Lust for Life

by Jeri Smith-Ready

The love of his life—before Lori—was a woman named Elizabeth who broke his heart and their engagement when she became a vampire, but fed on him (and only him) until she died permanently. At which point he got me and her mixed up inside his heart, because we looked sort of alike and he was lonely. At the time, I was insecure about my future with Shane, so we almost—

  “I can’t do that,” I tell them.

  “Ciara,” David says. “It’ll be all right, I promise.”

  “The important thing is to make sure you’re okay,” Lori adds.

  Shane’s face displays a hundred and two emotions.

  “What do you think?” I ask him.

  He comes and sits on the edge of my desk, taking my hand. “I think we should do whatever it takes to keep you well.”

  I look at Lori. “Do you want to be there when I—”

  “No.” She takes a step back. “I love you guys. I trust you guys. But I do not want to see it.”

  I lower my head, feeling relieved and grateful but also very sad. I can’t believe it’s come to this.

  10

  Kashmir

  Obsessive-compulsive disorder has at least a hundred different manifestations in both humans and vampires. Shane sorts. Regina counts. Spencer cleans. Noah watches where and how he walks, aligning his feet with the pattern of the carpet or grains of hardwood. Monroe and I share an obsession with words, rearranging the letters on signs or parsing definitions (he’s learned to do it all in his head, while I often blurt out a grammatical correction in a rude and embarrassing way).

  Jim? He was a hoarder.

  I always knew this in the abstract, because he was such a trivia buff. But apparently he collected more than facts. On my only other visit to his room, I was too busy trying to escape to notice how much stuff he had. Besides, he kept most of it below.

  Regina, Spencer, Noah, and I gather around the four-by-eight-foot trapdoor in Jim’s floor. It lies open, revealing part of a tomblike cavity.

  “How far does it go?” I ask Spencer.

  “Bigger than this room. Pity is it’s not nearly so tall.”

  “Can’t we just leave all that shit there?” Regina’s hands are twitching, and I can tell she’s dying to jump down and count the boxes and their contents. “Nail the door shut and put the rug back over? Pretend it doesn’t exist?”

  “Adrian should have a clean place to live,” Noah says. “Free of Jim’s bad energy.”

  The skeptic in me hates to admit it, but there’s some seriously unhealthy vibes in this room. Then again, I almost died here, so I could be biased.

  Spencer holds out a box of latex gloves in one hand and a box of garbage bags in another. “Let’s get started.”

  One by one we drop into the crap-oleum (like a mausoleum for crap, is where I’m coming from, linguistically). I put on the gloves—not because I can get an infection or even a cut that’ll last more than a few seconds, but because something down here might be icky. Like I told Lori, I’m a terrible vampire.

  “Ciara, do you need this to see?” Noah holds up a fluorescent lantern, the kind used for camping.

  I peer around at the darkness and marvel as the shapes and shadows come into sharp focus. “No, my eyes are adjusting. But thanks.” Next to Shane, Noah’s by far the most considerate vampire DJ. He’s too polite to say it out loud, but he seems to sense my uneven development. One day soon (or one hour soon) I need to tell them all that I’m fading fast.

  The closest box has a distinct metallic smell, like stale blood. Ugh, did he keep leftovers down here?

  No one else is touching it, so, not wanting to be a wimp, I pull up the flaps to see stacks of dark-blue cardboard folders marked “Lincoln Cents” in faint gold letters. I open the top one.

  Turns out that coppery smell actually was copper, not blood. Jim collected pennies.

  “Wow.” I run my finger over the rows of coins, some shiny and gleaming, some as dull as wood. The scent is making my fangs want to pop.

  I pull out an older folder, from 1941 to 1974. Most of these are dark with age, Abe Lincoln’s face barely distinguishable. But a single penny winks at me in flawless silver. “How come this one from 1943 is different?”

  Without sound, Spencer appears at my shoulder in an instant. I’m used to that by now.

  “During the war, they needed copper for shell casings, so the pennies were all made out of steel that year.” He brushes his thumb near the coin, wiping away invisible dirt. “Jim’s daddy bought that for him on his eighth birthday in 1951. That’s why it’s in mint condition. All the rest he collected himself.”

  So he was a collector even as a human. My heart twists at the thought of an eight-year-old Jim, maybe wearing a birthday hat, unwrapping this silver penny. Beaming at this relic from the year of his birth, when evil came in obvious forms, like Nazis and kamikazes.

  My American History professor told us that countries keep the basic personality of the time in which they were born. The United States, formed during the Enlightenment, has held fast to that era’s focus on individual freedom. Despite the efforts of religious zealots and reactionaries, it still puts reason above blind obedience to authorities like churches and kings and even presidents.

  It’s the same with vampires. Though we all have individual personalities and characters, we’re still the children of our times. Jim was made in 1970, a period of great anger, when the sparkling hopes of the sixties were beginning to wither and transform into cynicism and rage. Dr. King and RFK were dead and, for a while, so were their dreams.

  A heavy wooden thunk comes from behind me. “Bonus!” Regina shouts.

  Spencer goes to her, peeling off his gloves and taking a new pair from the box (for the third time). “What all’d you find?”

  “Jim’s progeny trunk. Look at these files.”

  Noah and I join her and Spencer at the trunk, made of heavy mahogany and lined with orange velvet. Clearly purchased in the seventies.

  “He had twenty-four progeny,” I tell them.

  “Thanks for the info, Encyclopedia Brown,” Regina mutters. “Don’t you think we know that?”

  It kills me not to know who Encyclopedia Brown is. I’d look it up on my phone’s Web browser, but no way I’d get cell reception this far underground.

  “Looks like it’s in reverse chronological order.” Regina hands me a thick accordion folder. “There’s your friend Deirdre, Jim’s latest and lamest.”

  I run my thumb along the green card-stock covering. It’d be helpful to know more about Deirdre to see if we can trust her, but it feels like a violation of privacy. “I’ll give it to Shane. He probably already knows most of it, since she was his donor.”

  “Whatever.” Regina pulls out progressively thicker file folders from the piles in the trunk and lays them on the floor, where Spencer straightens their contents without reading them.

  I open the next box, which is nearly overflowing with trinkets and pieces of paper, each tagged with a name and date.

  I pull out a ticket stub from the Winterland Arena in San Francisco on June 17, 1975. “Wow, Grateful Dead during their heyday.” A tag attached to it says, “With Carl and Bonnie.”

  “Oooh, look at this one.” Regina grabs another ticket stub. “The Place des Nations in Montreal. I used to love that venue.” It’s rare to hear Regina speak fondly of her native country. “But—gag—Jefferson Starship. One incarnation away from ‘We Built This City,’ possibly the worst song ever.”

  I lift the tag attached to it and read Jim’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “He went to the show with someone named . . . Gary?”

  “Oh God!” She yanks her hands away like the ticket is coated with holy water, leaving me holding it by the tag. “Cashmere.”

  Spencer and Noah gasp in unison and take a step back from me and the ticket.

  “Cashmere? Like—” I rub my thumb and forefinger over the sleeve of my sweater, even though it’s one hundred percent cotton.

  “With a K!” Regina hisses.


  “Oh, Kashmir.” I emphasize the second syllable, wondering what a Jefferson Starship show has to do with the contentious Himalayan region between India and Pakistan.

  Regina creeps closer to me. “Kashmir is the name Gary took after Jim turned him.”

  I roll “The Vampire Gary” over my mental tongue. “I can see why he changed it. But why Kashmir?”

  Noah explains. “After the song by Led Zeppelin.”

  Oh, right. I keep forgetting that’s the title. I think of it as the “dan-nan-nan, DAN-nan-nan” song with the “ooooh, yeah, yeahs” at the end.

  “That song used to make me laugh.” Regina twists the ends of her spiked black hair. “It reminded me of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But then I met Kashmir.” Even in the nearly nonexistent light down here, I can see her pale. “He was batshit.”

  “Crazier than Jim?”

  “Yes,” Noah says. “He was far gone when we met him”—he looks at Regina—“ten years ago?”

  “Eleven years, two months.” She sends me a glare of warning. “Kashmir is Jim to the Jimth degree.”

  I swallow a whimper at the thought. A sped-up slide show flips through my mind of Jim at his worst, and the way his eyes would simultaneously light up with joy and go dead with treachery.

  I turn back to the box of memorabilia. “It’d be cool if some vampires could be neutered like dogs so they can’t make new ones.” The others stare at me. “That would be wrong, of course,” I add.

  “That would be fascist,” Regina says. “But I agree about Jim. His own makers wouldn’t let him create a new vampire. They knew there was something wrong with him. Jim didn’t make Kashmir until after he left his makers’ coven in England and came back to America.”

  “When was that?”

  “Seventy-five—same year as the Zeppelin song.” She riffles through the box of memorabilia. “This whole half of the box is Kashmir stuff.”

  Noah takes another step back and crosses his arms. “We should burn it.”

  “No!” I grab the box flap, as if that will protect it. “We should learn everything we can about these vampires in case they ever turn up.”

  Regina paces, thumbing the silver hoop in her lip. “Blondie’s right, Noah. We need to go through it all, bad mojo or not.”

  He turns away, arms still crossed. “Then send me a memo with pertinent details. Leave out the murder sprees.” He crosses the dark cellar floor, ducking to avoid a spiderweb.

  I turn back to Regina. “Murder sprees?”

  “Jim and Kashmir made a lot of vampires together. First here, then eventually he went back to England to make more vampires, rub it in his makers’ faces that he had his own coven. As you can imagine, some of his progeny weren’t very stable.”

  “Did the Control ever go after them?”

  “They investigated but couldn’t prove anything. As crazy as Jim was, he was always careful. He’d take his progeny out into the forest around Yosemite. They’d attack hikers and make it look like a mountain lion attack. Or just make the bodies disappear. If someone’s buried long enough, it’s hard to tell exactly how they died.”

  “What about forensics labs?”

  “This was the seventies. The era of Barney Miller, not CSI.”

  “You know about CSI?”

  “We have to read commercials for it during our shows.” She narrows her eyes at me. “Despite what the Control claims, we are capable of learning new things. We just choose not to change the way we live. You’ll understand when you’re older.” She shrugs and turns back to the rows of containers. “Okay, people! Four down, thirty-three boxes to go.”

  Spencer looks at his watch. “I’m on the air in a half hour, and we’re gonna need reinforcements for this little project here. I’ll go call Shane and Jeremy.”

  I kneel next to Kashmir’s box and sift through the memorabilia until I find a photo of him and Jim, taken at a dark place punctuated by neon lights.

  They have the same sable hair, but Kashmir’s is straight where Jim’s is curly. Almost a foot taller than his maker, Kashmir’s body is long and lean as a cheetah’s. His clothes accentuate his height, a blue silk shirt open to the navel, tucked into white bell-bottoms that flare over boots that match the shirt.

  In the picture, he’s wearing wide, magenta-colored sunglasses, slid down his nose to show his amber eyes. The light reflects in them slightly off center, making his pupils look shifty, like he’s peering past the camera and into the brain of the observer. Or maybe that’s just me.

  His stance is half a step ahead of Jim’s, but his arm reaches back to his maker’s shoulder, maintaining the connection even as he poses.

  Jim’s not posed at all. He just looks happy.

  Over my shoulder I watch Regina and Noah work together, coordinating the dispersal of the boxes’ contents. Despite their differences, they’re in sync with each other, from years of working together—and months of sleeping together. He’s got fewer years on her than Shane has on me, so they could grow old together, too, assuming Regina doesn’t screw things up.

  The radio station keeps our vampires in touch with both their “Life Times”—as the Control calls our original eras—and with current events (by reading news reports on the air), so it could be decades before Noah and Regina fade. I wonder if they know how lucky they are.

  I sigh and turn back to the box of Kashmir. It’s full of crime and destruction and decadence, but also music and friendship and love. It’s full of life.

  You’ll understand when you’re older, Regina told me, not realizing I already am.

  11

  Secondhand News

  On Saturday night, Shane and I join the other DJs for a poker game, and I try to figure out how to tell them all I’m dying.

  How will they react? With pity? Scorn? Fear? I was the one who campaigned hardest for Jim to be put away when he started fading. Will they want me to put myself away to protect the station? Would they be right? How long before I jeopardize the secrecy that keeps us safe?

  Spencer insists on total silence during play, so we can speak only between hands. I use that as an excuse not to drop my bombshell.

  At midnight Shane leaves the table to start his show, planting a soft kiss on my cheek and murmuring, “Call me if you need me.”

  In a few minutes Regina enters from the studio just as the door to the outside passageway opens. Adrian staggers through, sets two suitcases on the floor, then leans on the doorjamb.

  “Hey,” he says with a weak smile.

  “What the hell’s your problem?” Regina asks, taking Shane’s vacated seat at the table.

  Spencer slides back his chair. “What she means is you look like forty miles of bad road. What happened to you? Need blood?”

  “There’s plenty in the fridge.” I set down my cards. “I’ll get it for you.”

  “No, I’ll get it. Right now, I just need to rest.” Adrian slouches over to the sofa and lets himself sink into the cushions with a whump.

  The lamp next to Adrian shows his face alarmingly pale, his eye sockets hollow. Even his hair looks dull and limp. Nothing like the bright flower child I saw two nights ago.

  “I’m getting you blood,” I tell him, “so just stay there.”

  When I return, warm cup in hand, the other DJs have resumed the poker hand without me.

  I sit beside Adrian and nudge him with the cup. “Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey. Okay, just blood, actually.”

  “Huh? Oh, you didn’t have to do that.” He takes my offering and uncaps the straw.

  “You might not’ve survived the trip down the hall.”

  Adrian gives me a mere shadow of his heartwarming smile. “I’ve survived worse.” But as he sips, his eyes go distant, like he just heard his own lie.

  “So what happened? Franklin turn you down for a date?”

  He blinks a few times, hard and fast, golden eyelashes fluttering like hummingbird wings, and just like that, life has returned to his face. “No! He said yes. We’re seeing Hair
Friday night. And it won’t even be our first date.”

  “Considering how Franklin feels about Hair—both the musical and the subject—that’s probably best. So what’s your first date? Don’t tell me Jesus Christ Superstar.”

  “No,” he says, chuckling. “It was tonight, sort of. He helped me get through a tough time, the thing that caused my current state of being.”

  The only time that was tough enough to make me look like that, I’d taken a tree branch through my stomach. “Did you get hurt?”

  Adrian shakes his head. “It’s personal—too personal even to tell you or Franklin. That’s what’s cool about him. He didn’t even ask what had happened.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t care.”

  “Exactly. No matter what I’ve done or what I’ve become, he accepts me.”

  “No, I mean he really doesn’t care. About anyone.” My lips twitch at one corner so Adrian knows I’m kidding. Mostly.

  “Franklin cares about you, Ciara.”

  I stretch and sigh. “Well, I am very important.”

  “The cards are being dealt,” Regina says in a sledgehammer voice.

  Without a word, I go over and pick up Adrian’s suitcases. They’re surprisingly light. He follows me into the hallway and past the studio, where Shane gives us a quick wave through the window.

  In the DJs’ apartment, Monroe is sitting on the couch, tuning his guitar.

  “Hello there,” he says, standing to greet Adrian with a bright smile. “Welcome to our homestead. Be sure and let me know if you need anything. Anything a’tall.”

  Wow, that was one of the longest speeches I’ve ever heard from my maker.

  “Thank you.” Adrian shakes Monroe’s hand, then looks embarrassed at the sight of me carrying his stuff.

  “Adrian’s not feeling well, so I’m his butler. For one night only, and no, that offer doesn’t apply to other vampires.”

  Monroe bestows a rare smile on me as well. Wow again. Adrian has a funny, sunny effect on people who aren’t Regina.

  I stop outside Adrian’s new room. “This is your place. Jim had his own special decor, which you’re welcome to change if you want. We moved his stuff out yesterday.”