invite just anyone.”
“I don’t know half these people,” she said.
“Most of them can’t really do you any good.” I pointed to a woman with a wild pouf of pitch-black hair. “Isadora is about to sell her blog to whoever owns Refinery 29. She’s decided she wants to do a wanderjahr and find herself, maybe write a novel.”
I pointed to her nonbinary companion who was rocking a beautifully cut black pantsuit. “Jono’s headed for Vietnam with their partner. They’re going into the silk business together.”
“I love Jono’s evening stuff. All that glitter and embellishment. Of course, I couldn’t squeeze my big toe into any of those dresses, but they’re beautiful enough to hang on the wall as art.”
“It’d probably be cheaper to buy yourself an actual painting,” I said. “You could get an Anibale Carracci work on paper for around twelve thousand dollars.”
Jessi contemplated that for a second. “I used to work in a museum back home. There were original William Blake watercolors hanging on my office walls. Illustrations from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I thought that was so cool.”
“That would have been cool,” I agreed.
“Who’s that?” Jerri asked, pointing to a handsome guy wearing an expensive suit but no tie.
I must have grimaced. “That’s Jerrold. With a J. He’s my stepfather’s brother.”
“He’s cute.”
“He’s a perv.”
“I’m over eighteen.”
“Then go for it,” I said.
She gave him another look. He was drinking champagne straight from the bottle while a giggly blonde woman batted her eyelashes admiringly. “Maybe later.”
“Don’t let me cramp your style.”
‘I really hate parties,” she said. “I’d much rather be home watching Christmas movies with my cat.”
“Jessi,” a stylish Asian woman practically screamed with feigned delight as she spun into our orbit. “There you are.”
I excused myself as the air kisses started. Jessi gave me a wry smile as she allowed herself to be dragged away.
I am never giving a Christmas party, I said to myself. And suddenly I felt like I was going to scream if I had to spend one more second in that smoky, noisy living room. I went back to my room to fetch a sweater and found two people I didn’t know having sex on my bed. The guy on top looked up as I entered and asked, “Join us?”
“No thanks,” I said and backed out of the room.
FML.
Chapter 5
It was cold up on the roof but I was so overheated that I knew it would take awhile for me to even notice the chill.
I’d been going up to the roof ever since I’d discovered the access door was left unlocked about two days after we moved in. I was younger than Tyler then, and still mourning the breakup of my family. I’d blamed my mom for my father leaving, not realizing until later that it was all him.
Well, maybe not all him but he was the main instigator.
The apartment was large, but it still felt like there was no place I could call my own, nowhere I could go to get away from my mother or even my own thoughts.
I loved the view from the roof, the lights of the city spilled across the night like my own personal jewelry box. It was hardly ever quiet, and I liked knowing that down below me the city was going on with its life.
You would have thought that would have made me feel lonelier, but it didn’t.
It was like the city saying, “We’re here if you need us, but take all the time you need.”
But it wasn’t time I needed. It was…space.
That’s why I was so excited about going to college out of state. I’d skipped a grade in elementary school, so I’d only be seventeen when I started my freshman year. My mother had tried to talk me into a “gap year” but I’d told her honestly that if I did that, I’d never go back to school. I wanted to start my life now and waiting for another year just because I was younger seemed crazy.
And it wasn’t like I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I liked art, but unless I got a job in a museum or an art gallery, it didn’t make much sense for me to study art history.
I liked reading, but I didn’t want to be an English teacher. My mother had pushed me to enter the competitive “Instagram influencer” ranks but I don’t have the killer instinct or the self-absorption necessary.
I envied Sloan for knowing who and what she was and where she was going. She’d skipped the same year I had and it felt like she’d had a plan even back then.
I didn’t love anything as much as she loved videogames.
Or rather, I loved too many things to choose just one.
It was kind of overwhelming.
I heard the guy before I saw him but I did not hear the sound of the access door closing behind him. That was weird because it was a solid door and it always made kind of a “thunking” noise.
“Hello,” he said as he came around the big air conditioning unit and saw me. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
“It’s your roof too,” I said, figuring he lived somewhere in the building and had come up for the same reason I had, to get a little distance between him and his family.
“Do you mind if I join you?” he asked and I said no, so he sat down next to me.
That told me he wasn’t afraid of heights and also that he was just a little bit rec
kless. I was always careful when I sat on the edge of the roof. It was a wide ledge, but if I got dizzy or slipped, it would be bad.
No one had ever fallen—or jumped—from the roof and I was glad for that because the management would have locked it up.
“I’m Rob,” he offered.
“Kennedy,” I said. “No relation.”
He’d nodded at that. “I met Joe Kennedy a few times,” he said. “Tough old bastard.”
I gave Rob the side-eye. He didn’t look much older than me and Joseph Kennedy, Sr. had died fifty-some years ago.
“Were you a bootlegger too?” I said, to humor him.
“No,” he said. “My crimes were less socially acceptable.”
“You mean they were more criminal?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Is this guy an actor? Getting a little too deep into his character?
“Getting rich isn’t a crime in the United States,” he said. “Only getting caught.”
“That’s remarkably cynical,” I said, but I was intrigued. This was the first conversation I’d had in a long time where I didn’t know exactly what the other person was going to say. Half the convos at school were about some show people were watching or some song people were listening to or some celebrity who’d gotten in trouble. Even Sloane’s conversations could be predictable sometimes.
And hardly anybody read.
“Who’s your favorite writer?” I asked abruptly.
He looked surprised. “It depends,” he said, “on what kind of book. I like the novels of Haruki Murakami and Toni Morrison. I like the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Carl Sandburg.”
“The fog comes in on little cat feet,” I quoted.
“Yes,” he said, and seemed delighted I knew the verse. “I like reading about history and science and art.”
“What’s the most interesting factoid you know about an artist?”
He thought for a minute. “Gustave Klimt died of the Spanish flu.”
Holidays Bite: A Limited Edition Collection of Holiday Vampire Tales Page 16