“You have a good memory.”
He waits for me to elaborate, but I don’t. “Were you and your friend connected with those murders as well?” he asks.
I peer at him through my dark lenses. “Why do you ask?”
“One of the people killed at a gas station in Seaside was a woman. Her skull was cracked open by an exceptionally strong person. The coroner told me about it. He said it would take a monster to do what had been done to her.” He pauses, adds, “The manner of her death reminds me of what’s happening in Los Angeles.”
I offer a bird one of my french fries. Animals generally like me, if I’m not chasing them. “Do you think I’m a monster, Joel?”
“You cannot keep answering my questions with questions.”
“But one answer always leads to another question.” I shrug. “I’m not interested in discussing my life story with you.”
“Were you there that night those people died in Seaside?”
I pause. “Yes.”
He sucks in a breath. “Did your friend kill that woman?”
A white dove takes my fry. I wipe off my hands on my skirt. “No. My friend sent that woman to kill me.”
“Some friend.”
“He had his reasons.”
Joel sighs. “I’m getting nowhere with you. Just tell me what you’re trying to tell me and be done with it.”
“Eddie Fender is our man.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. To me, it’s a fact. And the other thing is—I like you and I don’t want you to get hurt. You have to leave Eddie to me.”
He snorts. “Right. Thank you, Alisa, but I can take care of myself.”
I touch his arm, hold his eyes, even through my dark glasses. “You don’t understand what you’re up against. You don’t understand me.” I let the tips of my fingers slide over the sleeve of his jacket. I hold his hand. Despite my weakness, his proximity is stimulating. Even without trying, my gaze weakens him. Better to kiss him, I think, than to kill him. But then I think of Ray, whom I love. He will be waking soon. The sun nears the horizon. The orange glow lights Joel’s face as if he were sitting in a desolate purgatory, where the judgment of the damned and the saved had already been completed, five thousand years ago. He sits so close to me, but I cannot welcome him too far into my world without devouring his, as I did Ray’s. But I do have to scare him, yes, and deeply. I add, “I was the one who killed that woman.”
He smiles nervously. “Sure. How did you do it? With your bare hands?”
I take his hand. “Yes.”
“You must be very strong?”
“Yes.”
“Alisa.”
“Sita. My name is Sita.”
“Why do you go by Alisa?”
I shrug. “It’s a name. Only those I care about call me Sita.”
“What do you want me to call you?”
I smile sadly. “What would you prefer to call a murderer?”
He takes his hand from mine and stares at the ocean a moment. “Sometimes when I talk to you I feel like I’m talking to a mental case. Only you’re too together to be labeled unstable.”
“Thank you.”
“You weren’t serious about having killed that woman, were you?”
I speak in a flat voice. “It happened at the corner of Fryer and Tads. The woman was found on the floor of the women’s room. Her brains were on the floor as well. Like you said, her head had been cracked open, the front of it. That was because I grabbed her from behind when I rammed her face into the wall.” I sip my Coke. “Did the coroner give you these details?”
I see from Joel’s stunned face that the coroner must have enlightened him on some of the facts. He can’t quit staring at me. For him, I know, it is as if my eyes are as big as the sea, as black as the deepest subterranean crevasse. Beneath the ocean is molten bedrock. Beneath my eyes I believe he senses an ageless fire. Yet he shivers and I understand why. My words are so cold.
“It’s true,” he whispers.
“Yes. I am not normal.” Standing, I pluck the papers from his hand before he can blink. My eyes bore down on him. “Go home, Joel, to wherever home is. Don’t try to follow me. Don’t talk about me. If you do, I will know about it and I will have to come after you. You don’t want that, any more than you want to take on this murderer. He is like me, and at the same time he is not like me. We are both cruel, but his cruelty is without reason, without kindness. Yes, I did kill that woman, but I didn’t do so out of malice. I can be very kind, when it suits me. But when I am cornered, I am as dangerous as this Eddie. I have to corner him, you see, in a special place, under special circumstances. It’s the only way to stop him. But you can’t be there. If you are, you will die. You will die anyway, if you don’t leave me alone. Do you understand?”
He stares at me as if I am a distorted apparition trying to materialize from a realm he never knew existed. “No,” he mumbles.
I take a step back. “Try to arrest me.”
“Huh?”
“Arrest me. I have admitted to killing a woman with my bare hands. I know details of the crime only the killer could know. It’s your responsibility as an FBI agent to bring me in. Take out your gun and read me my rights. Now!”
My pounding gaze has short-circuited his brain synapses. But he does stand, and he does pull out his gun and point it at me. “You’re under arrest,” he says.
I slap the gun away. It lands a hundred yards off in the water. But for him it is just gone. His stunned expression, even in the ruby light, goes pale.
“You see,” I say softly. “You can’t play this game with me. You don’t have the proper equipment. Your gun is on the bottom of the sea. Believe me, Joel, trust me—or you will end up in the bottom of a grave.” I pat his shoulder as I step past him. “There will be a bus along soon. There is a stop at the entrance to the pier. Goodbye.”
SIX
Ray should not come with me to Los Angeles. I feel this in my heart. But after the sun sets, and he awakens, and I explain to him what is happening in L.A., he insists on joining me. How he shudders at the thought of more vampires! How his horror breaks my heart, even though intellectually I share his opinion. Truly, he still sees us as evil. But, he says, two are stronger than one, and I know his math makes sense. I might very well need him at a critical moment. Also, unless I take him with me, I know he will go another night without feeding. How many nights he can survive, I don’t know. I can endure for as long as six months without drinking blood. As long as I don’t have other vampires throwing knives in me, that is.
Anxious to get down to Los Angeles, we fly south in my Learjet without feeding. But once on the ground, before we do anything else, I tell Ray we are going hunting. He agrees reluctantly, and I have to promise him we will not hurt anybody. It is a promise I make reluctantly. Opening large veins, I never know what complications might result.
We go to Zuma Beach, north of Malibu. The beaches have always been a favorite den of victims for me. Plenty of out-of-state travelers, homeless people, drunks—portions of the population who are not immediately missed. Of course, I seldom kill my meal tickets these days, since I have begun to believe in miracles, or since I have fallen in love with my reluctant Count Dracula, whichever came first. Actually, I once met Vlad the Impaler, the real man Count Dracula was based on, in the fifteenth century in Transylvania during the war with the Ottoman Turks. Forget those stories about his mean-looking canines. Now, there was a fellow who needed modern dentistry. His teeth were rotting out of his mouth, and he had the worst breath. He was no vampire, just a Catholic zealot with a fetish for decapitation. He asked me out, though, for a ride in his carriage. I attract unusual men. I told him where to stuff it. I believe I invented the phrase.
Driving north on the Coast Highway, I spot a young couple on the beach making out on their sleeping bags. Up and down the beach, for at least half a mile, there isn’t another soul. Looks like dinner to me, but Ray has his doubts. He always does. I
swear, if we were a normal couple going out to a restaurant, he would never be satisfied with the menu. Being a vampire, you can’t be a picky eater, it just doesn’t work. Yet you might wonder—what about blood-borne diseases? What about AIDS? None of them matters. None of them can touch us. Our blood is a fermented black soup—it strips to the bone whatever we sink our teeth into. This particular young couple looks healthy and happy to me, a blood type I prefer. It is true I am sensitive to the “life vibration” of those I feed upon. Once I drank the blood of a well-known rap singer and had a headache for a week.
“What is wrong with them?” I ask Ray as we park a hundred yards north of them. They are behind and below us, not far from the reach of the surf. The waves are big, the tide high.
“They’re not much older than I am,” he says.
“Yes? Would it be better if they were both in their eighties?”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. They remind you of the life you left behind. But I need blood. I shouldn’t have to explain that to you. I suffered two serious wounds last night, and then I had to feed you when I returned home.”
“I didn’t ask you to feed me.”
I throw up my hands. “And I didn’t ask to have to watch you die. Please, Ray, let’s do this quick so that we can take care of what we came for.”
“How are we going to approach them?”
I open my car door. “There’s going to be no approach. We are simply going to rush them and grab them and start drinking their blood.”
Ray grabs my arm. “No. They’ll be terrified. They’ll run to the police.”
“The police in this town have more important matters to deal with than a couple of hysterical twenty-year-olds.”
Ray is stubborn. “It will take you only a few moments to put them at ease and hypnotize them. Then they won’t suffer.”
I stand up outside the car and scowl at him. “You would rather I suffer.”
Ray wearily climbs out of his side of the car. “No, Sita. I would prefer to fast.”
I walk around and take his hand—a handsome young couple out for an innocent stroll. But my mood is foul. “You would rather I suffer,” I repeat.
The blond couple doesn’t even look up as we approach, so entranced are they in each other’s anatomy. I throw Ray another unpleasant glance. I am supposed to hypnotize these two? He shrugs—he would prefer I anesthetize them before pinching their veins. My patience has reached its limit. Striding over to the hot-blooded boy and girl, I reach down and grab their sleeping bag and pull it out from under them. They fly three feet in the air—literally. They look up at me as if I might bite them. Imagine.
“You are about to be mugged,” I say. “It will be a novelty mugging. You will not be hurt and you will not lose any money. But you are going to perform us a great service. Stay calm and we’ll be done in ten minutes.”
They do not remain calm. I don’t care. I grab the girl and throw her to Ray, and then I am on the guy. Pulling his arms behind his back and pinning them there with one hand, I don’t worry when he opens his mouth and screams for help. With the pounding surf, no one will hear him. Not that it would make much difference if someone did. In L.A. the earth could shake and people would think it was the Harmonic Convergence. A little screaming on Zuma Beach never worried anyone. Yet I do end up clamping the guy’s mouth shut with my free hand.
“I prefer to dine in silence,” I say. Glancing over at Ray who is struggling with the girl—for no reason—I remark in his direction, “You make it worse by dragging it out.”
“I do things my own way,” he says.
“Hmm,” I grunt. Closing my eyes, using my long thumbnail to open a neck vein, I press my lips on the torn flesh and suck hard. I have cut the carotid artery. The blood gushes into my mouth like hot chocolate poured over ice cream. My young man goes limp in my arms and begins to enjoy the sensation. For me and my victim, feeding can be intensely sensual. I know he feels as if every nerve in his body is being caressed by a thousand fingers. And for me the blood is a warm pulsing river. But if I wish, feeding can be terrifying for my victim. By the time I finished with Slim, for example, he felt as if hell would be a welcome respite.
None of my victims, of course, becomes a vampire simply by being bitten. There has to be a massive exchange of blood to bring about that transformation. I wonder if Eddie Fender has needles and syringes.
So caught up am I in replenishing my strength that I don’t immediately notice that we are three when we should be four. Opening my eyes, I see that Ray’s girl has escaped. She is running down the beach at high speed, soundlessly, in the direction of concrete steps that will lead her past the beach boulders and back up onto the Coast Highway.
“What the hell!” I say to Ray.
He shrugs. “She bit my hand.”
“Go get her. No, I’ll get her.” I hand over my happy boy. “Finish with this guy. He’s good for another pint.”
Ray accepts the young man reluctantly. “His strength is ebbing.”
“You worry about your own strength,” I call over my shoulder as I chase after the girl. She’s a hundred yards away, on the verge of leaping onto the steps—it is a wonder that she hasn’t started screaming yet. I have to assume she is in shock. She is ten feet from the highway when I pounce on her and drag her back down the steps. There is more fight in her than I expect, however. Whirling, she punches me hard in the chest. To my great surprise, the blow hurts. She has hit me exactly where the stake penetrated my heart. But my grip on her does not falter. “This is going to hurt, sister,” I tell her as she stares at me in horror.
My right hand pins her arms, my left closes her mouth. Again, the thumbnail opens her big neck vein. But I am even more eager than before and suck her red stream as if I am drinking from the elixir of immortality itself, as indeed I am. Yet it is not the matter, the fluids or elements in the blood, that grant the vampire his or her longevity. It is the life—that essence that no scientist has ever been able to replicate in his laboratory—that makes any other source of nourishment pale by comparison. But this feeding with this girl is not erotic—it is ravenous. Feeling as if I am trying to drown my pain and weariness in one gulp, I drink from this girl as if her life is my reward for all the evildoers I have been forced to bring to justice.
Yet my thirst deludes even my sense of right and wrong. My vast experience fails me. Suddenly I feel Ray shaking me, telling me to let go. Opening my eyes, I notice the boy lying lazily on the beach, still a hundred yards away, sleeping off his unexpected encounter with the creatures of the night. He will wake with a bad headache, nothing more. The girl in my arms is another matter. Desperately pale, cold as the sand we stand on, she wheezes. Her heart flutters inside her chest. Crouching down, I lay her on her back on the beach. Ray kneels across from me and shakes his head. My guilt is a bitter-tasting dessert.
“I didn’t mean to do this,” I say. “I got carried away.”
“Is she going to make it?” Ray asks.
Placing my hand over her chest, I take a pulse reading that tells me more than an intensive care unit filled with modern equipment could. It is only then that I note the girl’s heart is scarred—the right aorta; possibly from a childhood disease. It is not as though I have drained her completely. Yet I have taken more from her than I should have, and in combination with her anatomical weakness, I know she is not going to make it.
“It doesn’t look good,” I say.
Ray takes her hand. He has not reached for my hand in over a month. “Can’t you do something for her?” he asks, pain in his voice.
I spread my hands. “What can I do? I cannot put the blood I have taken back inside her. It’s done—let’s get out of here.”
“No! We can’t just leave her. Use your power. Save her. You saved me.”
I briefly close my eyes. “I saved you by changing you. I cannot change her.”
“But she’ll die.”
I stare at him across my handi
work. “Yes. Everyone who is born dies.”
He refuses to accept the situation. “We have to get her to a hospital.” He goes to lift her. “They can give her a transfusion. She might make it.”
I stop him, gently, slowly removing his hands from the girl’s body. Folding her hands across her chest, I listen as her heart begins to skip inside. Yet I continue to look at my lover, searching his expression for signs of hatred or the realization that this being he is to spend the rest of eternity with is really a witch. But Ray only looks grieved, and somehow that makes it worse for me.
“She is not going to live,” I say. “She would never make it to a hospital. Her heart is weak. I failed to notice that at the start. I was so thirsty—I got carried away. It happens sometimes. I am not perfect. This is not a perfect creation. But if it is any consolation, I am sorry that this has happened. If I could heal her, I would. But Krishna did not give me that ability.” I add, “I can only kill.”
Ray follows the girl’s breathing for a minute. That is all the time it lasts. The girl gives a soft strangled sound and her back arches off the sandy floor. Then she lies still. Standing, I silently take Ray by the hand and lead him back to the car. Long ago I learned that death cannot be discussed. It is like talking about darkness. Both topics bring only confusion—especially to us, who have to go on living through the night. All who are born die, I think, remembering Krishna’s words. All who die will be reborn. In his profound wisdom he spoke the words to comfort all those born in Kali Yuga, the age in which we now live, the dark age. Yet it’s strange, as we get in the car and drive away from the beach, I cannot remember his eyes, exactly what they looked like. The sky is covered with haze. The stars, the moon—they are not out. I cannot think what it means to be young. All is indeed dark.
SEVEN
When I met Private Investigator Michael Riley, Ray’s father, he talked to me about my previous residence. Trying to impress me with how much he knew about my wealth.
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