Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  “Mostly theirs,” I lied, seeing how it was all theirs. Hugo (or Hector, whatever) nodded and gave me the thumbs up.

  “Muy peleonera,” he grinned. I had to ask him what that meant, which made the guys playing dominoes chuckle again. They laughed a lot, the guys who played dominoes on the sidewalk outside my apartment.

  “Don’t you worry,” he said. “Means you did good.”

  Insert ironic laughter here.

  Cut to me stepping into the apartment. It was stifling, the air stale and warm as any other summer night because Mr. B didn’t spring for a window unit. Only, it had never seemed quite as stale and stifling as it did that night. Thank you, werevamp super-senses. And there was the smell. Sure, my housekeeping skills were nonexistent. Still are. But the mess in the kitchen sink, and the mold running rampant in the bathroom, and the fast-food bags strewn around the place had never stunk even half as bad as they did that night. I may have actually gagged. Look at me, all creature of the night and shit, ready to spew at the smell of a filthy apartment. But like I said, the stink was LOUD. I mean, you’d think some kind soul had left a dead elephant to rot in that dump. I took a few steps across the mustard-yellow shag and could hear the bodies of roaches—some dead, some not—crunching LOUD in the home they’d made between the carpet and the floorboards. I could still hear every word the guys on the sidewalk were saying, and the Mexpop was starting to make my head ring. I went straight to the bathroom—and I’ll spare you further details of that parfum, except to say the gagging got worse before it got better. Last thing I wanted to do was vomit the belly full of blood, because, for all I knew, that meant I’d have to hit the streets again before sunup. Anyway, I found enough cotton (scavenged from an aspirin bottle and Q-tips) to stuff into my nose and ears, and that helped just a little. Okay, hardly at all, but give the girl an E for Effort, right?

  I stalked around the place with a Hefty garbage bag (I found a box of them beneath the kitchen sink, though I have no memory of ever having bought such things), tossing everything into it that I could stand to touch and cursing my slovenly ways. Fuck you, Siobhan. Fuck you, too, Mr. Month-Old Mystery Thing from Taco Bell. Fuck you, Miss Ashtray I’d Not Emptied All Summer. Let my vengeance rain down upon thee. By the time the sky was growing light, I’d made a few craters in the clutter, but I’d also come to appreciate the futility of my efforts. Might as well have been trying to tidy up a landfill.

  I couldn’t take the reek any longer, so I went outside and sat on the steps and smoked as the streetlights winked out. The domino boys were gone and had taken the card table with them. I sat and stared at the used car lot across the street. A sign promised me the best deals in town. I wondered what had happened to my own car after the encounter with the werewolf and the china doll who wasn’t Mercy Brown. Maybe it was still parked out by the reservoir. Maybe she’d pushed it into the water. You know, to cover her tracks, hide the evidence, whatever. Any bitch strong enough to take out a bull loup that size, she’d have no trouble rolling my beat-to-hell-and-back ’99 Honda Accord into the Scituate Reservoir. Sure, my Honda wasn’t as spiffy as the great deals to be had just across the street, lined-up safe behind chain link and razor wire, but it usually ran and was all I had. It tended to get me where I needed to go. Most times.

  Must have been about six or seven ayem when I smoked my last cigarette, got bored, and decided to take a stroll down the street, to the shade below the cavernous I-195 overpass. It’s not at all like most highway overpasses. It’s more like, I don’t know—like someone had to build an overpass when they actually wanted to design a Gothic cathedral. It’s like that. Sort of. Oh, by the by, that crap you hear about vampires bursting into flame if they’re caught out in the daylight? Utter nonsense. Just a lot of twaddle concocted sometime around 1922 by a German director named F. W. Murnau when he made Nosferatu, a loose adaptation of Dracula (which promptly got him sued by Bram Stoker’s widow for copyright infringement; she won). You may recall, Stoker’s count doesn’t have too much trouble with the sun. And, take it from me, vampires sure as hell don’t sparkle . . . or glitter . . . or twinkle, no matter what that silly Mormon twit may have written, no matter how many books she’s sold, and no matter how many celibate high school girls have signed themselves up for Team Edward. Worst it ever gets, I might feel a prickle on the back of my neck round about noon. Oh, and naturally it’s best to feed after dark, but mostly that’s so you’re less likely to be spotted. Common fucking sense. But that’s it. No fiery conflagrations, and no fucking glitter.

  It’s not far, the walk from my apartment to the overpass, but far enough that along the way I had time to think about how I could have at least changed my clothes and maybe washed my hair. I suppose I’d been too distracted, what with all the retching and cleaning and retching and all. The stains had made the fabric stiff and had gone sort of the color of raisins. My dinners would get a little less messy later on, but that morning in August I was still too entirely stupefied by the curveball the universe had thrown my way to worry overly about hygiene. I just hoped no one noticed, like Hector (or Hugo or et al.), and walked faster. But not too fast, because I was feeling paranoid and thought maybe walking too fast might attract as much attention as the bloodstains. And the two together, doubt anything short of dragging a dead body behind me would be more conspicuous and likely to get me noticed, right?

  It’s actually pretty nice there under the interstate on hot summer days. You can sit on a plastic milk crate, say, or a cardboard box someone’s mashed flat and spread out across a patch of gravel. The traffic roars and rattles by fifty feet or so overhead, but the roadway and those immense support arches of concrete and steel absorb and muffle the worst of the racket. Even after I got smacked with the double whammy of the loup and Mercy, after my senses went all cacophonous on me, it was peaceful enough. And sometimes there were other people to talk to, maybe a homeless woman or a couple of boys with their skateboards headed for the park at India Point. And, of course, Aloysius. He’s a troll. Yes, I mean the sort that lives under bridges (and in culverts and beneath railroad trestles), just like you might have read about as a kid in the “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

  Of course, Aloysius isn’t his real name. Trolls are fairies, after all, and fairies ain’t so free with their true names. Same as demons, they let that intel get out and they’re screwed. You know a troll’s name, he’s your servant for life. Though, it’s a risky business, binding a troll, and it rarely ends well for the one doing the binding. It occurred to me that morning, standing below the interstate and calling out for Aloysius, that an awful lot of folks (or what have you) were dumping pseudonyms on me. Even Bobby fucking Ng, I knew that wasn’t his real name. Sure, with Aloysius, he had his reasons, but not so with “Mercy,” Mr. B, and Bobby Ng. I considered chalking it all up to the sheer and perverse joy some assholes take in fucking with your head. Or maybe they were all too crazy to know better. From what I’d seen, Mercy Brown was certainly minus a fair share of her marbles. So maybe she and (this week) “Barlow” both had a bee buzzing in their bonnets, and maybe both had gotten the notion their true names were as dangerous . . . shit, wait, where was I?

  Oh yeah, Aloysius.

  I shouted for him, just like always, and, just like always, the brute came shambling out of the shadows. The special shadows that hadn’t been there a few seconds before, and that went away again as soon as he’d appeared (oh, another myth: trolls don’t turn to stone in the sun, but I don’t know who made that one up). Aloysius, he spoke with this rolling brogue might have been Scots or Irish, possibly Welsh. Never bothered asking him, but figured maybe he’d immigrated to the States back in the 1800s when so many Irish came over. He was a good nine feet tall, with these long ears like those lop rabbits have. They sort of dragged along on the ground, his ears, and each one had so many piercings I never bothered trying to count them. Some held loops of bronze and copper, others elaborately carved wooden rings, and still others were threaded through with bones. Did
n’t take a professor of anatomy or anthropology to recognize most of those bones were human. Aloysius was a troll, and trolls eat people (and pigeons and rats and stray cats, pretty much anything else too slow to get away), simple as that. But, to his credit, he never tried to eat me. Oh, also, none of his piercings were steel, because that’s another tale apparently gets it right. Fairies can’t bear the touch of iron. Not even a little bitty bit. No idea why, but there you go.

  Back then, Aloysius, he possibly was about as close as I came to having an actual friend-type friend. Someone I could talk to and whatnot. I brought him porn mags, 3 Musketeers bars, and pint bottles of Jacquin’s ginger-flavored brandy (all of it shoplifted). And sometimes he paid me in peculiar gold coins that always turned into stones or bottle caps by the time I got home. But hey, nothing lost, nothing gained. It’s not like I’d paid for the stuff.

  That morning, he got a good look at me and cocked one warty eyebrow. I’d never seen him look so surprised. In fact, I’d never seen him look surprised at all, and it took me a moment to realize that was the expression on his face. Surprise. Aloysius wrinkled his nose, obviously disgusted, like he could smell my apartment from two blocks away, and he took a step backwards. The special shadows reappeared behind him.

  “What?” I asked, like I didn’t already know.

  He narrowed his orange eyes and glared at me.

  “You’re not you no more, Quinn girl, that’s what,” he snarled. “They been at you, ain’t they?” And he pointed a four-jointed index finger at me, scratching at the air with a thick brown nail.

  “Yeah, but . . . I’m still me.”

  “No, you’re not,” he declared. “You’re what they made you. You’re dead. You smell like death, the sort what don’t know to lay down and be dead, ’cause they been at you.”

  Ever had a best friend stare at you like you’d just become a steaming heap of horse shit?

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said, even though that wasn’t precisely true. But near as I knew, trolls didn’t have magical lie-detecting abilities. Aloysius flared his wide, hairy nostrils again, snuffled, and looked about as revolted as I imagine a troll can look. Which is kind of ironic when you think about it, given trolls themselves are hardly easy on the eyes.

  “You ain’t only dead,” he said despairingly. “You’re gone dead and wolfish. You’re twofold balled, you are, Quinn girl. Me, I can’t even conjecture how that’s practicable and likely.”

  “It’s complicated,” I replied, hardly speaking above a whisper. “Well, not so much complicated as . . .” and then I stammered something incoherent and trailed off.

  Aloysius gritted his massive eyeteeth, sat down with a thud that raised a cloud of dust and grit, and buried his face in one huge hand. Those special shadows behind him evaporated again.

  “They done plugged you,” he moaned through his fingers. “Told you they would, now didn’t I? Didn’t I say ‘Quinn girl, you go tumbling to that bastard B’s angles and contrivances, sooner or later, you’ll get plugged good and proper’? I told you that, eh, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did,” I admitted, wondering if trolls could eat people who were half vampire–half werewolf. “Sure, that’s what you said, time and time again.”

  A couple of fingers parted, and he peered out at me from the space between them. His eyes were glowing. “This is fair awful,” he said. “This is worse than awful. This is . . . odious. An odious crime, what this is.”

  I waved my hands about, coughing and trying to clear some of the dust from the air. Mostly, though, I just managed to stir it around. Also, I wondered why I was coughing, when I wasn’t breathing.

  “Jesus, Aloysius, you think I don’t know that?” I said, wondering exactly what he meant by crime, if he meant the same thing the Bride and Mr. B had meant. “You think I need you to tell me it’s awful?”

  “And you were such a fine lass and all.”

  “I most certainly was not!” I all but shouted at him. Guess that takes some cojones, as Hugo (or Hector) might say, shouting at a bridge troll. “I was a goddamn junky so deluded I thought I could run around slaying nasties, that’s what I was. Strung out and suicidally foolish, and I don’t see how that makes a ‘fine lass’!”

  “No cause to yell,” he said indignantly, still peering through his fingers.

  “The hell it ain’t. I came down here needing somebody to talk to about this mess, not to have you getting all up in my face with what I already know full well. Not to have you tell me how I brought it on myself.”

  “I sure enough didn’t mean it like that.”

  I swatted at the dusty air again. “Well, that’s sure enough the way it sounded.”

  “You bring me a pint?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

  “No, Aloysius. I didn’t bring you a pint. I’ve been sort of fucking preoccupied.”

  “Killed anyone yet?” he asked, lowering his hand and pointing at my bloodstained clothes, now also coated with a fine layer of dust.

  “No, I cut myself shaving.”

  “No cause to be sarcastic,” he muttered.

  I wanted to ask him how many human beings he’d snacked on in the last few months, but I didn’t. Wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere, but I wasn’t about to have a troll get all high-and-mighty on me for eating anyone or anything.

  “Just one,” I said instead.

  “No one whose sudden adjournment gonna be noticed, I hope. No one with pals what might get—”

  “Shut up,” I snapped, and he did. I’d already answered that question for Mr. B, and I didn’t see the need to answer it again. I was not yet so keen on the idea that killing people and sucking them dry was okay, just so long as it was some pathetic soul who’d sunk so far down the social ladder no one was likely to miss them. And even if their disappearance was reported to the cops, what the fuck would they care. Just one more scrap of street trash the Providence PD wouldn’t have to worry about. A drunk, a bum, a vet who’d been cold shouldered to the gutter by the VA, a runaway teen, a whore, a schizo off his or her meds, and who gives a shit. Or a junky living from score to score, fix to fix, just like I’d been before Mr. B showed up. Just like Lily had been.

  Sure, I’m a blood-drinking freak and a loup, but I only prey on the dregs of society, so I’m really just doing a public service, right? Bullshit. I called it bullshit then, and, two years later, I still call it bullshit, that attitude or mind-set or whatever it is. That belief that great swaths of humanity are disposable, just so long as no one gets wise to the fact they’re being disposed of. We’ll come back to this.

  “Gotta learn to clean up after yourself,” he said, and poked at my T-shirt. “Ain’t nobody gonna buy that’s from a nosebleed.”

  I turned away from Aloysius and rattled off my entire repertoire of profanities. Which is saying something. The troll waited until I was done, and then he poked me in the back almost hard enough to knock me over. Sure, I know he hadn’t meant to poke me that hard, but I wasn’t much in the mood to cut him any slack.

  “Stop that!” I barked, whirling on him. I think if I’d had a pool cue or a lead pipe or anything else handy, I’d have smacked him upside his craggy, pockmarked face.

  “Stop what?” he asked. And never had a troll sounded so goddamn innocent.

  “Stop shoving me around, that’s what.”

  “Weren’t my intent.” He was silent for a few seconds, then asked, “You brought me a candy bar, eh?”

  I scowled. I stared icily. I gave him the dirtiest look I was capable of. “I came here, Aloysius, because I’m freaked out, and Mr. B’s worse than useless, and I thought maybe—just maybe—you might be able to answer at least one of the questions that seems awfully important at the moment.”

  “Not even a dirty magazine?” he whispered hopefully, and I kicked him in the ankle. Hard. Hard as I could kick. He made a noise like . . . I don’t know . . . a sheep caught in a wood chipper.

  “I’m going home,” I said, and turned my back on
him a second time. “I was an idiot, coming down here. I can get more answers from comic books and monster movies than I’m ever gonna get outta you.”

  He reached out, seizing my left shoulder and yanking me roughly back. My feet got tangled up together, and I landed on my ass in the dirt. I just sat there, my tailbone aching like a motherfucker, sure I’d pushed my douche-bag luck (think I mentioned that early on, the nature of my luck, or lack thereof) all the way into the red. I was pondering how many mouthfuls I’d make when Aloysius lifted me easy as you’d lift a ragdoll and set me on my feet again.

  “You gonna ask me a question, Quinn girl, and you ain’t got no sort of offering on hand, like you don’t know the rules. As if, of a sudden, the rules don’t apply no more, ’cause you gone and got yourself twofold plugged.”

  “I forgot, okay,” I said and rubbed at my bruised tailbone. “Believe it or not, sort of had a lot on my mind lately. Did I mention that?”

  Aloysius frowned and furrowed his gray-green brow. He shrugged. “Were it just me, Quinn lass, were that all there is to it . . . well, you versed sufficient in the ways of the fair folk to know . . . no exceptions and such . . .”

  “I was hoping for a freebie,” I told him. “Just this once. Maybe a favor for a friend.”

  “Ain’t the way of my vocation, and I know you cognize that perfectly fine without me havin’ to spell it out.”

  “I think you broke my ass,” I mumbled.

  “Your coccyx,” he said.

  “My what?”

  “Your coccyx,” he said again, but this time taking care to pronounce the word very slowly, drawing out the two syllables—cahk-six. “Almost indescribably tasty, marrow what a fella can dig from a coccyx. A bone I hold in highest esteem, it is.”

  “Well, I think you broke mine.”

  “No freebies,” he said.

  “I don’t have anything on me, Aloysius. And I don’t feel like petty theft today, all right?”