Kissing Carrion

by Gemma Files

  But you don’t care about all that. You don’t care about anything I do.

  Do you?

  * * *

  At 6:30 I reset my watch. I brought everything back down to zero.

  I went through the house, breaking things. I was pretty systematic about it.

  I went upstairs. I took off my clothes. I folded them neatly, and burned them.

  I smeared myself with incense ash, and ran myself a bath.

  I washed myself clean, nameless.

  Soon I will take a new knife, never used before, and write your name on the inside of either wrist. An inch deep.

  * * *

  It’s hard to write now, and I apologize for the way this letter must look. But you can console yourself with the knowledge that it will be my last.

  The most effective spell of all in my catalogue involves baptizing something living in the name of the person you wish to affect, and then killing it. As the body decays, the person whose name it bears suffers a similar dissolution.

  It’s the oldest spell I know—the most direct. So, fittingly enough, I saved this one for last. Very pure. Very simple. If it works, I won’t be around to take it off; if it doesn’t work, I won’t be around to find out.

  Everybody wins.

  * * *

  I date this letter Day Twelve.

  I think you will recognize the signature.

  Dead Bodies Possessed By Furious Motion

  I wanted to dance with the young men in town

  I wanted to dance till they hunted me down.

  —Susan Musgrave.

  IT WAS 1976, IT was night, it was Malibu. Elder Tallbie bent over to snag herself a beer, posing for this big, dumb guy named Flynn who she had her eye on—normally straight as an equally big, equally dumb post—who thought she was a guy, and wanted her anyway. Desperately. Which was fine with her. Easier to move and act the way she wanted to, in this particular teeth ‘n’ tits-obsessed decade, with a sexually ambiguous glamor to hide behind; she estimated it had probably been 75 years since she’d last worn a dress on more than two consecutive occasions.

  Not that she missed the sensation, exactly.

  As she rose, Elder caught Flynn sneaking a sidelong glance at her ass and gave him a narrow, wicked glare in return, licking the sharp tips of her fangs.

  “Hey, fag,” she said. “You checkin’ out my action?”

  Flynn went red. “As if. Fag.”

  “Fag.”

  “Fag.”

  And then it was later, time-lapse fast: The moon blinking up and over, a swollen white balloon against the endless night. They lay back in the light of the dying luau pit, surrounded by drained beers. Flynn trying hard not to let any part of him touch any part of her, as Elder toyed with her last bottle, and kept her fierce gaze firmly centered on his sweaty, fire-reddened cheek.

  “Want to smoke a doob, man?” Flynn finally asked, falling back on his oldest—and most reliable, hitherto—trick.

  “No, Flynn. I don’t.”

  “’Cause it’s, uh, good stuff . . . ”

  “No.”

  Bicentennial firecrackers were going off somewhere in the distance, accompanied by the hoots and hollers of drunken children. Elder shut her eyes a moment, remembering grazing through a clutch of dying redcoats near the far side of some foot-bridge in upper New York State: Choking musketfire chest-wounds, faint Cockney and Lancashire curses. Blood leaking slow from the open side of one boy soldier’s neck, even as she ripped the other wide and let the overflow spill down her greedy chops, soaking her bodice, drying so thick and hard that she’d actually had to throw her clothes away, afterward. She’d drunk her fill, drunk more, then eventually stumbled back to Eudo Lemonastere, three days late for their agreed-upon rendezvous—dazed, replete, naked and stained under a British officer’s discarded frock-coat, with bugs in her unbound hair from sleeping under piles of leaves on the forest floor.

  And Eudo had responded by slapping her face, sickened by her lack of restraint. Called her a peasant, uneducable, one brief step up from an animal.

  She grinned at the memory, even now: Pretentious Eudo, her long-suffering maker and so-called master, with his clean white hands and his dirty, dirty mind. Still playing the saintly father-figure with her, vampire Pygmalion to her mortal Galatea, even after he’d paid her parents gold for the pleasure of taking her virginity—no different from any other aristocrat—and then hadn’t been able to muster enough self-control to keep from killing her while he did it.

  But guilt only went so far, after all. Which was why she most often chose her own spawn as she did, from the ranks of fools and freaks—to avoid, quite frankly, the inconvenience of ever having to feel any.

  Flynn, Elder could tell, wouldn’t be capable of considering his options long enough to resent losing his one chance at permanent oblivion. He’d welcome the Change with open fangs: One big par-tay ’till dawn and beyond. All of the fun, with none of the fallout.

  She turned on her side, studying him closely. Watched him shift uncomfortably under her eyes’ weight, readjusting himself, knee half-raised to mask his growing erection, with a cute little hip-twist for emphasis—a laughably furtive movement for someone his size, just this side of a squirm.

  “’Kay,” he said, apparently still meditating on her bewildering refusal of free weed. “That’s okay. Um. So. Well . . . ”

  . . . what do you want to do?

  Elder sat up, stretched, languorous. She leaned over Flynn, towards the cooler—”discovered” it empty. Leaned down, close, a little closer, then nose to nose; Flynn’s sunburned surfer’s beak looming dangerously close to her own sleek, cat-snub profile. Close enough for him to smell her, and rouse further—helplessly—at the pungent scent: Woodsmoke and spices, plus a faint slaughterhouse tang of old blood.

  Appalling, the unexpected stink of it, under this fresh salt air. And yet . . . intoxicating, somehow.

  “Wellll,” she repeated, drawling. “What I’d actually kinda like to do—is—to suck—”

  (Flynn gasping, an incongruously tiny squeak)

  “—your blood.”

  “Whuh . . . ?”

  Elder laid her lips on his, lightly, as her palm pressed against his straining crotch. Exhaled, equally light. And felt him shudder in response, groaning—spurting into his own baggy shorts at the barest touch of her clawed hand.

  A slow whine: “Oooow, my Gohhhhdddd . . . ”

  “You like that, big guy?”

  Flynn shuddered again, eyes rolling; she nipped at his bottom lip, just nicking it—a paper-cut thin blood-weal, a mere shaving-accident scratch—and felt him spasm in response, paralyzed. Shaking like a dog left out in the rain, hair wild, sweat suddenly everywhere, gluing his hot skin to hers; her cool, nacreous moon-tan, pale as a pearl by the white beach’s reflected light.

  And then Elder slid down between his legs, taking his waistband with her. Pushing his poker-stiff penis aside to find the femoral artery, biting neatly in—hearing him yelp as he came again and again, gushing up over his own incipient pot belly. The beads of sperm choking his auburn pubic thatch until they hung in clusters, like limp stars.

  Elder laughed aloud to herself at the sight, coughing blood through her nose. And went back to what she was doing.

  Flynn, meanwhile, just kept on coming, right up until the very minute his big, dumb heart finally stopped: An empty thud, a last, wet squeeze.

  Then silence.

  * * *

  Afterward, Elder buried them both in the sand under a pitched-over boat, curling catlike into the slack arm of his corpse. And when the next night fell, she slapped him awake—then hiked up her little boy’s bowling shirt, and gave herself a shake in front of his dazed, red new eyes.

  “Hey, man,” she said. “It’s like, a miracle, or somethin’. Take a pull on you the once, and lo
ok what I grew.”

  “Huh,” Flynn replied, surprisingly unsurprised.

  Then, slow: “’M sorta . . . thirsty . . .”

  Elder’s smile widened. Sharpened.

  “Yeah. I just bet you are.”

  Thinking: I give you about thirty years at the most, buddy. Starting now.

  More like fifty, as it turned out. But by the time it finally came to pass, nevertheless, all she could find it in herself to feel was: Hmm. Gee.

  Right again.

  * * *

  “This cadre of yours,” Eudo began, disapproving, as the second millennium drew to its close outside—sitting pretty in the back of his limo, parked on the outskirts of Elder’s first official all-vampire rave. “A haphazard collection of strays, detritus . . . ”

  Outside, Flynn shot Elder the high-sign through the limo window, then put on a serious face, and asked one of Eudo’s Familiars what looked like a fairly intimate question about his mother. The Familiar, doing a passable Eudo imitation, simply ignored him.

  “Our Blood is not to be passed on lightly, Elder. There are channels, levels of approval.”

  Elder nodded. “Same ones you were following, when you made me,” she suggested, idly playing with the hem of her shirt-cuff.

  “I do find this continual harping on the circumstances of our first meeting remarkably tedious, Elder.”

  “I know you do. Eudo.”

  Beyond Flynn, Ulrike was augmenting her usual ballet-based dance moves with a series of Faster, Pussycat!-style go-go gestures. Tall, blue-eyed, blue-haired Ulrike, wearing nothing above the waist but a cross made from bondage tape over either tiny nipple. Ulrike, formerly single-name famous, who always struck Elder as having been genetically engineered to prove, through sheer embodiment, the general public’s sneaking suspicion that no one who looked like—or was—a supermodel could really be quite human.

  But here was Eudo again, still making that obnoxious, I smell something face of his: “I can’t shield you forever, Elder. The Clave demands respect for tradition. You would do better—”

  “I’ll do what I want, ‘magistere’ meo.”

  He sniffed. “As you say.”

  “That’s right.” Elder opened the limo door, stood up—snapped her fingers at the Familiar, who passed her her cane; Flynn came running at the sound, grinning. Throwing back, to Eudo, over a feel-it-in-your-chest-loud rush of sound: “Exactly as I fuckin’ say.”

  So don’t let the coffin-lid hit you in the ass on your way out, motherfucker.

  * * *

  Later, she peeled Ulrike’s crosses away—delicately, using only her blunt lower teeth—while Ulrike moaned in soft appreciation. Behind them, Flynn busied himself with the fourth occupant of their communal bed (some wannabe Familiar too pathetic to distinguish a valid invitation to the dance from yet another potentially fatal milking), baby-birding blood straight from the jugular back and forth to both women via long, exploratory, open-mouthed kisses. Ulrike, not normally interested in anyone born with more equipment than herself, tolerated this only because she wanted the hit; each successive draught made her shiver in Elder’s arms, clutching, arching.

  Elder, meanwhile, lay back on Flynn’s heaving barrel chest, letting his sloppy worship drizzle crimson down the length of her naked torso. She felt him stiffen and hunch against her, heard his vestigial parody of breath grow ragged, while their shared victim’s own breathing dimmed and clogged to a wet death-rattle. And wondered why this entire process—pleasant as it had once seemed, when she was still as young as Flynn or Ulrike—now made her feel far more bored than sated.

  Thinking: Things have to change. And knowing full well that they would, eventually—no matter what she did.

  Or . . . didn’t do.

  She turned her head in the hollow of Flynn’s throat, and whispered—into his convulsing jawline—

  “So: Big guy—”

  “Uh.”

  “That scientist you were telling me about? One who works for NASA?”

  Murky, mouth full: “ . . . Uhuh . . . ”

  “I want you to invite him by—tomorrow, next night , maybe. The uptown graze.” Snapping her claws against his cheek, sharply: “You hear me, Flynn?”

  “ . . . sure.”

  “Say it like you mean it, then. Just for my own personal peace of mind.”

  Flynn wheezed, whimpered; Ulrike, hovering on the raw edge of climax herself, made time to force a last bark of laughter at his obvious distress. And then they were hugging each other, instinctively, bone-crack hard, crushing Elder fast between them—their mutual convulsions sending their victim’s corpse sliding to the floor beside the bed, limp and pale, drained to nameless anonymity.

  Already forgotten.

  “I mean it, man,” Flynn whispered, finally, his sticky mouth glued to Elder’s ear. And fell immediately asleep.

  “Quel moron,” Ulrike muttered, face-down in Elder’s lap. Then: “If you really want something done, you know, you can always send me.”

  Elder just shrugged. And kept on stroking her “daughter’s” spiky blue hair, until the blood-daze overcame Ulrike as well.

  Thus freed from her spawn’s distracting attentions, Elder lay looking up at the mirrored ceiling of her bedroom for the rest of the day, choosing to forgo her usual diurnal hibernation period in favour of thought rather than rest—something neither Flynn nor Ulrike would ever consider doing, even sheltered from the sun as they all were, here behind the penthouse’s triple-layered steel shutters.

  Bed-bound, Elder studied her own reflection at length, scanning in vain for any subtle hint of change. Everything was exactly as she remembered it, however: Her clean-lined jaw and flat cheekbones, the thick, roan fall of her hair. The thin scar bisecting one eyebrow, where the village priest’s ring had cut it open with a backhanded slap after she’d blurted out that—with his dark locks and sorrowful eyes—the image of Christ crucified looked just like those Savages she’d seen trading furs down at the Post. The curve of her profile, incongruously elegant; a courtesan’s nose, Eudo used to say, accidentally misplaced onto the face of a feral child.

  Elder opened her narrow eyes wide, lips curling back, fangs extending: Her ancient’s stare, androgynous and blank, an empty blue-green like teal touched with milk.

  Well, she had to admit, Eudo did have one thing right—her story, sad as it might seem in retrospect (to her, at least), really was nothing new. Every night, the vampire nation increased exponentially just because some Old Guard-member found a piece of prey pretty enough to want to keep around forever. Yet these same parasite aristocrats remained, as a class, almost constitutionally incapable of realizing that no one could stay a toy for more than one lifetime.

  Eudo, for example, had wanted first a quick meal, then a catspaw, a curiosity gained on his tour of the Americas—a real, unlive wild Colonial girl to dress up and show off, to play with and teach to sing, to dance, to read and write and make herself entertaining. And for fifty long years, at least, Elder had been utterly content to feed on his livestock and act the chosen whore for his delight: Ash-gal at the shindy, as her relatives’ later Western descendants would have put it, by the colorful early 1850’s.

  To a point, though. Only to a point. And no—fucking—further.

  Poor Eudo. It really couldn’t have been too amusing, for a creature so ancient he craved amusement in almost the same immediate, desperate way he craved blood, to look into his pet’s eyes—one night, in an endless string of nights—and suddenly see an equal staring back at him. Like a dancing dog, a preaching hen, a singing rose: Depressingly, confusingly, terrifyingly improbable.

  And yet . . .

  . . . that’s what happens, isn’t it? She thought, with a certain contemptuous impatience—restless, reckless, heartless as ever, by poor Eudo’s wounded estimation. When your children grow up, I mean.

 
Though, as God knew (or didn’t, depending on who you asked), she sometimes did wish hers would—just to add even some small hint of variety to the well-established pattern.

  Eudo again, sniffing, at her mind’s ear: Fools. Freaks. Flesh-drunk addicts. Cannon fodder.

  Oh, yes. All that, and far, far less.

  But herein lay the difference: Only choosing spawn who came with clearly-marked expiry dates was the safest and most certain way Elder’d yet found to make sure they’d burn out long before you ever had to drive them away, or kill them. Which, in its turn, all but guaranteed you’d never again have to spend even a moment of your eternal life alone . . .

  . . . unless you wanted to.

  * * *

  Tomorrow, next night: Upstairs, where a floor-full of ‘Nought-i.e. nightcrawlers jigged and jumped, taking turns posing for each other while Elder watched, sipping her usual blood-and-tonic mixer, overcranked still center of their pathetically stop-motion world. And taking a certain secret pleasure in the knowledge that, all the while, a similarly stylish set of vampire younglings were going mosh-wild in the Tank beneath her feet, nipping and howling at each other as they jockeyed to get first bite at whatever tapped-out ex-Familiar the handlers threw in on top of them next. Flipping back and forth to deejays scratching 300 BPM, frenzied with white noise madness mixed far too fast for mere humans to hear, let alone follow . . . doing sept-, oct-, nonotuple twists in mid-air, upright and mid-step again before they even hit the ground . . .

  Now, that was a fuckin’ party, like this was just work under a different name: Nothing less than necessary, but definitely nothing more. Waiting, barely patient, on Flynn to sweet-talk the NASA guy through her front door and into her clutches—Elder could hear them clearly, music notwithstanding, and it didn’t sound like any known version of a sure thing, as yet.

  “You know it, G. She’s, like, sooo totally hot for you—tellin’ me just the other day how she wanted to meet you, dude. No lie.”

  “And what’s her name, again?”

  “Elder, man. Like the sign says.”