A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I draw a deep breath. He smells heavenly.

  How do I say this? I don’t want to totally freak him out. I surely can’t prove it to him by sucking him dry as dust.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says tracing my eyebrow with his knuckle. “I can’t look at you anymore without seeing that.”

  “And you’re really sweet,” I say, “but I need you to listen to me.”

  I take another huge breath of plain air. Not much courage in that. The air around us is saturated with the smell of our lovemaking and a haze of intense-tasting prana. I can’t tell what the emotions are in it, I’m too close to them, and the two of us have been too mixed up together.

  I clench my teeth. Here goes. “I mean I’m not human.”

  He looks solemn. “That was pretty extreme,” he says, “but I think you’re human.”

  “You ass,” I say, and he bursts out laughing.

  “Honeymoon’s over. My sharp-tongued Hel.”

  I almost melt then.

  “No. Really. I — I’m a vampire.”

  He chuckles indulgently. I’m thinking I’m gonna have to duct tape his mouth shut if we do this again. “All right,” he says in a tolerant tone. “Tell me about it.”

  I take a long, slow breath. This may kill me, but at this point I don’t care. I want more of this, I want it every day, I want it forever, and I don’t dare imagine it with someone who doesn’t know me for what I am. Someone here has to have their wits about them.

  Apparently sex clouds my mind something fierce.

  “When I was seventeen, I turned into an energy vampire,” I say. “I eat, but I don’t have to. I drink because it helps me cope. But I — I breathe in other people’s life force to stay alive.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. And I hear that indulgent chuckle again.

  “You can do better than that,” Nick says.

  My eyes fly open. He’s looking at me with understanding and pity.

  I push on. “I know what someone’s mood is like by smelling them, listening to their heartbeat. It’s how I taste their energy. To see if I want more. I can learn a lot about someone that way.”

  When he doesn’t speak, I add, “You hate your job, but you feel you have to do it because nobody else is doing anything about the mess the world is in. Your boss scares the poop out of you and you have never admitted it to yourself. You want to think magic isn’t real, and every time you find some that gets past your big thick-headed wall of denial, it makes you feel good, and that makes you so mad, you drive yourself to—” I break off. “What?”

  “That’s just sex,” he says.

  “No it’s not.”

  But I’m not sure. How would I know? Forty-three years of near-celibacy haven’t given me a lot to go on. Maybe everybody experiences this wack stuff in bed.

  He touches my lips with his finger. “My turn. You think you’re tough as nails, and you wear all your emotions so close to the surface that it hurts me to watch you trying to stand up to me. You love your grandmother more than anyone in the world, but she drives you crazy.” I roll my eyes. Anybody could tell him that. “You’re afraid you aren’t interesting enough to me.” His voice drops. His fingertip brushes across my mouth. “You want to give, and you’re afraid no one will notice if you do.”

  That stings. “What makes you such a psychoanalyst?” I say. For two cents I would turn invisible here in his arms, dissolve into mist, show him, dammit. Just show him.

  He takes a deep breath of his own, and his face goes dark red. “I think it’s love, Hel.”

  Before I can speak, or think of what to say, he adds, “Hel, you don’t have to be different to interest me. You already are different. You already are interesting. Did you know that in German the word helle means bright?” He strokes my hair, then my temple.

  His eyes are bright. His prana tastes of marveling and joy. “You don’t have to be magic. I talk to a lot of people who’ve had magic touch their lives, Hel. It scares them and twists them and scars them and sometimes they get religion from it.” From his tone I gather that he has a low opinion of religion. “But the saddest people of all?”

  He looks serious. “They’re the ones who pretend they’ve been touched by magic when they haven’t. Barflies with hopeless, empty lives. Bored suburbanites. Sometimes I’ll go to some little podunk town where nothing has happened since the town drunk fell off the church steeple, and I take depositions from the nicest, most ordinary people in the world. And they want so badly to find magic. They want to be magic. I can’t explain to them how different it is from what they imagine. They’re too scared to live in a city or even visit a city, and I don’t blame them. But they’re like people who idolize the barber who once cut a movie star’s hair. They want a little pixie dust sprinkled on their lives.”

  I’m speechless. Boy, does this guy spend a lot of time in his head.

  He takes both my hands and squeezes them. “Don’t be offended, Hel. I know you’re smart. You have more guts than anybody I’ve ever met. The way you skated to the blue zone—” He shakes his head. “I would be interested in you if you were just a schoolteacher. A loving granddaughter. A kick-ass derby girl who can’t hold her car bombs.” He smiles at me and kisses me, and I really can taste his love. It’s the sweetest thing in the entire world. I never want to be without it.

  A terrible black fear starts up in my belly, way down deep.

  I know what it is. I felt it when I heard how Ma keeled over at the casino buffet three months ago. I pretend I don’t feel it.

  He slides his arms around me and my brain almost switches off. Nothing terrible can happen if his arms are around me, I think, foolish as any teenager.

  He murmurs into my hair, “You’re not alone anymore, Hel.”

  At this, I burst into tears. I want to ask him, What does that mean? I don’t dare.

  Everybody is going to die before I do. I’m about to lose Jilly.

  I can’t imagine getting to keep Nick.

  As he soothes me and kisses me and we slide toward lovemaking one more time, I know that I will never tell him the truth. Doesn’t matter. This can’t last. All too soon, something will happen and he’ll find out and he’ll hate me forever.

  But let that day be far away. Please, please, please.

  “Don’t hate yourself, Hel,” he says, squeezing me. Dammit, sex is making him psychic. That’s gotta be way outside normal. “Hate the world. It’s healthier.”

  I giggle.

  At the same time I wonder if he hates the world. Or is he just fighting the unreality in it, maybe mixing up what’s unreal with what’s just too, I dunno, too stimulating to his senses? He’s so in control. Anything that kicks him out of his comfort zone brings out the Federal agent in him.

  Except this. He opens my mouth with his, and I stop thinking.

  Chapter Twenty

  Two hours before dawn, Nick borrows a pair of jogging shorts so he can go get some clean jeans out of his car. I’m in a sex-induced stupor. He kisses me more and then he’s gone. With an effort, I get up and go to the window.

  I watch Nick’s taillights vanish around the corner.

  Then I go to check my email and see if Ma sent me any updates.

  My laptop’s not where it belongs. I panic. Then I remember taking it out to my car. I fetch it inside and boot up, and right away I can smell my burglar-spy again, that sickening cocktail of new sneakers and dandruff shampoo and gun oil and unfamiliar toothpaste, which ruins my first-ever afterglow.

  I admit to myself that the burglar-spy actually handled my laptop.

  Which means my laptop is now hopelessly compromised.

  I am loaded up with Nick’s energy. I have something to lose, now, something I want more than anything, and this danger won’t go away.

  Rage is about to blow a blood vessel out each of my ears.

  I decide.

  We do it the old fashioned way. We smoke the bastard out.

  I feed the cat and try to pet her, but she hisses at m
e. Guess she can tell I’m planning to commit a homicide.

  I pack up my laptop in its case without turning it on. Then I hit the Walgreens for a couple of big-gig thumb drives. Then I take the El three miles south, to a Starbucks near the cemetery.

  In front of an orange mocha frappuccino, I send Google hunting for sheep porn — that ought to distract New Shoes Guy — while I begin the real work, backing up everything on the hard drive onto the thumb drives. Thank God I don’t keep a diary. Mostly it’s ancient banking records, and I wonder what possessed me to keep track of every check and every ATM and debit transaction for every account with every bank that ever got bought out from under me and switched over to a bank with more fees and less service for the past two decades. That’s worse than a diary. Creepy New Shoes Guy probably now knows that I binge on Bailey’s and chocolate ice cream once a month. And when my period is. Dammit, when I was planning my vampiric afterlife, why didn’t I plan to be amenorrheic while I was at it?

  All these paranoid thoughts are racing through my head while I transfer files to the thumb drives and then delete them from my hard drive, then overwrite the space where they lived with garbage. Every forty or fifty seconds I switch back to my browser and click on some particularly offputting-looking porn link and let it boot ever so slowly, because I haven’t bothered to upgrade my browser in six years. When I’ve used up all the sheep porn links — amazing, really, how little bestiality is available out there — I start searching for online gun merchants. That ought to draw him.

  My backups are complete long before my orange mocha frappuccino is drained, long before I smell a fresh blast of new track shoes, gun oil, toothpaste, dandruff shampoo.

  I stand up and stretch, looking around the room. He is buying coffee at the counter. He’s medium-short, chunky, maybe thirty-nine or forty, balding, with a motorman’s tan, dirty chinos, and brand new Skechers. The gun is weighing down the right pocket of his gray nylon jacket. He is watching me in the mirror behind the barrista. I wrinkle my nose at his smell.

  Swiftly, I shut the laptop, sling it into its case, and book out of there, walking quickly toward the bus stop.

  I hear the Starbucks door open when I am fifty feet away. Quick footsteps are approaching. I pick up my pace.

  At the corner of Montrose and Broadway I step up into a waiting bus, run my bus pass through the machine, and bustle toward the back, even as I hear New Shoes Guy put his foot on the bus step.

  Once there are people between us, I duck down and slide my laptop under the nearest bus seat.

  Then I rush to the back door of the bus.

  It’s too noisy and smelly in the bus for me to track his progress behind me. The bus groans and starts moving as I touch street again. I worry that I’ve lost him, but I can’t stop now. I’m committed.

  No, I hear the bus brakes whistle, and then footsteps running, then slowing, then quieting. The dumbbell. He must realize that I know he’s onto me now. I turn and walk down an alley under the El tracks between Kenmore and the cemetery, where pigeon droppings and litter lie deep and crunchy in a brick-paved alley, and I start jogging. I’m looking for a spot sufficiently dark, sufficiently dirty.

  On one side of the alley are the backs of tenements, their shut garage doors, rows of their dumpsters. On the other side, a twenty-foot-high cemetery wall. A perfect trap.

  Here he comes. I jump straight up, grab the El stanchion, and hang by one hand and one foot up there, waiting and listening as hard as I can.

  What’s worrying me is, I’ve got rid of the computer and therefore the GPS that has been telling him how to find me.

  But what do I do if he’s got a GPS on him? I think about this for a while and I decide, hopefully, that anybody who hires a guy this creepy probably doesn’t want to know where he is every minute. There’s a certain accountability inherent in that.

  While I’m thinking “certain accountability inherent,” he glances up for no good reason whatever and I have to drop onto him. I kick off fast, because thirty-two feet per second per second won’t cut it, he’ll be out of range too quick.

  As I flatten him, he squeaks like a stepped-on rat.

  He has his hand in his jacket pocket, but I’m too fast. I smash that elbow against the bricks, then punch him in the tailbone as hard as I can, so that something crunches. He starts crying. I’m sure it hurts. As we know well in derby, tailbone breaks hurt like sin.

  “Who hired you?” I say into his right ear. He’s radiating prana, leaking pain and fear. “You can’t keep the secret.”

  I sip a big sip of his life force. This is mental warfare. Every time I assure him he is losing, he’ll feel weaker.

  His tailbone is screaming in pain — I can feel it. He sobs and slobbers on the dirty alley bricks.

  I snarl, “I can make you tell.” I sip at his life. “Does that hurt?” I punch him more lightly on the broken tailbone and he squeaks again.

  Sip. The taste of his prana is awful. I feel his pain flavoring his energy. Every sip hurts.

  “Tell me and I won’t hit you there again.” Sip.

  He babbles, “Mr. Sageman, he’s Mr. Sageman! That’s all I know! He’s with the government. He says. He pays cash. I talk to him direct on my cell. I’ll give you the number! He paid me two thousand to search your place and set up bugs!”

  “Not the cameras in my bathroom and my bedroom, though, huh? I bet that was all your idea. Sicko.” I’m angry again, and I sock him hard in the butt.

  He sobs openly.

  “Shut up!” I can’t take any more of his horrible taste, but I have to. I have to kill him now. Oh, ugh. “What’s the game, bro? What’s next on the plan? Why the gun?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he sobs. “There may be a snatch. He says it’s legal. He showed me papers, a badge. He’s a Fed.”

  Nick. Oh shit.

  It can’t be Nick.

  It could be.

  I feel my insides turn to concrete. I’ll have to kill Nick next. My stomach roils, and I shy away from that thought.

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Really tall. Thin. Face like a shoe.”

  “What does that mean?” I say crankily, because Nick’s not thin or unusually tall and I’m beginning to feel relieved and I want to stay that way. “How old is he?”

  “He’s kind of shriveled. Must be seventy.”

  I relax a little. Not Nick. “How does he contact you?”

  “Phone.”

  Not Nick. I’m dizzy with relief.

  Not Nick, but somebody else, somebody higher up the food chain, maybe from a rival agency. I remember something from Nick’s phone conversation out by the blue zone.

  “Did he ever mention a coin?” I say.

  A shiver goes over my victim, and he seems to weaken under me. I crane my neck to see his face. He’s weeping again.

  “I’m gonna die,” he says quietly.

  “This is news?” I blurt.

  Very softly, the guy says, “He said if I told you anything about the coin he’d kill me.” I can tell he’s resigned to this.

  All of a sudden I feel terribly sorry for him. He can’t have led a nice life. His energy tastes awful. I’ve hurt him until he cries like a little girl. I feel like twelve kinds of shit.

  But I have to ask. “What did he say about the coin?”

  “Not much. As soon as you find it, I’m supposed to snatch you.”

  “And do what with me?”

  “He’ll take it from there.” His energy shifts a little, and he slumps further under me. “I think he was gonna kill me then anyway.”

  He’s half-crazy with pain. I can taste it in his prana.

  I can’t help myself. I roll off him.

  With finger and thumb, I pinch his spine about midway down, above the kidneys, pinch and hold until the nerves sever.

  After about four seconds, he sighs. The pain fades out of his prana. “Oh, thank you.” He’ll never get up again.

  I’m such a horrible p
erson.

  “Listen, it’s not that bad.” I’m trying to think of something to cheer him, but there’s darned little to work with in this dreadful little alley.

  High above us I hear a jet. That’ll do.

  I take another hit off his life. He fades more.

  Carefully, I roll him onto his back. “Look. Look up there. See the stars between the train tracks? Can you see the jet trail?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says faintly.

  “I bet that plane is going to Aruba. Someplace beautiful and warm.”

  “Mexico.”

  “Mexico. You could be on that plane in two minutes. Would you like me to send you there? Find a pretty girl with a window seat, sit next to her all the way, watch Mexico come closer and closer. What do you like in Mexico?”

  “Beach,” he breathes. He’s almost gone. He tastes a whole lot better. “Spear fishing. Conch soup. Beer.”

  “Cold beer, hot conch soup, and the sun on the water. Doesn’t get any better than that.”

  He makes a little noise, kind of like my cat when I’m rubbing her belly and she stretches and makes a “more” sound.

  “Are you ready to go to Mexico now?” He tastes more peaceful and happy. He’s far away from his body now. “Draw a bead on that plane. Follow it. Grab onto the tail. You got it yet?”

  “I got it.”

  “Here we go then.” I lay a hand on his chest and pull the last of his energy out of him. I’d like to think there’s a snap, or a twang, or some kind of sign that it’s over, but my first sign that I’ve taken too much is always when they turn to this ultrafine gray fluffy dust and their clothes sink to the ground, along with their teeth caps and fillings and any jewelry or watches they may be wearing.

  I never even got his name.

  That may be a problem later.

  Everything is a problem. Heck with that. It’s a beautiful night, and that plane’s contrail is streaking steadily southward. I wish I was on it myself.

  I gather up his clothes and anything else I can find that might have been his. First thing, I turn his phone off. Then I go through his wallet. Macy Rowlands, Chicago resident, age forty-two, short, thick, balding, check. Room key for a no-tell motel over on Lincoln Avenue — not even an electronic key card, but a corroded brass key. Rats. I’ll have to go to his motel before I can check the cell phone. I can’t afford to turn it on anywhere near where he died.