Diary of an Alligator Queen

by Winter Reid

  Funny. We’d both known Meidias first in a dream state, but our experiences with him couldn’t have been more different. To her, he would always be something comforting. To me, something complicated.

  “He spoke to me,” she said. “Whispered things.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, but I think… I think he was asking me to live.”

  The waitress brought out our quesadillas and tacos, sliding the plates along the table and dropping off a second jar of salsa. Lacey didn’t look at the food.

  “Do you think I could see him again?” she asked. “I’d like to thank him for helping me.”

  “I don’t know where he is.” I tried, but I couldn’t keep the hurt out of my voice.

  “Is that his fault or yours, honey?”

  “Honestly? I think maybe it was our fault.”

  She thought about that for a minute. “Nadine, I don’t know what it is you’re going through. Billy says I ought not to pry—”

  “Smart guy.”

  “—but I know you. Girl, I know you. And I’ve never ever seen you as happy as you were when you were with him. I mean, you looked pale and nauseated, but happy.”

  I shuffled around in my seat. “Lacey, sometimes happy isn’t the only thing to consider.

  Scoffing, she leaned forward. “Baby, happy is the only thing to consider. Everything else will work itself out.”

  “Says who?”

  She smiled and leaned back in her chair, popping a tortilla chip in her mouth. “Says me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “You’re looking a little rough, kid.”

  Renfield had his doctor face on, his brown eyes mildly concerned. We sat side by side on a park bench in Bowie Park. There were no stars out in the city, only artificial lights and their reflections bounced and danced on the surface of the pond in front of us: street lights, building lights, headlights, traffic lights.

  “I’m feeling a little rough. My so-called friends keep telling me how bad I look, and all this waiting to die is tedious.”

  “Your angst is tedious.”

  “Fuck you, too, buddy.”

  “Have you decided what to do?”

  “There was never a decision.”

  “You’re the only one who thinks that.”

  “You mean out of the three of us who actually know what’s happening to me, right? Because I suspect the population at large might have a different opinion. Do you even realize what you’re suggesting?”

  “That you live your life?”

  “By killing people?”

  “Possibly, but Meidias doesn’t.”

  “No, but Meidias has three thousand years of experience and he still fucked up.”

  “Are we talking about what he did to you? You still think what happened to you was an accident?”

  “You know it was. I told you everything.”

  “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “You mean fate?” I snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re a believer, Doc.”

  “No, not exactly.” He rested his ankle on the opposite knee and leaned back, looking out at the pond. “I just mean… you’re still looking at this situation as something horrible that happened to you instead of the beginning of a whole new way of being. You’re a member of an incredibly exclusive club, my dear.”

  I gaped at him.

  “Being a non-believer, I’ve always felt that this…” he said, waving his hands around and gesturing to the city, the sky, “… is it. That whatever comes after this, if anything, is likely not something we experience in the same state of consciousness. That the I-ness that is I will dissipate into the us-ness that is the energy of the universe. You, my darling, have the unique opportunity to experience an alternate state of being while maintaining, at least in part, the you-ness that is you. While I understand your hesitation, how dare you look the universe in the mouth and reject such a gift.”

  “Remy, the last thing the world needs is another fucking vampire story. I know your experience with actual vampires is limited to Meidias but as a general rule they’re not beautiful, tormented gentlemen. They’re not gods. They don’t harbor any secret, consuming desire to retain their humanity, and they certainly aren’t waiting for the right teenage girl to come along and save them. They are dirty, rank, violent, and alive. And when they’re hungry, they see us all as meat.”

  “You don’t have any faith that Meidias will steer or protect you?”

  “That’s a hell of a fucking gamble. And what if he doesn’t?”

  “It seems worth the risk to me.”

  I smiled at his profile. “Oh, yeah? Want to change places?”

  “I’m too old for that. I’ve already resigned myself to oblivion. In fact, I welcome it. There is peace, I think, in simply ceasing to be.”

  “You get awful poetic in the evening, Renfield.”

  “What’s more, you get to make this change with someone who has not only made the same change already, but who loves you intensely. Someone eternally bound to you by both guilt and affection.”

  “Right. Someone so very bound to me that I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You broke his heart.”

  I put my hand in my pocket, touching Jack’s photograph. I’d taken to carrying it with me. There was so much I should have been doing. So many ‘lasts’ I wanted to take care of, but couldn’t. Instead, I studied the side of his Remy’s face. “Where is he?”

  Renfield’s mouth was a tight line. I reached over and took his hand,

  “I know,” I started and my breath caught. “I know he’s not at the caves or at Evelyn and Jack’s.”

  He put his hand over mine, smoothing his fingers over the knuckles. “You can’t force him to watch you do this, Nadine. Any more than he can force you not to do it. Free will is a marvelous and lonely thing.”

  I tipped my head back, trying to stop the tears before they fell. “I miss him.”

  “Then choose him,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said, pulling my hands out of his and rising to walking away.

  “Alligator Queen,” he called.

  Stopping, I looked back at him, his face was gentle.

  “What do you love about life today?” he asked.

  The side of my mouth curled up. “Not knowing what comes after.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I opened the door and Meidias was standing there. He looked me up and down and reached out, taking my dress between his fingers. It was the dress. The one that brought me to him.

  I smiled but it wasn’t happy. “I never got to wear it.”

  He nodded.

  “Stay with me?” I asked. “Just until it’s time.”

  “Do you want to go out? Get one more?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

  He smiled, pulling me closer. “Why is that? Do you think?”

  There were only a few stars left, and a pink line crept along the horizon where the sun would come. I hadn’t seen the sun in weeks. Not since my sleeping pattern finished flipping, and I crashed like the dead from sunrise to sunset. I spread my shawl down on top of the tar paper roof, looking out toward the river and sat with the shed to my back, hiding me from the view of skyscraper windows.

  The wind in my hair was cold and I shivered, so scared and lonely it stole my breath. I wrapped my arms around my legs to keep from leaping to my feet and flying back down the stairs.

  The door to the roof opened and closed, the action so gentle I would not have heard it was I not becoming what I was. I froze, listening to the soft crush of the tar beneath his feet. I could smell him—always the woods. Meidias stepped around the corner and my heart seized.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he answered.

  “I’m not leaving,” I said.

  “I know that.” He looked out over the river
. “Can I sit with you?”

  I nodded and he sat down beside me, pulling me across his lap.

  Dawn’s pink light spread, seeping up into the night like a watercolor wash.

  “There’s not a lot of time left,” I said.

  “Oh?” He put his hand on my back, drawing circles with his fingers.

  The sun touched the horizon, rising slowly over it, casting the river gold.

  “It’s fucking freezing out here,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I whispered, watching the line of light that crept across the city.

  “What would I do after you?” he asked.

  The sweet, yeasty smell of fresh donuts from the shop on the corner came to us on the breeze. Someone’s car alarm went off down the street. It was a perfectly ordinary morning.

  “What if someone finds us?” I asked. “All fangs and vampire blood.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  I put my arms around his neck. “What happens next?”

  He kissed my forehead, working his way down over my cheeks to my mouth. “I’m the last man in the world who can answer that question,” he whispered against my lips.

  We were quiet for a minute and then he laughed.

  “You got to kill me after all,” he said.

  I smiled. “Betcha didn’t see that coming.”

  I put my face in against his neck so I couldn’t see. His arm came around to lock me there.

  “I love you, too,” I said, and the sun touched us.

  Epilogue

  So, the truth, anticlimactic as it is, is that I couldn’t do it. I don’t mean that I got cold feet about killing myself. I mean that the sun hit us and nothing happened. Oh, don’t get me wrong. After about forty minutes, I looked like I’d spent two weeks naked at the equator, but I didn’t burst into flames or turn to dust. Maybe it would have happened eventually, but there is a marked difference between jumping into the fire and gently sautéing yourself to death.

  Why did the tanning bed turn me into a starlight mint when the actual sun couldn’t kill me? I can’t really say. Maybe it was the concentration of light or the spectrum I was exposed to. Perhaps noon would have been more effective than sunrise.

  Meidias—who claims he had no idea nothing would happen, and whom I believe on that maybe forty percent of the time—did even better, turning the deep, delicious brown that pageant princesses dream of. It just goes to show you can’t trust vampire lore, because by all rights he, being the elder vamp, should have gone up like TP in a warehouse fire. I remember several days of him considerately peeling sheets of skin off my back while I raged at him for being liar and a cheat. I remember the way the morning sun felt on my face.

  After that, things get murky. I get bits and flashes from time to time, fleeting memories of pain and blinding need. Things I did that I can’t explore too deeply. Things I’m not sure I want to remember.

  Meidias says the truth of that time wasn’t as bad as I like to think it was, and that my coming back to myself didn’t take as long as it might have, and maybe he’s right. Maybe it was because he was so old when he made me. Maybe it was because of Remy, a nearly constant presence in those early years.

  He and Meidias became the closest friends, brought together by a joint mission to see me through the darkness. Bound together by a love of philosophy and history. Eventually, Meidias even offered to change him. Of course Remy refused. He wouldn’t give up the scant possibility of seeing Patrick again for something as insignificant as immortality. I remember him at the end, in mostly images and impressions—his tissue paper skin, his trembling hands smoothing hair off my face.

  “My Alligator Queen,” he’d whispered, and given me his diary, a collection of musings on our condition written through the course of a forty-year friendship. In it, he’d transcribed all the reasons I’d given him for loving life. Which they’d apparently made me continue to do throughout my transition.

  When I first returned to myself, I did consider attempting suicide again, but pulling a trigger is a far cry from taking a sunbath. And then there was Meidias to consider.

  So now I am a traitor to both of my races; to the vampires, whom I have slaughtered, and to the humans, whom I have murdered as well. We have confined our meals to animals and the occasional sick or malevolent human. That said, have you ever eaten beef from an old steer? There’s a reason people raise veal.

  Before you reach for the stakes (if you still think they’d help), I’ve never fed off a child, but it does bring up an interesting moral dilemma. Are we justified in taking human lives because they are bad or sick or dying? Are they any less human? Horton teaches us that personhood applies to even the smallest individuals. Does it matter if the smallness is in size or in spirit?

  Meidias sees everything in a different light. He sees all the beauty in the world as a gift. Even the exchange of blood that gives us life. And sometimes, sitting beside him and watching rare snowflakes fall through the shafts of moonlight that slip into our cave, I think he’s right. Because he is a gift to me; one I never would have dreamed for myself.

  One night we walked home together in the waning hours before dawn, meandering along the trails of our park. It had stayed largely the same, in spite of the growth of the surrounding city. I held his hand and watched the ground, listening to him describe a recently retrieved memory of his early life. Remy’s curiosity about the origins of our species had rekindled Meidias’s interest in his own origin story. Based on the sketches of buildings and gods he’d done in several hunger-induced fugue states, they’d decided he was likely from Mesopotamia.

  I hadn’t realized where he was leading me until he stopped and turned to face me.

  “We’re here,” he whispered, the corners of his mouth curved up in a gentle smile.

  I looked around, confused until I saw it. There wasn’t much left of the oak tree, the root ball covered over with composted leaves and moss until it was only a soft mound with sapling growing out of the top. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had closed our path years before, after a flood washed out the west footbridge for the fourth time. The kudzu vines were still there, covering the mouth of the hole where our story had begun. I looked closer and saw that leaves had been piled in front of it, mounded up to hide the scrape of dark dirt where years of debris had been cleaned out from inside.

  He was watching me, pupils dilated in the darkness.

  “Take your clothes off, Nadine.”

  I smiled, obediently stripping until I was completely naked, tucking my shirt, shoes, and pants behind a nearby log. The winter air was cold, but cold was no longer uncomfortable. I took a deep breath, exhaling steam that curled up, haloing my hair and disappearing into the bare branches overhead.

  Meidias said nothing, a small muscle twitching in his jaw.

  “Your turn,” I said, and my voice was hoarse.

  He shrugged out of his coat, peeling off his shirt and pants, kicking off his boots.

  I laughed, and he tossed all of it carelessly behind another mound of leaves, closing the space between us in the next heartbeat. He grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the entrance of our hole, where he brushed a kiss across my knuckles before pulling the vines aside and dropping inside, helping me in after him.

  He didn’t speak, but pressed me back against the soil, wrapping my legs around his hips, entering me on a growl. I reached out to brace myself, digging my hands into the dirt while he rocked into me. It smelled the same as it had the first time. I looked up, the moon peeking in shyly around the kudzu. I watched her as he moved inside me, my exhaled breath forming a cloudy ring around her face, growing thicker as my panting quickened. I came, sending up a broken cry. He took my face in his hands, bringing my gaze to his. In it was everything: hunger, gratitude, passion, regret, and love. Love most of all.

  A Note from Winter

  Thank you so much for reading Diary of an Alligator Queen. I’ve been carrying Nadine and Meidias in my heart for the last ei
ght years and I’m beyond thrilled to finally share them with the world. If you enjoyed the book—or didn’t—please consider leaving a review and joining my mailing list.

  Other Works by Winter

  The Stars that Keep Us

  Circus: A Halloween Novella

  Acknowledgments

  Goo- “Always for you.”

  Rowan- You goddess of Vellum, thank you for holding my hand way more than anyone should have to. And for my wallpaper. Sah-woon!

  Beth- See you in Florida. XOXO.

  D & V- I love you both. Thank you.

  About the Author

  Winter began writing ten years ago after a dream about a chance encounter in a stable became a novel about two young people falling in love in the Roaring Twenties. After all this time, there is nothing she likes better than a good romance.

  She lives in a hot, swampy part of the New South.

  Visit her on her website, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

  www.winterreid.com

  http://www.instagram.com/winterreidbooks/