He interrupted. "She didn't have to. I've known Selene for nearly thirty years, and I'm as familiar with her tricks as she is with mine." Then he took Lourdes's chin in his long fingers, and turned her face towards him. "Listen to me, my darling," he said, staring deeply into her dark eyes. She remembered the look from her earliest nights with him—as if he were seeing straight through to his upside-down image across her retina.
"Lourdes, I've never cared for another woman as deeply as I care for you. In fact, if what I feel for you and Cora is love, then I've never truly loved anyone before. With one exception."
"Who?" It came out a little more sharply than Lourdes had intended.
"Myself. I have always had a deep and passionate regard and an abiding respect for myself. So let there be no more underestimating of your Whistler: the extent to which I am currently letting you manage my life is a measure of your competence at the task, and of my intelligence and good judgment; not a measure of your power over me, or of my weakness or lovesickness.
"You see, my darling, in a way you are proof of a pet theory of mine, that into every family, noble or pauper, there are born those fit only to rule, and those fit only to be ruled. And while being born into the right family for one's temperament is no guarantee of happiness, being born into the wrong one is a dead lock on unhappiness. Videlicet poor Prince Charles on one end of the spectrum, videlicet Lourdes Perez Whistler on the other."
"Viddie what's it? And let go my head."
"Sorry. Videlicet. Usually abbreviated viz. By way of example. In your case, I was referring to the young woman who was once known as the worst receptionist in the history of the West County Blood Bank—"
"Hey—"
"Now now, just ask Beverly. And you know she adores you. As I was saying, the worst receptionist in history is the most effective administrator that Whistler Manor, or for that matter Whistler himself, if I may lapse into the third person, has ever known."
"Thank you, Jamey," Lourdes replied with a seated curtsey, and at least a measure of sincerity, if not abashment. "I give you my word of honor, I will never make that mistake again."
"Which mistake—underestimating me, or letting me know you're underestimating me?"
"You are good, aren't you?" With a forefinger she teased his butch cut back into place. "Both."
He pulled her hand away, and kissed her deeply there in the padded window seat, with the lights of Stateline, Nevada, lightening the sky to the south through the open casement window. "There," he said a few minutes later—for that was how long the kiss had lasted. "That was the worst fight of our married life, and it wasn't so bad after all." Then—fake afterthought: "By the way, m'dear, I also know all about your Kegels and your salve from Nanny Parish—or rather, all that I care to know—and I want you to understand that the Creature and I will be honored to wait until you're ready for us."
She kissed him back tenderly. "You lying fuck."
He laughed his careful laugh. "Only about the Creature."
TWO
The trouble with having a mother who had died like Glory was that when she came to you in your dreams, even if she looked okay and you were glad to see her, sooner or later you'd remember, and then in the middle of the dream, even if she was hugging you or something, her face would swell up all dead and drowned and you'd pray you could wake up quick.
January awoke bathed in sweat at sunset on Saturday night, though she was sleeping naked under a thin blanket. The TV was still on from last night—this morning rather. She threw back the covers and crossed the room to the kitchenette area, knelt sleepily, and checked the fluid level in her thermos in the tiny refrigerator. Still pretty full—she would be hunting tonight, not for blood, but for money.
The wind was blowing hard that summer night down on the Avenue, and the fog was thick and cold, driving the regulars into the doorways and the bars. This worked out for January—otherwise it would have been impossible to find an empty corner on a Saturday night. Besides, as long as a vampire kept nipping at her thermos, she'd be warm enough, even in her cutoff jeans and ribbed poorboy.
She didn't have to nip too long—within ten minutes a white Buick had pulled up to her corner with the window rolled down. "Hey, Long-legs." A skank-faced guy with a bad comb-over leaned across the front seat. He was wearing a gray sport jacket with a windowpane check.
"Hey yourself."
"You workin'?"
"No, I'm standing out in the cold just to get my nipples hard."
"Well bring 'em on in here." The door opened; she slid in.
"Haven't seen you on the Ave before," he said, looking down at her thighs, as if by her limbs alone he would have recognized her.
"I'm fresh."
"I don't suppose you'd consider coming back to my place with me?" he asked, as he pulled out into traffic.
"Sure." On the Ave, it was considered a dangerous thing to do. But then, most hookers weren't vampires with a good jolt of blood in them—if he did turn hinky, she figured she could handle him.
His place wasn't much better than the Bierce—a second-floor walk-up studio over a futon shop in Albany, with a kitchenette hardly bigger than hers. She wandered over to the refrigerator and grabbed a can of Sprite.
"Here, let me get a glass for you."
He reached for the can; she pulled it away. "No, I'm fine, I like it out of the—"
But he had taken it. "I insist. Please. Go on into the other room, I'll be right in."
Odd usage, because of course there was no other room—just a stained white sofa bed over by the window, and a glass-topped coffee table bare except for a telephone. She knelt on the sofa with her back to the room, and looked out over the broad, quiet, small-town-looking street below.
He brought her soda in a Golden Gate Fields highball glass. She turned around on the couch and tucked her legs under her—they seemed ever so long and bare to her: she'd have picked herself up if she was a John. He sat down cross-legged on the brown and orange shag carpet, on the other side of the coffee table, and watched her eagerly as she drank.
She in turn watched him watching her over the rim of her glass, and noticed that his eyeballs had a funny way of vibrating horizontally—bzzt—every few seconds. He was definitely giving her a creepy feeling. "Hey, are you on something?"
A goofy grin spread across his face—then he shivered involuntarily, and his eyeballs vibrated again. "A little a this, a little a that—you'll see." Bzzt.
"What do you mean I'll see?" But she'd just remembered where she'd seen that little eyeball zap before: when Glory was on acid. The creepy feeling threatened to give way to panic. "Did you dose me, you fucker?"
Zzzz. "That's why you had to drink out of the glaaass," he drawled, as if to a slow child. "I could have put it on the rim of the can, but it's so hard to mea—"
He was interrupted by the coffee table—January had reached forward with vampiric speed, grabbed him by the back of his head, and slammed his face into the thick glass with her full strength. "You stupid bastard, you know what you just did?" She reached into her purse for her thermos—might as well top 'er off—unscrewed the cap and popped the plug, picked up his head by the long strands of his comb-over, and positioned the mouth of the thermos under his smashed nose.
"I said, do you know what you just did?" She helped him nod his head, or possibly nodded it for him—Weekend at Bernie's again, but not so funny this time, not with his profile as flat as the glass of the coffee table. "You just dosed a vampire." When her thermos was full she let go of his hair and the head clunked back down onto the coffee table. "That was real stupid." She sipped hot blood from the mouth of the thermos, lifted his head again to top off, sipped until there was room for the cork, then let the head fall again.
It flopped sideways this time, and as the blood pulsed in waves from his nose and mouth, it formed a river flowing towards the table's edge. January snatched the telephone and her glass of soda out of the way; the river of blood pooled in an invisible depression of
the glass, then resumed its course on the other side of the new pond while she watched, fascinated, to see whether it would eventually spill over and form a beautiful crimson waterfall in miniature.
THREE
The white building shaped like a Monopoly hotel on the corner of Jackson and Darling streets in El Cerrito had doubtless hosted christenings before, but the christening of a healthy-lunged (just ask his groggy parents) Leon Stanton Santos-Shoemaker on Sunday afternoon, the twentieth of September, had been its first in the guise of the Church of the Higher Power, and a great success by all accounts.
The attendance of virtually the entire congregation of the CHP, as well as a representative sampling from the various branches of the East Bay recovery community, had assured both a full house, and one hell of a potluck upon completion of a rather eclectic ceremony involving a few drops of water and a great flood of affirmations.
Afterwards (and say this for the twelve-steppers: they cleaned up after themselves without being told), Nick and Betty, still in their christening finery, a baggy white cotton suit for her, a blue Blass blazer, necktie, and tan slacks for him, drove the Oldsmobile up to Tilden Park with Leon's carseat in the back for his first ride on a merry-go-round (he spit up on Nick's blazer), a visit to the Little Farm, and a ride on the miniature railroad (he spit up again, this time on Betty's suit).
When they returned to a church cleaner than it had been before the party, they found the parsonage kitchen had been cleaned top to bottom as well. On the kitchen table rested a small package from Executive Couriers, with RUSH and SUNDAY DELIVERY and NIGHT DELIVERY and B.A.M.N. and similar sentiments stuck and stamped all over it.
But the space on the address form for the sender was blank. Betty opened the box to find an exquisite silver christening cup engraved with the letters L.S. "It's beautiful," she said.
"That ain't one of your mall gift-shop engraving jobs, either," agreed Nick, loosening his tie. "Is there a card?"
"Yes, but it's not signed." Betty read it aloud: " 'Tolstoy was wrong.' Now what could that mean?"
Nick took the card from her. "If I had to guess," he replied carefully, "I'd say it refers to the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: 'Happy families are all alike.'"
Betty looked the cup over again suspiciously. "And if you had to guess, who would you guess might have sent it?"
Nick shrugged—if there had ever been a window of opportunity for him to come clean about the string of evasions that had begun with him not telling her about bringing January back from Midsummer, and extended through Whistler's conciliatory phone call at the end of August, he had missed it—it was too late for the whole truth now.
But even if Nick hadn't recognized Whistler's careless handwriting immediately, he knew no one else who could afford a By Any Means Necessary delivery from Executive Couriers—it would have cost him practically as much again as the cup itself, and that cup so heavy with silver it weighed more than Leon's head. Nor was the subtlety of Tolstoy's sentiment as a gesture of peace lost on Nick: it had JMW stamped all over it.
"Someone who doesn't believe all happy families have to be alike, obviously," was Nick's eventual answer. "And you know what? I think I agree."
Not only had the parsonage kitchen been cleaned, but the refrigerator was stuffed with leftovers—dinner for days. Nick served Betty while she nursed Leon, then left for his own house, promising to return for the 1:00 a.m. to dawn shift.
It was only fair—and as close as he and Betty ever got to resembling a married couple: there would be a bottle of expressed breast-milk on the bedside table; Nick would change into a pair of cotton pajamas he kept at the parsonage, then slip into bed beside Betty, who was often so exhausted she wouldn't even wake up (or at least acknowledge that she had awakened). When he heard Leon howling (usually around two or three, though it could be earlier—never later), he would feed him a bottle, change him, and put him back to sleep before either crawling back in beside Betty or, if he needed to work that night, returning home.
And he might indeed have some Net prowling to do tonight, he realized when he arrived back at his own house a little before seven-thirty: someone had posted a new, and rather sophisticated, entry to a dummy bulletin board Nick had set up to entrap unwary crackers.
He hit the print screen button, then went into the bedroom to change out of his christening clothes. He had just returned to the office in a softball-style Detroit Tigers jersey and his oldest, softest Levi's—no underwear—and removed the printout from his LaserJet when the office phone rang.
"Santos."
"Nick, please pick up the—"
"It's me."
"—phone, please—oh. I thought it was your machine."
"No, it's me. Is this January?"
"Please help me, Nick. Just this one time, and I'll never ask you for anything again."
"What happened?"
"This guy dosed me on acid last night—I been hiding behind the couch all night."
"Are you still tripping?"
"No. I don't know. Maybe."
"Where are you?"
"I don't know. His apartment."
"Is he there?"
"I don't know. I think he's gone." Not sounding very much like a vampire at all—more like a frightened little girl. "Nick, I'm scared and I'm having a bummer. Please come get me. I don't have anybody else to call."
"I don't want to start—"
"Please, Nick? I'll give up blood again, I'll do anything you want, please just help me this once."
"All right, all right. But you have to tell me where you are."
"I'm hiding behind the couch."
"No, I mean where the apartment is."
"Somewhere on Solano is all I remember. Second floor."
"Albany or Berkeley?"
"How should I know?"
"Can you see out a window?"
"Just a second." He heard the swoosh of curtains being drawn. "Yeah."
"Are there parking meters?"
"No."
"Okay, you're in Albany. What else do you see?"
"There's a bakery across the street, next to a frozen yogurt place."
"The bakery's on the corner?"
"Yup."
"Big clock in the window?"
"Yup."
"I know where you are. Hang on, I'll be there in ten minutes. Watch for the 'Vette."
He made it in five, including a minute to pull on his socks and Tony Lama boots and grab his fleece-lined Levi jacket from the closet. He cursed himself for a fool the entire way down to Solano, but when he saw January's pallid face peeking from between the drawn curtains of an upstairs window, he was glad he'd come.
For about another two minutes anyway, which was how long it took him to find the street door that led up to the second-story apartment.
Because when she opened the door for him, he saw over her shoulder a sight that would stay with him for a good long time: a dead man with his head resting on a low glass table-top coated with black and crusted blood.
"Fuck this," he said, starting to turn away.
She grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him into the apartment. "I didn't know," she whispered. Her eyes were blood red, her grasp had been blood-strong, but her voice was tiny as a talking doll's. "I was scared to look. I swear, Nick, I been hiding behind the couch the whole time—I just pulled the phone over with the cord."
Nick moaned at the mention of her phone call—he'd realized suddenly that it was too late for him to back out now: the first thing the police would do would be to examine the telephone company printout. "What the fuck have you got me into?"
"Nick, I swear—"
"Shut up." He was trying to remember what he knew about Pac Bell's new computer system, whether it might be possible to delete the record without leaving footprints. No, it would be easier to camouflage it. "Here's what I—"
Once again, he never saw it coming—next thing he knew, he was lying on his back with the taste of blood in his mouth. His own blood, he ho
ped, but then he felt January prying his jaws open again, and opened his eyes to see her leaning over him with her uncapped thermos poised above his mouth.
"No!" He twisted his head away from her, and tried to strike at the thermos; she settled over him, pinning his shoulders with her knees as he clamped his lips tight; he felt the cool blood splashing over his face.
"I'll break your fucking jaw," she warned him, forcing the fingers of one hand between his lips, prying his teeth apart. He tried to bite her, but her fingers were stronger than his mandibles, and when she began pouring again, it was either swallow or choke.
When she finally let him up—she would have had to, sooner or later, when his strength came on—he rubbed the side of his head ruefully. She had only slapped him, but with vampiric strength. "I was going to help you anyway, you know."
"Yeah, but I like you better on blood," she pouted. "You never told me to shut up on blood."
He realized there was no sense trying to reason with her, especially if she'd been behind the couch tripping on acid and blood for twenty-four hours. "Grab the phone and start dialing Berkeley numbers at random."
"Hunh?"
"My number is going to appear on this guy's phone company printout. So start calling now—as many local numbers as you can until I'm done here." Scary, how clear everything was becoming. "But nobody else you know—just four-four-eights, five-four-ohs, those prefixes. And every time somebody answers, say rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb real fast in a deep voice. Come on, try it."
She was near tears. "Roobaroobarooba—like that?"
"That's it. Say that about twenty times, or until they hang up, then keep dialing."
"I can do that," she said, beginning to brighten.
"Go ahead then."
And so it was to an intermittent background chant of roobaroobarooba from behind the couch that Nick began the unimaginably dreadful task of prying the dead pervert out from under the table: stiffened by rigor mortis, the body, once free of the table, toppled forward, then onto its side while maintaining its cross-legged, hunched-over posture.
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