Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2)

by Telep, Trisha

  “I can give you what you need,” he said. “I can give you –”

  I stopped. “You presume to know my need?”

  Small muscles jumped in his face. “I . . . ” he said, and then, wisely, thought better of saying anything. That high-sweet smell came at me again: cancer. He was in the beginning stages of it.

  I made a darting motion. Heat pulsed behind my eyes. I showed him my fangs, cold daggers in my mouth. Dropping my voice a full octave – a parlour trick, really, but it was a chance to amuse myself – I hissed, “You want my brand of cruelty? Because I can give you cruelty. I can give you pain.”

  His eyes widened. Behind him – and the forming puddle at his feet – drifted a double-decker bus reinvented as a pirate ship, electro-pop blasting from its deck. Bodies hung out the windows, yelled through September dark: “Come aboard! Come, my pretties! We love you! WE LOVE ALL OF YOU!” Some onlookers cheered. Two young men ran up alongside it and launched themselves through the door. By the time it had passed – only art-cars were allowed on the playa, and no faster than five miles an hour – my little vermin-stalker was gone.

  The wind died.

  The sand settled.

  The vermin had thrown me off. I’d been in some kind of trance, lulled by my lover’s scent in my nostrils, his taste in my mind, the memory and the anticipation. Now that was gone, throwing me back on nothing and no one but myself. I was alone on this dead Nevada land scattered with odd gigantic sculptures, over there some kind of laser show, and over there towering figures kneeling in worship of an oil derrick that, like the Man and the Chapel of Lost Souls, would be set afire at festival end. In front of me someone had set up a stand painted white with an antique telephone chained to a table and a sign reading TALK TO GOD. FIVE CENTS.

  You bring me here, I said, streaming the thought-words out across the playa. Oh this desire, like a fierce blade twisting in my chest, his name engraved so deep there could be no substitute or replacement. It never truly went away. It hummed its dark addictive song beneath my days and nights – months and years and decades – while I travelled and hunted and loved (tried to love) and all the while pretending that I wasn’t just marking time until he came again to my dreams, and told me where to go. Where to find him.

  You bring me here, I said again, to this bizarre place, this carnival on the moon, you summon me and I come, like the dog that you have made me. And I do it. I cross the country for you. I cross the world for you. I would cross time itself if I had to . . . because I want, I need, more you . . .

  But after tonight I am done with you.

  I won’t be caught on this chain any more.

  I waited, probing the air for some kind of response. There was nothing. But then that seemed so much of what he was: creature of silence and void. He seemed most at ease in the in-between spaces, as if to look on him directly would do to him what full daylight would do to me.

  “They’re all over, this year.”

  So lost was I inside my own head, and so still and striking the woman who had spoken, that for a moment I thought she was another sculpture: desert Venus rising from the sand.

  “The joops,” she said. “Like the one that was bothering you. I thought you handled him well, by the way.” She sighed. “That’s what happens when we drink without killing. Word gets around. What a pain.”

  I tuned into her with interest: the smell of her evoked berries and cream, richly coloured silks, Belgian chocolate.

  “I don’t know you,” she said, tilting her head. Reddish-brown hair spread along her shoulders. She wore a long suede dress that crisscrossed her torso in an elaborate assortment of straps. “I thought I knew all the nightsingers out here.”

  “Is that what we’re supposed to call ourselves now?” My voice was arch. “Is that the politically correct term?”

  Of course I knew the word, which had come into vogue at the turn of the new century – “nightsinger”, meant to designate a certain class of vampire. Vampires come in all shapes and sizes, with varying degrees of appeal for our prey; the nightsingers, though, are the ones they write books about, and that the vermin – the so-called joops, a play on the words “junkie” and “groupie” – tracked and followed, begged to be bitten by, as if that same nightsinger beauty could enter them and make them something other than themselves.

  Her eyes were pale gold, like a tiger’s, and they took me in and read me. “So you’re one of the rogues,” she murmured. “Lonely path, that. No wonder your scent trail was so strange. How long have you been off the grid?”

  “I have my own life to conduct,” I said. “I don’t need to be wired into some global psychic network.”

  “You don’t worry about being left behind?”

  “How can I be left behind?”

  “Even our kind –” and she held out her hands, palms up, as if weighing some invisible substance “– evolves.”

  “Into what? We are what we are.”

  She tipped her head, but it wasn’t a gesture of acknowledgment, more like sympathy for one in my position. I felt that – her sympathy – and the back of my mouth flooded with bitterness. I didn’t have time for this.

  “Come back to our camp,” she said, “and have a drink – we have loveblood – and we can continue to argue the point.”

  I laughed. “Goodnight,” I said, brushing past her, “nightsinger.” I passed a fire pit, humans huddling round it – had it gotten colder? Like others of my kind, I don’t always register a change in temperature – and walked round a giant plastic cube in which a woman in pyjamas slept atop a shag rug. People were passing messages to her, slipping folded bits of paper through slots in the walls. They knocked on the plastic, trying to wake her up, but her chest rose and fell in the rhythm of oblivion. I looked at the woman in the cube. Then I couldn’t help myself: I turned and looked back.

  The nightsinger had not moved. People wandered the space between us, yanking up scarves or nursing masks as the wind began to move again. Green laser light streamed the air from a nearby installation. I could feel her gaze on me: fixed, unyielding. As if there was something she wanted to tell me, and that I desperately needed to know.

  Your call: how I wait for it: how it thunders through my dreams, a tsunami of light sweeping me to you.

  I come to you in Paris, a smoky cafe somewhere on the Left Bank, you wait in a corner booth with your notebook and glass of absinthe. I come to you in London, behind the rubble of a bombed apartment building, clouds mounting overhead, their promise of rain like a promise withheld. I come to you in the country town of Wagga Wagga and we lie down in yellow grass, kangaroos racing their shadows across the distant hillsides. I come to you in Kyoto, dripping silence beneath a stone bridge, cherry blossoms swirling in the water. I come to you in Starke, Florida, the night they executed a serial killer, people standing vigil with their signs that said BURN BUNDY BURN and you took my hand and led me to the back of a van filled with flowers and candlelight. I come to you in Thailand, music pulsing down a beach crowded with dancing young backpackers, their pupils like full moons inside ecstatic faces. I come to you in Manhattan, on a windswept hotel roof, the spotlights of Ground Zero like ladders of light that souls were still climbing.

  I come to you.

  I come to you, and you are waiting.

  That is what I know. It is the fixed unchanging thing.

  I come to you now, in Black Rock, Nevada, this ragtag city of tens of thousands that didn’t exist a week ago and won’t a week from now. I hitched my way here – getting cars to stop for me is never a problem – and walked the access roads marked with traffic cones to the Black Rock border, where dust-blown twenty-somethings dressed like refugees from a Mad Max movie checked tickets, searched incoming vehicles for stowaways, told people to make sure you take out everything you bring in, spoke about proper hydration and the increased police presence this year on the playa so if you have any drugs, keep them in your hidey-hole and no loose glitter or feather boas please, they drop and s
hed and litter. I walk the long, curving dirt road until it empties into the grid of “streets” – named and ordered on a map – and I walk past the RVs and the cars and the tents, the humble campsites and the more complicated affairs with their awnings and canopies and furniture, their whimsical signs and sculptures, their smells of barbecue. People in sarongs, shorts, bikinis, people in all kinds of costumes, people in degrees of nudity are milling around me, swigging water; they are lining up at the rows of porta-potties, they are riding bicycles, they are hanging out in deck chairs, on overstuffed sofas and love seats, on blankets, they are dancing on the roofs of RVs, silhouettes writhing in the harmless glow of dusk.

  The last of the day bleeds out.

  The wind livens, and I am out on the playa.

  I find you beyond the Chapel of Lost Souls. Every year, I have learned, the Festival features such a chapel. Intricately constructed from small pieces of wood, this year’s model is an ornate and rambling two-storey structure with a peaked roof and surround balcony. A playhouse for adults. People roam the tiny rooms, post drawings and pictures of loved ones, create their own shrines and leave eccentric little items of devotion. They use the proffered pens and markers to write messages on the walls.

  I can’t help myself. I grab a pen and scrawl furiously along the side of a column: “Jonas Alexander Stevens, 10 weeks”. He was a good baby. The knife in my chest digs deeper, twists more. When I leave through the other side of the chapel I step out into a sandstorm. The wind cuts against my clothes so that even I can feel the edge. I blink the sand from my eyes. I see nothing ahead except blurred gritty dark. But that doesn’t matter. Because deep inside the darkness of me a third eye opens and I see you striding towards me. I can smell you; I can breathe you in. You are night-blooming jasmine riding ocean air.

  I feel your hand on my shoulder. I want to cry, and I am not the crying type, not even when I was just as human as those still back in the chapel. You fall beside me, your hand in the small of my back as you guide me through the sandstorm. The lights of the art-cars and sculptures and theme-camps thin out. We are at the far edge of the playa, as far out as we can go. Jagged rocks rise like teeth, cutting darker shapes against the dark sky.

  We stand in the space you have created. Walls of sand swirl round us, a crazed and frantic periphery, but we are in a centre of perfect calm. The ground is layered with Turkish and Nepalese rugs; standing lanterns with textured bronze surfaces call a dance of gaslight and shadow.

  I turn to you.

  “I wish you would speak,” I say, like I’ve said so many times before, hoping for a different response. “Say something. Anything.”

  You smile.

  You are dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a tan leather jacket. You do not look like an angel. Then again, how is a creature like me to know? You look like an ordinary human male, if more attractive than most, just a touch of the uncanny in your sad, grey-green eyes. I stroke your face. Love your cheekbones, your wide, thin-lipped mouth, your olive skin. Love the way you pull me against you, bury your face in my neck. My hands move through your dark hair, trace the hard, sweet lines of your back and arms and shoulders. I can no longer catch my breath, or feel I need to. I take my sustenance, my life, from you. I am made full, turned whole, through you.

  We sink into the rugs, and it is like all the times before. I freefall through a sweet and blasted oblivion. And in this oasis of space and time, you tumble with me.

  But I hit the ground alone.

  And shatter all over again.

  Your seed in my body, your blood in my mouth.

  He was gone.

  The lanterns cast spheres of light into the calmed air. I tried to hold on to the bliss as hard as I could, talk myself away from the despair I knew was waiting: If it bothers you this much – if he leaves you with nothing, worse than nothing – then put an end to it! Where is your will? Get over it. Get over it. Get over it . . .

  But then his absence rose up under me, made pure and perfect and new. It knifed my heart, my very bones. I started to shake. Who knew when I could have him again, or ever? I drew my knees against my chest and cried out once, twice. I tried not to scream. The sky unreeled above me and his absence seemed more solid than I was, my existence as tenuous as trembling ash. Scattered, lonely figures drifted the playa, heading home after a long night’s revelry. An art-car with a pink shag canopy trundled past and took no notice of me. Morning crouched just beneath the horizon and I was exposed and alone. So be it. Anything was better than this loss that rang me hollow, this attack of the sweats, droplets of blood trickling on shivering skin. My body seemed to belong to somebody else. Let the morning have it then, and send flaming into the void what scraps of soul I had left.

  The day’s first sun lashed my skin.

  And all thought dissolved into a soundless screaming.

  * * *

  I opened my eyes.

  Pain streaked my torso . . . or maybe just the memory of pain, because as my senses woke up one by one I realized I felt . . . not bad, considering I’d expected to be a blackened crisp.

  I was in a queen-sized bed, piled with pillows, the sheets stained my own sweat-pink. I knew by the black tape covering the windows and the bloodstained wine glass rolling on the floor that this was a vampire RV. It was also the most spacious RV I’d ever seen, not that I was an expert in such things.

  I stood. I expected a sweep of dizziness but instead I felt . . . not bad. Naked. I looked down at the whiteness of my body, the ridge of sunburn that ran from waist to shoulder. Someone had lathered me in ointment: I swiped off some of the glistening substance, brought it to my nostrils, but couldn’t identify it. Whatever it was, it had taken the edge off the pain and faded the scar.

  A robe hung in the door frame: ivory silk and tattered lace, lovely enough not to part with and ruined enough to bring here. Slipping it on, I moved gingerly into the hall, found the screen door and stepped outside. After the coppery, strange-vampire smell that filled the RV, night came as a relief.

  The vampire I’d met out on the playa was sitting beside a fire pit, dressed in jeans and a blue plaid shirt, her hair pulled back in a braid. She was roasting a marshmallow on a spiked wooden stick. As the screen door whapped shut behind me, she turned her head a little. Then she said, “I don’t actually eat them.” There were vampires who developed an eating fetish, despite the damage it did to their systems. They were generally held in contempt. “I just like to roast them. I like the way they smell. How do you feel?”

  “I’m alive,” I said.

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “Glad.”

  “My name is Anna.”

  Another RV, smaller and painted bright blue, was parked across the way. The space between had been turned into a lounging area, complete with oversized beanbag chairs, a Lucite coffee table, fringed yellow pillows. “You missed the others,” she said. “They’ve gone to watch them burn the Man.”

  “You stayed behind?”

  “I’ve been watching over you all this time, why stop now?”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Three days.” She looked at me with those pale golden eyes. “I still don’t know your name.”

  “Vincent.”

  “You don’t look like a Vincent.”

  “My father wanted a boy.”

  “You are most definitely not that.”

  “I renamed myself after my Changing.” It seemed absurd to stay with my original name, given by people clueless to who and what I’d become. “After Edna St Vincent Millay. Her friends and family called her Vincent.” I added, “She was a poet.”

  “I know who she was.” Anna tipped her head back, said, “‘My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/It gives a lovely light.’” She slipped the marshmallow off the stick, lifted it to her nostrils. She grinned. “But that’s not true for us, is it? Our candle burns for a very long time.”

  Popping sounds in
the distance. Towards the far end of the playa, where a shadowed crowd of thousands gathered round the Man, bright lines streaked the sky: purple, blue and yellow, blossoming into fire flowers and breaking apart, falling. “I guess it’s started,” Anna said. She yawned. “Fireworks. I’ve seen so many of them.” She looked at me sidelong. “You know, I thought they were just myth.”

  “What?”

  “The fallen ones. He wasn’t as stunning, or as otherworldly, as I would have expected. I would have thought he’d look . . . more like you, actually.”

  I shrugged. My beauty was no longer a subject that held much interest for me; and aside from singling me out to the vampire who had taken me for his own, before abandoning me for another pretty thing some sixty years later, it hadn’t done so much for me. But then the implication of her words penetrated even my vanity, and I said, “You saw him?”

  “He came out of the sandstorm, told me where you were.”

  “He spoke to you?”

  If envy marked my voice, she showed no notice. “No. He put an image inside my head. I had to – I couldn’t figure out, right at first, how to align the picture in my head with the playa in front of me, otherwise I would have gotten to you sooner.” She stared at me for another long moment. “You thought he’d left you to die?”

  “I’m nothing to him,” I said. “A toy. A dog on a chain.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. But if you believe that, why go to him?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say the response that came to mind – Why do people put heroin in their veins? – so I said nothing.