Dark Thirst

by Angela Allen

  When they made love, Chun wanted to fall into her body like water and become the air in her lungs. Every kiss, nibble, caress between them sent tingling through his spine. They took their time, stroking the kindled passion until they were intoxicated with desire.

  Touching her soft skin with his lips was enough to arouse him and take his breath away. His fingers traveled over her body, slowly exploring each curve, barely making contact. Chun loved to listen to her breath quicken and heart race as he caressed her. Each moan from Nisi’s deep voice poured heat into his body. Living this strange existence made sense when they were together. Nisi was the only light in the dark world he traveled through.

  He missed her, but understood why they had to work apart. The human race needed both of them working separately to get rid of this scourge.

  “Nisi will be in town any day now,” Chun said, scratching Ping under her chin. “She’ll be happy to see you again.” He still had a slight headache, and his shoulders, ribs and knees ached. Ping followed him upstairs to the first floor and sat patiently in the kitchen while Chun prepared her food.

  Chun made himself two thick roast beef sandwiches after putting Ping’s dish on the floor. Seizures always left him hungry.

  He pulled the subcompact computer out of the cabinet over the stove to review combinations of the words collected from other First vampires. The program shifted the words randomly into different groupings. Collected words were entered phonetically in the language used by the First and then translated into Navajo, a language Chun felt was more secure since few people knew it. It didn’t seem to matter what language he spoke the words in. The sounds reacted with the First blood in his body. It took these two things together to create a response.

  He spoke them out loud, typing in his reactions to the word combinations.

  “T’aadoo la’i yilkaahi.” His fingers and feet grew numb, and heat flowed over the tips of his nose, ears and neck.

  “Naa nish aah” left him flush, a little breathless and excited, the way he felt when he was around Nisi.

  He did this, carefully, every day, in hopes of putting together the words in a pattern he could use to destroy all vampires, or at least Firsts. The only combination he avoided was the pattern of sounds of the First who originally attacked him. The two times he uttered them out loud had produced seizures.

  There was no way, at this point, to test the effect these words would have on Firsts, but a reaction in him had to mean something. No one knew why the ritual rejuvenated only those with First blood. Chun followed research on the Internet about the positive effect of certain sounds and vibrations on healing normal humans. He couldn’t help feeling that the answer to curing himself and destroying all of them lay in these words. Maybe if he collected enough of them he could rid the world of vampires. Maybe he could become fully human again and have a normal life with Nisi.

  He tired quickly. Finishing his sandwiches, Chun checked the alarm system again and went to bed.

  Adina sat in the corner of the run-down jazz club. The quartet on the low stage played riffs that reminded her of Coltrane. Music was one of humans’ redeeming qualities. Jazz or rock or classical, she enjoyed the flow of music filling the air, the change of sound waves rippling and churning stillness.

  “Do you mind?” a young man said, pointing to the empty chair opposite her.

  For a moment she was going to tell him to move elsewhere, but she recognized his scent as the one questioning the vampire in the alley earlier. His long dreads were loose around his shoulders; his cinnamon-colored skin glowed with youth in the black turtleneck sweater. This couldn’t be a coincidence. What game was he playing?

  She nodded and turned her attention back to the stage.

  He turned around to watch the musicians and didn’t say anything until the set was finished. When the group went on break, he ordered a Black Russian and offered to buy Adina a drink, though her glass of white wine was still full.

  “I can see you’re here for the music, not the drinks,” he said.

  “And what are you here for?” Adina said, her newly acquired sunglasses hiding her eyes, but smiling slightly.

  “The music, a little human comfort.” He clicked her glass gently with his glass. “Here’s to music.”

  “And you assume I’m human?” Adina asked, still smiling.

  “I don’t like to use the word ‘assume,’ you know the saying, ‘Making an ass of you and me.’ But you do give the semblance of being human. Are you perhaps a ghost haunting the club?” he asked, smiling now.

  “Perhaps something like that.” Did he think flirting with her would be enticing? She tasted the air around him. He had something else going on. If she hadn’t just fed, this one would have been on the menu tonight.

  “Are you an artist? Let me guess,” she said, tapping her long red polished nails against her glass. “A writer.”

  “Bingo, you got me. And you, well, that’s not going to be so easy.” He leaned forward, squinting to see her face in the light of the small candle on the table. “A model or an international art dealer. Something unusual, not someone who works in an office building or anything mundane. You need the run of the whole planet.” He took a sip of his drink. “Do you always wear sunglasses in the dark?”

  She removed the glasses and set them on the table. “I’m sensitive to light. It’s brighter than you think in here.” His skin had the scent of someone about twenty-five years old, yet he maneuvered the conversation like someone older.

  He lifted the sunglasses, then replaced them without touching her skin.

  She raised an eyebrow behind the dark lenses. He was playing this very carefully, in no hurry to make his move, whatever that was.

  The next set started with a version of Miles Davis’s “My Ship.” Adina closed her eyes and listened to the trumpet, drums and keyboards while breathing in the young man’s scent. There was no cologne, just the natural musky odor of his body mixing with a slight fragrance of coconut oil from his long dreads. The heat of his body radiated through her. She imagined making love to him, his heat entering her cooling body. Hot lips on hers, his tongue, warm and wet, and in orgasm the sweet taste of his blood in her mouth and against her skin as her teeth ripped into his flesh. The trumpet caressed her thoughts, playing in between her images of them together.

  She opened her eyes. He was engrossed in the music, his back to her. He nodded to the beat, his long dreads moving gently. The steady pulse of his heart mixed with the music, adding to her desire to taste him. The band filled the second set with versions of Miles Davis’s work: “ ’Round Midnight,” “Now’s the Time,” “Tempus Fugit,” “Summertime,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Nefertiti,” “Portia.”

  Adina remembered an evening years ago, in this same nightclub, when it was the top jazz spot in town. Miles Davis played here and often sat in the audience to listen to others. She’d sat one table away from him that night, breathed in the smoky scent of his sweet dark skin and wondered at making him one of them.

  She laughed softly to herself, making her tablemate turn and look.

  “Sorry,” she said, shrugging. Not that it would have been easy to get to Miles. He was never at the club alone. It was a challenge she’d considered worthwhile. To think, Miles Davis, still making music today.

  Rapuluchukwu, leave it in God’s hands. Not that she believed in the gods anymore, but she left Miles to his own mechanisms, to the errant hands of time and death. Now these young ones played his music, but without his passion, his focused wildness.

  At the end of the next set, the houselights went up. The young man turned to her, lifted his glass in salute and finished his drink.

  “As a ghost of this establishment, I don’t suppose you could take a walk outside?” he asked.

  She considered him for a moment, vibrant and attractive in the way that only the young mortals were with their taut, firm flesh, easy breath flowing through their bodies, unaware of their own mortality. This made them as appetizing
to her as those at the ends of their lives, the other end of the spectrum, so unwilling to leave, so desperate to hold on to one last breath.

  “Not tonight,” she said, crossing her legs and leaning back in her seat.

  “Maybe another night?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “My name is Michael,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Adina,” she said, taking his hand.

  “A strong handshake, for a strong ghost,” he said, kissing the back of her hand.

  She simply smiled and watched him leave.

  Whatever he wanted from her, he was willing to wait. His need for her was as clear in his eyes as his death. And there was something else, a flicker of desperation, a kind of hunger.

  For a moment she imagined him nude, his strong body covered in bite marks, the blood trickling like dark juice over his cinnamon-brown skin. She shoved the image away. The idea of gorging on him as full as she was now was almost as satisfying as doing it.

  If their paths crossed again he would become a meal. After she played with him. Adina would show him what a real vampire could do, not like the weak Remade he had captured earlier. She licked her lips. He would be delicious. The words of the Whisper would settle nicely in his sweet body, his warm blood. Maybe she would take him to her place and bathe in his blood. She shuddered in anticipation.

  She stood and stretched. This night was filled with surprises and there were still clubs and bars open to visit.

  The next morning Chun worked out in the basement. These attacks always made his energy bunch and gather in knots. He went through two forms of Tai Chi, very slowly, leveling the energy in his body. Feeling more centered, he walked through his sword form, first with the light wood sword and then the steel sword. Finishing the form, a fine sheen of sweat on his face, Chun finally felt ready for the day and, more importantly, the evening.

  “How about a walk before we go to work, Ping?” he asked the dog, who was sitting patiently at the doorway of the dining room. Ping ran to the front door and waited to have her leash snapped on.

  While they walked, Chun listened to voice mail on his cell phone. A new client wanted an interview this afternoon. Chun returned the call. The nervous man didn’t want to meet at his office, so they settled on a restaurant near the man’s job. He wanted to talk to Chun about a missing person.

  Chun made his money as a private investigator, finding lost things and people. He was very good at it, another side effect of the vampire infection. This day work supported his night job.

  Back at the house, Chun showered and dressed in better clothes.

  “Let’s go to work, girl.”

  He placed his steel sword in its leather case and carried it to his car, followed by Ping. It didn’t take long to drive to meet his new client.

  Jim Piper was in his early forties. Ron, his sixteen-year-old son, was missing. Piper had gone to the police, but since the boy had run away before, he felt they wouldn’t aggressively look for him. The father was convinced his son was in danger and wanted him found quickly. Chun was inclined to think this was another runaway incident, but knowing the streets as well as he did, he also knew there was real danger there.

  Piper gave Chun a picture and, more importantly, a watch that belonged to Ron. Chun told the man he would call when he had something.

  Chun put the boy’s watch on and started at the bus terminal, then went to the train station, waiting for a sense of him, more than his face in the crowd. He drove to the usual places teenagers hung out, uptown and downtown, the Tombs, Gramercy Park and Washington Square Park, taking Ping for a walk around each area. It was Ping’s job to stay alert to their surroundings, since these searches were distracting for Chun.

  A bolt of energy, like electricity, danced on his wrist near the South Street Seaport.

  From an outside deck of the shopping mall he could see a group of teenagers skateboarding below on the side steps. Ping lay down at his feet while Chun closed his eyes and reached out with his inner sight. Taking slow breaths, he focused on the tingling around his wrist, and felt the surrounding air for its source.

  The boy had been there hours ago; his imprint was clear. There was no sense of which way he may have gone. He looked at the boy’s watch—4:30 PM—a half hour of daylight left. He’d come back to the Seaport early tomorrow; hopefully the boy would return. The night would come soon and he would have to get back to his other job. He waited on the deck, slowly sipping coffee, watching the sun set. He’d forgotten there was beauty in the ending of a day. For him it heralded the nightly hunt, not a time to rest.

  Adina moaned in torpor, the semiconscious state that vampires lay in while waiting for the night to come. The Whisper sang in her head, in images, sprinkled with words.

  …bodies torn open, a chaotic field of human remains, heads, arm, legs, hands, fingers…

  …her naked, floating in a sea of warm blood, weightless and sated…Fumiya, suffering.

  …a wave of blood covers her, she is dragged down in the warmth, not suffocating, but drawing the blood into her lungs, her mouth…the blood is alive, squirming into her ears, between her legs, into every opening of her body, her back arches in orgasmic pleasure, her skin is stretched as the blood bloats her, filling her out like a balloon…she is going to explode…

  Ayzie, let it come.

  Adina jerked up out of the bed, her eyes searching the dark. For what? She shook her head. Every night she woke to some phantom in the room. No one was ever there, just memories of the Whisper from her dreams, nightmares of torpor.

  “Fumiya ayzie,” she whispered, a burning surge dancing along her spine. She closed her eyes and moaned from the pain. She hadn’t expected the Whisper to call her out so soon. Hunger stirred inside. She didn’t usually feed two nights in a row. This happened if she spent time near another First. Maybe it was the influence of that creature from the alley last night.

  She dismissed a fleeting thought of holding off. She’d tried that before and could not control the maddening hunger and pain that came from denying the Whisper its place. She shook her head. No point in going through that again.

  She didn’t know why no First lived long without the ritual. It was woven into the fabric of their extended existence. To deliver the words into the almost-dead body of the victim, to drink his blood, to live. She smiled. Although people thought of vampires as the undead, she believed their lives were on another evolutionary level that unmade humans didn’t comprehend.

  Uwaezuoke, the world was imperfect; that was all she needed to understand. Whatever the reason, she would have to feed again tonight.

  She dressed for the evening. Tonight she didn’t feel like wearing black. The dark red leather bodysuit, with its deep V-neck and slit legs, matching boots and jacket and the sunglasses from last night would do.

  She considered taking the human she held in her basement, but changed her mind. Something fresh would be better for the ritual. She didn’t want to rush feeding on that one.

  Chun sat on the deck of the Seaport a few moments after the setting sun painted the sky in bands of purple, red and pink. On the lower deck the teenagers slowly dispersed. The missing boy hadn’t shown up. Chun removed Ron’s watch and put it in the leather pouch at his waist. The threads of Ron’s energy detached as soon as Chun was no longer in physical contact with the watch. He couldn’t afford to be diverted by the search while following the vampire.

  Chun stood and stretched. He would come back earlier tomorrow to see if the boy returned. Ping stood up and yawned.

  “Let’s go, girl,” Chun said to Ping. He drove home and fed Ping, leaving her to guard the house.

  Fortunately, it was a quick drive to Adina’s house. He parked his car a couple of blocks away. With his sword strapped to his back, hidden under his large overcoat, he found a good spot in the alley across the street to watch her house with binoculars.

  She didn’t waste any time once the sun set. As in the past days, the vampire left her
house not long after the sky darkened, hailed a taxi and sped away.

  Chun waited fifteen minutes, making sure she didn’t return before he entered the private courtyard. The gated fence between the house and street wasn’t locked. He stood in the shadow of the large tree inside the fence. Weeds and wild roses overgrew the small yard, and ivy covered much of the walls of the house. His heart raced. He willed himself to calm down. He needed to focus. Was there a way into her house?

  He closed his eyes and reached out. His augmented sight worked from the inside out, like three-dimensional waves in water. Every movement of the objects within the boundaries of his widening circle—insects, wind through leaves, birds, people in the street, and the surrounding buildings—caused ripples.

  He took a deep breath and pushed to direct his attention on her house. There were no vibrations or the hum of an alarm system. He pushed deeper into the house. There was someone in the basement. A heartbeat pulsed, making subtle waves in the air. It wasn’t another vampire. A vampire’s heartbeat was slow, just fast enough to pump the mix of poisoned blood and the blood of their latest victim through the body.

  Chun released his concentration. Why was she confident enough to leave the house with someone inside? He frowned. This didn’t feel right. He had to keep his mind on his objective, to see if there was a way into her house. He hadn’t come here to rescue anyone.

  He moved to the side of the house, trying to avoid the wild roses that twisted around the edges of the yard. The windows were barred on the outside and shuttered on the inside. The shutters seemed metallic. He shook his head. This wasn’t good. He worked around the outside of the house, but every entrance was barricaded. Even the windows to the basement had been sealed with bricks. He pressed his ear against the wall. Nothing. No doubt the house was soundproofed—vampires liked to play with their victims.