A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  A Hinky Taste of You

  Hinky Chicago Book Five

  Jennifer Stevenson

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  October 1, 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-121-4

  Copyright © 2011 Jennifer Stevenson

  Dedication

  for my love, Rich

  Chapter One

  I’m on my third lap in a power jam, skating nine second laps, I mean, I am in the zone, and Fist Kist of all people comes out of nowhere and sacks my skinny ass like a beer truck.

  Fist is no ninety-pound supermodel, so it doesn’t matter what part of her hits me — booty, hip, shoulder, thigh? I go flying and hit the wall, which knocks the wind out of me and makes me see fireworks and drives my elbow pad against my floating ribs. I fall, gasping, unable even to spit out my mouth guard.

  Everybody stops skating. Muldoon, the team’s chiropractor, appears at my side and feels me over lightly with his big hands, checking for breaks. He takes my mouth guard out for me.

  “You okay?”

  All I can do is shake my head and wheeze.

  You would think having vampire super-strength would make me immune to this kind of thing. In a perverted way, I’m really glad it doesn’t. That would compromise the integrity of roller derby as a sport. Still, my ribs are screaming. My pads have protected me from broken elbows, broken knees, and broken wrists, but right now I wish I could breathe.

  Lucky for me the energy in the chilly warehouse where we practice is good. I stop panicking and allow air to whistle into my lungs in a trickle. With the air comes more energy. The pain in my side eases. Then the healing flow of prana picks up, and my shoulders relax, and I feel my face flush.

  Every woman here has been pumping out extra prana — life force-energy — for an hour and forty minutes, and that’s going to save me now.

  Now they’re down on one knee, waiting to see how broken I am.

  It doesn’t always pay to be an energy vampire, but during a roller derby scrimmage is one of those times.

  In another eleven seconds the pain is gone, and I feel good as new. As I get to my skates under my own power, I hear the clicking of wrist guards all over the track. My league-mates are clapping, hey, she’s okay.

  I roll off the track, handing off the star-marked hat panty to the bench coach.

  “Nice one, Fist,” I say and high-five my recent assailant. “I did not see that coming.”

  Fist Kist grins. “I can’t believe I sacked Hélan Vittle!” She’s a new draft, only on the team a month. She’ll be a menace someday.

  I pat her on the ass.

  Sacker Tart, svelte and menacing, takes my place at the jam line, wearing the star. The blockers resume their positions. Rapture Snatch, the opposing jammer, tattooed with the entire Book of Revelations, is still on penalty, waiting out her minute in the sin bin, so Sacker has a power jam — a clear field to score in. Sacker is faster than I am, and more agile. I have to turn my back so Muldoon can finish checking me out, but I can hear my girls cheering. Good for Sacker.

  Roller derby has saved my sanity.

  I have a conscience about my carbon-footprint. It kills me to think that I’m some kind of life-force black hole, always sucking it in, never giving back. Until roller derby, I had concluded that prana is a nonrenewable resource, and therefore that, as an energy vampire, I am an obscene parasite on the planet’s soul.

  So it’s been a boon to discover that, while we skate, jostling, racing, knocking each other ass-over-teakettle, even when it’s not in front of an audience, we generate extra prana.

  I haven’t yet figured out exactly why derby should generate more life force than the sum of ten girls on the track. Most I can guess is that it’s like one of those Tibetan prayer wheels. Something so simple as, because we skate widdershins? Or is it because we’re women? Releasing all those pent-up aggressions?

  All I know is, after two hours of this madness, there’s more life force in the room than there was when we started.

  And I should know.

  It’s how I get a square meal four times a week.

  The bench coach comes by. “You okay?”

  “Yup,” I say.

  She jerks a thumb. “You’re up.”

  Sacker tosses me the hat panty. I slip it over my helmet, pop in my mouth guard, roll back onto the track, and hop up on my toe stops at the jam line.

  After practice, Donna Draper and her lesbian derby wife Bichon Frizzy invite me to join them at their favorite bar for Monday night pizza, as usual, and as usual I thank them and turn them down. It hurts. I want to go so badly.

  o0o

  My name is Hel, and I’ve been an energy vampire since I was seventeen. However, from birth I was raised vegan and ecologically sensitive to our mother planet.

  I’ve been working at this private school now for about three years. I have seven boys in my class, all of them what we once called, back in the sixties, “hyperactive.” Meaning, “bouncing off the walls.” They’re lovable little tykes, though, and I love especially that I don’t have to bite them or do anything creepy to draw off their excess energy.

  In this one context, my hunger is a plus.

  In other teachers’ classes, they chase each other, scream, throw things, break the toys, break the furniture, and hit the teachers. In my class they sit quietly, read, learn the computer, and play nicely with one another. Their parents love me. The other teachers are grateful that they don’t have to work with these boys.

  By now I can breathe a precisely calculated percentage off some bonkers kid and bring him back into the socialized zone. And I’m very, very careful.

  But isn’t that, well, icky? Stealing the life force of a child?

  Yeah. And I hate myself for it. And I booze because I hate myself. And I’m ashamed of myself for boozing.

  You happy yet?

  No, I see in your face that more a labored explanation is called for. Maybe some more self-loathing.

  For decades I’ve sucked prana from strangers. But doing that makes me, well, know too much about them.

  Let me put it this way. Ever eat a steak and find that it just didn’t taste good to you? And you couldn’t say why?

  It’s because the animal was in terror and agony when it was slaughtered. Those emotions translate into measurable chemicals injected into the blood by the poor beast’s endocrine system. Those chemicals, when the animal is butchered and sold and cooked and eaten, can be tasted.

  Imagine if you could taste the dying mood of every single animal that you ate.

  Even everyday human moods are no banquet.

  This is why I teach school for crazy-ass small boys. Because the energy tastes a lot better.

  Sometimes, of course, I find a kid with real problems at home. That’s when I return to my earliest strategy, which was to find people who deserved to have their energy sucked out.

  You know. Bad guys.

  The trouble is, some bad guys have rather nice energy. That’s because they themselves don’t know that they’re total monsters. And ya know? It turns out that judging people all the time, every time I want a meal, can get real old.

  And the bad guys with bad energy taste horrible. Afterward, I have to fight the urge to kick puppies and run over old ladies.

  So here I am, not totally satisfied with my solution, but feeling a lot better about myself than I did.

  Cities are a must for me. The anonymity, the crowds. If I’m very careful, and not greedy, I can breathe in enough to survive simply by standing in a crowded subway or bus for a couple of hours. Rush hour prana tastes so bad, I can’t bear more than subsistence-level quantities, and the smell of all those people, the despair and anger and bad health on their
skins and on their breath, ugh. I only do it when I’m starving.

  I’m always hungry.

  Chapter Two

  I’m still hungry after practice, so instead of going over to the hospital, I use the phone. “Hey.”

  Jilly, my mother, answers. “Hey yourself. I’m having dinner in a few minutes. Come join me.”

  “Naw, I’m going out with the girls.” Ma hassles me to eat all the time. She has reason. I’ve looked like an anorexic seventeen-year-old for forty-three years. “Just checking in. How did chemo go?”

  “Sucked. I survived. Hey, listen.” Ma sounds chipper, upbeat, fun-loving, happy. This is how she always sounds. “I found out you can play poker online! For money!”

  “No.”

  “Honey, I can’t get to the casino when I’m hooked up to this damned machine.” Ma is incredibly lucky. She makes her living expenses, neatly but barely, by taking a limo from assisted living to the gambling riverboats and walking out with the precise amount of cash that will pay her bills but keep her under the casino’s frequent-winner radar. “I’m nailed to the perch here.”

  “Ma, no. Absolutely not.” Thank God she has such sucky credit. She can’t get a credit card even from those yoyos who’ll send you one for having a bowel movement. However, I’m quite sure she could talk someone at the hospital into giving her my credit card number, which they are holding hostage. “Don’t make me crazy, Ma,” I plead.

  “I don’t want the hospital bill to give you a coronary.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, but I’ll be fine.” I remember that I’ve been ducking the Accounts Receivable lady for days.

  “Well, I can try and skin the nurses at bridge, but I hate to do it—”

  “No, don’t bother. That’s chicken feed, Ma,” I say, scrambling for an argument she’ll buy. “We’ve gotta be in five figures by now.”

  She gives me that coronary after all. “Six figures.”

  I shut my eyes. “Promise me you won’t gamble online.”

  “Ooo, you’re no fun.”

  “But I love you.”

  “Love you too. Oh, here’s dinner. Hot dogs, carrots and zucchini, what is this, the all-phallic-symbol diet?” I hear her saying to the nurse, who is gay. “Honey, you’re torturing me.” I hear the nurse laugh.

  I smooch into the phone and hang up.

  o0o

  As I stop for gas on Western Avenue, I am contemplating taking up a life of crime. Ma is seventy, which is not that old these days. She could live a long time. With her nailed to the perch, and her chemotherapy $30,000 per treatment, my special-education teacher salary is not going to cut it.

  I should have made her get on Medicare years ago. Good luck making Jilly do anything. All she’ll say is, she doesn’t trust the government.

  Gas is under twelve dollars, so I fill ’er up, keeping a paranoid eye on the sky. The gas station is eligible for “city funding for pest control,” i.e. they pay a sixteen-year-old with a BB gun to take down pigeons before they can drop a lighted cigarette butt onto my car and blow it up, but who trusts a sixteen-year-old with a gun?

  I’m not really worried about my Jilly-Ma. Much. Within days, she had the hospital staff organized to minister to her comfort, listen to her dirty jokes, sneak her drinks and cigarettes in between chemo days, tell her their problems, and get a contact high off her absolutely unshakable good mood.

  You might say that Ma has ruined my taste for broody energy.

  It’s too bad that my passion for all things vampiric was so short-lived, just those thirty-six hours that weekend in 1968 when Jerry G. Bishop played Svengooli, rolling his Fangs For The Memories vampire movie marathon on Channel 32. I thought no one was hotter than Barbara Steele, with her powdered skin and wide red mouth, especially with a little dribble of blood coming from the corner.

  What a fool I was.

  Where was I. Jilly. Broody energy, not.

  Sometimes I go to the hospital and it’s Six Flags Over Jilly’s Floating Crap Game and Black Market Nicotine Outlet. Other times she just lies there. Freaks me out. She doesn’t lose her cheer, but she’s listless and weak, and of course thanks to my heightened senses I can smell the chemo crud coming out of her pores.

  Next day she’ll turn better for no reason, and I’ll tiptoe in there with dread in my heart, and she’ll be sitting up, telling the chief surgeon just how to fix his marriage.

  It’s when she’s weak that I get this terror, that somehow I might be draining her without knowing it. She is, after all, the first meal I ever had — the first nine months plus God knows how much breast-feeding. I keep myself hungry because I feel so guilty for breathing.

  What if, in my reptile brain, I think, “Ma = breakfast” and somehow, on a level I can’t control or be aware of, I’m sucking the life out of her?

  I sure as hell haven’t told her I’m an energy vampire. There was a time, for about twenty minutes back in the early nineties, when she had a steady boyfriend who might have taken her off my hands, when I was tempted. She was working at her appearance then. She noticed how young I looked, and commented on it, not in the usual vicious, jealous way but just in passing, as if to say, hey, I like your lipstick. I was wary of that impersonal-sounding interest, and yet I felt wildly hopeful, briefly, that somehow she had morphed into a real mom.

  But the moment passed. And now I can’t tell her. Because every cell in my body screams to cure her the only way I might be able to help her, by trading prana with her, and I’m blind terrified of making the experiment.

  What if it doesn’t work? I’ve never tried to make another vampire. I don’t even know if I could.

  And what if it does work? I can’t imagine another fifty years of looking after my mother. Let alone four or five hundred years. Because she hasn’t learned to manage for herself by now. Why should she change, just because I might make her immortal?

  What if I could make her a vampire and she still had hepatocellular carcinoma? That would totally suck.

  My Ma.

  A headache, a source of endless interesting times, a reminder that it’s not worth hanging around with miserable, mean people, no matter how much energy they spew into the air.

  Oh, and she’s the only person in the world who knows me anymore. And mortal.

  Damn, damn, damn. She’s mortal.

  Who am I going to love when I lose her?

  Chapter Three

  Tuesday, my principal calls me out of my lunch in the staff room to meet a visitor.

  A cold hand clutches my heart. It’s either Ma, in jail for rooking the night nurses at double-up, or somebody from the hospital to tell me she’s dead.

  But it’s a total stranger. Some guy in a dark suit with a cop face.

  I pretend I don’t know a cop face when I see it.

  “Helen Nagazy, good to meet you. I’m Agent Nick Jones,” he says, taking my hand in a powerful grip. “Can we talk privately? He looks at the principal as if he’s a dog who should slink away, and by God, the principal does. “Is this room secure?”

  I blink at him. “The kids don’t like coming in here unless they have to.”

  “Ms. Nagazy, I work for a government agency that tracks and studies the incursion of magic into the mundane world. We work in hot spots like Pittsburgh, cool spots way off the interstate, and locations in transition, like Chicago.”

  My heart starts blattering.

  They’re onto me. Impossible.

  I blink again. “You must be very busy these days.” You didn’t have an agency five years ago. Nobody knows about you, do they? One of my teammates is an anti-magic cop for the city. I live in dread of her catching onto me and putting me away. “Does da Mayor know you’re in town?”

  He puffs up. The cop face becomes more pronounced. “We also track discussions of magic on the internet — people who claim to have expert knowledge.”

  Now I know where this is coming from. Damn. I haven’t gotten on a list in all these years, and now I have.

&
nbsp; “Are you learning anything new?” I say. “Because I’ve been trying to find someone online who knows anything about magic, and it seems to me they’re all idiots.”

  “That’s classified, Miss.”

  “Ms. I’m over twenty one.”

  His cop look says, You don’t look it. He’s right. I’m constantly having my driver’s license retouched.

  “We’ve noticed that you seem to turn up on all the sites we visit.”

  “Well, I’m curious.” I don’t sound defensive. Should I? It’s so hard to know what these bozos expect, and to fulfill their expectations but in a look-how-innocent-she-is kind of way. Thank God I look seventeen, I think for once.

  “You’ve been visiting Dr. Katterfelto’s website,” he says.

  “Oh, him. Yeah, he’s kind of a pollyanna.”

  Agent Jones looks at me long and slow. I can see we have reached the Agent’s Discretion portion of the interview. Now he has to stick his neck out. “We’d like you to infiltrate his organization on behalf of the agency.”

  My jaw drops. “Me?”

  “You look young for your age. He won’t suspect you.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “We hope he’s just a nut. But we have to know for sure.”

  I lie. “I’m no expert. What would I be looking for?”

  “That’s our concern.”

  I want out. This can’t go well. I allow moral outrage and disapproval to gather in my frown. “You want me to spy!”

  “We’re the government, Miss. It’s called ’investigating.’”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” I say sharply.

  “You owe it to your country.”

  I snap, “I’m not a machine or a puppet. I’m a person. If you want to plant a bug on him, plant one. I’m sure you can,” I add.

  These jerks wouldn’t have approached me if they hadn’t checked me out first. I have a huge paranoia about being checked out.

  Agent Jones favors me with that slow look again. “We want you to visit his installation. Find out what he is working on. Tell us what he lets you work on. If at all possible, obtain copies of records from his offices. Particularly records describing his experiments. Find out who funds him.”