Love in Vein

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Actually, I like to think of myself as a simple little hatcheck girl who maybe lets men follow her home sometimes,” she said without moving away from the door. “So are you coming in, Sherlock, or what?”

  I walked in, the door slamming shut behind me.

  “You’re my first vampire,” she said as she moved closer to me. Her breath smelled like springwater and I could hear my own blood rushing in my ears. “I mean, since the one I brought home who bit me and turned me into this.” She did a little pirouette; I found myself correct in how I thought the view of her fatal ass would be.

  The small talk continued as the light from between the slatted blinds crept across the room. All it really did was make me tired, the way the change to daylight savings time affects so many people. Veda told me her full name, telling me that there was some Norwegian in her blood, though her surviving line was from some country that had Alps in it. She asked me to get out of my clothes as she placed a cassette of Alannah Myles on the stereo.

  We danced, nuzzled, and finally fucked in her back room in an oaken coffin that doubled as an ironing board when darkness came around again.

  In my fevered dreams, Veda was everything I had always wanted, always needed, in a partner. The way she had let me approach her was so brazen it reminded me of my beat copper days at the Halsted Street bars. The casual abandon with which men and women chose their partners.

  Back before there was such a thing as AIDS, which begat complimentary condoms with your drinks at the finer gay establishments, most of the homosexual action occurred around Clark and Kinzie. The gays, lezzies, andpunkers slummed in dives like O’Banion’s and Passport. There were no dark rooms in the back; it was mostly people of the same sex giving each other neck hickeys while teenagers danced to The Culture Club and Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

  I had been approached by many young girls, my youthful appearance garnering me the club detail in the first place, and I had always turned them down. They had shaved their head and pierced their eyelids. Years later, it was new detail, and men in leather who did the same body modifications approached me with similar offers of satisfaction.

  It was then that I had become desensitized, although I am in no way homophobic. But I found pain to be an outlet for my self-gratification. I liked it, the first time experimenting by backing naked into a hot iron while I stroked myself.

  It became my only release, the way I now wanted Veda to be my release. When I woke, she was curled up knees to elbows, and I could see her pubic hair like a thin line of trees between two pale hills. The coffin more than accommodated us.

  I watched her and thought how easy it would be to hurt her, like so many of the lovers I watched in the bars, empty vessels dressed in biker gear or three-piece suits satisfied to watch women wearing latex so that they all looked like the Stepford Wives.

  I couldn’t hurt her, and I couldn’t ask of her to hurt me. I could only imagine it, the way I would imagine mounting her in my bat-form, my small claws embedded in her inner thighs, my tongue snaking far up her into her cunt until she begged for release.

  Shutting it out of my mind when she awoke, stretching like the playful cat she imagined herself to be.

  Veda and I had no formal commitment toward each other, though I became more than just a casual lover for her. I did want more—to me the idea of commitment is about as romantic as a vampire tale can get—but she had her work. Hard work and no prey, huh? No, it wasn’t like that. She did go out with others, although they were all one-night stands, of course. She did like me, but not enough to spend more than one day a week in my arms, one night a week fucking my nuts off. And gone from beside me as soon as the sun went down, all through the summer and autumn.

  It was like that in my human days, when I met a lady cop or a neighbor I liked. No one wanted commitments, but they’d end up dating the guys who would abuse them most. Maybe that’s the only reason the women from my human days even dated me, because they saw some effeminate quality within my clever banter and shoulder shrugs. Maybe they saw the willingness for self-abuse just below my skin level…

  I didn’t think this to be the case with Veda, but being without her was making me crazy. When she was out hunting someone else, I turned again to my deviations.

  “Where did you get these scars?” Veda asked me the twelfth time we spent together. She had not noticed them in the candlelight. Telling me of the week’s kills, every man of which deserved it, she said without derision. Talking about it like it was her regular business conversation, that she worked behind a desk and not from street level, jumping up to claw out the eyes of her men before killing them quickly.

  I watched her one night. I had to, hoping it would excite me more than anything else. She followed someone who had laid some lines on her at Indulgence, then cursed her indifference toward him. Cursed her most graphically, thereby damning himself in the process.

  She took a cab in her human form, following his own Mercedes 450 SL. Tipped the cabbie twenty dollars because he followed the Mercedes all the way to the far north side, Veda then shape-shifted into her feline form, jumped the guy and imbedded her cat fangs in his neck, her claws digging into his ears all the while.

  Not knowing I had watched, she told me all this, all the things he had called her, how it made everything all right by her way of thinking.

  Then feeling my scars when she nuzzled against my skin.

  “How did you get the scars?” she asked again.

  I silently cursed myself for the way I made everything all right. By my way of thinking.

  I had broken into Alexis Snavely’s Medicinal Emporium, a place the cops were always one step short of busting, at the corner of Wabansia and Damen. Stole myself a collagen derivative that the Reverend, as he liked to call himself, had created under the auspices of some medical practicioner’s license he had procured along with a notary public’s license in Richmond, Virginia.

  It was an absorbable hemostat, and I knew how to use it in all the wrong ways. I also brought several other items back with me to the house on Willard Court.

  I spent one evening slicing away with a straight razor. Not hesitation marks; these were down to the bone. Of course, there was little blood. I had not pierced my heart.

  I even strophed the blade against my inner forearm, causing wet tears of blood, like bad shaving nicks along a jawline.

  Satisfied, I injected the collagen, before the accelerated nature of my body could allow the skin to close. The technique caused fault lines—technically, wound dehiscence—just beneath skin level that caused the skin to scar ever so slightly.

  I hadn’t expected the scars to be there three nights later when I saw Veda.

  I felt that honesty in our relationship was important, and I wanted badly to tell Veda what I had done to myself. I tried leading into it by talking about the low-level thugs she encountered at Indulgence, the difficulties I had in not being around her every night.

  And while I was trying to answer, Veda took it perhaps to mean something else. She went into the kitchen area to fix herself a drink. There was dead silence in the rooms.

  Too late, I remembered the strychnine that Snavely kept stored in bottles of white zinfandel.

  I hadn’t thought about the strychnine when Veda came back into the room, passing a wall mirror. I watched the dimples in her butt as she bent to sit cross-legged in front of me.

  “Well?” she cocked her head. I tried to look sheepish.

  I told her that I had tried experimenting morphing into a new form, that I was tired of perching on rooftops. I said that I had misjudged the size of the beast I had become and got caught in an electrified fence.

  Veda had started to sip at the glass, threw her head back in laughter, swallowing the drink whole. The stuff foamed out of her nose and we both started laughing. Then she made a high, keening sound. After the foam stopped, we both stared down at bone cartilage on the wooden floor.

  Veda fell over, her spine arching in constriction, and I knew
what had happened. I could do nothing at all. She could not talk, but her eyes told me that there was only surprise, no distrust or denial in her gaze toward me.

  She was only an innocent tease, one who knew nothing about being physically hurt. All she had ever been dealt before was verbal insults. God forgive me.

  I knew she wanted to morph into a cat, but was unable. Her hands were claws when she reached for my embrace. She fought it for full minutes before the blood came. It trickled from her nose and the corners of her eyes, like a weepy girl beneath red neon. The floor felt sticky beneath me then, and I looked down. Thick blood was pouring from Veda’s cunt and rectum, her once-downy pubes looking like a dirty burr that had adhered to her crotch.

  I know that there was talk between us but it’s gone from my mind at this time. She coughed up great gouts of crimson before dying in my arms without ever knowing that it was I who had killed her.

  Veda Daanse died the way she did because she was a vampire.

  A human could not have survived the initial effects of the strychnine poisoning. The next level is something called DIC.

  Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation, it says in the book I brought back with me from Snavely’s. All plasma has this protein that will interact with calcium and cause a rejection of convulsions. Veda experienced massive DIC in her small blood vessels, and she was killed by hemorrhagic tissue necrosis.

  The book also mentioned puncture sites of invasive procedures. I thought of my collagen injections.

  And I also thought of my own depraved way to end my existence once and forever.

  I am hanging upside down from the Casablanca-style ceiling fan, long dormant and dusty. There is an enema bag shoved up my rectum and I am seconds away from shooting my asshole full of strychnine. The most vulnerable organ is the anus, and anuric renal failure would allow it to work through my system faster. I can finish up these last few lines, toss the notebook in the corner with the medical manual and the other crap.

  Veda’s remains are below me. Her crotch and nipples are the color of gangrene. I loved her so.

  I will start the fan revolving slowly as I let the screw on the enema bag loose. My blood should burst through every single wound I made that was affected by the collagen. That’s about seventy punctures in all, not counting the eyes and mouth, my ass and dick. I’ll be a fountain of blood, fuck the romanticism of it all.

  I wonder when the cops will find us? Veda’s employers will never report her missing; that kind of thing doesn’t happen. Maybe drug dealers will come across us. Think it was a satanic thing.

  I made sure I was hanging loosely, though. I want to have the strength to fall when I know the end is truly here, that I might fall down into Veda’s dead arms, allowing our bodies to explode in one final embrace of gas and pus and blood.

  A tale of two pathetic vampires who had great sex together, one who knew too much about the world, the other who knew too little.

  All those who feel any kind of pity out of all of this are from hunger themselves.

  * * *

  A Slow Red Whisper of Sand

  by Robert Devereaux

  When you realize that what love is all about is heartbreak, you’re all right. But if you think it’s about fulfillment, happiness, satisfaction, union, all of that stuff, you’re in for even more heartbreak.…

  Romantic love keeps the world dead.

  —James Hillman

  Young willing pussy stuck on beautiful slinky moist-crotched bodies, tan, lithe, lubricious if superficial to a fault—that’s what had drawn him to L.A. They were no-brainers all, into the new kink if given half a shove and enough nose candy to blame their natural prurience on. A set of cuffs, a fashionable ceiling bolt, a butt plug set to placehold for his cock, and the laying on of lashes at breasts and buttocks sufficiently rough to recall fathers trying to whip sense into them—these made them happy and tenderized them for the unexpected descent and feeding of himself and his wives. Drain the life out of them, watch tans blanch, hear screams dwindle to swoons as they swung limp and bloodless from their manacles: all prelude to a suck-and-blow multifucked frenzy with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.

  That’s why he was caught short at the first sight of Esme. He’d just scoped out the hopeful couchbait, a fast eyeflick over the crowd, and was in the process of taking in the cheesy paper lanterns and cheesier Hawaiian piped-in music—enjoying actually the fake longings it miasma’d over the beautiful people—when his eyes slanted downward and fixed on undying love. She strode easily, her simple dress swaying with unaffected rhythms, an intoxication of blood and bone beneath. Made him hesitate. Him, who had lived long ages and had long ago learned smooth means for attaining any desire. Her walk exuded confidence born of contentment. She floated, he could tell, above the petty needs of the empty smilers she threaded through, past the refreshment tables, along the pool, embracing their beefy host like family—Ah, she was!—and moving on.

  This raven-haired beauty, black fall breaking at her shoulders, had stuff and substance. Rare integrity shone from her eyes, a commodity lacking mostwheres he went but especially here, where dreams or drugs guided the will-less through lives bereft of all but surface meaning. She saw him, glanced aside, was approaching a pocket of isolation concaved between two chattering drink-holding groups, one of which would quite soon, surely, notice her and open up to draw her in.

  He began his approach.

  Her brother’d latched on to show business, nothing in the world reaching out and grabbing him in particular, so settling for a sinecure with Dad at the studio. But Esme had always been deep in books, found odd friends, cast an eye of bemused puzzlement on the sun-liquid dealings, the impressionless series of prettymates her father routinely passed through the house—in one day, out the next—to be replaced by another passing show. Back from Denver for a few days, say hello, remind herself of what she didn’t in the least miss. Breezing through the party seemed a bare sacrifice, no skin broken; but it pleased her father, for who knew what reason, immensely. She didn’t even have to stay for long. Pop in, pop out, like one of Dad’s slinky bedmates. But superficial obviously pleased him, and she knew that their relationship—from his looks, his drawing her aside at surprising moments to confide this or that—went much deeper than most; so she gave him this one tiny thing of surface whenever she stopped home, knowing it in some small measure pleased him, provided a conversational stopgap for the streams of nodding ghosts going by, Proud Daddy a role he loved to play, a role Esme loved watching him play.

  She slowed toward the diving board, chubby Ed Partch with his flab-arms angled out of a Hawaiian shirt to hold a fistful of drink and with his mouth flapping to delight (as he seemed to hope) the underlings he spoke to. About to backtravel to avoid him, she sensed movement at a pool angle. Advancing in a familiar way, and yet not quite so taggable as that, was the dark loner she’d glanced at. A weird mix to him. Belonged and didn’t. Thirties was her offhand guess. Not an actor, but handsome and intriguing enough to be one. In the business, but not of it. Blood hunger rode in his eyes—a lawyer, Esme supposed. Let him do his damnedest to seduce her, his intent obvious from a series of fumbled and skilled but rarely successful tries from either sex to bed her over the years; she’d wear him down until he wised up and fixed on other prey.

  Not quite a smile there, not blank. When would this deep odd man deliver his line? Still he came on, totally an easy assault, more an envelopment, an assurance, words needless not tainting the air. Then he was beside her, a hand touching hers. She took it, a smooth warm grip from him and from her in response. “I’m not sure I—”

  “Your name?” Soft velvet voice, a faint aroma which hinted vaguely of frankincense. An impression of ancient knowing came to her, impossible, surely, in this muscular young man.

  “Esme.” Her voice blushed in falter.

  “Esme,” he said, both a repeating and the opening of a new question. “It’s time. Are you ready?”

  Ready to leave the party, re
ady to go with him where he said, ready to climax at the slightest touch, ready to abandon completely her life in Denver—all of that was in his question, this man whose name she didn’t yet know but who made her feel so good just by looking at her, and her answer, absurd but true, was yes. “I’m ready,” she said, and she followed his strong dark form knifing through the crowd, windblown streamers of chat falling away to either side as they went. In the car, his car, no memory of her entry there, his hand rode up under her dress, fingers at her bikinis, beneath the lace, moistening up and down her labia, deepening, dipping in, swirling at her clit, touch at flashpoint sizzling up an orgasm, moaning unbelievably into his mouth— and by the time her body reconstituted, a smooth fast road was zooming beneath them, she was belted in, he drove dark and shadowed within caressing distance, and Esme had never felt more blessedly safe and secure in all her life.

  Brad resented Esme. She had an in with Dad, clearly his preferred child, and this despite the fact that Esme, long gone to Denver, only dropped in once or twice a year and barely showed herself even then. More than that, she had no trouble in the love department, sleek breasty lure with that long straight shiny black hair of hers. Always the guys were hitting on her, just like in high school, a look, a snag, bingo, they were wrapped tight as pigs in a blanket about her finger. Sure, he had the beginnings of a paunch (but only when he bent at the waist), and yes, a surly god had given him a bunchy sort of face; but he had lots to offer the right girl—correction, the right girls—and he was tired of watching turned-off bimbos suddenly turn on at hearing who his father was, cash registers hot and flashing in their eyes. He’d fucked ‘em. Got off as they acted their way toward pretend orgasms. Christ, who wouldn’t? But it was like humping tinsel. Just a little bit hotter than porn flicks, but no less impersonal.