I wished I didn't look so uncombed, so stereotypically dangerous—a redhead, in a leather jacket, T-shirt, and jeans (all black), and fists clenched into balls in my pockets. I sucked some water from a water fountain, and it went down my throat and sat in my uncomprehending stomach like liquid mercury.
I went into ladies' bathrooms until I found one that wasn't particularly crowded. There were three women before the mirror and none in the stalls. I washed my face in the sink, drying it with paper towels. One of the women left. I turned on an electric hand dryer and roasted my hands in the blast of hot air, careful not to look up, not to look anything but bored and busy. Another woman left, leaving just us—me and a yuppie in her thirties, dressed in a summer suit and pearls and white tennis shoes. She was compulsively putting on lipstick, checking the contours.
I gazed into the mirror at her. She looked into it at me, then turned and looked at me. "Is there something I could help you with?" she asked, her voice crisp, guarded.
"Yeah," I said, "actually." I smiled.
I need you to do what I say.
"Sure," she said. "Name it." She capped her lipstick and put it back into her overnight bag.
I angled my head towards the handicapped stall, and obligingly she went towards it. "Go in," I said. "Sit down."
She did so. I brought her bag in with her, and set it down under the toilet-paper dispenser. The stalls here were brushed steel, anti-graffiti, easy to clean. Good. I closed the stall door behind us.
She smelled great. I'd never encountered that particular perfume before, but it was woodsy, smoky, intimate, like a men's cologne but lighter. And her hair was really quite nice. She had money. "I need some money," I said.
Obligingly she opened her overnight bag, took out her wallet, and handed me five twenties. She smiled as I took it and slipped it into my back pocket. If I wasn't positive she was under my control, I would have sworn she was just doing this on her own. She seemed so cheerful about the whole thing. I concentrated on this sensation, the sheer pleasure I was getting from being near to her, and how happy she was to be helping this down-on-her-luck young woman who was just trying to get home, and communicated it back to her.
"Hand me your wrist," I told her. "Relax." I rubbed the veins under the tan skin, tapped her thumb, making them rise a little bit. "This won't hurt." I put my mouth over the wrist, found the vein with my tongue, and bit it.
I almost didn't stop in time. Really, I should have stopped before I did; she was passed out cold when I finally lifted my head and took a breath. It all happened so fast. I just couldn't get how Daniel and Ricari ever managed to control themselves, to just take a little. I threw back my head and sucked in the air, feeling it mingle with the oxygen already present in the blood, and stood up. I took a moment to smooth the woman's hair behind her ear, dab the little wounds in her hand with toilet paper, zip up her travel bag, and take one last deep breath of her amazing scent, which, it was becoming apparent, was a combination of her particular cologne and the smell of her body. I knew I would never smell it again.
I returned to the bar, where Daniel had downed two shot glasses of what smelled like whiskey. He looked vaguely drunk. "Any time," I said casually to him.
I fed him in the darkest corner of one of the parking garages. He slurped at the wound hungrily, sucking at it even when the skin had closed over the blunt cuts his teeth had made. He finished with a weary sigh. "You're good for me," he said.
"You're not good for me," I told him, feeling the strength and security that I'd had so briefly gone, gone into sustaining him.
He smiled crookedly. "I'm not good for anybody."
"I wish I could have a drink."
"You can. It just has flavor. Though the ones I drank got me kind of foggy. I think my body can't just ignore it right now." His eyes were brighter, clearer, and his grip on my hand was strong and steady. "Not too much longer, dearest, I promise. Only another hour, and then forty-five minutes on the plane, and then—"
"Then we see Ricari."
"Then we see Ricari," he echoed. "And find out whether we're saved, or screwed."
That last hour in the airport was hell. I went so far as to buy us sunglasses to protect our eyes from the harsh lights, and I was humiliated to my toes to look so stereotypically like vampires. I wanted to hunt again, but there wasn't time. I lay with my head in Daniel's lap while he stroked my hair, winding the curls around his fingers. I had lost my best friend, my little brother, and my lover, all at one stroke. That, on top of the death of Mimsy and Chloe (at my own hands!), on top of the physical pain and fear and disgust, had brought me lower than I thought I could go.
Nonetheless, I wanted to see Ricari again. Simply for the contrast, if nothing else. The more time I spent with Daniel, the more I missed Ricari's simple piety and gentleness, his oversized morals, his protectiveness of me. So much he didn't tell me, since it was better if I didn't know, and I had found it all out the hard way. He had tried so hard. I had no idea how he'd react to all of this.
One A.M. shuttle flight to San Francisco International Airport. We got on the plane at a sleepwalk, got off the plane in a white-eyed twitch of anxiety. I got a taxi the conventional way, and let the miles add up. "I don't even know if he's there anymore," I said, trying to chew on one of my nails. It wouldn't budge.
"He's here," Daniel said, his eyes unfocused. "I can feel him."
I watched him slipping into reverie. "All the way out here? How does it feel?"
"You'll know when you're separated from me. I'm with you all the time now. But when I'm gone, you'll feel like a part of you has gone with me."
I looked away then. Was he aware, then, of my desire to get away from him? I knew he couldn't help it, he was just trying to stay alive, but I just couldn't forgive him for abandoning me when he knew I'd need him, when he knew I'd be vulnerable. I was in no mood to be noble.
"So odd," he went on, "to be in the presence of a father and a child, at the same time. An extraordinary feeling. Quite rare, I'd imagine."
"Yes," I said.
"Oh, Orfeo! How I loved you!"
I shushed him, anxious for quiet now that we were in the city.
It was strange to be back. It was the very depth of summer, and the streets were warm and a fog was rolling in slowly over Twin Peaks. It was beautiful, but claustrophobic, after the infinite space of Los Angeles. It no longer felt like home.
The cab driver let us off in front of the Saskatchewan, and I paid the thirty-three-dollar fare. Daniel climbed out and shivered in the chilly fog. "Saskatchewan," he sounded out slowly. "This almost looks beneath him."
"Is he here?"
"Oh, yes. I do believe he's anticipating us."
The desk clerk, the same old man as before, had fallen asleep watching TV. Daniel and I slipped silently past him to the elevator. I punched the button for the ninth floor. "I can't believe he's still here," I remarked. "I thought he'd have killed himself before now."
"It takes Ricari a million years to do anything. That's why he's so bloody old." We shared a dirty snicker. "He works on nineteenth-century time."
"I think this place is perfect for him," I said.
We got off the elevator. The door to Suite 900 was open.
Ricari was sitting on the edge of his gold chaise longue, staring at the floor, counting out the rosary. He seemed so tiny, a little dejected elf, hair tucked neatly behind ears. He wore all black, was barefoot. His old aura filled the room with a quiet hum.
"Guten abend, Orfeo," Daniel said with quiet respect.
Ricari looked up. "How could you?" he said.
Daniel did not react well. He tossed his head like a sulky teenager. "Oh, God, don't start."
"I'm not talking to you," Ricari said. He looked piercingly at me.
I blinked. "What?"
"Daniel, well, it's too late for Daniel. We all know that. But didn't you learn anything from me?"
"I did," I said. "I didn't mean it. Anything. I'm sorry. This shouldn't
have happened. But it did. And now you have to help us." I went to him and took his hand. It felt remarkable—he had had less blood in the last month than either Daniel or I had in the last twenty-four hours, but he was very warm and alive and solid and smooth. His hands were like sunlit-carved alabaster. I had forgotten how beautiful his hands were. I rubbed them against my cheek without being able to stop myself, in love with their texture. I was in love with everything: the room, the light, the inexorable, subtle scent of him that I was too crude to perceive before.
He stroked my face for a second, then threw his arms about me. "Oh, Ariane!" he sighed. He covered my hair with kisses.
At the same moment, we both looked up at Daniel. He had quietly drawn the door shut behind him and was staring at it. Ricari gently edged me away, touching my shoulder, edging his fingers under the leather. "Daniel," he said. "You look like hell."
"I made a mistake," Daniel said.
Ricari folded his hands in his lap. "I don't want to help you. It's very tempting to let you stay like this, to feel pain and longing without release, for once. Perhaps you'll understand what I go through. What Ariane goes through. What everyone has to go through." He sighed and drew his fingers through his hair. "But then you'll just take that as an excuse to run amok and kill as many as you like, maybe betray all of us, out of revenge."
Daniel turned then, his eyes wide. "I wouldn't—"
Ricari stopped him with a subtle gesture of his hand. "I know you, Daniel. I know your nature. I'd rather not have that on my conscience. You nearly destroyed me once. I won't let you destroy me once and for all. I'd rather simply be rid of you. You're like a rat; you'll survive. You'll get through."
"Orfeo, you've never—"
"Shut up. I'm talking."
"You're having a goddamn monologue, you mean."
I stared at them, a smile darting across my face too quickly for me to do anything but cover it with my hand. The two of them! How in the world did they ever stop fighting long enough to fall in love? I could imagine their terrible fights, Daniel cocky with death, and Ricari growing more and more frustrated by the minute. I didn't doubt that it frequently ended with blows.
"If you'd be quiet, you'd hear what I'm actually saying. I'll give you just enough. Just enough to get you back to where you were before. And then you leave. You leave me, and you leave Ariane. You've ruined her life enough already."
"She's mine," Daniel said petulantly.
"Do you want me to leave you two alone?" I asked.
They ignored me. "You don't know the first thing," Ricari snapped, his cheeks coloring. "The first thing. You—you don't even know where to start. Haven't you got any sense? Let them draw four heartbeats of blood from you, no more, no less! I told you that."
"You didn't tell me it was a rule."
"I never thought you'd be so stupid as to reproduce! Let alone three times. And three mistakes. Thank God she's all right. Second—stay with her. That means you're there. You wash them, you help them understand their pain. I was with you. Wouldn't you give Ariane the same courtesy?"
"I was hurt. I was drugged. I was confused. I wanted to go somewhere and lie down and sort things out."
Ricari threw up his hands.
I stood up. "I'm going to go downstairs and buy a gun and shoot both of you," I shouted, and both of them were silent and stared at me with astonishment. "Fuck it, OK? It's done. It sucked, but it's done. We need to maybe concentrate on the matter at hand. Didn't you just say you wanted Daniel the hell out of here? I think you want to keep him here so you can bicker with him a little while longer, live out the old days when it was just you two in a tavern throwing glasses at each other. Well, it's cute, but I'm just not interested. I'm hungry, and I'm tired, and I really want to either feed myself, or get some sleep, preferably feed myself. You guys can play Punch and Judy while I'm actually getting something accomplished."
"Wait." Ricari rose off the chaise.
I stormed out and left the hotel, shutting my mind to their demanding, confused voices. I was on my old turf, home or no home, and I had some money in my pocket, and there had to be something I could do. I bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and walked until I had smoked four cigarettes. The act of holding a cigarette, smoking it, comforted me a little. I was getting lightheaded.
I went to my old apartment. Someone else was already living there; I could see the red glow of their digital clock shining through the ground-floor window. Lighting another cigarette, I stepped forward and touched the grate. It was cold and slick on my fingers. It was as though I had never existed. I wanted to ring the bell, see who occupied my home, whether or not the tiny blood drops still stained the living room carpet. Nonetheless, I turned away and went back into the fog.
In Golden Gate Park, I took a sleeping homeless man surprised that he didn't wake up as I pressed my teeth against his bearded throat. I didn't even find his smell offensive; it was strong and rank and his shirt collar greasy with sebum and sweat, but I appreciated it with savor. His blood was thick, but undernourished, and I needed a lot. When I was finally able to tear myself away, he breathed once more and then was still. I stepped back, then bent forward and covered him again with his cheap blanket and plastic tarp. At least he was happy when he died. I clung to that notion; at least it was pleasurable, what I did. It hurt for a second, and then joy beyond compare shot through the body. I remembered that much. There had to be some reason why I let Ricari and Daniel have me whenever they wanted. I began to walk again.
I found myself in a phone booth on Van Ness, calling the only number that I could remember, the number to John Thurbis's apartment. It rang so many times that I nearly hung up and left him alone, but I wanted to talk to someone. At last the line connected, and I listened to the dull soft fumblings on the other line.
"Hello, it's three in the morning, you better have a good excuse."
"Hi, John. It's me, Ariane."
There was a long silence. I said, "Hello, hello," at the phone, wondering if the connection had been lost. The quarter clanked into the machine. "John?"
"It's really you?"
"Yeah. Can I come see you?"
"You're in town?"
"Yeah. I'm on Van Ness."
"God." He began to laugh. "Yeah, I'll be here."
"I'll be there as soon as I can." I hung up, scanning the street for a taxi.
Seven dollars later I got out in front of the tall flat in the Duboce Triangle. It had a "FOR RENT" sign wired to the front gate, and John's number on it. I stepped up and hit the buzzer, and he came down to let me in.
He was wearing a bathrobe over a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, which he never wore when I was with him. His hair was quite long and it suited him, especially tousled from bed. He locked the door behind him and we went upstairs. I wanted to fling myself at his back and hug him to death, but I didn't allow myself to touch him. I sucked in the smell of him, the gentle purring of his blood in the quiet.
John turned on the lamp. "I want to make sure it's really you," he said, shining his glasses on his bathrobe and putting them back on again. "I keep thinking I see you in the street, but it's never really you. I've gawped at more women with red curly hair than I like to admit. I've been… I've been going mad."
I sat down on his couch.
"Where have you been?" he asked softly.
"L.A.," I said.
He looked confused, justifiably. "L.A.? Why?"
"I just ended up down there," I said. "It's actually a really long story."
He smiled. "You know, I got your letter."
"What letter?"
"The letter you wrote me. In April, I think it must have been. They found it in your apartment. You knew they were going to go over your apartment. Everyone thinks that you're probably dead. You've never just gone missing in your life. You haven't used your bank accounts, all your clothes were still there, you still had half a carton of milk in the fridge—we thought 'alien abduction' or something. Actually we were quite sure you'd
committed suicide. The department's pretty much given you a funeral by now. Police have even practically given up looking for you. You're probably going to end up on TV sometime soon."
"No," I said, aghast. "No, no, no, that can't happen. If you've done anything to—if you've—"
"I gave up," he replied. "I determined that you could only be dead, because you wouldn't just disappear without telling me, without letting me know where you were."
"I couldn't." I shook my head. "I couldn't. It's such a long story."
"It's not a long story. You fell in love with someone else. You went away with him. He sounds like a real character. Want a cup of tea? I have a pot ready."
"Did you read the letter? Really read it? It was real. I tell you, it's real. All of it's real."
"All of what?" He was in the kitchen, puttering about with the teapot and coffee mugs and sugar.
I sighed. "I fell in love," I said slowly, "with a vampire. A real vampire."
He joined me on the couch and handed me the tea. "A blood fetishist? I read about those. Or just a tall, skinny guy all dressed in black? I remember you used to have a taste for those."
"No. I mean… pointy fangs, white skin, drinks blood to survive, bleh bleh bleh." I held up my hands and hunched my shoulders, Bela Lugosi style. "Could crush your skull with his thumb, can't die, the whole works."
John's forehead was wrinkling interestingly. "What?"
"Like this." And I lifted my upper lip to show him my fangs.
He actually jumped, spilled his tea on the sofa. "What the hell are those?"
"Those are my teeth, John."
Now he was shaking, nervously rubbing his hands together. "So let me get this straight… you fell in love… with a vampire… and he made you into a vampire… and then you went to L.A.?"
"Well, no, I fell in love with a vampire, and we had a fight, so he sent me to L.A. to this other vampire, and he made me into… well, you get the picture."
"No, I don't think I do at all."
"It's true," was all I could say. I sipped my tea.
"That's… that's insane… not to mention impossible… not to mention totally… totally incomprehensible…" He rubbed his chin, bit his fingernails, glanced about the room in a panic, as if looking for some device, some prop, that might help him explain this. "Ariane, tell me this isn't true, tell me I'm still asleep, I'm dreaming."
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