Only Donnie knew about Nyx.
And now, more than likely, Gina did, too.
As Geraldo, he was an attractive gay man. But as Gina, she was a diva who rocked the stage.
Not my kind of performance. I was something different. I did something different.
But Gina was famous in the community. Everyone knew and loved Gina. Badass queen.
Geraldo was, by comparison, a quiet man. He kept to himself most of the time. From the little I’d gotten to know of him—I’d barely spoken five words to Geraldo even though I’d had many conversations with Gina—he was an artist who spent most of his time painting in his studio apartment in the Power and Light District.
Something about being Gina transformed Geraldo into a force. The quiet and introspective artist became a loud, impossible-not-to-notice diva who could wrap crowds around her little finger. Or around her little…
You get the point.
But it had been a long night. After nearly being bitten as Gina by a vampire, I doubted Geraldo had slept much at all.
I was worried.
And honestly, a part of me felt like teaming up with the vampire who’d attacked Gina was just wrong… It made me feel dirty. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t just give Wolfgang a clear answer.
I’d only been here once before. I wanted to purchase a painting from Geraldo for Donnie. A gift to say “thank you” for all the ways she’d supported me. I’d commissioned the piece—a vision of Marilyn Monroe in the present day. Donnie fashioned herself after the classic beauty. Donnie even went for a vintage style which, in truth, flattered her body well.
Donnie loved the painting. It wasn’t just Marilyn—it was Marilyn in our world. Our city set as a backdrop. In fact, one could make the case that it wasn’t Marilyn at all. It was Donnie, in all her beauty, taking on the world.
After all, Donnie didn’t have a glamorous job. But she was accomplished. She was a pharmacist. She had a respectable job—but the way I saw her, she was more than a pill-cutter. She’d found her place. She had her struggles, like most of us, but she was happy.
I was happy for Donnie. And I also envied her for it.
When I thought about that painting, though, I also thought of Geraldo. Geraldo had done a masterful job. But his story was different. Two totally different personas, two different lives.
Earlier in the evening it was Gina… that was the persona that was attacked.
I was preparing to visit Geraldo when I mounted my motorcycle. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a car or anything. And perhaps, since I was so prone to “draining out” if I got hurt, it was reckless. But I’d snagged a Thruxton RS in jet black, a retro-looking bike. And when I rode it with my red Jimmy Choos and my white, flowing hair blowing in the wind from beneath my helmet… well, I turned a lot of heads.
And I couldn’t get enough of the thrill. The wind in my face…
Momentary illusions of freedom.
I had to find as many of those moments as possible.
I dismounted my bike, parking it in a lot across the street from Geraldo’s apartment. I made my way to Geraldo’s door and knocked.
But it was Gina, surprisingly, who answered the door. Her eyeliner was smeared and running down her cheeks.
“Gina,” I said, “are you okay?”
Gina looked at me. Her whole body was shaking. “What are you, Nicky…”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you. How fast you moved… how you took him down, it down, whatever that monster was.”
“He was a vampire, Gina.”
“And you’re a vampire, too?”
I smiled. “No. I’m something else.”
Gina nodded and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “But you wouldn’t hurt me… You wouldn’t hurt people like that.”
Gina’s words cut me to the core. When I was purely one of the “Neck,” the name used to describe my kind, I had killed humans. I had seduced and lured vulnerable people not unlike Gina into my lair. I’d eaten people, for heaven’s sake!
Not like heaven had anything to do with it.
Who was I kidding? I was every bit the monster Wolfgang was… that Alice was.
Arguably, I was worse.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to be sure you were okay. I expected I’d be seeing Geraldo tonight.”
Gina shrugged. “Tonight we’re one and the same… just scared. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Sometimes talking is the worst thing you can do. There weren’t words I could speak—nothing that was true, anyway—to make Gina, or Geraldo, feel better.
So I gave my friend a hug. I allowed Gina to cry into my shoulder for what felt like ten straight minutes.
“If you need anything,” I said, “call me, okay?”
“Thanks Nicky,” Gina said. “I will.”
I sighed as I headed down the stairs and walked out of the apartment. I mounted my motorcycle and revved it up.
Wolfgang was right: I was a monster every bit as vile as he was. Who was I to even consider that I was somehow above him? I hated Wolfgang for what he’d done to Gina. But as the wind blew in my face as I made the short, ten-minute drive home in the middle of the night, I couldn’t help but picture all the faces, all the humans I’d made into meals over the centuries.
All the bodies that were on my hands…
I didn’t deserve friends like Donnie or Gina. I wasn’t a part of their world.
I was what I was.
Except when I was what I was, I didn’t have a conscience. I didn’t feel guilt. I wasn’t any angrier about it than a rancher when he slaughters a heifer.
But that was before I’d walked a mile in a human’s shoes… and certainly before I’d walked a mile in nine-inch heels.
6
I’M A NIGHT owl. Always have been.
Despite my regular gig at Leotards and Lace—even if Donnie didn’t wholly approve—I needed a little extra daytime work to pay my share of the rent and make my motorcycle payment.
Another thing that’s shitty about being human: the constant need to acquire more money.
So I had a second job at Leotards and Lace. Not nearly so glamorous.
I cleaned the place every day.
A challenging job for most people. They used to have a whole team that came in during the day to do it. But I moved fast. And I had an affinity for working with water—which is generally an essential part of cleaning shit.
I could clean the whole place, spick and span, in a couple hours.
It took a little convincing for me to get the job. I needed a day to prove I could do it alone. Totally alone.
Social anxiety—that was my excuse. I don’t work well with others watching.
You’d think that Tevin, the club owner, would call bullshit on that one. I mean, I was a performer. Why would he believe I had issues working with people watching? That was sort of the nature of the gig…
But as a drag-queen club owner, Tevin didn’t question it. Most of his performers were very different on stage than in virtually any other context. It’s not universally true, of course. Some of the queens were 24/7 fabulous—the extroverts. But you might be surprised how many queens are naturally shy, introverted men who only come out of their shells when assuming their drag personas and taking the stage.
That I’d have different anxieties in my regular life versus on stage wasn’t something Tevin would second-guess.
And I let them pay me half of what the whole team used to get. I made less than any of the individuals whom they’d formerly paid to clean the place, and I got it done in half the time.
A win-win from the owner’s perspective.
It was one reason I was reasonably certain they wouldn’t be completely put off by the fact that I’d skipped out on one of my numbers.
If I just explained… and certainly I’d have to.
After sleeping away half the day, I showed up at Leotards and Lace shortly after noon.
Tevin
was waiting for me. “What happened last night, Nicky?”
I sighed. “I don’t know if it’s my place to say.”
It wasn’t my place to tell anyone about Gina being attacked. Not that I was worried that someone would track Wolfgang down, but she deserved her privacy. And in this case, bringing her attacker to justice just wasn’t going to happen. If I told Tevin any specifics, he’d probably report it. And Gina certainly hadn’t asked for more attention over the matter. Who was I to bring it upon her?
“We have people paying cover fees just to hear you sing, Nicky. You can’t just bail in the middle of your set.”
“I understand,” I said. “It was an unusual circumstance. Sort of a personal emergency. I don’t foresee it happening again any time soon.”
Tevin nodded. “Make sure it doesn’t.”
“Yes sir.” I walked past Tevin and into the empty club. I stopped, took a deep breath, and turned back to him. “Tevin, I’ll clean today for free. To make up for any refunded cover charges.”
“Alright,” Tevin said. “Kind of you to offer, but this isn’t an arrangement we can repeat. If this happens too often, people will just stop coming to your shows. No matter how good you are, Nicky, you realize you’re not our club’s regular cup of tea.”
“I know,” I said. “Thank you for understanding. I’ll be out of here in a couple hours.”
Tevin nodded. “Not sure how you do it, but alright. Be sure to lock up when you’re done.”
Once Tevin left, I cleaned the place in record time. Wiped the tables. Emptied the trash. Mopped the floors. The whole she-bang.
I don’t know why I rushed it.
I mean, it wasn’t like Wolfgang was going to show up during the daytime. Vampires avoid daylight hours, for obvious reasons. And meeting up with him wasn’t going to happen any sooner if I got my work done more quickly.
And I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to say when I met with him.
I couldn’t turn Wolfgang down. I knew that much. The chance to hunt down Alice was too tempting.
And I had to stop pretending I was actually better than these vampires. All things considered, during my prior existence I was probably responsible for more lost lives than most vampires.
My meals never survived.
Most of the time, vampires preferred not to drain their victims completely. They had ways of making humans forget. Mercy Brown, my vampire “friend” from back at the asylum, had an interesting way of doing it. She usually targeted people who’d been drinking.
A vampire bite filters the blood when they feed. All the alcohol stays in the bloodstream. That means that since a person’s blood-alcohol content is based on a percentage, even a small amount of alcohol in someone’s system would become a high BAC after a vampire fed. It was enough to cause the “blackout” phenomenon that humans often experience when they drink too much.
A fine cover for a vampire.
If the human thought they remembered being attacked, but they also knew they were drunk… they’d question it. And if they didn’t remember drinking that much, well, the whole issue with blackouts is generally that one drinks more than intended, and since they’d have memory loss as a result, people don’t question it.
I mean, if you started drinking and ended up blacking out, you’d probably assume things just got out of hand. You aren’t likely to default to the oh-shit-I-got-attacked-by-a-vampire explanation.
So Mercy’s method usually worked. And since vampire bites healed quickly—something in the vampire’s saliva sped it up—there usually wasn’t even a bite mark in the morning to rouse suspicion.
I don’t know if that’s the tactic every vampire used. But Mercy said she learned it from her sire, Niccolo the Damned. Also Wolfgang’s sire. It made sense that he’d likely learned the same method.
Very different from how my species, the Neck, fed. But when I fed, when I killed, there wasn’t any artistry in the aftermath. All of that went into the preparation, the seduction…
But the feast itself… only the bones remained when we were done.
I shuddered at the thought. Perhaps there was another way. Maybe if I became myself again, if I regained my abilities, I could do things differently.
I’m not a killer. I’ve never thought of myself as such.
I’m a hunter.
I used to hunt humans—for food. Now I hunt vampires in vengeance.
When I’m not working with them…
But still, I hunt.
I sing. I hunt. And I look sexy as hell doing both.
That’s me in a nutshell.
Not like you’d ever catch me dead wearing a nutshell. Not even if all I had was the choice between wearing a nutshell and Wal-Mart clothes. Okay, never mind. I’d probably wear something made of nutshells before I wore Wal-Mart clothes. I mean, celebs have done stranger shit on the red carpet, right? Whatever. You get the point.
I was never a complicated person. What I want, the things I like, are pretty easy to define. None of it has changed much since the day I took this form. It’s the world, this human world, that makes simple things so damned convoluted.
I mean, in the community there’s this big debate. Are people born with a sense of their true gender, or is it conditioned over time? Influenced by their parents and peers? I don’t know the answer.
But I didn’t have any parents or peers to tell me that my ass looked better when I wore heels. It was so clear to me. Those were my shoes… Yes, even that first pair.
Maybe they were Wal-Mart specials. But a girl has to start somewhere, right?
My taste has grown more refined over time. But my fundamental sense about who I am… it’s remained constant.
If I was “born” when I assumed this form, I suppose you could say I’ve been this way from birth. And nothing was going to change me.
Not that therapist in New Orleans.
Not the odd stares I received when walking down the streets.
Not the messages I received, albeit subtly, when watching television or movies, or absorbing whatever else this culture put forward that was meant to dictate the ways I should dress or behave.
No one tells me who I am.
I am who I am. Take me or leave me.
And for the most part, I love me.
For the most part… until I have to deal with these damn bloodsuckers. And I’m inevitably reminded that as vile as they are, I was once worse.
And to think that nothing drives me—at least, nothing drives Nyx—more than the desire to recover what I lost.
I know it was inconsistent. I realize it was a little bit fucked up. It didn’t make sense.
If I loathed what I used to be, how I used to be, why would I want to recover what I’d lost? Well, my abilities weren’t what made me vile. Shifting was a tool I’d used to hunt… but did it have to be limited to that? What if I had that tool and could use it, instead, to take my ideal form? Not sure how that would work, but maybe there was a way…
And I had to believe that I’d changed. This whole experience had changed me. I was different now. I could never go back to being the kind of creature I used to be.
I’d still have to eat, of course. But if I’d managed to get by on human food for the past five years, surely I’d find a way to survive as one of the Neck again.
I could eat chicken. Lots of chicken. Tastes like human, after all.
Not sure how, as an elemental, I’d go about hunting chickens. I’d have to turn into whatever they’re attracted to the most.
Humiliating.
But if I spent some time as a rooster, would I start to empathize with them, too? Hell! How would I ever find peace?
I scratched my head.
One problem at a time, Nicky…
7
SOMETHING ABOUT WOLFGANG’S invitation didn’t sit well with me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a part of me that loves this body. I can see why it was the ideal form of beauty for Alice, when I’d targeted her as a meal… before I reali
zed she was a vampire.
I didn’t hate this body. Not at all.
It just never felt right.
I mean, with a good set of heels, a little makeup, and a nice dress I almost felt like me. But there was always something that just felt out of place. Maybe it was that piece of dangling flesh between my legs.
Damn thing looked like an anteater’s snout.
Perhaps it was that my shoulders were a bit broader than I’d like.
All I knew was that I was never meant to be like this… and I couldn’t stay this way indefinitely.
When I was feeding, it never bothered me much what form I assumed. Half the time I didn’t even pay attention to it. It didn’t matter to me; it was all about the effect my form had on my prey.
But once it was clear I was going to spend a bit of time in this form, I started paying attention.
At first, when I looked in a mirror or at my reflection in water, it felt like I was staring at someone else.
It still felt that way, I suppose. But I’d gotten used to it. I tried not to think about it.
But I had to think about this decision… I mean, cooperate with a vampire?
My experience with Mercy in the asylum excepted, I’d never met a vampire I could trust. Hell, I’m not even sure I could trust Mercy—we just happened to have aligned interests and a common enemy.
I still had a few hours to burn before sunset. I wasn’t on the schedule at Leotards and Lace, either. And I hadn’t been back home in a long time. Not my apartment with Donnie—I mean my old home. At least, the home that had been mine ever since the witches brought me from the old world.
In the old days, I dwelled in lakes in and around what’s now known as Germany.
When I came here, I was given a home in living water. Water that moves. In a river. It had a different energy to it, particularly in this part of Missouri where the river tends to move quickly. When you’re in a natural lake, you have a sense of familiarity. Some might call it stagnation, but I’d call it home. Going back to the lake always felt like going home.
Going back to the river always felt like starting over. The water was always changing, always different. When I’d feed, the descent back into the water, while not at all frightening, nonetheless felt like a new experience every time.
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 96
