Across the street and into the piss-smelling hallway of an old cinderblock motel, Devin vanished into a ground floor apartment like a thief. His mark was a man, thirty-something, olive complexion, black hair done up like a mafia movie reject. He was as tall as Devin, but wider, probably a high school linebacker gone to fat in his impending middle age.
Susan had wanted to try and hunt alone, but Devin had become overly cautious because of Jacobsen. Life had suddenly become nothing more than slinking in the shadows and feeding for survival.
There was no sport in this—waiting for “her man” to serve her.
Susan shivered in her damp trousers and coat. At first, she had hoped one of the advantages of becoming undead was losing the little annoying discomforts that accompanied living. She hated being cold more than almost anything else.
She certainly had not considered paranoia becoming a problem, especially after death.
Overhead in the hotel breezeway, a light hung by a frayed black cord; it swayed slightly in the breeze. Every now and again, a gust would blow the freezing rain into her face.
The hunger was maddening. She had never been a big user of drugs, but this had to be what addiction was like.
She looked down the hallway at the bare wall, white paint peeling away and exposing the gray concrete beneath. The open corridor emptied onto the beach. One narrow stepping stone path, overtaken with dune grass and reeds, curved between the high dunes. The ocean sang its low, gritty, constant song. Far away music played, tinny and as thin as crystal. No sounds came from the hotel room.
For a moment, the urge to simply run away into the night overcame her. She could return to Hamilton, curl against Michael’s warm body, deep inside the covers of their bed, and pretend she was normal. But there was no going back from this and besides, had she ever really been “normal,” anyway? Something had broken inside her twenty years ago, and maybe she had only been pretending since.
The door opened, and Devin stepped out. He held a plastic hotel cup overflowing with thick blood.
“This will make things better, yes?” He offered it to her and she accepted it greedily, downing it in one long drink.
“Come. He’ll be dead in a moment and spoiled.”
Inside the room, the lamp cast a jaundiced glow on everything. Like all the other rooms in Charlestowne, this one was decorated in 1970s tacky-chic. The Green shag carpeting was becoming saturated and brownish with the big man’s blood where he lay at the end of the bed. He lay face down, unmoving; the only sign of life was the pump of blood from the gash in the side of his neck. The room was unbearably warm after being in out in the crisp evening, and Susan shrugged out of her coat. She fell to her knees at the man’s side, bent low and pressed her lips to the yawning flaps of fat and flesh beneath the lobe of his ear.
Devin watched her feed. There was some morbid fascination he held with witnessing her drink. He had admitted that it turned him on. In the back of her mind, aware of this, she became aroused, as well. He sat on the end of the bed quietly, patiently.
Almost wanting put on a show, she took the dying man’s hair in her fist and yanked his head over. With the snap of bone, the gash grinned wider. She groaned softly and shoved her tongue deeper, lapping like a cat.
After what was too short a time, she realized she could no longer feel the faint, soft pulse of blood rising to meet her lips. The man was dead.
With a sigh, she sat back on her knees and wiped her mouth with her wrist. Her hair had gotten into the blood and now the ends were gummy with the stuff as it congealed.
She wondered about tonight’s quarry. Why had Devin chosen him? Not that it mattered very much. The need for blood had been stronger than the reins of her compassion. And she trusted Devin; he wouldn’t prey on an innocent. He was no mindless killer; whatever this man had been, he had not been good.
Probably sensing her question about the man, Devin said, “A killer of women, that one.” He nudged the body with the toe of his sneaker.
“How do you know?” Susan asked.
“Followed him,” he whispered, then leveled his eyes on hers. “Besides, a man can recognize his own kind.”
Susan stood and regarded him a moment. He did look the part, with the blood staining the front of his white cotton shirt and running in rivulets down his sweaty neck and along his hairline, into his right eye. But upon closer inspection, the blood that ran into his eye did not belong to the dead man. It was his. The big Italian must have put up a good fight. There was a deep gash along Devin’s eyebrow, made from a sharp punch or the heel of a boot.
Susan pushed Devin back onto the bed, her mouth first on his mouth and then moving to lick away the blood from his throat. Next, she sucked greedily at the wound above his eye. It was no longer hunger that drove her, but lust. Devin’s erection was sudden and huge, pushing hard against her belly.
His mouth found the ticklish area of her neck, just beneath her ear. He bit her there, the sting as sharp as the kiss of a blade.
“You’d better stop me, Susan,” he groaned into her hair.
She ignored him and ground her hips against him. Devin moved his hand down to caress her buttocks through her pants. Susan kissed his eyelids, her tongue flicking at the lashes, tasting his saltiness.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Devin warned again.
“You can’t hurt me now.”
“We’ll see,” he whispered.
He slipped one hand between them, roughly kneading her crotch through the coarse denim. She covered his hand with hers and guided his fingers to her aching sex. Her orgasm was a hot, pulsing burst of electricity, and she rocked against his hand, gasping. She pulled his hair harder than she meant to.
Breathless and trembling, she opened his pants and pulled his feverish member free. Roughly, she massaged him, and he thrust into her sweat-slick fist quickly. He bit into her throat, drawing blood and drawing a cry from her as he came into her hand. He grunted hard twice, a sound that was almost like that of a man in pain.
Afterward, they lay together, breaths slowing, heartbeats growing calm again.
Susan was almost dozing with her head resting on Devin’s chest and his heavy arm across her.
“We should get back,” he told her.
She rose up, bleary-eyed. “Okay,” she whispered.
***
Michael’s pulse quickened when he set eyes on her. She was about a hundred feet away, emerging from the gloomy breezeway of an old motel. She was dressed in an oversized leather coat that he didn’t recognize. When she turned his way, her eyes met his for a moment. He saw that the front of her shirt and jeans were stained dark. She followed his gaze and then closed her coat. Blood. Devin McCree loomed behind her. Devin took her hand, and they started toward the amusement park.
Michael moved parallel with them, hanging in the shadows. He checked the shotgun as he walked, his steps as silent as he could make them. He eased back the safety. He was going to kill this son of a bitch tonight, and then he was going to drag Susan back home, even if she kicked and screamed.
He moved closer, biting his bottom lip hard. They picked up their pace, and he realized that Susan was leading McCree. Faintly, he heard McCree ask, “What’s gotten into you?”
“Just come on,” she said. “I’m ready to get you home.”
But Michael was quicker and cut around ahead of them. He stepped from the shadows and raised his gun.
But they weren’t there. They had vanished into thin air. He stood for a moment, breathing hard, his eyes watering in the cold wind. He blinked hard and listened.
He could still hear their footfalls, but they sounded like they were a thousand miles away.
“Fuck!” he screamed.
Susan and McCree’s laughter echoed across the empty parking lot, mocking him.
***
Michael returned to the beach house frustrated and angry. He had remained on the boulevard for more than an hour, prowling the trash strewn streets and sidewalks, treading
upon derelicts who smelled like the bottom of garbage bins, and in fact, were wrapped or burrowed in trash and layers of old clothes to shield themselves from cold. They appeared as shapeless lumps left over from some silly science fiction flick or maybe a Lovecraft tale. Michael half-expected one to sprout tentacles, capture him in a death embrace and devour him like a drumstick.
There was no way possible that Susan and Devin could have vanished so easily, unless they were something more than human. He was not sure how they had done it, but he was simply unable to pinpoint their whereabouts. Susan had spotted him, and that was all. She was the one who had decided to run. Devin never knew. If was as if Michael had lost all sense of direction as their laughter rose up into the cold, damp air and echoed down the alleyways and across the grass-scattered flats of abandoned parking areas.
He yanked off his coat and flung it onto the sofa. Next came the gun, which he carefully propped against the high step of the sunken living room.
He sank down on the hearth and cradled his head in his hands. “Fuck,” he said aloud, “what am I doing?”
Tomorrow, he should just head away from the beaches and back to town, then call someone to come for him, Gerald, perhaps. In daylight, he would be relatively safe, from vampires, at least.
Of course, he couldn’t do that. He had to see Susan one more time. He had to appeal to whatever was left of her human self. Surely, she would listen. He would tie her up and force her to hear him, if he had to.
Yeah, right.
He made a fire and considered eating. He had two granola bars and a can of Beanie Weenies. Not very appealing, so he decided on a beer. He pried the top off against the edge of the hearth and drank greedily. The best thing about huddling inside an unheated house was that the beer stayed cold.
After two bottles, things began to appear a bit more positive.
He sat on the dusty sofa with a sigh. From his coat pocket, he removed the little journal he had found in the bedroom. It was a smallish booklet, faded hot pink with a cartoon of an abnormally slender woman holding an abnormally long cigarette on the cardboard cover. The inside flap bore the title “This journal belongs to:” and written in that same elegant, loopy hand as the “To Do” list on the refrigerator was the name Sandra Harp. Inside, there were lineless pages, yellowed and brittle with the passing years. It was nothing more than the daily journal of a woman bored with her life. She had a husband, whom she still loved, apparently, but who paid her little attention. There were the children she adored, lived for, but who remained ultimately ungrateful. Sandra evidently didn’t care for the beach and how the kids brought sand into the house on their feet. She was unhappy with her mother’s meddling. She was unhappy that the woman next door had evidently gotten a boob job.
Michael thumbed further through the pages and realized that he did not like this woman very much. It had become set in his mind that the husband was the one who did it, murdered the family and then, perhaps himself. If she complained as much aloud as she did in her diary, it was little wonder, he thought odiously, then felt rather loathsome for it.
He paged onward, no longer really reading, but skimming for some indication that something as ominous as what had occurred here was on the horizon.
September 13, 1973 was the date that drew his attention, because on that day, she encountered a man by the name Devin McCree at an antique dealer shop just outside Charlestowne.
***
Tall, blond and handsome, he looked just like someone from an old movie. I haven’t blushed looking at Jerry in ten years, but this man made me blush like a teenager. What’s more, he saw me. He smiled and I could not even remember why I had gone into that shop in the first place.
A glorious English accent, but his voice was rough—older than his face.
He claimed he was new in town and for some reason I volunteered to give him a lift back to his hotel.
I left with him—God knows why—and went to a hotel that was so seedy there was little chance of anyone spotting me going inside with him.
In my entire life, I have never done anything like that. Of course, a man like Devin McCree had never taken an interest in me.
Thoughts of dinner and the kids popped into my mind—would they even notice I was not there, in front of the stove?
Devin removed my clothes. It was like something from one of my romance novels.
I have never felt the way he made me feel.
I died.
I died, but I am not dead.
I am more than I was.
Devin wept when he was done and whispered he was sorry into my hair. I held him and told him I was happy it had happened.
He told me I would not be happy for long.
October 21, 1973
I don’t know what to do. Something grips my heart and my stomach. Devin McCree—that bastard—I haven’t seen him again.
I lapped the bloody run-off of the hamburger I was thawing for dinner from the bowl it rested in. Like a nasty animal.
Jerry knows something is wrong. He wonders why I keep the drapes pulled all day—I tell him the sunshine is causing migraines.
I’d like to rip his throat out. I smell the blood of my babies through their skin, and my mouth waters. I feel dirty.
The children. I cannot allow them to become what I have become. Worse, I cannot allow myself to make them that.
Sometimes I wonder if I can survive this way. If Devin was right, do I want to? Do I really want to?
October 31, 1973
I stopped it for them, but it never stops for me. I cannot die. I used all of Jerry’s bullets—my head is a goddamn mess, but still I am not dead. I am ruined, but I am not dead.
I will live with this until the end of the world.
It’s what I get.
There was nothing more after that. Nausea uncoiled in Michael’s stomach. Did Susan experience these feelings? Was she now an animal, just as Kasper had said? Was there any hope of making her human again? Susan. Somehow, she had known he had been near, watching.
chapter thirty-seven
Killing the man, as horrid a man as he was, had been no easy task for Devin. Knowing it strengthened Susan’s love for him. Finally, she saw the man, not the vampire. Devin was soft-hearted, and seeing that made Susan wonder even more about how or what had happened to her somewhere along the way of her life. And afterlife. She had spent too much time fearing and hating a man who had done nothing but defend himself. She had allowed Peter’s death, and then her baby’s death, to consume her. She had shut herself off from those who wanted to love her. Michael. Poor Michael. He had never deserved what she did to him.
But, enough of the self-pity. There was always redemption.
It was a new night, and there was a new piece of vile garbage that needed to be removed. They had watched this bastard most of the evening, peering from the shadows of a back corner booth and drinking shots of tequila, as he made his play for an extremely young girl. He plied her with drinks that she shouldn’t have had for another six or seven years, legally. She drank like an old pro.
The child should have been watching Hannah Montana and reading books about babysitters and their crushes, or maybe shimmering vampires who enjoyed daylight. She was young enough to wonder what it would be like to move into the ninth grade and kiss a boy for the first time.
But she had done all of that already because things were messed up in her world, and in the world in general.
The man, a greasy middle-aged nasty, draped an arm across the girl’s tiny shoulder with his hand grazing the buds of her breasts as they left the tavern. Susan glanced at Devin. Was he thinking of his own lost daughter? Susan’s hunger rose and ebbed like the tide. Slowly, she had learned that she could control it, rather than have it control her.
They followed the mismatched couple into the alley. The big man’s gentle caress morphed into the rough and abrupt handling of property he did not especially care about keeping for very long. His fat fingers bit into the soft meat of the girl
’s bicep through the thin cloth of her pink jacket.
Susan and Devin trailed behind, their trick of levitation a gift, their feet grazing the pavement like a kiss and leaving no echoing boot claps on the silent street.
The fat man sang sweet nothings to the small girl. He would make her love him. He would buy her a new coat if she would allow him what he wanted. He asked if he was her first, and she giggled so softly and so knowingly that it broke Susan’s heart. Devin scowled in the shadows. This man would not make it inside the confines of his apartment.
The light rain dampened the streets as if the night itself were weeping. An apartment building loomed, art deco chrome and aqua, both faded and peeling like disease had taken hold of the façade. The man fumbled with his keys, a big ring of dozens of them, to open the glass doors to the lobby. It was apparent his was the only occupied flat in the place, the others having fled, or died, long ago.
The girl swayed on her stick-pin legs, clad in tights with holes and boots that needed to be laced, but had no laces. She shivered and waited, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand. Her eyes were as glassy as marbles.
“I’ll get it,” the fat man told her. Sweat beaded on his cherry-red, swollen upper lip, although it was near freezing outside. He kissed the girl quickly, and when he turned his attention back to the stubborn lock, she wiped her mouth with the black of her hand. Susan’s mouth watered, but was it from the prospect of feeding or the notion of tearing this bastard apart?
I am not good. We are saving this child, but I’m not good.
Devin winked at her, but he didn’t appear happy. In the next instant, he appeared between the fat man and the door. He snatched the keys from the man’s sausage-sized fingers.
“Let me help you with those,” he said.
He bared his teeth and something erotic twisted in Susan’s middle. Devin was completely unaware of the incredible specimen he was. Above animal. Above human. They were superhuman. The food chain had not considered them. Evolution had not considered them. But here they were. Like gods, deciding who lived and who died.
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