It had occurred to Nick on the way back from the restaurant that Betty wouldn't be fitting into the front seat of the 'Vette for much longer—as it was, he had to help haul her out. Don't worry, honey, he reassured the car, I'm never trading you in on a station wagon.
"Want to come in?" she asked him, as he extracted her. "Bound to be something on HBO."
"Sure. Just let me check my messages first." He gave her his arm and she leaned on him as they mounted the porch steps. She was no lightweight, either: Betty was enormous approaching eight months—hadn't seen her feet since the Fourth of July.
Inside, she hauled herself upstairs to pee—again—while Nick checked his messages from the kitchen phone. Saturday was one of January's hunting nights, and Nick encouraged her to keep in touch, so he could give her some positive reinforcement in return for her adherence to non-lethal methods of blood harvesting. She also got two hundred bucks a week from him—between his two women, even Nick's generous resources were strained.
"So what's on the tube?" asked Betty upon her return. She had changed into a voluminous, wildly patterned maternity nightgown that was only a few ruffles short of a full Bozo, and settled its folds around her as she lowered herself to the Louis Wept sofa.
"Green Card."
"Great—I just love that Gerard Depardieu—and don't try to tell me he's gay."
"A flamer," shrugged Nick. He had heard nothing of the sort about the rugged actor, but he couldn't resist tweaking Betty. Besides, the guy was French, and in the theater, so how bad could the odds have been?
But he found himself enjoying the movie anyway—in the old days, he told Betty, "I always had a secret thing for homely straight men. In fact, the only men I preferred to homely straights were handsome straights, handsome gays, and homely gays, in that order."
He expected a laugh, but when he looked over there was an expression of alarm on her face. His eye followed her gaze down to the lap of her clowny maternity nightgown. It was wrinkled from having been tucked between her thighs, but he could see the blood spot as she tugged it free: it was dark red, glistening, the size of a silver dollar, and spreading.
They'd called an ambulance, rather than risk stuffing Betty into the 'Vette again. And against all odds, the paramedics were at the parsonage in minutes, and were both compassionate and competent. Nick followed the ambulance to the county hospital in Martinez, where he was surprised at the small-town feeling of the place—no gunshot victims lying around bleeding, no junkies bouncing off the walls.
The doctor catching in the ER that evening was a Ghanaian intern with blue-black skin and a singsong accent; his initial diagnosis of placenta previa was both unusual and interesting enough to draw the attention of the OB resident, who confirmed it with an ultrasound.
"Here, see this blob down here?" The resident, a thirtyish woman with an air of frazzled resignation, pointed to the ultrasound screen. Betty squinted from the bed in the OB examining room; Nick leaned over her for a closer look. "That's the placenta, and it's slipped down here, covering the uterine—"
Betty interrupted. "It's blocking the way out, isn't it?"
"It surely is."
"So what do we do?"
"Well, the bleeding has stopped. You're how far along?" She thumbed through the chart. "About eight months?"
"Thirty-three weeks exactly—it was an artificial insemination."
"Then we wait. And at the first sign of a contraction, or if you start spotting again, or after you come to term, whichever comes first, we go in for a C-section."
"Will I be waiting at home?"
"Only if you live within thirty minutes of the hospital, have no major steps to climb, and can manage complete bed rest—potty breaks only."
"No problem," said Betty miserably, as the nurse began removing the fetal monitor. "The servants will be happy to work overtime."
"We can do it," Nick reminded her. "Set you up downstairs with a hospital bed—I'll have a line and a modem put in, and I can move in and work, and take shifts with the church ladies—be a lot cheaper than three weeks in here, and a lot more fun—"
"Doctor B.," the nurse interrupted, pointing to the bedding—she'd been changing the sterile towel under Betty, but the clean white towel she'd slipped underneath was soaked with dark red blood when she pulled it out.
"Lovely," said the doctor. She took a second to arrange her face, then smiled down at Betty. "What do you say, Mom? Ready for an eight-month Leo?"
"We were sort of counting on a Virgo," joked Betty bravely, reaching up to squeeze the hand Nick had placed on her shoulder.
"Yeah, but look on the bright side," suggested Nick.
"Which bright side would that be?" she managed.
"No more goddamn Lamaze classes."
At Betty's request, Nick donned mask and gown and sat beside her in the chilly operating room through it all: the administering of the anesthesia; the initial scalpel slit, with its thread of blood quickly sponged away; more cutting and stanching; Doctor B.'s hands wrist-deep in Betty; the baby lifted casually into the air.
Nick checked the clock on the wall—his own watch was under the long sleeve of the gown, and he didn't know if he was allowed to pull it back—and committed the time, 1:52 a.m., to memory. Betty had made it clear that it was his responsibility to note the precise time of birth for the baby's chart.
After the baby had been de-corded, he was whisked away to the side of the operating room, vacuumed and Apgar-ed and found to be pretty high on the scale, considering his truncated engagement in the womb. They'd held him up briefly for Nick to see while they were stitching Betty up: his head was round as Swee' Pea's, his features as blank and untroubled.
Later, in the neonatal intensive care unit, Nick had the baby all to himself until Betty came out of the anesthesia. What surprised him more than anything else, as he held his son, was the preemie's size.
Not that he was tiny—just the opposite: when Nick held him, the child who barely rilled both his hands somehow managed to take up his entire field of vision. He was enormous, he was the most momentous thing his father had ever encountered. Nick then had only a brief moment to understand something that had always puzzled him—the peculiar shortsightedness, the tunnel vision that parenthood always seemed to inspire—before it sucked him under too.
After that it was too late, the understanding passed. He was a parent himself now: shortsighted, tunnel-visioned, obsessed.
Nick made a few phone calls while Betty and the as-yet-unnamed baby slept—most of them to the church ladies, and the aunt and uncle back in Williamsport who, along with their children, her two cousins, were Betty's only living relatives. Then he called his own number—one message. He played it back: Hi Nick. It's like, around one. It worked, Nick! I did the Oops Ring and it worked like a charm.
He checked his watch—4 A.M. Too late to call anybody but a using vampire. Still, congratulations were in order. The Oops Ring technique was tricky, involving a doctored ring with a sharp edge—you not only had to make it look like an accident when you severed your donor's vein, but you had to keep the blood flowing while appearing to try to stem the bleeding, and catch the blood while keeping your donor from panicking. If January could manage it, her social skills had advanced indeed.
She answered on the first ring, and accepted his acclamation with whispered thanks.
"I take it your donor is still there?"
"Sleeping like a baby," January whispered. "She's never been laid so good in her life."
"I can imagine," replied Nick, bursting to tell her his own good news. But then it dawned on him that there was now one more ball in the air, that his two-woman juggling act had now turned into one of those brain-teaser puzzles about how to get the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage across the river. So instead, he told her that he had been called out of town on a emergency job, gave her a line about a company in Portland whose system had contracted a virus. "I'll be back by Wednesday at the latest."
She sounded disappointe
d. "I haven't seen you all week, Nick."
"I promise, we'll get together as soon as I get back. And Jan? Congrats again on the Oops Ring—I'm so proud of you."
But his hand was shaking as he hung up the phone, and he cursed himself for a fool. Somehow, despite the absolute inevitability of this moment, until now he'd never quite put it all together. His charge, January, a vampire who craved baby-blood. And a baby, full of baby-blood. Vampire, baby; vampire, baby; vampire, baby…
What kind of an idiot would let a situation like that sneak up on him?
Wait a minute: sneak?. The alarums had been blaring for months—he remembered his conversation with himself back in June. Whatever it took, he'd promised himself back then.
Vampire, baby; vampire, baby; vampire, baby.
Now he renewed the promise: somehow, whatever the threat, he would do whatever it took to protect his son. Whatever the hell his name was.
FOUR
For Selene, waking up a few hours before sunset at Whistler Manor gave her the same sense of spaciousness, of time and peace and opportunity, as waking up at four in the morning back home in Bolinas.
The light through the pine grove was a sere green-gold, somehow crisp and hazy at the same time. Summer in the High Sierra always carried a foreshadowing of autumn. Selene sat up in bed to throw her first runes of the day. But the bones' message—endings and beginnings, death and birth—was the same message they'd given her last Yule. It was a wintry message, easier to interpret in December than on the seventh of August.
She thought about consulting the tarot, then decided not to—the runes could be awfully jealous. And in any case, she'd never found foreknowledge to be of much practical use. It was like watching Psycho—you could yell to Janet Leigh all you wanted, but she'd never hear you with the shower running.
Selene decided to cast a protective spell anyway, just in case, asking the Norns—the Teutonic Fates—to extend their protection to all those under Selene's protection.
But only if such a thing could be done without altering Destiny—this was the most she was allowed to ask for. Sometimes being a witch wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Spell cast, she showered, put on a Year of Tibet T-shirt and her baggy khaki shorts over her bathing suit, and went down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. The kitchen was cool and dark, full of echoes; metal surfaces glinted in the dusky light.
After tea, Selene went for a dip in the lake, which involved a short hike across hard-packed sand and then a long wade to reach water deep enough to bathe in. When she returned to the Manor, Catherine was in the kitchen, wearing an apron over her corduroy bathrobe, with her red hair pinned up in a careless bun. Barefoot, pink-cheeked, and now that she'd had her coffee, pleased with the world.
"Sherman must have come up last night," Selene remarked. Catherine only glowed like that after a night with her furry vampire husband.
"Around four."
"No clients?"
"He's lightproofed his study and changed his schedule around. Now he sees clients straight through from nine in the morning to ten at night, Tuesday through Thursday. Stoned on blood the whole time, of course—he says it makes him a lot more empathetic."
"Which gives him four-day weekends up here," Selene noted with an impish grin. "So how are you holding up?"
"Chafed, but still game."
Later, as she helped Catherine prepare the breakfast cart, Selene mentioned the runes she'd thrown upon awakening. "I've never been as good at runes as I wanted to be," she complained. "Maybe it's because I'm half German."
"What's the other half?" Catherine inquired.
"Welsh."
"That's some help. But I'm all Irish, and I'm pretty sure that half the time I throw the bones, they're only mind-fucking with me, anyway." Catherine looked down at the tray. "Can you think of anything else that will tempt Lourdes?"
Selene looked over the cart. "Dearie, anybody who can't find a thousand-calorie nosh here, isn't trying."
After breakfast Catherine returned to the kitchen and brought her garnishing tools out from their hiding place behind the spice cupboard (she had to keep them away from the vampires—it wasn't the blood that dulled them, but the skin) to prepare an antipasto platter for the men's sunset ritual, while Selene stayed behind to give Lourdes another in a series of lessons on Wicca.
The lessons—which Whistler knew nothing about, since neither woman was exactly sure how a vampire witch would fit into the scheme of things—had been going on for over a month. This evening they were discussing snakes.
Wicca did not worship snakes, Selene explained, nor have them for familiars. "The only connection is medicinal—poisonous reptiles are quite useful—shamans have employed them for ages. There's even rumored to be a potion called mithradite, made of all the different snake venoms, that antidotes any poison."
"No shit?"
"It's probably mythical. But you can do a lot with reptile potions as backup spells. Amphibians, on the other hand, frogs and toads and such, are definitely overrated."
"What do you mean, backup spells?"
"You always have to back up spells. Suppose you put a curse of impotence on a man. In general, those are self-fulfilling: you tell a man he's going to be impotent, and he'll pretty much take care of the rest."
"Except vampires," Lourdes pointed out.
"God bless 'em," muttered Nanny Parish, who was nursing Plum Rose in the rocking chair.
Selene continued. "But if it doesn't work, there are quite a few substances that will induce impotence."
"How many?" Lourdes wanted to know.
"A lot more than there are to induce erections, I can tell you that," said Selene, and the other women laughed.
"So putting a spell on somebody, it's not just, like you chant the magic words or something?"
"We should be so lucky, dearie. Magic words and three bucks'll get you across the Golden Gate Bridge on a weeken—why, good evening, Jamey," she said lightly as Whistler popped his disheveled head into the room.
"Good evening, ladies." He was wearing black satin pajamas. "Actually, I was looking for Catherine—she's promised Sherman and myself an antipasto platter to go along with our martinis."
"Kitchen."
"Cheer-o." He closed the door, then opened it again. "Anyone care to join us for a little casino action later? I woke up feeling lucky this evening."
There was a muffled snicker from Nanny Parish in the rocker.
"What occasioned that, Nanny?" asked Whistler.
"Mister Whistler, y'already de luckiest mon in de world. You get any luckier, de rest of us gon' to flat give up." She chuckled, and turned back to her baby. "Yes mon, flat give up."
And suddenly he'd darted back into the room, and laid a wet sloppy kiss on Nanny's cheek. But even that wasn't enough to vent all the joy burbling up inside him—he dropped to his knees and threw his arms around her and the placid Plum Rose, and hugged as much of the two of them as his arms could encompass. "You're absolutely right, Nanny Parish," he declared simply, when he felt he could speak. "I am the luckiest man in the world. Thanks for reminding me."
FIVE
Nick might not have been the luckiest man in the world that first week in August, but he was certainly one of the busiest, what with tripping back and forth to the hospital to visit Betty and little Chicken Legs (which was what they were currently calling the still unnamed Baby Boy Santos-Shoemaker) and driving around the Bay Area meeting with potential clients: the hospital bills were inconceivable, and Nick, who had once been able to pick and choose his clients, had let the word go out that he was now available to all comers.
Of course, with all those balls in the air, one of them was bound to fall sooner or later: he'd just plain forgotten his promised meeting with January on the Wednesday after C.L.'s birth. But she'd seemed to be okay about it when he returned her call on Thursday evening, and they had rescheduled for Friday night, the seventh—he was going to pick her up at her hotel and take her out t
o dinner.
But he'd had a hidden agenda as well: he planned to sound her out about reducing her allowance. He wouldn't tell her anything about Betty or the baby, of course—just plead a temporary case of the shorts, see how it went.
Not well, as it turned out. Not well at all. She listened politely over the formica table at the International House of Burgers as he babbled on about extra expenses, and a downswing in business, and how he wasn't feeling exactly clean about bribing her, in effect, not to—
She didn't wait for him to finish. "Fuck you, Nick." She was wearing her amber blue-blockers, so he couldn't read her eyes, but her voice was shaking with emotion, and her hands—big hands, even for a rangy girl like January—had clenched so tightly around her Hula Burger that the pineapple slices were sliding out from under the bun. "I got expenses too—it isn't cheap, getting blood without killing people. You gotta stay clean, and dress nice, and buy coffee for 'em sometimes."
"But don't you feel better about yourself?" Nick's Greek burger—feta cheese, sliced olives, and crumbled bacon—lay untouched before him.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Come on, you know you do."
"Okay I do. But I also feel better about a refrigerator and a cable TV, so if you're kissing me off, Nick, you might as well tell me now, so I can start tricking or something before my money runs out."
"I'm not kissing you off as a friend, Jan—"
She interrupted him again. "A friend who's gonna let me go out tricking—I can get lots of friends like that."
"I don't want to see you tricking—it's just like I said, it's not feeling clean to me anymore. How about if I give you a hundred a week for a while, while you get back on your feet?"
January put down her burger, wiped her hands on the tablecloth just to fuck with the world, found her thermos in the roomy pocket of the coat draped over the back of her chair—a moss green man's overcoat she'd bought at a Telegraph thrift shop—and took a swig. It was either that, or kill him across the table.
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