Her body was cool but not cold, soothing after the heat of the Texas sun. Mindy could’ve melted into it, like an open refrigerator door on a hot day. “I know it won’t. But you’ve gotta stop biting people, Lucia, I mean, even if they are bad tippers, what if one of them has AIDS or something?”
“What is this, Rent?”
“Promise me.”
“I need blood, Minz. If I don’t get it, I start to burn.”
“And if you do get it, people notice. Let me look for a cure. Or someone who’ll let you feed on them willingly. Hell, I’d be okay with—”
“No,” Lucia said suddenly, her whole body stiffening.
“It’s not a big deal, El. I’ve had my blood drawn before. You wouldn’t even have to bite me, I could just get a syringe and—”
Lucia let go of Mindy, backing away so fast the air rippled. When Mindy turned around, she was in the light. Pale as ever. “I am never drinking your blood, Mindy.”
Mindy nodded, suddenly okay with the distance between them. She understood. She got it completely. After all, drinking a dyke’s blood—you might as well be fucking her. And Lucia West didn’t fuck women.
* * *
They walked back home from the dog park, which was just a part of the Maxwell Bakula Community Park, built with funds left over from the new stadium.
“Hey, Ewoks, listen up.” Mindy pumped her legs to catch up with Abe and Artie, leaving Lucia in the dust. “Me and some of my girls are thinking of starting a club, and we wanted to know if you’d like in.”
Abe looked up at her suspiciously. “What kind of club?”
“Sort of a monster club. Horror movies, creature features, slashers, thrillers, chillers, that sort of a thing. It’s mostly just girls. Oh, and Kimberly’s in it. You know Kimberly? Wears glasses, has those Star Wars T-shirts?”
Abe elbowed Artie in the ribs. “Doesn’t sound too lame.”
Lucia was begrudgingly catching up to them. “Do you want in or not?” she asked. They nodded like she’d offered them free chocolate.
“Okay, but first you gotta pass a quiz,” Mindy said.
Both groaned. Even Malty seemed about to howl.
“Hey, you little monsters, just wait until high school. Essay portions. Get ready for that bullcrap.”
Lucia linked her arm with Mindy’s to whisper in her ear. “I know what you’re doing.”
“You want to know about monsters,” Mindy whispered back, “who would know better than a ten-year-old?” She raised her voice. “So what are a vampire’s powers?”
“Easy,” Artie said. “Standard-issue speed and strength. They can throw cars around or run circles around you in the blink of an eye.”
Mindy looked to Lucia for confirmation. “Why would I throw a car?” Lucia mouthed. “But I am pretty fast,” she added, with a pelvic thrust. Mindy rolled her eyes.
“Transmogrification!” Artie continued. “Vampires can turn into wolves and mist, and…what’s the other one?”
“Bats! Duh! How do you even miss that?” Abe demanded.
“Sorry! It’s not like anyone cares about vampires anymore. Not when there are zombies.”
“Zombies are so played out! And half of them are fast, so they’re not even zombies anymore, they’re basically retarded vampires—”
“Anything else?” Mindy interrupted; God help her with adolescent fan boys.
Abe tried snapping his fingers, which he couldn’t quite manage. “Mind controlling!”
“It’s not called that, he puts people in his thrall. You look into his eyes, bam, he’s got you. Goodbye cross, goodbye garlic, you’re done.”
“And bats, he turns into a bat.”
“Can he control mist too, or does he just turn into mist?” Artie asked.
Abe shrugged eloquently.
“That’s nice. Fine,” Mindy said. “What about telepathy?”
“Like X-Men?”
Artie put his hands to his temples. “To me, my brides!”
Abe gave him a push. “If you’ve been bitten by a vampire—or if you’ve drinken their blood—”
“Drunk,” Lucia corrected.
“Then there’s like mind reading, but only for two people.”
“Yeah,” Artie agreed. “Dracula bit Mina and made her drink his blood, so they were connected and she was turning into like his love slave, but since they were connected, she told Van Helsing where Dracula was going, and that’s how they got him.”
Mindy almost stopped. Some of the dreams she had felt like she was connected to Lucia, felt like they were one, but Lucia hadn’t bitten her. She hadn’t. “What about curing someone who’s been turned into a vampire?”
Abe mimed holding something in his hands, then plunged it into his chest like he was committing seppuku. “Gak!”
“That’s not the only way,” Artie said. “All you have to do is kill the vampire that sired them—the head vampire.”
“Sired?” Mindy asked.
Artie held up two fingers. “Drink someone dry, then feed them your own blood. It’s how vampires reproduce.”
“How do you kill one?” Lucia asked. “A vampire.”
Mindy stopped walking. Abe and Artie kept going.
“Well, stake, obviously.”
“What else?” Lucia pressed.
Mindy caught Lucia’s elbow, wishing she’d stop. Lucia ignored her.
“Cut their head off,” Abe said.
“Fire,” Artie added. “And sunlight.”
“Not in Dracula. Sunlight just weakened him.” Abe disagreed. “Oh, and silver.”
“Silver, that’s werewolves.”
“Not in Blade!”
“Blade sucked—”
“—you suck!”
“Wait, I got it, running water!” Artie stopped, turning around to regard his audience. “Vampires can’t cross running water. I think it’s like holy water to them. And we all know what holy water does to vampires; something to do with the moon and the tides or something.”
“So what, if a vampire tries to cross a river, he’ll melt?” Abe asked.
“Maybe.”
“You idiot. Vampires just can’t do it, the same way they can’t enter a house uninvited. That’s why they need to be in their coffins and get some schlub to move them across.”
“No, that’s just a comfort thing. A vampire can fly over water or walk over a bridge, but if he tries to swim across—”
Abe threw up his hands in exasperation. “That doesn’t make any sense! You can kill a vampire by cutting their head off, impaling them through the heart, setting them on fire, or making them soggy?”
* * *
At the end of their walk, Lucia came up to Mindy’s room. Mindy didn’t know what to say. Lucia had to be thinking about the head vampire, right? How to kill him?
Mindy drew the blinds and turned the lights down low, wanting Lucia to be comfortable. Not that Lucia noticed. She moved around Mindy’s room, examining the posters Mindy had swiped from her old job as a theater usher, picking up some of the books stacked around. Mindy tried to remember if Lucia had ever been in her room before. She couldn’t picture this Lucia there.
The silence between them grew larger and larger. Mindy picked up her laptop, sat on the bed, had a split second flash of Lucia closing her laptop for her—crawling over her on the bed, getting closer and closer until…her fangs.
She shook it off. She had work to do.
Then Mindy felt Lucia blowing in her ear. She looked up sharply. No, Lucia wasn’t. She was at Mindy’s desk, notebook paper spilled over the desktop. Lucia had borrowed Mindy’s textbooks, assembling a stack of them beside her chair. Lucia wrote like a fiend, stopping only to shake her pen when it ran dry or to pick up a textbook and flip through it at warp speed. Every little supersonic movement sent a gush of wind through the room. Each little gale carried Lucia’s perfume with it.
“Are you doing homework?” Mindy asked. She didn’t mean to sound so shocked, but she did.
&nb
sp; “Yeah.” Lucia paused, scratching her pen on the header of her notebook paper. No ink came out. In a flash she had the pen unscrewed and eyed the ink level. Next to Mindy, her waste bin shook with the pen parts dropped into it. When she looked back, Lucia had a new pen and was at it again. “Check my answers?”
“Yeah, sure,” Mindy agreed, and a finished homework assignment was on her chest, just like that, right in the middle of a closed Calculus text. She opened up the book and started matching the questions to the answers. Her laptop hummed beside her, faithfully torrenting the last Game of Thrones.
“So you’re trying to get into college? Vampire sorority girl?”
“Only if they have sororities at dentistry school.”
“You want to be a dentist?”
Lucia tapped her pen on her knee as fast as ever. Nervous. “It pays well. I could put Abe and Artie through college. Get Mom into rehab, if she’d ever agree to it. Hey, wouldn’t you go to a vampire dentist?”
“I think we’ll get you better sometime before you graduate college.”
Lucia stopped the pen, holding it still as a stone in her hand. There was a crack through it. “I am better, though. Kinda.” She broke into a grin. “How about controlling the mist? That could be fun. I’ll just put big misty dongs everywhere!”
Mindy giggled. “And you can hypnotize people? I wish I could hypnotize people! If someone’s being rude to me, I want to make them sing the theme song to Shaft instead.”
Lucia’s smile froze. “I, uh… I think that’s what the venom’s for. After I bit Quentin, he kept screaming, so I told him to stop and he did. Hey, Minz, take it from me, your room is dead. Where’s the boom box?”
Mindy pointed to a lone shelf her father had nailed into the wall. It held a few books, one photo, but mostly a pair of speakers and an iPod docking station. Lucia picked up the iPod, looking it over, trying to figure it out. It was weird for Mindy to think she’d never worked one. It was new, sure, but it wasn’t that new…
“Ah!” Lucia cried, selecting something and plugging the iPod back in. The petite speakers began to vibrate with sound. A gently warbling voice over a jaunting, trotting beat. Lucia swayed her way to Mindy’s bed, doing a hip roll that pulled up her shirt (her belly had an underlying golden warmth) before she crashed down beside Mindy.
It took Mindy about a minute to recall the song she was listening to from the depths of her iTunes account. “Really?” she asked incredulously.
Lucia was on her back, hands folded over her belly (where her shirt had ridden up). She looked like a girl in a coffin. “What, you don’t like Vampire Weekend?”
“Don’t you think that’s a little on the nose?”
“Hey, I liked Vampire Weekend when I was alive. Wait—feel me.”
“What?” Mindy asked. Not quite incredulous.
Lucia held up her arm. Mindy put her hand near the elbow. Lucia’s muscle was subtle, a little giving, but mostly hard to touch. And for a dead girl—undead—whatever—she wasn’t room temperature. It wasn’t a lack of heat, it was an absence. She had a chill, like metal at night.
“I liked Vampire Weekend before I was cool,” Lucia said, already giggling her way through her own joke.
Mindy laughed, more out of what a nerd Lucia was than her joke. Lucia nudged her head under Mindy’s arm, like a kitten asking to be petted, setting her skull on Mindy’s shoulder and forcing Mindy to wrap her arm around her. Mindy thought Lucia’s skin was less cool after a moment. Like Lucia was warming to the touch.
“Hey, you know how on Buffy, the vampires’ faces go all Klingon? Does my face do that?” Lucia asked.
“Happens when they pop their fangs out, right? Show me.”
Lucia shook her head immediately. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. C’mon, you saw me with Daryl. Did I have…ridges?”
“No, you were beautiful.” Then Mindy clamped her mouth shut. What did I say? Why did I say that? Am I hitting on Lucia? Why am I hitting on Lucia? And why is she nuzzling me?
Lucia’s claw of a fingernail clicked over Mindy’s belt. “If I show you something, will you promise not to laugh?”
“Not laugh at you? That’s a big ask, El.”
Lucia grinned ruefully. “Pretty please? With sugar on top?”
“Okay. I’ll try.”
Lucia pried Mindy’s arm off her shoulders, brushing her lips across the back of Mindy’s wrist as she set it down on the bed, then she went to the window and opened the blinds. A pillar of sunlight shot in all the way to the bed, turning the room white. Mindy shielded her eyes from the sudden glare.
Lucia laid back down on her back. She knotted her hands at the bottom of her shirt. “Uh, as long as we’re computing data or whatever, my skin isn’t white. Didn’t turn white. It’s still the same, I put on foundation to make it look this way.”
“Okay. Why?”
Lucia pulled up her shirt an inch, thought better of it, then pulled it down like she was trying to hide her whole body with it. “And obviously, I don’t burn up in the sunlight. Abe said that, right? That in Dracula, the vampires are just weakened by direct sunlight, they don’t—fwoosh. I don’t know, I have a hard time doing the speed thing during the day, but I don’t feel like I’ve skipped lunch or anything either.”
Mindy reached over and put her hand on top of Lucia’s. “Lucia, c’mon, you can tell me. I really won’t laugh.”
Lucia took her hands away. Mindy tugged at her shirt, sliding it up the tight, compact girl-warrior stomach all cheerleaders had. Without the makeup, Lucia’s skin was gold as ever, but it was also something else. Iridescent, multi chromatic, like a snake’s almost. Mindy had gone through a snake phase; she could remember the names. Iridescent Shieldtail, Brazilian Rainbow Boa, but more so, more of a sheen. In fact, when Lucia breathed and the light rippled over her, she almost seemed to…sparkle.
Lucia rolled over, turning onto her side away from Mindy and pulling her shirt down. “I look so stupid! No wonder vampires only go out at night!”
Mindy slipped in behind her. “No, you look glamorous.”
“I look like a Katy Perry video!” Lucia pouted. “Only Katy Perry has more class!”
“No, you look like—David Bowie’s lovechild. That’s a good thing!”
Lucia looked up. “You think so? Promise me from here on out we will never talk about Twilight getting things right. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.”
“I won’t even say the T-word.”
Lucia nodded gratefully. “So that’s the secret of my goth look. It really isn’t a phase.”
Mindy smiled at her. She put her hand on the back of Lucia’s, sliding her fingers between Lucia’s, dropping her fingertips to Lucia’s palm.
Mindy’s laptop pinged. She gave Lucia’s hand one last squeeze and rolled over to it, checking her e-mail. A message from the Austin Yacht Club.
“Okay, what is it you’re working on?” Lucia asked. “Because there’s no way your Supernatural fanfic is more interesting than a real-life vampire.”
“There are fifteen marinas around Lake Travis, I’ve either called or e-mailed all of them, trying to find out who the Persephone is registered to.”
“The Persephone?”
“The yacht where you…died.”
Lucia slipped up, slipped back down like a yo-yo, laying her head down on Mindy’s leg. “Smarty. You’re such a little smarty-pants.”
“Save it for when I actually find this asshole. Then praise me excessively and give me candy.”
Lucia put her hand on Mindy’s knee, rubbing it in her palm. Her brow furrowed, the warm look on her face going away.
“How do you know the boat is named Persephone?”
Mindy stared at her laptop like Lucia was a predator and if she just didn’t make eye contact, she’d be safe.
“I remember now,” Lucia said. “There was a boat, and I got on it before everything went black. But I didn’t remember that until you said it just now. So, how’d you know?” She lif
ted her head off Mindy’s leg. “Minz?”
Mindy shut the laptop. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
Lucia was already shaking her head.
“And in them, I’m…I’m you. That night, I dreamt I was you, swimming out to that boat, being attacked—”
“No,” Lucia said firmly, finally, but to no avail.
“I dreamt you being sick and you being burned and—I wasn’t really sure the dreams were real until you told me about the sun, but now that I know… Now that I know, I can use it.”
On her hands and knees, Lucia crept forward an inch, staring into Mindy’s eyes. Hers were very small, very white. “Did it hurt? What happened on the boat?”
Mindy nodded. She didn’t want to talk.
Lucia looked away. “What was it like?”
“You were…afraid and in pain and alone. You said—” Don’t tell her that. Please, let her stay happy. She deserves to be happy. “El, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to find this guy and make him pay, we’re going to make it right.”
“You shouldn’t have had to go through that. It was me. Not you. You shouldn’t—”
“It was just a bad dream, Lucia. That’s all it was to me. I’d go through it again if it helped us find him.”
Lucia looked at Mindy as if all of her being was trained on her, loaded and aimed at her, her eyes shrinking in a veil of tears. “Okay, but…how’d it happen? How can you see what I see?”
“I don’t know…but Abe said that…if someone were bitten, if they drank blood…”
“No!” Lucia moved up so fast that her feet slipped on the bedspread, then she shot forward, almost colliding with Mindy, only stopping because she slammed her hands on the headboard. “I would never do that to you! I’ve never bitten you, never slipped you my blood—how would I even do that, you would taste it, right? You would know, so you know I haven’t!”
Mindy felt herself swept up in the storm of emotions bursting out of Lucia, trying to calm the waters, trying to perform a miracle. “I believe you, I believe you!” She put her hands on Lucia’s cheeks, cold, so cold, and tried to press her warmth into Lucia, tried to infuse her cool unmoving body with any of the life she had to offer. “I know you, Lucia. You would never do that to me, not to someone you—”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 17