“If there’s more than one,” Spencer says, “then we don’t know what’s out there right now. We could be out-powered and outnumbered.”
I scratch my neck to subdue the prickling. “What’s to keep them from coming inside?”
“Besides the locks on the doors? Nothing.” Regina paces, looking ready to bite the head off a chipmunk. “The Control won’t give us extra security based on one phone threat, and they won’t change their minds over an intern’s goose bumps.”
“You don’t have any weapons?” I ask them. “Stakes and stuff?”
They look aghast at the mere suggestion. I guess it’s no different than humans who won’t keep a gun in the house.
“Not unless you count Franklin’s pencil stash.” Regina crosses to the credenza next to the sofa, opens the top drawer, and pulls out a white box. “You might stop one of us with a handful of these, but they wouldn’t even make Gideon sneeze.”
I suddenly wish I’d stayed in bed. “So what do we do?”
Regina puts the pencils back. “We know he’s there, but he doesn’t know we know.”
“That’s our advantage, then.” I sit in one of the empty chairs. “We know we can’t beat him by confronting him, so we act normal and wait for him to slip up.”
Regina gives me an icy look. “That’s what I was about to say.” She comes back to her seat and picks up the cards.
I pull my chair closer to the table. “Tell me more about Gideon.”
Regina deftly shuffles the cards without looking at them. “He and all the other geezers live out in the sticks where no one’ll confuse them.”
“Confuse them?”
“When we get old, we get freaky,” Jim says. “Gideon runs a kinda sanctuary.”
“How long can a vampire live?”
Noah answers this time. “Most live about eighty years after our turning.” He straightens his pile of chips. “But a lucky one can live centuries.”
Regina says, “I hear there are a couple two-hundred-fifty-year-olds working down in Colonial Williamsburg.”
“That’s a myth.” Spencer points to the cards. “Let’s go.”
They deal me in, and my chips start to trickle away. We don’t speak much, even between hands, each of us listening for signs of encroachment from outside. To distract myself, I focus on learning the vampires’ various styles of play.
Noah is as conservative as they come, while Jim is at the other extreme, betting expansively and impulsively. I’m coming to realize his hippie veneer is just that; beneath the serene trappings of peace, love, and happiness lies a wild animal. Of the five, he probably has the highest body count. The fact that I can even speculate on such a topic gives me the chilly willies.
Regina plays according to the numbers, calculating the odds of each hand with the speed of a supercomputer. Spencer is a poker genius, surprising me with flashes of superhuman intuition. Sometimes his eyes go eerily vacant, like a shut-down robot, but maybe he’s accessing some kind of collective card-player unconscious.
After an hour without incident, Regina goes to their apartment and returns with three beers. She hands one to Spencer and one to me.
“If you’re such a good con artist,” she says, “how come you’re so poor? Did you ship all the scam money to Switzerland for your retirement?”
“No one uses Switzerland anymore—too strict.” I shuffle the cards, ineptly. “New Zealand is the hot new place for offshore accounts.”
“Is that where your money is?” Jim asks.
“What money? I’m small-time. I only use scores to pay off student loans.” I set the shuffled deck in front of Regina to cut. “I’m allergic to debt.”
“Smart,” Noah says. “Debt is a kind of slavery.”
“It’s a commitment.” Regina taps the deck in an offhand show of trust. “Con artists are afraid of commitment, aren’t they?”
Instead of answering the question, I start dealing five-card stud, which automatically cuts off conversation, per Spencer’s rules. The cards feel crisp and slick; I bet they use a new deck every night.
After the hand, I change the subject. “How are your podcasts coming?” In response to their blank looks, “That’s the thing where I record you yammering for fifteen minutes, then people can download it onto their computers and listen to it anywhere in the world.”
Regina recovers first. “I thought I’d talk about Sunday matinees at CBGB, the big hardcore scene and the fights that broke out with the pigs in uniform.”
“I’m gonna do rock trivia,” Jim announces. Everyone else rolls their eyes.
“Of course you are,” Noah says.
Jim’s head hoards useless knowledge like a hamster’s cheeks hoard granola. He pulls a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Ciara, you’re a typical civilian, I’ll test my trivia on you. If you know the answer, the question’s too easy.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“First category, real names. Ready? Robert Zimmerman.”
I snap my fingers. “Bob Dylan.”
“Just a warm-up. McKinley Morganfield.”
“Um—”
“Muddy Waters,” he says without giving me a chance to think. “Famous quotes category: Who called rock ‘n’ roll ‘the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear’?”
I shrug.
Jim arches one brown eyebrow. “Frank Sinatra.”
“Hoser,” Regina adds.
Jim flips the paper over. “Bonus question: What Flint, Michigan, band generated the original members of Grand Funk Railroad?”
Noah and Regina groan. Spencer furrows his brow.
Jim looks at the other DJs. “Terry Knight and the Pack. You guys didn’t know that?”
“No one gives a shit about Grand Funk Railroad.” Regina fake-spits on the floor.
“That’s the point. The more obscure the trivia, the better.”
“You need a mix of easy questions,” I tell him. “You can’t talk down to people if you want them to tune in again.”
“Excuse me.” Regina slaps the bottom of her cigarette pack against the heel of her hand. “How long have you been a DJ?”
“That’s not the point.”
“You think you know everything because you’re from the so-called present, but you can’t even get your boyfriend to join you there.”
“Shane’s not my boyfriend.”
“Does he know that?” We lock eyes as Regina pulls a cigarette from the pack with her teeth and lights it. I hear the others shift in their seats. Finally Regina looks at them. “Leave us.”
Spencer looks at his watch. “Almost bedtime, anyway.” He and Noah stand up.
Jim stays seated, gathering the cards. “I want to see them fight.”
Noah gives Jim’s hair a yank. “You heard Regina.”
“Ow. Douche bag.” He gets up and slouches after them, rubbing his head. They enter the hallway and leave the door open behind them.
I turn back to Regina. “Shane said you broke it off years ago, so what do you care?”
“We stopped screwing, but he’ll always be my progeny, however freakishly oedipal that sounds.” She puffs smoke in my direction. “Either start taking him seriously or end it now.”
“I do take Shane seriously.” I inhale her cloud of smoke without wrinkling my nose. “I would never hurt him.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how easy it is to do.” Her eyes turn sad around the edges. “It’s like saying you won’t step on ants.”
The music fades from the speaker over our heads, and Shane’s voice comes on.
“WVMP 94.3, five fifty-four on a Friday. Weatherman says it’s another hot one, high of ninety-five and humid, so wear as little as you can get away with today.” His words reach thousands, but I feel like he’s speaking to me. “If you aren’t awake by now, a little White Zombie’ll fix that. Good morning, and good night.”
The first throbbing chords of “More Human than Human” stra
in the ceiling speakers.
Regina looks toward the stairs. “It’s light out by now. Safe for you to leave.”
Sounds like a hint. “I’ve got work to do. Think I’ll just head to my desk.”
She folds her arms and leans back in her chair. “Be careful.”
“I will.” I know she’s not talking about my safety. I put my feet up on the next chair and sip my beer, which tastes odd considering it’s almost six in the morning.
Regina finally sighs, shoves her chair back from the table, and slinks through the doorway to the hall.
When her footsteps fade, I walk to the door and peer around the corner into the studio. Shane is inside the control room jamming to the schlock-metal riffs as he programs the system to play an hour of paid programming after his broadcast. He’s facing the other direction, so he doesn’t see me watching.
I pull back and shut the door, then turn for the stairs.
Figures. I’ve finally convinced myself he won’t hurt me, and now I have a bigger, more realistic worry.
That I’ll hurt him.
17
Waiting for the Miracle
“We’ll start with the bands you liked when you were alive.”
I lower my voice at the end of the sentence. Probably not necessary, given the volume of the new Nine Inch Nails CD grinding out of the store’s speakers. Record & Tape Traders is holding a midnight madness sale, thus allowing me to bring Shane here for an after-dark lesson.
His gaze wanders over the selection of T-shirts and posters on the store’s wall. He won’t look at the CDs in the bin next to us. The major bands are in alphabetical order, but the miscellaneous ones at the beginning of each letter are all mixed up.
I guide him over to the G’s. “You remember Green Day, right?” I hold up their first major release, [i]Dookie,[/i] feeling like a remedial math teacher with a flash card.
“One of my favorites. 1994.” He takes the CD case and caresses it like a Ming vase.
“In 2000 they came out with Warning, which got critical acclaim, though some of their fans thought it wasn’t punk enough. But everyone’s got to grow up sometime, right? Except you, of course.”
The notion makes Shane smile a little, as I figured it might. Staying young and surly is probably the only thing he truly loves about being a vampire. He doesn’t reach for Warning, though.
“But the big one,” I continue, “was American Idiot in September 2004.” I display the CD, which features a hand grenade in the shape of a bleeding human heart. “One of the most important releases of this millennium.”
Shane hesitates before reaching for the CD. “Why?”
“First of all, the music is amazing. It’s a rock opera.”
“Hmm.” He turns it over and smooths the plastic wrapper—carefully, as if it might be covered in anthrax.
“But its influence was more than musical. It was released right before the elections. Green Day was part of this movement in pop music trying to mobilize young people to vote. And it worked. College kids lined up at the polls on Election Day—at your old school, some waited as long as eight hours in the rain.”
Shane continues the blank look he began around the middle of my speech. “Is Bill Clinton still president?”
I stare at him, the severity of his fossilization finally slamming my gut. Then the corner of his mouth twitches.
I huff in relief. “You son of a bitch.”
“Psych,” he says. “I’m not that dead. Yet.” He taps the CD against his palm. “Also, I heard Green Day did a rock opera but never bothered to check it out. I’ll try this, but don’t expect miracles.”
I beckon him down the aisle, past a group of multiply pierced teenage boys arguing over whether AFI is a true emo band.
Shane shoots past me, toward the P’s, and picks up Prince’s Purple Rain CD. “I used to have this on vinyl. That movie inspired me to learn the guitar.” He gazes through the far wall. “I took my first girlfriend to see it.”
His faint smile makes me wonder what Prince’s royal hotness inspired Shane’s girlfriend to do that night. I pick up another copy and check the issue date—1984. I was still in diapers.
Back to the nineties. I lead him to the M’s. “I’ve heard you play Morphine on your show.”
His face lights up. “You like them?”
“Baritone sax, two-string bass, and a drum. Their sound is detached and ironic yet somehow sensual.” Ew, I sound like a rock critic. “1993’s Cure For Pain is some of the smokiest, sexiest music I’ve ever heard.” I pull out one of their newer CDs, and this time Shane grabs it, handing me the others to hold.
“Are they still together?”
“The lead singer died in ninety-nine.”
Shane looks at me, stricken. “Mark Sandman died?”
“Heart attack during a concert in Rome.”
“That sucks.” He frowns as he examines the track list. “I liked him.”
I inch closer. “Why does it bother you that he died?”
Shane scrunches his face at me. “Shouldn’t it bother everyone when someone dies?”
“Last night a car crash killed four people outside of town. Does that bother you as much?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t know those people.”
“You didn’t know Mark Sandman.”
“It’s different.” He runs his thumb over the corners of the CD. “I felt like I knew him from his music.”
“What else bothers you about it?”
Shane scratches his neck and looks away. “The world lost something when he died.”
I point to the Morphine sign in the bin. “We haven’t lost him. We can listen to him any time we want.”
“We can’t hear the stuff he hasn’t written yet. Everything he never did, it all died with him.”
“Yes!” I clasp Shane’s hand. “Listen to what you just said. You’re thinking about all the Morphine albums that will never happen. As if you could learn to care about new music. As if you could learn, period.”
He curls his thumb around my hand. “Why do you care so much about what I care about?”
“I don’t want you to live like this forever, stuck in 1995. You’re not happy now, and as time goes on you’ll be less happy.” I tighten my grip. “I don’t want you to fade.”
Even under the fluorescent light his pale blue eyes seem to glow when he looks at me that way. The music growls above us as he leans over to kiss me.
For some reason, I keep thinking the kisses will become routine, that each one couldn’t possibly be better or different than its predecessors.
I am wrong.
I like being wrong.
I thread my hand through Shane’s hair and pull him into a deeper kiss. One of the teens behind me murmurs, “Yeah, dude, hit that.” We ignore him.
An adult voice beside us says, “Please tell me you’re off the clock.”
We break apart to see Elizabeth. I almost don’t recognize her in casual wear, though even in jeans and a V-neck T-shirt, her body could make a moldy cadaver sit up and beg.
“I’m tutoring Shane on new music.”
“He looks like an attentive student.” She winks at me, which I take as a positive sign.
“Good sale, huh?” I tilt my head to read the CDs in her hand. The top one is a collection of Rodgers and Hammerstein show tunes. “Franklin and I are about to close a cross-promotional deal with the store. They just have to work it out with headquarters to make sure they can align with more than one station.”
Shane and Elizabeth, instead of listening to my fascinating speech on radio business, are giving each other flat, steady glares, like enemy cats separated by a window.
I try to make nice. “So, Elizabeth, thanks for giving the va—the DJs a chance to survive.”
Her eyes narrow, still locked on Shane’s. “They’d survive without the station. Someone will always take care of them. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Make sure we rest easy in the arms of the Control?”
Shane looks like he wants to rinse his mouth after the last two words.
She waits for a pair of magenta-haired college girls to pass. “Many humans would long for such a comfortable retirement.”
“Comfort? In one of their prisons, feeding off blood bank leftovers until they’re so weak they can barely walk?”
“They’re not prisons, they’re refuges.”
“What kind of refuge locks its residents inside?” He smacks his forehead in mock surprise. “Oh, wait, I forgot. The doors unlock during the day in case anyone wants to shuffle off their immortal coil.”
She glares at him and speaks in a tight, hushed voice. “Without the Control’s retirement program, where would all those poor old vampires go when the world is too much for them?”
“Please. Save it for someone who doesn’t know better. And this Skywave takeover threat had better be about money, not about finding an excuse to ‘retire’ the six of us.”
“Of course. It’s just business.”
“So when the station turns a profit,” Shane says, “you’ll leave us alone.”
She laughs and runs her fingers through her shaggy, Jennifer-Aniston-second-season-of-Fn’ewA hair. “We’re so far in the red, it would take a miracle to bring it back by the end of the decade, much less the end of the summer.”
“A miracle, huh?” Shane takes the CDs from me and loops an arm over my shoulder. “Guess we’d better get to work on that.”
On the drive back to the station, Shane doesn’t speak, just stares out the window, turning his new CDs over in his hands. Even in a stack of three, they’re in alphabetical order.
His silence gives me a chance to ponder our encounter with Elizabeth. Shane said that a steady diet of bank blood weakens a vampire, but Elizabeth seems awfully vibrant for someone who claims to follow the Red Cross Plan.
As we pull onto the long gravel driveway, I finally break the silence. “How do you know so much about the vampire retirement homes?”
“I lived in one for two years,” he says without turning from the window. “Maybe ‘lived’ isn’t the right word. I existed there, in a special rehab ward for young vampires who aren’t too crazy about their new way of life. That ward’s locked twenty-four seven.” He gives me a little smirk. “Which was why I learned to pick locks.”
Wicked Game Page 16
