“Julia, you overestimate Jean-Luis’ capacity for introspection. As long as you haven’t made him look like one of the three little pigs, he’ll be happy.”
Julia just moaned.
The sound of an object being tapped against crystal swiveled everyone’s attention to the front of the room. Jean-Luis was holding a champagne glass in one hand and flicking his talon-like fingernail against its rim. It was time for the unveiling.
Julia covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t stand to look. This was going to be the end of her! She wouldn’t be paid. She’d already lost her apartment, and she wouldn’t be able to afford another. Her sire would disown her. After all, he’d recommended her to Jean-Luis in the first place. She’d have to go back to being a waitress at the all-night diner, feeding off drunks and rodents in the alley. Aeron had warned her: Being a vampire sucked!
Julia could hear the velvet swish and crumple as it was pulled away from the portrait. There was a collective gasp. I’m ruined! She thought. Even Aeron couldn’t stop a slightly startled inhale. She risked a peep between her fingers. Jean-Luis stood, staring, the cloth still gripped in his hand.
“The light,” someone said, and Julia dropped her hands. Jean-Luis’ face was everything she’d said it was—he’d insisted on a three quarter view to show off the aristocratic crook of his long nose and the height of his brow, it made him look like a raptor considering lunch—but the portrait itself was so much more than Jean-Luis.
It wasn’t just the luminosity of the vampire’s skin, or the way his eyes caught the flame of the candles—it was the way she had captured the moonlight. It fell thru the glass of the conservatory ceiling into the portrait, skittering across the fabric of the vampire’s elegant jacket, shining from metal and glass, refracted by crystal, weaving itself across the carpet under Jean-Luis’ feet, climbing the walls behind the chair, until it defined the shadows, not the other way around. The painting rang with light in a tone far purer than Jean-Luis’ champagne goblet.
“My dear!” Jean-Luis said. Aeron reached out and touched her trembling fingers before slipping away from the press of well-wishers. Julia was suddenly surrounded by congratulations. The vampire from the Times caught her eye and actually smiled at her. Every question seemed to be “When would she have time? How soon could she be available?”
Slightly dazed by all the attention, Julia suddenly realized she was holding something in her hand. She turned slightly away from her well-wishers, looked down and uncurled her fingers. The object she was holding was her Grandmother’s ruby drop. She raised her hand for a better look. The gold chain slid between her fingers, leaving the stone glowing like a burning ember on her palm.
Jean-Luis was suddenly beside her. His long pale fingers reached out and carefully took the necklace from her hand. “How beautiful,” he murmured. “I should have thought of this, but your sire beat me to it. May I?”
Julia lifted her hair allowing the old vampire to fasten the chain around her neck. The jewel hung just as it had the night she’d traded it to Aeron for turning her into a vampire, just below the hollow of her throat like a deep red tear of precious blood.
“Beautiful,” Jean-Luis breathed into her ear. “Now,” He took her arm. “I have people you simply must meet.”
As Jean-Luis led her across the room, Julia touched the ruby with one finger. It was a piece of her past but she was happy to have it back. It would remind her every day that she had willingly, deliberately made the choice to become what she was. It was time to stop mourning what she’d lost and embrace her future. She had not only found her place in this new world, but she had made peace with its light.
About Rusty Goode
Rusty Goode began her dark fiction career by writing several pieces of on-line fan-fiction and a novel based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. Joss Whedon and the other writers who worked on that series were a tremendous inspiration, and the much maligned fan-fiction sites were a great place to practice. The Deepening.com, an on-line fiction magazine has published four of her short stories under the names Rusty Goode and Beatrice Moore. Rusty has just put the final touches on her urban fantasy novel Raptor. Look for her soon to be published shorts stories; Reptile Dysfunction and Warm Hands, Cold Heart on Amazon.com.
THIN WHITE DUKE IN SNEAKERS, by Laura Wise
A sudden breeze off Matanzas Bay fluttered the paper of Linda Ramirez’s notebook, pages flying so fast that random words from the notes she’d jotted down seemed to escape into the night. The Lion’s Magick Shop. Cantina, after sunset. Greg.
She’d double-underlined his name with one bold strike obscuring part of the letters, a habit she’d picked up somehow back when they were dating and never abandoned. He’d teased her about it for years; she could almost hear him, in his pathetic attempt at a Spanish accent, “Ah, mi Linda, is that a black mark for your esposo? Ready to write me out already?” For that stupidity she would try to punch him, but he’d catch her hand in midair, saying dryly, “Que Linda, my violent girl,” and, yes, that was her husband, faster than he looked.
She flipped the notebook over so that the pages would be safe and she couldn’t see even the fragments in the dimness of the restaurant patio. Then she drank from her margarita, letting the salt burn where she’d bitten her lip a dozen times that day. Damn nervous habit.
It had been a long drive from her home in Winter Park: I-4 to fight, then the insanity of I-95. She’d gotten off the Interstate early, though, driven across the toll bridge to the barrier island and St Augustine Beach. The swamps were disappearing here as on the mainland, new construction taking over the world just like the loud, terrible traffic—Daytona’s Bike Week stretched all the way up here.
She knew where she was going, however. Two blocks off A1A, in a knot of older houses tangled between the ocean and the rest of the new-built world, was the McGarrity family’s summer home.
She’d pulled into its driveway just before sunset and turned off the David Bowie CD that Greg had left in the CD changer and she’d never gotten around to taking out, and she’d just sat there. The closed hurricane shutters still blocked every window, even though the season was four months gone. As she turned the key to the house over and over in one hand and held onto the necklace she always wore with the other, she saw the fading of the day over the house, heard the roar of the nearby waves. Nothing else, although she felt him.
Then she’d started the car and driven back to the mainland, over the Bridge of Lions, to keep the first of her evening appointments.
She drank more of her margarita, although she really shouldn’t, not with what lay ahead. She broke all the complimentary chips and dropped them in the complimentary salsa without eating any. She listened to the couple in the far corner start a domestic argument about a new Harley versus a custom Indian motorcycle. She gazed at the shimmer of dark water in the bay below the Castillo de San Marcos. She waited.
And before she was ready, she heard him. God, she’d always loved his voice—that soothing baritone, perfect for swaying a courtroom or leading one of his million protests in aid of who the hell knew what, world peace or economic justice for migrant workers or save the swamps/sea turtles/manatees/insert-wild-place-or-animal-of-your-choice. Perfect for saying her name, low and caressing, and right now apologetic. He’d sure as hell better be apologetic.
“Linda,” he said again, just as he had last night on the phone, after four months when she’d thought he was gone forever.
She licked the last of the salt from the corner of her mouth before she turned around. “Greg, babe. A little late, don’t you think?”
But her attempt at cool shattered when she saw him standing on the threshold between outside and in, trying to smile at her. Even in the wavering light from those tacky lanterns, his blond hair shone. Still flopping over his eyes, though, he needed a haircut. He looked thinner, his bone structure more defined, his skin translucent. Hollowed out, she thought, and she tasted more salt on her tongue.
H
e stopped trying to smile. “Christ, sweetheart, I’m… This was an epically bad idea. Sorry. So sorry.” He was already backing away, a name escaping from a fluttering page.
She leapt to her feet, ignoring the motorcycle couple in the corner, ignoring her own sudden shiver at the difference in him. “Don’t you dare run away!” Reaching out for him, her hands caught at his belt—which just like always was an old tie. He didn’t believe in wearing leather, always wore vegan-approved sneakers, even to court. He was still wearing those ratty things, even after…
The tears came in earnest as she pulled him to her and burrowed her head against his chest where his heartbeat should be. He didn’t put his arms around her. He stayed still, controlled, holding himself somewhere inside. “I could kill you, Greg McGarrity,” she whispered.
“A little late, I’m afraid.” A joke in the echo, except there was no humor in his voice. That lack, even more than the lack of heartbeat and the chill she felt, told her he hadn’t been lying on the phone.
Okay, then. Her husband was now a vampire. Time to deal with that, and the mystery that had brought her here.
* * * *
Oh God, she overwhelmed him—and not just her Linda-ness, her dark hair and darker eyes, the curve of her waist, the weight of her breasts, the dip in her collarbone made for his mouth, the fading scents of her perfume and deodorant and the environmentally friendly detergent they’d always used. No, it was also her trembling, her bitten lips, with blood so close to the surface, the gallop in her veins. His tongue could all but taste her.
He shouldn’t touch her. He shouldn’t be here—not in the existential sense, and not in the sheer awkwardness of meeting his wife after what she had to think was abandonment. In a way he had chosen to abandon her. Death should indeed them part, he thought for the thousand thousandth time, words he’d worn into his brain like the groove he’d worn into the old pine floors at the summer house these past four months.
But Linda had other ideas. “Sit. Talk to me.” She pushed him into the other chair at her table, sent a quelling librarian stare at the biker voyeurs in the corner, and then turned that stare on him.
He’d had a good reason for calling her, he reminded himself. “God, sweetheart, I’m so sorry for putting you through this, but it’s possible this Book of De Leon might be important. When I called you—”
“Yes, you told me. A note passed to you about this book, a mystery to solve. I’ve got a jump on the initial research, and I’ve got another lead I’ll tell you about as soon as you stop shovelling this shit about bothering me. For God’s sake, Greg, I’m your wife!” She reached across the table, caught his hand in hers. Although he could feel the shiver run up her fingers at the connection—it must be such a horrible difference, he thought, he shouldn’t be here—she said, “Talk to me, please.”
“You always say that.”
“Because you always try to keep too much to yourself. Stop it, okay?” But she shivered again as she delivered the familiar rebuke, her fingers restless around his. He wondered what she felt when she touched him now.
And he worried that under her touch what was left of Gregory James McGarrity would crumble into the dust he should be, would release the hungry, angry thing he’d become. He couldn’t let that happen to anyone, much less to her.
“What happened, babe?”
Lost in his fears, it took him a second to process what she was asking. “You mean—this?”
“No, I mean the gains of the religious right in the last election. Of course I mean that, estupido.”
“You sound just like Mami when you call me that.” He was unable to stop the pain, or the smile.
Linda’s grandmother hadn’t much liked him. The few times they’d met she’d stared at him from her nursing-home bed, her mouth turned down, her witch-black eyes burning with spells he had been damn glad she wasn’t speaking—not until the last visit, a decade ago, right before she died. “This estupido is going to hurt you, chica, I see it,” she’d told Linda that day.
One clawed brown hand had closed around Linda’s wrist, the other fumbling on the bedside table, and with a rush of power that belied her illness, she had produced two thin chains, each anchored by an ancient gold piece. Family legend had it that the gold had been handed down from the days of old Hispaniola during the governorship of Ponce De Leon. “One for my granddaughter, one for the stupid and skinny white boy she has married. God keep them safe together,” she’d said, old voice rising in strength. “Do not let them be separated. Do not let his folly be their undoing.”
Greg hadn’t believed in magic, not fully, despite Linda’s own gifts in herbals and sight. But when she had taken him out to the dark parking lot, spilled the two of them together down onto the backseat of their old Honda, and fastened one of the chains around his neck, laughing, “Mami doesn’t know. You’re not a stupid and skinny white boy, you’re my thin white duke,” he had let himself revel in her power, too. For a while anyway—long enough to find her under her skirt and make her wet and moaning, long enough to ease himself out of his jeans and slide into her, long enough to make sweaty, awkward love while Bowie on the car stereo sang loud enough to drown out the Miami night. When they’d come, almost simultaneously, they’d kicked the door so hard they left a dent.
Linda’s hand on his neck, on that absence of what he had treasured, called him back from memory into the hellish present. Trembling, bitten lips, oh, God—the gallop of her blood—“What happened to your chain, Greg?”
“I don’t remember. I…woke up without it.” Slick, black cold. Nakedness. Silence. Absence. Then his old friend Bobby had pulled open the drawer, and the lights of the morgue had poured over him, and he’d wished to be back asleep, to be hidden underground, to be anything but this. But here he was.
Because he knew she needed to understand the inexplicable, he told her the last living memories he had. That night he died, on his way back from that environmental-law conference in Charleston, he’d gotten hungry. He hadn’t thought he’d be able to get a good vegetarian meal that late, traffic on I-95 was fucking insane, and the summer house was right there, so he’d called her from outside the Publix in St Augustine Beach to tell her he’d be home in the morning.
“Nine forty-five,” she said now, the shadow of tears in her voice. “I could show it to you on my cell’s memories. I couldn’t make myself erase it.”
“Yeah. It’s on mine, too.” Hating this, hating the memories, he looked at his hands. In the dim light they looked like someone else’s—white, alien. Hurrying on: “So I went in, got some soy milk and cereal and some fruit. When I came out, there was a car next to mine. Broken down, it seemed like, hood up and everything. I went over to see if I could help the woman.”
“Saw a pretty girl stranded, huh?” God, that authentic Linda-snap, like she was going to haul off and hit him at any minute. He’d longed for her so desperately the past months. “Is that why you played Good Samaritan?”
“Um, no. I mean, yes, she seemed pretty enough. I wasn’t paying attention, really.” For some reason he found the next detail the most embarrassing of all. “It was the Save the Manatee sticker on the car. I thought, like-minded travelers, and everything…”
“Oh, Gregory, that is so like you.” And that was a true Linda-gurgle, caught between laughter and tears, closer now. “If she saves wildlife, she can’t be a killer, right?”
“I don’t believe I’d thought it through quite like that, and it probably wasn’t even her car,” he said with as much dignity as he could manage. “Anyway, that was what happened.”
“That’s all you remember?”
No, of course it wasn’t. He could remember reaching for his cell phone to call Triple-A for the woman. He remembered the woman’s hand reaching for his neck—a gesture like Linda’s just now, but snake-fast, with long, clawed fingers scratching him—and her face changing, human to inhuman. He remembered the fangs gleaming under fluorescence. He remembered the unknown words she’d growled a
s she’d slammed him face first against her car. He’d fought back, with elbows and knees, fists and sudden, heart-sped fury, but it hadn’t been enough. Once more he’d found himself face down, and then had come a rip into the skin and through his world, bringing agony like he’d never known. “Yes, sweetheart, that’s all I remember.”
He could never do that to anyone, much less to Linda.
Before she could ask the next unanswerable question, the server came by to take their order. He’d learned that his shell of a body tolerated solid food poorly, but he could manage a drink now and then—he asked for a Dos Equis, and Linda ordered some nachos and a glass of water. “Can’t get drunk, can I?” she said, smiling at him as if there were any other night. “We’ve got a lot to do.”
He gazed at her silently. For four months he’d held himself apart from her, from humanity, except for those necessary trips to the butcher’s his friend had found for him. He hated the taste of blood, hated everything about what it meant; he’d thrown up his first mouthful, and he still rinsed out his mouth as soon as he finished drinking. He couldn’t ever get rid of the taste, though—ashes, death, so much pain, so much anger.
Strangely, however, the worst thing hadn’t been the blood. A few days after he’d awakened, he had tried what had always calmed him when he was alive, the yoga he’d begun two decades ago and done faithfully since. There in the shuttered great room of the summer house, with the ocean beating against the sand nearby, he had begun his practice. His muscles responded faster, stronger, and more smoothly than they had ever done before—the lingering back pain from a recent game of touch football gone, the aches of a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer’s body dissolved. But then it had hit him. Yoga was for control, and yoga was for breath. It didn’t mean one goddamn thing if he didn’t have to breathe.
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