IN THE BLOOD:

VAMPIRE STORIES

by

Lawrence Watt-Evans

In the Blood

Contents copyright © 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999,

2000, 2011 by Lawrence Watt Evans

“The Art of Dying” and “Eye of the Beholder” are

copyright © 1994, 1995 by White Wolf Publications;

used by permission

Published by Misenchanted Press

Cover design by Lawrence Watt-Evans

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then you should return to your favorite eBook seller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's efforts.

OTHER BOOKS BY LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

The Nightmare People

Among the Powers

Shining Steel

THE FALL OF THE SORCERERS

A Young Man Without Magic

Above His Proper Station

THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

The Wizard Lord

The Ninth Talisman

The Summer Palace

THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES

Dragon Weather

The Dragon Society

Dragon Venom

LEGENDS OF ETHSHAR

The Misenchanted Sword

With A Single Spell

The Unwilling Warlord

Taking Flight

The Blood of a Dragon

The Spell of the Black Dagger

Night of Madness

Ithanalin's Restoration

The Spriggan Mirror

The Vondish Ambassador

The Unwelcome Warlock

THE LORDS OF DUS

The Lure of the Basilisk

The Seven Altars of Dûsarra

The Sword of Bheleu

The Book of Silence

WAR SURPLUS

The Cyborg and the Sorcerers

The Wizard and the War Machine

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Crosstime Traffic

Celestial Debris

The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

& Other Pseudohistorical Fantasies

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Name of Fear

The Art of Dying

Eye of the Beholder

I Was A Bestselling Teenage Werewolf

Blood Feud

George Pinkerton and the Bloodsucking

Fiend of Brokentree Swamp

Richie

Worthy of His Hire

The Pimp

Efficiency

The Note Beside the Body

The Pick-Up

~~~~~

~~~~~

Introduction

I don’t remember where I first encountered the idea of vampires; it seems I’ve always known about them. They’re everywhere. As a kid I watched “Dark Shadows” on TV, caught old Dracula movies on Channel 9 out of Nashua, read vampire stories in comic books, and found them in paperbacks by the likes of Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch.

I read Dracula when I was a teenager. I picked up Interview with the Vampire when it first came out, long before Anne Rice was a household name, and read Salem’s Lot when King was still a rising star. I read McNally and Florescu’s biographies of Vlad Dracula, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince whose name Bram Stoker had borrowed. I read hundreds of books and stories and articles about vampires and Bram Stoker and Vlad Dracula, both fiction and non-fiction, and I saw dozens of movies. I became familiar not just with Dracula or Lestat, but Varney and Carmilla and Lord Ruthven and a horde of others.

Once I became a professional writer the possibility of writing my own vampire stories inevitably occurred to me, and I began plotting a novel entitled Queen Vampire – and then Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned was published, and I threw out my notes. The plots weren’t actually very similar, but I still thought I’d look like a copycat if I tried to sell mine.

That was the hard part, I thought – doing something new with vampires. I was planning to try it someday, but there wasn’t any hurry.

And then one day I got a call from the editor of a book called The Ultimate Dracula, who was coming up on deadline and still needed a few stories; did I by any chance have a Dracula story handy? If not, could I write one? Quickly?

The money was good, so I gave it a shot, and wrote “The Name of Fear.”

The story, incidentally, is as historically accurate as I could make it. The descriptions of Vlad the Impaler’s actions are all drawn from fifteenth-century sources. He did die in the time and place I describe, but it’s unclear just who or what killed him. He was entombed in a church, but his bones are missing. It wasn’t hard to work all that into a story.

So I’d written my first vampire story.

Then Jane Yolen announced that she was editing an anthology of vampire stories for the “young adult” market, and she wanted good, traditional vampires, but no sex or gore.

A traditional vampire story with no sex or gore? That was a challenge! I responded with a story called “It’s My Body and I’ll Die If I Want To,” which Jane accepted on one condition – that I change that idiotic title to something more appropriate. It’s been called “Richie” ever since.

With that, I had a track record, and started getting invited to contribute stories to vampire-themed anthologies and magazines.

White Wolf Publishing, the company responsible for the wildly-successful “Vampire: The Masquerade” role-playing game, asked me to write a couple of stories set in the “Masquerade” world – “The Art of Dying” and its immediate sequel, “Eye of the Beholder.” These were written as work-for-hire, meaning White Wolf owns them outright, but I was careful to ensure that the contracts guarantee me the right to use them in single-author collections like the one you’re reading.

There aren’t any particular special circumstances behind “The Pimp” or “Blood Feud” or “I Was A Bestselling Teenage Werewolf,” which appeared in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, and Bruce Coville’s Shapeshifters, respectively. “Worthy of His Hire” was written for 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, and I figured I had better do something with a vampire no one else would do if I didn’t want my entry to get lost amid so many vampire stories.

“George Pinkerton and the Bloodsucking Fiend of Brokentree Swamp” was originally, believe it or not, a bedtime story I told to my kids – there was an entire series of stories about George Pinkerton, the monster-hunting librarian. Three of them eventually made it into print in a series of anthologies Bruce Coville assembled, and benefited greatly from Bruce’s expert editing – Bruce suggested adding the narrator, Billy, and changing the stories from third person to first.

As for “Efficiency” – back in the 1980s, “cyberpunk” was a fad in the science fiction community (not unlike steampunk today), but by the early ‘90s it was clearly fading into the background, and people began speculating online about what the next trendy sub-genre would be. “Vampire unicorns,” I said. I even posted steamy excerpts from non-existent vampire unicorn novels. It was a joke, and most people recognized it as such and laughed, but one of the editors of Midnight Zoo e-mailed me to say that yes, she understood I was just being funny, but if I ever wanted to write a real vampire unicorn story, she’d buy it.

So I did, and she did.

Then I got the writers’ guidelines for a planned anthology – I don’t think it was ever completed and published – and noticed that the editor had slipped up, and had said “and” when he meant “or” in a list of things he didn’t want to see in any of the submitted stories. I found the way that changed his meaning to be highly amusing, and deliberately wrote a story that violated the guidelines as written, rather than as intended. I didn’t send it to that anthology, though, but to one that paid much better, and “The Pick-Up” appeared in The Ultimate Alien.

After that, I felt I’d had my say on vampires, at least for awhile. I was drifting away from writing horror, and from short fiction in general.

But I wasn’t quite done after all. One day in 1997 I was out shopping and running various errands, and the sentence, “If you let me in, I’ll kill you,” got stuck in my head, and began growing. By the time I finished my errands and got home, the whole thing was complete in my head, and all I had to do was sit down and type it up.

(I’ve had one or two other stories happen that way, but they weren’t about vampires.)

Once that was done it was out of my head and there wasn’t any hurry about doing anything with it, but eventually I got around to selling “The Note Beside the Body” to Dreams of Decadence.

I think it’s worth noting that it’s one of the few stories where the title is an essential part of the narrative; if you leave off or change the title, it doesn’t work.

So those are the stories I’ve gathered into this collection, ranging from silly humor to (I hope) the genuinely creepy. I believe they’re all the vampire stories I’ve written to date; if I’ve missed any, I hope you’ll drop me a line and tell me, so I can include them in an expanded edition.

One final note, though – I threw in a ringer. One of these stories does not have a vampire in it, but I thought it belonged here anyway. You’ve been warned.

– Lawrence Watt-Evans

Takoma Park, 2011

~~~~~

The Name of Fear

Flies buzzed in the twilight, but ignored the sumptuous meal displayed on the white-draped trestle. They were drawn instead to the forest of stakes that stood on every side, to the slow trickles of blood that still ran redly down the wooden shafts, to the dangling hands and livid faces of the corpses that were impaled there.

The men seated at the table ignored the flies, and all but one strove mightily to ignore the bodies as well, to pay no attention to the dead faces that stared down at them from all sides and the ghastly stench that pervaded every breath.

The last man, seated at the center of the table, wasted no effort on anything but the meal spread before him. Despite the stink he ate with relish, dabbing up gravy with chunks of rough bread and licking beef fat from his bristling mustache. The corpses did not bother him in the least; every so often, while chewing, he would glance up at the nearest and smile.

After all, were they not there by his own order?

And was it not for fear of him, and him alone, that the others struggled to force down their dinner in this gruesome setting, and pretended that they were not troubled by the dead?

They surely remembered the brave fool who had once dared to complain of the odor. The prince had seen to it that the fellow was put where the smell would not upset him – impaled on a stake twice the height of the rest, above the stink, where he screamed until he died.

That was several months ago. Since then, no one had objected to any of the prince’s little habits.

The sun was down behind the hill, now, and servants were lighting torches so that the meal could continue. The prince toyed for a moment with the notion of using the torches in some new atrocity, but then dismissed the idea and reached for his wine.

From the tents below a sentry watched as the meal dragged on, the prince enjoying the discomfiture of his court.

The sentry was bored. The dead did not frighten him; they merely disgusted him. He was a fighting man, and had seen his friends hacked to pieces by the Turks, had done his own share of hacking in return, but that forest of impaled corpses – he grimaced, turned away, hawked and spat.

Something moved in the darkness, and he started. He stared.

The Turks? A night raid? Surely not! Not here, not so soon after today’s rout, when they had fled in disarray back toward Constantinople.

A spy? Hardly likely.

He peered into the gloom, and saw a pale face.

“Who goes there?” he called – not too loudly, for he didn’t care to alert the whole camp if it was merely a local peasant girl, out after a little remunerative fun.

“None who would harm you, soldier,” replied a voice – a male voice, to the sentry’s disappointment, speaking in a tone of supplication.

“A beggar?” the sentry asked, annoyed. “Be off with you, quickly, if that’s what you are – the Prince will have none of that in his lands.”

“Not truly a beggar,” the voice replied, the face seeming to drift a little closer. “I have a home, and a place. Still, I am hungry, and I thought I smelled food here.”

The sentry’s eyes narrowed in distrust. Something did not feel right about this. His right hand crept toward his sword-hilt, but his left slipped inside his shirt.

“Come forward, where I can see you,” he called.

The face drew nearer, and the sentry kept his gaze away from the eyes, centering his attention instead on the stranger’s mouth.

“What name do you bear?” he asked.

The stranger shrugged, a flowing, liquid motion. “My name means nothing,” he said.

The sentry smiled, and pulled his left hand from his shirt. “True enough,” he said, “For who concerns himself with the names of the dead?” He opened his hand and displayed the fine silver crucifix against his palm.

“I know you, nosferatu,” he said. “I saw the fangs when you spoke, and even over the reek of the corpses I can smell your foul breath.”

The stranger shrank back, saying nothing.

“What do you want here, vampir?” the sentry demanded. “What brings one of your cowardly kind skulking about a camp of armed men, instead of preying on village idiots and lovesick old women? If you try anything here, you’ll be up on a pole with the rest, but with the stake through your heart instead of your belly.”

“Well do I know it,” the vampire replied through clenched teeth, as he averted his gaze from the gleaming talisman. “It is as I said – when the sun sank and I arose I smelled food, and came to see why.”

“What food do you mean?” the sentry asked.

“Blood, of course – what other food is there, to me?”

“Of course,” the sentry said. “Well, yes, blood was spilled here in plenty today.”

“Why?” the vampire asked.

The soldier hesitated. Vampires were foul, unclean things, and the proper thing to do would be to send this one away, or to raise the alarm and have it destroyed – but he was bored, and his watch had hours left to go.

“There was a battle here this morning,” the sentry said, “And my prince carried all before him. We swept through the Turk like flame through the fields; they fled at the very name of my lord. And when we were done the prince had our Turkish prisoners, together with those of his officers who he said had not fought with sufficient valor, impaled, as a warning to any who would oppose him.” A certain pride crept into his voice as he added, “I swear that I think he will drive the Turk from all Wallachia, from all of Europe!”

“Impaled,” the vampire said, staring up the hill at the dangling corpses. “How many?”

“Thousands,” the sentry said, “I don’t know. We spent the whole afternoon at it, all of us, the entire army, setting the stakes and lifting the condemned into place and whipping the horses.”

“This prince of yours is ruthless,” the vampire said, still gazing up the slope.

“Ah, he’s a great man!” the sentry replied, eager to boast. He knew his own feats were little to brag of, as yet, but those of his lord and master were worthy of all the praise he could speak. “The best to ever reign in Wallachia, greater even than his father, who won such honors. Do you know, in his capital at Tirgoviste, there is no crime of any sort? No theft, nor beggars, nor any of the other plagues that the poor set upon so many towns – and all for fear of him.”

The vampire was skeptical. “Oh, but surely men are men, and there are limits to fear...”

“No, it’s the truth, I tell you,” the sentry said, his honor stung.

“You tell me a tale, that is all,” the vampire replied. “I have existed for many years, and I know mankind. How could even the greatest of princes stamp out beggary and theft?”

The sentry smiled. “Easily, when one has the courage and audacity of our prince! He issued a proclamation, inviting all those who could not work, who begged or stole or whored for their living, to a great feast – he said that he saw their hunger and poverty and would put an end to it. He gathered them all in a great hall, and had served the finest banquet you ever saw – it fairly made me sick to see such food wasted on those ragged wretches. But then he gave us our orders, and we marched outside, and closed and barred the doors, and then put the torch to the hall and burned it to the ground.”

The vampire’s eyes widened in shock, then narrowed.

“They screamed for mercy, and wailed and cried, but none escaped – those who tried, my comrades cut down with their swords and thrust back in through the windows where they had escaped. And when it was done, there were no more beggars, no more thieves, no more whores, in all of Tirgoviste. Do you know, in the market square, there is a well, as in any town, where a traveler may stop and drink? And there is a cup at that well, as in any town. But in Tirgoviste, it is no common wooden mug, but a golden goblet, set with gems, worth a king’s ransom.”

Seeing that some response was expected, the vampire said, “Indeed?”

The sentry nodded. “Gold and jewels, untended, in the market – and it is still there, because no one dares take what belongs to the prince. He has said that any who moves that cup from the well will be hunted down and impaled, slowly – he has been known to make an impalement last a full day, you know. No one doubts it, and the cup remains.”

“It seems that this prince is feared, indeed,” the vampire said. “As we of the night once were.”

“You!” The soldier laughed and dangled the cross. “In my grandfather’s day you were feared, but we know better now. You are so weak, you vampiri – you cannot bear the sun, nor silver, nor the cross. Even the humble garlic will keep you away. You cannot enter where you are not bidden, nor cross running water; holy water burns you like vitriol. Why should we fear you?”

“We have the strength of ten,” the vampire replied. “We can change our form, and call to all the creatures of the night; our gaze saps the will. Should you not fear us, then?”

The sentry laughed again, and brandished the crucifix. “Come nearer, then,” he said, “And show me why I should fear you!”

“I cannot, while you hold that,” the vampire admitted.

“Run away, then, weakling,” the sentry told him. “I do not fear you or yours. Only peasants and weaklings fear you. Those who serve the prince know what true power is!”

“I go, then,” the vampire said, “but first, one thing.”

“What might that be?”

“Your prince’s name, soldier. Who is this man who is so feared?”

“You don’t know?” The sentry’s astonishment was obviously genuine. “Why, Dracula, of course – Prince Vlad Dracula!”

#

The vampire studied the prince from the doorflap of the tent – he could not enter uninvited, as the soldier had reminded him a few hours earlier, but he could look, and his eyes, like the eyes of any predator, were keen.

Slipping past the sentries had been easy enough, once full darkness had arrived; he had been merely a mist in the night, drifting on the breeze. Finding prey was another matter – every tent was hung with silver and garlic, a cross over every bunk and around every throat.

But then, he had not come in search of prey, he had come for a closer look at this man who aroused such awe – and such fear. He could not say just why he was so interested; human politics were no longer of any concern to him, since he had become what he was. Still, a man who could spill so much blood, who could dine cheerfully amid the corpses of his enemies – such a man was something new, something to learn about.

A man who inspired such fear, who slew so casually – it brought back memories of himself, decades ago, before the people had learned how to defend against his kind.

The sleeping prince was not tall, nor handsome. His hair was dark and wavy, worn shoulder-length, as was the current fashion; his skin was pocked here and there, but unremarkable in color or texture. He wore a great bristling mustache below a Roman nose.

As for his eyes, they were closed in sleep, so that the vampire could not see their color, but they were deep-set and large, that much was plain. His lips were full, his mouth wide, his face rounded.

Not a handsome face – but a striking one.

The vampire raised a hand to his own features. He knew his skin was as pale as a corpse, of course, since a corpse was what he truly was, just a cadaver that could not lie down and be still. His nose was long and ridged, his lips full with stolen blood, his mouth wide to accommodate his fangs. His eyes were sunken into their sockets – large and deep-set, more so than when he had lived a peasant’s life, long before.

Even after his death – or undeath – his face had retained the roundness that had brought him childhood taunts about full moons. His hair was long and ragged.

The two faces, that of the sleeping prince and that of the undead observer, were not dissimilar. Vague thoughts stirred in the vampire’s mind.

He had existed for almost a century, now. At first it had been easy – the peasants had cowered in fear at the slightest glimpse of him, at the mere mention of the names vampir or nosferatu, and he had merely to demand in order to receive. Beautiful maidens were yielded up to him, that he might leave the rest of the village alone, and he had fed well, very well indeed.

But then had come the priests, with their crosses and holy water, and the village witches, with their garlic and their stakes of ash, and the villagers had learned to defend themselves, and feared him no more.

He had thought that they no longer feared anything – but now he knew he was wrong.

They feared this man, a mere mortal like themselves – this Dracula, Son of the Dragon, Prince of Wallachia and Scourge of the Turk.

They feared his very name.

A plan came to him, a good plan, a simple plan, and he turned to mist and let the night winds carry him away.

#

The battle was a long one, and a fierce one, but it went well, it went well. The Turks were falling back in disorder, fleeing into the night. Perhaps it would be this year, the year of Our Lord 1476, that would finally see the Turk driven from Europe.

It was hardly the custom to continue fighting after sundown, but the prince wanted to finish this, so as not to fight another day, when perhaps the fates would favor the enemy.

He could not see the battle well enough in the gathering gloom, though – the clash of arms was all about him, the torches and campfires far away, and he could not see the battle as a whole.

He caught sight of the hilltop, and spurred his horse toward it; from there, he would be able to observe, to plan, to see if there was any way to cut off the Turkish retreat and trap them all.

In a moment he was free of the melee, and riding up the slope.

The hill was held by his men, just a handful of them watching to be sure no Turks slipped by; he waved to them as he passed, and they waved back.

At the top his horse would not be still, so he dismounted and strode to the shattered ruins of a peasant’s hut. He stepped up atop a fallen chimney-stone.

A strong arm circled his neck, choking him, yanking him backward from the stone.

“Turk!” he gasped out, snatching his dagger from his belt.

Behind him someone laughed.

“No,” a voice said, “I am no Turk; I am more a native of this land than you are, you with your Magyar blood and Magyar king. I have been following you all this long time, waiting for my chance, Prince Vlad – and now I have it.”

Struggling, with no air left in his lungs, Vlad plunged the dagger behind him, and heard fabric tear. He felt the blade strike flesh – but then he met no resistance. It was like thrusting into mist.

Then the vampire squeezed harder, and the prince’s neck snapped, and he felt no more.

The vampire lowered the body and stared down at it hungrily. The blood would still be fresh and sweet, he knew – but to drink it might ruin his plan. If a spark of life remained, if the man died of a vampire’s bite rather than a broken neck, then in three days, in mockery of Christ, he would arise as another vampire.

The vampire had no use for competition. Making new vampires was not at all what he had in mind just now. He forced himself to turn away and call, “The Prince! The Prince is hurt!”

Soldiers turned their heads, spotted him, and ran up the hillside; by the time they arrived, he was gone.

#

Prince Vlad III, known as Tepes, the Impaler, and known also as Dracula, Son of the Dragon, after his father’s honors, was laid to rest in the church at Tirgoviste, beneath a stone by the west door. The manner of his death was a mystery; there were rumors that he had been killed mistakenly by his own men in the darkness and confusion, that he had been dressed as a Turk so as to spy upon the enemy, but no one really knew.

He was dead, and that was enough.

The boyars, the few that remained, breathed a sigh of relief. The Turks, upon hearing the news, were less subtle – they celebrated for four full days, and then set about planning a new offensive to regain the territory they had lost to the bloodthirsty madman.

The peasants of Wallachia and Transylvania wept bitterly. Terror though he had been, Dracula had defended them against the ravages of the Turks and the predatory habits of the boyars. The common people had feared Dracula – but they had loved him, too, as a child will love a stern father.

The hundred thousand Wallachians who had died screaming on stakes or in fires or in any number of other ingenious ways had only very rarely been honest working peasants, and the peasants had little sympathy for either the underclass or the petty nobility.

And they had no sympathy at all for the thousands of Turks Vlad had slain.

So they wept at his passing, wondered at the rumors, and then went on with their lives.

And then, a few days later, new rumors began.

The stone in the church at Tirgoviste had been moved, and Dracula’s body was gone – so it was whispered, though the priests denied it.

The peasants looked at one another and wondered. All of them knew one explanation for such a thing – could it be?

Could it be that even the grave had been unable to hold Dracula?

And then one night, near midnight, at a small house near Pitesti, came a pounding on the door.

The master of the house awoke, startled; his wife sat up beside him, the dog by the door whined, and the children stirred.

“Who is it?” the master of the house called.

“Dracula,” replied a voice, deep and commanding, “And you will open this door now.”

At the name of the dead prince the man rose immediately, trembling.

He hesitated. A visitor in the night was never good news. The vampiri still existed in the land, and there were tales of how they would trick their way into the homes of the unwary.

But the name Dracula – who would dare to claim it, other than he to whom it belonged?

The man staggered to the door and lifted the latch.

Sure enough, there in the moonlight stood a man – not tall, not handsome, with a round face, hawk nose, full lips, and deep-set eyes, a bristling mustache on his upper lip, a fur-trimmed coronet on his brow. The rich embroidery of his vest gleamed coldly.

“Come in, my lord,” said the master of the house, throwing the door wide.

The apparition in the moonlight grinned, baring fangs, and stepped across the threshold.

He feasted well – it had been so long!

The children he spared, and the dog, but both husband and wife he left without a drop of blood in their veins.

That they would rise again as vampires did not trouble him. He no longer needed to fear competition. After all, he was no mere vampire any more.

He was Dracula.

As long as he wore the crown and the clothing he had stripped from the corpse, as long as he kept in place the false mustache he had carefully constructed of horsehair and pig-bristle, as long as he kept his hair trimmed and combed in the royal style, he was Dracula, and the body he had dumped in a valley somewhere in the Carpathians was nobody at all.

And as long as he was Dracula, he would be feared again.

He would make all vampires feared again – and he would be their lord, their master, their king, the greatest of them all.

Someday, he told himself, as he settled into his tomb for the day, someday, all the world would know and fear his name – his new name.

The name of Dracula.

end

~~~~~

The Art of Dying

The lights came up in a sudden blaze, driving the darkness away from the easel, back to the studio loft’s furthest corners, confining the night’s gloom to the shadowy spaces behind the sparse furnishings – and of course, to the world outside.

Bethany suppressed her displeasure and discomfort at this abrupt, unexpected brightness; she would have thought that Anton would have chosen softer, more romantic light, but apparently he was sincere in wanting her to see his work.

She glanced at the canvas, not expecting much – not expecting anything, in truth, but to not even look would have been rude, and she liked to think that she was never unintentionally rude. Anton seemed so very intense about his artistic efforts; she really had to at least pretend to take them seriously.

The casual glance lengthened, and turned into a stare. She took a step toward the painting, her gaze fixed on the bright image.

A moment ago Bethany had been concerned only with the dark burning of the Hunger and the delicious anticipation of feeding, with the almost painful teasing she had been subjecting herself to as she let Anton babble. She had been caught up in the perverse enjoyment of delaying the moment when she would taste Anton’s blood, in increasing the tension between need and satisfaction so as to heighten the eventual pleasure.

Now, though, that tension had vanished; the Hunger itself was nothing but a minor distraction as she studied the intense colors, the textured surfaces of the painting.

It was a cityscape, San Francisco at dawn, knives of sunlight cutting between the gleaming towers and shattering to jeweled shards on the waters of the Pacific.

It was utterly beautiful.

She stared at it, drinking it in with her eyes, wanting to absorb every detail.

“Glare,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the painting. “Too bright.”

Instantly, Anton twisted a knob and the light dimmed. “I had the lights way up so I could work on it,” he said. “It was bright, but I didn’t see any glare. I guess your eyes are more sensitive than mine.”

Bethany smiled to herself. “Yes,” she said.

“You like it?” Anton asked.

Bethany struggled for a long moment, and at last managed to tear her gaze from the picture and look at the artist’s intense bearded face, at his black hair and guileless eyes.

That man had created this beauty.

She shouldn’t have been so surprised, she told herself. After all, she had met Anton when that little earthquake, earlier this evening, had startled them into bumping against one another at an artists’ reception at the Palace of the Legion of Honors. Why should it come as a shock to learn that he, too, was an artist? Who else would she expect to meet at an artists’ reception? She had gone mostly because it was a pleasant diversion on a quiet Friday evening, and what made it pleasant was the art, and the artists.

Of course, the surprise wasn’t that he was one of the hundreds of kine in the Bay Area who put brush to canvas; the surprise was that he was a true artist – in Bethany’s opinion, an artist of real genius.

That opinion might not carry the weight of some, after a mere forty years of undeath, but Bethany was confident of her conclusion. If this painting was not a work of genius, Bethany told herself, then she was no true Toreador, she was as bad as those poseurs of Serata’s.

No, even those fools with their fads and flash, even the youngest childe in the clan, would see Anton’s brilliance in an instant.

“It’s wonderful,” she said, smiling at Anton.

He smiled back, a smile of pleased relief. “Would you like to see some others?” He gestured at a dozen other canvases, leaning face-in against the east wall of the studio.

“Very much,” she replied, thrusting away, for a moment more, the pulsing hunger that drove her.

One by one, he lifted the canvases and displayed them, while Bethany stared in wonder at street scenes, sunsets, still life, each with that distinctive hard-edged, brittle light, like nothing she had seen before. While none of the other paintings were quite as magnificent as his most recent work, it was clear that that new creation was merely a continuation of ongoing artistic development, not a wild, one-time fluke.

Anton was a genius, the most brilliant painter Bethany had ever met in the flesh.

“Why haven’t I heard of you?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I haven’t exhibited anywhere yet. Haven’t tried. I have an inheritance I live on, and I wanted to build up a body of work, my family always said my work wasn’t good enough... do you really like them?”

“I love them – and I love you! Come here!” She meant it – she loved him, as he would love a fine wine. She threw out her arms to him.

She would have to be careful. She was very hungry, but she must not drink too deeply.

Not yet.

This one must be saved, must be made one of the Kindred, not given to useless, ungrateful death – but she could not do that without permission of the Prince. She was no anarch.

She would have to speak to Vannevar Thomas as soon as she could; she could not allow Anton to face the everyday risks of mortal existence a moment longer than absolutely necessary. Such talent must be saved for the ages.

As his arms went around her, as her lips neared his throat, she took one more glance at the painting.

Very careful.

#

“Bethany!” The voice was deep and penetrating.

Bethany paused, startled; she lowered her bulky parcel, then turned and peered through the dimness and smoke of the Alexandrian Club’s main lounge.

She saw a figure approaching, and recognized it. “Stefan,” she said in flat acknowledgment.

“I almost didn’t see you,” Stefan said as he squeezed his way through the crowd; the black leather of his tight pants brushed audibly against someone’s clothing, and the silver pendants on his chest jingled.

Bethany had not particularly wanted to be seen, but she saw no reason to state the obvious; she simply waited.

“I didn’t expect to see you tonight,” Stefan said. “Weren’t you going to some sort of event? Our host said you were.”

“Over hours ago,” Bethany replied.

“Oh, but... surely you didn’t leave alone!”

“Is there something you want, Stefan?” she asked, already tired of the pretense of friendship. Stefan was one of the trend-following fools in Serata’s circle, and there was no love lost between that group and Bethany’s own, more traditional faction of the vampiric clan.

“No, no – not at all! I was just surprised to see you.” He smiled. “Pleasantly surprised,” he hastened to add.

“I don’t know why,” Bethany said. “I come here often. If either of us should be surprised, Stefan, I would think it would be I. You are scarcely a regular here.”

“Ah, Bethany, you misjudge me. While I can scarcely tolerate the self-proclaimed artistes who run the place, I must admit that this is a fine place to meet with others of our kind, and when I return to the City to pay my respects to my sire I often stop in here afterward.”

Bethany bristled at the slighting description of the club’s management – both Cainen, who ran the Alexandrian Club upstairs, and Melmoth, who ran the secret club beneath, were her own kind, and kindred spirits, as it were.

“You come here, even though you don’t like the management, and yet you ask what I’m doing here?”

“No, no, sweet Bethany,” Stefan protested. “I merely express my pleased surprise at my good fortune, that our visits should thus coincide! I had resigned myself to missing the pleasure of your countenance.”

She turned away from this flattery, picked up her parcel, and took another step toward the alcove beneath the stairs.

“Oh, don’t hurry off!” Stefan protested, stepping quickly beside her.

“Stefan, I have business elsewhere.” She pushed past him and ducked into the alcove.

He followed her as she opened the heavy oaken door and hurried down the thirteen steps into the stagnant gloom of the Vampire Club.

At the bottom she paused in the tiny foyer, and Stefan joined her. The foyer was small enough that the two of them, and Bethany’s package, made an uncomfortable crowd.

“Aren’t you going to knock?” Stefan asked, reaching for the massive brass ring.

Bethany brushed his hand aside.

“Stefan,” she said, “I am here on business, to see the Prince, who I’m told is visiting my grandsire. You have no business here!”

Stefan smiled, his long white teeth a flicker of light in the darkness. “All the Kindred are welcome here, Bethany. I would not dream of interfering with your business, whatever it is – but I’m as welcome here as you are.”

She glared at him; untroubled, he reached past and lifted the heavy knocker.

Three times he let it fall against the carved oak while Bethany simply stood, her gaze hostile.

As the door swung open, Stefan remarked, “Besides, I hardly see what the great secret is – it’s obvious that that thing you’re carrying is a painting, and I presume it’s a gift for the Prince. Why should the presentation be private? Afraid he’ll see just how poor your work is?”

“It’s not my work!”

“Ah, then your artistic judgment.”

“At least I have some artistic judgment, you bloody poseur!” Bethany snapped, pushing past Stefan into the main lounge of the Vampire Club.

His laughter trailed after her as she descended through gloom and stale air to the lower deck.

In this place nothing lived, nothing breathed – but the undead moved in their semblance of life, past paintings that mocked the living, glorying in their own darkness. Here, Bethany met with her Prince.

Twenty minutes later, the preliminary formalities out of the way and the situation explained, Bethany carried the painting into the library, where the light was best, and carefully unwrapped it. A nude’s oil-paint eyes looked on from one wall, while Vannevar Thomas, vampire prince of San Francisco, and Sebastian Melmoth, master of the Vampire Club, watched with interest.

“The mission of the Toreador clan is to preserve great art,” Bethany said, talking to cover her nervousness, “and great artists, through the Embrace.” She saw Melmoth’s lips quirk with amusement at her presumption, and realized that she was telling her elders things they had known for longer than she had existed. “While of course I am still young by the standards of our kind, I have faith in my own opinions – I would never have been taken into the clan myself, were I no judge of art. And in my opinion, Anton Prihar is truly a great artist.” She pulled the last of the wrappings away, and held up the painting she had borrowed.

For a moment there was utter silence as Bethany’s audience took in the painting – the towers cut by golden glory, the water spattered with diamonds of light.

Then Stefan, standing in the doorway, began applauding.

Bethany almost dropped the painting; she had been so intent on the two elders that she had not seen Stefan’s arrival.

“Superb!” Stefan called.

Thomas turned.

“And by what right, whelp, do you dare intrude on this discussion?” the Prince snapped.

Stefan’s hands dropped, and he bowed respectfully. “Your pardon, sir; I am here as the representative of Allanyan Serata, Primogen of the Toreador clan in your city. It seems plain to me that this matter concerns her.”

“Ah,” Thomas said. “And how is it that Mistress Serata was aware of this meeting?”

Stefan looked suddenly uncomfortable.

“She isn’t!” Bethany shouted. “Stefan just followed me! He’s just trying to make trouble; he’s hated me for decades!”

“Oh, Bethany, I don’t hate you,” Stefan protested. “I am simply drawn irresistibly to save you from your own fo...”

“Silence!” Thomas said.

Stefan stopped in mid-word.

“I asked you a question, Stefan,” Thomas said quietly. “And I did not ask you, Bethany.”

Bethany cast her eyes downward as Stefan admitted, “Bethany spoke the truth, O Prince – I met her upstairs by chance, and followed her here. I did so, however, because my sire has charged all of us who curry her favor to keep an eye on the actions of those who would deny her authority as the eldest Toreador in the city – this Melmoth, the one who calls himself Tex R. Cainen, and all their descendants, all their followers in the... shall we say, the esthetic disagreement that divides our clan? You know they call us mere poseurs, that they’re so caught up in past glories that they can’t see...”

“We can’t see! You’re so dazzled by flash and glitter that you throw away all esthetic judgment...” Bethany began.

“I need no speeches,” Thomas interrupted. “You may dispute art theory elsewhere, not in my presence.”

“My apologies,” Stefan said, smiling ingratiatingly. “But I truly am here as Serata’s representative.”

Thomas smiled back. “I see,” he said. “And as Serata’s representative, would you agree that this Anton Prihar should become one of the Kindred, that his skill might be preserved?”

“Oh, absolutely!” Stefan said. “Bethany’s stumbled on a real gem this time, no question about it!”

“You are, of course, an irrefutable authority,” Melmoth murmured quietly. Stefan ignored the sarcasm.

“And if I say that San Francisco is overpopulated, that there are to be no more Kindred created at this time?” Thomas asked.

“Then we would have no choice but to obey,” Stefan said with a cruel smile.

“Yes, sir,” Bethany said, ignoring Stefan’s obvious pleasure in her discomfiture. “But please, don’t say that.”

“The work is quite remarkable,” Melmoth said, to no one in particular.

Thomas threw a quick glance at Melmoth, then at Bethany.

“You all agree, then, that this painter should be Embraced?”

The three Toreadors all indicated silent assent.

“Very well,” Thomas said. “I will permit it.”

“Oh, thank you!” Bethany said.

Stefan bowed. “I will inform Serata at once,” he said. “I have no doubt that she will wish to Embrace this artist herself.”

Bethany turned, shocked.

“But I found him!” she said. “His blood is mine!”

“And if Serata says he is hers?” Stefan asked, smiling.

Bethany, wordless with fury, turned to the Prince.

Stefan quickly said, “Surely, the Prince will not deny the rights and privileges of the Primogen, to favor this foolish young creature? Allanyan Serata is an elder of the Fifth Generation; Bethany is what, Ninth?”

“Eighth,” she said coldly. “I found him!”

“And would you refuse him a chance at greater power than your own?” Stefan asked her. “Is it, perhaps, your own power, your own ambition, that interests you, rather than this human’s art?”

Bethany’s hands came up, curved into claws.

“And pray, sir,” Melmoth interjected, “What is your interest in denying this young lady her treasure?”

“Spite,” Bethany snarled. “It’s just spite.”

Melmoth cast an expressive glance at the ceiling, then at the Prince.

Thomas gazed contemplatively back.

“Sebastian,” he said, “you see my predicament. These two have pitted the authority of the Primogen and the natural respect for one’s elders against proprietary rights. I feel like Solomon confronted by the two mothers disputing over a child; how to resolve this, save by refusing this man the Embrace, and thereby letting his talent die in a few short years?” He started to turn back to the others, not expecting a reply.

Melmoth surprised him by murmuring, “I always wondered why Solomon didn’t ask the child which was its true mother. Surely even an infant knows that much – and this Anton Prihar is no infant, as his painting makes plain.”

Startled, Thomas paused. A slow, thoughtful smile spread across his face.

“Indeed,” he said. “Indeed!”

#

The two vampires stood side by side before Anton Prihar, their dark clothing and black hair islands of night’s darkness in the brightly-lit studio, their pale faces colorless blanks against the vivid hues Anton had chosen for the walls. To the artist they appeared an intrusion from some hostile, washed-out other world.

As, of course, they were – they belonged to the world of eternal night, the world of the Kindred, a world he had never known existed until meeting Bethany the night before, a world whose intrusion he had tried to stave off.

“Choose!” Stefan demanded. “We bring you eternal life, centuries in which to create beauty; you need merely tell us which you would prefer to escort you into immortality, little Bethany, or the great Serata.”

“What does it matter?” Anton asked despairingly, the useless silver cross dangling from his hand. “Why should I care?”

“Your power would be greater as Serata’s childe,” Bethany explained. “I can’t deny that; it’s a fact of our existence. But she and her followers have no true understanding of art, Anton; they’re mere poseurs, dabblers, prone to trends and fashions, with no appreciation of lasting greatness.”

“Ha!” Stefan said. “We aren’t afraid of change, if that’s what you mean – we appreciate innovation and originality, we aren’t caught in the outmoded patterns of the past.”

Anton paid no attention to Stefan; he looked at Bethany, then down at the cross, then back at the vampire.

“When we met at the museum,” he said, “I thought it was fate. I thought the earthquake was destiny at work, throwing us together that way. But I thought you were a woman, not a blood-sucking monster.”

“I am a woman,” Bethany protested. “But I’m more than that. And you can be, too.”

“You drank my blood last night,” he accused her.

“Yes,” Bethany said.

“You’re a vampire.”

“Yes.”

“But the cross doesn’t affect you.” He jingled the silver chain.

When Bethany and Stefan had arrived at the studio door, returning the borrowed painting, Anton had confronted them with the talisman, thrusting it in their faces; they had ignored it as Bethany asked, “May we come in?”

Anton had admitted them, and listened as they explained the choice the Prince had set before him. Now the artist was asking questions, and Bethany did her best to answer – she did not want to deceive him. She wanted him to know what lay before him, to understand that he need never die.

“No,” she said. “Crosses and silver don’t affect us. Nor garlic, nor the rest of it. All myths.”

“And you don’t sleep in coffins all day, and come out at night?”

Stefan smiled sardonically as Bethany admitted, “We don’t necessarily use coffins, but that part is basically true. Sunlight burns us, can destroy us.”

Anton glanced at the painting, at the knives of sunlight cutting through the city streets.

“You give up something, yes,” Bethany said, “but you’ll be free of age and death forever.”

“And you drink blood. You prey on other people.” Anton put a hand to the bandage on his throat.

“But you don’t need to hurt them,” Bethany insisted. “It can be pleasurable. You saw that.”

Anton nodded. “In the stories, vampires can hypnotize their victims,” he said.

“Yes,” Bethany said.

“So I couldn’t resist if you just came in here and attacked me again.”

“No, you couldn’t, not for long,” Bethany agreed. “But the Prince has ordered us to offer you a choice between Serata and myself.”

Stefan, bored by this, growled, “Choose, mortal. Bethany or Serata?”

“I need time,” Anton said. “I need time to think about it.”

“What is there to think about?” Stefan demanded. “We offer you eternity, and you have a choice between more power or less – choose now!”

“I need time,” Anton said, “to put my affairs in order.”

“No one needs to know you’ve crossed over,” Bethany pointed out.

“Still, I need time,” Anton insisted. “You’re asking me to choose between a total stranger and a woman who is nearly so, between power and something that might be love – or might not. You two claim to be eternal – what does one day matter?”

Bethany smiled wryly. “It doesn’t,” she agreed. “Tomorrow night, then?”

“Serata will not be pleased,” Stefan warned.

“Come on,” Bethany told him. She took Stefan’s arm and pulled him toward the door; he shook her off and marched out, Bethany close on his heels.

#

The fog was thick the following night, spilling through the streets in opaque billows, cutting off all vision and blurring all light; perhaps, Bethany thought, that was why Stefan was late, why she had arrived alone and found the door of the studio standing open.

When she saw the door open, for a moment she feared that someone had broken in, that Anton had fallen prey to human avarice – or Serata’s.

There had been no robbery, and Serata had not disobeyed the Prince; a dozen paintings were set out on display, untouched. The one that Bethany had borrowed had a place of honor in the center.

The note was pinned to that last finished canvas, and addressed to her – not to Stefan, only to her.

“Dear Bethany,” she read, “I have made my choice.”

She looked up for a moment, then continued reading.

“I had thought that you understood and appreciated my work,” the note said. “You certainly praised it highly, and in your own way, I suppose you did appreciate it – but it’s plain that you didn’t understand it, nor did that other person, Stefan, who you brought here.”

Bethany glanced at the painting, momentarily puzzled.

“Perhaps I could have explained it to you,” Anton’s words continued, “but I don’t think that Stefan or the creature he serves could ever have accepted it. All my life, other people have made my decisions for me – sent me to the best schools, found me the right jobs, always acting for my own good – until I inherited my grandmother’s money and could finally do what I pleased.

“And now, I’ve succeeded too well, and Stefan’s mistress would act for my own good, and destroy what she seeks to control. I can never be what you are, what you want me to be, any more than I could be what my parents wanted me to be.

“Goodbye, Bethany. I know you meant well.”

Bethany dropped the note and looked up again, at Anton’s body dangling from the noose, turning slowly, limbs stiff – he had obviously died hours before, perhaps just minutes after she had last seen him alive, and there was no hope of revival to either life or a vampiric approximation of life.

Even had revival been possible, Bethany thought, she would have respected this final artistic decision – or at least, she hoped she would have. Her gaze fell back from Anton’s remains to his works.

His body hung below the broad studio window, below the row of too-bright lights, and the corpse’s black shadow twisted across a dozen paintings, paintings that, one and all, showed bright sunlight slanting across the sky, illuminating fields, forests, streets and spires, sunlight gleaming from whitewashed walls, sunlight scattered by dancing water, sunrises, sunsets – everywhere, on all sides, in every painting, the sun that Bethany had not seen with her own eyes for more than forty years, the sun she had asked Anton to give up forever, the sun he could not live without.

end

~~~~~

Eye of the Beholder

Bethany felt the warm blood welling up and filling her mouth, felt the hot frenzy of the Hunger – but she wasn’t seeing the hapless drunkard she had settled on for her latest meal.

She saw Anton.

Anton Prihar, dangling there in his studio, the thick ugly noose tight around his throat. Anton Prihar, who had died rather than let her Embrace him and turn him into one of the Kindred. Anton, who had loved the sun’s light so much that he had refused an offer of eternal life, if it meant giving up the day.

She closed her eyes, and she still saw him, hanging surrounded by his paintings, twisting slowly, his face congested and swollen.

How could he do that?

How could he do that to her?

She swallowed mechanically and let the blood fill her, strengthen her.

She would need her strength if she truly meant to do what she had promised herself she would do. She just hoped that the strength of the blood would be enough.

Sated at last she rose from her kill, the image of Anton faded for the moment. Flush with power, she saw the world around her in awesome clarity, in sharp-edged precision. The brick wall beside her was rich with textures, the air of the alley thick with scents, the sky above her awash in subtle color. For once, there was no morning fog.

A man at the mouth of the alley was looking at her – she could see him, smell him, hear his heartbeat and his shallow breath. He didn’t seem to have noticed her victim, or if he had, he hadn’t understood what was happening. Bethany smiled disarmingly at him, and took a step nearer, to where she could see that one of his eyes, the left, was so bloodshot as to appear almost solid red.

Then the man turned and walked away, as if nothing had happened.

Bethany frowned as she realized that the man had seen her, been aware of her, and hadn’t cared. He had dismissed her as unimportant, irrelevant – but how could he? She was one of the Kindred and a Toreador, at the height of her power; he should have been fascinated by her.

It didn’t matter, though. Ordinarily she might have pursued him, made sure that he wouldn’t do anything to damage the Masquerade, but not tonight. Tonight she had other concerns.

The sky above her was beginning to lighten; the time was coming. She leapt up and caught the lowest rung of the fire escape above her, then pulled herself quickly upward.

A moment later she was on the roof, staring eastward, out across the Bay to where the sky above the Oakland hills was turning pale and pink.

To her heightened senses the colors were magnificent. Was this what Anton had seen that had so captivated him?

But mere kine couldn’t see as clearly as she did, she knew that. Anton had had a true artist’s perceptions, but he had been merely human, after all; he could not have seen with a vampire’s eye.

Was there perhaps something Anton had seen in the sunlight that a vampire could not?

Bethany had been human once, forty years earlier; she tried to remember what it was like, whether there was something that she had lost in the Embrace, when she had gained so much. There had been certain immature feelings that she had shed, a foolish warmth and naive compassion that she had cast aside, but she could not recall any lessening of any kind in her experience of the physical world.

No, whatever Anton had seen in the sunlight was not a matter of his eye seeing more than hers could.

But he had seen something.

The first rays of dawn burst upward, painting gold across the sky, and she stared.

It was beautiful, there was no question of that, it was intensely beautiful... but she could feel the sun’s heat on her face, even though the air was still cool. It stung her skin, it almost burned – and the sun’s disk had yet to actually cross the horizon.

It was painful, yes, but she had survived plenty of pain in her life. Mere physical pain was far easier to bear than much of what had happened to her, back when she was young, both before and after the Embrace.

There were many among the Kindred who would say she was still young, young and foolish, but she knew she had learned much. She had learned to endure through pain. She had even learned to appreciate the beauty of the pain itself.

Golden light flared as the sun itself appeared, and the light cut at her like knives; she remembered Anton’s painting where knife-edged sunlight had cut down the city streets. Had he somehow felt this the way she did?

She could feel her skin burning and reddening, but she stared in fascination as the sunlight transformed the sky and the landscape. The colors were so different, so vivid – she had forgotten, after forty years of darkness, how bright the sun was. The rich blue and shining gold of the sky seemed to burn into her...

And she knew that they were burning her; the pain was exquisite.

At last the pain grew unbearable and irresistible, overwhelming the fascination, and she knew that if she stayed any longer she would be risking her very existence; she forced herself to move, to grab the railing with blistered hands and climb down the fire escape on throbbing feet, her eyes almost blind in the shadows after looking into the glory of the sunrise. Wounded, limping, she made her way to the shelter she had prepared.

Oddly, she thought as she climbed, it had taken a greater force of will to tear herself away from the light and pain than it had taken to confront it in the first place.

And as she went, she remembered the transcendent beauty of the dawn – the beauty that she shared with Anton, the beauty the rest of the Kindred had forsaken.

That was worth any pain.

#

“She has no protector,” Allanyan Serata said, as she toyed with the medallion she wore. “Her Sire is gone, her grandSire will not risk his studied neutrality on her behalf, and the Prince owes her no special favor.”

“I am aware of that,” Stefan said drily. He was not so much standing before Serata’s throne as slouching there, with the casual insouciance he had made a part of himself.

“And you didn’t see fit to tell me?” Serata demanded.

“You didn’t see fit to ask me,” Stefan retorted.

Serata stared coldly at him, and Stefan realized he had overstepped. He straightened and bowed slightly; a chain jingled. “My apologies,” he said. “I had not realized you were so concerned.”

“I am the Primogen of the Clan for this city,” Serata replied. “This upstart Artiste has cost me a precious resource; am I to simply tolerate that? If I allow this once, will I be able to prevent other, similar discourtesies in the future? No, any sort of defiance of my will must be punished, swiftly and forcefully.”

“I see that,” Stefan conceded.

“And as my faithful servant – and you are my faithful servant, are you not, dear Stefan? As my faithful servant, was it not your place to anticipate my desire to punish this Bethany? Was it not your duty to discover for me whatever difficulties there might be in administering this punishment, and to inform me of those difficulties – or of their absence? Was it wise to leave it to me, acting on my own, to determine that this Neonate is defenseless?”

Stefan bowed his head again. “I rely on your wisdom, Madame, for clearly my own is lacking.”

Serata’s lips twisted sardonically. “And what of your ingenuity, Stefan? Is that in any better condition?”

Stefan smiled back. “I would like to think that it is, Madame, but I have had little cause to put it to the test of late.”

“Well, then, little one, here’s your opportunity. I do not wish this Bethany destroyed outright – allowing a human artist’s suicide would not justify so extreme a response, even in this case, and I do not care to excessively alienate others of her faction, as many of the Artistes have the Prince’s ear. Rather, I’d have you devise a suitable penalty for her. Consider this to be your penance for your own part in allowing Anton Prihar to slip through our fingers – that you shall arrange and carry out an appropriate vengeance against Bethany. Do you think you can come up with some artistic response to her affront?”

“Of course,” Stefan replied, trying not to show any discomfort. “It should be a delightful challenge.”

“Good,” Serata said, sitting back on her velvet throne. “See to it, then.”

#

The first step, of course, was to locate Bethany.

Vampires survive through invisibility, through going unseen even in the midst of the cities built by their prey. The Kindred’s senses are far greater than those of kine, and a vampire’s knowledge of vampiric ways is necessarily far greater, but still, finding a single specific vampire who does not wish to be found is not always an easy task for anyone, even one of the Kindred.

Stefan had to admit to himself that he was not particularly enthusiastic about finding Bethany; she hated him for his part in that artist’s death, and he did not enjoy being hated for something he had not meant to do. Still, he had been ordered to do so, and he had to at least make an effort.

And it would be best to find her quickly and get it over with.

He began his search at the Vampire Club, the gathering place and neutral ground for their kind. He moved from one airless underground room to the next, greeting those he recognized among the patrons, asking those he knew well whether they had seen Bethany of late. No one admitted having encountered her recently.

He did no better in the above-ground Alexandrian Club.

Stefan began to worry at that; what if Bethany had fled the city? Serata might insist he go after her. He did not relish the prospect of pursuing her to the ends of the earth; such a hunt could take years, and might take him to places where the local powers would frown on any sort of artistic revenge.

Another possibility was that Bethany had been destroyed. That might be even worse; how would Serata take being cheated of her vengeance? She might simply accept it as the workings of Fate, but she might equally well decide to take out her frustration on Stefan.

He wished he had not tied his own prospects quite so closely to Serata’s.

Stefan remained in the Alexandrian Club for hours, watching Kindred and kine pass in and out, hoping to spot Bethany, or to find someone who knew of her whereabouts.

His hopes waned steadily as the night wore on, but at last, as he was about to leave, he tried one final question of a new arrival.

“I haven’t seen her lately,” the vampire replied. “I heard that she’s been hunting the area between the Embarcadero and Telegraph Hill, though.”

That was more than Stefan had gotten elsewhere, and at least she was still in the city; he thanked the man and hurried out the door.

Once outside, though, he saw that the eastern sky was beginning to go pale; there wasn’t time to track her down before dawn.

The following night Stefan set out patrolling the streets, block by block.

It wasn’t until three nights later, not long before dawn, that he spotted a thin woman in black climbing a fire escape. He could see no details at such a distance, but it certainly could have been Bethany.

A fire escape – what would she be doing there? Had Bethany resorted to breaking into apartments at random? That hardly seemed likely; she had never had any difficulty in finding her prey through more traditional, more entertaining methods. She had been a lovely young woman when Embraced, and forty years later her beauty was untouched – if anything, it had been heightened by her vampiric pallor and grace. Stefan could not imagine that she would ever have any difficulty in finding men who would accompany her to private places.

He turned down the alley, and almost tripped over the corpse she had left.

A glance and the smell told him immediately that yes, this was a vampire’s kill. Unforgivably sloppy, he thought, to leave it here like this! He looked up. The woman in black had reached the top of the fire escape and was climbing onto the roof.

That was interesting; then she wasn’t breaking in windows. But what did she want up there?

Was it really Bethany?

He jumped and caught the fire escape and began climbing. On the final ladder, his head still a foot or so below the coaming, he hesitated – what if this was some sort of trap? What if he was walking into a Diabolist’s lair?

“Bethany?” he called.

No one answered.

“Bethany?” he called again, more loudly.

“Anton?”

The answer was unexpected, but it was Bethany’s voice. Stefan heaved himself upward, onto the roof.

“No,” he said, “it’s I, Stefan.”

She was sitting cross-legged in the center of the roof, staring east, away from him.

“Go away, Stefan,” she said, without looking at him.

Though the words were unwelcoming, the voice was not as hate-filled as he had expected; she sounded almost resigned. He took a wary step toward her. He had been so concerned with finding her, he realized, that he had given no thought to just what sort of suitably artistic revenge he might take on her. Her asking if he was Anton, though – that might provide possibilities. Did she think someone had found a way to revive Anton Prihar? She should know better. Was there another Anton, perhaps?

He regretted giving his correct name; he should have claimed to have been Anton, he thought.

“Bethany?” he said. “What are you doing here? I’ve been looking all over the city for you.”

“Whatever for?” She still didn’t turn to face him; she was staring fixedly at the Oakland hills, across the Bay.

She clearly didn’t want to talk to him – but on the other hand, she wasn’t afraid of him, either, or she would be watching him. Perhaps, he thought, if he could gain her confidence, he could lure her into some sort of public humiliation.

“I wanted to apologize for... well, for Anton,” he said. “For driving him to commit suicide.”

For a moment she didn’t answer, and he stood there, feeling foolish for attempting so transparent a lie.

“Thank you,” she said. “I accept your apology.”

He blinked in surprise, and took another step toward her. He hadn’t expected that. He had expected anger, hatred, mistrust – not a quiet acceptance. What had happened to her since their last meeting?

“Are you all right?” he asked. To his own surprise, the concern in his question was sincere.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for your apology, but please go now.”

“Why? I mean... what are you doing up here? Why are you sitting like that? Why don’t you look at me?”

He could almost hear her smile as she said, “Poor little Stefan! Are you confused? Still caught up in your poses and your intrigues and your feuds? Still obsessed with power? Always afraid someone might be planning to harm you? Well, I’m not planning to harm you, Stefan; I’m not plotting against you, or Serata, or anyone else. Is that why you came? Has my recent absence had you worried?”

“Not about me,” Stefan said hastily. “We were worried about you, Bethany!”

“You needn’t be. I’m fine. Go away, Stefan.”

“Not until you tell me what you’re doing up here.”

Bethany sighed, and turned her head to look at him.

“I’m watching the sunrise,” she said. “I’ve been doing it often, of late. Would you care to join me?”

Stefan looked at her, saw her face clearly in the faint fog-reflected glow of approaching dawn; then he turned and fled without another word, almost tumbling down the ladders as he went.

#

“And did you find little Bethany, then?” Serata asked.

“Yes,” Stefan said, uneasily.

“And did you take an appropriately picturesque vengeance on the little meddler?”

Stefan remembered the sight of Bethany’s face, the skin blackened and blistered, here and there the flesh burned completely from the bone.

“Vengeance has been done,” he said.

He saw no need to say that Bethany had done it herself.

#

On her rooftop, Bethany watched the sunlight spilling across the sky in billows of color.

Let Stefan and the rest live in the darkness, she told herself, and play their intricate games of power and dominion; she had found something better.

She had found beauty.

She knew that sooner or later the fascination of it might hold her too long, might destroy her; that if she continued her morning vigils she might one day be immolated by the sun’s rays.

She didn’t mind. If that happened, it happened. She would accept it.

Anton had thought the sun’s beauty was worth his life.

Bethany had come to agree with him.

end

~~~~~

I Was a Bestselling Teenage Werewolf

Okay, so you’ve read my first book – everybody’s read my first book, and if you haven’t I’m sure you can find a copy somewhere. It’s called Moon Child because my publisher’s legal department insisted that I couldn’t call it I Was A Teenage Werewolf on account of that old movie. You must have heard of the book – I mean, it did eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and it wasn’t that long ago.

Anyway, Moon Child will give you the whole story about how I got to be a werewolf, and I swear, just as the book says, I thought it was a dog, and as far as I know it’s still loose. The book tells you how I tore up the family next door, how I got arrested – I still can’t believe that every single hair and drop of blood turned back to human like that, I mean, really, isn’t that incredible? And it covers the trial, and all the fuss about the lawyers, and the multiple-personality plea, and the riot at the sentencing, and all that stuff.

And if you can’t find the book, you probably read it all in the papers. So you know all that. And you know that I wrote the book in my cell during the trial, and then at the hospital afterwards, and it got rushed into print because while lots of people have written about werewolves, this was the first book written by a real, live, court-certified werewolf.

So did you know that it sold 1.2 million copies, at $24.95 each? Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, it should have been, yeah, because even after my agent took his fifteen percent and all that, I socked away three million bucks, and I thought I was all set.

Except about a million went in taxes, and another million for all those lawyers, and then there were the psychiatrists, and the civil suits by the victims’ heirs. Not to mention the gypsy witch who finally came up with a cure.

So when I came out the other side, and all the bills were paid and the lawsuits settled and I had waivers and quitclaims up to my neck, what I didn’t have was any of the money – in fact, I still owed about a million and a half! And I wasn’t hot news any more, either, and I’d missed my shot at a college education, what with going straight from my junior year of high school into five years of litigation.

So I wrote another book, called After the Fang. I mean, what else had I ever made any money at, besides writing – mowing lawns?

Never heard of After the Fang, have you? It bombed. I mean, totally. Got a nice, fat advance that won’t earn out until the twenty-seventh century, at the rate it’s going.

It isn’t fair, you know. People have gotten rich writing about recovering from dope, from booze, from bad marriages. But nobody wanted to read the story of an ex-werewolf recovering from bankruptcy.

Heck, if I’d known that, I might’ve stayed a werewolf – three days a month in the federal pen isn’t that terrible. And I didn’t know what I was doing anyway, when I was wolfed out, so it really wasn’t a big deal.

But at the time I wanted out, and I got it. And there I was, a million bucks in debt and flipping burgers for the rent money.

After that – well, I just held on for awhile while I thought everything over. Eventually I realized that writing was still the way to go, but that nobody wanted to read 280 pages of a loser feeling sorry for himself. I needed something else to write about. I mean, Moon Child had everything – blood, death, dramatic courtroom scenes, everything. Even the animal rights people got into it. But After the Fang... well, nobody cared about my tax audit.

I thought about trying fiction, maybe doing a novel based on my experiences, but I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t come up with a plot to save my life, except just rehashing Moon Child and pretending it was somebody else.

And I couldn’t sell any other non-fiction – I mean, what credentials did I have? I don’t even have a high school diploma – I can’t afford the mail-order kind, and I was in jail when the rest of my class graduated.

What was left of it, anyway – I really do feel sorry for poor Marcy.

Anyway, getting back on track here, I did finally hit on something. I had to borrow every cent I could for traveling money, and it took me a year and a half to find what I was after, but I did it.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but it should be easy, and I think it’s a sure thing. My old publisher doesn’t agree, and they won’t touch it, not after the lousy sales they had on After the Fang.

So I’m shopping it around, and I brought it to you folks first, because this is the kind of house I feel can really do the story justice. It’s all true, every word. It’s first-person stuff, with plenty of blood and sex. It’s a winner. If you’re interested, give me call.

But please, remember, evenings only. Don’t try calling during the day.

I call my new book Confessions of A Vampire.

end

~~~~~

Blood Feud

It’s your typical small suburban home, your typical master bedroom, the slightly-tacky bedspread dumped at the foot of the bed, the phone and the alarm clock and an empty water glass on the bedside table, and there’s the lady of the house stretched out on the flower-print sheets, arms thrown out in a fine comfortable sprawl, one knee drawn up.

What’s wrong with this picture?

First, the blood, which is spattered across the pillow and the sheets and the woman and just about everywhere else, all from the deep wound in her throat.

Second, she’s not breathing.

Battaglia suppresses an urge to rush to her and try to make her breathe, to pry open her mouth and press her chest and pump in air. It’s far too late for anything like that; one look at her throat makes that abundantly clear. The son of a bitch had cut almost to the bone.

There are other things – the nightgown sliced lewdly open up the front, the pale white face, the staring dead eyes. It’s ugly. She’d be good-looking alive, but now she was really, really ugly.

“Lots of pictures,” he orders the forensics people. “This one goes to VICAP and whatever other program the Feds have going. Everything measured and photoed. Nobody touches anything without someone else watching – they’ll want to know where everything was. And we want DNA analysis if the bastard came, or if he left hairs or skin we can get it from, so... oh, hell, you know what to do. Do it right on this one.”

A tap, and Battaglia turns to the door, but there’s nobody there. “Someone drop something?” he asks.

The tap again – at the window, he realizes. He turns, but sees only darkness. And he remembers that they’re upstairs – ten, fifteen feet up.

He crosses the room quickly and looks out.

No trees that might tap on the glass. No balcony. Something’s fluttering away, but he can’t make it out in the gloom.

“A bird,” he says. “A fucking bird.”

At his shoulder, one of the evidence-collectors remarks, “Looked more like a bat, to me.”

#

He only had a glimpse, but that was enough; he saw her lying there, throat opened, blood strewn wastefully about. He saw the men in uniforms and suits and lab coats.

He did not keep up with much of what happened in the world, he rarely troubled himself to watch movies or television and he never read fiction, but he knew a murder investigation when he saw it.

He stands on the empty plaza, his cloak wrapped about him, and stares out at the city streets. Dawn is close enough that the late-night die-hards, the all-night partiers and night watchmen and graveyard-shift workers, are giving way to early risers; he will have to be gone soon.

Even at this hour, though, there are people in the streets. By day, there must be thousands of people walking every street of the city, their blood warm and pulsing beneath the skin, going about their silly, superficial business – millions of them, in all.

How dare someone, out of all those people, steal his prey?

For almost a fortnight he had been feeding on her, visiting her each night as she lay in an anemic, hypnotized daze, awaiting his attentions with that strange mix of apprehension and lust that made her so exciting. Another night or two and she would have died – to rise again by his side.

And now he would have to begin anew; she could not rise from this death.

Someone would pay for this.

#

“Oh, jeez,” Battaglia says, flinging the medical report on the desk. “The son of a bitch sucked out her blood?”

“Somebody did,” Wilson answers. “But it might not have been the killer; it happened before she died. Hours, maybe days.”

Battaglia frowns. “Wasn’t any sign she’d been held captive more than a few minutes before he cut her throat.”

Wilson shrugs.

“You think maybe he cut her throat to try to hide these other marks you found?” Battaglia asks.

“Could’ve done a better job of it, if that’s what he wanted,” Wilson tells him.

“So maybe it was somebody else,” Battaglia says, more to himself than to Wilson. “A kinky lover, maybe, playing vampire.”

Wilson, after eight years working in forensic medicine, expresses no shock at the suggestion, doesn’t argue for a minute, just mildly remarks, “Haven’t seen anyone do that that I can remember.”

“Well,” Battaglia tells him, “I haven’t either, but you know what people are like.”

Wilson nods agreement.

#

She hadn’t struggled much at all, the killer remembers irritably as he cleans his antique straight razor, she’d practically just laid back and let him do it. Not like the other one at all. The first one had screamed and kicked and thrashed around.

Funny, he’d thought all women were pretty much the same. Maybe this one hadn’t realized what was happening.

He’d liked doing the fighter better, for sure. That was what it was supposed to be like – she was supposed to fight back, so he could prove to her that he was stronger, that he was better than her, that she couldn’t hit him hard enough to hurt any more, couldn’t keep him from taking anything he wanted. She was supposed to fear him, to be overwhelmed by him.

This second one had just given up.

Maybe she’d been sick. He hoped it wasn’t anything he might have caught, when he did those things to her while she died, and afterwards. Could you catch things from dead people?

This wasn’t any good.

He’d have to do another one, one who would be right.

#

Women alone are not always easy to find, he reminds himself. They live in fear – not of him, but of living men, of thieves and rapists and murderers.

He smiles wryly. He is, perhaps, all three – he steals their blood, violates their bodies, leaves them to die. Yet he is none, for he gives them eternity as payment for the blood, he does not touch them in unseemly places, and they do not stay dead. Many welcome him – if not at first, then by the third or fourth visit. And by the end, almost all are eagerly awaiting his attentions, anxious to be seduced into undeath.

And now, with his latest stolen prematurely from him, he must find another. And when he has found her, taken her, seduced her – when he has fed – he will seek out the thief who robbed him thus.

#

“We’ve got a match,” Battaglia says, staring at the photos spread on his desk. “Gotta be the same guy.”

Wilson looks over the detective’s shoulder, reads the report. “No one sucked any blood out of that one,” he says.

“So her sex life wasn’t as weird.”

Wilson hesitates, then says, “Listen, Al, I was doing some checking myself, on that bloodsucking thing. It’s’ really rare, even among psychos, according to the write-ups – but we’ve had half a dozen reports in the past two years that mention it. All women.”

Battaglia looks up, startled. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

“Not reported as homicides,” Wilson explains. “They hadn’t died of it. Not your department.”

“So? You think maybe they could tell me who the kink is, and we might have a lead?”

Wilson nods. “That, yeah,” he agrees. He hesitates, then adds, “I already tried to call a couple of them, though. And most of them are missing – we’ve got missing persons reports on three out of seven. One of the others says the guy was a real vampire, she doesn’t know a name, he’d sneak in her window at night. Another won’t talk about it. Haven’t found the last two; they may have vanished, too.”

“Five of them missing?” Battaglia stares at Wilson.

Wilson nods.

Battaglia says, “So maybe we’ve got two serial killers? A throat-cutter and a vampire? Only the vampire’s a lot better at hiding the bodies?”

“Could be.”

“And the throat-cutter took out a woman the vampire had targeted?”

“Looks like.”

“Bet the vampire’s pissed about it.” Battaglia turns back to the photos. “Wonder if we can use that...”

#

The secret to surviving in the modern world, he thinks as the rats scurry about his feet, is to be unobtrusive; he has known this for years, for decades. The people of the cities no longer fear the night or the dark, they do not tremble at the howl of a wolf or the scream of the hunting panther – and they know, also, how to destroy the undead. They have conquered everything but themselves.

To survive, then, one must be taken as one of them, or else remain always hidden. The ancient powers of the king vampire that once struck terror into peasant hearts are of little use against modern machinery, modern organization, modern education. Many vampires, and most of those who still believe in vampires, have forgotten just what abilities the undead possess, even though that accursed Bram Stoker laid them all out in print as recently as 1897 – using them merely draws the attention of the wielders of garlic, cross, and stake.

Thus, it has been fifty years and more since he last called upon the rats, and the sensation is strange, almost new again.

He rather enjoys it.

First the rats, and then the insects – sniffing at the bedclothes, at the spilled blood, searching for the killer’s scent; listening in as the police discuss the butchery.

They will find the man for him – the man who dared claim prey destined for his better.

#

A woman living alone would be best, he thinks, because then he won’t have to kill anyone else to get at her, he won’t have to worry about someone walking in while he’s in his rage and glory; he’d gotten the first two alone.

But the need is building, the second one wasn’t good enough and he needs another, maybe he won’t worry about details.

#

“This vampire killer, if he’s real, and it’s not just a weird coincidence, he’s what we call an organized serial killer,” the FBI man explains. “He’s smart, he plans the whole thing out, he knows what he’s doing. He’s probably a high-IQ type, and part of his motivation is to show off how smart he is and rub everyone’s noses in it. The slasher, though, he’s more your disorganized type; he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, doesn’t plan things out, probably doesn’t really think about whether he’s going to get caught or not. He’s probably kind of a slow guy, working at some menial job or unemployed, could have a history of mental problems.”

Battaglia nods, and the fed continues. “You’re going to get plenty to work with with the slasher as far as physical evidence goes, not much with the vampire, but with both of them, you’re going to get patterns. Because they’re both really doing the same thing – they’re acting out a sex fantasy, one that’s gotten tangled up with power and pain and death. They’re trying to make reality fit the fantasy, and it never will, exactly, so they keep trying. And the fantasy gets more and more elaborate over time, if they aren’t stopped.”

“So where does this get us?” Battaglia asks.

The FBI man shrugs. “Depends,” he says. “You find the pattern, sometimes you can find the killer from it. Sometimes you can figure what he’ll do next, even when he doesn’t know himself.” He taps the folder. “I’d say to go for the slasher first,” he says. “He’ll probably be easier, for one thing. For another, the vampire killer’s got an established pattern, he takes his time, he’s not going to go out and rip up an entire family tomorrow, but these disorganized killers, once they get started, they tend to accelerate. You get bloodbaths if they aren’t stopped. They get frustrated when the fantasy isn’t perfect, they don’t think of lying low – they aren’t that bright.” He picks up a crime scene photo. “This one’s going to strike again. Probably soon.”

#

Mist in the alley, and rats scurrying, and he knows his enemy now, he knows the sour scent of him, the crude and brutal hunger – but not where he is.

Again, the rats fan out.

#

She’s pretty, very pretty, the kind who’d laugh at him, or else pretend to be polite while her pity and derision spill out, the kind who knows he’s worthless, the kind that would hit him, would refuse him, would be offended and turn up her nose at the very idea of yielding to him.

They’re all like that, all the pretty ones, until he teaches them better, until he makes them see that he’s strong and powerful and that they must yield, because he can make them die. They don’t laugh when they’re dead, they don’t reject him any more, and he can do what he likes when they’re dead.

She’s alone, walking alone from the bus stop, and he follows her, the razor hot in his pocket, the heat growing in his groin.

#

Battaglia shakes his head in appreciative wonder. “This profiling stuff is great,” he says, pulling a folder under the light. It’s the night shift, and Battaglia’s on the day shift, but he’s working very late, hoping to pick up something, and now he thinks he’s got it. “Look here, at this guy Felton – arrest record starting at age twelve, six months in the loony bin, all of it fits, and that partial print could be a match. Could be our man.”

“So now what?” Wilson asks. He, too, has stayed on; unlike Battaglia, he went out for dinner a couple of hours ago. Unlike Battaglia, he’s tired and wants to go home.

Battaglia looks at him, startled. “Now we go get him, of course.”

#

The summons comes; the rats have found him. The vampire moves as mist through the streets, blowing on an unnatural wind in pursuit of this butcher.

#

She’s on the stoop, fumbling with her key, and the razor is in his hand as he steps up behind; the door opens, and he forces himself through, shoving up against her, pressing his body against hers, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her through the door as she looks up, startled.

“Just do what I tell you and you won’t get hurt,” he lies, showing her the razor.

She stares up at him, eyes wide, and he smiles down into those frightened eyes.

And then her eyes shift, looking past him, and he turns to see a figure standing on the stoop, watching – a tall man, pale, dressed in black.

Not a cop. A friend, a nosy neighbor, maybe just someone who’d been passing by.

For an instant he hesitates. Close the door, ignore him, go on with it? Or try to talk to him, make him go away? But the bitch might scream, and then the pale-faced geek would probably call the cops – he isn’t a cop himself, but somehow Felton figures he’s the kind who would call, he’s not one who understands about what women are really like.

It’s all going wrong again.

It’s no good.

Felton snaps the razor shut and slams out through the open door, thinking he can knock the tall geek aside and run, no one will follow him, he’ll run, go through a few alleys, and get home, and he’ll try again tomorrow, or maybe he’ll find a woman on his way home. The door claps back against the stop so hard that the top hits the wall, and Felton’s out the door, but the geek doesn’t move aside, doesn’t brush aside, it’s like hitting a brick wall, and Felton stumbles, loses his footing.

And then a hand whips out and grabs him by the collar, and that long, strong arm pulls him up and he’s staring into the geek’s face.

It’s a frightening face, pale and bony, and the eyes are black, black as death, Felton’s staring into them and seeing nothing at all, no fear, no hate, nothing, not even his own reflection, just black emptiness.

“Pu’me down!” he demands.

“I don’t think so,” the geek says, in a whisper that’s like ice down Felton’s back.

The razor is still in Felton’s hand; he flicks it open.

“I said put me down, you freak!” Felton says.

The geek smiles, and his teeth are white, white, white in the light from the open door, they’re gleaming white and pointed, the guy’s got fucking fangs.

“You know,” the geek says, “had you remained within, and I had no invitation to enter, I could not have entered; you could have gone about your butchery unhindered, and I’d have been able to do nothing but watch and wait for you to emerge once more. But you chose to flee, and now you’re mine, and your panic has saved this young lady’s life.”

“Not yet it hasn’t,” Felton snaps furiously, as he slashes at the geek’s throat with the razor. He’ll take out the geek, then he’ll go for the bitch; she’s still cowering there in the entry, it’ll be easy, if she had any brains she’d be inside dialing 9-1-1.

The razor passes through the throat, but the grip of geek’s hand never loosens, no blood spurts out, the toothy white grin never flickers; all that happens is a stench like rotting meat, like something three days dead, reaches Felton’s nostrils, and he almost chokes.

But he doesn’t; with his collar pulled tight he’s afraid that he might strangle.

The woman chokes, though, he hears her; she makes a coughing noise, and from the corner of his eye Felton sees her turning to run in, the door’s swinging shut, and he’s still hanging here from the geek’s hand, the geek who took a razor slash across the throat without even bleeding, let alone dying.

“Now the question is,” the geek says, “what should I do with you?”

Felton doesn’t choke, but now he does wet his pants.

#

Felton isn’t there. The building superintendent lets Battaglia and Wilson and the two uniforms in, and the apartment’s empty.

They don’t have a warrant; that’s as far as they can go without one, unless Felton walks in the door.

Hey, it’s his apartment; he might show up at any time. Battaglia’s got a picture. He goes down to the car and settles in to wait.

Wilson, apologetically, goes home; Battaglia doesn’t blame him. He’s uncomfortably aware of his own empty belly, and has just sent a patrolman for burgers when the call comes.

The 9-1-1 operator’s done her job properly, and the call on the radio says the woman’s reporting her attacker has a razor, and Battaglia makes the connection.

What else would a schmuck like Felton be doing out this late? The file says he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t date women normally.

It’s him. Gotta be. Battaglia doesn’t wait for his burger.

#

The vampire considers carefully as Felton squirms in his grasp.

The safest thing to do, the simplest, the most efficient, would be to snap this little pervert’s neck. That would be satisfying – but only for an instant.

Too quick.

He will hardly want to make a meal of the man’s blood, though, for a variety of reasons. The madness might be carried in the blood – the vampire knows nothing of modern medicine, nor does he care; he fears that the madness might be carried in the blood, and is not concerned with verifying it. Further, if he sups on this creature’s blood and in his thirst and anger drinks too deeply, the man will die, but only to rise again. The vampire will not allow such filth to become as he is.

But that still leaves a myriad of choices, and one of them occurs to the vampire as especially appropriate.

It was the rats that found the man, who is a little like a rat himself, a fearful, malicious, skulking animal.

Let the rats have him, then.

The summons goes out.

#

Felton struggles, but the grip does not loosen. He slashes with the razor, at the geek’s throat, at his arms, but it doesn’t work, the grip doesn’t loosen, the geek never flinches. He pries at the fingers, but he can’t budge them, the geek’s like steel bars.

The geek’s a monster, obviously. Felton knows that. He’s seen movies on TV about monsters who aren’t bothered by razors, who pick people up like this.

He’s going to die.

But he can’t die; he’s the special one, the strong one. He kills other people, he doesn’t die.

The sirens sound, and that’s too much; he has to get away. Felton lifts the razor again and cuts at his own shirt; cloth tears, and he falls free.

His foot lands on something soft, something that squeaks, he hears scrabbling as he loses his balance and falls. He puts out a hand to catch himself, and only when it’s too late does he see where he’s putting it, what he stepped on.

Rats.

#

The vampire looks up at the squeal of brakes and the sound of shouts, barely audible over the sound of the killer’s screams. Headlights and spotlights shine on him, on the rats, on the screaming man.

It’s too soon; the rats have hardly started. The man could still live. That’s unacceptable.

Deliberately, as the rats scatter, the vampire places a foot on the man’s forehead, taking aim.

Then he stamps, and bones shatter with a very satisfactory crunch.

#

Battaglia is out of his car, pistol drawn. “Hold it right there!” he shouts.

Calmly, the tall man turns to face him. It’s not Felton.

“I think that’s the man you want,” he says, pointing to the figure lying on the pavement at his feet.

Battaglia barely glances at the downed man. It could be Felton, he doesn’t take time for a good look – the one that’s still upright is the immediate threat. That guy on the ground looks dead, and dead men aren’t dangerous.

Something’s moving on the sidewalk there, but it’s too small to be important; Battaglia assumes it’s a cat or a squirrel. This isn’t the sort of neighborhood where he’d expect rats.

“Could be,” Battaglia says, “but right now I’m talking to you.” He has the gun pointed at the tall man’s chest.

The tall man smiles.

#

Escape would be easy, even trivial; bat or mist, and away. The policeman’s bullets will do nothing, if the man is foolish enough to fire.

But there is no need to be hasty. If he vanishes there will be stories, and a vampire’s greatest defense is that most people do not believe in vampires; providing evidence of the supernatural is undesirable. There will be plenty of time; dawn is still a good six hours away.

He steps away from the skull-crushed corpse and asks politely, “Should I raise my hands?”

#

The conversation is bizarre, almost surreal.

“The lady will testify, I’m sure,” the pale man says.

“I simply defended myself,” he says.

And he doesn’t say Word One about how an unarmed man was able to take out a lunatic with a straight razor, how Felton’s shirt got slashed open, how Felton got those dozens of little wounds that look almost like bites, how he was able to stamp Felton’s face in.

Battaglia can’t see where this guy has the weight to cave in Felton’s skull like that. Maybe he used a brick or something?

But he doesn’t say that.

And he’s a weird-looking character, all right – six-three, easy, with a cave-dweller complexion and fucking scary black eyes and those teeth that would make a dentist swoon.

And in Battaglia’s head something clicks.

“You’re the vampire, aren’t you?” he asks.

He doesn’t mean it literally, of course, he doesn’t believe in vampires, but he assumes that the vampire killer thinks he’s a real vampire.

The tall man gives him a look that Battaglia never wants to see again, then forces a smile and says, “Surely you can’t be serious!”

Battaglia knows he should just keep it for later, that he shouldn’t let the suspect know too much, but those dark, dark eyes are staring at him and he can’t keep his mouth shut.

“We’ve got dead women who’d had their blood sucked,” he says.

#

The vampire is very annoyed at this accusation, and for a moment again considers escape.

But no, not yet; better to see if he can talk the policeman out of it. The detective is susceptible to hypnosis – not very, but enough that he may be suggestible.

“Dead, detective? Are you sure?” the vampire asks.

“Missing, anyway,” the detective says.

“And if they were to be found alive?”

“Then... then I’d be wrong, I guess.”

“Ah.”

It would be a nuisance collecting his women to show this policeman, but it might be necessary. He had scattered them to half a dozen cities; no one place could support that many vampires without their risking detection and destruction.

“It may be, detective,” he says coldly, “that I have performed some, ah, unusual acts, with certain women of my acquaintance – though I have no idea how you became aware of it, or why it concerns you – but I assure you, all of them are alive and well.”

#

Battaglia’s head hurts. He doesn’t like this creep. He doesn’t know what this crap is about producing all the victims alive – ringers, maybe? – but he’s irrationally certain that this is the vampire killer, that he’s a serial killer, a smart one. The organized killers are often near genius level, the FBI says.

The guy talks like he thinks he’s a genius, anyway.

Battaglia is pissed; he should be pleased, Felton’s taken care of, there isn’t going to be a long, messy, expensive trial, no more women are going to get their throats slashed open while they’re being raped, and he may have the other killer as well, but this son of a bitch is making it difficult, and it’s hard to think for some reason, with those damn black eyes of his...

Battaglia turns away and shouts, “Someone put the cuffs on this guy and read him his rights.”

“Detective, surely that’s not necessary...”

“Yes, it is,” Battaglia snaps, not meeting those eyes. “You killed a guy, and maybe he was scum, and maybe it was self-defense, but I’m gonna leave that up to the judge, I’m not gonna turn you loose. It won’t hurt you to spend a night at the station. You can call someone in the morning.”

#

In the morning.

The vampire has had enough; he’ll worry later about covering his tracks. As the patrolman approaches with handcuffs, the vampire becomes mist and lets the wind carry him away.

#

“Where’d he go?”

Battaglia turns back and the eyes are gone, the guy is gone completely, there’s nothing but a wisp of night fog drifting past the streetlight at the corner.

“Shit,” he says.

“Detective,” the uniform says, “he was right here, I saw him, he didn’t run or anything...”

“Forget it,” Battaglia says, staring at the mist as it drifts away.

That click again.

All the victims, alive and well – or at least not dead. Vanishing at the suggestion that he’d be held until morning. The guy really sucks blood, he’s got those sharp teeth like fangs...

Battaglia has never believed the stories, never, but he’s not stupid, he knows when to believe what’s shoved under his nose.

Vampires are real.

As if the crazies and the punks and all the rest aren’t enough, vampires are real.

Well, why not?

He’d never convince the department, though.

His job is tracking down killers, and even if the victims don’t know they’re dead, the vampire is a killer.

But he’d never get to hunt him down on departmental time; the vampire would walk in the door with his victims some evening – never during the day, he’d make excuses about a job, or family – and the higher-ups would take a look and say, “Battaglia, you’re nuts.”

And a cell wouldn’t hold the vampire, anyway. You don’t jail vampires, you kill them.

The captain’s never going to go for that.

Battaglia sighs. No way the department’s going to go for it. He’ll have to do it himself.

Like he doesn’t have enough work already.

He knows how he’ll be spending his nights from now on.

end

~~~~~

George Pinkerton and the Bloodsucking Fiend

of Brokentree Swamp

I had been hanging around the Springfield library all afternoon. I hadn’t found any new books about monsters, but I didn’t have anywhere better to go. I was thinking of going home, but then the phone rang, and I decided to wait a few more minutes and see if this call was anything interesting.

Mrs. Garcia answered it, and I sort of tried to listen, not really snooping, just standing around nearby. I couldn’t hear much, though – whoever was on the other end wasn’t very loud.

Then Mrs. Garcia covered the mouthpiece with her hand and looked around and of course she saw me, since I was standing right there. “Billy, have you seen Mr. Pinkerton?”

“Sure. He’s in the stacks.” (That’s what they call the shelves where they keep all the books, the stacks.)

Mrs. Garcia uncovered the phone. “If you could hold on a moment I’ll see if I can find him.” She put the phone on the desk and headed for the stacks.

I looked at that phone for a minute. Someone must be calling about a case, I thought. Mr. Pinkerton doesn’t have a wife or kids or anything, and he hardly ever gets personal calls at work. If it was a case, that meant he was going to go off fighting monsters again, and I might be able to go with him.

At least, if he was talked into taking the case. If the monsters aren’t hurting anyone, he won’t touch them. He always says he’d rather read about monsters than meet them, same as he’d rather read about a war than fight in one. He never planned to get into the monster business; he was just good at it.

It all started when a maniac turned a bunch of zombies loose here in Springfield, Indiana, and no one but Mr. Pinkerton was able to stop them. That was how we met. I was in the library at the time, and he needed a hand with some details, so I helped out a little – but just a little. Mr. Pinkerton did all the dangerous stuff. He doesn’t lift weights or have a handsome face or anything, but he was a real hero – he saved the town.

A couple of months later my brother, who’s in the navy, told me they were having trouble with a giant squid, and I suggested he talk to Mr. Pinkerton. Next thing I knew the navy had hired Mr. Pinkerton as a consultant. Since then a lot of people have called him about monsters, and when I’m lucky I’ve managed to tag along and help out.

Not that I wanted anyone to get hurt or anything, but I sort of hoped that monsters were causing real trouble somewhere. So I picked up the phone, which I probably shouldn’t have, but no one had actually told me not to.

“I’m Billy Barnett,” I said in my deepest, most mature voice. “I’m Mr. Pinkerton’s associate. Could you tell me a little about your situation, please?”

“My name’s Aloysius Brown,” the voice on the other end said. He had a southern accent, like the country singers on TV. “I’m the sheriff of Brokentree County, Tennessee. Seems we might have a vampire loose here, and we’d like your Mr. Pinkerton to come take a look.”

“A vampire?” I said. “I wouldn’t think that would be all that difficult to deal with, once you know it’s a vampire.” After all, everybody knew about vampires from the movies – you keep them away with crosses and garlic, and kill them with stakes through the heart.

“I wouldn’t have thought so, either – not that I gave much thought to vampires before this week – but this one’s giving us plenty of trouble. The state police and the FBI don’t know a thing about vampires, and I saw a newspaper piece about Mr. Pinkerton’s work for the Navy, so I thought he might be able to help. I sure hope so – we’ve got two good people dead so far.”

That scared me a little. If people were getting killed, this was serious. But it meant that Mr. Pinkerton would take it seriously, too.

“Sheriff,” I said, “Mr. Pinkerton should be here in a minute, and you can tell him all about it. First let me explain a few things about how Mr. Pinkerton works. If he does decide to go down to Tennessee, we’ll need two seats on the first available flight. We might need to send a few things by air express freight as well. You’ll be expected to cover all our expenses, and pay an additional fee . . .”

That was as far as I’d gotten when I heard voices. “Here comes Mr. Pinkerton now,” I said quickly and put the phone down.

I was pretty sure Mr. Pinkerton had seen this – he doesn’t miss much. But he just picked up the phone. “This is George Pinkerton.”

For a minute he listened. Then he said, “I’m just a librarian. Yes, I know a lot about monsters, because I’ve studied them in books, but anyone could. If this is an ordinary vampire...”

Then he stopped, and frowned.

“Two people killed?” he said. “Both exsanguinated?”

“Both what?” I asked.

He covered the mouthpiece. “Exsanguinated. It means, ‘drained of blood.’”

I marveled at that – who’d think there would be a word for it?

“You’ve searched for a coffin?” Mr. Pinkerton asked. “It wouldn’t necessarily look like a traditional coffin, you know – any big box...”

Sheriff Brown must have interrupted him, because Mr. Pinkerton didn’t finish the sentence. A moment later he sighed.

“I don’t promise I can do anything,” he said, “but I’ll try. Tell me how to get there.” He fished a pen and a piece of scrap paper off the desk.

He listened some more, took notes, then suddenly threw me a look through his thick glasses, tightening his lips so his beard bristled. I sort of grinned back, pretending it was nothing. He settled a few more details with Sheriff Brown, then hung up the phone and glared at me.

“My associate, huh?”

I nodded.

He glared a moment longer, then threw up his hands. “Oh, why not? If it’s okay with your family, you can come.”

Early the next morning we boarded a plane to Knoxville, and Mr. Pinkerton filled me in on the case. The first murder had been a Mrs. McGillicuddy. The sheriff said that on hot nights she always slept out on her porch, to save on air conditioning. One morning that week her sister had found her dead there. They’d called in a doctor from Oak Ridge, a bigger town a few miles away. She took a good look at the body, then announced that there wasn’t a drop of blood left in the woman’s veins.

Everyone in town knew what that meant. Sure, a few folks said it was all nonsense, that there wasn’t any such thing as a vampire, but most people didn’t want to take any chances. The sheriff said that once word got out the K-Mart down the road in Brileysburg sold out their entire stock of crosses in just two hours. The local supermarket sold out of garlic by suppertime, and some of the nearby jewelers spent the whole day melting down silver to make bullets and more crosses. Just in case, a few people in town had even added stars of David, or Islamic crescent-and-star emblems, or other religious insignia. And Father Genetti, the priest in Brileysburg, had even let some people fill squirt-guns with holy water.

It hadn’t done any good. Two nights later old Mr. Densmore was killed – all the blood sucked out through a hole in his neck. And Mr. Densmore had had a bunch of garlic, a cross, and a Star of David at each window, a squirt-gun of holy water at his bedside, and another cross around his neck. The vampire, if it was a vampire that killed him, had apparently smashed right through one of the windows. The crosses and garlic didn’t seem to have bothered it a bit.

The sheriff and his deputies had looked everywhere for any sign of the killer, without success. One deputy thought he’d seen a faint trail from Mr. Densmore’s house down to the swamp, but he wasn’t sure, and no one could find a single footprint.

A vampire was bad enough. A vampire like this one, that wasn’t stopped by the usual methods, was really awful. Everyone was terrified.

Sheriff Brown had organized a posse to search every attic and basement in town, looking for the vampire’s coffin, but hadn’t found anything – no coffin, no oversized trunks, no big wooden crates, nothing. He’d just about run out of ideas by the time he phoned the Springfield library.

We landed in Knoxville and rented a car. Mr. Pinkerton picked up the box of supplies he’d checked as luggage, and loaded everything in the trunk. “It’s not far from here, Billy,” he said. We drove past Oak Ridge, where the government does a lot of research on nuclear stuff, through Brileysburg, to Brokentree.

I don’t know whether the sheriff had made some sort of announcement or what, but word had definitely gotten around. When we rolled into the tiny town – which consisted of maybe three blocks in each direction and then just woods and hills and swamp – a crowd that looked like the entire population of Brokentree, Tennessee was watching.

We stopped in front of a little wooden building with a flag and a sign out front saying “U.S. Post Office.” I watched their faces as Mr. Pinkerton got out of the car. Some of them looked kind of surprised. Mr. Pinkerton’s just average height, with narrow shoulders and a bit of a potbelly. A beard and thick glasses hide most of his face, and he was wearing a baggy striped shirt and old jeans. He’s not the heroic figure you’d expect a monster hunter to be.

“Mr. Pinkerton?” said a man in a brown uniform and a Smokey- the-Bear hat. He stepped forward from the crowd and held out a hand. “I’m Aloysius Brown.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Pinkerton said, as he shook the sheriff’s hand.

“And I’m Billy Barnett,” I said.

The sheriff shook my hand, too, but he looked at me a bit funny.

“You sounded older on the phone,” he said, which I guess was his way of being polite.

“I tried to,” I said.

He didn’t say any more about it. Instead he just told us, “If you’d like to come to my office, we can discuss the case.”

Mr. Pinkerton hesitated, and looked around at the tiny town. “There’s something else I’d like to do first, Sheriff. Right away, in fact.”

“What would that be?”

“I’ll explain in a moment,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “Now, you think you have a vampire loose around here?”

“That’s what it looks like. The doctor can tell you...”

Mr. Pinkerton held up a hand. “We’ll start with this idea of mine first, if you don’t mind; then maybe I’ll talk to your doctor.”

The sheriff frowned. “What idea?”

“Well, unless there are more houses tucked away somewhere I can’t see, I’d say Brokentree is a very small town. Perhaps a hundred people?”

“Ninety-two,” the sheriff said. “It was ninety-four a week ago.”

“So you’d notice a stranger. When I drove in you seemed quite sure who I was.”

The sheriff nodded.

“Well, maybe you’ve already thought of this, but if you do have a vampire here, chances are it’s one of your ninety-two people. You’d notice a stranger.”

Sheriff Brown blinked. “Well, I’d thought something along those lines...”

Mr. Pinkerton waved his hand at the cloudless blue sky and the bright sun. “Traditional vampires don’t come out in open sunlight. It looks to me as if you have just about the entire town standing around right now. You can count your people and see who’s missing. If everyone’s here, then at least you know that it wasn’t one of your own who became a vampire.”

“Good point,” Sheriff Brown agreed. He turned, raised his arms, and called out, “All right, everyone, line up! Let’s see if we’re all here!”

A few minutes later, he’d run down the line and counted ninety-one people, including himself.

“Where’s Tom Adams?” asked a boy my age.

For a moment everyone looked back and forth.

“He must be the vampire!” a woman shouted.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” another woman protested. “He just didn’t know Mr. Pinkerton was coming!”

“Who’s Tom Adams?” Mr. Pinkerton asked.

“You might say he’s the town hermit,” the sheriff explained. “He lives by himself in a cabin down by the swamp.”

Mr. Pinkerton nodded thoughtfully. “And where were the two killings?”

The sheriff pointed. “Mrs. McGillicuddy lived in the last house on Willow Street, and Harvey Densmore’s place is there at the bend in Water Street.” He noticed Mr. Pinkerton’s inquiring expression, and explained, “We’ve got three streets running east and west – Main here in the middle, First Street to the north, and Water Street alongside the swamp to the south, running down to the river. The cross-streets are all named for trees – Willow’s at the foot of the hill.”

“And this Tom Adams...”

“His place is back off Water Street a few hundred yards.”

“And Mrs. McGillicuddy lived at the corner of Water and Willow?”

“More or less,” the sheriff agreed.

“Well, I must admit this Tom Adams is a likely candidate. Let’s go have a word with him.”

A few minutes later Sheriff Brown knocked on the door of Tom Adams’ cabin, while Mr. Pinkerton and I stood by, watching. They had convinced the rest of the town to stay back; there wasn’t any point in confronting a suspect with a mob.

No one answered the sheriff’s knock, not even when he pounded heavily on the door with his fist.

At last he stepped back and charged at the door with his shoulder. Just like on TV. The latch snapped, and the door burst in.

I hurried in, before anyone could stop me. But then I sort of wished I hadn’t, because it meant I was the first to see what was left of Tom Adams. I made a noise, sort of a gasp.

Tom Adams wasn’t the vampire. Tom Adams was the third victim. His throat was all torn open – the holes weren’t neat little spots like in the movies, they were great big red openings. They looked horrible.

I turned away so I wouldn’t be sick. Mr. Pinkerton studied the area around the dead man, and the smashed window in the cabin’s rear wall and the floor. “It’s wet,” he said. He pointed to the braided rug on the floor, and the rumpled blanket on the bed.

“Well, the swamp’s right out back,” the sheriff pointed out. “Whoever did this probably waded through it to hide his trail.”

Mr. Pinkerton frowned. “Your traditional vampire doesn’t need to hide his trail,” he said.

“Maybe it’s not a real vampire at all,” the sheriff said. “Maybe it’s just some crazy person.” He shuddered. “They’d have to be crazy to wade through the swamp!”

“Oh?” Mr. Pinkerton said. “Why?”

“It’s full of snakes and leeches and bugs,” the sheriff said. “Used to be gators, too, though nobody’s seen any lately.”

Mr. Pinkerton nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps we could go back to my car,” he said.

The sheriff nodded, “I need to get the doctor,” he said. “And if whoever did this went through the swamp we won’t be able to track him, anyway.”

We all hiked back up to Main Street. Sheriff Brown went to his office, and Mr. Pinkerton and I headed for the car. A bunch of the people were still hanging around the post office and watched curiously as Mr. Pinkerton opened the trunk. If they were expecting high-tech monster hunting gear, that wasn’t what they got.

What they got was books.

The entire trunk was full of them, hundreds of books – old, new, big, little, hardcovers and paperbacks. As he always said, he was a librarian – everything he knew came from books, and when he traveled on monster business he brought along his own personal collection of monster books.

He selected a few. He handed me an old book about Tennessee folklore and said, “See what you can find.”

Then we sat side by side on the sidewalk, looking for anything that might help, until the sheriff came out of his office. Mr. Pinkerton looked up from a big black book.

“I’ve been doing a little research,” he explained. “We are clearly not dealing with the traditional western vampire, since they can’t pass the cross nor tolerate garlic, nor do they leave a trail, or need to break in a window to pass through it.”

“Maybe the vampire heaved a rock through the window to knock the stuff out of the way,” I suggested.

Pinkerton shook his head. “No, I’m afraid that simply isn’t the way vampires work. Tom Adams was wearing a cross around his neck, in any case.” He put down the black book and picked up another. “Now, the Chinese vampire, or kiang-shi, is violent and brutal, and would not be stopped by crosses, but cannot abide the smell of garlic. I think we can eliminate that possibility. The Australian yara-ma-yha-who never enters homes, but only attacks travelers. The Ashanti obayifo, from Africa, and the Malaysian and Filipino vampires, prey primarily on children, rather than adults.” He slammed the book shut and set it aside.

“What we are dealing with,” he said, “is not any documented variety of vampire.”

“Well, then what could it be?” I demanded. “What else sucks blood?”

“The sheriff told us, Billy,” Pinkerton replied. “Think about it. Sheriff, I would say that in this case, crosses and garlic and stakes through the heart are not what we need. Do you have a shotgun I could borrow?”

Sheriff Brown blinked in surprise. “A shotgun?”

“And buckshot,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

“I told you something?” the sheriff asked, puzzled.

“Indeed you did,” Mr. Pinkerton said, getting to his feet and dumping an armload of books back into the trunk of his car. “You told me exactly what I needed to be reminded of. I’d be glad of your company, Sheriff – I’d like to do a little hunting.”

The sheriff looked at me, but I just shrugged.

“You’re the expert, Mr. Pinkerton,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, the two men sloshed into Brokentree Swamp in waders that went up to their waists. Each of them carried a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun.

I kept a look-out from the edge of the swamp as they slogged through the black water. They had gone out about sixty feet, then turned and started wading parallel to the shore. I followed along the soggy ground, staying as close as I could.

I thought I saw something big in the water beyond them. I squinted, trying to make out what it was – maybe there were still gators out there after all. It didn’t look like one, though. It just looked like a black shadow under the water – an old log, maybe, about ten feet long.

“What are we hunting, Mr. Pinkerton?” the sheriff asked, as he squinted into the gloom under the thick, vine- covered trees. “I’d think you were after gators, but they don’t suck anyone’s blood, and no one’s seen any lately.” He poked at some weeds with the barrel of his shotgun.

That shadow almost seemed to be following Mr. Pinkerton, I thought. Then I realized that maybe it was his shadow, so of course it was following him.

“The gators gave me a clue, but they aren’t what we’re after,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “I think you’ll see soon, and if I told you, you wouldn’t...”

There was something in the water, and it was moving – I was sure of it! All of a sudden I knew it couldn’t be Mr. Pinkerton’s shadow because it was on the wrong side, the side toward the sun. I still couldn’t tell what it was, but it was big and it was moving straight toward them!

“Behind you!” I shrieked, and ran into the murky water, and never mind that I didn’t have any waders.

The two of them turned toward me. “Billy, go back!” Mr. Pinkerton shouted.

“Behind you!” I shouted again. As I pointed, and jumped up and down in the water, a huge humped shape started to heave itself up from the water. I watched in terror as that thing reared up and up and up... it must have stood eight feet out of the water, and there must have been another couple of feet I couldn’t see, supporting it as it swung upright. It was a hideous black thing, reaching a horrible gripping mouth for Mr. Pinkerton’s throat. It didn’t have much shape, I couldn’t see any eyes or anything, just that mouth and some stubby, crooked little legs that waved uselessly.

I yelled and yelled, and it seemed as if Mr. Pinkerton and the sheriff just kept staring at me rather than where I was pointing. It couldn’t have been more than a second or two, but it seemed like forever before Mr. Pinkerton finally turned the rest of the way around and saw it. He dove sideways, splashing into the swamp.

The sheriff turned, too, and he acted fast once he saw it. His shotgun roared, and the creature exploded, splattering the surrounding swamp with more blood than I had ever imagined anything could hold. The water turned an ugly red for a dozen feet in every direction, and the sheriff and Mr. Pinkerton were soaked in gore.

Sheriff Brown ignored the blood as he sloshed forward and pumped two more shots into the oozing black mess, just to be certain it was really dead.

Then he stood, panting, and stared down at it as the echoes of the shotgun blasts faded in the trees.

“What was that thing?” he asked, his voice trembling.

Mr. Pinkerton stood up again, splashing and dripping. “A leech,” he said. “A giant mutant leech – as I suspected. When you and Billy asked what else sucked blood, and you mentioned leeches in the swamp, I put two and two together. Something must have changed it, made it grow into a monster – perhaps radiation from the experiments at Oak Ridge?” He shuddered. “It was a hungry giant mutant leech. I’d guess as it grew bigger it preyed on the alligators, until it had killed them all off. When there wasn’t anything left in the swamp big enough to feed it, it went ashore to hunt.”

Mr. Pinkerton turned and smiled at me. “Thanks for the warning, Billy.”

The sheriff looked sick as he stared at the dead monster. “A leech,” he said.

I thought about leeches – those nasty black slimy bloodsuckers an inch or two long that can get on you in the water sometimes. I thought about a leech ten feet long, and smart enough to come ashore for food. “Ewwww,” I said.

Mr. Pinkerton used a dry corner of his collar to wipe blood from his glasses. “You’ll want to keep an eye out in case there are any more, but I’d say we’ve solved your problem,” he said. He straightened up and tugged at his shirt, trying to look businesslike even though he was standing in the middle of a swamp, dripping blood and water. “Now,” he said, “about my fee...”

end

~~~~~

Richie

Ashley was only fourteen when she saw Richie for the first time. She was at the Lakeforest Mall with her mother, on a Friday night, doing some back-to-school shopping and being extremely bored, when she saw this guy hanging over the rail beside the escalator.

He was tall and thin and looked about sixteen, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt and a black windbreaker even though it was August, and black sneakers with black socks. His hair was long and black and spiked.

All that black really stood out against the pastel and beige of the mall and the other people, and Ashley couldn’t help noticing him, so she looked him over.

His face was pale as cream, the palest she’d ever seen, as different from the pink and brown faces around him as his clothes were from the background. His eyes were an odd shade of green – and they were staring right at her.

The guy looked seriously creepy, Ashley thought. She stared back at first, but he didn’t turn away, didn’t so much as blink, and she lost her nerve. She looked straight ahead, at the back of her mother’s blouse, and when she looked again he was gone.

She saw him six months later, on a Tuesday night when Jay Jay had his driver’s license and took Ashley and Maureen and Shanna to the mall to hang out. The four of them were in front of Mrs. Fields eating giant cookies and laughing about some stupid joke when Ashley looked down over the rail and saw him sitting beside the fountains, staring up at her. Black jeans, black T-shirt, black socks and high-tops – no windbreaker this time, though; he was wearing a black woolen pea coat, like a sailor. His black hair was still long, but the spikes were gone.

His face was just as white as ever, and even from up here she could see the green of his eyes.

She ran a few steps alongside the rail, and his gaze followed her. She made a face, then ran back to the others.

“What’s up?” Jay Jay asked her.

She shook her head. “Nothing.” She didn’t look back over the rail for several minutes; when she did, the black-haired boy was gone.

Four months after that, when Ashley was fifteen, she was at the mall again with Maureen, Friday after dinner, more or less looking for a new swimsuit, and the two of them were talking about what they were going to do that summer, when Ashley looked up and found herself looking straight into those weird green eyes. She stopped walking.

Maureen stopped, as well.

“Hi,” the black-haired guy said.

“Hi, yourself,” Maureen answered.

Ashley didn’t say anything; she was too startled.

She remembered him, of course. He had the sort of face and style that are hard to forget, and she wasn’t a girl who had boys staring at her in that creepy way all that often – her looks didn’t rate that kind of attention.

Right now he was staring at her again, only this time it didn’t seem creepy at all. Maybe it was because he wasn’t fifty feet away, but right there in front of her, looking right into her eyes, or maybe it was because she was a little older. But he didn’t seem creepy. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“My name’s Richie,” he said.

He had a really great voice, smooth and velvety, Ashley thought.

“I’m Maureen,” said Maureen. “That’s Ashley.”

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Ashley managed. She smiled.

He smiled back, but it was a tight, closed-mouth smile, no teeth showing.

They managed to lose Maureen after a while – she saw that she wasn’t going to get anywhere, and decided, with a shrug, that there was no reason to stand in Ashley’s way. Richie had some money, so they got sandwiches at Arby’s, and they talked.

Afterwards, Ashley was never sure just what they’d talked about. She didn’t get his last name, or his phone number, or his address.

She did remember asking where he went to school.

“I don’t,” he said. “I get tutored at home.” He grimaced.

“Why?” she asked.

“Oh, y’know, my parents don’t trust the schools, they think it’s dangerous, and I had some health problems... you don’t want to hear about that.”

He was right, Ashley realized; she didn’t want to hear about that.

Afterward, though, when she met Maureen and got driven home, she couldn’t remember what she had wanted to hear instead – except for one thing.

She was going to meet him at the mall the next night to see a movie.

The movie was great, and being with Richie was great, even though he didn’t try to kiss her or anything, which was sort of disappointing. Somehow she didn’t really mind, though.

They saw each other off and on after that. At first they always met at the mall, but after awhile Richie began meeting her at home sometimes, after dinner, for walks.

She never saw his home, though. And he was usually pretty late when he came by, and they never ate together; Ashley figured maybe he couldn’t afford it. They saw movies, and hung out at the mall, and took walks along the sidewalks, under the streetlamps. Sometimes they just talked – but Ashley could never remember much of what they talked about.

And he never kissed her. He put his arm around her, cuddled up to her, but never kissed her, and the cuddling never went beyond what they could do in public.

At first it was sweet, but after awhile Ashley began to wonder.

Then in late August, Jay Jay made his big announcement.

He’d gotten the use of his uncle’s place in Ocean City for a weekend, and everyone was invited for an end-of-summer beach party. Carloads were organized; anyone who could drive and had access to a car was recruited, with every seat spoken for. The apartment, a block from the beach, would be for changing clothes and cooking and storage; the actual party would be out on the sand.

“You’ll come, won’t you, Richie?” Ashley asked.

Richie blinked, and his mouth twisted. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not much on beaches. The sun hurts my eyes. And I can’t swim.”

“So who wants to swim?” Ashley said, disappointed. “And you can wear shades.”

“Well, maybe. When is it again?”

“Saturday. All day. On the beach at 130th Street in Ocean City.”

“I’ll try, Ash, but I’ll probably be pretty late getting there.”

“Okay – but try, all right?”

Richie nodded.

Ashley stared at him, wondering.

He was such a neat guy – but he could be so weird, sometimes. He never ate popcorn with her in the movies; she’d never seen him eat anything. He always wore black. She’d never seen him with his shirt off, never seen him grin. She’d never seen where he lived. And he never came around until after dark.

But he was so sexy, the way he moved, and those green eyes, and she got a warm feeling just being near him and talking to him, like she was about to melt.

“Richie,” she began, “I like you, but...”

“But what?”

She didn’t answer right away, but a moment later she said, “You better be at the beach, that’s all.”

She rode out with Maureen and Robbie B. and Dorrie and Dave, and they got there about noon and found Jay Jay and Shanna and about half a dozen others on the beach, setting up.

Ashley loved it. She splashed in the ocean, ate hot dogs for lunch, and then rode down to the Boardwalk with some of the others, where she bought an Ocean City T-shirt and fed a dozen quarters into different games without ever getting to post her initials on the high score lists.

They giggled all the way back to 130th Street, thinking up raunchy slogans to put on T-shirts.

Ashley had hoped that Richie would be there, waiting, when they got back.

He wasn’t.

She asked; no one had seen him.

Giggling in the car had been the high point of her day; from there on it was a slow, steady descent into gloom as Richie failed to show. Ashley genuinely enjoyed the sun and the sea and all the rest, but as the afternoon wore on her disappointment and anger at Richie’s absence grew, until it overwhelmed her enjoyment.

It didn’t help that she wasn’t sure whether there was any way he could turn up, once everyone else was there. She didn’t know if he had the use of a car – or even if he had a driver’s license. She’d never seen his house or met his parents.

How could she know so little about him?

That just made it all worse, somehow.

She hid her feelings until dinner, which started around sunset. Someone had brought back a huge bag of take-out steamed crabs from someplace on the Coastal Highway, and the whole crowd, grown to about forty by this time, gathered around to pig out on them, strewing broken bits of shell all about.

Ashley sat back a little apart from the others, trying to see through the growing shadows, her appetite gone. Richie hadn’t shown.

She got up to pace, and after about three steps her foot landed on the sharp edge of a broken crab-shell. That was the last straw. She yelled at Shanna, who was sitting closest, “Watch where you throw your garbage!”

Then, ignoring Shanna’s protest, she stormed off up the beach, onto the sidewalk and back toward Jay Jay’s borrowed apartment. She rounded the corner of the building, heading for the door, and nearly ran into Richie.

He was standing there with an uncertain smile on his face. “Hi,” he said. “Sorry I’m so late.”

“Wha... how’d you get here?” she asked, dazed.

“Maybe I flew,” he said, still smiling.

She looked up into his eyes, then burst out crying, her forehead falling onto his chest, her arms going around him.

For a moment he seemed startled and resisting, but then his arms closed around her. His own head fell forward, and she felt his cheek brushing down across her hair, and then the brush of his lips on her neck, and she thought, with a burst of wonder, that he was finally going to kiss her. His lips parted, and she felt moistness – and then two sharp, sharp points, and she tried to jerk away, but he held her, and then the pain vanished and she felt only a pressure and a suction on her neck. She tried to struggle, but he was too strong, much stronger than she had ever realized, his arms like steel, and she couldn’t get her breath to scream. She didn’t really want to scream. She was too tired, she’d been tired for hours, but this was a new sort of tiredness, not the disappointed weariness that had been gnawing at her, but a warm, lazy languor, like lying in a nice hot bath after a day of pleasant exercise.

When he finally withdrew she was almost asleep. She wanted to just slump into his arms and let him carry her off somewhere – but then Shanna’s voice spoke behind her.

“Ashley, are you okay, girl?”

Richie looked up, and Ashley turned, startled.

Shanna said, “Oh, hi, Richie! Glad you could make it!”

“I’m fine,” Ashley said.

There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Shanna said, “Well, hey, you two don’t want me butting in, do you? I’ll just go on in and use the bathroom and see you guys later.” She smiled, and stepped past them.

Richie and Ashley watched her go.

The mood was broken, and Ashley was awake again – but bone-tired. Drained, in fact. She slid down the wall of the building into a sitting position on the sidewalk, and looked up at Richie. She didn’t meet his eyes.

“You’re a vampire,” she said, accusingly. Tired as she was, it seemed very important that she get everything clear right here and now.

He nodded, watching her.

“You really did fly here?”

“Last night,” he said. “But I couldn’t come out until the sun was down.”

“You... you sucked my blood, just then.” Her hand came up and touched her neck, and came away with a smear of blood, dark red in the fluorescent glow of the streetlights.

He nodded once again.

This, Ashley thought, certainly explained a heck of a lot.

But it didn’t explain everything. She felt her strength coming back somewhat now that she was off her feet and out of his spell – whatever that spell was – and she wanted an explanation for the rest of it.

“We’ve been dating for months,” she said. “Why’d you wait so long?”

“Because I wasn’t sure about you,” Richie said, sliding down to sit beside her. “I’m still not, but I couldn’t wait any more.”

“You weren’t sure about what about me?” Ashley asked, baffled.

“How you’d react. What you’d do. Whether you’d want to see me again.” He kept his face expressionless as he watched her closely.

“See you again?” Ashley demanded. She looked at her bloody fingers, and then at Richie’s eyes. “Why would you want to see me again?” she asked angrily. “You’ve got what you wanted.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t just want a one-night stand. I want a long-term relationship.”

She stared at him. “What sort of relationship? You mean sucking blood? Regularly?”

He nodded.

“Eew, that’s sick!” she said, sliding away from him a little.

“I can’t help it,” he said, shrugging. “It’s what I do.”

“Yeah, but... I mean... how often would you do it? Wouldn’t I get sick? Wouldn’t I... wouldn’t I die?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Eventually, you would, sort of.” He smiled at her, the broadest smile she’d ever seen on his face, and his teeth showed.

His teeth. And his fangs.

“Sort of?” she shouted, pushing at him. “Sort of die? Hey, I want to live!”

He caught her hand. “Yeah, sort of,” he said. “You wouldn’t stay dead.”

She blinked. For a moment she sat staring silently at him.

“I wouldn’t?” she asked at last. She knew the stories, of course. “You mean I’d become a vampire?”

He nodded.

“And live forever?”

He nodded again.

“And never grow old?”

Again.

She eyed him suspiciously. “How do you know?” she asked.

He gestured at himself. “How old do you think I am?”

“Sixteen,” she said. “Don’t try and tell me you’re hundreds of years old!”

“No,” he said, “Not hundreds. I was born in 1932.”

“You’re sixteen. Maybe seventeen.” She pulled her hand away.

“I was sixteen when it happened, in 1948,” he said, letting her fingers slide free. “Forty years ago.”

“So if I let you suck my blood,” Ashley asked, “I’ll die, and I’ll come back as a vampire, and I’ll live forever, just the age I am now?”

He nodded, smiling.

“But what about my parents? And everyone will think I’m dead, and how can I explain that I’m not?”

The smile vanished. “Well, yeah, that’s rough, I know. You’ll have to leave, go live somewhere else, be someone else for a while, like I did. My mother’s still in California, where I grew up, I think she’s in a nursing home. I haven’t seen her since I snuck back for a visit in ‘53.” He frowned. “She thought I was a dream. And my dad, well, he died years ago.”

“But... but where do you live, then? Just by yourself?”

He grimaced. “Yeah. My coffin’s in a storeroom.”

“A storeroom? Where?”

“I can’t tell you that, not yet.”

“But you sleep in a coffin? In a storeroom somewhere?”

“Yeah.”

“And if I... if I died, I’d do the same thing? Is that the idea?”

“Well...”

She cut him off. “And I’d have to go away, never see my folks again, never see any of my friends?”

“Well... well, yeah.”

“Would you come with me?”

He smiled again. “Yes. Yes, Ashley, I would. We’d have each other.”

“Yeah,” Ashley said sourly, “Just each other.”

“Yeah, but Ash, you’d live forever! You’d always be young, same as you are now! Think about it, you could be the same age you are now forever. Look, I was a teenager in 1948, dancing the jitterbug, and I was a teenager in the fifties, listening to rock ‘n’ roll, and in the sixties, at the demonstrations and festivals, and in the discos in the seventies, and I’m still a teenager.”

Ashley thought about it.

“Think about it, staying young while your enemies go on and get old and ugly...” Richie insisted.

“Yeah,” Ashley objected, “but my friends would get old and die, too, Richie.”

“I wouldn’t. And think of all the things you’ll see – think what I’ve seen! All the movies I’ve seen, and the music I’ve heard, all while I was young enough to enjoy it!”

“So I’d be fifteen forever?”

“That’s right,” Richie said, smiling again. “You’ll be young and beautiful forever.”

“Young and beautiful, Richie, I’ll be fifteen. I’m not beautiful, and I’m too damned young! I can’t drive, can’t get a job, adults treat me like a kid, but I’m not a kid... Richie, fifteen sucks. I don’t want to be fifteen! I want to grow up!”

The smile vanished.

“So did I,” he said. “What I said... well, it’s true, but so did I.”

For a moment they sat there, each waiting silently for the other to say something else. Then he stood up and stepped back into a shadow, and in his black clothes she could hardly see him. She blinked, and he was gone.

“Richie?” she called, unsteadily.

She didn’t see him again for another eight years. Shanna found her crying on the sidewalk, and someone drove her home, and she didn’t see Richie again.

Until one day in the mall, when she looked across and saw a pale kid all in black, trying to look tough, and she realized he was familiar somehow.

The memories came back, and she knew who it was, and she took a step toward him, and her thoughts were tripping over each other.

Twenty-three was a good age, she didn’t want to die, didn’t want to grow old, fifteen was wrong but twenty-three was all right, if it was all true, if it wasn’t just a dream, but she’d be undead, not really alive, she’d have to prey on others, but to live forever, never grow old...

He looked up and saw her, and he smiled bitterly and shook his head. He stepped back and vanished in the crowd.

She stopped.

He didn’t want her any more. He was just a kid, he wanted a kid his own age, not a grown woman.

After all, misery loves company. He was a kid, he was sixteen, would always be sixteen. An eternity of sixteen.

She turned away and went back to her shopping, fighting back tears, unsure whether she wanted to cry over her own lost opportunity, or for the eternity Richie faced.

end

~~~~~

Worthy of His Hire

Mike thought he heard something; he looked up from the kitchen table and saw the water leaking out under the cabinet door, but for a moment it didn’t register. Water on the floor? Had something spilled?

Then he realized that the water was coming pretty fast, and there was a lot of it, and he decided that he’d better check, right now. He dashed to the sink, knelt down, and opened the cabinet.

Once the door was open he could hear the hissing clearly; he pushed aside a soggy roll of paper towels and saw the water spraying from the cracked copper pipe.

“Damn,” he said. It must have burst when he got that drink of water a few minutes ago.

He’d have to turn it off at the main valve; that would hold it until morning. He could call a plumber – some of them advertised 24-hour emergency service, but he knew that usually meant they’d take a message now and send someone in the morning.

He stood and hurried for the main shut-off valve in the basement.

As he stumbled down the cellar stairs he cursed quietly to himself. This is what he got for buying this house. The ad had called it a “handyman special”; he should have known it was trouble.

He wasn’t much of a handyman, really – they just hadn’t been able to afford anything better and hadn’t wanted to rent any more. Maggie had so wanted a house of their own!

Well, she had it now – and she was up in bed, probably asleep by now, as any sensible person would be at this godforsaken hour of 1:30 in the morning. She didn’t know that something else had gone wrong with her suburban dream.

He pushed aside a box of Christmas lights and found the valve; he grabbed the rusty knob and turned it, hard.

Metal groaned, and the knob snapped off in his hand.

He stared at it in horror.

“Oh, my God!” he said.

He dropped the broken valve and ran for the stairs.

His first stop was the broom closet, where he snatched up the big mop bucket. Then came the cabinet under the kitchen sink, where he shoved the bucket under the leak, and almost broke his neck sliding on the wet floor--the puddle now covered everything from the refrigerator to the end of the counter, and it was creeping toward the breakfast table at an alarming rate. Then he splashed his way over to the phone, hauled the yellow pages out of the drawer, and opened it to “Plumbing.”

Half a dozen ads in the first few pages listed “24 Hour Emergency Service,” as he had expected. George Miller & Sons, heretofore his regular plumber, was not one of them – he knew that he’d just get an answering machine there. He’d settled on Miller because he was reliable and didn’t charge an arm and a leg, not because he was convenient.

He looked over the ads, trying to clear enough of the panic out of his thoughts to decide who to call, and his gaze fell on a neat little box in the bottom corner of one page.

“Midnight Plumbers,” it said. “Open 8 pm to 5 am. Why pay extra for nighttime service? Late-night emergencies are our specialty. Over fifty years experience.” And the address was only a dozen blocks away.

It sounded too good to be true. Mike punched the number into the phone.

He expected it to ring half a dozen times, or to connect him to an answering machine, but instead it was picked up on the first buzz, and a voice that did not sound at all like a machine said, “Hello?”

He didn’t mention the company name--a bad sign. “Is this Midnight Plumbing?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, Midnight Plumbing, Al speaking.”

“Listen, I’ve got a burst pipe here, and the main shut-off is broken – how soon can you get someone here?”

“Where are you, sir?”

Mike gave his address.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes, sir.”

“Fine, I... wait. Is this going to cost me an arm and a leg?”

He heard a chuckle from the other end of the line. “Not exactly. I think you’ll find our rates quite reasonable. And our work is guaranteed one hundred percent.”

“All right.”

“Ten minutes, then.” With a click, Al hung up.

“Honey? Who were you talking to?” Maggie called from upstairs.

Mike hesitated, then shrugged and called back, “The plumber, dear. We’ve got a broken pipe.”

Then he slogged across the kitchen and looked under the sink. The bucket was more than half full already; he dumped it quickly and slid it back into position.

Maggie appeared in the kitchen doorway. “A leak?” Then she saw the puddle. “Oh, damn. How bad is it?”

“Very bad,” Mike told her, “but the plumber says he’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“Well, let’s mop up some of the water, then.” She headed for the broom closet.

No more than eight minutes after Mike had hung up the phone, the doorbell rang. He looked out the window.

The van at the curb didn’t have a company name on it, but it otherwise looked like a plumber’s truck; a rack on the roof held a ladder and several lengths of PVC pipe.

The man at the door was tall and thin and pale, not the usual hale, hearty, and hairy sort of plumber, but he wore gray overalls and black boots and a tool belt, and carried a steel box.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Al, from Midnight Plumbing – you the guy that called?”

A minute or so after that Al looked at the broken shut-off valve, shook his head, and said, “You wouldn’t happen to know where the water company’s shut-off is, would you? The outside one, like a little tiny manhole cover?”

“Not exactly,” Mike admitted. “Somewhere in the sidewalk, maybe.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Need a flashlight?”

“No, thanks.”

Mike assumed that Al had his own flashlight, but if so, he didn’t use it; he found the outside shut-off in the dark and did something to it with a huge black T-shaped thing.

The hissing from under the sink began to fade.

That done, Al came back up to the door.

“Now,” he said, “before we go any further, it’s time to talk about price.”

Mike cringed. “You do charge an arm and a leg,” he said.

“Nope,” Al said. “Just blood. Plus parts.”

Mike blinked. He supposed that was meant as a joke, but it wasn’t funny. “Ah... how much?” he asked.

“I figure for this job, about two pints would be fair--I saw your wife in there, that’d be one from you, one from her. Plus five bucks for parts.”

For a moment the two men stood in utter silence as Mike gaped at Al. At last he said, “What?”

Patiently, Al explained, “I’ll fix your leak, replace the supply line to the sink and the main shut-off valve, for two pints of fresh human blood and five dollars for the parts.”

“Blood?”

Al sighed. “I’m a vampire,” he said. He bared his fangs. “See?”

Mike backed away, trying to remember where he’d put his grandmother’s rosary.

“Look, it’s like this,” Al explained. “Most vampires, they figure hey, I’m a dread creature of the night, I’ve got hypnotic powers, I can turn into a bat or a mist, I have a supernatural appeal to the opposite sex, I can take whatever I want, as long as I want! So they go around preying on people, and sooner or later people get mad, and next thing you know the vampire’s got a stake through his heart and his head cut off. That’s not for me, thanks. If you want to get by you can’t just take what you want, you’ve gotta give something back. So fifty or sixty years ago I sat down and thought it over and tried to figure out what I, as a vampire, could do that people would want enough that they’d pay blood for it.”

“Plumbing?” Mike gasped. “You decided on plumbing?”

“Sure. I saw that one thing I had was that I was up all night, when most folks weren’t, and I tried to figure out how I could use that. I didn’t see much use for turning to a bat or a mist, and hypnotizing guys or seducing women just gets other people ticked off--I can’t hypnotize everyone, and sooner or later there’s some smartass with a sharpened stake who gets angry because his secretary’s mooning about with a pair of holes in her neck.”

“Plumbing,” Mike said.

“Plumbing,” Al agreed. “And locksmithing, too. And I’m on call to chauffeur sick pets to the animal hospital – regular ambulances won’t do that.”

“And you take payment in blood.”

“Sure. Not enough to do any real harm – I mean, you’ve probably donated a pint or two to Red Cross, right?”

“You’re really a vampire? You sleep in a coffin and everything?”

“In a spare tool locker, actually. So, is it a deal? Two pints and the cost of the parts and I fix your little problem here?”

Mike glanced toward the kitchen and remembered the spreading puddle.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

An hour later the pipe and valve were replaced and the water back on, and Mike watched woozily as Al bent over an all-too-willing Margaret’s throat and sucked thirstily.

Looking at Margaret’s expression, Mike could see how people would be jealous of vampires. He began thinking vaguely in terms of wooden stakes himself.

It was as if Al had heard his thoughts. The vampire looked up, Margaret’s blood dribbling down his chin.

“Just remember,” Al said, “how hard it is to get a human plumber at this hour!” Then he turned, wiped his mouth with a rag from his back pocket, checked to be sure he had the five dollar bill Mike had given him, packed up his tools and left.

Mike thought about that, and remembered all the years of waiting until morning, of staying home from work to let tradesmen in, of paying outrageous prices. As the door closed behind the vampire Mike called after him, “Don’t worry!”

And a moment later, as he helped Margaret up to bed, Mike laughed. “He charged us for parts,” he said. “At least he didn’t want an arm and a leg!”

end

~~~~~