Certain Dark Things

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “Do you get hangovers?”

  “Not from drinking booze.”

  “From what, then?”

  Atl looked out the window, making sure Cualli was still sitting outside the restaurant, where she’d left him. He wouldn’t go anywhere without her order, but she was still nervous when he wasn’t right by her side.

  “Blood,” Atl said. “Drugs.”

  She thought of home. The parties. They’d hire humans and then they’d drink from them. And then they’d drink tequila, bottles and bottles of tequila, and there was always a pick-me-up, some of the synthetic drugs that vampires loved and that would have fried a human’s head. Atl partied with her cousins, drove a convertible but also owned two motorcycles, kissed beautiful vampire women and punched the vampire boys who were too grabby and didn’t know how to play nice. The nights never ended and neither did the blood. Izel complained about her high tabs and her fast friends, but Atl gave her the finger. Vampires didn’t really live forever, but she felt she might, when there was still home and her clan and her unencumbered youth.

  Izel, she thought. Izel, Mother, my aunts, my cousins.

  Domingo leaned forward and knocked the salt over. The tiny grains rolled across the table. Atl stared at them, counting them. If she didn’t count them she was going to scream.

  “… mind…”

  “Sorry?” she asked finally, lifting her eyes toward him and brushing the grains of salt away.

  “Do you mind if I ask for dessert?”

  “Fine.”

  The restaurant was nearly empty, but their server was busy chatting with the cashier. Domingo raised his arm, trying unsuccessfully to attract their attention. Normally Atl wouldn’t have wanted to attract their attention, but the sooner she got the boy his dessert, the sooner they might go home. There were certain matters they needed to discuss.

  Atl decided to raise her own hand. The waitress looked at them and took out her notepad.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “My brother wants dessert,” Atl said.

  “Umm … can I have a banana split?” he asked.

  The server jotted down the order and walked away.

  Domingo looked confused. “Why did you say I’m your brother?”

  “It’s an easy way to explain why we are hanging out together,” she said. Atl doubted anyone could peg her for his elder going by her looks, but her attitude was that of a woman grown, not a timid girl on a date.

  “We are the same age.”

  “I’m twenty-three,” Atl said.

  “That’s basically the same thing.”

  “It’s hardly the same thing,” Atl scoffed. “I’m a lot more mature than you.”

  Domingo seemed to consider that as he wiped his face with a cloth napkin. “Do you have any real siblings? You know, back wherever you come from.”

  “No,” she said, and did not volunteer Izel’s name. It lodged there, in her throat, like a thorn.

  “I had two brothers,” Domingo said. “One of them was sort of nice, but the other was an asshole.”

  “What happened to them? Did they die?” she asked.

  “Oh, no.” The boy shook his head. “I just haven’t seen them in months. I don’t go home too often.”

  The server returned, bearing a banana split. She placed it in front of Domingo. He stared at the ice cream for several minutes until Atl had to roll her eyes.

  “It’s going to melt,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah … I know. It’s just it’s so pretty. I don’t … um … I only see things like this in magazines.”

  Domingo lifted a spoon and carefully began to eat. Atl felt funny, looking at him. There was plenty of food to go around back home and Atl never wondered where her next meal would come from. But it came from kids like this. Kids who stared at a cherry like it was a ruby, like a banana in a glass dish was an exciting new discovery.

  “You don’t want any?” he asked.

  “I’d vomit all night long,” Atl said.

  “Okay,” Domingo said. He kept eating merrily.

  * * *

  The bare lightbulb of her apartment created stark planes of light and shadow. It reminded her of a German expressionist movie she’d once seen, a scene in which a murderer runs across the rooftops. Atl peeled off her jacket and looked over her shoulder at Domingo, who was staring at the dog.

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “Cualli, sit.”

  The dog sat obediently.

  “You can pet him,” she said.

  Domingo hurried forward, rubbing the dog’s head while Cualli endured the caresses with stoic indifference.

  “It’s a very nice dog,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Dobermans were supposed to be smaller than Cualli, but she’d always wanted a big dog, even if Izel said that the tiny Xoloescuincle was the breed the Aztecs owned. In their mythology, it accompanied humans in the journey to the underworld. Atl sulked and kept a Xoloescuincle when she was small, but eventually that dog died and Atl became a teenager. She asked for a Doberman, a large one. Izel called her dog the Beast for this reason, but Atl called him Cualli, which meant “good.”

  Domingo scratched the dog’s ears and Cualli groaned with delight.

  “Are you hungry?” Domingo asked her.

  “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “You can have some of my blood. I don’t mind.”

  Atl pressed a hand against her chest, pausing and carefully considering her options. “Domingo, would you like it if we were friends?”

  “For real?”

  “Yes. But being my friend is a bit different.”

  “I’ll bet it’s different,” he said, smiling goofily, his crooked teeth showing.

  “No, it’s not just the blood.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s a bond. You’d be my tlapalēhuiāni.” She moved closer to him, brushing his hand. “Bloodletting was very important to the Aztecs, did you know that?”

  “No.”

  He probably didn’t know Aztecs from Mayans. None of the gods, none of the mythology, none of the names she’d learned since childhood. There had been vampires in America before the Aztecs rose to power, and they had interacted with humans, of course. But the Tlahuelpocmimi had blended so seamlessly into Aztec culture it was difficult to determine who had influenced whom, whether the emphasis on blood and sacrifice had come from exposure to the vampires or whether the vampires had gravitated toward this tribe because it meshed with their worldviews.

  “Sacrifice is always important,” Atl continued. “The codices show noblemen and-women piercing their tongues, lips, and genitals. Drawing blood with bits of bone and maguey thorns, because we offer ourselves to the universe and to others. We can only pay our debts with blood. The ultimate gift is always blood.”

  Domingo looked justifiably intimidated as she spoke, but she noticed the spark in his eyes, the hunger lurking there.

  “People aren’t very good to you, are they?”

  “Not all the time,” he muttered.

  “The blood rituals are part of a reciprocal relationship. Do you know what “reciprocal” means?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s when two people owe each other.”

  A murky simplification, Izel would have said. The bond with the tlapalēhuiāni was powerful. The transference of blood was symbolic, but it also served to create a mental connection. A Tlāhuihpochtli could not command a human—tales of vampires hypnotizing their victims had their basis in the Necros—but the vampire and the human, after coming in contact with each other’s blood, could share memories and even a crude form of telepathy. Atl’s kin called this the xiuhtlahtōlli, the precious speech. Since the word “xiuh,” precious, was associated with turquoise, the tlapalēhuiāni wore pendants or bracelets made with this stone to indicate their high-ranking status.

  And just as the turquoise was precious, so was the human a vampire picked as its tlapalēhuiāni, and picking one was a delicate, painstaking tas
k: it did no good to choose a weak or unsuitable candidate. After all, this would be the human who would protect, represent, and assist the vampire for decades to come.

  Which is why Izel would have cautioned Atl against selecting a boy she hardly knew.

  But Izel was nothing but ash; she was bits of blackened bones.

  “I can take care of you. If you’ll take care of me. If you’ll be loyal,” Atl said, shoving her misgivings away.

  “I can be loyal.”

  “Give me your blood and I’ll give you mine.”

  “And then we’ll be friends?”

  Atl grabbed his arm, pulling up his jacket to reveal his wrist. To his credit, Domingo barely flinched as she shifted and pressed her mouth against his skin. His blood was very sweet. Clean and fresh, like drinking from a spring.

  She drank greedily, enjoying each drop. It might have only been better if she’d had a chance to down a few glasses of tequila. Booze and blood. She’d had them aplenty, before things went to hell. Now … now blood and blood alone would have to do. But it wasn’t so bad, was it? For a fugitive she was doing quite well. She’d be fine. She’d survive.

  Domingo closed his eyes and muttered something. She felt his body collapsing against hers, nothing but an old rag doll. His heart fluttered in his chest, like a scared bird. She let him slide down onto the floor and knelt down next to him. Atl slashed her wrist with one of her nails.

  She stared at the line against her wrist, the rich, dark blood. This was more than a pact; it was a true connection. Once she gave him this, she could not take it away. There should have been a selection process, a ceremony, the burning of copal. She was going at it wrong and she was too young to have a tlapalēhuiāni. The Aztecs did not consider a warrior a man until he had captured his first prisoner of war. Her people did not think a warrior was a woman until she had made an honorable kill or pleased the gods with her deeds. Youths had no business with a tlapalēhuiāni.

  Fuck it.

  Atl pressed her wrist against Domingo’s mouth.

  “Be mine,” she said.

  He did not swallow the blood at first. But it was easy to force him to do it. She pressed her wrist against his mouth with such vehemence that he’d either swallow or choke. The boy did swallow, slowly.

  “Yollo. Tonal. Nahual,” she said. “The three principles. The flesh of the body. The spirit of the body. The animal brother.”

  The boy shivered violently. She held him as a mother might hold her child, his head pressed against her shoulder, her chin resting on his head. Cualli stared at her and whined.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Nick ignored the gnawing hunger as much as he could, he really did. Vampires had markedly different appetites. Nick’s subspecies ate food along with blood. In fact, his kind was quite voracious. He had a predilection for junk food. Twinkies, chips, soda, popcorn. They helped keep him mellow and staved off the hunger. Nick ate a lot during a single day, gobbling tortilla chips, going through three bags of cheese doodles, and downing two bottles of vodka. He put it off for as long as he could, then finally walked to the kitchen, dragging his feet the whole way.

  When he opened the refrigerator and pulled out the bags, he knew he would not drink any of the blood Rodrigo had procured. Just the smell of it made him want to vomit. It smelled like the plastic it came in. Rancid blood. Tasteless mush.

  He might as well drink his own piss. Not that Rodrigo would care. Rodrigo didn’t give a shit what Nick felt, and hadn’t wanted Nick to come in the first place. He sensed the older man’s disapproval in every quiet look, every movement of his head. But Nick had more of a right to be there than Rodrigo. Atl had killed his kin, and not only did he want payback, but he was also going to prove to his father that he was ready to handle the family’s affairs.

  Of course, Rodrigo disagreed. Rodrigo knew everything.

  Dad should have sent me alone, Nick thought. He squished the bag of blood between his hands. Nick squished so hard that the bag burst open, spilling blood over the floor, which made his stomach grumble. But when he sniffed it, it still smelled disgusting.

  Enough. He needed to eat. Real food, not the garbage Rodrigo was stuffing in the fridge. La Bola was on sentinel duty and Rodrigo was in his study, but Nick didn’t need to break down doors to get to where he wanted.

  He went to the bathroom, locked the door, and opened the small window. It would not have been large enough for a normal man to squeeze through, but Nick was not normal. His bones cracked and he twisted his limbs, dislocating his joints, and out he slid, slipping down the edge of the wall like a lizard.

  The Aztec vampires could fly a bit, he’d heard, but Nick was a Necros, so all he could manage was to climb up and down the sides of buildings. Not that it mattered. He didn’t envy the powers of the others. Most vampires were so caught up in tradition, in bullshit pomp and ceremony, that they forgot the reality of the world around them. The Necros were pragmatists, willing to seize modernity with both hands while the others cried about the good old days. His kin were creatures of action.

  This was why Rodrigo made him so angry. Instead of catching the girl before she reached Mexico City, they had lost her trail and were now trapped in this ridiculous place. Nick was told to simply sit still and wait. Nick wouldn’t have to be hungry if it weren’t for Rodrigo’s ineptitude. After all, how hard was it to find a stupid spoiled chick like that?

  Nick reached the alley behind the apartment building, cracked his knuckles, and headed away. The other night, when he’d gone to the Zona Rosa, one of the girls in line at the club had told him about an interesting joint where you could slip in without ID.

  He found it without much trouble. The Hyena was an old Porfirian house in the Condesa, painted a bright blue. It was one of the more fashionable establishments in the area, supposedly Bohemian and really a bit snobbish. The interior was just what Nick was looking for: lots of taxidermied animals on the walls and stuffed birds hanging from the ceiling. Coyote heads, horse rears, a whole bull near the bar. The music was Eurotrash, with tiny beats and obscure vocals. He didn’t like it much, but at least it was loud. Loud was good. It mellowed him.

  Nick ordered a drink. He didn’t bother with any food. He wasn’t there for overpriced nachos—he wanted blood. He zeroed in on a girl in a tiny neon pink miniskirt. She wore several silver crosses on her chest. The sight of them amused him. But no, not her.

  He looked around and saw another. This one wore a black, lacy outfit. Her hair was a matching black and her makeup was excessive, caked too heavily, artlessly applied. He thought she looked a bit like Atl, a vague resemblance that stirred him, made him lick his lips.

  He drifted toward her, smiling and asking if she was having a good time. She gave him an answer he did not catch, so he nodded and asked what she was having. She yelled into his ear, a screeching, irritating sound, but he continued smiling and ordered two, three, four shots for her. They danced.

  Three songs later Nick told her it was too warm inside and it was too loud, and she agreed eagerly when he said they should step out for a minute.

  Humans were so simple, so stupid, so trusting. Like this silly girl, wearing a ring on each finger, one of them a mood ring that sparkled blue and then green.

  They ventured into the alley behind the club.

  She kissed him and Nick kissed her back with the indifference of a man pressing his lips against a piece of mutton. But she did not care. She did not notice. Her hands drifted toward his belt and he considered his options. Sometimes sex and blood mingled well together. He didn’t mind playing with his food.

  Nick grinned against her mouth and bit his own tongue, hard, then kissed her again, his blood coating her mouth. It took only a few seconds and the girl went lax in his arms.

  “Take off your shirt,” he commanded her, and she did, an obedient doll.

  “Your name is Atl.”

  “My name is Atl,” she said.

  She sounded wrong. Atl had a beautiful voice.<
br />
  “Kiss me,” he said, deciding it was better if she didn’t speak.

  She did. But then, when he looked at her, he frowned. He liked doing this. He liked using his power to control humans, wrap them around his little finger. Something felt wrong, though. It wasn’t a sudden attack of morality, but the realization that Atl would never, ever yield like this to him.

  Staring at the girl, he realized what a cheap imitation she was.

  “Put your top back on,” he said.

  Her black hair, now that he looked at it more carefully, was a bad dye job. Her eyes, which had seemed as dark as Atl’s inside the club, were a honeyed brown. She looked nothing like Atl. The mere sight of her repulsed him.

  “Bite your tongue,” he said, and she did. Hard.

  Blood dribbled down the corner of her mouth.

  He threw his head back before crashing down on her, his serrated teeth tearing the skin like it was papier-mâché. Yes, they were also different from the Aztec vampires: his kind had fangs. They had sharp teeth and strong neck muscles to pull and rend the skin. The Tlāhuihpochtli had her nails and a stinger.

  A stinger. Nick thought that was ridiculous. Give him strong fangs to eat his meat.

  Nick slurped at the blood and took another bite of the woman’s flesh, enjoying the taste. She whimpered and in response he bit her harder, bit her right ear and tore a chunk of it. After that she didn’t complain and he was able to drink without her annoying noises bothering him.

  He could hear the music coming from the club, he could feel its vibrations as he pressed the woman against the wall. Her heart beat erratically and she opened and closed her mouth, like a fish out of water.

  It was good to have a proper meal again and he was enjoying himself immensely when the girl had to ruin it, suddenly growing still. She had died quickly, useless in every single way.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then looked around. The music was still beating loudly. No one had seen him. He dragged the girl behind a bunch of wooden crates. He discovered a dirty blanket on the ground and covered her with it.