I, Vampire

by Jean Marie Stine

  "I don't want to die!" She repeated, her eyes closed and welling with tears.

  "No one does, Em," I said gently.

  Then I pulled her inside the shop where she slowly regained her composure as we examined the fabrics and patterns.

  For the rest of the day all I could think of was Em, her pale, white skin, the sweet throbbing of the pulses in her veins. I felt as if night would never come and when it did, I felt as if it would never be bedtime. But eventually the household slept. Mortals are such fragile things and yet I am forever falling in love with them. I have loved many times, and yet I never loved as deeply as I loved Em.

  My body melted into mist away at the thought of her sleeping in the next room and I flowed to her under the locked door of my chamber.

  Gathering myself at the foot of Em's old-fashioned brass bed, I watched her breasts rise and fall with each breath. I hesitated, longingly, beside her. "Em, sweet Em," I murmured as I leaned over the bed, nuzzling the cleft between her white snowy mounds. Her bodice came loose and my lips moved down. Em moaned but did not wake.

  Em, Em, Em, goddess how I love you! Her life essence welled to my lips like ambrosia of paradise.

  She moaned and writhed beneath the sheets. A floorboard creaked outside. Em woke instantly as if at a bad memory and screamed. I vanished, misting away and back to my room.

  "It was a big nightmare. Nothing more," Mrs. Lafontaine assured Em as the household crowded at her door.

  I pushed past Em's younger siblings crowded at the door. Mr. Andrews stood near his daughter's bed, looking troubled. Mrs. Lafontaine sat on Em's bed, holding her while she sobbed and gasped and sobbed again.

  "Is Emily all right?"

  "She's had a nightmare," Mrs. Lafontaine said.

  Em flushed and settled back into her pillows. "Oh. I'm sorry I woke everyone. Really." She caught at my hand as I moved away from the bed, "Sit with me until I fall asleep."

  "I don't know," Mr. Andrews frowned.

  "Oh, surely there's no harm in it," said Mrs. Lafontaine. Mr. Andrews shrugged.

  I drew a chair near the bed and sat down.

  Em watched the door close, then turned her lovely blue eyes to me, with an insistent, pregnant look. "Kiss me again like before, Missy. I won't scream this time. I promise."

  I was startled and rose from my chair. "Em! What are you saying!"

  "Oh, I don't know how ... but I know." She looked away. "I've read books. I know what you are. Kiss me like that again, Missy."

  "You don't know what you're asking." I moved to the window, gripping the ledge so hard my knuckles whitened.

  "I do too," Her eyes met mine unafraid. "I'll never die, not really, and we can be together forever..." She halted and her eyes filled with tears. "Unless you don't love me?"

  "Dearest Em. Of course, I love you." I returned to the bed.

  "Then kiss me again. Any life is better than this living death."

  It was an inescapable truth. Em had won and I had lost. I bent over her, pressing my lips to the great blue vein in her breast.

  To Hell with my promise to Mama. She would have to do the accepting, for once.

  Finally I couldn't stand it any longer. As I lifted my blood-rimmed mouth from her delicate breast, Em moaning weakly beneath me, I could feel her dying. "No, Em. You mustn't leave me. Do you truly love me, Em?"

  Her eyes, glazed with weakness stared up trustingly "Forever, Missy."

  With a sharp fingernail, I slashed my left breast and pressed her mouth to it. The blood flowed unheeded across her lips and for a moment, I feared I had acted too late. Then I felt her sucking, weakly at first, then more strongly. "Yes, Em. Yes, yes, yes. Drink, Em, my love. Drink."

  Suddenly the door slammed open with such force that the knob shattered against the wall. Mr. Andrews confronted us, a large black gun in his hand. My back had been to him. He had not seen what we had been doing, only our embrace. I turned to move between Em and her father.

  A normal woman would probably have felt vulnerable standing there in only a nightgown in front of a man with a loaded gun. I didn't.

  "I thought so. You filthy pervert! I have been watching you." He gestured at me with his gun. "Now get away from my daughter."

  "No," I said simply and stared at him, my lips drawing slowly, almost instinctively from my teeth.

  "Please, father, don't!" Em cried in panic.

  From the timber of her voice, I could tell her strength was returning, and took heart. "Don't beg this time, Em," I said softly. "Not ever again!"

  "I knew it! I knew it all along." He gritted the words with such hate that my soul shriveled. "You lesbian bitch! Seducing my child! Leading her in the path of sin and corruption!"

  "Oh, I'm a lesbian all right," I said coolly, sauntering leisurely toward him. "But I'm also something more." I paused about two yards from Mr. Andrews, regarding him for a moment with my hands on my hips, then started forward again.

  A hint of puzzlement came into his hard righteous expression. His finger tightened on the trigger. "Stand where you are, Miss Karnstein!" he ordered roughly.

  I ignored him.

  He still wasn't frightened when he fired. My body shuddered at the impact, but I felt no pain.

  Even then he didn't get it. These fundamentalists! They claim they believe in the devil and the supernatural-but when they come face to face with them, none of them can ever truly believe it.

  Mr. Andrews fired again. But I kept moving closer.

  It was when the third shot failed to stop me that he panicked and emptied the gun. But by that point he was shaking so bad he only hit me once more. The wounds closed within seconds.

  "Jesus Christ in Heaven save me!" He stumbled backwards, fell, got to his knees, began to pray. His kind don't believe in crossing themselves or wearing crucifixes. The bible is enough for them – but it's damned inconvenient to carry as protection against the undead. Besides, holy objects only work for those whose actions are loving and godly. That left Mr. Andrews out.

  I reached him before he could regain his feet and stood over him.

  The empty gun trembled in his hand. His face was a mixture of hatred, fear, disbelief, and that look of simplicity that often precedes madness. I took the gun from him and crushed it. Then he began the Lord's Prayer in a fractured fashion, unable to finish it before he gave up and started over.

  "If there's a heaven, Mr. Andrews, I wouldn't count on your getting there." My hand closed on his throat and I lifted him off the ground. He strangled in my grasp. Yet that look of mindless hate and loathing – not of my state as one of the undead, but for my loving his daughter – never faltered.

  After a time his struggles grew weaker, ceased entirely. I dropped him. I never once considered drinking from him – even the thought was distasteful. I mean he was sewer water compared to Em's champagne.

  I felt Em's eyes on my back and I turned. "I'm sorry," I said.

  "Don't be," she answered. There were tears in her eyes, but they were not for her father. "He imprisoned me. You released me. He caught me with Jemina when I was sixteen. We'd been lovers for two years. That's why we're in Montana. But ... but," her voice started to shake a little, "I heard Mrs. Lafontaine say Jemina disappeared just before we moved. I don't think she ran away. I think father…" she didn't finish.

  I could hear the rest of the house stirring in response to the shots and grabbed Em's hand. "Let's go," I said. "I'll show you how."

  She looked at me trustingly, grasping my hand tighter as I drew her to the window. "Take a deep breath," I told her, staring deep into her eyes. "Then imagine yourself melting into mist."

  She did and we flowed out over the snow, leaving not the slightest footprint behind.

  Maybe this was what they meant by Happy Ever After. I hoped so. But only the centuries will tell.

  TWO-SPIRITS

  CHRIS MORAN

  I.

  COMMON SENSE is something I really don't have much of anymore, not much.

  M
ark's body folded onto the floor in a sad, twisted pile of bone and leather after ... after I tried to bring him with me. I tried, but I couldn't find the essence, the seed – that sweet, sweet, pindot of primordial juice that you can find when you draw on a human ... and you draw, and you draw, and you draw out all the banalities, all the laundry lists, all the forgotten dinners, all the blind dates, all the jobs at Chicken-Jerk-To-Go. And then ... sometimes, only sometimes ... you find it: The sweet human being-ness, the love of animals and leaves and water and soil; the wonderment of the moon; the awe of women's courage and fertility, of men's tenacity, of their audacity.

  But, no. What I found was all that Mark really desired in his deepest heart-of-hearts was a Masarati and a cheap fling with a drag queen on a muggy Saturday night. A shallow, loveless husk whose promotion from six boring years as an associate with Lautman, Kirk, and Dunn had nothing more to offer him but an extra zero to his holy goddamn bank account, a dimestore stock portfolio, and an unlimited credit line at Nordstrom's.

  And then, I saw that I was the drag queen to be had on a muggy Saturday night, to be momentarily adored, to be briefly fondled, to be ... a cheap drag queen at that.

  So I kept on sucking.

  Then, there was nothing to be kept pure, nothing, except the simple fact of his birth. And even that was suspect in my book. Certainly nothing to be kept alive ... at least alive forever. He almost had me sold with his sweet, pseudo-cosmic tenderness when he ticked off that box on the back of his driver's license which would someday donate his sorry, diseased liver to the Children's Cancer Society. He almost sold me again when he recited a long, dewy, politically correct diatribe about the plight of pre-adolescent, organic coffee pickers in El Salvador. But, all that is past now.

  Now, like a complete idiot, I've dialed 911 and I'm sitting in this little rathole of a hotel room, three blocks north of the Greyhound, waiting for an ambulance to show up. Probably the cops and the coroner, too – because all I really want is to be done with it. All of it. All one hundred and fifty-three years of it. And I have no fucking idea what I'll tell them when they show, when the black-and-white rattles to a stop below my window, spewing out its salt-and-pepper crime-fighting team of pure compassion and empathy. No fucking idea of what iron-clad alibi or judicious reason I'll offer to them for this cold-blooded, and it was cold-blooded, extermination… "Officer, I just couldn't stand this fuckin' greedy creep anymore, so I just sucked out every fuckin' ounce of his precious fuckin' life's juices and the goddamn asshole just fuckin' died on me."

  No, that won't work.

  I'll just do what I've done many times before. Many more times than I'd care to admit. I'll just slip out at the last minute, vanish. There will be no clothes, no knickknacks, no fingerprints, no combs with tangled hairs, no lipstick smeared tissues, no traces. The hotel cashier won't be able to read my name on the register. He won't be able to tell them what I looked like, what I sounded like, what I wore, what fabulous three-day old essence I smelled of. My entire being will become tantalizingly elusive tidbits afloat on his pale, watery memory. Gone. Done. Goodbye.

  No, no common sense at all.

  II.

  A DEEP, ALMOST BOTTOMLESS bluish-green is the color I always see when I dream of the Gila Mountains. I've never seen another color like it. Nowhere else in New Mexico, certainly nowhere east, nor west, at least not on land. A color that to this day, even in the midst of this rancid afterthought called Los Angeles, I still find piercing. Maybe it was the reddish-orange clay of the flayed hillsides against the dark juniper and pine. Maybe just the way the light settled along the Mogollon Rim at dusk. But that color, that heartbreaking shade of color resonated through me, far beneath my skin.

  It was in that cast I first saw Jonathan. I was sick with the smell of silver wafting off the mine tailings in the late afternoon winds. Except for a half plate of beans and a couple of stale tortillas negotiated from the livery helps' breakfast, I hadn't eaten all day, unless you'd call miners' coffee and roll-your-owns food. But at that moment my dizzy, aching head didn't matter, the vacant condition of my belly didn't matter. What mattered was the single, singular image in front of me.

  On the boardwalk across from General Dry Goods, I was trying to sweep up enough courage to walk into the tavern for a short, but numbing shot of gin. It was all I needed to set my spirit for a night of work. At nineteen, and looking fifteen, it took more than just a little courage to just open the tavern door, since I had been with a good third of the miners in town, and both barkeeps, and I hadn't been resident in Mogollon more than four months. Bragging rights notwithstanding, I was frozen short in my steps by the sight of what appeared to be a white man, at least six-foot-four with long dark hair, wearing a doeskin shirt, black breeches, and dismounting from a mottled-gray Appaloosa mare.

  Even in that wild part of the country he was impressive. I wasn't the only one who paused to take note, but I was definitely the longest, most gaping to take note. A lot of men in mining country let their hair grow for a time, eventually succumbing to some local Russian or Chinese barber so as not to be mistaken for an Indian, or "half-breed,

  " or worse. Worse being that type who wound up sleeping with the top of the pecking order amongst the miners, that is, if he was young looking enough. Naturally, I had the experience to know.

  But what struck me as unusual wasn't the man's hair, or his mount, or even his size, but the fact that he wore doeskin. Most men, whether they were Indian or white, wore the tougher yellow-tanned buckskin, even in summer. Doe was usually only worn by Indian children, women and, strange to me then, "medicine men.

  " And while I tried to collect my jaw and tongue and bulging eyes into some expression of dignity and discretion, the man-in-doeskin paused, and taking his saddlebags down from his mount, turned and stared straight in my direction as if I had called out to him by name. His eyes burned right into the back of my eyes. Whatever thoughts were trying to line themselves up in my young brain at that moment, all-at-once, shook loose with a violence, my ankles wobbled and I had to steady myself against the veranda post.

  So much for dignity. So much for discretion.

  The man-in-doeskin hiked his satchels over his shoulder and then did the unthinkable: He walked

  towards me. In a focused, even gait, he walked across the dusty, pot-holed street, towards me. His boot heels creaked on the veranda steps. "Find decent food in there?" he asked, nodding at the tavern door.

  What I found was that the scuff marks on the toes of my shoes might reveal the secrets of eternity if I stared at them long enough. "Jack Spence b-bagged a mule deer this morning ... M-may be stew,

  " I stammered. "Good. Join me inside?"

  Somehow, I managed to ratchet

  my neck in the direction of his voice, meeting his eyes from below my hat brim. "…Sure ... maybe-in-a-bit." My stomach betrayed my nonchalance with a growl. The man-in-doeskin nodded. His eyes burned a clear blue flame. I returned to the toes of my shoes. He opened the tavern door to a wave of sodden noise and tobacco smoke mixed with the smell of grilling meat.

  I turned slightly to study him out of the corner of my eyes: the pitch of his shoulders, the shape of his thighs, the worn patina on the shafts of his boots. The man-in-doeskin spent a lot of time on horseback.

  The tavern door closed soundlessly behind him.

  Gin could wait. Food could wait. The miners could

  definitely wait. My mind was the consistency of poached tripe. After I found my legs and pulled my eyes back into focus, I set off across the street to the dry goods store and planted myself near the man-in-doeskin's Appaloosa, deciding to just sit and watch ... and wait. The tavern door must have opened fifty times over the next two hours. It gave up every conceivable brand of humanity known to the New Mexico Territory: Spanish, English, Chinese, Russian, one-legged, two-legged, miners, thieves, bankers, hucksters, lawyers, drifters, the odd Indian, the more odd woman, the dead sober, the dead drunk. The man-in-doeskin was not among them.
>
  I retreated and collapsed back into the end stall at the livery. The help there were buried in a card game and a bottle of cheap whisky in the loft. After the smell of the miners, the smell of stabled horses was as welcoming as lilac water. Bursts of outrage and laughter poured down upon me from the loft, yet I fell asleep on the spikey, three-day old straw as if someone had clubbed me from behind.

  I could have been asleep for three minutes, or three hours, or three days.

  The wet fog of the Appaloosa's breath and the nutty smell of her muzzle coaxed me from dead sleep to soupy consciousness. What I could make out in the dim lantern light was the shape of a man cinching the saddle of my new, nuzzling stablemate. I didn't move. The man-in-doeskin stood over me, studying me. Any other time I would have been terrified, or lashing out, or most likely, both. Instead, I felt reassured, calm, peaceful, accepting

  ... wanting. "We can't stay here through the night. We must leave." His eyes flashed in the lantern light.

  We, I thought? I couldn't even raise a stutter. My head cocked.

  "I have no more purpose here,

  " he answered, " and you are not safe. " Even though I knew how true this was, his pronouncement soured me with resentment. How would he know anything about my life? I coughed to find my voice. "The Mescaleros will raid Mogollon before week's end. This town of money and grief will burn.

  " His voice sounded strange, foreboding, foreign. I struggled to respond to him. Laying back on the straw, I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach, and managed to bubble some words about my knapsack and my hat.

  Another eternity later I awakened on horseback to a sharp jolt, my hands loosely lashed around the man-in-doeskin's waist. We came to a slow halt. "She's usually surefooted ... even on creek beds… Do you need to get down?"

  He untied the lashings. I slipped off the mare and stood groggily at the edge of the trail to piss.

  Running away would have been easy. My gut told me that the man-in-doeskin wouldn't try to stop me. Silver Creek would lead me back to town in little more than a day by foot. But what would I have returned to? The bugridden mattresses of the miners' camps? Stealing pinches of gold dust in the cold pre-dawn just to afford a cheap muslin shirt, or a leather-tough shank of horse meat or mule? The bitter ridicule of the "god-fearing and respectable" wives of the mine owners and bankers who sold themselves nightly to the thieves and robbers who were their husbands?