Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  “I gave you a finger,” I said.

  “And you still have nine more. And ten toes. And I’m sure each and every one is as precious as the last. If you’d like to renegotiate the terms of our deal . . .”

  Which is when I wondered why the hell I hadn’t offered him a little toe instead of a pinkie. Then again, this whole bargaining-with-body-parts enterprise was new to me, and a girl makes mistakes. A shame the rat wasn’t in it for booze, porn, and 3 Musketeers bars.

  “What’s so special about the gun, Ng thought it would take out a vamp like Cregan? That’s my second question.”

  “Poor choice,” he said and spat into the excelsior and Styrofoam peanuts. “How’s it gonna help your case, muffin, learning what the gun can and can’t do, when what you need to know is who’s the dearest bodily part in back of the dead undead lady’s assassination, right? The who it is, however indirectly, got you involved in this affair. But, like I said, we can still remedy that.”

  The seagull, perched on its aluminum pail, made the odd giggling sound that seagulls sometimes make. Boston Harry seemed to be considering his long yellow toenails with the greatest of interest.

  “Second toe off your left foot, that’ll buy you two whole extra questions. You think about that, Miss Quinn. A little flesh and bone goes a long way.”

  “How about, first, you answer the question I’ve already asked?” Oh, I knew he was right, sure as shit, but like I said, I wasn’t yet wise in the ways of swapping digits for intel. “How about that?”

  Boston Harry snorted in a vexed or disappointed or merely amused sort of way, then turned one candy-corn eye back towards me; the other continued staring at his feet.

  “April 19, 1775. Carried by Samuel Prescott, Battle of Lexington, though fat lot of good it did him. Might have popped a few redcoats, but General Gage, he still won the lottery and got the city of Boston. But that’s not the important part. The important part about how that blunderbuss got to be that blunderbuss, possessed of all its demon-smiting abilities, that happens later on, when Mr. Meriwether Lewis carried it off on his and Mr. Clark’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage.”

  I wanted to ask him if possibly there was an answer available that didn’t involve a history lesson, but I knew I’d already shown more disrespect towards the rat thing than it was rumored to tolerate. One dilemma to find yourself on thin ice, and another to take the opportunity to dance a fucking jig, right?

  So, I stood still, and kept my trap shut, and I listened. And listened. Eventually, ten or fifteen minutes later, the gun made its way to the twenty-first century.

  “. . . and by then, well, by then the old flintlock had absorbed enough spooky juju and bad vibes even Jesus Harold Christ himself might think twice before looking funny at the damned thing. But, I ask you, how was I gonna pass up a steal like that? A hot piece of merchandise, to be certain, and not without attendant risks. And yet, a discerning purveyor like myself knows there’s always a buyer, and sometimes there’s no such beast as a price too steep.”

  While the rat had yammered, I’d had time to think it through, and figured losing the toe wasn’t going to be much of a handicap.

  “Frankly,” said Boston Harry, “I’d like to know what became of the gun after that night in the cemetery. Which is to say, I’d like to reacquire said instrument, if the opportunity should ever arise.”

  “Reacquire it from the person you actually sold it to,” I said. “The person whose name is all hush-hush and who shall remain nameless unless . . .”

  “Unless,” he said, and wiggled a crooked index finger at my left foot. “After all, it wasn’t I who failed to ask the more pertinent and efficacious question.”

  “But I only need one more question answered, not two.”

  “So, you can use the other later. A woman . . . or beast . . . of integrity . . . such as yourself, she, or it, is bound to find herself in need of my aid again at some point or another along the line. I’ll simply consider half the toe on account. Charitable terms, yes?”

  “You’re just as sweet as pumpkin pie,” I said, playing the game because it was the only game in town.

  “Why, considerate of you to say so. I do like to keep the customer satisfied.”

  No need to dwell on the details of what happened next. Nothing new, only that quick and searing subtracting pain, same as before—wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. I didn’t have to unlace my shoe to know I was minus three phalanges. Harry was holding the toe up to that unseen light source, examining it the way a jeweler might examine an especially choice ruby or sapphire. Not a drop of blood anywhere.

  “This time, you choose with care,” he grinned, and the seagull giggled. And I did. I selected each word the way a condemned man might order his last meal.

  “To whom did you sell the blunderbuss?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you,” he sighed. “Well and true, I shouldn’t. I do have my scruples, whatever folks might think of me.”

  I repeated the question, more slowly this time, pushing the anger down as best I could.

  “Very well. A deal’s a deal. That was back in January. Impressively shady fellow downtown. Downtown Providence, that is. Dressed like an investment banker, but came across like a pimp. Paid a handsome sum, though. I expect you’ll be wanting a name, eh?”

  “I expect I will,” I replied.

  Boston Harry pocketed my toe (forgot to mention he was wearing a claret silk waistcoat that had seen better days).

  “Jack.”

  “Jack,” I repeated. “Jack in downtown Providence. I don’t suppose he came with a last name?”

  “You ask a lot, my love. But, now that you mention it, yeah. Jack Doyle. Butterscotch hair, green eyes, and I think he has his eyebrows waxed.”

  “So, we’re done here?”

  “Looks like. Unless, of course, you’d wish to ask that one remaining question now. Lest the Bride of Quiet finishes you off before we chance to meet again. Would be a terrible waste, should events take that turn.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” Me, I was already looking about the huge crate of a chamber, trying to locate anything that might serve as an exit. Right then, all I wanted was to put as much space between me and Boston “the rat thing” Harry as quickly as possible. I take that back. I also wanted another shower to wash away the scent of that place, that and the way I felt after being subjected to his magic and those candy-corn eyes. “Wanna have your bird show me the way back to Benefit Street?”

  “That would be the second—or rather, the fourth—question, wouldn’t it?”

  And I never had a chance to answer, because right about then’s when I felt what I’d felt before the blackout back in Pocasset Cemetery, standing next to Bobby Ng’s green Gremlin. I heard bones snapping, folding into new configurations. I smelled dog. And this time when I came to, it was broad fucking daylight, and I was curled up amid the garbage cans and recycling bins behind my apartment. When I could stand, I found the spare key I kept under an empty flower pot and let myself inside. If I’ve ever awakened with a worse taste in my mouth, mercifully, the memory is lost to me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A RUDE AWAKENING, A NEW TROLL, AND JACK DOYLE

  Well, the good news—if you want to look at it that way—is that I didn’t puke up Boston Harry. Or the seagull. Yeah, I assume I ate them both, even if I can’t prove that I did. So, that’s the silver lining, if you’ve got a genuinely twisted sense of what constitutes good news. And two years after these events, I admit that I do.

  The bad news? Hang on. That’s coming.

  It was long after dark when I woke and lay staring at the bedroom ceiling. My mouth tasted even worse than when I’d awakened behind the garbage cans, and I lay there, staring at peeling paint and cracked plaster, wishing like hell I’d had the good sense to buy a bottle of Listerine after this whole werevamp thing started. But, it’s not like I had to worry about cavities anymore (and, truth be told, after all those years on the street, dental hygiene hadn’
t been a priority to start with). I lay there staring at the ceiling, letting myself remember the business with the rat thing, the questions I’d asked and the answers it had given. I held up my left hand, and, sure enough, I hadn’t dreamed giving him that finger. I made a fist and it felt odd, but I couldn’t imagine missing one pinkie was going to impair my manual dexterity (I’m a righty, anyhow). Oh, I checked my left foot, too. Ditto on the proffered toe. I wasn’t going to cry over spilled milk. You start offering body parts to . . . whatever Boston Harry had been . . . you deserve whatever you get for your troubles.

  I lay there, gazing at the four remaining fingers on my left hand, thinking about the stinking wooden-crate place that I suspected had been no place at all. I could hear cars out on the street, and the domino guys talking, their Mexpop, an airplane passing overhead, cockroaches all around me, mice in the walls, the slow reproduction and growth of fungal spores . . . you get the picture. I’d already learned how to parse that flood of sensory info, the Flood, as I’d begun to think of it. The LOUD FLOOD. It no longer overwhelmed me. I lay there and wondered if my car was still parked on Benefit, or if it had been towed, or if there was a third option. I lay there and wondered where in the name of fuck all Mean Mr. B was holed up, sitting out whatever topsy-turvy hell was unfolding around me.

  I wasn’t hungry, so I assumed that whatever the wolfish half of me had snacked upon in Crate Land, it must have at least sated the bloodsucker half of me. I was filthy, but that probably goes without saying. My skin was smeared with blood and dirt and . . . worse things. My hair was matted and sticky. I wanted a cigarette, but I knew there were none in the house. I thought about taking a shower, and somehow summoned the requisite motivation to do just that. Afterwards, I pulled on one of my two pairs of jeans (at least they’d been washed a couple of days earlier) and a halfway clean T-shirt. I can recall that shirt with perfect clarity, even if it wouldn’t survive the next hour: the old Soviet flag, red with the golden hammer and sickle, the golden star, and CCCP printed underneath. I’d found it in a Dumpster somewhere. I liked that shirt.

  Of course, there was no sign of my shoes.

  Barefoot, I walked to the kitchen and ran a glass of water. It tasted like crap, but I kept it down. I ran another glassful and pretended it was mouthwash, though it hardly helped at all.

  And then . . .

  “You’re her,” a gravelly male voice said behind me, the sort of voice that commanded your attention, that wields authority. He hadn’t asked a question. He was merely stating the obvious. “The Bride’s whelp.”

  “Fucking unbelievable,” announced a second voice, this one female and languid. Mellifluous. She had an accent, but I couldn’t make it out. Standing there, I thought about how that would have been the last thing lots of people had heard, and how it could be worse. Her voice was making me horny, no matter how much shit I was in.

  “Don’t look like so much to me,” added a third voice, another dude. I’d already figured out he was back there. Maybe I’d been too busy trying to get the taste of Boston Harry (and who knows what else) out of my mouth to hear this trio of observant douche bags break in, but now I was all ears, and I’d heard . . . never mind. No point trying to explain what I’d heard, but it had been the sound of him. Even dead things made a racket, if other dead things are listening in.

  “Do I turn around?” I asked. “Or maybe that’s not part of your plan.” Yeah, I assumed they’d come to do me harm. Seemed astronomically unlikely this was a social call.

  “I don’t kill anything that’s got its back to me,” the gravelly voiced man said. I didn’t have to look to know he was big, at least six five, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds.

  “We ain’t cowards,” the girl with the honeyed accent (never placed it) all but sneered. Even sneering, that voice made me want to fuck her. I guessed she was no more than five six, a hundred twenty, a hundred twenty-five pounds tops.

  “We don’t need filthy loup blood in our veins to get the job done,” said Mr. Number Three.

  So, I was the job. I gripped the edge of the sink and the glass, and felt myself tensing.

  “Never heard of such a mutt. An insult, that’s what you are, but that’ll be over in a jiffy.” Just a guess, dude was on the short side. Not much bigger than the chick.

  “In a jiffy?” I laughed, and turned, pegging the son of a bitch between the eyes with the glass. He howled and stumbled backwards.

  “You cunt!” the girl screamed, but I dodged, and the stake she’d aimed at my chest buried itself in a cabinet door instead.

  “What, you thought maybe I wasn’t gonna fight back?”

  There was a very short pause here, and maybe the Three Caballeros really hadn’t expected I’d be that much of a challenge. Maybe these creeps were that full of themselves. I stared at her, then at the big guy, then at the guy I’d pegged with the glass. He was rubbing his forehead. Me, I was waiting for the change, the bone-cracking, flesh-burning agony that announced the coming of the wolf. After all, I had every reason to believe that’s the way it worked. I get pissed enough—maybe even just a little pissed—and here comes the beast.

  “You take this however it pleases you,” the big dude muttered. He sort of looked like Ron Perlman with a bad haircut. “You wanna put up a struggle, it’ll only make this more satisfying.”

  “Your call,” I said. “Your funeral.”

  Tough talk, that’s one thing, but I’ve always hated drawn out action scenes in books. Fight choreography can work great in a film (I love kung fu flicks. Oh, and anything with Jason Statham), but it usually comes off like a pile of bricks on the printed page. Case in point, just about any of the Harry Potter books. So, like I said before, let’s cut to the chase.

  No wolf. Just me.

  The fellow I’d hit with the glass, I took him out with the stake the girl had thrown at me. The big guy, he proved the most trouble, the bitch of the bunch (no surprise). We rolled around breaking shit, upending the table, etc., you know—until he went down that hole in the kitchen floor. I caught him by the ears as he fell and let him dangle several seconds, kicking and screaming, before I pulled upwards with enough force that his head and neck parted company. By then, Little Miss Honey Voice was on me, one arm tight around my throat, the other poised to skip the staking business and yank the dead, unbeating heart out of my chest with her bare hand. I flipped her, easy as pie, and she went skidding towards the back door. I was on her almost immediately. I pinned her and, I will give her this, those black eyes of hers, those empty pools of nothingness, they managed to radiate so much hate, so much spite, I still wish I knew her backstory. My knees were enough to hold her, and I put a hand on either side of her head, tangling all nine of my remaining fingers in her auburn hair.

  I stared back at her, but didn’t even try to match the loathing in her eyes.

  She cursed, and she hissed, and she spat in my face. She made noises I’m not sure there are words for. And then she grew quiet, and I only had to deal with the eyes.

  “You finished?” I asked her. She told me to go fuck myself with a lawn dart (I swear that’s what she said).

  “I’d rather have a roll with you,” I replied, then spat back at her. “But I’m thinking we’re probably way past a good and mutually pleasurable fuck. Which is really a wicked shame.”

  “Not if you were the last gash on the face of the earth,” she growled.

  “Thought so. That settled, I’m gonna ask you a question. You tell me what I need to hear, you won’t go the way of Moe and Curly. Capiche?”

  “Fuck you,” she said again, like it was going to carry more weight the second time around.

  “One question, and you get to crawl out of here. Just give me the name of the cocksucker sent you, and you’re a free woman.”

  I could see she was considering the offer. Not long, but she did think it over for the briefest moment.

  “I’d rather die now, and get it over and done with.”

  You saw that coming, d
idn’t you? Kneeling atop her on my kitchen floor, I sure as shit did.

  “Probably a wise move,” I told her, then broke her neck with a quick twist to the right. The way her cervical vertebrae popped made me a little queasy.

  And here’s the kicker. I found a yellow Post-it note in a pocket of her jeans. Just two letters and a phone number. The letters were J. D. and I’m pretty sure that didn’t stand for Jack Daniels. No, it was that other Jack, the one Boston Harry had given up for one of my toes.

  Time to go forth and meet Mr. Doyle.

  * * *

  By the by, I would like to pause to mention that—unlike you see in so many horror films and those paperback vamp potboilers, the ones you see in grocery store racks—my being rendered dead and fangulous did not bestow upon me kung fu action grip. Believe me, I was shocked I took out those three who invaded my kitchen. When it was over, I sat and stared at the corpses, scared shitless, confused, and thinking how much trouble it would be to get rid of the bodies. Easier with my car . . . coming to that in a moment. All I could figure was, becoming the “daughter” of Mercy Brown, the daughter of such an old bloodsucker, had come with an edge. Like, older vamps make way for stronger baby vamps. And the three were obviously very young, possibly four or five years since their hearts stopped beating and they cut their piranha teeth, but no older than that.

  Still, I couldn’t stop thinking, I should be dead, really, truly, once and for all dead.

  And, where was the beast? Why the hell didn’t it make an appearance this time?

  Just like Clemency Hate-evill had said, Ask the scary questions.

  * * *

  In case you’re wondering, if the domino guys heard the scuffle in the kitchen, they minded their own business. They’re good at that. Tit for tat, you know? I washed up a bit, found an older and more ragged pair of Converse high-tops, and left the apartment via the front door. I’d pushed the three corpses down the hole in the kitchen floor. It would just have to do until I had time to deal with them properly. I did take time to bother with the makeup and the contact lenses, even though time was beginning to feel like a precious commodity, and I wasn’t in a wasteful state of mind.