by Heidi Lowe
"I know, I know. I have to go."
I hung up as fast as I could, then erupted into tears, and tossed the phone across the room with a bellow. When it hit the mirror, the glass shattered everywhere.
What did another seven years of bad luck matter now, anyway? What did seven years matter to eternity?
ELEVEN
A gorgeous blonde in a bikini, with hair that passed her butt, answered the door when I arrived at Oliver's house. I thought I had the wrong address.
"Hi, is Oliver here?" I said, or should I say stuttered. Beautiful women often had that effect on me.
"Come on in. He's by the pool."
I followed her through the house, gawking at the size of it, and the sheer opulence. Oliver did everything big and expensive: chandeliers, marble floor, knight armor in the foyer, statues of important-looking men in the hallway, and life-sized paintings of himself in ridiculous poses on every wall. One with a pipe in his mouth, one in what looked like a general's uniform, one on horseback. There was no doubt that the men in the paintings were him, but they didn't capture the personality I'd come to associate with him. Just how old was he?
"You didn't tell me this was going to be a party," I said when I saw him. He was lounging on a pool chair in nothing but trunks, accompanied by no less than five women. He seemed to attract them like a magnet, or more like flies to shit!
"At my house it's always a party. You'll learn soon enough. Come, sit." He rudely swatted away the girl seated on the chair next to his. I offered her an apologetic shrug, and sat down. She didn't seem all that fazed by his rudeness, and simply dived into the pool.
"Hungry?" he asked. "You haven't tried anything until you've tried Vanessa here," he said, putting a hand on the shoulder of the brunette perched on the edge of his chair.
"It's Drea," the girl said.
He waved a dismissive hand at her. "It doesn't matter. Lissa, try her."
I cut him a look of disgust, as I'd been doing since the start of our budding friendship. It only made him laugh.
"She's not a piece of meat, Oliver. Have some respect."
"It's all right, really," Drea insisted. And before I knew it, she'd taken a seat on my chair, practically forcing herself on me. She brushed her hair aside and offered me her neck.
I wanted to refuse, my heart begged me to, but once my eyes settled on that delicious vein, and the pulsing began ringing in my ears, I couldn't help myself.
The moan of pleasure that escaped her lips upon penetration gave me a thrill like nothing else. It made me feel powerful.
I drank her up, and tore myself away before I could do damage. After a week and a half of taking from the source, I was able to better control my hunger, and knew when to stop. It was always a challenge, however. A challenge to let go.
"The hunger never goes away, not really," Oliver had informed me once. "You just learn to control it, ignore it."
We were essentially slaves to the hunger. The thought filled me with dread.
"Who are the girls?" I asked, when Oliver had dismissed his guests into the house, leaving us alone by the pool.
"Blood whores. I told you, this town is full of them. All I need to do is click my fingers and they come running. It's the bite, they can't get enough of it."
"You could be a bit nicer to them." It was no use trying to appeal to his better nature. The guy thrived on being a narcissistic asshole. He'd probably spent a long time this way, and wasn't about to change because of me.
"What for?" he asked, laughing. "They respond better when you treat them like dirt. Besides, they know they can be replaced just like that, so they'll put up with it."
"You're a pig, you know that?"
"Why thank you." He chuckled and lay back in his seat, as though he had not a care in the world. The rich, the powerful, the dead.
When he realized that I didn't find any humor in his chauvinism, or rather that I looked more distressed than usual, he added, "What crawled up your ass and died?"
I didn't dignify that with an answer, just stared up at the moon, which hung serenely in the sky.
"I don't know why anything that woman does still bothers you," he said after a while.
"What are you talking about?"
"Your "life partner". That's what you're thinking about, isn't it? I don't know why. Just ditch the bitch. There are so many women out there...and men."
I rolled my eyes in disgust. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes, I do. I invite some of the hottest maidens in town, real models, to party with us, and all you can think about is that miserable, insipid, English snatch."
We saw Jean in completely opposing lights. It was like Dallas and Jean all over again. I didn't see a boring, miserable woman when I looked at her. Quite the opposite. Which was why I felt like crap about our situation, about her feelings towards me changing.
"I keep thinking, today's the day when she finally admits to me that she doesn't love me anymore, and that she never can the way I am."
He sighed. "Good, then you can finally replace her. Trust me, this life is too long to be in love with one person. If it didn't happen now, it would happen eventually."
I wasn't really listening to him, just wallowing in my misery. Saying this out loud felt good, even if the person to whom I spoke couldn't have cared less.
"She doesn't even argue with me now. Before the change, she would stick it out. Now, she simply walks away, like she's wasting her time with me."
"You're both wasting each other's time. Let me get Vanessa out here again. Lose yourself in her. Forget about that woman."
"How long have you been on Earth?" I asked, turning to him with cold eyes. "Have you ever loved anyone, besides yourself I mean?"
"I was born in 1939, a couple of months before the war began. And no, to answer your second question. I knew better."
He spoke as though there had never been anyone he cared about. It saddened me for him, and for myself. Would that happen to me? I barely had any family as a human; the list of people who cared about me was ever dwindling. Jean had people around her, but she was estranged from her family. Was this all any of us had to look forward to – solitude?
"What about relatives? Didn't you have anyone when you were human?"
"Everyone is dead. That's what happens, Lissa. This isn't the life for lasting relationships." Although his air was light, amused, there was something in his eyes that suggested he wasn't as indifferent as he let on.
"I spoke to my sister before I got here tonight. She doesn't know what's happened to me, and I can't tell her. She despises vampires. And my best friend is mad at me for being rude to his new girlfriend. My life has fallen apart around me, and there's no way to fix it."
He jumped up, suddenly wearing the biggest, freakiest grin. "I know just the solution."
I shot him a dubious look. "Let me guess, No Man's Land?" That was his answer to everything. He never tired of the place.
"What better place to drown your sorrows."
It had been a good distraction of late. At least there I didn't have to think about Jean falling out of love with me and replacing me with a human.
TWELVE
No Man's Land's appeal lay chiefly in its ability to attract men and women from all across the globe. People came from all over to party here, to become meals to greedy vampires who couldn't say no. For this reason, there were always new human faces mixed in with the regulars. Among the vampires, however, were the usual suspects. After coming here ten nights in a row, they'd all become familiar. I even received a couple of nods of greeting from some of the less snobbish ones. The staff, too, greeted me with familiarity. For some reason, this only depressed me. When the staff at an establishment you frequent know your face, it's time to stop frequenting it.
The first couple of women who approached me got bored and went to proposition another vampire, when they realized I didn't want to drink. They didn't come for the conversation but the bite, clearly.
"
It all feels so empty," I said to Oliver, who had a pretty blonde on his lap, getting the life drained from her.
His fangs receded from her neck, and he stared at me without wiping his mouth. I hated that look, that savage image. He looked every bit the beast the rest of the world thought he was.
"What's empty?"
"All of this. No one wants to spend five minutes getting to know the person who holds their life in their hands with every bite. It's bizarre."
"No, what's bizarre is you thinking that anyone comes to a place like this to talk. Stop trying to make it something it's not. We're all here for one reason: to have fun."
Fun. I seemed to be the only person not having any. Hedonism for its own sake had never appealed to me, and I was beginning to realize that, even as one of the undead, indulging my vices and doing little else left me feeling empty.
Oliver sighed. "You're really starting to piss me off, Lissa. Were you this annoying as a human?"
I was about to answer him, to tell him that he could take a long walk off a short pier, to tell him that he had been pissing me off since the moment I met him, when I noticed some activity around the entrance. People were breaking their necks to see who had just entered, and humans were whispering to themselves. A real buzz had begun, and now I wanted to know what the fuss was all about.
"What's going on over there?" I asked, zigging and zagging my head to try and get a peek.
"A new vampire is my guess. The blood whores get like that when someone new shows up. Remember how they were on your first night?"
"Not like this. Anyone would think the king of vampires had just stepped in the joint." I didn't know if there was such a thing, but I imagined he would have received this type of reception.
But it wasn't the king of vampires; it wasn't a man at all. The crowd parted a little, parted to let the woman through. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, human or vampire. And everyone's eyes were on her, mine included. My jaw hung open.
And where were her eyes? On me, and only me. Every night we'd spent, gazing into each other's souls, promising everything, came flooding back to me.
The thud-thudding of my heart sounded like a cacophony. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time; she often had that effect on me.
Then she turned away, sat at the bar, and a bevy of men and women surrounded her.
"Isn't that your "life partner"?" Oliver said with humor in his voice. "Maybe she isn't as square as I thought."
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to throw something; everything. What the hell was she doing here? She'd had nothing but negative things to say about the place and the people who visited it. What was she doing here, goddammit?
The fury built inside me, making my breathing come out heavy and rattly. My nostrils flared, my eyes became thin slits of hatred that I couldn't take off of her. Everyone was fawning over her, offering their necks, their wrists, whatever she wanted.
They had what she wanted, that was why she'd come. She could feed off them, screw them for hours, not seconds. They could give her everything I couldn't.
I saw red. Oliver spoke but none of his words registered. Everything else was immaterial at that point. She was here to replace me, just as I'd known she would. But to do so right in front of me, that was the cruelest punishment.
Five minutes was all I could stomach to watch before I shot up from my seat and marched over to her, like a woman scorned.
"Do you like rum? I've had a lot tonight," I heard a woman say to her.
Jean laughed, but I jumped in before she could answer. "She's not hungry," I said with murder in my eyes, directed at Jean.
"Can't she answer herself?" another woman asked.
"I'm answering for her," I said through gritted teeth.
They quickly got the message and dispersed in a flash, as though they sensed danger. They must have smelled it on me, the blood-lust, not through hunger but anger.
Jean just stared at me with her usual unreadable expression, as I glared back at her. I took a seat on the bar stool, and tried to steady my breathing.
"What are you doing here?"
"Well, you painted such an impressive picture of the place, I thought I'd check it out. Nice. The people are incredibly friendly."
I was shaking with rage at her easy, smug voice, at how calm she was when I was ready to break things. How did she do that so well? It must have been something she'd learned as a child. She'd spoken once about the strict finishing schools she'd attended as a child, the summer schools in Switzerland that she hated. Her lessons in etiquette must have been so ingrained in the fabric of her personality that even now, after so many years, she couldn't shake them.
"I want you to leave," I said.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because you're making me uncomfortable."
"How so?"
The intense staring match we were having continued with us barely blinking. It probably wasn't easy to tell whether we were about to fight or screw each other's brains out. Or possibly both...at the same time.
"You came here to piss me off, I know it."
"Well, Lissa, it's a little hard to avoid that seeing as everything these days pisses you off. I saw the mirror, by the way..."
"I wish you'd been there so I could have thrown my phone at you instead!"
"So that's your new friend?" she said, ignoring my comment and gesturing across the room at Oliver. "That's the person you've been spending all this time with? Do you like boys now?"
She knew I didn't, that tone said it all. She was trying to get a rise out of me. She knew she was the only person I wanted, and always had been since she'd walked into my life.
"You're just being ridiculous now. You of all people know that's not what I'm into."
"I don't. The Lissa I know wouldn't be friends with someone like that."
"The Lissa you knew died when you turned her," I said, teeth clenched. "So why don't you just leave?"
"I only just got here. There are still so many new people to meet."
You haven't experienced real jealousy until you meet the love of your life. I realized that the hard way. Real jealousy causes atrophy; it stings, it burns, it scorches. My love for her had always been a jealous one, even before she was mine. Very little had changed, but with the vampirism, every sense, every emotion, was heightened. And insecurity and jealousy often went hand in hand. The thought of her making friends, friends who bled the fresh stuff that kept her alive, friends who she could make love to and not have to stop within seconds of starting, destroyed me.
"I knew it, I was right," I said, the anger fizzling away and being replaced by sorrow.
Now she frowned, her smugness gone. "About what?"
"That's why you're here, isn't it? Fresh, undead meat." Fighting back the tears, I turned away from her.
"Is that what you really believe? That I'm here to find someone else?"
I nodded but didn't look at her. "To rub it in my face."
She was silent for a moment, then she let out a loud breath. "Is that why you come here, to find someone else?"
"I'm going home now," I said, unable to answer her question. Not able to tell her that I would never look for someone else, even when she was done with me, because there was no one else. Not for me, anyway. There was just her, the woman who had saved me, the woman who had once loved me, but was now just enduring me out of sympathy.
I expected her to stay seated, say that she would be home later, after she'd replenished herself on all of the raw, delicious blood flowing in the bar. After all, that was what she'd come for.
"Okay, let's go," she said instead, practically jumping out of her seat.
I was too upset to say goodbye to Oliver, too desperate to get as far away from that place as possible. But more importantly, desperate to get her away from there. All that fresh, willing meat to sample and sate her appetite with. If she was going to do it, I didn't want to be there to see it.
She said a couple of words to me on the d
rive back, but stopped speaking once she noticed I wasn't going to respond. My back was turned to her as I cried silently into a piece of tissue, erasing any trace of tears from my face.
And once home, I charged up the stairs to our bedroom and threw myself on the bed.
She took her time to come after me, which only angered me more. Just as I thought, I'd become too much of a burden, and she didn't have the patience to deal with me. We were through and I knew it.
"Are you going to tell me what that was all about?" She sat on the bed beside me. I waited for her to stroke me or touch me in some way, but she didn't.
"Leave me alone."
"When I leave you alone you break our furniture, you develop friendships with hoodlums, you frequent sordid bars full of degenerates. So forgive me if I have a hard time leaving you to your own devices, Lissa." She sounded more schoolteacher than girlfriend.
I sat up, shot her a scathing look, and then said something I didn't mean a word of, but had to say in order to save face. "I don't need you, and I don't love you. So why don't you just go back to that bar and screw all the men and women you want."
She didn't bat an eye. "I don't believe you. And I don't think that's what you want. For some reason you're trying really hard to hurt me, but it's not going to work." She pressed her palm to my chest. "Because I know what's in your heart, Lissa."
"You don't know shit!" I shoved her hand away, but she grabbed my wrists, and I couldn't shake her off.
Trying to wrest them free, I went into full aggression mode, and the next thing I knew I was pinning her to the bed.
She didn't put up a fight, didn't even struggle. And as I lay on top of her, staring into those deep, black pupils, my fury disappeared, and lust took over; love took over.
Her eyes held the same desire for me as mine did for her. Her chest rose and fell. Her cherry red lips were slightly parted.
When my lips met hers, it was a relief. A relief to finally be kissing her again, feeling that connection I'd thought lost forever. It was still there, thank God.
Her scramble to help me out of my clothes and to get out of her own was frantic and obsessive, as though nothing else mattered in the world. She didn't care that I was on top, despite this being her usual position.
