The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge

by Mark L. Van Name

  And the police hadn’t called. I looked at the answering machine and there was no light blinking. Pressed the button and it said no new messages. It wasn’t just that I’d given them Phil’s name—which was listed here. But my jacket had been there as well, with my student ID in the pocket. They would have called, either to avoid going there, or after going there. And it had taken half an hour to walk home. It had to be forty-five minutes since I’d called. They’d have called by now.

  Had I dreamed it all?

  Had I slipped on those stairs, passed out, had concussion and imagined the rest—remembered a scene from some horror movie with Phil’s face on the corpse? By the time I had reached the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, I was fairly sure that’s what had happened. Who Uri was and why he’d told me that entire tale was something I couldn’t imagine, but anyone who made a living as a psychic investigator was probably ready to tell more than a few fantastical tales. Perhaps he’d thought I’d pay him to do a psychic investigation or look for Phil or something. Or perhaps he believed what he said.

  I glared at the mirror above the chipped harvest-green sink. I looked extremely pale, but at least my pupils—as I glared at my reflection—seemed to be the same size, which meant there was no skull fracture. The back of my head, when I felt it gingerly with my fingertips, blazed into a burst of pain.

  I’d asked Uri if I’d fainted from the sight of Phil’s body or some sort of magic, but he’d shaken his head and told me, “No. They hit you on the head. You were supposed to be the . . . wake-up snack.”

  I shuddered. Charming imagination, that. I swallowed two aspirin, threw cold water on my face and wondered why the heck Phil had left me a note asking to meet him it the basement of a warehouse. Probably someone had something to sell and he wanted me to look at it. Likely a desk, as he’d been looking for one. I brushed my teeth.

  He’d probably gotten done before I got there. And they’d left the door unlocked, and I’d slipped and fallen down the steps in the dark. Yeah, that made sense.

  I realized Uri—if that was his real name—had never turned the lights on or a flashlight or something, and let me see that basement. Probably full of old furniture someone was disposing of. And if Uri thought I believed for a moment that when he’d put his hand over my tea, he’d been blessing it, or that this had any effect in making my concussion better, he had another thing coming. Heck, if the lid of the teapot hadn’t been firmly shut, I’d have thought that he’d put something in it. Roofies or wallies, or windowees, or whatever the latest rape drug was.

  But no, he was just one of those new-agey deluded souls who cleansed auras and talked about one’s past lives. And he knew where I lived. Which was just wonderful. Of course, normally I wasn’t here alone at night. And when Phil came dragging home tonight, he was going to get the talking-to of his lifetime, for having left before I arrived. And then he was going to promise me to forfeit his next two Fridays with the guys. He could bring them here for chips and TV or whatever, but I wanted company in case the delusional maniac came trolling around again to save me from vampires.

  By the time I’d put on a nightshirt—actually an old, oversized T-shirt—I’d talked myself down from that, too. After all, Uri hadn’t harmed me, and he could have, when I was so out of it. He might be a nut, but he was an inoffensive one. I’d be fine. And Phil would probably laugh at it.

  I wanted to go to sleep, but then I’d just wake up with Phil coming in. Normally I’d get out my laptop and play free cell, but I was too tired for that, and I didn’t think I could concentrate that well. Not with my head hurting so badly. So, I moved Phil’s textbook and sprawled on the sofa watching late-night TV. I was trying to figure out what the thing advertised as a mop that could also double as a shovel could possibly be, when I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with someone pounding on the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me, babe.” Calling me babe was one Phil’s worse habits. But, hey, it could be gambling. Or instigating revolutions in small third-world countries. “I lost my key.”

  I didn’t realize I’d been worried until I failed to be angry at Phil’s losing the key. He did it about twice a month. Sometimes he lost my key too. And each time, it cost us over a hundred dollars for the landlord to have the lock reconfigured. If he stopped doing that, we could afford cable and I might have something to watch other than late-night commercials.

  But at least Phil was alive, and the bizarre dream hadn’t been true. I turned the TV off and went to open the door. Phil was leaning against the wall outside, looking at me with a slightly unfocused gaze. He was drunk. I was sure of it. Only drunkenness would account for his leaning on the wall like that. Besides, he gave me a slow, sloppy smile and said, “Man, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “What was it? The margarita special at what’s-its-name in Lodo, again?”

  He frowned, as though not sure what I meant. I took a deep breath and stepped back from the door. “Fine. Come in. I suppose there’s no point arguing.”

  He . . . flowed in. It was odd. One minute he was leaning against the wall, looking too wasted to stand up properly, and the next minute, he’d come through the door in a single motion, as if he were made of liquid. He shut the door behind himself with a careless slap and smiled at me. His eyes were still unfocused though. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  And like that he was on me, pinning me against the wall—his hands on my shoulders, kissing me as if he’d spent the last ten years trekking the Sahara and never meeting a woman or even a female camel.

  Look, I’m not going to say that Phil was normally a slouch in that department, but he wasn’t exactly Casanova, either. I wasn’t his first girlfriend, but I was the second. He hadn’t spent years practicing his kissing with experienced women of the world. But that is what it felt like now. His tongue flowed into my mouth—cold and skillful, twining my own tongue in a seductive way, and he sucked, just a little, and he leaned close and pushed me up against the wall with his body, so that I could feel every inch of his muscles . . .

  The problem is, as he tried to shift my position—with his hands now on either side of my waist—he shoved my head against the wall. Right over the bump. I howled, and pulled back from the kiss, the moment broken.

  And I realized something was very wrong. For one, Phil didn’t smell of alcohol. For another, Phil didn’t usually smell this good. It wasn’t a smell I could define—something exotic, like . . . like a tropical plant. But he smelled irresistible and made me want to melt into his arms.

  Of course, maybe it was the windowees that Uri had given me. Only he hadn’t, and I knew he hadn’t, too, and I remembered Uri saying that vampires were sexually irresistible, even if they hadn’t been before. It was nonsense, it had to be nonsense. . . .

  But I allowed Phil to start kissing me again and, while he did, I unzipped his leather jacket, as if I were just sort of playing and not sure what I was doing.

  I unzipped it enough for it to part and for the collar he’d raised to fall. Looking down, as he kissed me, I should not have been able to see much of anything. But the slash across his throat was pretty damn hard to miss.

  A slash across his throat and the drip, drip, drip of blood being collected into a bowl.

  Pushed against the wall, pinned in on either side by the arms of a dangerous—zombie? vampire?—boyfriend, there was only one direction I could go. It was a direction, too, that most men don’t think of stopping a woman going.

  Down. My face scraping against his jacket, my body sliding down as if I meant to kneel. Only instead, I lurched sideways, and rolled away from him. Good thing I’d actually been good at gymnastics, though it had been a long time since I’d done anything of the sort. Very good thing, because Phil didn’t even hesitate. He flowed towards me, moving as fast and soundlessly as he had at the door, reaching for me. And now he was making a roarlike sound, which should have been scary—and was—but also re
minded me of a house cat throwing a fit. And his teeth glimmered in the light, displaying two long and quite pointy fangs. Vampire, then. Good to know. He must have been damn careful not to let me feel those while we were kissing.

  I slid around furniture, evading him. We must have looked like a Victorian maiden and her unruly suitor. “So you’re a vampire?” I said conversationally, hoping to distract him. But all he did was roar at me again.

  We were dancing on either side of the sofa, this way and that. His arms were extended, like a goalie’s trying to prevent me getting past him either way. Were those claws at the end of his fingers? I really didn’t want to know. Bad enough the wide-open mouth, the fangs glimmering, the roaring.

  I jumped—straight back, over the coffee table—then lifted the coffee table, holding it as a shield between him and myself. It was exactly like a lion-taming act, only much more dangerous, because he kept trying to reach around the table, and the table was heavy. I wasn’t going to be able to stay like this very long. If I could reach the door . . .

  But I realized that would only mean that I would careen down the stairs and Phil would catch me and suck me dry. The new, improved Phil moved much better than I ever had.

  I could run into the kitchen and find something to skewer him with. Unfortunately neither of us was exactly a gourmet cook, and there was only one knife in there. I didn’t think that vampires could be killed with a paring knife, could they? Heck, I didn’t even have chopsticks in there. Perhaps the broom handle?

  He must have read my mind, or anticipated my thoughts, because he moved that way, blocking my path to both the outside and the kitchen.

  So, I ran the only way I could—into the bathroom. And grabbed the first thing I saw that looked like a stake—the toilet plunger. Wrong side out.

  I heard Phil’s feet pound towards the door and the snarl-hiss louder than ever, as he grabbed the door I was trying to close and pulled it not just out of my grasp but off the hinges, throwing it into the living room with such force I heard it crack and splinter.

  And then he advanced on me, with a big smile—or at least with his fangs really showing. I knew the plunger would never work, but what the heck. I grabbed the rubber end and struck, hard, in the direction of his chest.

  Vampire chests must be different, because it went in, the whole way. He looked down for a second, somewhere between surprised and puzzled.

  And then he fell into a pile of dust on the floor, and I leaned back against the sink. Just long enough to realize that I could hear screams coming from downstairs, and the same sort of hiss-growl that Phil had made. I looked down at the pile of dust and Phil’s empty jeans, T-shirt and—incongruous—wristwatch.

  There were more of them. Phil had probably bitten people and made them vampires. Or they’d been awakened by the sacrifice. Which meant . . .

  It didn’t matter what it meant. As I recovered from my fright, I realized I couldn’t let vampires roam the streets of Denver. For one, I thought, I liked this town. For another, whoever had created vampires and made Phil into a vampire had, in a way, killed Phil. He might not have been the best boyfriend ever, but he hadn’t been too bad. And he certainly hadn’t deserved to die. Besides, my mind added, somewhat more incoherently, a plague of vampires would be really bad for tourism.

  My body hurting as if I were about a hundred years old, I forced myself to walk out of the bathroom to where Phil had, so helpfully, broken the door. It had splintered in so many pieces that only ten or so layers of paint held the century-old wood together. Pulling a decent stake out of the mess was not hard at all. Running down the stairs to the front hall was the work of a minute.

  Uri stood in the hall, defending the building from—I blinked. They were definitely vampires. But the front two were—I’d swear—two of Denver’s finest, male and female, in their uniforms. They looked alive and, like Phil, would pass for human if it weren’t for the glittering fangs. Behind them there clustered a far-longer-deceased multitude. Those who retained any shreds of clothing seemed to be dressed in the remains of turn-of-the-century clothing. One of the men at the back even had a very shredded top hat set atop what must have once been glistening curls but were now just grave-dirt-caked curls. All of them were grave-dirt-caked, which made race, age and creed indistinguishable. The only thing about them that glimmered was their very sharp fangs.

  And Uri was keeping them back with . . . a flaming sword. There was no other way to describe it. It was a sword, and long, and made of flame. Whenever it touched a vampire, the vampire crumbled to dust.

  Except for the two police-officer vampires, who must have retained some of their training because, though they were clearly in the lead and inciting the others on, they managed to stay just out of reach of the flames.

  I dove under his arm, and the sword, and managed to plunge my stake into the male officer’s chest. He crumbled into dust, but the female officer had gotten the point and managed to get between me and Uri, grab me by the shoulders and pull me towards her.

  I swung my arm around with the desperation of the lost, and plunged it into her back, right about where I thought her heart should be. She screamed and crumbled.

  The army of the long undead, losing their leaders, hesitated. Uri advanced, swinging his flaming sword. Rank on rank, they fell before they could react.

  Soon, we were in the hall of my apartment building, all alone.

  “A few at the back ran away,” I said. “I heard them.”

  “I know,” he said and sighed. “Can’t be helped.”

  The other thing I supposed couldn’t be helped was how he looked. He still wore his leather jacket and tight, tight jeans. His features still looked like an illustrator’s wet dream. But his hair had come loose of the ponytail and seemed to have acquired a life of its own. It writhed and shone, silvery gold, lighting the entire shabby hall and its collection of turn-of-the-century, in-wall mailboxes in a way it could never have been meant to be lit. At his back, seemingly growing right through the leather jacket, was a magnificent pair of wings—white and feathery and glowing.

  He did something with the sword, and the flame went out, though I supposed something remained, because he slipped something into his pocket. But the wings and the hair remained, and as he raised his hand to touch his forehead, light seemed to leak between his fingers.

  “Who are you?” I asked, and realized a little late I should have said what.

  He didn’t argue semantics, though. Instead, he gave me a level look. “Uriel,” he said. “Archangel of the presence. I—” For a moment his gaze looked as unfocused as Phil’s had been. Then he glared at the light glowing around his fingers, swallowed hard and looked at me. “You don’t have any liquor?” he asked. “Or cigarettes?”

  “What?”

  “I . . . need it,” he said. “To keep from ascending. You see . . . the form on Earth is unstable, and when I’m tired or . . . or exert myself too much, I revert to my most true form.”

  “Liquor?” I said. “Cigarettes?”

  “Any carnal pleasure would do,” he said, managing to sound very tired. “We . . . don’t have those, normally. It . . . it reinforces the body.”

  I looked at his confused face, his glimmering body, now seemingly shining with an interior light that came even through the leather jacket, the very tight jeans. His wings fluttered and they weren’t so much real feathers as light woven into feathers. I looked up to meet his very sad expression. “Don’t you want to ascend?” I asked. “Isn’t it to . . . go to heaven?”

  He shook his head. “Not while there’s danger threatening people in Denver. I came here because the shielding this high in the mountain was unstable and there was a chance of . . . breakthroughs of . . . magic and supernatural and . . . evil things. Like this. The place itself gives people ideas, and it’s easier to fight them as they start. If I go to heaven, I’ll leave the area to be taken over by evil.”

  “We don’t . . . Phil didn’t smoke and I don’t either. And he only dra
nk when he was out.”

  “Oh, but then . . .” The light was stronger around him.

  Carnal pleasures. There was only one thing I could think to do—and I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask. He could stop me any time. It was odd, on short notice, but he’d saved my life. Twice.

  I took him by the hand and led him up the stairs. His hand was large and strong and very soft—skin never marred by the touch of everyday life on Earth. I opened the door to my apartment, led him into it, closed the door behind us.

  He shone softly, making the torn-up living room look like something out of a dream. Even the bedroom—when I led him there—with the unmade bed and the ratty bed cushions, looked like something strange and wondrous, with him in it.

  I unzipped his jacket and took it off, then his T-shirt. They came off with no hint of catching at the wings—as though the wings weren’t quite material. Underneath, his skin was very soft, a sort of pale gold, with a dusting of darker gold hair. I reached up to pull his head down, my fingers twined in the writhing hair, and kissed him hard. His mouth was soft, very warm, and after a second he returned my kiss with an ardor that Phil could never have matched, even as a vampire. He felt warm, and contact with me warmed me, in a not-quite-physical fashion. It was like kissing the rising sun, like holding fast onto a warming flame that didn’t burn.

  When I managed to pull back and recover my breath, he looked at me with something close to hunger. “I didn’t know,” I said, babbling the first thing that crossed my mind, “that angels could do anything like this. I thought angels were all holy and wore . . . nightgownlike things.”

  He narrowed his eyes, but seemingly only to focus better on me. “We’re not . . . what we’re painted. We’re very ancient. Before Christianity. Before Judaism. Men called us into existence when they first started thinking of eternity. Conjured us as messengers to the divine.” He sighed. “We’re not . . . good. Or perhaps it’s easier to say we’re so good, most humans would perceive us as terrible.”