Cravings
Page 13
“Well, thanks, but I’m a little new around here to ask the queen to solve my problems. I’m—”
“We’re.”
“—just here to pay tribute. We stopped when we saw your sign.”
“I’m flattered!” Marjorie actually clapped her hands. “And you have no idea how much good it does this old lady to see you in such control of your faculties. Why, you could be fifty years old!”
“Really?” she said, thrilled. “That’s so nice of you.”
“And to think you came to see the library when you have pressing business with the queen.”
“What’s—uh—what’s she like?”
Marjorie fixed her with a paralyzing stare. “She is unlike any vampire sovereign I have ever seen, and I have lived through three.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Andrea could see Daniel mouthing numbers and counting on his fingers.
“I’m eight hundred sixty-eight years old, dear,” Marjorie said. “If you were wondering.”
“Are you shitting?”
Andrea elbowed him sharply in the side. “But—Marjorie—why aren’t you the queen?” She could get behind a queen—a scholar—like Marjorie.
Marjorie made a face like she smelled something bad. “Ech! Not hardly. This,” she said, her hand indicating the huge library, “is my passion. I’d rather eat a garlic sandwich than run the world. Can you imagine the headaches? The paperwork? The hostess duties?” The ancient scholar actually shivered.
“Oh. Um, do you know where we can find the new queen?”
“Certainly. Nostro’s holdings now belong to her—that law is a thousand years old—and his old properties are out on the edge of Lake Minnetonka. I’ll get you a map.”
She clacked away in her sensible shoes and Daniel let out a breath. “That nice middle-aged lady is older than America? Shit!”
“Much older, and be nice. She could have ripped both our heads off and used them for bookends.”
“Yeah, well, she might be super decrepit, but I’m still—aagggghhh!”
“Here you are, dear,” Marjorie said, coming around—somehow—from behind them. “I’ve marked the queen’s territories in red. You should have no—well,” she added, fixing her gaze on Andrea, “you should have no trouble.”
“Thank you very much, ma’am.”
“Feel free to poke about in the stacks before you leave—hardly anybody ever comes here to read,” she said with a disapproving sniff.
“Wh-what do they come for?” Daniel managed.
“Maps.”
“Oh. That’s a toughie, Marjie.”
She fixed him with a forbidding look. “Marjorie. And thank you for your sympathy, shee—Daniel.”
“Thanks again,” Andrea said. “I’ll be back, if the queen doesn’t kill me. I love libraries.”
“You’re welcome here any time. As to the other matter . . .” Marjorie made a vague gesture and clacked off.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Daniel whispered in her ear.
“Don’t do that, it tickles. And I guess it means I’m supposed to find out for myself. Come on, let’s look me up in here.”
They found the Ms after a few minutes. The library was a peculiar combination of the old card catalog system, and up-to-date computer files. They found a card which simply read, Mercer, Andrea. DOB 07/29/76; DOD 07/29/97.
“Oh, that sucks!” Daniel cried. “They killed you on your birthday?”
“My twenty-first birthday,” she added thoughtfully. “Must have needed people that exact age for his dumb ceremony. Barely drinking age forever . . . oh, the humanity!”
“You’re in a weirdly good mood,” he muttered, jumping at small noises—who knew when Marjorie would appear out of nowhere again?
“I like libraries.” She took the card with her name on it and inserted it into the slot in the computer. Instantly information about her began to scroll down the screen . . . there was her old house, there was her high school, her parents’ names and occupations, her grandparents . . . there were her college transcripts, including her transfer paperwork to St. Olaf . . . there was her credit report, there was her bank account . . . “Huh. Would you look at that?”
“It’s creepy, is what it is. Creepy dead librarians keeping track of your whole life, lurking here waiting for you to come back . . . yech!”
“It’s a pretty logical system, actually—what the hell?”
“What, what?”
She froze the screen. Under Affiliations, there was a single name: Sinclair.
“What’s a Sinclair?”
“I have no idea. I don’t affiliate with any vampires.”
“Shit, you barely affiliate with me.”
“I wish we could cross-reference my file with Sinclair’s to find the—whoa.” The computer unfroze and started to do exactly that. In a few seconds, they were staring at the screen, which read:
04/06/00. His Majesty King Sinclair, passing through Des Moines on business. See transcript.
“Let’s see it,” she ordered.
Instantly a dark, slightly amused voice came out of the computer. “I was passing through town—this was a couple of years before I became Elizabeth’s consort—and back-trailed a young vampire. It was a chilly night; I thought she might need a hand. She was very young; I doubt she knew her own name at the time. She was afraid and wouldn’t come with me. I made a few attempts and left her to her own devices. See if her description matches anyone in your files: about five foot six, shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, pale coloring—hereditary, not as a condition of being dead—slender, no tattoos or birthmarks that I could see, but she had a beauty mark high on her left cheek. Transmission ends.”
“Holy shit,” Daniel said, poking her beauty mark. “You met up with the king of the dead guys!”
“I remember him, too,” she said faintly. “I was too scared to talk to him. I’m not surprised he’s Elizabeth’s consort. Still, it was nice of him to try to help me.”
Daniel snorted. “He barely tried and gave you up as a bad job quick enough.”
“It’s not really in a vampire’s nature to help another vampire,” she explained. “For him, for what he was, he went above and beyond, believe me.”
“Well, d’you want to look up more toothy dead guys, or finish what we came to do?”
She was tempted to remain in the library—to sleep in the library!—but Daniel was right, they were just postponing the inevitable. She had no desire to look up Elizabeth’s file—for one thing, it was probably forbidden, and for another, why find out more information that was just going to scare her? And she had no wish to look up Nostro’s file, since he was dead and gone.
“Elizabeth must be a thousand years old,” Andrea muttered. “Maybe more.”
Daniel puffed out his chest. “Well, she’s no match for the baby and the sheep, tell you that right now.”
Andrea had to smile. “Still got that map?”
“No, in the three minutes since Marjie gave it to me, I’ve managed to lose it. Yes, I’ve got the damned map.”
“All right, then. Let’s go find the queen.”
Chapter 11
“THIS place is so totally creepy,” Daniel commented, his hand firmly in the center of her back as they moved through the ankle-high grass of the lawn. “I feel like Shaggy on Scooby-Doo.”
“The resemblance,” she agreed, “is remarkable.”
“Man, if you hadn’t told me a ton of badass vampires lived here, I’d have totally figured it out on my own.”
“Sure you would have. Stay close.”
“Don’t worry, Andy. Anything comes shooting out of the dark, I’ll kick their ass.”
“Don’t call me that. And if anything comes out of the dark, you get down and you stay down and you let me handle it, do you understand?”
“Sure. Not too lame,” he muttered.
She could hear a chain-link fence rattling and, after a moment’s effort, could see it, barely illuminated by the cold s
liver of the moon. “There. That way.”
“What way?” he complained, stumbling beside her. “It’s darker than a woodchuck’s asshole out here.”
“Never mind. I can see.”
“What, you’ve got flashlights for eyes now? Is that, like, a vampire power?”
“Daniel, hush up.” To her left, she heard a low, feral growl, and stopped suddenly. Another to her right.
“What?” His voice seemed very loud in the night air; booming. “What’s the matter? Change your mind? Because we could be back in Chicago in—”
“Shhhhh.”
Another, flanking them . . . no, two of them. No, three. Shit. She didn’t worry for herself—what did she care if she was ripped to pieces? But Daniel was easy meat. She wasn’t about to stand and watch one of these things eat his dear face.
She heard them coil to charge and jerked him behind her (“Hey!”) and got ready. She felt her fangs come out; part of her was always ready for a fight, welcomed a fight, and that was the true tragedy of her condition.
She could see their attackers now, scrambling toward them on all fours, but they weren’t wild dogs, as she had first thought. Or even wolves. They were too big, too long-limbed, too . . . pale?
They were . . . they were people.
She could smell their breath; old blood, and death. She could see their eyes; devil’s eyes, all black, like pits, but far down, sullen red light . . . their pupils? Their pupils were red? She could see their fur—hair, rather—long and falling to their shoulders in greasy clots. She could—
“Hey! Stop! Quit it, you guys! Bad fiends. Baaaaaaad fiends!”
Blinking, she saw a tall blond woman stumbling after the—the whatever-they-were. The woman’s progress was impeded by her footgear . . . ridiculously high heels in electric blue, with white toes. She was wearing a black skirt and a black double-breasted jacket, sleeveless. Her arms were slender; the wrists tiny, barely two inches across. Odd, on such a tall woman. Her hair was light blond and curled under at the ends, framing an attractive face with high cheekbones. Her eyes were bright green. Andrea had never seen such green eyes before.
There was a gold cross nestled in the hollow of the woman’s throat; it made her slightly sick to look at it.
Perhaps oddest of all: the things were listening to the woman.
“Bad, bad, bad!” she was saying as she neared them. The things cowered and whimpered but kept their distance. “You guys! Gross! I mean, just stop it now! You just had, like, ten buckets of blood apiece, how could you possibly be hungry? Bad!” She turned to Andrea and Daniel, and covered her eyes with her hands. Her nails were beautifully French manicured, Andrea saw, and the fingers were long and slender. No rings. “This is, like, so embarrassing. I’m not with these fiends, you know. I mean, I’m with them, but I’m not with them with them, y’know?”
“Sure,” Daniel said, which was a relief, because Andrea was completely mystified. It’s like the woman was speaking another language. One Daniel could understand! Thank goodness she’d brought her own interpreter.
“Like, just really gross-out, you know?”
“Totally,” Daniel said.
“Thank you! Usually people don’t get it, but it’s just . . . yech!”
“Not to mention massively bogus ’n’ stuff.”
“I know!” The blonde shook her head and rested her hands on her hips. “So, what brings you guys to Hell’s Acre? In case you missed the memo, it’s so totally dangerous out here. Probably looking for a nice place to make out but this is so not it. I hate to be a hardass, but I’m really gonna have to ask you to leave.”
“Hello,” Daniel muttered. It was obvious his eyes had finally adjusted to the dark . . . while remaining oblivious of the danger. “Babe alert.”
“Down boy,” Andrea muttered. Louder, she said, “We’ll be glad to go, miss, but we can’t just yet. We’re in town for—never mind. Thanks for helping us. Are these your . . . ah . . .”
“They’re mine, all right,” the woman said grimly. “Unfortunately. Don’t get me started. I mean, yech! We try to keep them clean, but they’re like puppies . . . they roll in everything.”
“Sure,” Andrea said, humoring the woman. Puppies. Undeniably evil puppies with foul dispositions and the appetites of rabid, starving tigers. All righty. “Well, thanks for calling them off. Listen, this might sound kind of weird, and I promise we’re not crazy, but we’re looking for a vampire.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said, totally unfazed. “Which one?”
“Well, the, uh, the queen. Of the vampires.”
“Whyyyyyyyy?” the blonde whined. “I mean, you’ve got nothing better to do with your time? What do you want?”
The blonde was weirdly unfazed by this . . . maybe she was a what-do-you-call-it, a sheep. Before Andrea could answer, Daniel was bulling in.
“Well, she’s here to pay her respects n’ all, and I’m here to kick the queen’s ass if she tries to do anything to my girl.”
“Oh.”
“Daniel!”
The blonde snickered. “Well, the queen is me, and I don’t want to kick anybody’s ass.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Andrea snapped, her nerves almost at the breaking point. “You’re not a vampire.”
“Am, too!”
“You certainly are not.”
“I am, too!”
“Oh, now just stop it! You can’t be a vampire, and you certainly aren’t an all-powerful queen. For one thing—” Andrea pointed triumphantly. “You’re wearing a cross.”
“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “It was a present from El Jerko, aka Eric Sinclair.”
“Eric Sinclair? As in the Sinclair?”
“Guy gets around,” Daniel muttered, then gasped as a fiend licked his hand with her cold tongue. “Uh . . . nice kitty. Go away.”
Andrea, puzzled, said, “But Eric’s the consort of—”
“Let’s not talk about it,” the blonde said thinly. “Look, you’re just going to have to take my word for it: I’m a vampire. The—uh—the queen.” She choked back a giggle. “Believe me, I know how it sounds.”
“This isn’t fair!” Andrea wailed. “I come all this way—I was scared, but I came anyway—and you won’t take me to the queen! You’re just playing games!”
“Look, babe, do I have to write it on my forehead? I’m the queen. I sicced these guys . . .” Indicating the fiends. “ . . . on Nostro. They had him for lunch. I didn’t know that by doing that I’d end up the queen; I thought I was just saving my friends. Now I’m stuck with this fucking crown and that sneak, Sinclair, and frankly, I’m pretty pissed off about it!” She was shaking her perfectly manicured finger in Andrea’s face, while Andrea was trying not to vomit from being so close to the woman’s cross. “So believe me or don’t, but either way, get lost!”
“Perhaps I can be of some assistance?”
“Aaaaagggghhhhhh!” all three of them howled in unison.
Andrea literally couldn’t speak, and Daniel was busy sucking gasps of oxygen into his lungs. So only the woman whirled on the darkness that had approached them. “God damn it, Sinclair! Stop doing that! And stop following me, it’s so fucking creepy and you know I can’t stand it!”
“Good evening to you, too, Elizabeth. Away, fiends,” he said, snapping his fingers, and the poor things scattered.
“My heart,” Daniel muttered, “is not having a good day.”
“I do apologize,” Sinclair said smoothly. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Elizabeth, aren’t you going to introduce me to your—” He saw Andrea and his black eyes narrowed. “You. Iowa?”
“Yes, we ran across each other there, sir,” she said faintly. It made her extremely nervous to be chitchatting with the king. He was just as terrifying, just as powerful, just as frighteningly polite as he had been that long-ago snowy night. He was, in fact, everything Elizabeth, the One, was not.
“You seem better now. In fact, you’re a couple of years ahead of schedule.” He careless
ly turned his back on her. “Why are you here, Elizabeth? We have staff to take care of the grounds. If you won’t live here, why can’t you stay away?”
“If you won’t fuck off and die, why do you keep bugging me?” she snapped back. Andrea was filled with admiration: the woman seemed more irritated than terrified. “These guys are here to pay homage to the—” She gnashed her teeth and finally spat it out. “The queen, but they didn’t believe me when I told ’em—”
“We believe you now,” Daniel and Andrea chorused.
“Oh. What gave it away? My innate royalness? My fabulous highlights? My shoes, did you see my shoes?” She propped one of her feet up on its heel, showing off her slender ankle. “Aren’t they cute? I knew if Kate Spade put her mind to it she could do decent pumps.”
“Actually,” Daniel said, jerking a thumb toward Sinclair, who looked gratified, “it was him.”
“Welllllll, isn’t that great.” Elizabeth, the One, scowled at them, then whirled on Sinclair. “Dammit! You told me this was going to stop eventually! It’s like some sort of twisted The Incredible Journey, except with dead people instead of animals.” She turned back to Andrea and Daniel. “Why, why, why do you all have to be so dumb and dependent? Can’t you just migrate somewhere else? Like to North Dakota, or the Antarctic Ocean?”
Daniel snickered and poked Andrea. “Queen says you’re dumb.”
“Shut up, sheep,” she muttered. Then, louder, “But you—you’ve been calling me!”
“Nuh-uh!”
Sinclair ahem’ed. “It’s a function of your power as sovereign,” he explained. “You probably have been calling them. Her. And the others who have been—”
“Well, shit!”
“Yup,” Daniel said.
The queen frowned. “What do you want, anyway?”
“N-nothing,” Andrea managed. “Just to see you. To make myself—”
“Us,” Daniel corrected firmly.
“—known to you.”
“Well, that’s nice and all, but you sure didn’t have to come all this way just to see me. Ever heard of e-mail?”
Daniel laughed, and the queen smirked as he exclaimed, “Don’t even tell me we could have avoided this whole trip!”