Twenty minutes later, Ann had trussed the guy up in a couple of extension cords she found at the ballpark and tied him to the front of the huge motorized Snorting Bull overlooking the stadium. It was lighted at all times and accessible from a restaurant patio behind it. The Bull was built for a movie but stuck around. During games it announced victories and home runs: its eyes would light up, the tail would wag and smoke would come out of its nose. The front read, in plain white letters, HIT BULL WIN STEAK. This was the most obvious public place Ann could think of on short notice and it was right on the trail. She figured, what the hell, if she wanted the guy to be found she might as well shine a literal spotlight on him.
Ann worked fast and was lucky: it took the cops even less time to notice the guy hanging there than she’d imagined. While a couple of police officers were interviewing Clyde and Dora Hanford about the anonymous melee that had burst into their home off South Alston Avenue, many of their colleagues were swarming the DBAP. When they realized the place was otherwise empty they just stood around while a fire truck brought down the apparent kidnapping victim on hand. When he was conscious, the burglar was only too happy to confess to his crimes if it kept him away from the lunatic who'd put him up there. The next day a writer in the Herald-Sun made an allusion to the repeating logo found on the shopping bag Ann had fashioned into a gag and to the sign from which the burglar had been displayed for police to find: he dubbed the anonymous vigilante “The Bull’s Eye”. It was a joke, but it stuck. Durham, North Carolina, also known as the Bull City, had its first superhero.
Ann went home and slept well for the first time in many months. She did not bother to linger over old photos of herself in Delta Force days as she often did. She simply walked in, changed clothes and went to bed. The silence of the house usually kept her awake for a while after she tried to close her eyes but this time it couldn't get its hooks in.
Her therapist was very glad to hear she wanted to make her “meditation walks” a nightly practice.
2
A couple of other vampires and I were watching the local youth ballet perform Dracula in hypnotic slow motion when a perfectly pleasant autumn broke out in a war. It started with a scent: the faint but distinctly sickly sweet bloodstench of a fellow predator – another vampire, one I didn’t recognize – in an auditorium I’d expected to hold only humankind. One sniff sent the hairs on the back of my neck straight to standing and I groaned to myself. I was still thoroughly spoiled then: I’d gone out with some friends to enjoy a little culture. I didn’t want to endure politics instead.
The ballet performance was good but not great. To be honest, that’s one of the things I liked best about it. At human speeds of perception it probably looked fine enough, maybe a little rickety in the way of every event ever staged for parental benefit. I’m a vampire, though, so I was watching everything happen at a fraction of real time courtesy of my predator eyes. Ground to a supernaturally slow pace, that same ballet performance took on a poetry improved by its imperfections. A child – a teen, but gods: a child! – donned the mantle of that classic monster skillfully but not infallibly and I loved every second of it. The best art speaks to something universal and at the same time to something deeply felt and personal: Faulkner’s tales of familial claustrophobia, a lasting pop song, painted landscapes that snare the viewer’s mind by arranging colors and textures into somewhere familiar they’ve never been. These kids were doing the same with the archetypes of predator and prey.
The teenager in the title role was depicting a character we’d all seen a hundred times, sure, but he was also showing us himself as a monster: how it would look one day when he would stalk one or another type of prey. That probably didn’t occur to the average mom and dad in the audience but there were children on stage hunting and fearing and slaying one another to the applause of those who loved them and it was important – it was art – not just because of the skill or the time they’d invested in it but because they too would one day face monsters and chase each other and eventually they would maybe even kill or be killed. These kids were dancing the nightmares that kept them awake into the gray hours and so too their own uneasy society. In wide arcs and graceful swoops – and trembling embraces and slightly staggered tempos – their frail vitality contrasted the inevitability of mortality and I reveled in that contrast.
They weren’t actually moving in slow motion, but I was seeing them that way. Speeding ourselves up so that the world around us slows down is a vampire specialty. It's a useful trick when you're swooping down off a fire escape onto the back of unsuspecting prey, of course, but we use it for other stuff all the time. Sometimes, in the end, I find it fails to improve an experience. I had thought there would be a satisfying perversion in attending the performance of a stage illusionist and using supernatural powers to observe as he palmed the coin, privately forcing a demonstration of the absence of magic behind the trick. It held some pleasure, yes, but it also felt like finding the Christmas presents early: sneaky, fun and just a little disappointing. The pleasure of revelation fades into a shadow of regret. You learn it's possible to scratch an itch so hard it breaks the skin.
Used purely as an enhancement of the spectator experience, the best targets are any circumstances in which physical strength, agility or speed must be exploited to create the illusion of delicacy. A curveball thrown with full force looks like the nimblest of insects at hyper speed. I've known or heard about vampires who would sit and watch spiders spin webs because, dangerously close though that might be to living the stereotype, it afforded them an opportunity to meditate on the patience with which one might plan and execute some plot or vendetta. It is a different thing to watch someone dribble a ball down the court in the blink of an eye than it is to watch that same athlete use all the big muscles of the arms and legs and back in concert with all the little muscles and tendons around ankles and wrist and fingers and eyes to control a ball in a spontaneous and self-updating zigzag down the court. I don't know the first thing about basketball – I mean, honestly, it's just a game – but I respect how beautiful all that thoughtless self-control is when not just seen but examined.
That's all to say I was sitting stock still in the first balcony of an historic Jazz Age theatre in downtown Durham, North Carolina, when that smell of another vampire was carried to me from the orchestra level by a slight updraft: the simple physics of body heat in a venue with over a thousand seats.
As I mentioned, I was with colleagues. I was sitting with two vampires: Seth and Beth, whom I tend to regard as the rhyming opposites. After all the business with the Transylvanian I’d decreed that we all had to go out and be sociable with one another sometimes. I’d been convinced by my cousin Roderick – to whom I’d handed control of the city of Asheville, four hours to the west – of the value in choosing to stay a part of the world, to generally do things people do. So, we'd gone to see the ballet because I got a chuckle out of the thought of vampires having a social outing to see Dracula and just about every bloodsucker loves to watch mortals dance.
We gazed with slack faces as performers whirled and twisted their joints so that parts of their bodies could snap into a specific posture on more or less the right beat. There was a small orchestra droning in long, humming tones across my warped perception as I watched. The magic of dance is that the human body is a collection of curved shapes, all stuck together, and these kids could stretch and bend those arcs into wholly new geometries that were fascinatingly alien to their form.
Beth is a dancer by trade. She runs a strip club, which I'm sure some people would try to wall off behind caveats, but bodies in motion are bodies in motion. She was sitting in entranced fascination. Beth was in fantastic physical shape when she got turned into one of us but she has the least interesting face in human history. That forgettable mug sits in front of mouse-brown hair she pulls back in a limp ponytail. Beth tends to tuck her dancer’s body away under layered sweatshirts and dresses the size and shape of a flour sack. I don’t critici
ze her for this or question her reasons for doing so. We all hide ourselves from the world in some way and a woman in our culture has at least ten times the reasons of any man.
Seth looks like a young ‘80s punk: all badly bleached mohawk, sinewy limbs and blank gaze in leather and studs. He has slightly olive skin and I have no idea what ethnicity he might be or how old he really is. Beth turned up ignorant of everything but fangs just a few years ago so I’m pretty sure she’s extremely new to this stuff but Seth has eyes as old as time and then some. He looks like a kid with a bad case of Small Dog Complex (chief symptom: bark without ceasing) but in fact he is quiet and wise in a way few of us are. I used to think he would one day be gunning for my job – I’m in charge of the whole state with a couple of exceptions – but now I think he’d do anything to stay out of the spotlight.
I'm a huge fat-ass and I like the balcony of that particular theatre because the seats feel bigger and the tiered rows have more legroom. I was dressed chiefly in black, but that's because that's what I always wear. Under my black overcoat I had on a white and silver checkerboard shirt and pants so dark gray they were black in most light. I had on old jump boots I'd about worn out, but not quite, and the big mop of wavy black hair on my forehead was flopping over in a fashion regrettably close to being back in style. I'd liked being something of an anachronism, but no such luck anymore. At least I was sitting in a balcony once forced on African-Americans as a form of institutionalized insult. I need to feel a little bit like an outcast, all the time, everywhere, or I never quite know what to do with myself.
We were staring in silent fascination but that scent of unknown vampire from the orchestra level nearly snapped me out of my meditation hard enough to push me back to normal speed. I leaned forward very slowly and started flicking my eyes around the seats below us. I didn't immediately see anyone or anything of interest so I glanced to either side and saw that Beth still seemed to be lost in the moment; that's how we refer to it sometimes when we really zone out watching something. Seth’s eyes were also crawling all over the audience. He and I locked gazes for a fraction of a second and he gave me a curt nod: he had likewise detected it and failed to recognize the source.
I leaned forward – extremely slowly, just in case that would camouflage me amongst all the other fractional movements going on in any given instant of human perception – and looked across more of the floor. Seth did the same. Beth still didn't seem to have noticed or cared, and though Seth and I sat there gawking as hard as we could no one seemed to do anything out of the ordinary. The odds were, and we both knew this, that the other vampire in the audience was probably sitting very still and watching the performance as we had – or, perhaps, that he didn't have the ability to dilate time like most of us do and so he was sitting there watching it as a human would. I'd pity him a little if that were the case but we all wind up with such a weird grab bag of powers he probably had something to make up for it. Shit happens.
The problem for me was purely that I didn’t recognize him. That meant he was new in town or that he’d better be. Hopefully he was just a tourist – maybe he'd even come in just for this one show – because if he wasn't then he and I had to have a conversation and those talks were rarely fun for anyone. Sometimes people would ask around, call ahead, make themselves easy to notice or otherwise try to be polite, but not always. Vampires have worked out a system of subtle signs they can leave in public to indicate they’re new in town and looking to connect to whatever the local social scene might be. It's not entirely unlike the hobo signs of an earlier era and from time to time I’ve wondered if they somehow got the idea from us. Sign use isn’t totally universal but they’re the common etiquette in major East Coast urban centers these nights. I hadn't noticed any of them around lately but on the other hand Durham is both in my turf and not where I spend most of my time.
Sure, I'm in charge of the vampires of North Carolina, but it's a big state. When I say I'm in charge I don't mean I'm so conceited I think I can actually know everything going on in all places at all times. What I mean is I reserve the right to find out what's going on in any given place at any given time. There are vampires I more or less trust as my proxies in two towns: my nutso cousin Roderick up the mountain in Asheville and an ally named Sara who nests in Greensboro. There are also a couple of places where none of us ever dares go, especially the city of Charlotte. Besides those, though, I have no hesitation telling someone that North Carolina is mine. Where I live, on the other hand, is Raleigh. Though it is only twenty minutes from Durham by any number of highways, Raleigh is big and it's where the vampires in my part of the state are concentrated. Durham used to be a really run-down town with horrible city and county governments and too much crime, too much sprawl, too little to give a shit about, but in the last few decades it’s really pulled itself together. That's a lot of why I started coming to shows in Durham on occasion instead of sticking strictly to Raleigh: Durham is just as nice a place to hang out as anywhere else.
If it appealed to me, though, it could just as easily appeal to others. I knew I needed to spend more time in Durham and in Chapel Hill than I’d been doing in order to create moments just like this: opportunities to find out things I needed to know. I wasn't exactly on patrol, per se, but I wasn't exactly not on patrol, either. That didn’t make me any happier about having my reverie broken by the appearance of a strange vampire but were I really honest with myself I’d admit I’d come here in hope – and fear – of exactly this.
I immediately started thinking of this unknown vampire as a trespasser. My knee jerk reaction was to view them as at best a rude guest and at worst an invader. My experience with the Transylvanian, an ancient vampire who’d tried to set up his own little sphere of influence in the mountains around Asheville the year before, had made me wary and touchy and territorial all over again, just like I’d been right after I stole the crown from the last state-wide boss. My inability to spot this interloper started to grate on me after not very much time at all, so I turned off the slow-mo and let time rush into the chronological vacuum created whenever I use it. There's this weird kind of hiss and pop sound and then, boom, everyone goes from sounding like they're very far away and under water to sounding normal again. It was just in time for the movement going on right then to wrap up and the applause to start as the house lights came on. It was intermission. I turned to Seth and said, “Sorry, but I just can't sit here and enjoy myself anymore. Time to go to work.”
Beth had rejoined the here and now, too, and was completely oblivious to what was going on. “She's very beautiful,” Beth said in a kind of dreamy exhalation. I looked over, followed her gaze to the dance floor – empty now, curtain descending – and Beth went on. “If we turned her she could dance forever.” She sounded like she was high on the good stuff and I half smiled and half sighed.
“No dice,” I said. “Remember that.” I held up a finger and caught her eye by waving it in front of her and then used it to drag her vision back to me. “Remember. Seriously. No turning anyone.”
“I know,” she said. She sounded a little closer to the here and now – not that she ever got closer than spitting distance from it most nights – but her voice was a little sad. “Still, it's a pretty thought.”
I dipped my forehead towards the stage. “No,” and I put one hand lightly on Beth's shoulder as I said this, “It's that she was a pretty thought.” I smiled at Beth as I stood and turned around to walk down the aisle. Seth's face – always so still and emotionless – was so blank it spoke volumes. Beth always seems one misstep away from going on a permanent mental vacation and I wondered how many vampires of that sort Seth had seen in his unknown and unknowable years.
Intermission was a chance to go get some popcorn and a beer and I am never one to turn down fresh movie theater popcorn or a cold one. My maker taught me to eat after she turned me. It's not something most vampires can still do. I mean, sure, they could put food in their mouth and chew it and make it go down their esophagus
but they would eject it again pretty much immediately. My sire knows how useful it is to fit in amongst the living. Agatha made me sit and eat little nibbles of soft, bland, inoffensive things in the nights and weeks immediately following my turning. That was decades ago now and let me be the first one to tell you that there was plenty of boring white pap around to practice on in the 1940’s. If someone had asked me back then to describe Indian food, for instance, I would have thought they meant Wild West type Indians. There wasn't a tremendous amount of variety back then. I was enthusiastic to learn to eat, though, because I had never been one to shy away from the plate when I was among the living and I had no intention of giving up one iota of pleasure in the ever after, either.
I went downstairs to the lobby’s concession stand, bellied up to the counter and ordered my food. Popcorn and beer in hand, I walked outside to a courtyard of bricks and paving stones and concrete hell. I settled in on a bench of shaped and shapeless cement conceived in some war crime of urban planning. This place had been designed during Durham’s bad old days. The landscape was constructed from the bits and pieces lying around some hack's pale excuse for an imagination: obstructing curves and prickly shrubs and all the creature comforts of a cargo container. I started eating popcorn one puffed kernel at a time, slowly but steadily, as I watched the throng of smokers and their friends and anyone else who’d walked outside during the break. I wasn’t sure exactly for what I was looking but I figured I’d know when I saw it. Sure enough, a few moments later I felt that tingle.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 2