Mindy felt like she would vomit. Like she would be sick.
“Look at us,” Bakula continued, both hands on her shoulders, like he was pulling the strings of the marionette that was dancing in her guts. “Fighting like an old married couple. Which we were, of course. Are.”
He checked the IV. Mindy could see his hands. In the mirror, she could see his clothes. She just couldn’t see him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Always so curious. You have to be, for our game to be played. Me hiding, you searching, uncovering, discovering…me. The truth. I am your truth, your great truth. ‘The big truth,’ as a man I greatly respected once said, ‘is that you must have an open mind and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same, we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.’”
“So, what’s the small truth?” Mindy spat.
“The small truth is why you could see me in your mirror. Look.”
Mindy looked. She saw in the mirror an invisible man putting on makeup. A cotton swab in a jar of flesh-colored cream makeup. Being stroked across a glass statue, spreading rich fleshy cream. The hovering splotch becoming the eyelids of a closed eye. A cheek, a face, a head. Then foundation. Highlighter, contouring, blush, lip gloss—eyebrows, a wig, something halfway between Mindy’s Essix retainers and dentures. It covered up all the sharp points that Mindy had glimpsed. All the jagged edges of that face inside his face. Until there was Bakula. All but his eyes.
“Usually, I wear scleral lenses, but I want to look at you with my own eyes. I want you to see into my soul, wife.”
His eyes were hollow. Empty chasms leading down inside some latex appliance, some mask. He crossed from behind her to the seat next to her, sitting down, and that thing in the mirror was now her favorite teacher. Her friend. The coach.
“Who are you?” Mindy didn’t know if she could ask again without whimpering.
“I am Wladislaus Dragwlya, vaivoda partium Transalpinarum. Also called Kazıklı Bey. Also called Vlad Tepes. Also called Vlad the Impaler. Also called Count Dracula. Born 1431. Murdered 1476. And again, 1893. And again, 1922. Again, 1931. Again, 1944. Again and again and again, I climb my own corpses like mountains to ascend to you, my angel. My sweet Ilona, my Mina, whatever you want to call yourself, you. Are. Mine.”
Count Dracula. Coach Bakula. It fucking rhymes.
“We do this same dance, again and again, the music changes but always the same steps. Condemned to Hell, I pull myself free because it holds no interest to me. I find your world of daylight just as I’ve left it, the stage changed, but the same players as ever. Your friend, the whore. The professor, my nemesis—I’ve learned it’s best to kill him quickly. The doctor, the cowboy, the madman, the list goes on. And you. Always you. My one reason to try, try again, no matter how many times a jealous God denies you to me because our happiness would eclipse his heaven. Yet, still, you did not wait for me; you never do. Your affections are so fickle, but would I be so intent on capturing them if they were not?”
“You hurt Lucia.” Mindy’s mouth was dry. It felt like it was cracking open as she spoke. “You hurt her because I love her.”
“Because she didn’t deserve you.” Bakula’s gesturing hand drifted about him like a spider in the air. “Usually I turn her. I just can’t resist. I can take my time with you, I can be patient, knowing you’ll understand, but with her—the thirst always wins. And she ruins everything. This time I tried to be clever. I had her—and she was satisfactory, as usual, but nothing next to you—and then I let her die. If only she’d had the good grace to stay that way. One of life’s little ironies. She made herself a vampire. Bit me, came back to you—I suppose I don’t have room to talk, as they say.”
Mindy was crying now. Was he going to make her like him? Or was he just going to kill her? The man was insane, a serial killer, going through his fucked-up cycle on an immortal time scale. Maybe she really was a reincarnation, or maybe she was just some girl who fit the profile. She was going to die. Lucia had already died, because her nose reminded him of his thousand-year-old fucking sweetheart.
Bakula wiped her tears away. Wouldn’t even allow her that. The water smudged the caked makeup on his fingertips. He just kept talking.
“It must’ve been so hard. For both of us. When you were fifteen, your body finally ripening, changing, and you not knowing—remembering—what to do with it. I could’ve shown you…those long, lonely nights, thinking it would never happen for you, when it had already happened! From the day you were born, it was fated to happen. Can you hear me yet? In your mind, in your heart? The same blood runs in us, my love. Are you ready to listen? Can you feel, now, what you’ve been afraid to feel?”
Mindy looked at him. His eyes were red. Red like the earth had cracked open, red like there was something inside, burning, primordial.
“I don’t feel anything for you,” Mindy said. He was going to kill her one way or another. She just didn’t want to die afraid. For Lucia. She could be brave for her. Lucia had died, and she’d gotten over it. “I’m not even afraid of you. You…” She searched for the right word. Something an English teacher would appreciate. “Offend me.”
“Don’t lie,” he insisted, his voice drawing itself out like a cat’s seething growl. “It’s impolite.”
“I see nothing in you worth loving. Nothing even worth liking! You’re nauseating! I’m repulsed by you! The thought of you makes me sick!”
“You’ve been telling me!” His voice was a sudden roar, an explosion. “All day in class, every time I look at you! How much you want me, how much you need me!”
“That’s all in your head.”
“Then why have you been dressing that way!” He pulled at her nightgown as if she’d put that on herself. She nearly cried out as her nipple poked over the neckline. “Catching my eye, flaunting your body before me!”
“That’s just how I dress… Lucia thought it looked good…”
Bakula reared back like the thought burned him, and she realized how to hurt him. She realized how to hurt him enough so he’d hurt her back, kill her instead of giving her a fate worse than death. “I have it with her. With Lucia. I hear her in my heart. She makes me whole.”
“Then you can thank me!” His hand came down on the table in a fist, hitting it so hard that the mirror fell over, glass cracking. “I made her! Hate me all you want for her insignificant work, but she’s my work! I took a nothing girl who would’ve grown up to be a nothing woman and I made her a goddess.”
“She was a goddess to begin with.”
Bakula opened his mouth to reply, but there was only the endless gaping, the thing inside pushing out through his mouth in a nonstop smile, the teeth. Oh God, so many teeth!
“I want to know what love is…” erupted through the window, and the music continued playing, loud and jarring from the driveway. Bakula stopped, his face half cramped human flesh shoved to all sides, half the thing protruding from his mouth like a vast white tongue obscenely licking the air. He moved so fast, a little sonic boom that stirred the whole room as he went to the window blinds, opened them with his fingers.
But Mindy didn’t need to look through the blinds to see. She could look through Lucia’s eyes to the idling Taurus outside, the microphone plugged into the stereo system, the iPhone app running beside her as she sat on the hood. It must’ve taken some CPR to resuscitate the old car; Lucia was smeared with engine oil as she belted out the song like she was trying to embarrass Foreigner.
Bakula’s face drew back together at his mouth, hiding the beast safely in his throat. “Don’t get up,” he told Mindy. “I’ll get the door.”
All Mindy could do was watch, not daring to probe Lucia’s thoughts. Couldn’t distract her. Lucia tossed the microphone aside when Bakula opened the door, letting the light from his house razor out onto his yard. Foreigner conti
nued to blare out across the lake as she walked over the gravel, to the edge of the rectangle of light from inside the house, surrounding Bakula’s shadow. There, they faced each other.
“Never had a single lesson!” she said cheerfully.
“Ms. West,” he greeted her with his civility pulled up as sure as his face was so easily shrugged on. “What an unexpected pleasure. Drop by for another quick bite?”
Lucia toed the light from the door, drawing her bare feet around the dirt like a line in the sand. “I heard your little pitch…” She tapped her ear. “Super-hearing. Useful for more than just cheating on tests. And I gotta say, as a woman who reads three different advice columns, I think I see your problem.”
“Oh?” Bakula leaned against the doorframe as Lucia’s mixtape progressed to The Cure’s “Love Cats.” “What does a child like you know about love? About Mina?”
“I know her name’s Mindy. Listen, I know you’ve got a good thing going with this whole reincarnated love thing—very Anne Rice—but have you considered that maybe she’s not into you? Hell, maybe you should be with someone else.” Lucia plucked at the corsage of her dress. “Let’s face it. A life with her would be like having the world’s worst dietician. Always telling you what you can and can’t eat. You need a vampire chica. Someone who understands your…needs.”
“I need Mina. She is one of God’s women fashioned by His own hand to show that there is a heaven men can enter, and that its light can be here on Earth.” He smiled, false face sloughing away a little. “What could be worth more than that?”
She stepped into the light, her white dress hanging off her in tatters, her body underneath camouflaged by blood and engine oil. She looked like a Pict warrior on her wedding night. “Sex? I mean, take it from someone who knows: Mindy wouldn’t know what to do with a dick even if our sex ed didn’t suck.”
Mindy was so engrossed, watching Lucia talk to Bakula, trying to tell her to run, that she didn’t even notice the other person in the room until a hand was clamped over her mouth.
“Shush!” Seb whispered to her, “It’s a rescue!”
He bent over her, lockpick in his other hand, working at her cuffs as Foreigner bounced off the walls.
“Harder than it looks, isn’t it?” Mindy whispered, just as the first cuff snapped open.
Seb moved to the other one; Mindy got a sudden vision like a blaring headache. Bakula beginning to close the door on Lucia.
“You were fun…but Mina is the ne plus ultra. You should know that better than anyone. When her crimson blood tastes so sweet on her lips—when all of her tastes so sweet—would you not do anything to have it?”
Mindy could feel Lucia’s anger suddenly being let out; flowing through her body like fuel injected in an engine.
“I love Mindy for her, not her blood. That’s just a bonus. Just like she loves me, not my awesome tits.”
“Your tits aren’t that great.”
“IT’S ON!” And through Lucia’s eyes, Mindy saw the nauseous sight of the world blurred at the edges, Bakula’s house growing like a balloon being inflated, Bakula looming up to receive her fist—which stopped, like the air had turned to amber around Lucia, holding her still. Her fist quivered over the doormat.
“I’m sorry,” Bakula said, “did I neglect to invite you in?”
The other cuff snapped off Mindy’s wrist.
“Let’s make like a shepherd,” Seb said, “and get the flock out of here!”
With a rush of wooziness, Mindy pulled the IV out of her arm. “Seb, you used an idiom right!”
“That’s great! What’s an idiom?”
The sound of a door slamming crashed through the house. Bakula’s booming footsteps bending the floorboards. “That was smart—playing the music so I couldn’t hear you. But I still have a nose, such as it is. And your friend wears entirely too much Old Spice.”
Mindy rushed to her feet, head swimming again, but she was able to get a handle on it more quickly this time. “I’ve tried to tell him…” She picked up the table mirror, ready to use it as a blunt instrument. Its cracked surface reflected Bakula’s nothing as he came to the doorway. “You want him, then you’ll have to go through me!”
“And if you want her, you’ll have to go through this!” Seb stepped in front of her, holding up a cross.
Bakula’s eyes struck it like flints and it burst into flames.
Seb dropped it in surprise. It spat smoke on the floor as Bakula crossed the room, lashing out with his anger to backhand the table. It shredded through the chairs before twisting into the wall with one glancing blow.
Bakula took a step forward, but his foot didn’t touch the ground; it became a strand of mist as his entire body streamed like sea fog toward the door at the far side of the room, blocking Mindy and Seb from getting to it. A heartbeat, and Bakula was a swarm of rats scurrying across the floor for Mindy’s legs. She backed up, but they were on all sides. Another pounding lightness in her skull; she fell over, and they were on her calves, her ankles. She frantically backpedaled, into a corner. A blink, and he was standing over her.
“Maybe when the thirst burns in your veins.” Viper fangs muffled his voice, “then you’ll sympathize with how I need you!”
Seb was behind Bakula. He pulled open his jacket, and twenty crosses hung around his neck, from tiny rosaries to a wall decoration that nearly covered his stomach. Bakula was physically propelled through the air, forced against the wall where he clung like a spider hanging over Mindy.
“I’m live with a white suburban Texas family. Did you really thinking I had only one cross?”
Pulling his fingers out of the plaster walls, Bakula set himself down almost before Mindy could scramble out from under him and behind Seb. Seb ripped one of the crosses from his neck, held it out like a gun. Bakula was pushed back a half step. Then he concentrated. The cross burnt out of Seb’s hand.
He reached for another. “Go! I’ve got this!”
“I’m not leaving you!”
The third cross kept Bakula in the corner. He looked like he was suffering no worse than a bout of indigestion. Seb didn’t yell. He never yelled at her. His voice fell to a plea instead. “I can’t be brave for much longer. Please go before you see how afraid I am.”
The third cross burst apart. Seb already had a fourth in his other hand. Mindy took a step back.
“Do you see God in that flimsy piece of metal?” Bakula asked Seb, pushing his hand against the air like he was tapping on the glass at a pet store. The cross burned and melted, Seb holding onto it as it scorched his hand. “Would you like to know where I see God? In the mirror.”
Mindy ran outside. Lucia was in the driver’s seat of her car. The passenger door was open. Mindy threw herself inside.
“We have to go back! We have to go back for Seb!”
“No,” Lucia said, eyes on the road, foot on the accelerator.
“You can’t just leave him there!”
Lucia’s fingers were so tight around the wheel that the red showed through. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“There has to be something we can do. We can figure something out, just turn the car around and—”
“Mindy! He’s gone!” Lucia yelled. “I can hear!” Her voice cracked, but didn’t shatter. “I can hear everything…”
Mindy buried her face in Lucia’s arm and screamed.
CHAPTER 28
The digital haze of the dashboard lights made the blood on Lucia look black, and her makeup white. Mindy couldn’t look away. Her eyes kept shifting over, like Lucia had her own gravitational pull. The tires crackled like worn leather on the blacktop, darkness in all directions.
“Where are we going?” Mindy asked.
“Your place,” Lucia said. “At least there, Bakula can’t invite himself in. We can think of something to do.”
“Think of what to tell Seb’s family.”
Lucia nodded grimly. A bullet hole on her breast refused to close. Lucia probed around it, closing
her eyes like a little kid about to get a shot as the shell worked itself up, out of the wound, crinkled lead tearing at the edges of her entry wound as it burrowed out. Then the raw punctuation knitted shut, strands of skin holding it closed but a gaping hole just underneath. Mindy could see it trying to fill in. Lucia was shrinking, her skin pulling flush around her ribs, turning so pale it seemed translucent, body burning through the last blood she’d had.
“You need blood,” Mindy said.
“I’m fine. What about you? Did he bite you?”
“I don’t know—he said he drank from me, but he might’ve used a needle.”
Neither of them said that if he’d bitten her where Lucia had, there’d be no way of knowing. But Lucia’s hands tightened on the steering wheel like she wanted to rip it off.
Mindy became lost in her own world the rest of the way home. Trying to think of something they could do, something they could bring to bear on Bakula. But her mind kept returning to Seb—thoughts of burning crosses. He must’ve been so afraid, at the end. He must’ve regretted saving her… No. No, he wouldn’t have. Not Seb.
They pulled onto her street and Mindy’s eyes unconsciously darted to the console’s clock like she was delivering a pizza, checking to see how fast she’d made the trip. No good. The glass was smashed in. Then she heard Lucia scream.
Mindy looked up. She saw Seb on the lawn before her house, and relief flooded into her. But it was laced with poison. Even as she was seeing him, she was registering how he stood on his tip toes, no, how he dangled, the toes of his sneakers brushing the ground, the pole in-between them. It was jammed into the ground. It started a foot above Seb’s open, upturned mouth, and it kept going down. Right through him.
Suddenly Lucia was out of the car, biting her wrist open, next to Seb, pushing her bleeding wound at his blue lips. “Drinkdrinkdrinkdrinkdrink.” His lips didn’t move, no matter how much Lucia’s did.
Mindy’s brain kicked back into working order like it’d lost power in a brown-out. And she found herself beside Lucia, unsure how she’d gotten out of her seatbelt and the idling car, and she was noticing the folded-up paper taped to Seb’s still chest, and she was plucking it away from the notch of scotch tape, and she was opening it up, and she was reading.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 34