They admired the night sky and the panorama of colored lights below, then Hans checked out the apartment itself. Again, it was perfect. Minimalist, but warm and inviting. Every piece had been selected with care, from the leather chairs to the ebony dining set to the priceless artifacts I’d “picked up” over decades of museum heists.
“How much for the whole thing?” Hans asked. “Fully furnished.”
Brigid’s gaze swept over the apartment, her lip curling. “It’s not really my style—”
“It’s mine.” He met my gaze. “How much?”
“A lot. I don’t think you want—”
“I do.”
His tone said either I named a price or he’d take it. The serpent uncoiled. I clenched my stomach muscles, sending it back to sleep.
“We’ll discuss it,” I murmured. “For now, if the location is to your—”
A shuffling rasp came from the bedroom. I went still. But they didn’t hear it, only frowned, wondering why I’d stopped.
I put my hands on Hans’s back, propelling him toward the door. “Actually, let’s discuss this over drinks. My treat. I know this amazing place on Queen’s West. Much more your style than Miller’s.”
He let me push him two feet before locking his knees. “I want this apartment, Zoe.”
“Actually, you know, transferring the tenancy might not be that easy . . . ”
The shuffling sound reached the bedroom hall. Brigid heard it now, pivoting that way.
“You want more money?” Hans said. “Is that what this is about? It better not be, because I’ve dealt fairly with you, and if you screw me over—”
“Mein Gott,” Brigid whispered. “What is that?”
Lurching from the bedroom hall was a woman. I already knew her gender—otherwise, it would be impossible to tell. Gauzy rags encased her skeletal limbs. A tangled mass of matted white hair hid her face. As she shuffled forward, her bony fingers waved in front of her as if she was conducting an orchestra no one else could see. Her head bobbed, sunken eyes glittering with madness, fleshless lips moving soundlessly.
Seeing me, the woman stopped. She squinted, head weaving like a hawk trying to get a better look at its prey.
“Tee,” I said, “Hi. I, uh, was just—”
“Going somewhere, Zoe?”
I bit off a nervous laugh. “Uh, no. Of course not.”
“That’s not what Tee heard. She heard you’re leaving us. Running off because big bad vampires have come to town again.” She looked at Brigid and Hans and sniffed. “Are these them? Nasty creatures.”
“Hey!” Brigid stepped toward Tee, then thought better of it and stopped, crossing her arms over her chest. “Whatever that monster is—”
“Monster?”
Tee unfurled her limbs, pulling herself up until she was almost as tall as Brigid. She shuffled toward her, rags whispering against the hardwood floor. Brigid tried holding her ground, but when she caught a whiff of Tee, she drew back.
“A monster kills and does not feed,” Tee said. “A monster leaves pretty boys to die in ugly alleys.”
“José?” Hans said. “That was—”
“There was another, last night. The one this naughty vampire didn’t tell you about.” She drew herself up again to look Brigid in the eye. “The pretty boy with the pretty red hair and the pretty red shirt and all that pretty red blood.”
“How did you—?” Brigid began.
“Tee knows everything. Her friends tell her.”
Tee swept a hand around the room. Brigid and Hans followed it, but saw nothing.
I stepped forward. “And that is the great thing about you, isn’t it, Tee? You have a regular army of spirit informants.”
Tee rocked back on her heels, lips smacking in self-satisfaction. “Tee and her friends help little Zoe.”
“Exactly, and now you can help Hans and Brigid.”
Her lips pursed and she eyed them. “One vampire is enough for any city.” She sidled toward Hans and whispered. “Give Tee the naughty one, and she won’t ask for morsels for a very long time.”
“Morsels?” Hans’s gaze shot to me.
“Er, yes. See . . . ”
I motioned him off to the side. When Tee tried to follow, I waved her away. She grumbled, then stumped over to a chair.
“Tee’s a demon,” I said, voice lowered. “She got trapped in a human body a hundred years ago. Being a demon, she can’t die, which is why she . . . looks like that. But over the years, she’s misplaced a few of her marbles.”
“A few?”
“Most of the bag. Anyway, she’s convinced that she’s alive because she’s found the key to immortality: consuming the flesh of the living.”
“What?”
I motioned for him to keep his voice down. “Usually she just takes a few nibbles off dead bodies. Sometimes she does hunt—”
“Tee eats what she hunts,” she called. “Not like some people.” She glowered at Brigid.
I lowered my voice another notch. “We discourage the hunting. It’s messy. Instead, Tee and I have an arrangement. Her spirit friends help me and I feed her.”
“Feed her what?”
“If you’re looking for immortality, what’s better than the flesh of the living?”
Hans stared at me. He blinked. Then he eased back with a harsh laugh. “If you really expect me to believe that you feed her—”
I took a penknife from my pocket, sliced a strip of flesh from the underside of my forearm, then walked over and gave it to Tee. She gobbled it down like a strip of bacon.
Behind me, the room went silent. I flexed my arm. The flesh was already filling in the furrow. In an hour, it would be back to normal.
“So.” I smiled brightly. “That’s all there is to it. Now, let’s get that drink and we can talk terms. There are a few pieces here I couldn’t bear to part with, but the rest is negotiable.”
I walked to the door. Hans and Brigid didn’t move.
“We don’t like them,” Tee muttered. “We don’t like them at all. Nasty things. We like Zoe.”
I sighed. “Yes, it’ll be an adjustment, Tee, but you’ll get used to them.” Another bright smile. “I’m sure we all taste the same.”
“Okay,” Brigid said, hands flying up. “That’s it. Zoe might put up with your shit, demon, but I won’t. If you ever try to take a bite of me—”
Brigid sailed off her feet, smacked into the wall and collapsed at the bottom.
“She’s a demon, remember?” I whispered. “You don’t say no to a demon.”
“The hell I don’t,” Brigid snarled.
She leaped up . . . and got hit in the gut with an energy bolt. The smell of burning flesh filled the room. Tee hadn’t budged, just sat placidly stroking the leather chair.
“We don’t like her.” Tee looked at Hans. “We don’t like you, either, but we like her less. Give her to Tee. Tee has a good hiding place, dark and cold. She’ll save all the naughty vampire’s bits and eat them slowly.”
Brigid let out a growl, pawing the ground like a bull.
I swung over to Tee and squeezed her shoulder. “Ah, Tee, you’re such a joker. You’d never do that, would you? Not to a big, strong vampire like Brigid.”
“Even vampires sleep,” Tee murmured. “Yes, they do.” Her gaze darted around, listening to her spirit counsel. “That’s how we’ll do it. We’ll get her when—”
“Tee,” I said sharply.
She pouted and grumbled under her breath.
“I’m not staying in the same city as that thing,” Brigid said. “Either she goes or I do.”
Tee launched herself at Brigid. The vampire stumbled back, arms sailing up to ward her off. Then she stiffened and fell over.
“Shit!” I said. “Her binding powers. Hans, grab her before—”
Too late. Tee was on Brigid, biting chunks of flesh from her shoulder. Hans and I managed to get her off. I restrained her, thrashing and howling, as the binding spell broke and Brigid scrambled
to her feet. As they ran for the door, I dropped Tee and tore after them.
“Wait! We had a deal! I’ll give you a discount on the apartment—”
I caught up with them in the stairwell. We had a brief discussion, the upshot being that I could keep my damned city and they were never setting foot in this godforsaken town again. I begged. I pleaded. I cajoled. All to no avail.
I walked back into my apartment. Rudy and Randy were helping themselves to my bar.
“That went well,” I said. “Thanks for the spells, guys.”
Rudy and Randy were half-brothers. With different mothers and twenty years between them, they didn’t look much alike. The only thing they shared was their father’s sorcerer blood.
Tee was back in her chair, now stroking a Maori mask she’d plucked from the shelf. She whispered under her breath. Talking to her spirits. Tee wasn’t a demon—just a very old, very powerful, very crazy necromancer terrified of death, certain it would condemn her to an eternity of serving ghosts.
I cut another strip from my arm and handed it to her. She gobbled it down. Randy turned away; Rudy glowered at me.
“It grows back,” I said. “And it’s better than having her hunt humans.”
“Well, don’t do it while I’m here, okay?” Rudy helped himself to my daiginjō-shu.
“That’ll be twenty bucks,” I said. “You can add it to my credit.”
“Credit?”
“You got a grand for a fifty-dollar tab, most of which José already paid off. I expect at least five-hundred in credit.”
“Sure, we could do that.” He headed for the couch, circling wide around Tee. “Or I could introduce you to the blond half-demon. She asked about you last night. Of course, not having any experience with vampires, she’s a little nervous about introducing herself . . . ”
“Keep the money.”
He sat. “I’m sure you had fun with this scheme, but you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and just killed them.”
“Me?”
He gave me a look that said I didn’t fool him. I never had.
Randy handed Tee a glass of my cheaper sake. She whispered under her breath and petted his hand before he continued on to the sofa.
“Normally, I’d be all for the humane solution,” Randy said. “But in this case, killing them might have been the humane solution. At least for everyone else.”
True. I did the world no favors by sparing Brigid’s life. I could argue that in killing her, I could unleash a worse predator inside me. But that’s bullshit rationalization. I let her live because I wouldn’t risk the personal hell that could come with killing her.
I have a good life here. A damned near perfect one. Would I kill to keep it? I’d rather not find out. Someday, I’ll be tested. Just not today.
I pulled out the watch I’d swiped from Hans when we were struggling with Tee.
“Anyone want a Rolex?”
La Vampiresse
Tanith Lee
British author Tanith Lee has written around ninety books and close to three hundred short stories in a variety of genres including both adult and young adult fantasy, science fiction, Gothic romance, historical novels, and horror. Her prose is always intelligent, often darkly twisted, exotic, and lush. Vampiric themes appear frequently in her fiction, most notably in short novel Sabella: or the Bloodstone and the novels of the Blood Opera series—Dark Dance, Personal Darkness, and Darkness, I—which reveal the life of the Scarabae: elegant, mysterious, seductive creatures of few words and many secrets. Additional vampire novels include The Blood of Roses, and Vivia. Some of her shorter works are considered vampire classics. These include “The Beautiful Biting Machine,” “Red As Blood,” (which twists Snow White’s tale into something darker), “Bite-Me-Not, Or Fleur de Fur,” and “Nunc Dimittis” (adapted for the cable TV series The Hunger in 1999). The title character of “La Vampiresse” embodies the charisma, power, and presence of the vampire in an unusual way. This story is another with the makings of a classic.
Tanith Lee has won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award, two World Fantasy Awards, and two Spanish Gilgames Awards. She was named a Grand Master at the World Horror Convention in 2009. She is married to the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine. They live on the Sussex Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants. Norilana Books is currently reissuing some of Lee’s early novels: including The Birthgrave Trilogy and the five books of the Tales of the Flat Earth opus.
Going up in the elevator, he felt a wave of depression so intense at what he was about to do, that he almost rushed out at another floor. But then what would he see? The eerie elongate building was frosted with a dry desert cold. On the ground floor he had already encountered strange sliding, creeping or slipping shades. He had glimpsed creatures—things—he didn’t want to be at large among. And anyway, there was the man with him in the lift, “helping” him to reach the proper place.
How is she today?” he had asked, when they first got in.
“As always.”
“Ah.”
And that was all.
Ornamental, the elevator had fretted screens of delicately wrought white metal. Its internal light was soft, but not warm. When the cage finally rattled to a halt, and the screens parted, a cold blast hit him from an open window.
“Is that safe?”
“What?” asked the man.
“That window—surely—”
“That’s fine. See the grill?”
He looked and saw the grill. And in any case, now they were in the heart of a desert night. The sunset had been sucked under, sucked up like red blood, in the minute or so of the elevator’s ascent. Stars glittered out in the black sky, undimmed even by the lights of this immense, automated mansion. Soon a moon would rise.
“Thanks,” he said humbly to the attendant. Should he tip him? Perhaps not. The man was already undoing a door, and it seemed he should go through—go through alone. And now after the depression, for a moment he was afraid.
“Am I okay in there?” He tried to sound flippant.
The attendant smiled suddenly, contemptuous as a wolf. “Sure. It’s all right, you know. She’s sated.”
“She is?”
“Yes. Quite.”
“Sated.”
“Yes.”
“How?” he heard himself ask. The ghoulish word hung there in the slightly-warmed cold air.
The attendant said. “Best not to ask, mister.”
“No . . . ”
“Best not to ask,” the man repeated, as fools or the nervous or the indomitable often did.
But this time he resisted, himself, doing so.
And then he was through the door, which—as it seemed with its own laughter—shut fast and closed him in.
The first thing he saw in the great wide room was the Christmas tree. It was that blue-green variety, about two meters tall and growing in a stone pot. He knew of the tree, had indeed seen pictures of it, both stills and film. Probably not the same tree. but the same type of tree and decorated in the same way, for it was hung with long pearl necklaces.
The room was luxurious. Thickly carpeted with deep chairs upholstered in what looked like velvet, or leather. The drapes were looped back from two tall windows, in one of which the moon was now coming up from the desert.
In fact, this whole room was very like the other room, the room he had seen photographs of. Not absolutely, he supposed, but enough.
He looked around carefully. On a gallery up a stair were book-stacks lined with volumes of calf and silk, gilded. A globe stood up there on a table, and down here, one long decanter filled with dark fluid and two crystal goblets.
“It isn’t blood.”
He snapped around so fast a muscle twanged at the top of his neck.
Christ. She had risen up silent as the moon rose, out of that chair in the corner, in he half light beyond the lamps, a shadow.
“No, truly, not blood. Alcohol. I keep it for my guests.”
/> He knew what to do. And if he hadn’t known, he had had it droned into him by everyone he had had to deal with, lawyers, his own office, and inevitably, the people here. So he bowed to her, the short military bow of a culture and a world long over. But not, of course, for her.
“Madame Chaikassia.”
“Ah,” she said. “At last. One who knows how to say my name.”
Naturally he knew. He had known from the day he saw her in the interview on TV. Rather as he had seen the actress Bette Davis in an interview years before and she had been asked how her first name was pronounced. So that he therefore knew it was not pronounced, as most persons now did, in the French way, Bett, but—for he had heard the actress herself reply—as Betty. And in the same way he knew the female being before him now did not pronounce her name as so many did: not Che´-kasee-ah, but Ch´-high-kazya.
She did not ask who he was. They would have told her when they said he would be coming. After all, without her permission, he would never have been allowed into this room. And all the way here, if the truth were known, he had been sweating, thinking she would, after his journey of two thousand miles and more, suddenly change her mind.
“Help yourself,” she said idly, “to a drink.”
So he thanked her, and went and poured himself one. To his surprise, when he sipped it, it was a decent malt whisky. Despite her words he expected anything but alcohol. Yet obviously, they knew she would never drink this.
When she beckoned to him, he sat down facing her where she had once more sat down. The side lamps cast the mildest glow, but behind her the harsh white neon of the moon was coming up with incredible rapidity. It would shine into his face, not hers.
In the soft flattering light, he studied her.
Even under these lamps she looked old. He had been prepared for that. No one knew her exact age, or those who did kept quiet. But twenty, twenty-five years ago, when he had seen her in that interview, or more recently in little remaining clips of film, she had looked only a glamorous thirty, forty. Now he would have said she was well into her sixties. She looked like that. Except, of course, she still was glamorous, and she still had her wonderful mask of bones on which the flesh stayed pinned, not by surgery, but by that random good luck which chance sometimes handed out, just now and then, to the chosen few.
Vampires: The Recent Undead Page 13
