Annie of the Undead

by Varian Wolf

  A moment later, I heard Miguel’s voice.

  “Annie, get under the table!”

  I didn’t hesitate a nanosecond. I dropped to the floor just as the door blew in.

  “Where is your master? Where is your master, vermin?”

  It was Miguel’s voice, and he sounded like a wolverine. He was right across from me in the dark, and he was doing something unpleasant to Psalter. The crazy thing was that no time had seemed to pass from the moment the door collided with the table and the moment I heard his words. He had moved that fast.

  “Where is the cur who has given you so paltry a claim to immortality? Speak or die eternal death.”

  “Y-c-c-c…y-you sh-c-c-c-shouldn’t be here,” Psalter choked.

  “There is no time for you, bacterium. Speak, and I will allow you to crawl forth from this place with your wretched skin on your carcass.”

  “N-no. P-p-p-please. D-don’t-t…hkkkkk!”

  I heard several weighty objects fall wetly to the floor. Miguel had ripped him apart.

  “Annie.”

  I felt his hand on mine. For the first time ever, it was actually hot.

  “Miguel! Fuck, I can’t see shit.”

  “We are leaving.”

  “Yoki –my friend…”

  “She is not here. She has already been freed.”

  “Those lying fuckers.”

  “I am going to carry you.”

  “Good, because I really need some sleeeee…”

  He swept me into his arms and we shot through the door like…well, like Miguel. I think we knocked some people down along the way, and leaped over things, and generally treated the precinct office like a child’s obstacle course made of Tinkertoys and Lego blocks. The poor cops in the dark were no match for Miguel. Even if they’d known he was there, which they didn’t, I don’t think they could have gotten any rounds fired as he blitzed by them. He wasn’t walking against the wind. He was the wind. We were on the rooftops faster than you could say Mississippi three times, and then we were sailing through the air in fine style.

  And somehow, despite the fact that I had pulled some crazy shit, and I was bound to get an earful, I was, for the moment, incredibly happy. Vampire Miguel had busted me out of jail, which was, I decided, quite the most romantic thing anybody had ever done for me.

  Back at the house that Andy built, with Andy and his merry men respectfully in some other part of the house at Miguel’s silent behest, the two of us convened in a slightly less white room than the others I had seen. This one had very subtly salmon curtains and burgundy lamp shades that popped like cherries against the otherwise endless white. The rug was salmon shag. I sat on it, or in it. It was deep shag.

  Miguel sat in a chair beside me. I spent a good deal of time just looking at him. His flesh was flushed a hot pink like a person with a fever. Certain veins stood out brightly through his pale skin. His lips were positively scarlet. The weirdest thing was his eyes. The whites weren’t white at all. They looked like those of someone who had been smoking way, way too much weed. Righteous weed. They made a scary contrast with the sparkling green of his irises.

  He spent a good deal of time just looking at me too. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but if it was anything along the lines of what I was thinking, it was a miracle that we didn’t kill each other or fuck right then and there.

  I was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “Thanks for getting me out of jail, and for killing that fuck in the suit.”

  He merely looked at me.

  “But you didn’t tell me about werewolves.”

  I watched his face closely, but I hadn’t learned to read it well enough to read it then.

  “…In Canada.”

  Nothing yet.

  “And you didn’t tell me about earthvines.”

  Nothing.

  “Or covens of thirteen full witches plus their understudies. Or mind control. Or zombies.”

  He watched me, unmoved.

  “Or the fact that young vampires can handle the sun, but it turns old ones to ash. Or that young werewolves are certifiably crazy, and old ones can look like anybody. –Oh, and you didn’t mention that werewolves hate vampires, and if I’m a vampire, I have to stay between the tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, or I get smoked just for not breathing. You didn’t tell me any of that. You left me here so that Andy’s boys could tell me, so that Mark could…”

  I stopped myself, suddenly seeing the intelligence in the face in which I had only at that moment wanted to find fault.

  “You left me here so that they could tell me.”

  He merely looked at me.

  “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “I thought he would explain things better.”

  “He doesn’t know that much. I think you could tell me a lot more.”

  “I will do so.”

  “But not yet.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Not until I’m dead.”

  “You know what a mortal should know. When you are immortal, I will teach you what immortals should know.”

  “You didn’t trust yourself not to tell me too much.”

  He did not deny the accusation.

  “How old are you, Miguel?”

  “Tell me what happened to you yesterday.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Tell me why I had to storm a house of law enforcement for you.”

  Fair enough. I hadn’t gotten the earful I had expected, so I couldn’t tell if he was pissed at me –not that he had any right to be, but if he was, maybe this was my one chance to win him over. Besides, the steam had suddenly gone out of my argument. Maybe I was just too tired to sustain it.

  I told the tale in fine style, complete with near-nakedness conjoined with remembering to bring a firearm. Winning combination, I thought.

  After I had told him everything, he only sat in silence for about thirty seconds before saying what he had to say, and, God help me, I listened.

  “Something has infected this city. The creatures we have encountered are not like any vampire I have known. They are weak, strange. They bear no predator’s teeth. They behave like humans. The one who fled from me pleaded for mercy when I found him again. He was so brittle, like a dried twig. His blood was less fine than mortal blood. It was…thin.”

  “Sounds like you killed him.”

  I saw that something in Miguel’s expression then that I had seen the night we had encountered that other vampire, that gut reaction that looked so much like disgust.

  “So frail an existence…can we even call it killing?”

  “Well I’d sure call killing what they were going to do to me, and probably Yoki if they find her, and I don’t think they’ve got crowning you king on the agenda in looking for you. I really think they know something about you. At least, they want to meet you. I think they’ve got some kind of racket going here, something we’ve blundered into.”

  Miguel spoke icily, “Those creatures do not own this city. Their conceit will not be born.”

  I had never seen him look so revolted, not even when he had spoken of the witches. He wasn’t even looking at me as he talked –almost like all he could see was the foulness of which he spoke. The only time I’d seen him remotely like this was the night of the other encounter. He had called that creature, like these, “weak.” Somehow he made the word sound dirtier than “toddler-fucker.”

  “Did you run into any more of them while you were out?” I asked.

  “Only one.”

  “Did you learn anything from him, like what their game is here, how many of them there are?”

  Miguel did not answer.

  “Is that a no?”

  “He begged me not for his immortality, but for his life, like an animal.”

  Miguel was thinking out loud.

  “I fail to see the difference.”

  “He saw in me no equal, but a monster. He did not see me.”

  �
��Now you’re really confusing me.”

  He finally looked at me.

  “You do not understand eternity. Neither did that creature.”

  “Now you’re just sweet-talkin’ me.”

  “You will understand it,” he assured, “when it is yours. But these things do not. The one in the police station with you was more a man than an immortal, but his heart did not beat. I did not even desire to take his blood.”

  “Now that is mystifying.”

  He stared into his own brain, lost in thought. Finally, he said, “I cannot deduce how these creatures came about.”

  “So there’s something new and interesting out there for even the most jaded world traveler. So, how many of these two-percent vampire fuckers do you think there are?”

  He spoke with his teeth bared. It was an expression to behold with those red eyes a-burnin’. “I don’t know, but the way they behave suggests their numbers are strong where their bodies are not.”

  “Fat hell. So much for New Orleans being an open city.”

  How the fuck was I supposed to save Yoki from this? I sighed tiredly.

  Miguel looked at me. His blood-soaked eyes softened. His face melted from revulsion to something like sympathy or…no, couldn’t be that.

  “Annie,” he reached out his hand to my face. “You have outgrown this flesh. I once wanted to change you for fear of losing you, but now I must change you because you must be changed.”

  “Uh, Miguel, I…”

  “Are you uncertain?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I mean yes. I’m uncertain about a lot of things. I’m uncertain what it’s going to be like not having to shave. I’m uncertain about all the possibly hostile super-neighbors. I’m uncertain about being addicted to blood. I’m uncertain about all kinds of crazy things, but I’m also uncertain about what color the couches are in the Playboy Mansion. There are some things you just can’t know until you’ve been there. Uncertainty has never been one of the things that goes bump in my nights. I’ve lived in it my whole life.”

  I took his hand away from my face and held it to my chest so he could feel my heart beating.

  “There is one thing of which I am certain. I want to know more about you, and I am going to need eternity for that.”

  “It is decided then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It must be soon.”

  “Because of the redheaded-step-vampires.”

  “Because of you. When you become your true self not twenty or thirty or forty such creatures will intimidate you. You will be magnificent.”

  He paused. He was tasting me again, through the air. He removed his hand from my chest and my grasp. He took it back into his lap as though to contain it –and himself.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Now hold on…”

  “You are ready.”

  “But I haven’t reached a thousand crunches yet. I’ll be mushy for eternity.”

  “Nonsense. Your abdomen most closely resembles a cheese grater.”

  “You know how to flatter a girl. I can hear the pickup lines now: Is that a kitchen utensil in your pants, or are you just happy to see me? Shred me, baby! Sorry, Don Juan. You’re just not the sharpest cheddar on the block…”

  Miguel laughed at me.

  “The cheddar, naranja, is not what needs to be sharp.”

  He snapped his teeth at me. I dodged. He tackled me on the shag.

  “Miguel…Miguel, dude,” he was breathing through his teeth at me. I knew it was a what-sweet-blood-you-have thing, “So what are we going to do about the two-percent vampires?”

  He thumbed my throat.

  “Don’t call them vampires.”

  “So what are we gonna do about the vaguely vampire-like un-vampires?”

  “Eradicate them.”

  “Do you have any idea how unbearably sexy you just got?”

  “Don’t get used to the feeling.”

  “What vampires have is better, isn’t it?”

  “You will know soon enough.”

  So I would, or I’d be dead.

  We spent the next two hours entangled in it and each other, discussing what we were going to do about two-percent vampires and New Orleans and immortality...and about that damned tattoo on my... Anyway, he felt my heart beating, and I felt his flesh slowly cool to room temperature, and I fell asleep in his arms.

  When I awoke in the afternoon, I found the blood crystal lying in the shag where Miguel had been –I had left it behind when I had undressed for that shower what seemed like days ago. I recalled that expression on his face that I had been so hesitant to label when he had aimed it at me the night before. The emotion behind that expression was one that in my life I had never either given or received. I had been ill-equipped to do so. As the crystal warmed in my hand, I found I had lost my fear of that emotion, lost my fear of calling it by name. If this ageless vampire could feel it for me, maybe even I could one day learn to give it back.

  I spent the afternoon in a guest bathroom, shaving, trimming, and tweaking away anything I wouldn’t be caught dead in and watching the news reports. I’d never really been interested in news before now –any kind of news, but I guess being in it can tickle the narcissist in anyone. New Orleans’ troubles weren’t only local. They were nation-wide. The big news networks had picked up the story about me and Yoki and Tulane. They were already referring to the incident as “Terror at Tulane”, with its obvious harkening to that other incident where people actually did get killed. My face was all over the news too. There was little back story from my time in Detroit –they hadn’t gotten a hold of that yet, but there was plenty about how I’d possibly attempted to kidnap a girl, set a whole college campus a-jumping, and then been broken out of jail by sophisticated people who had cut the power and possibly used an explosive device and kidnapped Detective Frederick Psalter…naked. Only his clothes were found at the scene. I was even shown as one half of a pair of notorious miscreants, my eviler twin being Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. It was an injustice, but I wasn’t about to come out of the woodwork to explain how I had actually probably saved a life.

  In the local news, another story was already attached to my name. The body of Trisha Danes had been discovered floating in a bayou outside of the city. She had been wrapped in black plastic and sunk, but had apparently escaped her watery tomb through bloating and improper weighting. Those Detroit boys could have taught her killer a thing or two about the proper disposal of bodies. That wasn’t all. She had been brutalized –chewed on, and they were likening her manner of death to the Louisiana Werewolf’s MO. Again, my picture was shown. Was Annie Eastwood somehow connected to the Werewolf? Even though I had been in Detroit until two weeks ago –in detention, no less, they were all too eager to draw the conclusion that I was somehow involved. I couldn’t exactly explain that my alibi was a houseful of gay lethal weapons and a dead guy who hated me.

  Mr. Robicheaux, the familiar gray-eyed man who seemed to get hounded by the press more than anyone else about the Werewolf, and who I now learned was the head of the task force, sent down by none other than the FBI to run the Werewolf investigation, was on TV again. In his long-suffering manner, he explained to the press of news people that there was no need to jump to conclusions, and that Annie Eastwood was only being sought for questioning on the matter of Danes’ death. As far as he was concerned, he said, I wasn’t guilty of anything, not until I had been convicted in a court of law. The news people found this tact less than exciting, but I realized that it wasn’t meant for them at all. It was meant for me. The man was holding out hope that I’d be found and be useful to his investigation. Smart man. I wondered how he’d like to know that the Werewolf was actually a pack of vampires that had been infesting the city like fleas.

  Yoki had still not been found, which meant that she was either caught by the bad people or hiding. One was fine, the other really not fine, and I had no way of knowing which was reality.

  Eventually, I lost my taste fo
r news. Imagine.

  I wandered outside to be alone. I had avoided the merry men all that day. I didn’t feel up to their energy. I needed to be alone, to think, to remember. I never saw Andy. He was apparently avoiding me too.

  I sat in the garden outside, something I couldn’t remember having ever done in my whole life, unless you count hanging in the city park and getting into trouble after school. There was something incredibly soothing about a garden, I thought. A cold front was finally moving in, bringing a cool breeze to the grass and trees and to me. Butterflies danced about kissing flowers and sucking out their juices. A mockingbird, the noisiest bird in all creation, tripped around the yard, singing and stabbing things with its long, sharp beak. A huge holly tree dotted with gleaming red berries provided me shade. I pricked my bare feet on its sharp fallen leaves only once.

  Night came on subtly, the change and eventual loss of color in the sky, the loss of radiant heat from the sun, a drop in butterfly activity, the emergence of the hummingbird moths, fat insects that also drink from flowers but do so with a far more mysterious air than their daytime cousins. En masse, they sound like tiny helicopters. Soon, my vampire would be waking to tap his flowers and then come to me.

  I did not realize that I had drifted off to sleep, until I smelled blood.

  I took a sharp breath as I awoke. I started up out of the sedan chair. There’s nothing like the scent of blood near your nose to fire up the fight or flight response.

  I never got my feet on the ground. I was yanked out of the chair by two hands with the grip of steel and slammed onto my back in the grass so hard that the wind was knocked out of me.

  An arm was clamped over my mouth and I was given the instantly familiar ultimatum:

  “Drink.”

  It didn’t feel like a drill; it was terrifying –you think of waking up to that. But the conditioning was there. If anything had been stressed to the point of absurdity during my time with Miguel, it was to drink when I was commanded.

  So I did. I bit my little teeth down into the tough flesh of that arm as deep as I could go, and I sucked. Blood flowed into my mouth, from that flesh that was ever before so devoid of it. The blood was salty and ferrous…and hot. My vampire reeked of blood. It seemed to seep from every pore.