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Copyright ©2009 by Jordan Castillo Price First published in 2009, 2009
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CONTENTS
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Sweet Oblivion 4: Swarm
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Sweet Oblivion 4: Swarm
Jordan Castillo Price
For some time, Michael has suspected that Wild Bill's done more than just dabble in art. As with every other piece of his personal history, Bill plays his cards close to his chest. But when he lets on that a mural he painted before his change might still exist, Michael's dying to see it---and Bill's never been good at saying no.
Only fragments of the building remain, but it's possible Wild Bill's painting is still there. Unfortunately, there's a lot more in the ruins than Bill and Michael bargained for.
Steam hissed from the dull chrome hulk of the autoclave and wended up the walls, where it seemed like it could work its way into the electrical system and short out the whole building. All the wiring was on the outside of the walls---the light switches, the conduits holding the wires, the two-pronged outlets without any ground hole. It was as if whoever'd converted the building from gaslight to electricity had never been fully convinced electric power was more than a passing phase, and soon enough they'd simply need to tear it out to make way for the next ridiculous fad.
I suspected Melba was responsible for the code-nightmare that hummed through her building. Directly responsible.
She must've taken my staring for admiration. "Yeah, I run a clean shop," she said. Her voice was so low and rough the telemarketers probably addressed her as "sir." If she even had a phone.
"Not like you can catch anything over the Dracula Bug," she added, "but back when I trained, you could lose your arm to a staph infection. Then there goes your shop's reputation, right down the can."
"I don't have the---"
"Don't sass me, kid. You want ink or not?"
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. "Sorry."
She tied a red scarf around her curly brown bob. A few strokes of lipstick and she would've looked like Rosie the Riveter, with her men's slacks and her rolled-back cuffs. Except the arms beneath those cuffs were covered with colorful sleeves of ink. Oriental flowers, dragons, traditional motifs like you'd see on someone's grandfather---just as faded, too, though Melba's skin was still smooth and firm.
"You do piercings, right?" Wild Bill appeared to be talking to one of the many panthers on the wall of flash. "Maybe I should get another tongue stud ... or a Prince Albert."
"Don't tempt fate," Melba warned him. "Vamps shouldn't pierce anything that might heal shut."
He glanced back over his shoulder at us and leered. "Wouldn't want to chip Michael's pretty teeth, anyway."
"You think you can shock me by talking about your pecker? Nothing shocks me. People think sex is shocking? That ain't the half of it. I see coloreds and whites getting married now when they couldn't even drink from the same bubbler before. I treated a whole battalion sprayed with mustard gas, skin practically fell right off 'em and they screamed louder than the amputees. And the smell..." Her gaze went somewhere far, far away.
"Which war?" I asked.
"The Great War."
History had never been my strongest subject. I nodded gravely, as if I knew what she was talking about, and made a mental note to check Wikipedia later.
"All right, show me what you want."
I peeled up the sleeve of my T-shirt and showed her the thorn armband Bill had drawn on me earlier.
"That's not how it's done---you draw it out on paper and I make a sterile transfer."
"Bullshit," Bill said amiably. He hiked up the side of his jacket and pointed to one of his tattoos---I'm not sure which. He's got a hodgepodge of them that look a lot like the wall of flash. "That's how I did this one."
Melba gave him a withering look, which he ignored, then she said to me, "If you didn't have the Dracula Bug, I'd wash it off you and make you start from scratch, and do it right. Good thing bacteria won't stand a chance against it."
"But I don't---"
Her mouth was at my ear. I hadn't even seen her move---it was like she'd appeared there. "The blood you brought with you to barter---you drank some of it. I can smell it on you. Maybe you still eat and crap and run around after sunrise, but that bug's inside you all the same." My heart started hammering in my throat, and she backed off to a more conversational distance. "Don't look so blue. It'll be a fine-looking tat."
Melba pointed at an old dentists' chair that looked like something out of a Marilyn Manson video. "Sit."
I obeyed.
Metal clacked against metal. She pulled a straight razor out of the autoclave and began stropping it, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Both Melba and Wild Bill jerked around to look at me as if I'd just shouted, even though I hadn't made a sound, hadn't even moved. "No one told me straight razors were involved."
"I just gotta shave the area. Don't worry, I won't cut you. I been doing this since your great-grandpa was nothing more than a gleam in his daddy's eye."
I squirmed. "No, that's not it. I had a bad experience with a straight razor once."
"Forget about it." She pumped some surgical soap onto her fingertips and smeared it over the design. "This part don't hurt at all. Now buck up and take it like a man."
Wild Bill drifted toward the chair and peered over Melba's shoulder.
I clenched everything---my teeth, my eyes, even my ass---as she swept the blade over me. I hardly felt it. But Marushka had been precise, too.
The shave was over in a second, and Melba wiped off the excess soap with a wad of gauze. I looked down at my bicep. She'd shaved me so precisely she hadn't even taken off any of the marker. She said, "This next part, you will feel. I won't think you're sissies or nothing if you want to hold hands. I seen sailors cry on their buddies' shoulders over the sting of the needle."
"Make sure you leave the little hooks on the ends of the thorns," Bill said. "That's what makes 'em look wicked."
"I know." Melba inked her needle.
Wild Bill flanked me on the other side of the chair and curled a lock of my hair around his forefinger. "You don't hafta do it just 'cos I drew it on you, y'know. You're plenty hot without it."
I reached up and caught his hand. "I want to."
"Ready?" Melba asked. I nodded, and she touched the buzzing needle to my arm. It did hurt---and in fact it felt more like she was cutting my skin than piercing it---but I'd been hurt a lot worse. It was nothing I couldn't handle.
Wild Bill laced his fingers through mine and stared down at me with an intense expression I couldn't even begin to read. Melba stopped inking, dabbed, and started another line. Ink, dab, ink, dab ... the steady rhythm was hypnotic. The antiseptic smells of the surgical soap and the rubbing alcohol almost masked the scent of fresh blood, but the familiar copper tang was still there, beneath it all.
I closed my eyes and tried to will myself not to get aroused. It wasn't easy. Blood and pain and vampire were in the air, my triumvirate of kinks.
Wild Bill was still staring when I opened my eyes. He mouthed the words, "I love you," and I worried I might bust out of my jeans, because that was the cherry on top.
Two hours later, I was down on all fours in the back of the van with a new tattoo---a Wild Bill original---and my jeans around my ankles.
"The sight of you getting inked was something else," he said. His breath was cool and moist against the small of my back, where he trailed tantalizing wet kisses.
I forced myself not to beg him to stop messing around and get down to business. As far as I was concerned the tattoo was the foreplay, and now I ached with the need to come.
He knew it. How could he not? And so he took his sweet time tracing each of my vertebrae with his tongue, petting my ass with his fingertip but never pushing in. I squeezed the air mattress and it made a sound like latex balloons rubbing together, and I bit back the word "please," which was trying to force its way through my vocal cords.
Bill's kisses wended their way lower. They drifted down my ass cheek and settled on my balls, which hitched up at the touch of his mouth.
I breathed carefully and did my damnedest not to tear a hole in the air mattress. Please. It was killing me to not say it.
Bill sucked one of my nuts into his mouth and dragged his tongue back and forth over the underside of my sack.
"It would be really awesome if you fucked me," I mumbled into my forearm.
"I'm getting to it."
I made a frustrated sound and pushed my ass toward him. "Thought you said I looked good."
"More than just good."
"So what's the holdup?"
He worked his tongue into the crease of my thigh, then spoke cool words against my hot, wet skin. "I'm savoring."
My pre-come pattered against the taut air mattress. I steeled myself against the feathery touches, the lingering wetness of his mouth and tongue, and I tried to pretend my whole groin wasn't aching for sweet release. That lasted about five seconds. Bill licked his fingertip and traced the rim of my ass so gently it almost tickled---but not quite. Another viscous drop hit.
"You're torturing me." My voice was so rough it didn't even sound like mine.
He put his mouth to my ass and spoke, and the gentle vibration of his breath teased each and every nerve ending. "Now you know how I felt, watching you with a foot-long boner in your jeans while that old broad inked you."
He fluttered his tongue over my hole and my breathing went ragged. "Can I come before dawn does?"
"You feel that too, huh?" He sat up, squirted some lube into his hand, gave himself a quick overhand stroke, then pushed a slippery finger up my ass. I bit back a noise, and he lingered there, felt around longer than he needed to so he could draw out the anticipation another agonizing moment. Finally, he pulled his fingers out and his cock was pressing there. Bill's hung, and it felt even bigger when he did me like that, doggy-style. "You're trying not to moan," he whispered.
I didn't say anything. My jaw was clenched too tightly.
"I can hear it, when you're trying to be quiet. Your breathing changes." He eased in and out a few times to make sure the lube was where we wanted it, then he started going at it. Hard. "That trips my trigger like you wouldn't believe, kid." He angled deep and started to pound me, and I saw stars. The pain was delicious. "Watching you squirm brings out the predator in me."
I grunted and considered touching myself. I could probably come from him fucking me, I decided, even though he wasn't really buffing my prostate, not from that angle. Didn't matter. I was a different animal than I'd been when I first met him. Different things got me off now, dark things---blood and pain and vampire.
I breathed deep and tried to scent the bloody ink tang of the tattoo, but it was gone already, dried and scabbed over. I could remember the feeling of the tattoo gun slicing lines through my flesh like a sharp razor, and my dripping cock ached when I opened up that memory.
Bill fucked me hard. "Feel that?" he said in his whiskey voice. As if I could feel anything else.
"You're in deep."
"And your guts are molten."
He wound my hair around his fist so he could pull me harder onto his cock, and that was it, that sent me. I yelled out in shock and pain as my cock started pumping, and I spurted over and over, throbbed my come out onto the air mattress while my ass clenched convulsively around him. "Fuck, yeah, fuck," he muttered, and his thrusts went slick and juicy, and the whole van reeked of sex and vampire.
Sometimes I can go a few times, but right then I felt like a dishrag that had been wrung out so hard it was nearly dry. I barely had time to shove the fitted sheet out of the way before Wild Bill pulled me down onto the plasticy flocked surface of the air mattress and mashed me against his chest.
"That was a little too rough, huh?"
"Uh-uh. Just right."
He sighed into the hair he'd just yanked and kissed the top of my head. "That ink looks righteous on you. Not just saying it 'cos I drew it, either."
"Mm." The words thank you had been banished a long time ago.
"Play hooky today."
"I can't. I have a surgery." And luckily I had a stash of ginseng-taurine-caffeine shots I'd scored at the last truck stop we'd hit, otherwise I'd pass out in the doberman's abdominal cavity. I checked the side view, pulled away from the curb and headed back toward our place.
"Why didn't you say something?" Wild Bill rolled down the window a crack, even though predawn air was cold, and lit up. The smoke blew back into the cab, but it was a considerate gesture. "I woulda hurried it up."
"Caught up in the moment, I guess." A tingle crawled over my nuts, like maybe I really would be up for round two, though other things were too tender to manhandle again without a few hours of recovery. I calculated the time the dashboard showed minus daylight savings plus the inexplicable seven minute slide---or was it eight---and whether or not I wanted more tattoo-fueled loving was beside the point.
As it was, I'd need to skip breakfast---or whatever you want to call my 6 a.m. meal---so I didn't keep Dr. Marshall waiting. He was the rock star of veterinary surgeons, and all the new techs were drooling over the chance to assist him.
"I'll be there when you wake up," I assured Bill. Maybe it was just the way the passing streetlight shone over his face, but I thought he frowned slightly. He liked it better when we went to bed at the same time---and he'd prefer I slept until he woke, so I didn't see him comatose from the sun. But I can only sleep so many hours a day.
The sky held a hint of rosiness as I pulled up in front of our building. Bill had the door open before I even put the van in park. "Grab me another carton of smokes on your way home, wouldja? I'm down to my last couple of packs."
And with that he swung out and ambled up the cracked concrete stairs. He's never been big on flowery goodbyes.
I drove to work faster than I wanted to, parked Big Red on the far side of the parking lot at the Near South Emergency Veterinary Clinic, then ducked through the staff door and into the showers. Most employees clean up before they go home and the overnight shift wasn't through yet, so it was all clear.
There wasn't time to get nostalgic about whatever was running down the drain: my eyeliner, the sweet ride I'd just had with Bill, the remaining inky scabs from my new tattoo. I toweled dry, pulled on my plain navy scrubs---because even though everyone else wore them, I wouldn't be caught dead in the puppy and kitten patterned monstrosities that looked like kiddie pajamas---and squatted under the hand dryer to blow-dry my hair. A smear of concealer on the blade marks on my neck, a quick ponytail, a paper surgical cap, and I was ready to go. Three minutes early, even.
The smell of cooked down French vanilla coffee made my stomach churn as I passed the break room, and I veered out of the way as Lance barreled through the doorway, flirting with the early morning receptionist and talking way too loud. He's been at the clinic 90 days longer than I have, which is only a month and a half, but he lords it over me like he owns the place. He works out so religiously he can't put his arms all the way down against his body, and he's short, maybe five-eight, so he tries to make up for it by being really wide, and really loud.
"Oh, it's you," he practically shouted, not bothering to contain his lack of enthusiasm. "I thought Coombs was working this morning."
"So did I." I probably didn't say that loud enough for him to hear, since he'd desensitized his eardrums with all his bellowing. I looked at the big whiteboard schedule. It was supposed to be Coombs and me, but his name was erased---I could still see the outline---and Lance was written in with a different handwriting. "I guess he called in." Lucky me.
"I'm assisting Marshall," Lance told me. "You can stick with anesthesia." What was next, would he call shotgun when we made a Costco run for cat litter? Call dibs on the last jelly donut? I didn't give a rat's ass which vet he wanted to assist---it wasn't as if I was working toward a veterinary career and I needed certain practicum hours. I was only there for the drugs I could pocket. Besides, I was so used to knocking things out it was second nature to me now. I just didn't like his attitude.
I'd never been able to vamp his head, either. I'd tried.
I went and got our patient, Molly, a seventy-pound bundle of muscle who we suspected was bleeding internally. She eyed me as I unlatched her cage. She didn't growl, but I wasn't treated to the enthusiastic wiggling of her tail-stub everyone else got, either. Animals don't automatically flip out when they scent a vamp, not like they do in the movies, but they do notice something different. I wasn't sure if they picked up Wild Bill's scent on me, or if all the scrubbing in the world wouldn't get rid of that undertone of patchouli, because now it was part of my own chemistry.
Molly's gums were pale. She probably didn't have the strength to growl at me. I administered a sedative, shaved and prepped the area, and set her up in the O.R.
If Coombs had been on the team with me that morning, he and I could've both scrubbed up at the same sink. But I couldn't fit next to Lance and his arms, so I had to stand there feeling like Stephanie the anesthesiologist could see I'd just gotten fucked within an inch of my life while I waited my turn.
"Michael. Lance. Stephanie." Dr. Marshall breezed into the O.R. like he was Bono taking the stage at Live Aid. I said good morning, but was drowned out by Lance. Stephanie was busy double-checking her equipment. Or maybe covertly noting that I was standing funny.
Marshall wore a pair of prescription glasses with loupe insets over each eye that made him look like a mad scientist when he pulled up his mask. "Let's see." He picked up a chart. "Lance, you're with Stephanie, and Michael ... you're with me."
Did he pause? Had there been a strange pause there? And what was its meaning? Lance's eyes looked beady and hard over the top of his mask. Screw him. It's not like I'd been the one calling the shots.
It was exhausting sometimes, keeping up all the pretenses. I wasn't like Lance, or Stephanie, or anyone else there. Their lives weren't anything like my life, and sometimes I was at a loss for a way to convincingly fake it.
I scrubbed, Stephanie sent Molly deeper into dreamland, and the four of us converged on the table. Marshall drew an incision line. "Mr. Davies, if you'll do the honors."
What? I had to be hallucinating from lack of food. I was too new to open. Lance's eyes got even meaner, and Marshall watched me expectantly. Yep. I'd heard him right.
Dog skin is a lot thinner than human skin, and usually there's nowhere near as much subcutaneous fat. I guess in that regard they're kind of like vampires. But I'd never opened up a vampire in such good lighting and sterile conditions.
My first cut was tentative, but then I got a feel for the thickness of the skin, the elasticity. My hand was as steady as Melba's, and my second cut was perfect.
"Very good. Suction."
Feeling pleased with myself, I angled the suction in to capture the bleeding as it started, and then the world went red.
Blood was everywhere.
"Suction. We'll need to find the hemorrhage."
Blood welled up from the abdominal cavity and spilled onto the table. It coated the clamps, and our gloves, and the nozzle of the suction tip. I couldn't imagine how there could possibly be so much blood in a dog that only weighed half as much as me.
"Mop that up, Lance, and start a line for the transfusion. Feeling faint, Michael?"
"I'm fine." I was so not fine. Faint? Hell, no. I was starving.
The smell of copper engulfed me. And I could tell it wasn't human blood, in the way I can tell pure vanilla extract from the fake stuff, but I knew it would still go down hot and thick and good. The air in the room was so laden with blood scent I felt like I was swimming in it, like it was coating my nostrils and the fronts of my teeth simply from breathing it in.
Saliva filled my mouth. I swallowed, and swallowed again.
"If you need some air..."
"I'm fine." I angled the suction and schlorped up some more blood---older blood, thick with clots.
"There's a likely culprit near the liver. Focus there, and we'll see if we can't locate it."
The liver. The minute Marshall said the word I spotted it, ruddy and gleaming, and I yearned to crush my face to it, to taste it and consume it, as painfully as I'd yearned for Wild Bill's touch back in the van.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
"And there, you see it? There's the bleeder." He held his hand palm-up toward me. "Cauterizer."
Blood smeared the tray where I picked up the instrument. It smeared Marshall's hand where he took it. The dog's vein crackled and a thin wisp of steam rose, blood turned airborne from the heat of the tip.
"Suction."
I suctioned the area, and slowly blood stopped seeping in to replace what I'd removed.
"Good. Pale, you see? But otherwise healthy."
Did the slurping noise of the suction have to be so incredibly loud? I swallowed back another flood of drool, scared that while I was focusing on vacuuming out the dog some saliva might slip and spread over my blue paper mask like a wet spot on the front of my jeans.
Concentrate. Focus. I followed the network of blood vessels where Marshall poked and prodded to make sure there were no more weak spots---but there weren't. I could feel the blood coursing through Molly's belly like a subway train right on schedule. After the transfusion, assuming no infection set in, she'd be fine.
I followed an artery down to the bladder, and I did a double-take. If her circulatory system was a subway, the cluster of blood vessels wedged behind her uterus was a train car that'd rolled off into an old, forgotten side tunnel.
"AVM," I said, and I pointed.
Marshall tilted his head and lined up the sight of his Dr. Frankenstein glasses with the arteriovenous malformation---a mass of weak-walled, ineffective blood vessels, another time bomb in the dog's belly. "Impressive, Mr. Davies. Very observant."
He cut the mass out with the cauterizer, and the odor of cooked dog guts filled the room. It smelled vaguely like barbecue, but that smell didn't send my salivary glands into overdrive, not like blood scent had.
It was a relief to have the blood tide ebb, to know we'd close up, and scrub up, and no one would be any the wiser that I'd been two seconds away from upending that dog and chugging it like a beer bong.
But then I caught another glimpse of the shiny liver and thought maybe I still was. "I think ... I need a minute."
"Go," said Marshall, and he sounded like he was all smiles behind his paper mask. "You've earned it. We'll close."
I tugged my mask down so I could breathe, shouldered my way out of the swinging O.R. doors and made for the small half-bath the secretaries use. It was a few steps farther away, but it was private, unlike the toilet in the men's locker room that was only protected by a flimsy little stall. I reached for the door and realized I was still wearing my bloody surgical gloves, and worse, a normal person would've slipped them off by then. "Hey, are you okay?" someone said, a woman, a secretary or maybe a tech. I ignored whoever it was and slipped off my left glove to avoid leaving a bloody smear on the doorknob, and I locked myself in the tiny bathroom.
The motion-activated light flickered on, and I blanched at the sight of my reflection. The front of my navy scrubs was black with blood. My hair had slid out of its ponytail, my cheekbones were blood-spattered, and even though I'd scrubbed off my eyeliner, my lashes were still starkly black against my pale eyes. My skin looked as white as Bill's.
I turned my back to the mirror and closed my eyes tight, and I sucked a bloody finger into my mouth. Not human. But I was starving and it didn't matter.
My knees started to buckle and I slid down until I squatted on the floor with my back against the sink. I sucked each finger clean, then licked the palm of my glove too. Not enough---but I reeked of blood. There had to be enough.
Enough was relative, though, wasn't it? Enough to satisfy my sudden, startling hunger? No, not nearly. Enough to get me out the door without bleeding someone? That seemed to be the best I could hope for. I wadded up the front of my scrubs and pulled them into my mouth so I could suck the fabric. Detergent. Blood. And a trace of rain on soil---vampire. Those scrubs had never been anywhere but my locker in the clinic---Bill had never touched them. So that vampire taste could only be mine.
I nursed on the front of my shirt until it became clear I wasn't getting anything out of it, then I stood and forced myself to look in the mirror again. The dried blood ringing my mouth made me look twice as ghoulish. I washed my face with lavender-scented hand soap that made my eyes burn, and I hoped everyone figured I'd just upchucked.
The only way out of there I could think of was to say I was sick and I needed to go. I'd worked less than half my shift, but so what? They had Lance, and his muscleman arms. They'd survive without me.
I slipped out of the bathroom and looked around. Voices rose and fell in the reception area, and the disinfectant odor of a freshly cleaned exam room warred with the scent of a fresh pot of coffee. Whatever staff was on duty was occupied somewhere else. All clear.
I found my way to the office manager's cubicle. She and one of the nurses were looking at pictures of somebody's kids on Flickr. I lingered by the doorway and cleared my throat.
One jumped and the other flinched, but they both relaxed when they saw it was only a lowly tech and not a big-shot surgeon who'd caught them being human. The office manager's eyes went to the huge splotch of blood I hadn't quite managed to suck out of the front of my scrubs. "I don't feel well," I said. "I'm going home."
"All right. Let me know if you want to make up the hours later in the week."
I nodded and headed back for the locker room. The nurse whispered, "He looks so pale," which I guess a regular person wouldn't have heard. They'd think I'd seen a surgery that was more than I could handle, and they'd chalk up my "illness" to the blood. Good---that was exactly what I wanted them to think.
At some point, I imagined I'd stop caring what humans thought. Their lives weren't my life, and at some point it was bound to happen. Would it be a slow and gradual thing, or would it be more like an on/off switch?
My scrubs were trash, but I'd need to at least pretend to take them home and soak the blood out, because that's what a regular person making $7.50 an hour would have done. I wished I could shower again so I didn't carry the reek of dog blood back to the room with me, but I felt skittish at the thought of interacting with anybody, especially naked. I just wanted to get out of there.
I heard Lance's voice booming from the breakroom. "...Blood everywhere, down the side of the table..." Good. He was busy. I could change my clothes and get out of there.
I had a plan: fresh clothes, toss the scrubs in the dumpster at the fast food joint, get some food before I turned into a flesh-eating zombie, then crawl into bed with Wild Bill and try to recapture the part of my life that was good, when we were doing things that were normal for us, like whiskey shots and tattoos and rocking the back of the van. I was so far gone spinning out the plan in my head that I didn't notice the smell. Not until it was too late.
The combination lock clicked, I opened my locker, and something heavy and wet rolled out and landed on my foot. A six-centimeter carcinoma. Blood-tinged bile surged up from my stomach and I swallowed against it.
If I were still in high school---which was exactly what it felt like---I would've been angry, pissed enough to "vamp out" and hand someone's ass to them. But my physiology seemed to know the difference between mortal danger and asshole prank. For now I just felt hungry, drained and disgusted.
"Hannibal Lechter" was scrawled in blood on the inside of my locker door. Lance---he'd seen me looking at that dog's liver and he'd known what I wanted to do, even with most of my face hidden by the paper mask. And by the end of his shift, everyone else there would know too.
I listened for him as I changed my clothes. He hadn't taken any care to protect my belongings from the carcinoma, so there was blood on the leg of my jeans, old blood, foul blood, but outside the clinic I'd attract less attention in the stained jeans than I would in bloody scrubs.
The story hour in the break room was going strong when I slipped past, and into the supply cabinet, the key to which I'd copied a month ago. Phlebotomy works---tiny, compared to human rigs, but I took a couple of the biggest ones just in case. Broad-spectrum antibiotics. Antiseptic wipes. Ketamine.
So far I'd only stolen a dose or two at time. Now I swept everything into my bag. Then I reconsidered and left behind a couple of doses, which should tide them over until they could order some more. I dumped some extra syringes and a few bottles of Valium into my bag and slug it over my shoulder.
The receptionist who'd been worrying about me while I was freaking out in her bathroom came out of the office supply storage room and nearly collided with me. "Fuck, don't even look at me," I thought, and she stopped and looked down at the legal pads and correction fluid in her hands.
I knew better than to stand there and revel in my success at vamping her head. Vamping people is like riding a bike. You think too hard about the mechanics of it and you were likely to wipe out.
One more pass by the break room. I saw Lance with his head thrown back, laughing. Everyone else was laughing too, but especially him, and I broke stride to notice the thick, muscular column of his bodybuilder's neck, how the veins bulged, plump and defined, down either side. And I imagined my teeth clacking together as they broke his flesh, and the steamy red goodness spurted and filled my mouth, my throat, my belly.
I found my rhythm again and kept on walking before they saw me. I didn't bite people. Only Wild Bill, and not on a major vein. Damn it, if I was jonesing to clamp down hard and drink deep, I couldn't imagine how Bill must have felt, day in and day out. I could always grab a Big Mac. He was stuck with nothing but blood for sustenance.
How did he manage?
I got in the van and dumped my bag on the floor, and double-checked the glove box. My gun was there. But what if it had been in my locker---what if that muscle bound dickwad had cracked the combo to haze me with a nasty tumor and had found something that could really sink me with a single call to the police?
It took three tries for me to jam the key into the ignition, and when I turned over the engine I held it so long it made a scary grinding sound. I thought maybe I'd killed it, and I finally panicked for real, but then I realized I heard the chug of the engine, syncopated as usual, and everything was okay. As okay as it ever was. I put both hands on the wheel, ignored how hard they were shaking, and pulled out of the parking lot.
The moment the sun slipped below the horizon, Wild Bill threw off the covers and sat up. He touched his mouth. "Did you kiss me while I was out for the count?"
"Maybe." I'd pried our heavy drapes back a fraction of an inch, and I was staring out the window at the fire escape across the alley. Which was to say, I was looking at nothing.
He grabbed a pack of Marlboro reds from the bedside table and lit up. He smoked. I could tell in my peripheral vision that he was staring at me, and while I wished he wouldn't, it wasn't the same extreme and visceral revulsion I had with other people; only a slight discomfort. Something was up with me, only he couldn't pinpoint exactly what.
Join the club.
Bill ground out the butt of the first cigarette, swung his legs over the side of the bed, pulled on a pair of jeans, and lit up a second smoke. Tobacco haze hung at eye-level. He did a sweep of the single room, then peeked into the bath. "You cleaned."
I nodded.
"You scrubbed down the bathroom, you did laundry, and there's so much K on the dresser you can't even fit it all in your jacket. Something tanked on you while I was sleeping."
I watched a pigeon land on the fire escape and tuck itself into a rounded ball as it settled in for a rest.
"You don't wanna tell me?" Bill said. "All right. I can see you're in one piece. That's all that matters to me." He circled, and looked for more clues. "Did the critter die, the one you were working on?"
"It's fine."
"Good." Bill sorted through the syringes and pills on the dresser. The tattooed wings on his shoulder blades shifted. "Do we need to skedaddle, take a little road trip ... find us some new digs?"
The clinic had a fake address for me. My last paycheck, all two hundred dollars of it, would end up in the dead letter box at the post office. "No."
Another sweep of the room, and then Wild Bill was at my side. He rolled back my sleeve and traced his fingertip over my new tattoo, which was still slightly raised. "I suppose you'll think I'm trying to give you a sympathy fuck if I say I got a wicked hard-on with your name all over it."
"Aren't you?"
"C'mere." He wedged his short stub of a cigarette between his lips, eyes squinted against the smoke, and pulled me out of the sagging chair two-handed. The bed creaked under our combined weight as we fell on it sideways. Bill reached back with the cigarette and found the ash tray without even looking, and when his hand was free again, he ran his Marlboro-scented fingers through my hair. "Just so we're clear, here, you and I both know I'm getting stoned off the vibe you're throwing right now."
He'd told me as much the very first time we'd ever slept together---he might like pretty boys, but more than that, it was whatever was messed up inside me that dragged him into my orbit---and kept him circling. He'd tried to pull away. But there he was, right across the bed from me, all this time later.
"It'd behoove me to let you stew in your own juices, seeing as how I get off on your juiciness, but as much as I'm happy to mainline your abject misery, I can't live with myself if I fail to mention you really don't got it so bad. You got food, clothing and shelter. You didn't need that job anyway. You were too good for 'em, and you all knew it. And for whatever it's worth..." he caressed my cheekbone with his thumb ... "you got me."
Wild Bill might talk a tempting pep talk, but he didn't fool me. In this half-life we lived, he was miserable too. The two of us were made for each other.
He trailed his fingers down my jaw, my neck---and my whole body convulsed when his fingertips grazed the old slashes on my neck where he'd drank, and drank, and drank again, and all the while I'd soared in the numbing embrace of ecstasy. "Drink me," I said. Because what was one more time?
"Am I missing something?" Bill looked down at himself, then at my fly, then him again, as if to point out that we weren't currently getting busy. "You're trying to bake the cake without the batter."
"It doesn't matter. I'll probably come anyway. I always do."
"You could make me feel guilty for plenty of things." Bill leaned in and brushed his lips over my eyebrow. "But not that. Never that." He wove his fingers through mine and pushed me onto my back with my hands on either side of my head. "Making you come ... that's one of the few worthy goals I've ever made any headway on."
Now he was just being silly. "Your artwork."
"What artwork?"
"Don't play dumb. You don't call something 'blue.' You say it's 'cobalt' or 'manganese' or 'ultramarine.' You draw a doodle on a sticky note and it looks like a Van Gogh. And then that semester of anatomy you took---"
"Semester and a half."
Most likely he was trying to bait me into some story about how he'd dropped out of school. Why would he think I'd give a damn? I couldn't even bring myself to enroll, not when a diploma wasn't worth the ink it was printed with, and I could learn ten times faster on the Internet. "Before Ambrose Gray. You were an artist."
"Bullshit." He disentangled his fingers from mine, rolled away and lit a cigarette. The last quarter of the one he'd been smoking was still smoldering in the ash tray. He smoked until the air was thick, and then said, "I was a wannabe poser. That's all."
Maybe, if I hadn't been as crushed myself from the weight of the world, I would have wrapped my arms around him and told him he wasn't fooling anyone---that whenever he picked up a pen, anyone within range stopped to look at whatever he drew. But I couldn't find any words that didn't make it sound like I was being a sarcastic prick, so I rolled onto my side instead and just watched him smoke, and thought to myself how amazing he was, and how smart and droll, and how sad none of that mattered when it all came down to it. We were all mired in this nasty business of life.
"Anyone can draw a fucking line," he said, eventually.
"Don't say that. You're really good."
"People like me, idiots who can draw a pretty line, are a dime a dozen. How many dumb asses who never amounted to anything do you think there are for every successful artist? Five? Ten? A hundred? I'd say it's more like a thousand, a hoard of useless spouters of bullshit who can talk the talk, but haven't got the balls to walk the walk. There's so many sorta-Warhols and almost-Picassos out there, you can't walk through a coffee shop without needing to scrape 'em off the bottom of your shoe. They swarm there like fruit flies on a three-day-old can of Schlitz, talking about how they had this and that great idea, but someone else got to it before they did, and what use is it all anyway, since no one understands their tortured genius."
Normally, Wild Bill was slicker than a shaved dog---and everything rolled off his back. So I could tell the subject went beyond drawing a few cool tattoos. "So, the way you see it, you're not any good."
He looked at me sideways through the cigarette smoke and raised one eyebrow high.
I said, "I can't tell the difference between a Jackson Pollack and a dropcloth, so you'll have to explain it to me. Are you any good, or not?"
The cigarette crunched against the others in the ash tray as Bill stabbed it into the ceramic. "Are you listening, kid? I'm trying to tell you, it don't matter how 'good' you are. It matters what you do with it."
I thought about it. "So if Leonardo da Vinci got his hand crushed and he had to learn to paint with the opposite hand, then he'd be a big loser, 'cos he had talent but something happened to him that threw him off course for a while."
"Leonardo was ambidextrous."
I sighed. "Okay. Michelangelo."
"He was really more of a sculptor than a painter, other than the Sistine Chapel."
"You know what I'm saying." I dug a pint of Jack out of the nightstand drawer and took a warm swig, then handed it to Bill. He did the same. "You had a few bad years. But now you can work again."
He took another sip and stared off somewhere far, far away.
"Unless you're worried you'll have an unfair advantage," I said.
That got a small laugh out of him. "Yeah, how so?"
"Time. You could spend a year trying to draw the perfect circle, and it wouldn't matter. You could afford to, 'cos your eyes aren't gonna give out, and your hand's not gonna go shaky. Look at Melba. I saw that work on her left arm---it wasn't just hokey and old-fashioned, it was a little bit clumsy, too. Not now, though. She's as sure as anything now."
Wild Bill took yet another cigarette---a thinking-cigarette, I suppose---lit it, took a drag, and squinted through the smoke.
"What's the last thing you drew?" I asked.
"I coulda sworn you were there---the band on your arm."
"You know what I mean. The last big thing."
He took a drag, and smoke curled out of his nostrils when he spoke. "I don't remember. It's all a drunken blur."
I might've been somewhat vampish, but I couldn't feed off Wild Bill's suffering like he did mine, and so I hated to see him wallow. It seemed to me he'd paid and paid and paid for things he'd never been at fault for to begin with, and enough was enough. "Forget about before, then. What about now? Ivan would give you a show. He's crazy about you."
Bill rolled onto his back and tucked his free hand behind his head. "I don't want a show I got by waving my wiener around for somebody."
"Not 'cos of that. I mean, yeah, he got off on it. But even if we hadn't modeled for him, I still thought the two of you had some things in common. I could see you as friends."
"Except he thought I was some young pup impersonating a middle-aged guy who's stuck in a kid's body." Wild Bill reached for the ash tray and his jeans rode down and flashed the curve of his pelvis. I trailed my finger over the ridge, then slid it down into the waistband of his jeans. He watched my hand.
"When it comes right down to it," I wondered, "how much does age really matter? Doctor Harman and Melba are both old. They've both seen plenty of the same things, and they've both stitched people up. They've both figured out how to blend, and how to hide, and how to survive. But can you see them hanging out together? 'Cos I can't."
I worked three fingers down the front of Bill's jeans. My fingertips skirted his pubic hair, and he let his breath out slowly. "I can't picture anyone enduring Doctor Pricktastic's company willingly ... but I do see what you're getting at." His eyelids dropped partly closed, and he watched my hand even more intently. "And I wouldn't say no to that other thing you're getting at, either."
I laid open his fly and his hard cock twitched free. He hadn't been kidding. My bleak mood really had revved him up, and the sight of his big, meaty cock was enough to distract me, to start luring me out of my dark place. Maybe we were lucky the cycle of my depression and his arousal wasn't self-perpetuating. We'd probably end up blowing our brains out or fucking each other to death.
A big vein curved along the underside of Bill's cock. I traced it with my tongue, and he let out a shaky breath. "You got one sinful mouth on you, baby doll."
I breathed a laugh against his cock, and wet the whole length with the flat of my tongue so it would glide right in when I took it deep.
"What changed your mind?" he said. "I suppose it don't matter. Whatever it is, I'll take it. Shit, you're such a pretty thing---a sweet little whore."
What? Whoa. That remark sent a zing down to the bottom of my balls. I had to reach down and adjust myself.
"Like that? Feeling dirty tonight? Like a hot little slut?"
I answered by swirling my tongue over Bill's cockhead and giving it a slow, wet suck. He gave me an unsteady groan in return. He ground out his cigarette and tangled both hands in my hair while he flexed his hips up. "C'mon, Michael. Suck my cock with that hot whore's mouth of yours."
My real name---not some silly Bill-nickname---and the word whore? It practically had me humping myself on his leg. A small sound escaped me as I angled my head over his hips so I could take him in, all the way down. I jammed my mouth over the length of him until my lips were buried in his pubes, and I squelched down that choke reflex while I did my best to suck for all I was worth. Bill groaned again, and I felt his thighs tremble.
I worked my way back up, sucking, wetting his shaft, stroking his balls, and I reveled in the way his hands quaked with the strength he held back---not just the ability to tear out my hair, but the power to rip off my head. And when I'd glided up and down a few times and finally inched back up to the juicy, wet tip of it, I wrapped my fingers around that gorgeous length and started to pump it, sure and hard. Pre-come welled. I forced the tip of my tongue into the tender slit, and painted the roof of my mouth with each earthy-sweet drop.
"I'm close," Bill gasped. I jacked him harder, and fluttered my tongue against his glans. "Gonna let me come in your hot fucking mouth? Huh? Gonna swallow that load?"
I drank another drop of pre-ejaculate, as if I wasn't so sure and I needed time to think---like I wasn't salivating at the mere thought of it. I savored it, swallowed, and then looked up along the length of his chiseled, inked body, narrowed my eyes, and said, "Make me."
There was a pause.
At first I thought I'd said something wrong---a mood-killer, where I'd been thinking our fantasies meshed pretty well, but in reality, when it was all said and done, I was just too sick to swap kinks with anyone.
Then I got a look at Wild Bill's eyes. They weren't blue anymore. They were black---vampire eyes---no iris whatsoever, all pupil, like he was seeing in the dark. My T-shirt tore at the shoulder seam as he hauled me onto our bed and flattened me against the wall, and then he took me by the hair again, two-fisted, and drove his cock into my mouth.
My throat spasmed around him as I tried to conquer my gag reflex, and Bill jammed himself in again---deep, impossibly deep---his huge cock, all the way in, and his hands squeezing my head like he could crush it if the notion took him. I'm afraid, I realized. And not just afraid I didn't know what I was doing, or I'd say the wrong thing. For the first time in ages I remembered, felt it deep in my gut, that Wild Bill actually had the power in his hands to kill me.
My body took the fear, the panic, the adrenaline, and channeled it all straight to my cock. It was either keep scrabbling at Bill's wrists---crap, when had I started doing that? Or lie in the bed I'd made, and stroke myself off while he emptied his balls down my battered throat.
My esophagus tried to heave Bill's cock back up while I forced myself to swallow around it, and Bill uttered a satisfied noise while he angled my head to bury himself deeper still. "That's right, baby, go ahead---unzip your jeans, touch yourself."
Oh, shit. Baby. Mingled with slut and whore. Wild Bill's breathing changed, grew desperate. My breathing was nonexistent. My entire world had narrowed down to the enormous cock jammed down my throat. And when I started seeing stars, from the pain of his strong hands crushing my head, and the lack of oxygen to my brain, Bill let go of my hair and pulled his thick, hard length out from where he'd been stuffing it, and I felt the tepid patter of semen jetting onto my mouth and cheek. The scent of earth blossomed all around me. All the while, Bill exhaled---a long, gentle sigh.
The spongy, flushed tip of his cock prodded my mouth as he painted my lips with his come, and I managed to get a few licks in as it passed. Bittersweet salt. Vampire sex.
I looked up into Bill's eyes. They were mostly closed, but from what little I could see, they were blue again. "Finish it up, sweet thing. Show me that load." He beckoned for me to climb up next to him and wrapped both his fingers and mine around my cock.
"How d'you wanna get off? Want me in your ass? I'll bet I can get it up again."
"It kind of, uh ... stings down there ... from this morning."
Bill's grip tightened on my cock, and he bent his head so he could speak against my sticky mouth. "And that turns you on."
It did ... but I hadn't said anything.
"Know how I know?"
I shook my head.
"Your blood. It speaks to me, tells me all your secrets."
And if I'd felt awkward before, when I'd been commanded to "show him" my "load," I felt exponentially more so now that Wild Bill had reminded me that my every thought, every fleeting emotion, was splayed open wide for him to see, all thanks to my own body.
Bill handled my cock more roughly than I would have myself, which seemed to be doing it for me just like the good, hard fuck he'd given me in the van. Like the sound of him calling me a whore, a slut, in his whiskey and Marlboro voice.
He changed the angle of his wrist so he could thumb my slit, and he said, "Take right now, for instance. You know what your pulse is saying?"
"What?"
Wild Bill wet his lips and pumped my cock even harder. "It's saying ... drink me."
The word please had been banned months ago, too, so instead I whispered, "Yes."
He flipped me onto my back and straddled me so fast it felt like I'd been hit by a passing taxicab. We both had jeans on, wadded awkwardly down around our hips, with zipper teeth threatening to catch a wayward pube or snag a scrotum. My shirt was still there, but I could feel spots of coolness where the seams hadn't stood up to Bill's manhandling.
"Fucked up, ain't it, that you can't pick and choose what you're gonna tell me. That I know as soon as you do when something's getting your rocks off." His hand blurred, and then there was a switchblade resting loosely in his palm. The blade slide out with a metallic snick. "I tried to warn you the first time we tangled. It's not fair. It never can be fair."
"Maybe I don't give a damn about what's fair."
Bill shoved my shirt up to my armpits and rested the tip of the blade on my sternum. "Yeah, I figured as much."
The blade was sharp, and it stung less than you'd think. It actually hurt more when Bill cut me near a bone. Like tonight. My hips bucked up, and I writhed beneath him. He caught both my wrists in his free hand and pushed my hands into the mattress above my head, held them there, and the feel of his steely fingers sinking into my forearms really got my blood pumping.
A few beads of blood rose from the cut. Wild Bill thumbed them off me and then licked his thumb clean. Tease. He caught my eye and smiled, then he caught my shirt on the switchblade and pulled. The shirt resisted a lot longer than my flesh had---it stretched before it gave, momentarily cutting me off from the intensity of Bill's eyes. But even the shirt had its limits. Wild Bill gave the knife a couple of jerks and the fabric split up the center, and there went our only Sid Vicious T-shirt. All that was left was the trim around the neck. I did my best not to move, but my back arched up off the bed as the blade slid under the rib knit and the tip of the knife pricked my Adam's apple. Bill let his breath out carefully, then with a quick twist, sliced open the trim. He bent his head to me and touched his tongue to my throat.
Blood.
It was a tiny drop, no more than that, but a heady sensation sang through my body when he took it into himself and my blood became his. I was writhing, gasping, moaning his name, and I couldn't stop myself. I was a slut, his slut, and I needed him so badly my cock ached for him to touch it, or even for him to drink me---that alone would be enough to make me come. Especially with him holding down my hands, and his semen drying on my cheek.
"Where should I cut you?" The cold point of the knife traced my collarbone, and my arms struggled of their own volition to break free of Bill's grasp, though they weren't nearly strong enough. He grazed my nipple with the blade, and my hips bucked. Even they could hardly move, with him straddling me like he was. I was at his mercy. Completely.
He stopped trailing the knife over my chest and put his mouth to my ear. "When you make them hot little noises in your throat, I wanna eat you right up. You sound like prey."
I held my breath in an effort to stop making noises altogether. I was able to do it for all of a minute, and then the knife tip skirted my trachea, and I whooped in a great gulp of air.
He lowered his stomach so our cocks were trapped between our bellies, and he rocked against me so I could tell he was doing it on purpose. "I got you. You ain't going nowhere."
Bill wended the knife softly over my cheek, a touch so gentle it didn't break skin, and my breath went shaky. He followed the knife trail with a tender brush of his lips. "You'd even let me cut your pretty face, if I took it in my mind to do it."
Evidently my cock thought that was a fabulous idea. It throbbed so hard I was positive Bill could feel my pulse pounding against his stomach.
"Don't worry, baby doll. I'm not dumb enough to break my own toys." The knife tip glanced off my jaw, a tiny sting. "Much." Wild Bill pressed his tongue against the scratch, and my hips humped up against his body as anxiety and passion and fear coiled deep in my balls, and pushed me into that soaring spot where there was nothing left to do but hang on for the ride.
I felt the cut, like fire and ice, right over the top of the scars of all the dozens of other cuts had come before it. One place got me off each and every time---my neck. We'd discovered that hot spot early on, and it never failed to deliver.
Wild Bill fixed his mouth to the wound and drank like he could draw my very essence---my fear, my darkness, my love, straight out of me into himself. Like he could take part of me and own it, forever.
My body bucked as wave after wave of pleasure coursed through me, and I was thinking it, please, as he drank. Please do it deep. Please don't stop. Please. He felt me pleading, I think, or maybe even tasted it in my blood---because he didn't stop once he'd made me come. He kept going, and it started to feel less like sex and more like a drug, the sweet, soaring rush of a big hit of K, and Bill and I seemed to dissolve wherever our bodies touched, to bleed together and mingle. To become one.
By the time Wild Bill had drunk his fill, I'd peaked into numbness, and I lay there, splayed on the bed, capable of doing nothing more involved than drawing one breath after another. He rolled off and the whole front of me was wet. "Did you come again?" I said, when I could manage to put together a few words.
"You kidding? Fucking you is like going over Niagara Falls---without the barrel." Bill dragged his finger through the stickiness on my belly. He held it up, rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, considered it a moment, then wiped it on the sheets.
"I just washed those."
"How'd you manage that, with me on 'em?"
"Not the bedspread, you were rolled up in that."
"Okay. Forget it, I don't want the details. Light a cigarette over here for your love machine."
I reached across his chest and groped for the pack. He made no move to help me. The remote fell off the nightstand and I stuck my fingers in the ashtray before I acknowledged that I'd need to actually sit up and look at what I was doing. I swung a leg over Bill so now it was me straddling him, and I lit a smoke for him.
When I was about to pass it over, I realized how hard he was looking at me with an expression so vulnerable it bordered on pain. I took a deep drag, then eased down and pressed my mouth to his so I could breathe the smoke into his lungs. He held it a moment, then let it curl from his nostrils, saying, "Just when I think we're out of new tricks..."
One drag was plenty for me, thanks very much, so I let him take the cigarette---but we stayed there for a long time, eye to eye, just staring. Finally, Bill was the one to turn away to cop another drag, and once he blew the smoke over my shoulder he said, "You trust me to play with knives two inches away from your eyeball, so it stands to reason you could fill me in on what happened at work---if you wanna talk about it."
What? Oh, that. Wild Bill's patented all-purpose solution had transported me so thoroughly that the Lance incident seemed like it had happened a week ago, and maybe even to someone else. Since Wild Bill had a hard time sitting still long enough to watch movies, I asked him, "Do you know who Hannibal Lechter is?"
He smoked, and considered. "Should I?"
"Never mind." I rolled off and tucked an arm beneath my head. "It was just a prank some idiot tech pulled. He decided he needed to push me around so he could feel like a man."
Wild Bill laughed several puffs of smoke into the air, and they drifted up and dissipated around the bare light bulb in the center of the ceiling. "You had a bully at work?"
"No, not a bully. Bullies steal your lunch money." And smash you into your locker and call you a faggot while they ride your thigh. "A jerk."
"How many of his limbs did you take off in retaliation?"
"None. I mean, I wouldn't give him the satisfaction."
"C'mon. You didn't strike back? Not even a love tap?"
"Well, no. I guess I didn't want to call attention to myself. I just wanted to get out of there." A few years ago, when Scary Mary was alive? Before I knew vampires existed---before I'd killed one? Back then, yeah. I guess I would've freaked out to have a co-worker fixated on me like that. But now, seeing what I'd seen, it felt like I was traveling in this whole other world that just happened to brush up against Lance's in a couple of spots---and him trying to make me the butt of his jokes was about as devastating as being mocked by an ant.
My sleep cycle was all screwed up. I'd lazed in bed all night watching re-runs of seventies sitcoms and indulged in a lot more whiskey than I normally do. We'd fallen asleep with the set on, and I woke to the flickery glow of the tube through the cheap polyester bedspread illuminating the thin sliver of iris in Wild Bill's eye. "Wow. You're up first."
"And you smell hung over." He didn't say it like it was a bad thing. He probably wished it was him.
I wasn't sure how he could smell anything over the patchouli scent of vampire. I breathed deeply, and sighed.
"You gonna upchuck?"
"No, I don't think so."
Bill flung off the blanket. "Okay. Then hows-about we go for a little ride?"
I pulled on a T-shirt, and felt my neck to see if I could get away without wearing a scarf since I was healing fast nowadays. Then the room dipped and whatever blood was left in my veins raced at the memory of how deeply Bill had tapped me the night before. The cut was a raised scab now, a dryish line. I reached for my scarf and double-wrapped my neck. It might have been a good idea to mention to Bill that my circulatory system was feeling low, but it wasn't as if he had the switchblade up to my throat at that very moment. And maybe I wanted to reserve my options for later on in the evening.
Even though I'd cleaned the day before---not because I'd had Martha Stewart-esque urges, but because the scent of sick dog blood seemed to pervade the place---it had started to clutter up again. I nudged the empty Jack Daniels bottle in the middle of the floor toward the overflowing trash can with my foot. "When you say 'go for a ride,' is that a euphemism?"
"For what? Having you put to sleep?"
I ignored that. "Like hitting the road. Maybe for good."
"If you get itchy feet, just say the word. You wanna spread our wings? Head south before it snows?"
I was torn. I missed the travel, the scent of the night air in the middle of nowhere, the adventure of figuring out who we were going to tap next. But I was spoiled now from having a shower ten feet away from the bed. And a bed, for that matter. "I would miss Suzanne."
"What's she got keeping her here? Take her with us."
I was crazy about Suzanne, but I wasn't sure I wanted to share the van with someone else, no matter how much I loved her. Plus, my gut told me if the three of us were that close for any length of time, the urges for sex and blood being what they were, things would undoubtedly get weird. "I'll think about it." I'd already made up my mind, but the little white lie didn't sound quite as harsh. Now that I'd actually thought about sharing my life with Wild Bill, I realized how precious our time together actually was to me.
"Think about it," he said. "Tonight, I got somewhere local to go."
He didn't explain, and I didn't ask. I worked a few knots out of my hair with my fingers, then put on fresh eyeliner. Bill spiked his hair but didn't bother to touch up his nails. "You ready to go?"
I looked him up and down---and I wanted to stay in and peel off everything he'd just put on. But he seemed keen on going out, so I figured there was time later for tickling his spiky hair against my inner thighs.
It was a mild night. Wild Bill opened his window and lit up. I pressed my feet into the glove box and rocked back in my bucket seat. "Once upon a time," Bill said, and a thin stream of smoke drifted out to punctuate the words, "there was this wise guy, a jerk with a head full of grandiose ideas who thought he was a painter."
I froze, even held my breath. When Wild Bill talks, it's usually as much of a smokescreen as his smoking is. So when he actually tells me something, something of substance, I listen.
"He even studied up on it---not that his professors ever thought he'd amount to much. Until one day he was at the bursar's office with a fat check in his hand, maybe a day after one of the most pretentious fucks on campus said his work was skilled, but lacked a certain spark, and he got to thinking about how his cupboard was bare."
Bill crushed out a cigarette and lit another, and I waited for several minutes to make sure that was the end of the story. We pulled up at a red light. The car next to us housed a thudding subwoofer so loud it made our van shake, and what few pedestrians were waiting for the buses were mostly Hispanic and black. We passed a small animal clinic, steel gates drawn for the night, and I said, "Where were you working then?"
"What makes you think I've made an honest living even one day of my life?"
I glanced at Wild Bill out of the corner of my eye. He was smiling. "So you did have a job. Not cool enough for you to admit what it was? I'll bet you were a data entry clerk or something."
"This was the eighties, kid. We trafficked in the archaic substance known as paper. Office drones were file clerks. Typists."
"You were a typist?"
"Nah. I never could've handled the dress code. I didn't own a tie, or a shirt with a collar, for that matter. No office casual for me. I worked at the brickyard."
Brickyard. I tried to picture it. "You made ... bricks?"
"Fuck, no. I wasn't skilled enough to make the bricks. I drove the forklift. I think it would've been right around..." he squinted through the smoke haze and checked out the trees. "Here? Maybe. Doesn't much look the same. Them townhouses over there are all new."
I leaned across the console. "Here? You mean you lived in Milwaukee before?"
"A couple of years."
Until Gray turned him---into both a vampire, and a nomad. Wow. I grabbed Wild Bill's hand and squeezed it, and I really hoped I wasn't making too big a deal out of it, him giving me this tiny peek at the man, the myth ... the legend.
He gave my hand a squeeze, then eased up on the brakes so we could get a better look. The town homes were cute from a distance, but when the van rolled close enough that we could make out the detail, I saw they were a bunch of cheap rental units with some peeling trim and window boxes stuck on in a halfhearted attempt to gentrify an iffy neighborhood.
"There was a gin mill I used to drink at." We drove a couple of blocks, and a prostitute sashayed up to the van. Her clingy dress was way too skimpy for the weather. Bill rolled down his window. "Sorry---ain't got no money, honey."
"You got a cigarette?"
Wild Bill groped in the trash pile around the console until he found the carton I'd bought him. He fished out a new pack, handed it to the girl, gave her a finger-wave and drove on.
"That building there was a sweatshop. Korean girls, Mexicans. Piecework, I think. Sometimes I'd cross paths with 'em filing in when they were starting their shifts if I'd happened to get lucky after the bars closed."
It was nothing anymore, abandoned, but it had been a realty office at some point between then and now. We crept along so slowly Bill didn't give the van any gas, just let it idle along, and he showed me whatever sights were left to see---or mostly ones that weren't. The record store sold cell phones now. The diner was a beautician's, and the Laundromat was gutted. Inexplicably, an import wig shop was still right where Bill had remembered it.
We rolled under a viaduct where I caught the scent of old sweat and urine, and I spied a human shape beneath a camouflage of corrugated cardboard. If I could scent humans so easily, even with my mostly-mundane senses, I didn't see how they stood any chance at all against vampires. It was a wonder there were any humans left at all.
"You're awful quiet," Bill said.
"I'm listening."
"Huh. So where do you think the quaint, seedy charm's gonna come to an end? I keep thinking we'll turn a corner and find it Starbucked."
I rolled my window down another few inches and breathed. The air was sour, like dumpsters that hadn't been emptied in a few weeks. "Not yet."
"That's probably for the best. I'd hate to look up my old stomping grounds and find out I'd missed the cool Bohemian phase and gone straight to the condos full of dickheads with briefcases and cell phones."
"No condos. None that I've noticed." Though I wouldn't have minded a Starbucks.
"And here's where all the action ... went down." Bill's voice dropped from a cheesy, over-the-top delivery to an afterthought. I leaned across the console to see whatever it was we'd pulled up in front of.
It was a large building, brick, bigger than the wig import store but smaller than the sweatshop. Every street light on that half of the block had been shot out. A weed choked field butted up against the building on one side, and a crumbling parking lot surrounded the other two. "What is it?"
"Was. It was a storage unit, on paper, anyway. But some bands used their cubes for rehearsal space---and for an extra hundred a month, the landlord would look the other way if you happened to throw a futon on the floor and hang your hat."
Wild Bill stepped out of the van, and I followed. My gun pressed into the small of my back, and Bill's old butterfly knife hung heavy in my jacket pocket. Even without those weapons, it occurred to me, I wouldn't have been worried. I'd seen too many things to let a rough neighborhood scare me.
Bill stood with his feet apart, thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets. "I always suspected this place was a firetrap. Good thing it wasn't me who fell asleep with a cigarette in my mouth."
I could see the roofline was irregular, but my eyes weren't vampish enough to detect the telltale blackening of soot on brickwork Bill must be seeing. It didn't smell charred. The fire hadn't been recent.
"You asked me what the last thing I painted was. It was a mural. Here. In the basement, where we used to shoot dice---and whoever wanted to shot smack, or huffed gasoline if there weren't any real drugs around."
"Tell me you weren't a junkie."
"Nah. Just a drunk." He lit a cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. The orange light played over his face for just a moment, and then there was nothing but the glow of the cherry. "Maybe I huffed a few times."
"That's so dangerous."
Bill laughed---and covered his mouth with his hand as if he'd just coughed.
"What's so funny?"
He took a deep drag, and sighed. "Says the pot to the kettle."
"I wonder if it's still there. In the basement. Could be smoke or water damage, but what if some of it's left?"
Bill shifted. "Huh."
"We've been in plenty of falling-down houses. We can always tell when the floor feels too spongy to hold."
"I guess."
I was worried I'd sound too eager---that if I wanted it too much, this insight into whatever made Wild Bill tick, he'd whisk it away with a nasty little comment. As casually as possible, I said, "Camping lantern's charged. We might as well look."
Mentally, I braced myself for the dismissive remark, the classic deflection---and it didn't come. I went and got the lantern.
Navigating by it proved to be harder than you'd think. As our main light source in the back of the van, the lantern was always stationary. It wasn't nearly as handy now. Walking over a web of broken asphalt littered with cans and bottles while using the swaying beam to light my way proved to be a much bigger challenge.
Once we'd made our way successfully into the building, it wasn't difficult to figure out how to get to the basement---not if you weren't afraid to hop down some big, scary hole in the floor. Wild Bill edged in front of me and crouched so he could peer into it. I wondered if I should block the light with my body, if the presence of light reduced vampiric night vision, but of course I couldn't just ask. There was a right way and a wrong way to deal with the subject, and the frank, open approach got me nowhere fast---unless I wanted to email James Harman at UW and ask him, which I didn't. He was creepy.
"Twelve foot drop," Bill said. "Whaddaya think, Robin? Are your side-kick skills up for it?"
In other words, was I vampy enough? If I dangled, it'd be more like six. No problem. Getting back out---that would be the challenge. "You take the lantern." I handed it off, and Wild Bill hopped down like it was nothing. The hair prickled on the back of my neck, and I hurried to join him.
The basement walls were caked with layer upon layer of graffiti, some of it fairly new, some of it with green patches of mildew obscuring the lettering. It wasn't good graffiti anyway, the large-scale urban art you catch sometimes on billboards or train cars. The painting was random and amateur, a bunch of tagging and some random "fucks" thrown in. Bill squinted at it. He didn't seem terribly broken up about it, but with him, you never can tell.
"Was this the spot?"
"No. This is someone else's big ta-da."
I rolled my eyes.
"There." He shone the light toward a far corner of the room. "That doorway led to the boilers, and past that we had our speakeasy."
I sniffed, searching for the smell of urine and old sweat I'd copped under the viaduct. A few well-placed cinderblocks for a makeshift stairwell, and the old basement would have been a heck of a lot more secure for any homeless person than the niche beneath the train tracks. I didn't smell it. The earthy scent of old concrete tinged with mildew obliterated everything else.
Bill picked a path while I held onto the hem of his jacket and followed. The sound of grit and broken glass crunching under the soles of our boots was so loud I was tempted to talk just to cover it up, but I was worried I'd only babble and come off as nervous as I was, so I kept my mouth shut.
"I wish I could say it was all coming back to me like it was yesterday," he said, very low, so I could barely make out the words, "but the way things change---everything with the same bones, but different skin grown over the top---I wonder if maybe it's better to let sleeping devil-dogs lie."
Underneath my jacket sleeves, the hairs on my forearms crept. "Let's just go, then. There's nothing to see."
Bill stopped. He glanced the lantern beam off the far wall. "Just a few more feet. Shame to turn back now, since we came all this way. We'll have a quick look-see, then we'll go home."
Home. The word sent a shiver down my spine, and I chafed at the sleeves of my jacket in an attempt to rub away the gooseflesh.
Funny, how a common, simple word like home can set off a physiological reaction. I never figured I cared about stuff like that. But to hear Bill say it, and to know he meant our home, his and mine? That struck me harder than a red rubber dodge ball.
I was busy reeling with that realization when lights flared all around us, and I was blinded.
"Well, you're not the pizza guy."
"Don't mind us," Wild Bill said quickly, while I blinked away afterimages. "Didn't mean to barge in."
Another blink and my vision cleared. Shit. There were people around us, people everywhere. People who'd just been standing there---perfectly still, perfectly quiet---in the dark. People who smelled like concrete. Vampires.
One man detached himself from the group. He wore Converse All-Stars and baggy jeans, and an army fatigue jacket two sizes too big. His blondish hair hung in his eyes, and he looked like he'd just stepped out of a grunge video from a dozen years ago. He considered Wild Bill a moment, then said, "You've been here before? When?"
"It don't matter. We were just leaving."
"Before the fire ... yeah. Maybe. Maybe I saw you around. Hard to say. Everyone here looked the same, jeans and leather. And I didn't pay much attention. I only came to get high." He sized me up, and said to Bill, "That guy ... he's your main vein?"
Bill cut his eyes in my direction. "That's right."
The grunge vamp eased closer, and I realized Bill was getting some kind of sniff test. "Him and who else?"
"If there's some kind of territorial thing, just draw me a map and I'll stay on my side of the line."
There was a shift, a rustle of fabric. So many vampires.
The grunge vamp turned to look at me. His expression was mild, but his eyes sent a chill straight down my spine. "The dog blood. That smell's coming from you."
"I work at an animal clinic." And a massive tumor had fallen on my shoes---thank you, Lance.
He turned back to Bill. The tension was so thick I had trouble breathing. "You set him up to get you dog blood? Is that the deal?"
Bill didn't answer. He just watched.
The other vamp eased even closer, like the two of them might break into a tango. "I hardly smell blood on you at all. Pacifist?"
"Touch my boytoy and you'll see otherwise."
Someone laughed, a guffaw that burst out as if they couldn't stand to hold it in. There were maybe a dozen other vamps, and all of them looked like they'd been waiting in line for Pearl Jam tickets when the vampirism overtook them. A single vamp slipped out of the crowd. She was willowy, with straight black hair, thick eyeliner and an Iron Maiden T-shirt with a long-sleeved lace body stocking underneath, the kind with the spider web pattern. But she moved, and I realized it wasn't fabric at all. It was ink. "Be nice," she told the grunge vamp. "if he was sloppy, we'd smell it on him."
"Sloppy?"
The grunge vamp turned away from Bill, and the crowd shuffled to let him through. He picked up a pack of Camels from an old crate that served as a table and lit one. "An asshole vamp that goes around killing people and making things harder for the rest of us."
"I ain't no killer. Plenty of other ways to get what you need."
There were a couple of sighs, and a lot more rustling as the other vampires relaxed, stood down. "The name's Charlie," the vampire said.
The woman added, "Our fearless leader." I didn't know her well enough to gauge the level of sarcasm in the remark.
"I'm Wild Bill. The quiet one's Michael."
Charlie said, "You'd be surprised how many vampires go around tearing out people's throats like a bunch of lunatics. It's careless. There's no call for it."
"Uh-huh," Bill said cautiously. I was suddenly glad he'd dubbed me the "quiet one." I didn't know what Charlie was getting at, and navigating the conversation with him felt like walking through a field of landmines.
"Delivery guy's here," someone said.
Charlie put his hand on Bill's forearm. "Stay quiet. Let Silk handle this---and then you'll see how things are."
Wild Bill nodded once, and the room went black. My eyes focused on the tiny red glow of Charlie's cigarette. It was so still he could've parked the thing in an ash tray for all I could tell.
After a couple of minutes, we heard a grunt from the other end of the hallway, out by the hole, and footsteps. They seemed comically loud, like a new Foley artist who hadn't learned any subtlety was making them.
"Hello?" A male voice. It cracked on the second syllable.
Silk bent a glowstick, and a gentle green glow bathed her and the guy who'd just arrived. Definitely human. He smelled like drug store cologne and fear sweat. "How many?" she asked.
"F-fifteen." He held up a bunch of grocery story shopping bags, the plasticy kind that rustled really loud. He had them looped all the way up his arm.
Silk pulled the first bag toward her and looked inside. "I'm impressed."
"End of the month. I said, let's do a couple days ahead. Then we'll have it easier next time."
"What about next time? Won't you be short?"
"I peeled off some labels. I'll put 'em on fresh ones."
"You can do that?"
"They don't really watch us that hard. I mean, it's not like we're in the pharmacy or anything. Most people wouldn't steal..."
I think he sensed the minefield, same as I did. He didn't finish the thought.
Silk reached into the bag, and I had a sudden flash of my mother squeezing produce at the Saturday morning farmers' market. I told myself it was not funny, and chewed my lower lip. She pulled out a blood bag---the shape so familiar now I can even spot it by the light of a glowstick---unclamped the line, and drank.
My mouth watered. Not funny at all.
A few swallows, then she said, "You'll run low eventually."
"No, that's what's so cool. When the current stock gets below a certain level, they'll hold a blood drive, get a church group or a bunch of high school seniors in to fill it up again. They don't crosscheck. As long as we mark the units 'expired' before I bring them, no one will ever know."
Silk tucked the glowstick into the delivery guy's shirt, and everything went dark. "You did good."
Bill and me and a bunch of vampires all held our breath.
"You can leave now," Silk said.
"I was just thinking..."
Oh God. He shouldn't think.
"...there's this band playing at Beer Palace tomorrow night. My sister's boyfriend can get us in free."
"Do you want the tattoo or not?"
"Well, I..."
"We have a business deal, got it? I'm not your girlfriend."
"Okay, I ... sorry. Sorry."
He schlepped out even louder than he'd come in. I released a breath I'd been holding. If the vampires did the same, I didn't hear it.
Movement resumed in the dark---quiet vampire movement---and then someone said, "Okay, he's gone."
The clink of a chain, then a single light came on. "So that's the way it is," Charlie said. "The blood they save up for transfusions expires, and they throw it out. We figure out a way to get hold of it before that happens, plant a thrall in every hospital, every blood bank, and then no one's the wiser about us."
Bill didn't offer that he already knew the expired blood trick, so I kept my mouth shut too.
Plastic rustled, and the shopping bags made their way around the room, growing lighter as each vampire dipped in. "Eleven of us," said Silk, "and fifteen units. What do you say? You smell hungry."
Wild Bill pulled out his own cigarettes, lit one, and said, "You guys sure know how to party."
"You have no idea." A black vamp with dreadlocks handed Bill his very own blood bag, but I knew, from watching him and Jim Harman drink them, that they were foul.
Charlie rolled his eyes, unclamped his tubing and chugged.
They all chugged, in a big, unspoken drinking contest. Wild Bill gave me a look and a small shrug, and did the same. It took maybe two minutes, then with a gasp, the first vamp lowered his blood bag with a repulsed shudder ... then a second, and a third, who said, "Dude, I think I got a fresh one."
Wild Bill's brow furrowed as he struggled to finish his portion. He was only able to outdrink the three women, who took another minute or so to finish their pints. Some of the vamps were stoic about it, but others grimaced and groaned, and cringed as if they'd just swallowed their own vomit.
"You're lucky, Boytoy," Charlie said softly in my ear. I hadn't noticed his approach, and I jumped. "Once upon a time, it took people a lot longer to notice if their friends and loved ones disappeared. Now there's Facebook, and Twitter and cell phones with Bluetooth headsets. Every moment of everyone's day is accounted for, and if we slip up, drain someone a little too deeply, within two minutes everyone's up in arms. And so we subsist on ... rot."
He tilted his head, and I realized he was sniffing at my scarred throat. I angled that side of my body away from him. "Vamp people's heads, then. Get fresh blood."
"Drinking is one thing. But stopping ... that's another. You wouldn't get it."
I figured he was trying to get a rise out of me, so I just shrugged and played the role of the stupid vamp eye-candy.
The vamps broke off into groups of twos and threes. Silk tossed her empty blood bag into one of the shopping bags and said, "The main course is nauseating, but the dessert makes you forget about it soon enough. Name your poison."
Bill looked around the room. "Why---is there a bundt cake with my name on it?"
"Crack, junk, ecstasy..." Charlie glanced at the far door. "And booze, if you're not shy."
Liquor? That made no sense---not right after the vamps forced down that blood.
"He doesn't know," Silk said. She sounded amused. Smug.
Wild Bill cut his eyes to her. "What's to know?"
"The minute Charlie-boy said 'booze,' your heart skipped a beat. There is a way to get drunk---yeah, really---but it's not for the faint of heart."
I can recognize plenty of pharmaceuticals, especially at a party, but the vampires in the burnt out storage facility had hard stuff, the likes of which I'd only seen in the movies. Two guys hunched over a candle with a spoon. I looked away, saw two more with a pipe. I wondered how long we were obliged to stay, since Bill had filled up on their stale expired blood.
"You never know," Silk said. She looked Wild Bill up and down like maybe he was her dessert. "You might like it."
She disappeared through the sagging doorway where a handful of vamps had gone once their blood was choked down. Charlie was watching us so hard I felt like I couldn't even expect an eye signal from Bill, but I looked to him anyway, figuring any other Renfield would have done the same.
"You never know," Bill echoed. He followed Silk, I followed him, and Charlie brought up the rear.
The utility room tucked behind the boilers had been painted white once---maybe fifty years ago. The blackened overhead beams seemed to suck all the light out of the room, even though a bunch of mismatched table lamps tethered to a single power strip were on. They threw more heat than light. The room felt stuffy and moist, and it reeked of cigarette and pot smoke.
Three vamps were in the corner, a guy with long brown hair on the floor, and two women kneeling, one in front, one in back. I thought maybe it was a kinky threesome, what with his feet in the air. But then I saw the enema bag.
Which didn't entirely rule out a threesome. But it wasn't one I wanted to explore in any more detail.
"We figured it out in the service," Charlie said. "How to get fucked up on practically nothing. Wine enemas. You get drunk hard, you get drunk fast. And there's no throwing it up, 'cos you don't waste it on your useless gut."
The vampire girl between the guy's legs murmured to him, encouraging him to hold it in. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. It seemed like they should have been embarrassed---why weren't they embarrassed?
I glanced at Bill. His eyebrows were all twisted up.
"So what do you say?" Silk asked Bill. "Want to give it a shot?"
"I would," Bill said, "but I got my church underwear on. Too holey to let anyone else see it."
The vamp on his back let loose, and wine gushed out. The girls tittered, like it was a perfectly normal thing---and maybe for them it totally was. His ass was right next to a grate in the floor. I tried to pretend I didn't smell the wine. That I didn't hear it dripping down the grate.
If I had anything in my stomach, I think I would have puked.
Wild Bill lit a cigarette and said, "He gonna do a trick with ping pong balls for an encore?"
Charlie didn't laugh, not exactly, but it seemed to me Wild Bill had passed some sort of test. If he'd shown any fear at all, and maybe even disgust, which would've implied he thought he was too good for them---and God forbid he had any aspiration to be a decent person---then that would have been it. Minefield. Kaboom.
Wild Bill's nihilism saved him. Good thing he'd been perfecting it all these years.
I didn't seem to matter. I was just an accessory---and I was happy to keep it that way.
"C'mon," Charlie said to Bill. "We got a TV out front. The whole movie package. There's a new vampire series that's not too bad, they re-run it every two hours or so..."
"What about that room?" Bill pointed to a door that seemed to have stood the test of time and the trial by fire better than the rest of the basement. "That's where we used to hang."
Charlie and Silk glanced at each other.
"What?" Bill said. "You got your meth lab in there now?"
A strange pause, and then Silk said, "No big secret. I'll show you. Put the cigarette out."
Wild Bill dropped his smoke and stepped on it, then Silk pulled a small keyring out of her pocket and unlocked the door. Table. Couch. Autoclave.
I wouldn't have recognized the gear if I hadn't just spent a few hours with Melba. But ... a tattoo shop? Here?
I tried to take a better look at Silk's arms without being too obvious about it. The work was stunning, lines so fine they didn't even look like tattoos, that seemed to shimmer and move with her body as the light hit them. Melba had been steady, and she'd had a century of experience. But Silk was a DaVinci. Or Michelangelo. Or whatever.
When I looked to Bill, I found him focused on the wall behind the couch instead---a wall covered from floor to ceiling in a mural.
It didn't look like much of anything at first other than chaos. There were figures, but they were vague, painted with big, angry strokes. Guns. Dollar bills. A mushroom cloud, the top of which was lost to water damage and mildew.
"That's not mine," Silk said. "It came with the room. It's old. But I like it---in a eighties kind of way. Remember it?"
Wild Bill stroked his chin and shrugged. "Thought I did. But it don't look much like it did in my head."
"So who's got the new tat?" she said. I felt myself blush and she looked at me. "Take off your jacket, Boytoy. The smell of new ink's making me antsy."
I slipped it off only far enough to expose my upper arm. "Wild Bill drew it."
She peeled up my sleeve and cocked her head. "Not bad."
Charlie craned his neck to see. "That's the first time she hasn't ripped a tat that wasn't one of hers to shreds."
"It needs something, though." She pointed at the table. "Sit down."
"I like it the way it is."
The room went so still it felt like time had stopped. The vamps stared at me. I stared back. I told myself I wasn't scared, not exactly, but a bead of cold sweat gathered between my shoulder blades and rolled down my spine, and it seemed like one false move would blow up the whole minefield.
I did my best to sound calm. "Wild Bill designed it for me. I think it's perfect now."
"He's just a kid," Charlie told her. "He has no idea what he's turning down."
Silk's eyes were two ticking landmines.
"Her tats are like currency," Charlie told Bill. "Solid gold. She won't take a penny for them, and that makes them priceless. Those inside men I told you about---at the hospitals, at the blood banks? They all have ink that their buddies drool over. It gets 'em laid, it gets 'em clout, it gets 'em respect."
Silk wouldn't stop staring. Anywhere I stepped, kaboom.
I looked to Bill for reassurance---guidance---anything. Now I knew how he felt when a dozen vampires stuck a bag of rotten blood in his hand and told him to drink. I did my best to plead with my eyes---get me out of here. But there were too many ruined doors and rooms and corridors, and too many wasted vamps, between us and freedom.
Wild Bill patted my cheek. "I got him so vamped he'd slam the door on the Prize Patrol if they showed up on our doorstep and tried to give him a million bucks and a trip to Tahiti." He motioned toward the table with a tilt of his head. "Go on, kiddo. That's a collaborative piece of work to begin with. It ain't like I inked it myself."
He helped me out of the jacket and I slid onto the table. "Don't look," Silk told me. "Not 'til I'm done." Fine by me. Her landmine eyes made my skin crawl. Charlie and Bill sat on the couch, each one slouched at opposite ends, and spoke in tones so low I could only catch fragments of words. I smelled the surgical soap, felt the cool swipe of the razor, the blot of gauze. Then the buzz of the needle.
No ink transfer? Not even a sketch?
I stared helplessly at Wild Bill. He winked at me.
I must've held my breath for the first two minutes or so, but I couldn't very well stop breathing forever. Eventually my panic ebbed---slightly---and it was just a matter of trying to pretend I wasn't there---whatever was happening wasn't really happening to me.
Though the sting in my arm told me it really was.
Whatever Silk was doing, it felt different from what Melba had done---and not just because I'd been relaxed at Melba's and I was ready to jump out of my skin here. Silk had a gentler touch, yet somehow, even more sure. It might have even been fun---if I'd had any say at all in the matter of what was being etched permanently on my own skin.
I gazed up at the mural, and tried to pick out a stroke or two that looked like Wild Bill's handiwork, but I couldn't find any. It was all angles and lines, where his new work was curvilinear and flowing. Maybe Wild Bill thought he was stagnant, stuck at the point at which Grey had changed him---but right there on the wall we had proof he was a living, evolving being. That thought gave me hope. Enough to endure my vampire hazing---my ritual scarification.
Less than an hour later, an hour in which each minute was an age of agony, Silk wiped down my tattoo and said, "You can look now."
I wanted to wince, but I held my face steady---I had enough practice at doing that from my day job. Heck, from high school---and I looked down.
Gently scrolling letters followed the tattoo. They were subtle, and yet somehow they framed the existing piece, made the shape seem more vivid, more dynamic. Two words: Wild Bill.
I choked up.
I swallowed a few times, then said, "I love it."
I was so mesmerized by the sight of my lover's name engraved on my arm I didn't see her hand coming. She grabbed me by the chin, and nailed me with her landmine stare. "You don't tell anyone where you got it. Ever."
Something rearranged itself inside my head. I nodded against her hand, and she let go of my face.
Wild Bill and Charlie came over to get a look at it. Bill whistled though his teeth. "Y'know, Mikey ain't the only one who likes ink."
"Forget it," Charlie told him. "If you ask, you don't get one. I found out the hard way."
I couldn't take my eyes off the ink. The letters were made up of slender, faint lines, like an engraving, like the work on a dollar bill. "I really mean it," I told Silk. "I love it."
She grabbed me by the arm and looked hard at her work, like maybe she'd spotted something---a tiny gap she'd meant to fill---then she shook her head and said, "Well, that's that."
We walked back to the van in silence. Bill headed for the driver's side. I didn't bother to ask if I could drive. He pulled away calmly, and waited several blocks before he spoke. "You got anything back at the room you can't afford to lose?"
"My computer. But everything's backed up online."
"You can go on a recon mission for it later. I feel like roughing it tonight."
Outside it had dropped to a miserable forty degrees, clammy with a mist of rain, but the thought of one of those vamps following us back to the room made me nearly as sick as witnessing the wine enema had. Also, something in Bill's tone made me think our plans weren't up for debate. "Sounds good."
Wild Bill made a few turns. I noticed he was checking his rearview more often then usual. He hopped on the expressway, checked his rearview one more time, lit a cigarette and relaxed back into the bucket seat.
We drove for several minutes. He made no move to turn on the radio, so I didn't either. For all I knew, he was listening for something.
"Can a vamp run as fast as a car?" I asked, when I couldn't stand the silence anymore.
"On surface streets, stop and go? Maybe."
I hadn't thought he would even answer me. Vampirism is one of those things we don't talk about, not directly, at least. I didn't feel any better knowing a vamp could catch me in a moving vehicle.
Bill veered onto an off-ramp and rolled to a stop at the bottom. He made a cautious right on red, then glided into a Christmas tree farm that wouldn't see much action until closer to Thanksgiving. He turned from a paved road to a pair of dirt tracks and hid the van among two neat rows of balsam firs.
I peeked behind the black rubber light-proofing. We had only one blanket, and the air mattress. The sheets were dirty from the night before. I hadn't thought to bring them to the Laundromat. "Are you sure we shouldn't go get something? More blankets maybe? Some hot water?"
Bill stared out the windshield at the tree line, thinking. Then he said, "Get in back."
It wasn't threatening, particularly---not in the way blowhards like Lance would talk to try and prove they had authority and push you around---and I think that quiet certainty was what pushed my buttons. I ducked under the rubber mat that separated the cab from the back, and I wondered if I should turn on the camping lantern. If I had permission.
Bill left me there, alone with my thoughts, with my heartbeat, to imagine what he'd do to me. My stubbornness had almost gotten us killed back there. I saw he was going with the flow, playing along with whatever the vampire horde wanted until we could make tracks. A tattoo might be permanent, but it's hardly worth dying over---especially with the availability of laser surgery.
I usually felt like Wild Bill and I were more or less equal partners in our relationship. This was not one of those times. This was when I got to feel too stupid for words.
I knelt on the air mattress and wondered if everything we'd been doing the past couple of days---the biting, the cutting, the rough, raw fucking---would culminate tonight in something big. Some point of no return.
The sick twist in my stomach felt as much like anticipation as it did dread.
Wild Bill came through the flap, dropped it back in place, fumbled for the lantern and turned it on.
"I'm sorry," I said---before I could stop myself.
Bill flexed his shoulders so his jacket slipped to the floor.
I almost said it again, but somehow I managed to keep my useless apologies to myself by matching him, item for item, as we both stripped down. I waited then, on my knees, for Wild Bill to give me an order. To tell me to suck his cock. To spread my legs, or to bare my throat to him.
"Lay down."
I did.
He shook out the blanket, got in beside me and covered us both up. That was all.
"Wild Bill? Are you mad?"
He sighed and clasped me to his chest. His bristly five o' clock shadow chafed my forehead. "Let's not talk, baby. Not right now."
Baby? Damn. That word stripped away my defenses faster than any hot, nasty, bloody, painful, dirty thing he could think up ... and then some.
He tightened his arms around me pressed his lips to my temple. My breaths in the crook of his neck grew hot and moist. I ran my hands over him. He was warm, full of old blood, a stranger's blood---blood he hadn't wanted, but he'd swallowed to avoid a scene.
I wanted to talk more than anything, probably because he specifically asked me not to, so I arched into him instead, skin to skin, so every part of me that could touch him was pressed up against him. Hipbones bumped, leg hair ruffled, cocks brushed. Bill sighed again and held me closer still.
"I love you," I said, and really I'd meant to just think it, but my breath carried it out of me, soft against his shoulder, like a butterfly kiss.
Bill jostled me back, and at first I thought he was pushing me away, that he'd tell me to shut up once and for all---but then his mouth crushed against mine, wet and desperate, and we kissed like we could lose ourselves in one another's mouths, if only we tried hard enough.
He locked a leg around mine and pulled me against him, and our cocks nudged each other where they swelled, side by side. His hands were everywhere---gliding over my back, tracing my ribs, threading through my hair. Everywhere but my arm. The tattoo.
A small sound escaped Bill, and I loved that I could awaken this need in him, but it was also alarming in a way, like I needed to quell it before I felt more guilty than gratified. I slipped a hand between us, and he hissed into my mouth. I was hard, him mostly so, and I took our cocks together and stroked them.
I couldn't taste the old blood on him, just cigarettes, just Bill, but I nicked my tongue against his fang anyway---not a deep cut, but enough to rinse away the night, and hopefully to make us taste like us again. Maybe make things like they used to be ... though I doubted it could. Some things are like tattoos. You might be able to get rid of them with a lot of effort, but they'll still leave a nasty scar.
Blood taste blossomed in our mouths, and I guided his stiff cock between my thighs and clamped my legs together hard. He made another one of those sounds, and I kissed it away, moving against him to coax him toward release.
With my thighs doing all the work, my upper hand was free. I stroked him, thigh, hip, arm, shoulder, and settled on his face. We rocked together, him cupping my face, and me his, tongues twined, breathing.
He came so gently it was like a long exhalation, his semen wet and warm on the back of my thigh, and his tongue gliding over mine. I held him then, and I kissed his mouth---slow kisses, tender kisses---while we drank in each other's breaths, and held each other, and sighed.
I'd begun to drift off when I felt Bill's hand slip between us.
"You don't have to---"
His thumb swiped slick wetness over my cockhead, and he handled me so expertly you'd think it was his own dick he was pumping at. My breath ratcheted in, and my back arched. "You didn't think I'd leave ya hangin', didja?"
Fast. Hard. He handled me so mercilessly I wanted to beg him to stop---except I was scared he would, and that would be even worse. He might have slowed down when he felt me start to clench up all over, except this time he let the imminent rush spur him on even harder. When I came it felt more like rush, and explosion, a sudden hit of bliss that left everything raw, red and sated.
Wild Bill looked down at his come-smeared palm like he might be able to tell a fortune with it, and I sucked air as if a hand had been forcing my head underwater. Eventually Bill located his T-shirt and blotted himself off.
By the time I was coherent again, that weird, vulnerable look was gone from Wild Bill's face, and his expression was set in those familiar lines---the "I've seen it all---and nothing fazes me" twist to his mouth, the cynical quirk of his eyebrow. And I figured since he had his mask back on, it was safe to talk. "I'm sorry she gave me the tattoo, and not you. Are you sure you're not mad?"
Bill gave me a weary half-smile. "No, I ain't mad." He peeled the blanket back and had a look at it. It was more raised than the band I'd gotten from Melba, which made me wonder exactly how fast I healed. Not Bill-fast. But fast. "I feel like an idiot, like I picked up a stack of old dishes and a mess of cockroaches swarmed out from underneath. How'd I miss 'em, a dozen vamps all packed into a room like that?"
"They smelled like concrete."
"And rain. And empty wine bottles. And old, old fire." Bill sighed. "I thought things were gonna go south, I truly did---and I wouldn't have been able to take 'em, not that many. Good thing you didn't panic. Nothing sets off a predator like a chase."
I scratched my arm, remembered the fresh tattoo, and tried to push the itch to the back of my mind. "I don't get it."
"And I probably can't enlighten you ... but give it a shot anyway."
"Silk. Her work is incredible. She won't sell it, and she won't give you a tattoo if you ask for it. But then she acts like I made some huge faux pas when I didn't want one."
Wild Bill smirked. "Women."
No, that wasn't it. I knew plenty of women who weren't weird. It was more like she was trying to set me up so no matter what I said or did, it would be the wrong thing. Like the animal clinic. Like Lance. "Those vamps, that whole gang of them, they were like a bunch of twelve year old bullies."
"Scary to think if you had a key to the code, you could categorize the whole fuckin' world. Bullies and victims, predators and prey."
I was prey. He didn't need to say it---I knew. I've always known.
At least, I thought I was. I didn't see Wild Bill as either one of those things. He was happy to live and let live, to go with the flow. But rile him up and he'd give as good as he got.
He turned off the camping lantern and settled himself against me. I tucked the blanket around us and listened to his breathing slow as dawn approached. I was jittery with nerves, but I reminded myself none of those vamps could function any better than Bill while the sun was up, so if they hadn't managed to trail us, we were safe. For the moment.
The thought of being considered prey nagged at my mind as I struggled to clear it and join Bill in sleep. I've never been able to fly under a bully's radar, ever. Mainly because I'm gay, but even if I wasn't, they'd be threatened by my intelligence---not that it felt like any big asset, given that it hadn't done me any good back at the vamp warren.
I decided it was more than intelligence, more than competency, and even more than sexuality that drew a bully to a victim, and a predator to prey. Something subtle, too small to see. Something you couldn't change.
Wild Bill's breathing lulled me, and I told myself there was no sense in worrying about something so instinctual and inborn. But then, in a fleeting moment of clarity that hit me a moment before I drifted off, it occurred to me...
I'd killed an awful lot of vampires, for prey.
Jordan Castillo Price
Jordan Castillo Price grew up in the steel mill warrens of Buffalo, NY, spent some formative drinking years in Chicago, and migrated north to small-town rural Wisconsin once she realized she was going to kill the next person who bumped into her with a shopping cart. She did a six-year stint in art school and played bass in a punk band that crashed and burned just before their first CD was pressed. At least she got a cool boyfriend out of the deal, since she ran off with the drummer.
Jordan has a weekly show on erotica writing tips and techniques at www.packingheat.net. She suspects some of her listeners aren't much interested in writing, and just tune in to hear her say naughty words.
Readers interested in freebies, snippets, and peeks into the writing process should check out JCP News, a monthly newsletter where Jordan posts links to free eBooks and serialized M/M stories. Visit www.jordancastilloprice.com to sign up.
Visit www.changelingpress.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

