Vampire's Dilemma

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  She brought back one last moment he’d forgotten until now: a cut wrist held to his mouth, that blood-taste he loathed on his tongue, choking him, and a whispered, “Now I’ll help you, pretty one. I know what you seek.”

  Memory bled into now, into her voice on the sea breeze saying, “I’ll help you, pretty one. I still know what you seek. See you later.” The woman-thing smiled, her tongue stealing between her descended fangs to lap at the night air, then she disappeared through the gates into dark—

  And all trace of her was gone, as if blown out to sea on the wind.

  He stopped at the corner of St. George Street, on the periphery between the official Quarter and the rest of the town, and stared at the empty night. Not really empty, of course. There was traffic taking the curve from San Marcos Avenue to Avenida Menendez—same street by a different name. Noise and laughter spilled out of the restaurants here on the border, and nearby a lantern swung, its pendulum of light revealing a small group at the cemetery by the Visitor’s Center. That must be one of the walking ghost-tours: people paying to see where the dead lived.

  The vampire that had killed him was walking the Spanish Quarter, and she used the language of the note left for him. Shit.

  He ran back to Linda and the light as fast as he’d fled.

  She was standing in the center of the street as he’d asked, but her folded arms and frown meant trouble. “Gregory James McGarrity, what the hell were you thinking?” She dropped defensiveness for a swift grab at his lapels. “Don’t you leave me like that.”

  “Sorry, but it’s okay, the thing was moving away from you. You were safe—”

  “That’s not the point, goddamn it. You do not leave me again.” She gripped his shoulders, her nails pressing into his jacket so hard that he almost could feel them cut through the layers of fabric. He could tell how much she wanted to shake him. More softly: “Please don’t leave me again.”

  “You know I can’t promise you that.” God, he hated to see the words strike her, hated the tremor in her fingers. He hurried on. “Never mind—Linda, that was her. The vampire, I mean, the one who turned me. She spoke to me, and then she went somewhere, I lost her.”

  “Is that right?” Letting go, she started to dig in the purse slung over her shoulder, muttering, “Right, where did I put that…”

  “What?” he said, distracted.

  “This.” She pulled out a sharpened crucifix and a water pistol so suddenly that he took an involuntary step back. “Oh, don’t be stupid, Greg, it’s not for you. It’s for the puta who turned you.” Tossing back her hair, she stood taller—the picture of an ancient warrior-queen, albeit one with slightly unorthodox weapons. “Show me where she went.”

  “Okay, calm down…que Linda, my violent girl.” When his hands closed around hers, a few drops from the gun-barrel seared his skin. He didn’t let go. “Yes, Holy Water—good choice, that hurts like a bitch. But put it away now, all right?”

  “Babe, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She yanked the pistol away from him, dropped it in her bag, but kept the other. “Doesn’t the crucifix do anything to you?”

  “Makes me a little edgy, perhaps. But remember—lapsed Presbyterian here. We never worried much about those kind of things.” He risked a smile before he recalled the more crucial information her Linda the Vampire Slayer routine had pushed aside. “Anyway, anyway…before the vampire disappeared, she spoke to me. She said something about knowing what I seek.” When he was sure she was paying attention, he finished, “She said something like that when she turned me as well.”

  Linda didn’t speak. In the midst of their silence he could hear other noises now, and he glanced over his shoulder. The ghost-tour people were approaching, in laughter and the guide’s theatrical calling on the dead and the swinging of the lantern, light revolving in a circle. Gently he pulled her to the side of the street so that the group could pass, and the two of them stood mute in the hanging shadows until they were alone again.

  Then she said, “‘Seek the fountain where it is not.’ Was that what she said?”

  “Not specifically, but along the same lines. Seeking is the common thread. Which is why we need to cancel this little expedition, or at least put it off for a while.”

  She folded her arms again, the crucifix-stake tapping against one bicep. “And that would be because—?”

  “Because there are too many coincidences for comfort. Think, Linda.” He shoved his hands in his pockets again—the slight burn on his fingers hurt even more on contact with his clothes. “It’s like…it’s like a circle, a dark one. From turning to searching to who the fuck knows what, it’s all connected, and none of it’s good. None of it’s any good, sweetheart. I want you out of it.”

  Although she didn’t answer right away, he was unfortunately all too familiar with that particular flash of brown eyes and set of jaws. Yes—“I’m already too far in it, Gregory. We’re going to the Lion’s Magick Shop to investigate this book and the note, and we’re going right now.”

  “That’s just Ramirez stubbornness talking. Come on, sweetheart—”

  “No, you come on.” She was already heading off in the direction of the magic shop, toward an alley that rose dark between two buildings.

  But he couldn’t make himself stir from the shadows. He couldn’t tell if what was trapping him and Linda in the circle was too much order or too little, recursion or entropy, but he felt the sting of the trap’s teeth like yet another rip in the skin. He needed to be able to protect her, leave her, shatter himself into dust before she was hurt again. Before he was hurt even worse.

  He didn’t believe any Book of De Leon was going to give him what he sought.

  She stopped at the alley’s mouth and looked back. Quiet, beautiful, stern: “You promised me tonight, Greg.” Even though she’d put her crucifix away, she still seemed armed in fire. “I hold you to your word.”

  And he sighed. “I don’t know what else I expected. All right.” Before he went to join her, however, he lifted his head and breathed in again, using all of his senses to plunge into the natural and unnatural worlds. He scented nothing at all. Small mercies, he supposed.

  When he joined her, she caught his hand. Her touch scraped at the burned skin, but he said nothing, just held on. He had promised her tonight, after all.

  As they stepped into the alley, though, she chuckled. “You know what I just remembered?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You voted for Nader in 2000.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Linda! You faithfully swore never to mention that nightmare again.”

  “Yeah, but it’s such an excellent example of how wrong you can be, babe.…”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Laughing a little, they walked further into the shadows, hand in hand.

  * * * *

  The Lion’s Magick Shop was hidden in the depths of the Quarter. If Linda hadn’t scoped it out before she’d gone to the restaurant, not even a map might have helped her find it now. It was tucked behind two historic buildings; they had to thread through one dark passageway to find the second passageway which led to the freshly painted sign of a lion leaping the moon. The shop itself lay behind a seven-foot-high wooden fence, impossible to see through, but the spaces between the slats let fingers of gilded light escape from within.

  “Not too inviting for the tourist trade, I’d think.” Greg opened the unlocked gate for her and then said in her ear, a familiar tickling rumble, “‘I’d turn back if I were you.’”

  “Greg, we’re not tourists. Just suck it up.” When the gate swung all the way open and when the light from inside struck them, she glanced over at him to make sure he was paying attention. He looked much as he always had done when they’d gone adventuring before—his own golden Quixote, hair falling over his eyes and intelligent curiosity marking his smile—but the pain-forged edge was new.

  If it was here, they would find the answer to his problem, she vowed silently, as she squeezed his
hand. With her other hand, however, she held her gold coin and made herself focus. After all, Mami hadn’t raised her granddaughter to be a fool.

  Behind the gate lay a courtyard of red brick, which shimmered in the golden light from two dozen lanterns. Anchoring the corners were four tiled, empty fountains, now silent and dry. Beyond the courtyard was a small building, its front wall made of glass; inside, more lantern light, and a man bent over a shop counter, leafing through a book.

  “Too many fountains to be the right answer to the riddle. Let’s take off, okay?” Greg said. She could tell that he wasn’t really joking, though, and she understood why.

  When Mami had begun teaching her all those years ago, she had sat small Linda down on the other side of a blessed candle and then tested her with various totems or things—a black feather, a dried bit of snakeskin, a river rock. “What do you feel?” Mami would say, in the heavy accent she’d never bothered to lose. “What do you see, chica?” The answer would be nothing, or a lingering trace of the dark, or nothing again, until that one day Mami had brought out a shark’s tooth, polished and clean. When Linda had reached across the flame and touched the tooth, however, she’d felt the poison at its heart, seen the blood it had taken rise to the surface. Mami had been so proud of her that day.

  Linda felt the same hidden poison and saw the same blood in The Lion’s Magick Shop. The thing in the night was at home here.

  But before she could get Greg and get the hell out clean, the man behind the counter looked up and smiled at them. “Ms. Ramirez, hello,” he said, his voice distorted by distance and glass. “Come on in, you and your…friend.”

  She had enough time to whisper to Greg, “You were right, this isn’t good. Be careful, we’ll leave as soon as we can,” before they opened the doors and went inside under Archer’s seemingly vague gaze.

  He was a dark-haired, weedy forty-something, with one of those pathetic wannabe-hipster goatees and a thick silver chain over his black turtleneck sweater. Nothing about him at first would have suggested the wrongness rising like foulest swamp-gas everywhere. Like its proprietor, the Lion’s Magick Shop also seemed innocuous enough on the surface. Although there were a fair amount of cheap trinkets, orbs, trade paperbacks about magic, and candles in its main display area, Linda could see in the dimly lit corners the real goods: a shelving unit holding jars of potion ingredients to one side; three floor to ceiling shelves of grimoires and histories to the other side; the shine of what looked like Spanish coins and rings collected in open glass containers, two of which were on the counter near Archer’s hand.

  The ceremonial knives arranged on the wall behind him were a pretty damn good clue to what lay beneath, however. Even she could smell the blood not quite cleaned on them. Who knew what sense-impressions Greg might be getting—

  At which point he stepped in front of her, blocking her from Archer. Although she pushed at his back, her long, lean husband had always been as impassable as a damn brick wall when he wanted to be. In his best soothing-the-jury voice: “Hello. Hope you don’t mind my coming along, Mr Archer.”

  “Not at all.” A nasty undercurrent in the tenor voice, a scrape of feet over brick and the slap of the book on the glass counter. “Now I think Ms. Ramirez asked about what book holdings I have?”

  “One specific book, actually, although I don’t know if you have it,” she said. When she managed to slip around Greg, he threw his arm in front of her like an iron bar. “Cool it, babe. Let me work,” she whispered, grabbing his hand and stepping up beside him. Then, “Well, Leo, as I told you on the phone, my father’s family comes from the Caribbean originally. From Hispaniola—my father’s traced our heritage back to the initial Spanish occupation.”

  “Of course,” he said. He moved with strange, turtle-ish deliberation from behind the counter. Enspelled, maybe? As he rounded the corner, he turned the small book he’d been reading away from them; the book’s leather cover shone dully, an ancient, heat-stained brown in the light. “I’ve got a couple of lovely nineteenth-century grimoires in stock. They were annotated by some little old women up in the Cordillera. Spells of protection, spells of aggression—fascinating what kinds of things can be passed down in some of the island families.”

  When his gaze went to her necklace—and it was her necklace that drew his attention, not her cleavage—she really began to worry. Still, just for a moment, she’d follow the plan. “That’s what I’ve heard, too. But I was looking for something earlier than that, closer to the first Spaniards’ time, and a friend of mine in San Juan who works in the archives gave me your name.”

  “Lovely. How nice to be known.” He smiled with a curl of weirdly stained lip.

  Greg interrupted, “Linda’s friend told us that you’ve researched magic use among the Spanish imperialists there?”

  “One, um, ‘imperialist’ in particular, yes. Juan Ponce de Leon. He looked for the Fountain of Youth here in St. Augustine, the old stories go, but this is only one point of his explorations.” Archer leaned back against the counter, his hand resting beside the book. “Which weren’t confined just to physical travel, either. His search for the fountain, for the drink that would change life, took him down other, stranger paths, and he was smart enough to write them all down.”

  “That’s what my friend in the archives said, although I’m not sure I believe it. I’ve never read anything about such an interest of De Leon’s anywhere else, and I’ve done a fair amount of research on the period.”

  “You haven’t read what I have, and I’d expected more from a person whose abuela no doubt should have taught her what to look for. Many people don’t believe in what lies beyond their immediate, extremely limited experience, but they’re delusional fools.” Archer’s fingers tapped against the counter top, a rattle of shark’s teeth, before he pushed himself up. As he turtled around the counter, he reached into the nearest jar of coins and pulled out one small piece. Folding it into his fist and seemingly idly rubbing that fist against his heart: “Haven’t you found that? People use the old names for a new world, even if it doesn’t look like the old one. They explain away what they can’t see in the mirror, but it’s still there.”

  The dark circles against black—she didn’t need her necklace to know that Archer was calling something nasty, some poison about to burst from his hollowness.

  Beside her, Greg began to growl in that uncanny way, not quite vocalized yet but threatening to erupt in his own version of a vampire lion’s roar, and with hand-clasp and glance he urged her backward toward the doors. His eyes were edged with gold now, his face starting to sharpen even more as she watched.

  She found it all the strangest comfort, actually. He might look like a monster, and he couldn’t be caught in the mirror any more, but she knew he wasn’t the thing in the night. His essence was real and unchanging.

  Archer said, “There are many ways to call what you need, as the Book of De Leon tells us. If you can’t find what you seek in one place, you seek in another.”

  The Book of De Leon. Seek. In her mind she heard the echo of Greg’s, “I know this is a terrible idea.”

  He dropped her hand. “Go, Linda,” he said, and he threw open the doors, letting in a rush of displaced sea breeze.

  As Greg touched the panes, however, Archer slammed the fist with the coin down upon the counter. The Lion’s Magick Shop echoed with the shiver-sounds of glass, rippling out from the public display cases to the secrets in the dark corners.

  And in the furthest corner of the shop, the floor to ceiling bookshelves began to break apart. A hidden door of magick and history opened behind it, tore the brick wall in two.

  Archer reached up for one of the knives on the wall. Greg pushed Linda through the doors—his shove so strong that she stumbled alone into the circle of light from two dozen lanterns. She fell in the spaces between the fountains, scraping her hands on the brick.

  Behind her she heard Greg growl again. But then came the weirdest sound, like a lapping big cat flicking
its raspy tongue against solid air. Each flick cut at her heart: torn skin, torn world, open wound.

  The thing had arrived.

  Ignoring her own hurts, she pushed herself up and looked back. Archer was going for something in the far corner, his slow body blocking her vision for a second, but then she could see. Her stupid Quixote was leaping toward the woman-thing just emerging from the darkness. Faster than he looked, just like always.

  Linda dove one hand into her bag for the weapons she’d brought, while the other hand reached for something else she’d brought along just in case.

  * * * *

  The vampire, the one who’d killed him, was stronger than he was. As soon as Greg touched her, he could taste the shadow of blood in his mouth—iron and bitter-dark, too close, too close. He trusted Linda was gone already, running for safety.

  Then, thrown by the woman-thing, he slammed against the wall.

  Laughing, she said, “Oh, pretty one, this is why I had to seek you, find you. You need to be taught your new world’s ways—you don’t turn on the one who makes you.”

  He attacked her again. Not that he knew what that would accomplish, not that he had any idea how one killed a vampire in a fistfight, but anger and hunger drove him now.

  A moment of awkward grappling with fists and feet, a moment of merchandise and display cases crashing down, before he got his hands to her neck—and then he felt the gold chain he’d seen earlier, gleaming as she’d disappeared into the dark. It was his chain, given by Linda, blessed by Mami.

  The vampire grinned at him with fangs descended, and he remembered how she’d smiled that night when he’d asked if she needed any help. “When I was hunting that night, I saw you, all tired and helpful and pretty, and I knew you were a prize. But when I took you, I found out how much better you were—oh, not just the delicious way you tasted, but this gold you wore. My Leo and I came back for you, but you had disappeared before I could help you rise.”