The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  “You’ve a right to your privacy.” He played with the cigarette, turning it end over end between his index finger and thumb. “Were you born with your abilities or were they acquired?”

  “Acquired.”

  “Are there others like you?”

  “I know of only two others.”

  “What are you?”

  I considered that one seriously for a few seconds, then started to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. Adrian looked vaguely insulted at first, then broke into one of his sudden smiles. It was brief, on and off again, but he meant it.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged it away and finally lit his cigarette, blowing smoke up into the still air. “Yes, I can see I’m ridiculous.”

  “Not you, the situation. Wanna change the subject?”

  “By all means.”

  I broke away from the door and took one of the other chairs at his table. “Sandra.”

  Muscles on both sides of his neck tightened into iron. “No.”

  “Have to.”

  “Why? No … never mind, it’s all too obvious. As with Evan, you want to know if I murdered her.”

  “You need to be eliminated from a list of possibles.”

  “Same thing, nicer phrasing.” He looked directly at me, his eyes and voice like ice. “Ask.”

  I did and got the answer I expected. While I had his attention I asked my other question. “Did you kill Celia?”

  His reply was slow in coming, so slow in fact that he woke out of my influence in his fight to hold it in. His walls were back up again but not as solid as before. When he took a puff from his cigarette I noticed the slight tremor in his hand. “1 did not kill my wife,” he whispered. “Not directly.”

  “How, then, indirectly?”

  He was quiet for so long I thought I’d have to give him another nudge. “My work,” he said finally, his tone so faint I might have imagined the words. “Always my damned work.”

  I waited until he’d smoked another half inch. “Your work?”

  “What I have is not artistic talent, it’s addiction. It’s always been there, all my life. The silence and total solitude are utterly necessary for me to produce. Not many people can understand that, least of all Celia. She did try, and God knows she loved me, but it must have been the bitterest thing of all for her to realize she would always be second to the art.”

  I knew how bitter it had been for Barb Steler.

  “I believe that all people have the need to create, and consciously or not they find outlets for it. They paint or write, they marry and have children. Celia had no such outlets for herself, but the need was there, so eventually she found one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Another man. I really don’t know how long it went on. She had the most miserable excuses for being out and sometimes she couldn’t keep her stories straight. Even now I’m not sure if I was being selectively blind

  or just stupid, probably a bit of both. She wanted me to find out, like a child who does something bad for the sake of getting attention.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. Sooner or later every sleeper wakes. I think she was glad when it happened. It was quite an explosion on my part, but it proved to her I could still be hurt—that I still loved her.” Some of his inner agony welled up, constricting his throat, thickening his voice. “Two days later she went out to the garage and started the car.”

  He drew deeply on the cigarette to distract himself and coughed a little on the smoke. If there was a suppressed sob hidden in that cough, I pretended not to notice.

  “I was on the other side of the house in the studio and heard nothing. I’d been avoiding her by working on another damned magazine cover. We’d talked divorce; neither of us really wanted it, but we didn’t know how to return to each other. I didn’t know how to forgive her. She broke it off the only way she felt she could.” He stared out the tall windows, seeing nothing. “That’s how I killed her.”

  “Did Sandra know about this?”

  “No. I wanted things to be different for us. She would have always been first—I would have made certain of it. We never had the chance.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “Celia never told me.”

  “Could it have been Evan?”

  He was almost amused. “No, of course not. He talks a lot of charm to a lot of women, but has the sense to stay away from the married ones. Besides, at that time he was happily involved with a little blond model named Carol.”

  “Have you ever figured out who it was, or guessed?”

  He shook his head and stubbed out the cigarette in a tin ashtray. “I used to think of nothing else and now it hardly seems to matter anymore.”

  “You’ve no idea?”

  “None.” He ticked at the ashtray with an idle finger and nearly sent the dregs flying. “I think I’ll look in on Evan now.”

  “He’s going home with Reva and Leigh ton tomorrow.”

  “I thought they might make the offer, if only to spare him from my cheerful company. They did the same for me when Celia died, but I knew I’d smother beneath all their concern for my well-being. Evan’s the type to respond to such care, though. Perhaps it’s what’s best for him.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Good night.” He walked out slowly, hardly making a sound.

  “… so if Charles is still up when I go home he’ll be getting an earful.” Bobbi half reclined on her couch, her feet curled under her and a small coffee in her hand. I sat opposite her on the edge of a low table, rubbing my right fist into my left palm.

  “You think Celia and Sandra are connected?” she asked.

  “They were both involved with Alex Adrian.”

  “He really got to you, huh?”

  “Because of losing Maureen, I see myself in him. I know how he feels.”

  “You want to help, but you can’t.”

  “In a nutshell,” I said, sighing. “Your phone back on the hook?”

  “Not yet, you need to use it?”

  “No, I’m just noticing the quiet a lot for some reason.”

  “Stop carrying the world on your back and things will get a lot noisier for you.”

  She raised a smile out of me again. “Want to go to a movie?”

  “How ’bout a western with a nice cattle stampede?”

  That made me blink, until I figured out what she was getting at. “Been thinking about visiting the Stockyards?”

  “All day.”

  “If you’re sure …”

  “Not yet, but you said I should watch what you do.”

  “I know. I think you have less problems handling it than I do.”

  “We can find out.”

  “Okay, (Go put on something you don’t mind getting dirty. That place ain’t exactly Michigan Avenue, you know.”

  Ten minutes later we were cuddled up in the front seat of my car. Bobbi wore some battered Oxfords, a dark sweater, and a matching pair of wide-legged ladies’ trousers. Her bright hair was covered by a black cloche hat she said she hated, but hadn’t gotten around to throwing out yet. We didn’t talk much, but it was a companionable silence. I drove sedately and parked fairly close in.

  The air vibrated with the lowing of hundreds of animals, and their stench flooded over us. Normally I wouldn’t have parked downwind, but it was convenient. The car air would clear out when we left. I glanced at Bobbi to see if she was ready to chicken out. She seemed to read my mind and shook her head with a smile.

  “How do we get inside?”

  “I usually disappear and float in, like I did the other night through I van’s door. This time we’ll climb a fence.”

  She opened her handbag and pulled out a tattered pair of black cotton gloves. “Just as well I came prepared. I don’t want to pick up any splinters.” She pulled them on and tossed the bag under the car seat. “Ready?”

  “You been studying for this?”

  “I had a lot of time to think about it.”<
br />
  Picking a long, dark stretch between streetlights, I led the way in and helped her climb up and over. No one was near enough to notice our intrusion, but I didn’t want to take any chances by hanging around too long. We went to the closest occupied pen and scrambled over its thick timbers.

  Bobbi stared at the three cows huddled in the far corner and they stared unenthusiastically back. “Big, aren’t they?”

  “They stink, too.”

  “But you put your mouth—”

  “Baby, I get so hungry, it just doesn’t matter.” A lazy stream of wind from a distant slaughterhouse carried a breath of the bloodsmell over us. Bobbi couldn’t pick it up, but I could and it stirred dark things within me.

  “Are you hungry now?”

  “I’m getting there.” I’d fed last night, but a person can be full of food, walk past a restaurant, and still salivate. The same principle applied now. I made myself breathe regularly to catch more of the smell and centered my attention on the nearest animal.

  The process of hypnotizing people is fairly simple, but different rules apply to animals because they have less intellect and better defensive instincts. I didn’t entirely understand how to make an animal stand still for me, it was on the same level as my ability to disappear: I’d think about it and it happened, like flexing an invisible muscle. Maybe the animals could sense it somehow; it didn’t matter much to me as long as it worked.

  I closed in on the cow and ran my hand lightly over a big surface vein. The animal remained still, as though I weren’t there. Bobbi tiptoed closer to see things better.

  “This is where I usually go in,” I told her, keeping my voice low and even. She nodded her understanding.

  “What about your teeth?”

  My canines had not yet emerged. I wasn’t really all that hungry, nor was I sexually aroused to any great degree. “I’m having a problem there.”

  “Maybe I could help?” Her intuition was working again. That, or she correctly read the look in my eye.

  “If you don’t mind a little smooching in a cattle pen …”

  She didn’t.

  A few minutes later I had to pull away from her. “I should have brought you along sooner, it’s a lot more fun like this.”

  “Just as long as you don’t feel the same way about the cow.”

  “Good grief, no.”

  The animal hadn’t moved. I crouched next to it, careful to keep my knees out of the muck, and centered in on the vein. Not so very long ago I’d been quite squeamish about the whole business, now I cut straight through without any fuss—and I drank.

  Bobbi crowded in to see. I finished and wiped my lips and she patted the cow. “Nothing shows, at least nothing I can see now,” she said.

  “They get worse battering on the trip in.”

  “Maybe you should keep one as a pet.”

  “Charles hates cattle, too messy for him. So—what do you think?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not what I expected.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I’m not sure … maybe that you’d sprout horns or something or start foaming at the mouth. Actually, you looked like you were enjoying it.”

  “Maybe I should start selling tickets.”

  “Get an agent first. Shall we go?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  We went back to her place and she shucked out of her old clothes while I flushed some soap and hot water over my face. When I came out of the bathroom I immediately noticed the lights were out and that she hadn’t bothered to get dressed again.

  “Something on your mind?” I asked innocently.

  “I’d like to take up where we left off in the cattle pen.” She slid her arms around my neck and fastened lightly onto my lips. “That is, unless you think you’ve already had too much for one night …”

  She stifled a shriek as I picked her up and carried her to the bed. We fell into it, laughing, and proceeded to do some delightfully indecent things to each other. Between the giggles and gasps, we talked of love and, eventually, consummated it.

  Bobbi dozed a little and I stared at the dull white bowl of her overhead lamp, drifting in a pleasant haze of good feeling. Our legs and most of my clothes were tangled up in the sheets, but at the moment it seemed like too much trouble to straighten things out. Elsewhere in the hotel two radios played, each at a different station, but faint enough so as not to be annoying. Outside, traffic sounds oozed in through the windows.

  “What are you smiling at?” she murmured.

  “You were right. The world isn’t so quiet since I put it down and started listening.”

  “I’m a font of wisdom,” she agreed, and stretched luxuriously.

  “Have you thought about what comes next?”

  “You mean about changing me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She snuggled in closer. “Well, it’s kind of scary, but then so’s love.”

  “How can love be scary?”

  “It just is; the most important things always are.”

  “You scared of me?”

  “Never, but you’re still important.”

  “That’s good. What do you want to do?”

  She propped up on one elbow and looked at me. “I want to spend forever with you, or at least try.”

  Damn if I didn’t start to get a lump in my throat. I pulled her close and couldn’t let her go for the longest time.

  “jack … ?”

  “Mm?”

  “You may not breathe, but 1 still …”

  I opened my arms a little and she emerged, smiling, her hair as rum pled as the sheets. “What do we do?” she asked.

  I stroked the whole length of her body as though for the first time, making new discoveries, tasting new tastes. They say when you make love to produce a child it’s different, more intense and vital. I felt that now and savored it. This was something to always be remembered and I wanted it to be the best of all possible memories for both of us.

  She moved against me and on top of me, her warmth soaking into my own flesh. With her I had no need of sunlight. I spread my arms to her and her hands generated new heat where they touched me.

  Her lips plucked at my face, my chest, my neck….

  That felt wonderful. I encouraged her to continue.

  Her blunt human teeth wouldn’t be able to break the skin easily, but the touch of them was maddening. I caressed her long, smooth back and worked my hand around front, between us, to her flat stomach. She lifted a little and I moved my hand lower. Her sighs lengthened, matching my own.

  The clean scent of her rose perfume filled me, the roar of her heart deafened me, the weight of her body on mine was a delightful burden I never wanted to set down.

  She lifted her head, arching it back, her mouth open in a breathless cry as she accepted the climax I gave her. Her legs went stiff, her arms wrapped convulsively around me. Her hair and skin glowed in the faint light from the window. Dear God, she was beautiful.

  My other hand came up, because I couldn’t stand to wait any longer. With” one of my fingernails I dug into my neck over the large vein. I felt no pain, only a sudden trail of scarlet fire seeping onto the flesh.

  She saw—and understood. She kissed my lips once and then put her own to the wound. My sigh stretched into a moan as she took from me and as I gladly gave. I’d never had this kind of a climax before, not as a human, not even with Maureen. Like a storm, it rolled over and through and went soaring up to a peak lasting as long as she drew on my red life, taking its promise into herself.

  11

  “COME on, Jack, this isn’t funny.”

  Something energetically tugged and shook my arm, hard enough to wake the dead.

  “Wake up.”

  “Mmm?”

  The shaking stopped. “Are you in there? Wake up and answer or I’ll get a bucket of water and—”

  “Mmm!” I was more affirmative this time and waved her off. “ ’M ’wake already.” My voice was slurred an
d it was an uphill battle just to open my eyes.

  “So convince me,” she insisted.

  After a bit of concentration I managed to keep the lids up long enough for a glimpse at her face. Her expression was an interesting combination of anger and worry. “Whas the ’mergency?”

  “You are. You haven’t moved for hours. I thought I’d killed you.”

  I considered the heavy feeling of pleasure that still dragged at my edges. “What a great way to go.”

  “Are you all right? What happened?”

  “Just having a little rest. I should have warned you that I might conk out afterwards. Is it very late?”

  “A little after ten. You mean that’s normal for you when we do it this way?”

  “Yeah, but don’t worry, it feels just great.” I reached for her and pulled her close, craving her softness again. “I think it happens because of my blood loss.”

  “But you’d just eaten, sort of. I couldn’t have taken that much from you.”

  “I think this had less to do with amount and more to do with sensation.”

  “Does it hurt you?”

  “Anything but. How do you feel?”

  “Fine, I guess. You just scared me with that stunt—I mean, you were so still.”

  “Maybe you wore me out.”

  “Is that how you sleep during the day?”

  I nuzzled her hair again. “That’s right. Having second thoughts?”

  “It’s a little late for that, this is just healthy curiosity.”

  “I’m all in favor of any kind of healthy activity.”

  “No kidding.” She burrowed a little closer and a low laugh bubbled from her. “You know, one of my friends says sometimes it’s so good for her she passes out. Is that what happened to you?”

  “Yes, my sweet love. That’s what happened to me. Accept it as a tribute to your talent and its effect on me.”

  “Wow.”

  And that said it all for some time and we held lazily on to each other until she stirred and stated she was starving—for solid food.

  “Take you out?” I offered.

  She stretched. “Maybe tomorrow; all I want are a couple of scrambled eggs and then I have to sleep. I’ve got to get up to rehearse at the radio station and then work out what I’m going to wear at this broadcast.”