The Girls With Games of Blood

by Alex Bledsoe

  He parked across the end of the driveway, blocking her in. When he got out, he heard music and laughter from one of the other houses, and watched a low rider drift past checking out the big white guy. He went to the front door, knocked authoritatively, and said, “Open up! Sheriff’s office!”

  He waited. There was no response. The single mailbox indicated that the house had not yet been subdivided. He saw no sign of life beyond the dark windows.

  He tried again. “Open up or we’ll break down the door.”

  He was about to knock a third time when the door suddenly opened, and his hand met no resistance. Instead it thudded against flesh, and a female voice cried, “Ow!”

  He jumped back, and the porch light came on, momentarily blinding him. Patience stepped out, one hand to her face. Furious, she yelled, “You punched me in the eye, you asshole!”

  Startled, Cocker blurted, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”

  She glared up at him with her good eye. “And you’re no sheriff, you’re that drunk who passed out at my show tonight. How about I call the real sheriff and get you locked up for assault?”

  The threat cleared his confusion, and he was back on track. He put his hand on her sternum and pushed her back inside, closing the door behind them. “Turn on the light,” he snapped.

  After a moment a single overhead bulb came on, revealing Patience in a simple black cocktail dress. She had one hand over her eye, but the other still blazed with fury. “Look, pal, I don’t know who you think you are—”

  “I’m the man looking for Rudy Zginski, bitch,” he said. “And since you’re dressed to go out, I figure you’re going to meet him. So you’re going to tell me where he is.”

  Patience stared blankly at him, then laughed. “Is that right? No, I don’t think I am. I think I’m going to ask you to leave, and since that won’t work I’m going to make you.”

  He smiled. He was twice her size, and had no moral problem forcing a woman to do anything. “Sweet thing, you best start saying ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ if you don’t want that pretty dress torn. Now where is he?”

  She lowered her hand. The eye behind it showed no sign of injury. Then she turned away and went into the sitting room. The walls were faded and water-stained, and except for an old couch and stacks of unopened boxes the room was empty. She turned on another lamp and faced him again.

  “You’re used to getting your own way, aren’t you?” she said casually. “Using aggression and violence to accomplish things. I’ve known a lot of men like you. A lot.”

  Cocker smiled coldly. “You ain’t known nobody like me, hot stuff. Now where is Rudy Zginski?”

  “You’re thinking that if you threaten to beat me or rape me, I’ll tell you.” She mimicked his heavy drawl. “But you ain’t known nobody like me, either.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Maybe I like the thought of being raped by a stranger. Maybe I want you to slap me around.” She fingered her neckline and licked her lips voluptuously. “Did you ever think of that?”

  Cocker said nothing.

  “Or maybe I just want you to do enough so that when I kill you, it’s clearly self-defense. Maybe close enough to kiss is close enough to kill. Maybe I’m just waiting for you to make a move.”

  Cocker’s eyes flickered around the room. He saw no weapons, but the girl’s mocking tone and blatant sexuality had him off-balance.

  Suddenly he froze. A painting propped on the mantel, barely visible in the light, transfixed him. He tilted the lamp shade so more illumination shone on it.

  The face, the blond hair, the regal cheekbones, all looked familiar. It was unmistakably Mama Prudence as a young woman, beautiful and cold and somehow frightening.

  His eyes opened wide and he stared at Patience. Now he knew why she had seemed familiar; the painting in Mama Prudence’s living room was clearly her, dressed in the fashion of a century or more ago.

  “Who is that?” he whispered, nodding at the painting.

  “That? It’s my sister, Prudence.”

  “Your sister?”

  She smiled. Her canine teeth looked abnormally long. “Yes. Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Cocker began to back away. “Stay away from me, bitch.”

  Patience laughed. “ ‘Bitch’?” You mean little ol’ me has scared big, strong you?” She looked at him in an odd, new way that truly did terrify him. “Friend, you don’t have any idea how scared you should be of me. If there’s a lick of common sense in that dense redneck skull of yours, you’ll leave now and never come back. Not here, not the bar, maybe not even to Memphis.”

  Cocker’s back was to the door, and he fumbled for the knob. “I got friends on the force,” he said, but it sounded weak and pitiful. “They can make life real hard for you.”

  “And I’ve got friends out in the night,” Patience hissed. “Friends who leave bloody pulps where there used to be human bodies. Friends who aren’t half as scary . . .”

  And here she stepped close so quickly she seemed to vanish across the room and reappear right in his face. “As I am,” she finished with a whisper.

  He wrenched the door open and fled down the drive. By the time he reached his car the door was again closed, and all the lights were dark. He roared off into the night.

  CHAPTER 16

  PATIENCE WATCHED OUT the front window for a long time to see if the man would return. At one time this sort of encounter would have sent her fleeing the city, possibly the country. But the man clearly had no interest in her except as a way to Zginski. That certainty allowed her to brush off the encounter, but it also meant she couldn’t risk putting Zginski in danger by keeping her date with him. Still, he was bound to approve when he learned of her reason.

  Zginski was a handsome devil, and his manners reeked of a bygone time. He was certainly sure of himself, in a way that both infuriated and fascinated her. He reminded her of Vincent, in fact, and that thought made her hands slide slowly up and down her thighs.

  Vincent. Young, dashing Colonel Vincent Drake . . .

  Why must we wait until our wedding night? he whispered as his hands slid over her corset. You will be my bride, and surely a few days can make no difference? She could barely breathe as he unlaced the garment, and her body blossomed with desire as his lips traveled from her shoulders to the curves of her breasts. She had no idea that a grown man would want to suck on a woman’s nipples, let alone that the sensation would practically immobilize her. By the time she lay naked on his cloak in the summer night, she was too overwhelmed to resist. And once the initial sharp pain of his penetration had faded, she had not wanted to resist.

  Oh, Vincent, you damned fool, she thought now, if you’d only been as true as you claimed to be.

  She gazed at her sister’s portrait. Prudence was tall, slender, with Grecian features and the haughtiness that accompanied them. Beside her, Patience always felt fat and dumpy. That’s the only thing that isn’t right, she thought for the millionth time. Prudence, your eyes were never that kind.

  They certainly weren’t the night before Patience’s wedding, when her sister looked up from beneath Vincent, her pale thighs spread wide for him, his firm behind clenching as he poured his seed into her. Prudence’s eyes were triumphant, looking over Vincent’s shoulder at her sister frozen in the garden shed’s doorway. Then Vincent, oblivious, had said, “You are so much more a woman than your fat sister.” Prudence’s eyes had turned triumphant with delight, and her laugh made Vincent say, “Oh, my love, my love,” just as he had done to Patience beneath the summer moon mere days earlier.

  Patience traced the frame’s beveling, feeling the weight of the cherry wood and its varnish. Their father had commissioned separate paintings instead of the usual one of both sisters together. “You two are so different you might not even be related,” he’d said often, “if I wasn’t so completely sure of your mother’s fidelity.” And for a long time Patience had pretended they weren’t,
that she was a changeling born of a Gypsy princess and a disgraced nobleman, sent to America for her own safety.

  But truthfully, there was a resemblance. Both were smart, capable of great deviousness, and able to see through the lies of most everyone around them. Except, in her case, those of her fiancé and sister. They were bound by blood, now in more ways than one.

  She sighed and went upstairs to the master bedroom. She’d placed clothes in the closet, and filled the dresser with lingerie, but otherwise the room was bare. She needed no bed: she rested on the floor, usually naked, her limbs neatly arranged. She required nothing else.

  She’d tried sleeping in a coffin once, for a week. It had been both uncomfortable and pointless. She’d researched the folklore and understood the desire to return to the grave, but for her it was simply a waste of time. She knew what she was and understood her limits. She did not fear discovery.

  As she lay on the floor, feeling the grain of the wooden slats beneath her, she recalled the night she had been turned. Her final mortal memories were all sensations: the weight of Vincent’s pistol in her hands, the cold metal barrel against her soft bosom, the flash of light, the smell of powder and burnt meat, and the incredibly anticlimactic, muffled bang. Then the agony of the round bullet tearing through her bodice, her flesh, the bone beneath it, and finally her heart. She had fallen atop the hill, where the morning sun would reveal her body for all to see.

  But before the sun rose, there was the moon. It was full, and cold, and merciless. It carried magic that she never anticipated, charms sympathetic in the worst way to the impulses that drove a girl to suicide. More than just the bite of another vampire could create its kindred; the universe itself, if the conditions were right, could spawn one just as it had once spawned life from a sea of primeval chemicals. Instead of journeying to heaven, or hell, or the nothingness she truly expected, the moonlight fixed Patience’s soul to her body and left her with an irresistible urge for the only substance that would anchor her to the earthly plane.

  And before her lifeless corpse could be found by her family, she awoke beneath the stars with a chill in her heart and a hunger greater than anything she’d ever known. With a certainty so great it was as if God himself had ordained it, she made straight for the one thing that could appease her new appetite: Vincent.

  There was no hesitation, no stealth, no subtlety. She burst through the window of the guest room and pounced on him without a word. Her teeth had grown long and sharp, the better to rend the flesh she’d once coveted. He managed to fire a pistol at her, striking near the wound she’d inflicted on herself. But except for the thump of impact she felt nothing, no burning or pain or weakness. If anything, it made her more furious.

  She crushed his hand while it still held the pistol, driving splinters from the wooden hilt into his palm. His screams were high and girlish. Then she slammed him back against the wall, tilted his head to one side, and buried her teeth in his neck. She had not understood the nature of her need, and instead of simply piercing his vein she’d ripped out a fist-sized chunk of flesh. She spat it to the ground, and then the ecstasy of the blood found her. She put her face into the wound, uncaring that it flooded her nose as well as her mouth, grateful only for the sense of completion she now felt. This was what she needed. This was her reason for living.

  Except that she wasn’t living. And when the door flew open, and her father and male cousins stood frozen in horror, she realized she was no longer Patience Bolade. She was a monster.

  Her cousins tried to restrain her, but she killed two of them instantly with blows to the head, and a third was left crippled after being hurled out the window. Her father tried to shoot her but could not bring himself to pull the trigger, and stepped aside for her to emerge from the room and ascend the stairs. She bellowed her sister’s name like the cry of some rabid beast.

  But when she found Prudence huddled in her closet behind her petticoats, she felt a cold certainty that stayed her hand. “I will never die, Prudence,” she had warned, her voice wet and gurgly. “For the rest of your days I will haunt you. You will never know when I will strike. No prayer can save you from me.” And with that, she left her family and her life behind. She bore them no ill will, and no anger; with all eternity before her, she saw Prudence’s actions as those of a limited, selfish mortal.

  Or at least she tried to. Because the next night, while the moon was still full, Prudence also killed herself on the same hill. And when she arose, she eliminated the rest of the Bolade family and swore eternal vengeance on Patience.

  Patience tried to reason with her sister, to convince her that vampires had no need for grudges over things done during their mortal existences. But Prudence was adamant that someday, somehow, she would avenge what Patience had done. So Patience left Tennessee, putting as much of the planet between her and Prudence as possible. Discreet inquiries subsequently told her that Prudence still occupied their ancestral home, a dim shade spoken of in whispers by those who lived nearby. “Mama Prudence” they called her, and came to her for fortune-telling and crude magic spells. Isolated, with no one to feed on regularly, she withered and shrunk so that she resembled a storybook crone. No one truly believed she was the same Prudence Bolade from a century earlier; most assumed she was a slightly dotty relative, content to live among the relics of the past.

  As her limbs grew rigid and her consciousness faded, Patience’s last coherent thought was, Soon, sister. We shall settle this soon. You know I’m close, just as I know you are. Because I’m weary of running and hiding. I’m tired of not being able to come home.

  Clora kissed Leonardo hungrily, and her body squirmed against him almost of its own volition. She couldn’t wait to get naked with him; it was all she’d thought about since sundown. He never specified which nights he would visit, so every night became a sleepless, humid battle against her raging body. The sleeplessness was beginning to tell on her, too: she’d lost ten pounds, and now had dark circles under her eyes.

  On the nights he didn’t come, she thought about Mama Prudence’s warning. There was no question which of the two boys in her life was truly her “lover.” Yet could Leonardo seriously pose that sort of danger? He never asked to meet her out anywhere, and if she couldn’t be safe in her own bedroom, where could she? No colored boy would dare injure a white girl in her own home. Not in McHale County, for certain.

  “Touch me,” she said, reaching for his wrists and putting his palms against her breasts. “Please, touch me everywhere . . .”

  He smiled, but she was too close to him to see it. “Don’t worry, girl, you’ll get what you want.” He squeezed gently, and she moaned in gratitude.

  He could tell there was less life in her than before. The air around her used to be heated by her body’s thriving energy, but now it was cooler and weaker. It wasn’t yet dangerous, but before long it would become so. He would have to decide then what to do about her.

  She took his right hand from her breast and began to kiss his fingers. She said breathlessly, “Daddy and I went to town today. I got you a present.”

  “Really?” he said, his free hand roaming over her body through her clothes. If she sensed how clinically detached he was from the process, she gave no indication.

  “Mm-hm,” she said, and pulled away enough to open the night-table drawer. She retrieved a small, velvet-covered ring box. “Open it,” she said when she handed it to him.

  He did, and took out the plastic ring with its wide oval stone. He held it up to the light. “What is it?”

  “It’s a mood ring,” she said.

  “What does it do?”

  “You know what a mood ring does, don’t you?” She had seen commercials for them on Channel 5 out of Memphis, so surely everyone in the city knew all about them.

  He shook his head. “Tell me.”

  Maybe he was just testing her, to see if she was really with it or not. Bruce would do that, quizzing her on the latest music. “It changes color based on your mood. Well,
really, based on your body temperature. For example, when you’re here with me, mine turns blue.” She held up her left hand, where she wore an identical ring. The stone was deep blue. “Now let’s try out yours.”

  “I don’t think it’ll work on me,” he said.

  “Oh, come on, give it a try.” She took his left hand and slid the ring on his finger. They both watched it for several moments; it remained the same neutral gray color.

  “Sorry,” he said, and took it off. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

  She sighed, and wanted to cry. It had been such a minor thing, but to have it collapse this way left her feeling as useless and stupid as she did around Bruce. She took the ring and hurled it through the open window into the night. Then she turned back to Leonardo.

  The next thing she knew it was dark, and she was alone.

  She sat up in bed. She was still dressed in her panties and T-shirt, but she ached inside as if she’d had sex. As always, though, there was no memory of it, just a nagging sense that something had happened. She looked at the window, which stood open to the night; the tops of the trees were visible in the moonlight. She stood, intending to close it, but a wave of dizziness struck and she sprawled back on the bed. Just a moment, she told herself, until this passes, and then I’ll close the window.

  In less than ten seconds she was asleep again.

  Outside, on the roof, Leonardo sat on the peak beside one of the chimneys and looked up at the moon. He knew he should get going, in case Clora’s other boyfriend came around. But he needed to think and regroup, because he’d learned something tonight that was totally unexpected.

  Another vampire had fed on Clora.

  Whoever it was had been careful to use his fang marks, and had clearly not taken much. But the taste of strange saliva was there, altering the essence of Clora’s blood for those first few draughts. He had shared victims with Fauvette and Mark, as well as Olive and Toddy before they were destroyed. He recognized the change, but not the taste.