The father hurried his family on down the street.
“Nice,” Jody said. “Way to stay under the radar.”
“Well, you know, I like to stay sharp,” Tommy said. Because he was nineteen and had only started having sex regularly since he met Jody, he still thought he had some sort of secret knowledge that was unavailable to other people. How can they possibly be thinking about anything else? he thought in the private part of his mind.
“I’ll bet it smells like peppermint,” Tommy said.
“What?”
“Elf sex.”
“Would you please put me down.”
“Okay, but don’t hurt the huge cat guy.”
“I’m fine. I’ll meet you at the drugstore in five minutes. This had better work.”
“Five minutes,” Tommy said. “Cinnamon. Maybe it smells like cinnamon.”
The pale couple stalked the aisles of the Walgreens, having a great time dismissing the crass accoutrements of bourgeois American life, and generally scoffing at all the conventions of traditional culture. They were elite, after all. Special. Chosen—if you will—if only by the nature of their heightened sensitivities and superior sensibilities. They both claimed the ability to look past the facade put on by most people, and see the very depths of the human soul. Strange, then, that they didn’t see it coming when the skinny guy in a flannel shirt popped around the corner in front of them.
“Let’s ask these guys,” Flannel said. “They look like heroin addicts.”
Jared White Wolf and Abby Normal backpedaled from the eyeliner display where they’d been looking for something hypoallergenic. Abby’s eyes had been watering all night, causing her makeup to run and giving her more of a sad-clown-of-life look than she was going for.
Jared hid behind Abby, just a little, which was awk-ward, since he was nearly a foot taller than she. The guy in flannel was joined by a beautiful, pale redhead, carrying an armload of toiletries. What amazing hair, Abby thought, looking at the long red tresses. I’d give anything for hair like that.
“Tommy, leave these poor people alone,” said the redhead.
“No, wait.” Flannel turned to Abby and smiled. “Do you guys know where they keep the syringes?”
Abby looked at Jared, who looked at the guy in flannel. “Well, you can’t just buy them,” Jared said. He was fiddling with the leather straps on his bondage pants, looking coy. Abby slapped his hand.
“You need a prescription to buy syringes,” Abby said.
“Do you really think I look like a heroin addict?” Jared threw his bangs out of his face dramatically. His head was shaved except for his bangs, which reached to his chin, specifically so he could throw them out of his face dramatically. “I was, like, thinking that maybe I should bulk up. You know, eat and stuff, but—”
“Well, thanks,” said Flannel Shirt. The redhead moved off down the aisle. “I was going to try some heroin, but if you can’t buy needles, well, there you go. See you guys. Nice shirt, by the way.”
Abby looked down at her T-shirt, black, of course, with the image of a poet taken from a nineteenth-century etching. “Like you even know who it is.”
“‘She walks in beauty, like the night,’” quoted the flannel-shirt guy. He winked at her, then grinned. “Byron’s a hero of mine. See ya.”
He turned and started to walk away. Abby reached out and snagged his sleeve. “Hey, there are needle exchange programs all over town. They’re listed in the Bay Guardian.”
“Thanks,” said flannel. He turned and Abby grabbed him again.
“We’re going to be at the Glas Kat. There’s a Goth club to night. Five-hundred block of Fourth Street. I know a dealer there. You know, for your heroin.”
The flannel-shirt guy nodded, and looked at Byron’s picture on her shirt again, then at her face. Fucksocks. He’s so looking at my streaking eye makeup.
“Thanks, milady,” said Flannel Shirt. And he was gone, off over the dark moors of the tampon aisle.
“What was that about?” whined Jared. “He’s so, so Happy Days.” Jared White Wolf spent a lot of time watching Nick at Nite when he wasn’t brooding or fussing with his appearance.
Abby walked into the flap of Jared’s black duster and pounded his slight chest with her palms. “Didn’t you see. Didn’t you see?”
“What, you acting like a complete ho?”
“He had fangs,” Abby said.
“Well, so do I,” Jared said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pair of perfect, dentistry-quality vampire fangs. “Duh, everybody does.”
“Yeah, but his grew! I saw them. Let’s go,” Abby said, pulling Jared White Wolf by his great bat-wing lapels. “I have to change into something hot before we go to the club.”
“Wait, I want to get some Halls. My throat is raw from all the cloves we smoked last night.”
“Hurry.” The buckles of Abby’s black platform boots jangled as she dragged her friend past the lipsticks and hair products before he could get interested.
“Okay,” said Jared, “but if I don’t meet a cute guy tonight, you have to stay up all night and hold me while I cry.”
You should try black lipstick sometime,” Tommy said to Jody as they approached their building, their arms loaded with packages. He was still thinking about the kids at the drugstore. It was the first time since tenth grade that he’d used his knowledge of Romantic poetry. For a while he’d tried molding himself into the tragic Romantic hero, brooding and staring clench-jawed off into space as he composed dark verse in his head. But it turned out that trying to appear tragic in Incontinence, Indiana, was redundant, and his mother kept shouting at him and making him forget his rhymes. “Tommy, if you keep grinding your teeth like that, they’ll wear away and you’ll have to have dentures like Aunt Ester.” Tommy only wished his beard was as heavy as Aunt Ester’s—then he could stare out over the moors while he stroked it pensively.
“Yeah,” Jody said, “because I need to make it more obvious that I’m an undead creature that feeds on the blood of the living.”
“You make it sound so sordid.”
“No, I meant it in a nice way.”
“Oh.”
“Because it’s not like people wouldn’t understand if they found out we were vampires, because we slipped up and, oh, I don’t know, UNSHEATHED OUR FANGS IN THE FUCKING DRUGSTORE!”
Tommy almost dropped his packages. She hadn’t said a word about that all night. He’d hoped she hadn’t noticed. “It was an accident.”
“You called that girl ‘milady.’”
“She was impressed with my Byron.”
“Yeah, well, your Byron was probably sticking out a little, too, wasn’t he?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“You drooled.” Jody paused at their security door and dug into her jacket for her key.
Tommy stepped around her. “I’m still new at this. I think I’m doing pretty well. My ghastly pallor obviously impressed the lady at the needle exchange.” He reached into his bag and fanned out a handful of sterile-wrapped and capped syringes.
“Congratulations, you can now pass as an HIV-positive heroin addict.”
“Très chic.” He grinned like he imagined a sexy Italian man-whore might.
“Who drools in public,” Jody said.
Damn, she’s immune to my sexy Italian man-whore grin, Tommy thought. He said, “Be nice, I’m new. My lips don’t fit together right when my fangs are out.”
She turned the key and swung the door open. There, passed out on the landing, was William the huge cat guy and sleeping on his chest, Chet the huge cat.
“I told you it would work,” Tommy said.
Jody stepped into the stairwell and closed the door behind her. “You go first.”
Fifteen minutes later, as he placed five syringes full of blood in their refrigerator, Tommy said, “This vampire thing is going to be great.”
He’d had a moment when he’d bitten William—not just getting over the idea of being t
hat close someone who smelled that nasty, but also being close to another man period. But after cleaning William’s neck with an alcohol swab they’d gotten from the drugstore, and consoling himself that most literary vampires seemed sexually ambivalent anyway, the blood hunger pushed him through.
He was feeling more relaxed, now that they had the food problem solved—for a while, anyway. If his friends didn’t kill them in the next couple of days, he might even enjoy life as a vampire. Then he turned to Jody and frowned. “But I can’t help but think that it may be wrong, taking advantage of a homeless alcoholic.”
“We could just hunt and kill people,” Jody said cheerfully. She had a little crust of William’s blood in the corner of her mouth. Tommy licked his thumb and wiped it away.
“We did give him a nice sweater for his huge shaved cat,” Tommy said.
“I loved that sweater,” Jody said. “And we are giving him a warm landing to sleep on,” she added, diving onto Tommy’s rationalization dog pile.
“And if we only take a little bit each day, he’ll actually feel better. I know I did.”
“And we won’t become alcoholics ourselves.”
“How are you feeling, by the way?” Tommy said.
“Better. Hair of the dog. You?”
“Two-beer buzz, max. I’ll be fine. You want to try the experiment?”
Jody checked her watch. “No time. We’ll do it tomorrow night.”
“Right. So, on to the list. Looks like hot monkey love.”
“Tommy, we need to find a daytime person to help us. We have to move out of this place.”
“I’ve been thinking about Alaska.”
“Okay, good for you, but we still need to find a place to live where the Animals and Inspector Rivera can’t find us.”
“No, I’m thinking we should move to Alaska. For one thing, in the winter, it’s dark for like twenty hours a day, so we’d have plenty of time. And I read somewhere that Eskimos put their old people out on the ice when they are ready to die. It would be like people were leaving snacks out for us.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Eskimo Pies?” He grinned.
Jody put her hand on her hip and looked at him, her mouth hanging open a little, as if she was waiting for something more. When it didn’t come, she said, “Okay then, I’m going to change.”
“Into a wolf?”
“Clothes, cadaver breath.”
“I didn’t know. I thought maybe you’d learned.”
Tommy thought Alaska was a great idea. Just because she was a few years older, she always acted like his ideas were stupid. “The thing with William worked,” he said defensively as he put away the supplies they’d bought at the drugstore.
“That was a good idea,” Jody said from inside the closet.
Now what? “Well, Alaska isn’t a bad idea.”
“Tommy, there’s like nine people in all of Alaska. We’ll stand out, don’t you think?”
“No, everyone is pale there. They don’t have sun for most of the year.”
She came out of the closet wearing her little black cocktail dress and her strappy come-fuck-me pumps. “I’m ready,” she said.
“Wow,” Tommy said. He’d forgotten what they were talking about.
“You think the Ferrari-red lipstick would be too much?”
“No, I love the Ferrari-red lipstick on you.” Hot, sweet monkey love, he thought. This was exactly why he loved her. In the midst of all of the pressure, the danger, really—she still took time to think of his feelings.
She lifted her breasts until they threatened to spill out of the plunging neckline of the dress. “Too much?”
“Perfect,” Tommy said, walking toward her with his hands out. “Gimme.”
She breezed past him into the bathroom. “Not for you. I need to get going.”
“No, no, no,” Tommy said. “Hot monkey love.”
While Tommy watched from the doorway, Jody applied the Ferrari-red lipstick, checked it, then frowned and wiped it off, then grabbed a different tube off the vanity. “When I get back.”
“Where?” Tommy said. Sexual frustration had reduced him to single syllables.
She turned to him with the new coat of maroon lipstick. “To get your minion.”
“Not like that, you’re not,” Tommy said.
“This is how it works, Tommy. This is how I got you.”
“Nuh-uh, you weren’t wearing that when I met you.”
“No, but the reason you pursued me is because you were interested in me sexually, wasn’t it?”
“Well, that’s how it started, but it’s more than that now.” And it was more, but that was no reason to leave him here all aroused and stuff.
She walked over to him and put her arms around him. He let his hands slip inside the low back of her dress. His pants were getting tight and he could feel the pressure of his fangs coming out.
“When I get back,” she said. “I promise. You’re my guy, Tommy. I picked you as my guy, forever. I’m going to find someone to help us move and do things for us in the daytime.”
“They’re just going to want to bone you, and when you don’t do them, they’ll turn on you.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Of course they will. Look at you.”
“I’ll figure it out, okay. I don’t know how else to go about it.”
“We could put an ad on Craig’s List.” (Craig’s List was a classified Web site that had started in the Bay Area and was now the first place people checked for jobs, apartments, or nearly everything.)
“We’re not putting an ad on Craig’s List. Look, Tommy, we have more things to do than we have time. You can clean the loft and go get the laundry done and I’ll get us an onion.”
“Minion,” he corrected.
“What ever. I love you,” she said.
Bitch! He was vanquished. Unfair. “I love you, too.”
“I’ll take one of the disposable cell phones you bought. You can call me anytime.”
“They’re not even activated yet.”
“Well, get on that, buddy. The sooner I get out there and find someone, the sooner I can get back here for some hot monkey love.”
She has absolutely no sense of ethics, he thought. She’s a monster. And yet, there she is, only a few dress straps from being naked.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t step on the huge cat on the way out.”
Jody had only been gone twenty minutes before Tommy decided that cleaning and laundry sucked and that he could find a minion as well as she could, even if he didn’t look as hot in a little black dress. He was careful not to wake Chet and William on his way out.
8
She Walks in Beauty
Jody moved down Columbus Avenue with long, runway-model strides, feeling the windblown fog brush by her like the chill ghosts of rejected suitors. What she could never teach Tommy, what she could never really share with him, was what it felt like to move from being a victim—afraid of attack, the shadow around the corner, the footsteps behind—to being the hunter. It wasn’t the stalking or the rush of taking down prey—Tommy would understand that. It was walking down a dark street, late at night, knowing that you were the most powerful creature there, that there was absolutely nothing, no one, that could fuck with you. Until she had been changed and had stalked the city as a vampire, she never realized that virtually every moment she had been there as a woman, she had been a little bit afraid. A man would never understand. That was the reason for the dress and the shoes—not to attract a minion, but to throw her sexuality out there on display, dare some underevolved male to make the mistake of seeing her as a victim. Truth be told, although it had come down to confrontation only once, and then she’d been wearing a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, Jody enjoyed kicking ass. She also enjoyed—every bit as much—just knowing that she could. It was her secret.
Without fear, the City was a great sensual carnival. There was no danger in anything she experienced, no anxiety. Red was red, yello
w didn’t mean caution, smoke didn’t mean fire, and the mumbling of the four Chinese guys standing by their car just around the corner was just the click and twang of empty swinging dick talk. She could hear their hearts speed up when they saw her, could smell sweat and garlic and gun oil coming off them. She’d learned the smell of fear and imminent violence, too, of sexual arousal and surrender, although she’d have been hard-pressed to describe any of that. It was just there. Like color.
You know…
Try to describe blue.
Without mentioning blue.
See?
There weren’t a lot of people out on the street at this time of night, but there were a few, spread up the length of Columbus: barhoppers, late diners just wrapping it up, college boys heading down to the strip clubs on Broadway, the exodus from Cobb’s Comedy Club up the street, people giddy and so into the rhythm of laughing that they found one another and everything they saw hilarious—all of them vibrant, wearing auras of healthy pink life, trailing heat and perfume and cigarette smoke and gas held through long dinners. Witnesses.
The Chinese guys weren’t harmless, by any means, but she didn’t think they’d attack her, and she felt a twinge of regret. One of them, the one with the gun, yelled something at her in Cantonese—something sleazy and insulting, she could tell by the tone. She spun as she walked, smiled her biggest red carpet smile, and without breaking stride, said, “Hey, nano-dick, go fuck yourself!”
There was a lot of bluster and shuffle, the smart one, the one with fear coming off him, held his friend Nano-dick back, thus saving his life. She must be a cop, or just crazy. Something’s wrong. They clustered around their tricked-out Honda and huffed out great breaths of testosterone and frustration. Jody grinned, and detoured up a side street, away from traffic.
“My night,” she said to herself. “Mine.”
Now off the main drag, she saw only a single old man shuffling ahead of her. His life aura looked like a burned-out bulb, a spot of dark gray around him. He walked stooped over, with a dogged determination, as if he knew that if he stopped, he would never start again. From what she could tell, he never would. He wore baggy, wide-wale corduroys that made the sound of rodents nesting when he walked. A wisp of breeze off the Bay brought Jody the acrid smell of failing organs, of stale tobacco, of despair, of a deep, rotting sickness, and she felt the elation leave her.
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