"Blood," he whispered back. "Only blood, and a beautiful woman to drink with."
Lourdes heard the roaring in her ears again, but this time it was only a BART train. She opened her purse to show him the bag of blood inside. He nodded slowly; his eyes never left hers, but she knew he had seen it all the same, and for the first time that night, Lourdes smiled.
At any rate, it appeared to be a smile: first her lips parted, just wide enough to show her teeth, then her teeth parted, just about wide enough to hold a small olive. "James, was it?" she asked, turning again, pushing open the double doors.
"Please, James is my V.A. name. I despise it." He stepped out beside her, and offered her his arm.
She took it. "What shall I call you then?"
"Whistler." They started down the steps together, her hand resting lightly in the crook of his elbow. "My friends call me Whistler."
Chapter 3
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ONE
The Dessert Inn was an upscale joint for El Cerrito. Black-trimmed brick walls, exposed beams, art posters. More important, espresso drinks until one.
The night manager's practiced eye told him instantly that the striking couple were on a date. He was torn between seating them at table eleven, where he'd be able to watch the dark-haired woman in the white sweater and tight beige skirt from behind the register, or at fourteen, which was his girlfriend's station. Wealthy older man, beautiful younger woman—everything about it shrieked big tip.
He settled on fourteen. "This way, please."
But the yellow-haired man pointed instead toward one of the booths, not with an upraised arm, but with a languid flick of forefinger, and a persuasive arch of an eyebrow. "Over there will do, I think," he said with a faintly British inflection.
Something in his manner sucked the night manager right in. "Very good, sir," he found himself saying, with some astonishment: he'd never said "Very good, sir" before in his entire life, as far as he could recall. On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for a booth, he thought a moment later watching Lourdes's skirt ride up her bare thigh as she slid sideways into the booth. And up, and up—
Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder—Jesus, the old guy had moved fast. And something about his grip intimated that the thumb and forefinger now squeezing from opposite sides of his shoulder could just as easily be meeting in the center of it—that bones were not an obstacle. But the voice was as toney and untroubled as before. "A gentleman never stares," was the advice it whispered in the night manager's ear. "He may peek, but he never stares."
"Thank you, Whistler," said Lourdes, primly smoothing her skirt as the night manager fled. "A creep like that could flat stomp a girl's buzz." They had stolen a quick sip from her bag in the restaurant parking lot—just enough for a buzz, and to keep off the crash.
Something about the turn of the phrase tickled him. "Stomp a girl's buzz," he repeated, laughing delightedly. He'd already decided she was the most breathtaking creature he'd ever seen, vampire or no vampire, with her sleek round skull slightly large for her body, her oval face and clear olive skin, her dark thick-lashed eyes, and the black hair pulled back ballerina-tight, not to mention the legs that had launched a thousand night managers. "I've never heard that before."
"We say it all the time where I'm from."
"And where's that?"
"Modesto. West Mo, actually. How about you?"
The waitress arrived to take their orders—Whistler waited until she was out of earshot before replying. "Maryland born. Raised there, and in the Virgin Islands. London in my teens."
"So what the hell are you doing in El Cerrito?"
"I have a restored farmhouse in El Sobrante, actually, but I divide my time between there and Whistler Manor, my lodge up at Tahoe, and my villa in Greece, and—"
"Stop, stop." She held up a hand, laughing. "I'm sorry, Whistler. But your villa in fucking Greece? Gimme a break—I'm a Filipino Okie from West Modesto. We don't know men with villas in Greece."
To his credit, he laughed back. "Well, you do now."
When their drinks arrived, she threw back her steaming double espresso like a B-girl. "There, that should keep me awake another five minutes, easy." She tugged the neck of her sweater away from her body and fluttered it for a little breeze, although it was not especially warm in the Inn.
"I'm sorry, are you starting to crash again?" he asked with concern.
"Well, it's not a crash, exactly. Just that feeling—do you know what I mean? Do you get it, too? When everything's so—so—"
" 'Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable' ?"
"That's it. That's exactly it."
"Shakespeare," he advised her. Shakespee-ah: his English accent had grown more pronounced. It was not quite an affectation, as he had indeed lived in London for nine of his formative years, but it did tend to meander, respecting neither class nor regional boundaries on its wanderings.
Lourdes's eyes widened. "Was he a vam—was he one of us?" Her own speech was northern Central Valley—not quite Valley Girl, more like a Midwesterner with a mouthful of chewing gum.
Whistler shrugged, stirring his cappuccino with the spoon held loosely between thumb and forefinger. She found herself staring at his hands—his fingers were long, tapered, the moons perfect ivory-blue crescents in the elegant nails. "During my brief university career, I once wrote—well, commissioned: I rarely wrote my own papers (which may well account for the brevity of the career)—a little beauty entitled 'Blood and the Bard,' and I can tell you with absolute assurance that there are over eleven hundred references to blood in Shakespeare." He drank, then with his napkin carefully blotted a spot of foam from his long upper lip. "My personal favorite is from King John: 'at feasts, full warm of blood.' "
Finally she couldn't stand it any longer—she reached across the booth and took his left hand in hers, turned it over, ran her fingers lightly along the back of it. "Sounds good," she whispered dreamily. "Feasts full warm of blood."
Whistler began some wisecrack or other, but it caught in his throat as he watched her stroking his hand, this beautiful, untutored, newly-Awakened young Orphan. What a world of blood there was to teach her about, he thought, trying to place this peculiar sensation that seemed to be coming over him, this painful, pleasurable sense of fullness in his chest and throat, and behind his eyes. Then it came to him—it was the way you felt just before you broke down and cried.
No wonder it had been hard to place—Whistler hadn't shed a tear since 1988, when Nick and Leon and the others had tied him to a bed in his own lodge in order to wean him from blood.
Could I be falling in love? he thought wonderingly, and then, like an echo in his mind, he heard the voice of the poor drowned Viscount—Nick's first casualty. Falling in love? What a demned foolish thing for an aging vampire to do.
TWO
"I never did this with anybody before," Lourdes declared as she unloaded the bag of blood from her purse onto her kitchen counter. "You?"
"Every chance I get."
"What's it like?" Just nervous small talk, but he seemed to take it seriously. "Doing it together, I mean."
"You are an Orphan, aren't you? Well, it's interesting."
"That's all—just interesting?"
"At my age, 'interesting' is praise indeed."
"How old are you?"
"Three hundred and twelve."
She gasped, then saw the long vertical seams of his cheeks deepen—there were dimples hidden in there somewhere. "I don't think so," she said, employing a catchphrase of the day. "Homey don't play dat. What year were you born?"
"Let's see, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen… ninety-two less twelve… 1680!"
"Nice try." She held the bag up for his inspection, turning it around so he could read the West County Blood Bank label. "Good shit. Guaranteed HIV-negative."
He took the bag, turning it over thoughtfully. "Not that it makes a difference."
"But I thought—in her share, Beverly said—"
; He waved Beverly away as an annoyance. "Party line."
"What're you saying? That you can't get AIDS from drinking blood?"
He shrugged. "No one ever has—no vampire, that is."
"Maybe the stomach acid kills the virus?"
"I doubt it. My god, we practically used to wallow in the stuff—all it would have taken was a cut or a chapped lip or canker sore. And then there's the sex. Even the rawest Orphan finds out soon enough that the most common side effect of blood—to those of us who have that lucky gene or condition or whatever that makes it a drug for us—is that it is, beyond question, the most powerful aphrodisiac imaginable. So when you take into account all the blood, and all the sex, it means that if we're not immune, my dear, then we are all, all of us, walking dead. And I don't mean Nosferatu."
"Speaking of Nosferatu," she said, somewhat indistinctly, as her tongue was busy exploring the inside of her mouth for cracks and cankers, "how come they took down the cross for the meeting?" He handed the bag back to her; she hooked the top over the brass knob of the white lacquered cabinet above the sink. "Wait here, I have to get the good glasses for this."
She brushed past him; he caught a whiff of jasmine-based perfume. "Sally. Our long-necked Ethiope?" he called after her.
"The black girl?"
"Reddish brown, I'd say—yes, that's the one."
"What about her?" She returned with two bulbous Cost Plus brandy snifters, one of which she handed to him; the other she positioned under the outlet tube.
"Her family back in Addis Ababa tried to have her deprogrammed once—exorcised is more like it—by some self-styled North African Van Helsing. Not only does she still carry a brand in the shape of a cross high on her eminently callipygian left buttock, but the smell of garlic sends her into conniptions."
Whistler watched with breathless attention as Lourdes gave the plastic wheel at the bottom of the tube a delicate quarter turn. Such a wonderful touch, he thought. Fingers like a surgeon. Or a harpist. Or a porn star.
Lourdes gave the wheel a final turn, then tapped the tube, and the blood began to flow, a few drops, then a dark ruby stream that coated the inside of the glass as it fell. She closed the stopcock and held the goblet to the light. "God, I love that color." She handed it to him; he traded her the empty glass. "You know, I was scared to death when Beverly busted me tonight, but now I feel like thanking her."
Whistler rolled the snifter between his hands to warm the blood like a fine brandy. "How so?"
"Because now I know I'm not alone." Lourdes rinsed out the sink, then opened the refrigerator and stooped down to stow the half-empty bag in the crisper, tucking it carefully out of sight behind the cabbage. She was aware of her skirt riding up her thighs again, of Whistler's eyes on her, and for his benefit dipped a little lower.
He had been right, of course: she had discovered about sex on blood all by herself. But she'd never had sex with a man who was also high on blood—an omission, she suspected, that was about to be remedied soon.
They carried their glasses through the living room/dining room of her one-bedroom apartment; she parted the white curtains and opened the sliding glass door that led out to a balcony overlooking the flat pebbled roofs of the neighboring apartment buildings. It was a warm night—it had been warm that whole long weekend.
"Boy, my life sure gets strange sometimes," whispered Lourdes, looking down at the glass in her hand—the blood was a dull sparkling carnelian in the moonlight.
"Do you like it that way?"
"I love it. Know any good toasts?"
Whistler smiled, and lifted his goblet to hers. "Of course. 'Other things are all very well in their way, but give me Blood!' "
"Shakespeare again?"
"Dickens. David Copperfield. Chapter Twenty-five: Good and Bad Angels."
They clinked glasses, the crystal rang prettily, and they drank.
THREE
An orchard of gnarled Gravenstein apple trees stretched on for half a mile behind Whistler's farmhouse. Looking out through the screen door, Lourdes couldn't quite see to the end of it, even in the moonlight, even on blood, which always sharpened her senses wonderfully.
She was good and high now. The blood had taken its own sweet time coming on—as cold blood was wont to do—but as they drove north from Berkeley in Whistler's '58 Jaguar saloon, on it had come: colors brightened, objects grew sharp-sided and discrete, thoughts spun away into the night like blips in a video game, and the stars began to align themselves along a three-dimensional grid. The world on blood was an awesome piece of work, but delicate too, sparkling like a spiderweb sprinkled with dew.
"It looks like an enchanted orchard," whispered Lourdes, with her nose mashed against the screen. "Like it's alive."
"Everything looks alive on blood." Whistler was high too, but then Whistler, after twenty-five years, drank not to get high, but to stay high: the hallmark of an addict. He reached over her shoulder to unhook the door. "I'm letting the orchard grow wild," he explained. "Must be the Druid in me."
"I'm growing wild," she called over her shoulder, racing down into the orchard, white sandals flapping. "It's the blood in me."
He caught up with her where the orchard was the darkest, and the sweet winey smell of the rotting apples the strongest.
"No neighbors?" she asked.
"Not for half a mile." He slid close behind her, reached around with both hands, and pulled her tight against him.
"Stop or I'll scream," she giggled.
"Scrrrream, den." His long solemn face was expressionless, and his yellow hair washed colorless by the moonlight. "Scrrrream all you vant to, my dearrrr. Dere isss no vun to hearrrr you."
"Ooooh." A deep chesty moan. She turned to face him, but when he bent to kiss her pursed lips she danced back a step, dry leaves and applewood twigs crackling underfoot. "Wait." She pulled her white sweater over her head, and draped it over a low spiny branch. Then she let her skirt fall, stepped out of it, and hung it next to the sweater, where it was soon joined by her bra and panties. When she was naked save for her white sandals, she closed her eyes and took a few slow, deep breaths; her wide-set breasts rose and fell, pale fruit in the orchard in the silvery light. "There, that's better," she reported. "Much better. Now where were we?"
"I believe we were about to scream," said Whistler, reaching for his belt buckle—it was in the shape of an ourobouros, a tail-eating snake.
By the time they reached the bedroom on the second floor of the farmhouse, he was as naked as she was, and the Creature—which was Whistler's name for the erection that customarily visited him during a blood high (it seemed not to belong to him; quite the other way around, in fact)—had attained full Creaturedom. She pushed him down across the bed with a gleeful whoop, glorying in her newly regained vampire strength; he seized her wrist and pulled her down just as roughly.
She gasped appreciatively the first time he entered her. She would have gasped appreciatively in any event—still, it was nice not having to pretend. And as he began moving above her, inside her, she felt herself responding—it was as if her Creature was her dancer's body, her whole body: a blush spread out from the center of her chest, and when it reached her eyes the whites flushed Chinese red.
She understood now that she had been wrong about sex with another vampire: it was even better than she had imagined, like being high on all the drugs in the world at the same time—Quaalude-hypno-trance, early-cocaine-engorgement, Ecstasy-empathy with a dash of porn-fever. At first her orgasms were powerful, and prolonged—she'd think she was finished and then, at a smile from him, or a tender touch or just a thought, she'd feel it rippling in her womb, and the orgasm would build from the inside out until her belly skin rippled in sympathetic vibration. And if he was not inside her, if he was lying beside her with the Creature bobbing, perhaps a bead of clear come at the tip, then together they would watch her fluttering gently, and at that moment she would have sworn he was feeling every ripple right along with her.
But a
fter a few more hours, orgasms, though no less frequent, began to seem irrelevant, and it was after one of these (they had by then each donned one of Whistler's kimonos, hers lilac, his black—more for the color and the contrast and the feel of the silk than for warmth or modesty), upon finding themselves entwined in a position so convoluted and unlikely that only a mind on blood could have conceived it, and two bodies on blood achieved it, that Lourdes turned to Whistler and asked, through swollen lips, with what was left of her voice: "Why would they ever imagine I'd want to give up drinking blood in the first place?"
FOUR
"Are you always hard?" Lourdes murmured, lying on her right side on the damp and rumpled pearl-colored satin sheets of the king-size bed. It was nearly dawn—the kimonos and the black down comforter had hit the floor ages ago.
Whistler rolled onto his side to face her, propping himself up on one elbow. He trailed a finger down her rib cage, along the dip of her waist, and over the swell of her hip. "On blood."
She giggled. "You're hard and I'm easy."
"Match made in heaven." He placed the back of his right hand under a breast, hefting it gently, letting it settle back into its delicate curve.
Between them, the Creature began to stir—when its head brushed her thigh Lourdes sat up abruptly, crawled to the end of the bed, and snatched the comforter off the floor to wrap around herself. "Actually, I'm getting kinda sore."
"Coming down?"
"I don't think so. I could use a boost, though—you have any weed around?"
"Do the royal corgis shit on the palace lawn?"
"I don't know. Do they?"
"Frequently, in elegant little turds." From the drawer of the bedside table he produced a small coffin-shaped wooden pipe and a pine green bud the size of a Ping-Pong ball—Humboldt's finest. He filled the bowl, lit it, passed it to her; she inhaled in tight little sips, managing not to cough.
The World on Blood Page 4
