Diary of an Alligator Queen

by Winter Reid

  “You had a major life crisis all because one day you happened to be paying attention when I passed your hovel?”

  He hadn’t moved his fingers. Now he threaded them through the hair at the back of my neck.

  “Oh I remember the very first time you ran that trail,” he assured me.

  “I’ve been running that trail on and off for ten years,” I said.

  He shrugged. What’s ten years to an ancient? A blink. A sigh?

  “But none of this explains why you moved to a completely different path, hid under a fallen tree, and attacked me,” I said.

  “I moved to a place where I wouldn’t smell you.”

  “You were protecting me?” I asked, and my voice was higher, incredulous.

  He rubbed my skin with his fingers. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop myself,” he whispered. “Once the hunger took me.”

  “Why bother starving? Why not just find a gun and be done with it?”

  “I…” he trailed off.

  “Tell me,” I pushed, ignoring the absent way his fingers squeezed me harder as he grew more uncomfortable.

  “I had a lot to answer for,” he said.

  I was dumbstruck. “So you thought a slow and tortured demise would atone for it?”

  “No,” he said quickly, “not atone. But I wanted to… honor them.”

  I was dead quiet for a moment.

  “Good plan,” I whispered, then pointed to myself. “Oops!”

  His face went dark and he shook me. “You never ran that trail. Why were you there?”

  The fire went out of me at that and I swallowed but wouldn’t answer. I wished I could have said it was fate. That I was destined to meet him, but the truth was so much more mundane, so human and commonplace that I couldn’t bear to think it, much less say it out loud.

  Pressing my head against his chest, he put his other arm around my back to hold me against him. His heartbeat echoed in my ear, so much slower than mine, so much stronger and more efficient. I wondered if mine would sound like that someday, too.

  His hand moved down to the small of my back.

  “Not lovers,” I whispered, the small hairs on my arm rising, my breath speeding up.

  “Please?” he asked, and I smiled, listening to his breath speed up too.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t know.” His thumb slid up under the back of my tank top. Once again, I was astounded by how warm he was, given the conventional wisdom that he should be an ice cube. “Not my real name. I’ve had many others.”

  “You don’t know or you can’t remember?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said. “I haven’t used it in a very long time.”

  “Then this isn’t something you do often?”

  “No.”

  He stroked the sides of my waist, brushing his fingers along my belly. On one hand, it felt intensely wrong to let him touch me considering what he had already done to me. On the other, I felt this insanely potent drive to touch and be touched by him

  I slid my hands up his arms to his shoulders. He had a hunter’s body, long-boned and lean, with well-defined muscles and visible veins.

  “How long were you in the cave?” I asked, stalling.

  He brought both his hands to my neck, cupping them around my jaw.

  “I couldn’t say,” he answered, and ran his thumb over my bottom lip. “The humans were having a war at the time.”

  He’d heard me ten years earlier, sometime after September eleventh. “We’re sort of still having it,” I told him. “Overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  He shook his head. “No, there were battles in Europe and some kind of plague or sickness here. I remember the way it made all the dead smell.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Are you talking about World War I?”

  He shrugged. “I believe they called it The Great War.”

  “Same thing.”

  “I was tired. I’d been a hunter for a long time.”

  I looked at him. How strange was it that I took pleasure in the fact my body brought him out of hiding? How strange that I should take his face in my hands and kiss him ferociously while plastering said body against his? That I should like the sound of the low chuckle that came from him as I did so, the quiet laugh that tripped its way down my spine?

  I pressed my forehead into his chest, breaking away to catch my breath. He had his hands under my shirt again, sliding them up and around.

  “Wait,” I breathed.

  He paused.

  “Can we stop?” I whispered. “Please.”

  He nodded slowly, taking his hands away.

  “It’s too much.”

  “Should I leave?”

  I shook my head. “No. No, I just… can you understand how this is a little awkward for me? I shouldn’t want this at all.”

  He nodded again but I didn’t let go when he stepped back. Instead I stepped with him, following as if we were joined together at the naval.

  “It’s the blood,” he said gently, brushing my hair away from my face. “It ensures an affectionate connection between a maker and a young vampire.”

  “It’s not the blood,” I said. “Unless… did you sleep with the last vampire, too?”

  “No.” He smiled.

  “Good.”

  I reached up and kissed him again. He gripped the backs of my thighs, pulling me closer, lifting me up against him. I wrapped my arms around his neck, my legs around his hips, holding on tight as he carried me across the room to my bed and pressed me into it. His thick erection rubbed against me through my pajama bottoms and I wished I wasn’t wearing them. He must have wished the same thing because his fingers slid along the inside of my waistband. Along the inside of my panties.

  In that moment, I was ready. I was beyond ready, arching toward him, waiting for him to touch me… dying for him to shove something of his inside me. I looked up at him and remembered the dream.

  I flinched. Just for a second, but the second was enough.

  He pulled away and stood by the door, facing out to the living room.

  “Get dressed,” he said.

  It was fucking hot. The hottest part of summer.

  Even along the river.

  Even after dark.

  We’d walked a few hours in the rough northern outskirts of the city without catching so much as the scent of another bloodsucker. Sweat soaked through my tank and shorts, streaming down my face. My vampire gestured to the steps of an empty skatepark, and we sat down, watching a barge pass under a drawbridge.

  “How do you measure time?” I asked. Curious since he didn’t seem all that concerned with years or centuries.

  “Short spans I measure as they come. In days and seasons.”

  “What about longer spans?”

  “I don’t know. In periods of thought, I suppose.”

  “Like eras? The Renaissance? The Middle Ages?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Something like that. I seem to revisit the same ideas over and over. Each time they change. My perception of the world changes as I age.”

  I grinned at him. “How so?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the same with you, the cycles of life we all have. We sometimes value action, sometimes complacency. I seem more drawn to complacency of late.”

  “What do you think about?”

  He smiled. “What we all think about when we have the leisure or capacity to do so. Why am I here? What keeps me?”

  “That sounds disturbingly human.”

  He laughed. “It does.”

  “But you can’t remember who you were?”

  “That idea bothers you greatly, doesn’t it? That my origin is something I’ve lost.”

  I nodded.

  He took a breath before he spoke. “I think who I was once became less important than who I am.” He shifted in his seat to look at me. “There is only so much capacity for retention in the mind. To make room for new thoughts and memories, old ones are released. If you look b
ack through your life, how much of it are you able to remember well? A fraction of a fraction?”

  “I guess. But my earliest memories are some of my strongest.”

  “True, but how long have you been alive?”

  “Twenty-eight years.”

  “So a fraction of a fraction of the time I have been living.”

  “Everything is fleeting.”

  He smiled again. “Yes, life is fleeting… whether you’re a human or a vampire. All we can really hold onto is the present.”

  The streetlight lit the side of his face, broken by the shadows of leaves.

  “Take me to your cave,” I said.

  I slipped inside the sandstone crevice, ducking to keep from bumping my head, turning sideways to make my body small enough to pass through. A scant wedge of moonlight trickled in through a long, thin crack in the ceiling, pooling on the floor where years of rain had carved a small ravine. There were drop marks in the damp dirt that lined it. I couldn’t see the back wall of the cave, just blackness.

  “So, this is the hovel?” I asked.

  He smiled and took my hand, pulling me back toward the darkness.

  “Don’t you have flashlight?”

  “No.”

  We walked along the west wall about twenty paces before he stopped and turned to me. “Get on your hands and knees.”

  I laughed.

  “Do you want to see where I stay or not?”

  So I did. He took one of my hands and pressed it against the wall, landing on a gap in the rock, a tight, low opening.

  I looked over my shoulder into the darkness.

  “I trust you,” I whispered.

  “And I you.”

  He pushed against my rear end. I belly crawled through the hole and stood, dusting off my legs. There was the sound of a match and I saw a small flame to my left. It grew, and suddenly I could see the wick it touched. Then the lantern in his hand, his black clad body… the room around us. Waving the match out, he put the lantern on the floor. This chamber was tiny, much smaller than the first one. There was just enough room to lay down and stretch out, and I saw where he had done that, a few blankets on the ground. His newly-acquired wardrobe folded neatly on what appeared to be a piece of cardboard. There was a small collection of objects on a rock ledge that jutted out a few inches: different rocks and pinecones. A few feathers.

  “You’ve lived here for almost a hundred years?” I asked.

  “So it would seem.”

  “And no one has ever found you?”

  “Nobody of consequence.”

  I grunted and picked up a book on the floor by the blankets.

  “Bram Stoker?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “Van Helsing.” He smiled.

  “You like it here don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes. I like it with you here as well.”

  “It feels very safe.”

  He pulled me up against him and kissed my cheek. “It is.”

  I took his face in my hands and redirected his aim. His whole body was loose, relaxed, unguarded for the first time since I’d met him. I deepened the kiss and grinned when his breathing picked up. He pulled back and rested his forehead against mine.

  “We should go,” he ground out the words, “before you get stuck here all day.”

  I picked his book up from the floor where I’d dropped it and slapped it into his hand.

  “Read to me,” I said, and made myself comfortable on the blankets.

  This time I do drink from him. One, because I already have. Two, because I’m so thirsty I think I’ll die. He rubs my head as I do it, his fingers behind my ear, and it reminds me of children, the way we stroke them to put them to sleep.

  I woke up completely disoriented. There was no light to tell the time by and a two-hundred-pound vampire had me in a vice grip. I felt the hard-packed dirt under the blankets, some of which we’d kicked off in the course of the day. Wriggling around to face him, I traced his nose and cheeks with my fingers.

  “I could kill you now,” I whispered. The corners of his mouth rose, but he didn’t answer.

  I slipped out from his grasp and did another army crawl through the crevice and into the main chamber of the cave.

  Instead of moonlight, sunlight poured through the crack in the ceiling. A pale yellow shaft that blinked and shifted as it shone through the canopy of leaves outside. Tiny specks of dust and minute moths danced and drifted in and out, passing back and forth between light and shadow. It was breathtaking, and I could do nothing but sink to the floor and watch until the light turned purple and died away.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The next night we spooked a vampire about to munch on a guy taking out the trash behind a dingy bar on the northern edge of the city. I had a decent shot but the vampire moved at the last minute and I caught him in the shoulder. The human dropped his bag of garbage and ran back inside, screaming in Spanish.

  We tracked the vampire back through town. I was getting better at it, at focusing on the one smell I was looking for and following it. Of course, that the vampire had a gaping hole in his shoulder helped. I could taste his blood on the air. He was hungry, angry we’d interrupted the feeding, and too distracted to bother keeping sharp about his surroundings.

  My vampire walked next to me, his gait a match for mine, though it must have been uncomfortable for him to shorten it. He didn’t say anything, but held a small smile on his face. Love of the hunt, I suppose.

  He was a very strange man to be with, the constant juxtaposition of someone who could strategize and murder with such relative ease, even when he didn’t want to, who couldn’t stand to watch television for more than a few minutes but stared at neon signs in awe.

  His hand brushed mine.

  “He’s heading for the swamp.”

  I nodded. The buildings thinned as we got closer to the park, giving way to American jungle as we neared the back entrance. Rumor had it the trails had been a haunt for vagrants and gay men in search of anonymous encounters for years before a Baptist mayor made a point of cleaning things up in the eighties. I didn’t put a lot of stock in those rumors. First of all, straight folks are as likely as gay ones to seek out that sort of experience. Second, it seemed unlikely that anyone who valued their life would go onto those trails alone at night, even with its scrubbing down.

  My vampire led me across the street and into the shadow of a magnolia tree.

  “How do you want to do this?” I asked, slipping out of my track pants. He reached over, catching my arm to stop me.

  I sighed, pushing his hand away.

  “I’m the bait,” I said. “It’s easier for him to smell me like this.”

  I adjusted my compression shorts. They were a lot more modest than what most runners wore. Hardly any cheek hanging out at all. When I looked up, I was getting the stink eye.

  “You know,” I said, “you’re pretty prudish for a guy who was running around in the buff until a couple weeks ago.”

  He pulled my gun out of his pants and yanked me closer, shoving it into a zippered pocket on my warm-up jacket. “I’ll go in the front entrance. You go in here and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  I frowned, testing the weight of the gun through my clothes. “It’s too heavy,” I said. “I’m all unbalanced. It’ll throw my gait off.”

  “Tough shit,” he said.

  I snorted. “Where’d you hear that one?” The way he tried to work modern phrases into his lexicon cracked me up on a regular basis. Obviously it was adaptive, but I thought I was going to die the first (and only, thanks to yours truly) time he’d said YOLO. I had no idea where he got the stuff, especially since he wasn’t a big fan of the silver screen. I suspected he’d found a MAD magazine somewhere, but truthfully, I didn’t know a lot about what he did when we weren’t together. I figured it was okay to let him keep a little mystery. The secret life of vampires.

  He ignored me. “I’m not taking any chances. Which trail could you run with your eyes closed?” />
  I smiled. “Do I have to answer that?”

  He cracked and smiled too.

  “I’ll wait for you by the caves then. Give me some time to get there.”

  “How long?

  He shrugged. “Forty minutes.”

  Grabbing me by the front of my collar, he and I kissed, long and hard enough I got dizzy. He sucked on my lip and pulled away.

  “He’d smell you anyway,” he said.

  I watched him take to the highway that ran between the park and the river, jumping the guardrail and disappearing into the trees. I waited twenty minutes, crouching in the shadow of our magnolia, before I crossed the street and snuck into the picnic area that bordered the park.

  The children’s playground was skeletal in the darkness, random pine trees blocking out the light from the streetlamps so it fell to the ground in broken pieces, shifting with the wind. I passed through the split rail fence that corralled the woods and kept the jungle from eating up the parking lot. The trail was damp with the rain that had over-saturated the ground. I smelled the swamp, hot and messy, and took a right, keeping an easy pace as I made my way toward the slough.

  For a long time there was nothing, just me and the trees and night birds, but at the second bridge, I felt the wounded vampire coming up behind me. I had another mile and a half to go to get to the caves.

  Hot damn, he was fast. On my heels by the next curve where the path became the land bridge I’d met my alligator on months before. The vampire growled. And then he spoke:

  “I’m going to make you bleed, bitch.”

  I faltered, going down in a spectacular mess of arms and legs. He jumped on top of me. Struggling to reach my gun, I unzipped my jacket pocket, pulling it out before he knocked it away. He grabbed my arms, trussing them at my sides beneath his legs. I felt his mouth at my neck, his fangs against my skin.

  There was a snarl on the trail above us. The vampire’s head snapped up, a slow smile spreading on his lips. His weight shifted back to his heels a split second before he launched himself off me.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees, looking up in time to see him connect with my vampire, headbutting him in the stomach before they went down together, fangs bared and fists flying. I ran at them, jumping on the vampire’s back and yanking his head up, my hands under his chin. He roared and whipped his head back, hitting me in the face. My vision blurred and tears poured from my eyes, blood gushing from my nose. He froze and made a different sound. He was hungry. Too hungry.