Certain Dark Things

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Rodrigo opened the door without knocking. Nick was sprawled on the large bed, bits of chips on the sheets. Candy wrappers littered the floor. Two empty one-liter soda bottles lay in a corner. When Rodrigo took a step forward, he felt the sole of his shoe stick to a piece of bubble gum.

  Rodrigo crossed the room and flung the curtains aside, daylight darting in. At first Nick slept peacefully, no change reflected on his features. Suddenly, he twitched. Nick opened his eyes and jumped up, shrieking.

  “Close the curtains!”

  Photophobia. You had to love it. Sunlight didn’t turn vampires like Nick into ash. Short-term exposure was more of a nuisance than a real danger, but it could, at the very least, cause blisters. Long-term exposure might give them third-degree burns, which, while not fatal, healed slowly. Hurting them, frankly, was more fun than having them crumble into ash.

  Rodrigo closed the curtains. Nick had tumbled onto the floor and pushed himself against the wall, his eyes wide and spit trailing down his chin.

  “Good morning,” Rodrigo said nonchalantly.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

  “I’m just seeing if you want breakfast. Feeling a bit peckish?”

  Nick did not reply; his eyes had narrowed into two dark slits. A red, ugly rash was starting to bloom on his cheeks from his brief exposure to the sun. Good. Rodrigo hoped he developed a few nasty blisters.

  “Probably not, seeing as you’ve already eaten,” Rodrigo said, squatting down, forearms resting on his knees. He looked straight at the vampire.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “This,” Rodrigo said, taking out his cell phone and pressing it against the kid’s face.

  Nick frowned as he looked at the screen and began scrolling through the story. Rodrigo stood up, let him read for a couple of minutes, then spoke.

  “Girl dead, found beyond nightclub alley. Throat torn out,” Rodrigo said.

  “Who cares?” Nick spat back.

  “Vampire bites! The cops will be searching for you.”

  Nick rose, his movements those of a spider, a tad jerky from the exposure to sunlight. A tad uncertain. But his voice was assertive. “They won’t find me.”

  “Oh, because you cover your tracks so well? Might as well have carved your name onto the bitch’s chest.”

  Rodrigo snatched the phone back and stuffed it in his suit jacket’s pocket. Nick didn’t look the least bit guilty about his actions. Not that he expected anything else from such a pampered bloodsucker.

  “Do you want to go back home in pieces?” Rodrigo asked.

  “We could be back home now if you knew what you were doing,” the boy said dismissively.

  Rodrigo glanced at his shoes. They’d been polished recently and he could practically see his own reflection, though the image was distorted, distended, just like he felt in that instant.

  “I know what I’m doing. It’s trying not to attract attention. Trying to catch a vampire with no one else knowing and without the authorities figuring out I’m with another damn vampire,” he said, looking back up at the kid.

  “Mexico City is like any other city. The authorities can be bought,” Nick replied.

  “Sometimes. And sometimes, when the vampire is the son of a narco like your dad, the authorities just want to fry you in hot oil. We are behind enemy lines, idiot.”

  “Don’t you call me that,” the boy said.

  He noticed that Nick’s fangs were showing and that his pupils were dilating. He was ready to attack. Rodrigo had his gun and more than twenty years of experience with bloodsuckers, but vampire bites still hurt.

  “If you’re thinking of biting me, you better make sure I’m good and dead. Otherwise you are going to be in a lot of trouble.”

  “You’re an old man, Rodrigo. I don’t think there’s much you could do if I took a chunk out of you.”

  “Let’s see you try,” he said. It was best to push against the brat. Vampires delighted in weakness, sniffing out the lame lamb.

  Nick growled, but Rodrigo could see that his impulse to attack was evaporating. The kid was stupid but not that stupid. Rodrigo hadn’t spent so many years in the employment of a vampire by being gentle. Goons working for vampires are not sweet and loving. Mind you, Rodrigo didn’t like getting his hands dirty, never had, but when push came to shove he wasn’t above cutting an asshole’s head with a machete.

  The kid knew this, and if he’d forgotten he was suddenly reminded of it.

  “Fuck you,” Nick muttered. The boy sat down on his bed and began rummaging by it, probably looking for candy. “What have you done so far, anyway? You don’t know where she is.”

  “I don’t have Atl’s coordinates yet.” Rodrigo stressed this last word, feeling the point needed to be underlined. “She’s sneaky. But I do have a team of people assembled. They’ll be able to bring her in once we find her.”

  “I still say we don’t need no stupid team. We should be able to nab a girl.”

  “We made that mistake before, didn’t we?”

  He smiled, recalling the look on Nick’s face when the “girl” landed a good kick on him. Nick was young and he healed fast, but there was no denying Atl had inflicted a nice amount of damage on this cocky boy. Atl was not as strong as Nick, but what she lacked in brute force she seemed to make up for in agility.

  Rodrigo pushed away a bottle of soda with the tip of his shoe and walked around the bed, toward the door. “No matter. We should be able to catch her and kill her quickly enough, if you don’t fuck it up by eating random girls.”

  “Whatever,” Nick said, stuffing a chocolate bar in his mouth.

  Rodrigo took out a cigarette and lit it, feeling the weight of it upon his fingers. He smoked and did not say anything for a couple of minutes, letting his silence settle upon the room. Nick looked at him, waiting. Rodrigo removed the cigarette from his mouth. A red-hot poker is always cooler than a white-hot poker. When Rodrigo spoke he did not allow the rough anger that had invaded him minutes before to color his voice, instead branding each sentence with a white-hot anger that burned even deeper.

  “Your father thinks you are ready for this. I disagree. Nevertheless, he’s entrusted you to a task. But he’s also entrusted you to me. From now on, I will have total obedience or you will find yourself with more than a sun-rash around your mouth. Go back to sleep.”

  Nick stared at him and bowed his head, a snake momentarily tamed.

  Rodrigo slammed the door shut and stood there, savoring his cigarette for a good, long minute.

  CHAPTER

  12

  When Domingo returned she had not woken up yet. Her dog was sitting in front of the closet. It raised its head and growled at him.

  “Easy, Cualli,” he said. “I just need to—”

  But the dog wouldn’t have any of it. It growled again. It was a mighty big dog, and Domingo didn’t want to end up with a chunk of his leg torn off. He sat at the edge of the bed for about half an hour, trying to muster the courage to knock on the closet door, before giving up and retreating to the kitchen. He set the kettle to boil, made himself tea, and went back to sit in the living room. He was tired and dozed off after a while. He had a dream that he was running. He reached a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, climbed it—or leapt up, he wasn’t sure—his hands holding on to the wire. The long barbs dug into his skin, blood trickling down his palms. The pain, however, did not seem to matter.

  He opened his eyes and it was night. Atl was standing on the other side of the room, staring at him. Domingo stood up and palmed around for the light switch.

  “How long have you been back?” she asked. He couldn’t see her proper, she was draped in shadows.

  “A while. I didn’t know if I should try and wake you. Your dog, it growled at me.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “Yeah. I can’t find the light—”

  She walked over, effortlessly touching the switch. She wore the black jacket
and jeans, not black, but a dark shade of gray. Monochromatic, like the panels of graphic novels. His yellow jacket provided the one note of color to the room.

  Domingo squinted, his eyes adjusting to the brightness, and began searching his clothes. He took out the piece of paper the vampire had handed him and held it up. She took it.

  “This is all he gave you?”

  “That’s all.”

  Atl frowned. Her disappointment was easy to read and Domingo found himself wincing, quickly trying to make things better.

  “I can go back,” he offered.

  “No, it should do. It should lead somewhere,” she muttered.

  “Do you want tea? I made some for myself. I can make you a cup.”

  “No.”

  Her dog padded into the room and Atl bent down to scratch its ear, the Doberman staring at Domingo with its small black eyes.

  “Atl, who are you running away from?”

  The way she looked at him, the way she lifted her chin and her eyes narrowed, told him real quick that he shouldn’t have asked.

  “Why do you think I’m running?”

  “I just know. It’s a— I dunno.”

  He thought he ought to mention the dream, but he kept quiet for now. It might only make it worse. She already looked half-spooked.

  “I’m not going to tell no one,” he said quietly.

  Atl stood up and pushed her hair back behind her ears with both hands. She shook her head. She seemed … kinda offended. He thought she wasn’t going to tell him anything and then she leaned back against the wall, arms crossed.

  “I’m trying to get away from some drug dealers.”

  “Can’t you call the police?” he asked, sliding his hands in his pockets. He had a pack of bubble gum somewhere.

  She laughed. For all her talk of being his elder and apparently so much more mature, it was girlish laughter.

  “What do you think they’ll do first? Throw me in a cage because I’m a vampire or because I’m a narco?”

  “Like, what, you sell those synthetic pills and shit?”

  He thought of the parties he’d attended and the stuff that was up for grabs there. Not much, to be honest. Street kids were more likely to be sniffing glue, paint thinner, and rubber cement than doing blow. But once in a while, he would go to a rave in a rugged warehouse. There, the upper-middle-class kids who spray-painted themselves with glow-in-the-dark paint mixed with the street kids and the poor from the lost cities—the poorest of the poor neighborhoods, where people lived in shacks made of tin and whatever they could find. There, too, sometimes you’d find a rich kid from high up the slopes of Santa Fe. And there Domingo had met guys and girls passing pills with funky names. Crimson Dreams. The Snail. Four Times Three. He’d tried one and didn’t like it. It had dulled him too much and had made his head spongy. Domingo didn’t have much more than his wits, so in his view, he couldn’t be messing with them. Even if he thought he could, he didn’t have the cash for it.

  Try as he might, though, he just couldn’t picture Atl at a rave, carrying a plastic baggie full of pills, selling them and counting the money before putting it in the change purse at her waist. It seemed way too … ordinary for her.

  “I don’t sell anything.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “My family is in the drug trade. They run—well, they ran—a tidy operation for years and years up North, supplying drugs for the vampire and human markets. Very lucrative. Then a few years back other groups started moving into our area. It’s gotten … rough.”

  He remembered the headlines flashing in the newspapers, the ticker going round the screens in the subway. Narco vampires were always killing each other up North. That’s all you heard about them. Rough. Sure.

  “Anyway, we’ve been having problems with this one guy. Godoy. One of those new vampire lords who have been messing with our operations and stirring the pot. My mother thought she had it under control … and then they killed her.”

  “Jesus. So you ran off?”

  “My sister said I should be ready. I looked through the window.…”

  Atl’s voice trailed off. She looked down at her hands, as if she were concentrating, inspecting them very carefully. Suddenly she snapped her head back up and stared at him.

  “They killed my sister, my family. That’s when I ran. Now they’re going to make an example out of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Won’t the cops arrest them, anyway?”

  “You don’t get it.”

  Atl unzipped her jacket and tossed it on the floor. Then she turned her back toward him and lifted her shirt. She had a tattoo between her shoulder blades. It looked like a bird with a long beak, stylized and kind of odd. Sort of like the pictures he’d seen in his history book when they talked about the Aztecs. Like the picture from one of them codices.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “My family’s crest. The hummingbird. We’re not a small-time gang. I’m not a small-time thug. The police won’t do shit. Well, except maybe kill me or jail me. Or jail me, then kill me.”

  Domingo extended his left hand, reaching toward, but not touching, the intricate drawing. Atl tugged her T-shirt down and threw him an irritated look. He pulled his hand back.

  “I need to find a place with an Internet connection,” she said.

  “I know a café where they don’t ask for ID,” he said. “That’s … umm … that’s what you want, right?”

  Atl scooped up her jacket from the floor and nodded.

  * * *

  He took her to the café near the basilica. The person at the door waved them in, taking their money without bothering to check their papers. Even if someone had said something, Domingo knew it would take no more than a few words to convince the employees to let them use a computer.

  “That was easy,” Atl said as they navigated a narrow hallway, looking for an empty booth.

  “It’s no big deal. There’s this talk about how biometric IDs are super necessary and cops can stop you to look at your papers for no reason, but it’s not a problem. Most of the time no one asks me for papers. I know the places where they never even bother thinking about asking, anyway.”

  “Why don’t they?”

  “’Cause I’m not important,” he said with a shrug. “If I was a superhero my power would be invisibility.”

  “What about sanitation?”

  “Sanitation is looking for Cronengs. They don’t care about me.”

  Domingo didn’t even know why they bothered harassing the Cronengs. It’s not like they were going to get proper medical treatment; all they did was ship them to that old convent in Coyoacán they had turned into a crappy sanatorium, and if that was full they were off to Iztapalapa. The Cronengs died quick, anyway. They shuffled around the city, with their sores and their tired faces, begging for coins, and nobody really gave a shit as long as they weren’t loitering in the nice areas.

  “They do care about vampires,” Atl said.

  He found a booth for two and opened the door. It was narrow and it smelled of cheap air freshener, but they squeezed in. Atl pulled out the keyboard and began typing.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “The telephone directory. Shit.”

  “What?”

  “There’s like a hundred Elisa Carreras.”

  Atl brushed away the screen. She began typing again.

  “That’s better,” she muttered. “There’s only one Elisa Carrera who does translation work.”

  Domingo leaned down next to her, mouthing the address.

  “How’d you know she’s a translator?” he asked.

  “Verónica Montealban was a translator.”

  The monitor flickered, cheap thing that it was. Atl gave it a whack with the palm of her hand and the image steadied itself.

  “You think she changed her name?”

  “Yes. You have a pen?”

  Domingo looked in his many pockets and handed her a pencil and a scrap of
paper. Atl noted the address on-screen, then flicked the terminal off. She pushed away the keyboard and opened the door, motioning for Domingo to follow her. She walked ahead of him. They were about to reach the exit when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Domingo turned around.

  “What’s up, man?” Quinto asked. “You missed my party.”

  He was an okay dude, Quinto. A few years older than Domingo, but still pretty cool. He even had a cool haircut, tapered sides and longer at the top, and wore a neat gold earring.

  “Hey. Yeah, I know,” Domingo said. “I was kind of short on cash. And I’ve been busy.”

  “Too bad. Belén was there.”

  Which meant the Jackal had been there. Which in turn meant it was probably a good thing he had missed the whole thing, since the Jackal had it in for him. Nevertheless, it might have been nice to see Belén.

  Eh. He wasn’t sure.

  “Domingo.”

  Domingo turned around. Atl was standing near the exit, in the shadows. She stepped forward with that liquid way of moving she possessed, terribly elegant, her face coming into the light.

  “I’m leaving,” she said, hands in her pockets.

  “This is my friend Quinto,” Domingo said. “This is … um … my cousin.”

  “Hey,” Quinto said, smiling broadly, showing his teeth. “How you doing? Quinto Navarro. And you are?”

  “His cousin,” Atl replied, her face serious.

  Quinto chuckled. “You’re funny! I dig that. Totally dig that.”

  Quinto grinned at her. Domingo recognized that smile. Quinto never missed an opportunity to pick up girls. He worked at a pharmacy and could easily score a variety of pills, which meant he was pretty popular around his neighborhood. He’d also gone to veterinary school for two years and operated on the Jackal’s dogs when they got injured, which gave an extra luster. The Jackal made most of his money by collecting “fees” from the street kids who washed windows at certain intersections. You worked for him and you paid your dues. If you didn’t pay your fee, the Jackal would beat you to a bloody pulp—and since he was a big gorilla of a guy, often with three or four gorillas on the side, it could get real bloody. So you paid. But the Jackal, priding himself on his business sense and his ability to diversify, had happily expanded into the world of dog fighting, ’cause he was such a big fan of that crap.