Biting Nixie

by Mary Hughes

  Of course, the memory of sex with Julian might never fade, but I didn’t want to consider that.

  “Some other time.” I slipped loose and started toward the fire. Bo and Elena might have been fighting here. Julian might have been fighting here. I wanted to make sure they were not lying helpless nearby.

  “Nixie, wait.” Bart grabbed my arm, swung me around like a yo-yo. “You do not want to get any closer.” He glanced toward Kalten’s, then back at me. His stare was hard, like blue marbles. “You shouldn’t even be here!”

  The music in his voice was wrong. The emphasis should have been on “be”, as in “You shouldn’t even be here.” But it wasn’t, meaning… “What’s wrong with here?”

  It was hard to tell in the red glow, but I think he flushed. “Alone, I mean. At night. And, um, near a fire.” He kept hold of my arm.

  “Bart, I’ll be fine. I just want to make sure no one needs help.” I tried to tug away but he was strong.

  “The cops’ll handle it, Nixie. Look, I’m going your direction. Let me walk you home.” Bart started dragging me northeast, toward my parents.

  “I don’t live that way!” Exasperated, I tried one more time to pull away. Bart wouldn’t let go. So I gave him a twist and a hard yank.

  “Hey!” He rubbed his wrist. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Then let go, next time I ask.” I started toward the fire, felt Bart reach for me again.

  So I drew the bazooka. It wasn’t loaded, but even an empty bazooka pointed at your chest makes you stop and think.

  “What the hell?” St. Bart said.

  “Leave me alone.” I spoke each word clearly. “Do not touch me again.”

  “Okay, okay.” Bart raised both hands, backed off. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Warn me about—?”

  An explosion rocked the street. I spun. Flames belched from every orifice of the Kalten, window and door. Glass burst onto the street. I put up one arm to shield my face. Heat roared around me.

  I whirled back. “How the hell did you know that was going to—”

  But Bart was gone.

  “So when did you find out about Bo? When he bit you on your wedding night?”

  Elena and I were eating breakfast at the Caffeine Café. It was Tuesday morning, and she’d just gotten off shift. I played with my scone, chocolate chip this time (warmed with butter). I was too unsettled to eat. The incident with Bart was still on my mind. But this breakfast was about finally getting the 411 on vampires. And about a very huge apology from my best friend because she had lied to me and made me feel like an idiot.

  Had I known what the future held, I would have at least tried to choke something down.

  “I knew sooner than that.” Elena smiled slightly. “I suspected long before, but didn’t want to believe it.”

  “Come on. You must have known something was up when Bo’s love-nips turned into real bites.” Elena’s smile widened and her eyes sparkled naughtily. Oops. Apparently Julian wasn’t the only maestro at fangilingus. “Er, I meant neck. Neck bites.”

  “Of course you did. Look, if it’s any consolation, I was as much in the dark as you in the beginning.”

  “Consolation? Hardly. Your best friend wasn’t in on the secret.”

  “My sister was.”

  “You deliberately misled me! After that first attack on Julian and me, you said I was imagining the blood. Imagining things. Like I was Bruno, or something.”

  “Actually, I said ‘I’m not saying you’re imagining things.’”

  “Whatever. I felt like an ID-ten-T.”

  “You’re not an idiot. Eat your scone. You’ll feel better.”

  I used my fork, but only to torture the damned scone. “I’m not joking, Elena. This time, the truth. All of it.”

  “Fine.” She held up both hands in surrender, which looked a little funny with a forkful of muffin still held in one. “What do you want to know?”

  Everything about Julian. Starting with his age. Could he really have done Renaissance dances when they were hip tunes? “How old is Julian?”

  “I’m not sure. But Bo just turned a thousand a few months ago.” She said it offhand, like she was just telling me the time.

  “A thousand?” I sputtered. “Like a millennium?”

  “Give or take a few years. I get the impression calendars have changed a bit since he was first born.”

  “Sweet chocolate Venus, Elena. A thousand years. Have you any idea how long that really is?”

  She shrugged. “Your Julian might be even older.”

  My cheeks heated. “He’s not my Julian.” I smashed scone in my agitation. And then it hit me. “No wonder he’s so good.”

  “He’s good, is he?” Elena raised one eyebrow.

  The heat in my cheeks became Bunsen burners. My scone became crumbs. “Moving right along. How did Bo become a vam—”

  Elena mashed a finger into my lips. “We don’t use the v-word, even here.”

  “Sorry. Bad case of the stupids.” I tried to come up with a code word, mauling what remained of my scone as I thought. “So how did Bo…get his extralong dentures?”

  Elena rolled her eyes. Apparently she didn’t think much of my secret word. And I’d gone to such trouble, too. “You mean his ang-fays?”

  “Like that’s any better. Look, not just Bo, but how does anybody turn? I always thought it was getting bit that did it. But with as often as Julian bites…um, yeah.” I broke off because Elena was grinning madly again. “Anyway, if it was all about the bite, I’d be sporting size extra-long pearlies by now. Julian said only dead people turn.”

  “Julian’s right. So’s folklore, as far as it goes.” Elena forked up muffin. “You have to be bitten, and you have to die. But that’s not a guarantee you’ll turn.”

  “It isn’t? Is there some sort of blood exchange ritual thingy?”

  Elena’s pale cheeks colored. “Not exactly. I mean, an ampire-vay’s blood works as well as a bite. As long as it gets into the human’s bloodstream. The human doesn’t actually drink it.”

  “Don’t you mean uman-hay?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “But I still don’t get it. How exactly does a human turn fangy?”

  “You mean the mechanism behind it?” Elena’s color returned to normal. “We don’t know, exactly. We know certain steps that have to take place. We know a human has to be exposed to v-blood or a v-bite. We know the human has to die. We know three days later, the human wakes up, new and improved and bloodthirsty. Other than that, we’re pretty much in the dark.”

  “But if vamp—I mean fangy guys have been around for thousands of years, someone must have figured out how they get that way.”

  “You’d think, but no.” Elena popped a bite of muffin, washed it down with her mocha latte. “We don’t even know what makes them different from humans.”

  “What? Isn’t that pretty obvious? Pointy teeth, great reflexes, really bad sunrash?”

  “I mean physically. At the cellular level.”

  “Cellular. Like phones?”

  “Ho, ho. Like DNA. V-guys don’t have doctors, don’t need ’em. But there are a few. And the mystery is—V-DNA is entirely human.”

  “That’s impossible!” DNA was a building plan, like blueprints for a house. Only instead of building a house, DNA built a body. Mouse plans built mice, camel plans built camels. Chicken plans were without lips. Human plans built humans. And if there was one thing Julian was not, it was merely human.

  “Well, subject tissue under the microscope has holes. But no one is sure what that means.”

  “Not even the wise and mighty ‘Ancient One’?”

  To my surprise Elena put a hand over mine. Looked me straight in the eye. “Nixie. I know you’re confused. It’s natural. And I know you’re feeling crabby about it. But you don’t want to mess around with the Ancient One. You just don’t.”

  Elena Strongwell, supercop. Warning me about a mysterious vampire li
ke he was some daggy ruler of Oz. “Thanks. Everything’s so clear now.”

  She sighed, removed her hand and sat back. “Look, three things to remember. First, most dead people stay dead. Second, for those who do turn, it’s bite, die, three days, done. Third, most dead people stay dead.”

  “I would guess the staying-dead part is kinda important.” I pushed my much-abused scone away.

  Elena’s face turned pensive. “Bo and I have discussed it a lot. About making me like him. I’m going to age, and he’s not. No problem now, but forty years down the road…well. He refuses to try. Not until we have better odds for me actually turning.”

  Wow. And I always thought marriage meant happily-ever-after. Guess there were still problems to overcome. And from Elena’s frownie-face, that one hadn’t been overcome. The frown, and the fact that she was stabbing her muffin like public enemy number one. Time to get her mind off it. “So what happened to Bo? How’d he do option two?”

  Elena stopped her muffin-mangling to smile briefly at me. She knew why I’d changed the subject. “Bo was killed in a Viking raid.”

  “A real Viking. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” I drank coffee. “I always thought he’d look good in a bearskin with an axe over his shoulder.”

  “Yeah.” Elena shivered. A bedroom shiver. Like maybe the image of a hot Viking warrior in nothing but a bearskin and sweat was more than a fantasy for her.

  “TMI!” I plunked my mug down. Coffee sloshed onto the table. “I don’t want to know. So Bo got it in a raid, and then what? ‘Thor’ bit him?”

  “Thorvald? No, he’s younger than Bo by several centuries.”

  I’d meant the Norse god-guy, but apparently Elena wasn’t into sarcasm this early in the morning. “Fine. Someone bit him. And then three days later Bo woke up, saw his shadow, and we had six more weeks of winter?” I waited for a reaction.

  “I know you’re being sarcastic, Nixie. I’m just ignoring you.”

  Friends are so annoying. “Love you too. Bo?”

  “He doesn’t remember. But there were some v-rogues following the Viking raiders. The V-raiders feasted on the spoils, and the v-rogues feasted on the spoiling, if you know what I mean.”

  Ew. My turn to ignore her. “So a rogue drank Bo’s blood, and by the luck of the dice, he turned.”

  “It might have been several rogues. You have a better chance of turning if there’s more than one. Or if the one is very old. That’s why I think Bo should at least take the chance of turning me…old topic. Never mind.”

  “And Julian? Do you know what happened with him?”

  “I think it had something to do with Druids and ritual skull-bashing.”

  “Oh goodie.” There was a hot bedroom discussion in the making. Not.

  “So are we good, now? I’m sorry I lied to you about the blood. But you can see why. The world isn’t ready for the reality of—” She did a quick scan of the room. Whispered, “Vampires.”

  “Especially not the Meiers Corners corner of it. Yeah, we’re good.” I dug into the remains of my scone, finally calm enough to eat.

  That’s when I got the first of the Munster calls.

  Thursday at what should have been supper time, my cell phone tweedled the theme from The Munsters. That meant someone from the Meiers Corners’s Common Council. Now what’s wrong? I wondered, swinging the phone open. It was the day before the festival opened. I was at home, staring at empty cupboards.

  The elderly voice on the other end of the phone was panicked. “The refrigeration went out at the Deli Delight, Nixie! Half the cheese balls melted and I don’t know what to do!”

  “Cheese balls don’t melt, Brunhilde,” I said, opening another cupboard. Also empty. Except for the cricket chirping.

  “These cheese balls did. They were running grease all over the place! It was like someone took a flame thrower to them.” She paused. “I think we’re going to have to cancel the tasting. There’s no way we can get more balls by tomorrow. Especially with the tasting opening so early. Why did it have to be three thirty? Couldn’t you have picked four?”

  “I didn’t pick the time, the mayor did. And we’re not going to cancel.”

  “We can still run the cheese contest,” Granny Butt said.

  “It won’t have the same draw. Call Lew Kaufman.” Mr. Chee$eball $alesman. “He can pull some strings.” I hung up and took out my frustration by kicking all the empty cupboards closed. Even the ones over my head. Then I stomped into my bedroom to take a nap.

  I flopped down on my bed. My stomach growled at me and my head ached. I rolled over to go to sleep. My mind refused to shut down. Tuesday. It had started Tuesday.

  Tuesday morning, after breakfast with Elena, the first of The Munster calls came. Kurt Weiss, practically yipping with panic. “The truck with our shipment…all over the road…like vultures on a dachshund carcass…”

  “Slow down, Kurt. Is it the corn ’n weenie roast?”

  “The hot dogs. Sideswiped by a Winnebago camper!”

  I swore. “No weenies, no roast.” I rubbed my forehead. “Okay, look. Raid every grocery store within fifty miles. Buy all the weenies you can.”

  “Oh…great great great! You have insurance money!”

  “Um. No. Not quite yet.” Fuck. So I had to give Kurt the money I’d saved on bands to buy wieners.

  Out of the blue, Julian called. Obviously in a hurry, he told me he’d be unavailable for a while. With a “sorry” that sounded anything but, he hung up before I could even ask what he meant by “a while”.

  On the heels of that disappointment, the mayor’s sister, advisor for the Wauwatosa Applied Math Organization, showed up. At my townhouse. That was the first I knew that the mayor expected me to find a place for the WAMO kids to stay. After making a few hurried phone calls and getting nowhere, I ran up the white flag with my mother. Mom knows everyone in Meiers Corners, and what’s more important, she’s owed favors by the entire city. Even Bo Strongwell owes Mom. She found a place for all twenty little geeks to stay, and made me promise to come to dinner for a month in return.

  I really hate owing my mother.

  I needed groceries, but between one thing and another, the shopping didn’t get done Tuesday. Wednesday morning I got up an hour early and skipped breakfast just to get a grocery guerrilla-hit in. Not that I had any breakfast in the house anyway.

  The instant I arrived in the parking lot of Der Lebensmittelgeschaft (you got it, The Grocery Store in German), I was intercepted by Donner and Blitz. They were so drunk I could barely understand them. I had to drag them to the Caffeine Café and pour a gallon of coffee into them to even make out a word. And by the time I finished paying for their coffee, I had no money left for food.

  Finally I deciphered the story. When Donner and Blitz pulled the tent for the beer tasting out of storage, it was half-eaten by moths. Going with them to City Hall, they showed me the huge holes in the seemingly indestructible canvas.

  The unnaturally large holes.

  All right, maybe I was vamparanoid. But those holes looked too big to be caused by moths. Unless, of course, the moths sported inch-long fangs.

  I spent the whole morning chasing down a replacement tent. Without cash or a credit card, no one would sell me one, much less rent one, even used. I finally called Bruno. “Please, Bear! It’s only for three days.”

  “Well, I’d like to, Nixie. You being a friend and all. But without credit—”

  “I’ll pay you out of the profits for the festival.”

  “I only have the one tent big enough to run the store out of. If something, you know. Happens.”

  That’s how Bruno thinks. Everything’s in terms of the Apocalypse. “We’re just borrowing it.”

  “Yeah. But if something happens…unless you have insurance?”

  Not that again. “I’ll…I’ll have to get back to you, Bear,” I said as I whacked my head against the wall.

  Noon was already a two-hour memory by this time. I ran to the kitchen. F
lung open cabinets and refrigerator. The only thing I had in the house was a box of mac and cheese. Literally. No milk, no butter.

  I found out you can actually make mac and cheese with only hot water.

  Stomach partially satisfied, I set off for the grocery store. Only to take a Munster call from Buddy. A month ago he had ordered five hundred packs of cards for the Sheepshead Tournament, but they never arrived. When he called the company he’d ordered from, they said they’d have to trace it. It took them two weeks to get back to him. Monday they told him the shipment had been lost.

  Not one to idly bemoan fate, Buddy started hitting the local department stores. The first store was out of cards. Coincidentally, so was the second. Not so coincidentally, so was the third. And the fourth.

  It took me the rest of Wednesday into early this morning to solve that one. After calling practically every store in northern Illinois, I finally thought of the little geeks I’d traded my soul to my mother for. Geeks were gamers, right? Well, maybe not all of them, but luckily, these geeks were. They called their parents back in Wauwatosa and I had nearly two hundred packs promised by tomorrow morning.

  So Tuesday and Wednesday I had a total of ten hours sleep and a box of mac and cheese to eat.

  And after that first phone call, I didn’t hear from Julian once.

  Today was Thursday. My stomach growled. I had a headache. Things were getting screwed up left and right. I’d used up my emergency money. I had no food for dinner. I didn’t have a place for the bands to play. I didn’t have a tent for the beer tasting.

  And I hadn’t had sex for over forty-eight hours and my pussy was screaming at me.

  What else could go wrong?

  Chapter Twenty

  At that point I did what any sane woman would. I got up and went to the kitchen, to get something to eat.

  Like I’d gotten to the store in the last ten minutes. Still, I checked one more time. One cabinet contained a half-eaten package of cellophane noodles. Another revealed a soda cracker and a spider web. A third had an open bag of cherry licorice sticks so dry you could dig to China with them. In the fridge was a moldy can of spaghetti and an apple that looked like a shrunken head. My stomach growled again.