by Varian Wolf
“Yeah?” I said, “Well I don’t see him calling you up to spill his secrets to. In fact, he hasn’t even talked to you in years. You know why? Because you’re the ex. You’re history, buddy. I’m in his bed now. I’m piping hot, and I bet you want some, you big-mouthed walking corpse.”
Andy considered me for a second. There was frustration in his undead-Nordic eyes. He decided to ask one more question.
“Has he told you about the Mar-“
“That is enough.”
Andy never got to finish what he had meant to say. Miguel had spoken suddenly and with such an authoritative voice I scarcely could have distinguished him from the mad bastard of a judge who had slammed down that gavel and put me away for two years in the big house. He rose with an imperiousness that said his patience was exhausted. He had let Andy have his little bit of fun, but now it was over. The senior vampire had spoken.
The two dead guys stared at each other. Eventually, I got bored with their little psychic dance.
“Look,” I said. “You two obviously have a lot to sort out, and to be honest, I’m just not interested in sitting through it. So, whether or not you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find something more interesting to do.”
I stood up.
“I’ll take you home,” said Miguel.
“Don’t bother. Just don’t.”
So we’re begging to be killed, huh? Practically irresistible…
I sensed what was going on here. I knew this Andy wouldn’t dare touch me, and I wanted him to know it too. As I moved past him stooped close to one ear and then the other, though I spoke to Miguel.
“You told me how he was going to hate me. You forgot to mention,” I lingered, watching the temptation my nearness brought him stab him like knives, “that I was absolutely…going…to…abhor…him.”
I let my hand drift across his shoulder as I walked away. I did not look back.
Andy put up a very nasty front, but he was going to help Miguel. That was why he was here. He was using the opportunity to be nasty, using that fleeting moment when he possessed some power over Miguel to wreak small vengeance, like a child having a temper tantrum in public. But there was no doubt who still wielded the most power, both physically and emotionally.
He could take cheap shots at me. I didn’t care. But I knew how to hit as well as I knew how to take hits, and as my opponents had discovered over the years, when I hit I hit hard.
I’m Miguel’s honey now, big boy, and I know you won’t dare touch me. And now you know that I know. How ‘bout them apples?
I marched off into the crowd with my most flagrantly gender-confused Gestapo strut.
I didn’t let all the things that Andy had mentioned trouble me. The “fugue,” that thirst business –I figured I’d know soon enough. So my vampire hadn’t told every single thing there was to know about vampires and covens and what-have-you. He was getting around to it, and he’d told me a hell of a lot already…or so I thought.
One thing he’d strategically neglected to tell me was that sharing blood was the closest thing vampires had to having sex, or at least sex is the closest thing to the excruciating ecstasy of immortal blood-drinking, and he and Andy were going off not just to save his unlife but to have ex-sex that night. He’d also neglected to tell me that covens and cultists meant witches, copious amounts of magic, and power struggles as old as the last Ice Age. And I trusted the romantic undead bastard. Me. Tough kid from Detroit.
Holy hell, I was an idiot.
7
Gay Hippies
Finding that I didn’t really have better things to do and having already worked out for four hours that evening, I went for a walkabout –a nice stretch of the legs to get vampires out of my head for a while. I didn’t really keep track of where I was going –I didn’t care. I just walked, and walked, and eventually found myself in an area that seemed disproportionately populated by twenty-something-year-olds, on foot and in cars, and sitting around having useless twenty-something-year-old conversations about hair and pimples and politics in the wet southern air. I was on the campus of Tulane University.
As I walked across a green lawn beside a brick building, labeled Minster Club, that looked to be a trendy apartment building, I heard a terrible noise –the worst noise, in fact, that I think I have ever heard, before or since –a noise so appalling that my eardrums curled up into little tortillas and slunk deep into the recesses of my brain in terror, which explains my propensity ever after to fail to heed sound warnings given me by people who know better…or maybe I had that before. Anyway, the sound was horrible.
It was bagpipes. But at the time I was certain it was the sound made by a sheep’s bladder ripped from the abdomen of a sheep, pumped full of air, and then squeezed in an act of slow torture…oh, wait that’s EXACTLY what it was.
I stood there, when I should have been running for my life, mesmerized by the horror of it all. A bearded college boy was puffing away on the thing on the stone walk before the front door of the building. He seemed immune to the auditory toxin his sheep’s bladder emitted.
But there was someone else who apparently felt as strongly as I did that the sound was from Satan, or maybe even more strongly. She flung open her window on the third floor over the bagpiper’s head and began hurling curses down upon it with a slatternly British brogue.
Her name was Yoki Hayashi.
The bagpiper, apparently rendered mercifully deaf by his prolonged exposure to the noise, did not notice her. She disappeared from the window, and for a second I thought she had given up, but a moment later she reappeared, reached out of the window, and dropped what appeared to be an entire bottle of Scotch like a bomb from above.
The bottle smashed on the walk behind the bagpiper, ineffectually spreading its contents over the bricks. I watched as Yoki produced every imaginable item from her room –a pair of shoes, a lamp, a stack of textbooks, half a dozen DVDs and their player, a bunch of bananas, a bag of bagels, a dildo, and hurled them down on our tormentor. But it was all to no avail. Yoki Hayashi was not only the world’s worst boxer, she was the world’s worst aim. A stuffed toy bear to his left, an oscillating fan to his right, a feather boa landed somewhere off in the bushes, and a bright pink bra hung from one of the pipes, but the piper himself sustained no damage, and the torment went on. It seemed that she had lost her battle with the horrible Scottish instrument of terror.
But Yoki Hayashi still had one big gun left. She disappeared from the window again, then reappeared, an expression of maniacal glee on her face, up-lit by the street lamps below. In her hands she held the Beast, Jesus Christ, and tied to its tiny hood-dog studded harness was a yellow nylon rope.
Hand over hand, she lowered the crazed Christ. The creature thrashed in its fury, itself driven mad by the sound, spinning at the end of the rope like the top of death. I watched with morbid fascination as the hairy black spider descended, inch by inch toward the unsuspecting piper, never once feeling the urge to yell warning.
Jesus did not disappoint. When he reached his prey, there was a horrible sound as of some deformed thing dying, the noise abruptly ceased, and a phenomenon that looked like the blur of that cartoon Tasmanian Devil occurred. When it was over, the piper was lying dazed on the ground, and the bagpipes, or what was left of them, lay strewn over an eight-foot radius. Yoki began hoisting her emissary of doom back up again, a look of insane satisfaction on his hairy face, and a scrap of green plaid in his jaws.
When she got him to the top, she gathered Jesus into her arms and closed the window. Mission accomplished.
I suddenly wondered how I had ever hated this girl.
Driven by some impulse I didn’t understand –a, shall we say, curiosity about another human being (what, me?), I walked past the bewildered former bagpiper and the rubble that surrounded him and went into Minster Club. The name is easy to remember, because Yoki lived in it. I started up the stairs.
I didn’t make it to the top of the stairs, for halfway up, I was nearly b
owled over by none other than the girl and her beast, flying down the stairs as though they were on a toboggan. I dodged out of the way, and she ran half a dozen steps past me before she screeched to a perilous halt at the edge of a step and turned around. Her face brightened into a ridiculous caricature of joy when she recognized me.
“Gollygosh! Gollygosh! Annie!”
Yoki danced back up the stairs, her little ballet toes barely touching the ground. The hoodlum chains on her pants rattled like Ebenezer’s ghost. The little black hairball came flying behind her, nipping at her heels and snarling like a sheepdog.
“I knew you would come, once you got over despising me.”
“That’s interesting logic.”
“You will find me filled with that. I’m British.”
I looked over this new, non-gym-ninja Yoki. She was like a little goth jewel, tumbled and polished to a high sheen. Her skin was perfect pale yellow. Her eyes shined beneath mascara-thickened black lashes, and deep violet eye shadow. The earphones sprouting from the mp3 player on her hip still hung around her neck, blaring techno music at 120 beats per minute. She was wearing a pair of jeans so wide they made her legs look like those of an elephant, torn at the hems to accommodate her petite stature and dripping with chains meant for people twice her size (good exercise, lugging all that metal). A teeny, tiny black halter top revealed her shiny navel ring and the yin yang tattoo that encircled her bellybutton. And there was that thing on her head, the thing I had seen from all the way down on the lawn, the thing that made her look like Sonic the Hedgehog.
“It’s jolly good to see you. You’ve decided to come to the concert then?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Well, we go as far as we can.”
She was still speaking a mile a minute. Apparently that wasn’t just something she did when she was being threatened by big, mean boxers on ego trips –Yeah, yeah, I’m including myself in that.
“Why don’t you come up to my abode and I’ll make you a drink. I’ve got lots to choose from. Ve is loaded here.”
She held out her hand to me and begged, “Come! Come! I have a gift for you.”
“A…gift?”
“Oh, yes. I hope you’ll like it. It was sort of impromptu, really, but…”
She grabbed my hand, and I yielded to her forward motion. She waltzed up the two more flights of stairs with me in tow. She had gotten over halfway down in the space of a few seconds while I was heading up. Amazing. She was like the Flash. She was Flashette.
Jesus Christ snapped furiously at my pant legs as we went. I gave him a gentle shove with my foot, only enough to send him tumbling four or five stairs, and he laid off.
Yoki talked all the way up the stairs. She never took a breath. I would tell you what she said, but it was all drivel. You don’t want to hear it. Trust me on this.
We reached the door to her apartment. Through it issued into the hall like a flesh-eating cloud the awful smell of ylang ylang incense.
She dragged me through the door. Jesus Christ proceeded to rampage around the room in a continuous circuit that took him over the top of every single piece of furniture. Was there an Iron Man for dogs? This guy would win it.
Yoki’s room was like a gothic fairyland, filled with fairies, masquerade masks, stuffed animals, vampires (coincidence?), cemeteries, gargoyles, ghosts –everything you’d find at one of those goth/emo stores at the mall. In fact, her room looked like an amalgamation of the two stores. The cute and the macabre. The whole room was decorated in black fabric strung with Christmas lights. Mardi Gras beads dangled from the posts of her four-poster, telling of much partying had, which was also draped with black fabric and a big wine-red comforter and populated by Hello Kitty pillows. A collection of footwear made of shag populated the space beneath the bed. There was a little candle and rum bottle shrine on the table in front of her mirror that showcased pictures of Johnny Depp and some other broody-looking actor.
But, unlike so many goths I’d met in my junior high days, Yoki’s room was absolutely neat and tidy. Even her forty cans of Spam, plethora of tea boxes, and other weird British foods were stacked with military precision on a bowing cinderblock and one-by-four next to a cubical refrigerator covered with badly hatched magnetic poetry.
She swept up a few strands of Mardi Gras beads from the doorknob and put them over my head. Then she sat me squarely on the bed. Jesus Christ set about tearing up one of his numerous toys, a battered Beanie Baby mouse with beans coming out everywhere. His snarls were so small but so fierce that he sounded like a recording of an angry bear sped up to chipmunkize it.
“Welcome to my flat.” She aped a gracious hostess. “It’s a small place, but it’ll do for now. I have to share a toilet with three other girls and they are in there FOREVER in the mornings, but that’s the worst of it. It’s brilliant to be living in an historic structure in this town. You know, there are ghosts living here. Amy, the girl down the hall, saw a Confederate soldier on the stair. You know, there’s a house in the Quarter where a slave girl leaps to her death every night? –I do ghost tours.”
She opened the cubicle fridge to reveal her trove of alcohol. She began removing bottles. Grey Goose, Bacardi, Coca Cola, Medori Melon…
“So, what can I pour you to drink? A rum and Coke? A Whiskey Sour?”
…Dark rum, light rum, Crown Royale, piña colada mixer…
“Uh, just a…” I really shouldn’t drink in training mode… Oh, what the hell. “You got Hennessey?”
“Ooh, you like it strong. I should have guessed.”
She dug deeper. Brandy…red wine…Triple Sec… I leaned closer. How much alcohol did she have in there? The amount she was extracting didn’t seem reasonable for the space available. Was the fridge like a doorway to another dimension or something? One where alcohol flowed free in rivers of delight?
“So,” she said, vigorously assembling my drink, “what on earth brought you here? Was it my irresistible personality?”
“I was just in the neighborhood…”
“Oh, pish posh. That is a flimsy explanation. Come up with something better.”
“I saw how you dealt with that bagpiper, and let me say, that was a mighty fine piece of work.”
“Oh, the sadist thing! You think I’m one too. Well, I’ll have you know that had nothing to do with my entertainment. That was purely self-defense.”
“I would never have mistaken it for anything else.”
She handed me the drink. Then she swept a package from her dresser and presented it to me.
It was one of those glitzy gift bags, covered with My Little Ponies with pink tissue paper sticking out the top.
“It’s your gift, Annie. You can stop staring at it now.”
She wasn’t joking about that?
“Oh, go on.”
I wasn’t certain I wanted to touch it, but my hands acted against my will and accepted it. I stared at the thing sitting in my hands, stunned.
“Oh, go on. Open it. It’s not filled with razor-sharp teeth or anything.”
I pulled the tissue paper out and peered inside before reaching in. The contents seemed innocuous enough, so I pulled the thing out.
It was an enlarged photograph in a stately, utterly non-cutified frame, and it was of me from a three-quarters rear-view, standing naked in the shower. I had just removed my clothes and was in the act of dropping my shorts on a bench. I was tired, covered with sweat, and from the partial view of my face I looked somehow….gratified. It took me a moment to realize where the picture had been taken.
“How did you get this?”
“Oh! Isn’t that the secret?” She held up her cell phone, pointing at the little eye on it gleefully. “Technology.”
I stared at the picture. I had no idea I looked like that. I mean, I knew what I looked like –I didn’t run from mirrors or anything, but I didn’t know I looked that way after a fight. I looked almost –and this is practically profane…peaceful. And the camera had captured
that moment, and Yoki had had it –me, presented as though I was art.
“You didn’t mention you had a tattoo,” Yoki said.
Oh, shit, was that…No, thank God that wasn’t in the picture.
“You’re proper peng. How on earth did you get your back to look like that?” asked Yoki, peering down at the picture.
“Hit a lot of people,” I said absently.
“That’s ghastly enough. Well, I may not have your back or abs, but I can crack pecans with my tush, of which I am very proud. Thank the ballet for that…”
I wasn’t listening. I stared at the picture. Then I stared at Yoki.
“The proper words are: ‘Thank you’, or, ‘Thank you most gracious and talented friend with whom I will be attending a concert on Friday…’”
“Nobody’s…” I stopped myself. What had I been about to say? Nobody’s ever given me a gift before. No human had anyway –not since my brother had been killed. I couldn’t remember a single one, not ever. No cupcakes on birthdays, no toy gumball machines at Christmas. I suddenly remembered having wanted one long ago –not just a toy, but a real, working toy gumball machine. I had seen them in the Sears catalogue when I was very little. I would sit and stare at the picture, at the shiny blue machine filled with colorful gumballs. I thought I could take it to school and sell the other kids gumballs for a quarter a piece and make some money for all the things I needed so very much in a house with no food in the cupboards. I had wanted one so bad I had actually asked my mother for one. I had begged. Then Christmas came, and there was no Christmas tree, but there were two wrapped packages on the kitchen table, one with my name, one with Chris’s. I couldn’t believe it. I rushed to open mine and discovered inside a basketball. I wasn’t interested in basketball. I didn’t play basketball. Chris did.