Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  “You’ll want to step aside now,” I said, lowering my voice, almost growling the words, becoming that avenging bullshit bloodsucker so popular with the women who read the silly ParaRom pulp I mentioned earlier. The woman with the busted nose promptly stepped aside.

  “Now, go downstairs,” I said, and she did that, too.

  The husband was standing on the other side of the room. He was three sheets to the wind, and put me in mind of a mentally deficient gorilla.

  “What the fuck you want, bitch?” he sneered. “This ain’t your business.”

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed. “But I’m hungry, and here you are. You need a punching bag, have a go at me before you die. I won’t hold it against you.” I showed him the mouthful of piranha teeth and—I swear to dog—the son of a bitch pissed himself. But not even that dark stain spreading across the crotch of his knee-length camo cargo shorts made him look any less tasty.

  He had just enough time to mumble, “What in hell—” before I was on him. I admit that I was deeply gratified at the way he screamed. My teeth parted skin, fascia, muscle, and sliced through his carotid. Some of those fictions, they make it sound pleasurable for the victim. Feeding, I mean. Right. Well, it ain’t. Trust me. He made a lot of noise, and none of it was the sort people make when people feel good. How you think it would feel, having your throat chewed, then the better measure of your blood slowly sipped out through a loop-the-loop crazy straw? Really romantic, yeah. Gets me wet, just thinking about it.

  Anyway, when it was finally over, I left him crumpled in a corner, and went back downstairs to wash up. The wife was standing outside talking to Hector and the gang.

  I rinsed my mouth from the tap, watching the reddish water swirl down the bathroom sink. I put on a not-clean T-shirt (but at least there were no bloodstains). My cell rang—the one I’d bought for Aloysius—and I answered it. It was B. The squeaky, scary wheel, grease, and all that happy crappy, right?

  “Siobhan, love,” he purred.

  “You,” I said.

  “Not very nice of you, threatening poor West like that. He was all but hysterical.”

  “And I care why?”

  There was a moment’s silence before he asked, “So, you’ve been to Brooklyn, I trust? You’ve had your tête-à-tête with the hellion?”

  “Yeah, I did that. And I have the scars to show for my trouble. And a few other trinkets. Not that I know what to do with any of this junk.”

  “Oh, you know, my precious. You just don’t remember you know you know.”

  “And you’re not about to meet with me, you being on the Bride’s hit list and all.”

  “Actually,” he said, and I could hear his smirk through the phone, “the situation has changed, thanks to Lady Penderghast’s generosity. I trust she gave you the locket, the one on the brass chain.”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “It cancels out the effects of the Bride’s collar. Now you’re just a regular old wolfy. Well, except for the also being a vampire part.”

  My fingers went to the locket. I hadn’t yet tried to open it, and had a feeling it was best I didn’t.

  “Oh, by the way, don’t open the locket,” he said, and I almost laughed. “That would break the charm.”

  “She could have told me that.”

  “That’s not her way.”

  “And the dagger? You gonna bother telling me exactly what sorta voodoo it do?”

  “It’ll put down Miss Mercy Brown like the rabid dog she is,” he replied, “thus ending this whole absurd affair.”

  “Not for me. Would it work on me?”

  “Love, plain old wood would work on you. But I don’t think that’s what you really want.”

  I stared up at the ceiling. I could still taste the drunken bastard.

  “You might be interested to know I just ate my upstairs neighbor. But don’t worry, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

  “That’s not very discreet.”

  “You got a cleanup crew on hand,” I said, “You might want to send it over, on the quick.”

  He didn’t say anything else for a moment. Then he sighed and said, “Consider it done, love. Only for you.”

  “What next?”

  “Well, don’t hang around your apartment, if, indeed, that’s where you’re calling from. Leaving the scene of the crime, that’s a good place to start. You want my advice.”

  “Where to?” I asked. “I mean, how’s this all supposed to play out?”

  “The knife is also a compass needle. Isn’t that clever? Lay it on consecrated ground. Any church, synagogue, mosque, or cemetery will do. Set it down, it’ll point straight towards the Bride, be she east, west, north, or south.”

  “That’s pretty fucking vague,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. Once the knife spins, once you see, you’ll know exactly where to find her.”

  “Jesus, why didn’t she just tell me? Oh, let me hazard a guess. It’s not her way.”

  “You’re no prat. I’ll give you that. But I do wish you’d quit leaving these discommodious messes.”

  “I don’t even know what that means, discommodious.”

  “Buy a dictionary, treacle-tart.”

  I hate it when B starts in with the Cockney rhyming slang. I don’t get half of it, and he’s not even Cockney.

  “Whatever. There’s a wife. He beat her. Don’t you dare lay a goddamn finger on her, hear me.”

  “Loud and clear. And my, oh my, haven’t we grown all chivalrous.” I ignored the jibe.

  “So, simple as that? I go forth and slay the nasty who made me a nasty, and who has it out for us all?”

  “Simple as that.”

  I pushed back the drapes, glancing out at the sidewalk. It was a scalding day out there, and none of the domino boys were wearing shirts. The woman was talking to them, and now and then she’d look up, towards her apartment.

  “Nothing is ever simple as that,” I told B.

  “Just do as I say. Then we’ll have a long sit-down at Babe’s, just like old times. You have a very bright and profitable future ahead of you.”

  The wife saw me watching her, and I let the drapes swing shut again.

  “You set me up,” I said.

  “We’ve been over that, love. I did what I had to do. The greater good and all.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “That I am. Now, run along before someone calls the coppers, and you have to try to explain things that can’t be explained without recourse to fairy tales.”

  He hung up. I hadn’t even gotten around to telling him about the three vamps buried beneath the kitchen.

  I grabbed my car keys and sunglasses. The dagger was tucked into the waistband of my jeans, in back, hidden beneath the T-shirt. Out on the sidewalk, the wife with the bloody nose asked me what had happened. Hector and company looked pretty damned curious, as well.

  “He won’t ever hurt you again,” I said, and then I got in my car and drove away towards the intersection of Benefit and Wickenden, to Our Lady of the Rosary. Mostly Portuguese, not Irish Catholic. But what the hey. I spared a single peek at the rearview, and the wife hadn’t moved.

  * * *

  The business at the church went smooth as smooth can go. The sanctuary doors were unlocked, which surprised me. I thought everyone locked everything these days, but maybe the righteous are less cautious than the rest of us, or simply more concerned with saving souls than with material possessions. Anyway, I admit that I lingered a moment at the threshold after pushing open the heavy wooden door. How could I not? Lots of people buy into all those timeworn, treasured chestnuts about interactions between the Old Man in the Sky and us walking-dead types. Those empty superstitions to make them feel just a wee bit safer in the night. Say your prayers, go to confession, drop a buck in the collection plate, whatever, and the nasties won’t get you, and you won’t go to the Bad Place, and you’ll even be forgiven for cheating on your income taxes. See, you hear that shit repeated all your
life, you have it drilled into you as a kid, and some of it sticks, and it really doesn’t matter if you realize it’s all a crock later on.

  But I only lingered a moment.

  I stepped into the sanctuary, and nothing happened. Nothing whatsoever. The air in there was heavy with the odors of dust and aging hymnals and Murphy’s Oil Soap, felt and polished wood, plaster dust, sacramental wine, candle wax, the bodies of a thousand different men and women and children . . . and no, you probably wouldn’t have smelled all this stuff (or it might have struck you as a single complex scent), but I did. The door creaked shut behind me, and I stood there in the silence, as though I’d forgotten why I’d come to this place. It reminded me too much of a childhood I’d done my best to forget, but always wanted to remember. Former homeless, junky runaway cum pissed-off and terrified werepire, thy name is contradiction. But if I looked at the pews, there I was with my mom. I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, the phantoms had gone.

  I walked a little way down the aisle, kneeled (as Jesus, Mother Mary, and any number of saints watched on) and pulled Evangelista’s black dagger from the waistband of my jeans. I laid it on the red carpeting. And, at once, it began spinning like a top, finally coming to rest with the tip of the blade pointing, more or less, southwest.

  “Great,” I whispered. “So, we could be talking about Connecticut. Or New Orleans. Or Mexico fucking City. Or . . .”

  But then I remembered some of what Evangelista had slipped into my head. I saw a tumbledown wreck of a house, and knew the address that went along with it. It was in Exeter, less than twenty miles from where I kneeled there in the sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary.

  “Tag,” I said. “Got you now, bitch.”

  This was, obviously, a tad premature. I did not have her. I only knew where she was, and the one ain’t the other. Not even close. But I was tired, the church was creeping me out big-time, and I was getting a headache. Probably, whatever had been coursing through the veins of Mr. White-trash Wife-beater Crack-head wasn’t agreeing with my bloodsucker’s anti-metabolism (just made that phrase up). Or it was a side effect of the hocus-pocus Penderghast was playing at with my mind. I picked up the dagger, and pulled that heavy door shut behind me as I left. I prayed to nothing at all that it was the last time I’d ever have cause to enter a “house of God.” Whether he was there or not, I’d not felt welcome.

  * * *

  What I did next, it sure as hell wasn’t on Bad Mr. B’s itinerary. It was, in fact, a major deviation from the plan, his and Evangelista’s. But I did it, anyway. I didn’t do it to spite them—but I also didn’t do it not to spite them. I was the black knight being sent into Blake’s “forest of the night” to slay this “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright.” “What dread hand? And what dread feet?” indeed. I was the one who was about to face her fearful symmetry, and, the way I saw it, that gave me a certain degree of latitude as to how this endgame was going to play out. And, besides, I was in the mood for a big-ass, fuck-ton of Fourth of July fireworks—the ones that get all the ooohs and ahs—not a handful of bottle rockets. Maybe this would be my coup de grace, and if that were to be the case, I wanted a blaze of glory that the nasties would be talking about for decades to come.

  I knew the late and possibly lamented Jack Grumet, formerly of Woonsocket, had a wife. It had come up in that conversation with B, right after I’d made my first kill. Her name was Hannah. Getting her phone number was easy. A walk in the park, or two for one; choose your favorite idiom. I drove to the parking lot at India Point, there where the polluted waters of the Seekonk and Providence rivers flow into Narragansett Bay. I rolled down the Honda’s window and dialed her number on Aloysius’ cell, and stared at the late afternoon sun glinting off the calm blue water. It rang six times before anyone answered. Before Hannah Grumet answered.

  “I’m Siobhan Quinn,” I said. “I was there when your husband died.”

  There was quiet then. Let’s toss in another idiom: you could have heard a pin drop. Well, except for the crows and the catbirds making a racket in the trees.

  I heard her draw a deep breath, and the exhalation seemed to take forever. And then she said, “The bitch-whore that murdered him. That’s what you mean.”

  “Is that the way they’re telling the tale up Swamp Yankee way?”

  “Don’t think this is over,” she said. “Don’t think I won’t have my retribution.”

  “Re-tri-bu-tion. That’s an awfully big word, Hannah. How about you just say you’re gonna get even and be done with it? See, that’s what I’d have said.”

  I’d never heard the cold, hard hiss of seething rage, but I heard it in the spaces between her words, the spaces between the syllables.

  “We’ve got a fine plan for you, darling,” she said.

  “That a fact. And don’t call me darling.”

  “Can flay a bitch like you at our leisure, keep you alive for days. Throw in a little rock salt—”

  “Hey, puppy dog. You wanna hear what I got to say, or you gonna spend this whole conversation barking like a mangy junkyard cur? ’Cause if that’s your plan, I’ll hang up now, and you loup fucks can get back to your shucking and salting and whatever the hell torture makes inbred shits like you happy. Capiche?”

  “Why’d you even call me?” she asked, and, I will admit, I was impressed how she didn’t take the bait I’d tangled with all those werewolf-specific insults.

  “Shut up half a minute, I’ll tell you.”

  She sighed loudly, but she also shut up.

  “Now, I didn’t kill your husband. Or your mate. Whatever it is you people call each other. I was planning to, won’t lie to you about that. But someone beat me to it.”

  “And who was that?” she sneered, and you’ve heard how somebody’s voice can “drip with sarcasm,” right? Bingo.

  “Vamp calls herself Mercy Brown. Or the Bride of Quiet, depending on her mood. She’s the one did Jack Grumet, and, while we’re at it, she’s the one did me, too.”

  This time the silence on the other end was different. It was a shocked silence.

  “You still there, puppy?”

  “The Bride? So, you’re a vamp?”

  “Alas, I am. But it gets better. Your fella, he had just enough time to sink his teeth into my backside before Mercy laid him low. So . . .”

  Another surprised silence.

  “You’re saying . . . ?”

  “Smart puppy. That’s what I’m saying. And I’m also saying I’m heading down to Exeter this evening, and when I’m done, there isn’t going to be any more Bride of Quiet. No more precious little china doll of doom. And seeing how it was her—not me—killed Jack . . .”

  “So you say.”

  “So I say. Seeing as how that’s what happened that night by the reservoir, how he and me were both set up by Mercy and a certain ne’er do well calls himself B . . .”

  “I know about him,” she said. “You work for him.”

  “I’m beginning to think that’s past tense. I’m beginning to think we ought to say I worked for him. But I’m never gonna get to the point, you keep cutting me off like that.”

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “Way I see it, Hannah, you deserve your pound of flesh, same as me. Way I see it, I let you in on putting her in the ground once and for all, that squares us, good and even. No more vendetta. I leave the loups alone, the loups leave me alone.”

  “You are a loup,” she said, and there was a note of humor in her voice.

  “Again, touché. But let’s not get all worried about technicalities. This offer’s on the table for about the next sixty seconds. Then I go forth to do the job alone, and later you can send in the pack, and we can play who’s the worst nasty in the days and nights to come. Personally, I don’t give a shit. Just being polite, and I wouldn’t mind the backup. Anyway, take it or leave it.”

  She took it. I gave her the address, and I gave her a time. I also told her not to make a move until I got there, because I was fairly cer
tain Evangelista Penderghast hadn’t put that black dagger in my hand just because I needed a compass. Vamps get that old, old as Mercy, it generally takes special tools to get the job done.

  Hannah hung up first, and I sat there in my car awhile. I smoked a couple of Camels and listened to the birds. And I wondered if I was right about B, about him being my former employer and all. Sure, with the Bride out of the way, neither he nor Penderghast would have to worry about me (it was hard to imagine the molten thing below Battle Hill ever had). But B, he wasn’t one for loose ends. Maybe he’d keep me around, and maybe he wouldn’t. But, no matter what a fine soldier his wolfpire might make, all I could think was, Better safe than sorry. I could hear him saying it before putting a hallowed ash bolt or two in my chest.

  Better safe than sorry. You bet.

  * * *

  You will, I’m sure, recall what I said about my dislike for road movies? Those interminable scenes of protagonists driving, driving, driving across some road-scape or another, slithering along highways, interstates, and back roads. Conversations as wheels whir along tarmac. So, let’s just say I left Providence and followed Ten Rod Road southwest to Exeter. I’ve never cared for that part of the state. Something too stark, too wild. Like, maybe some old pagan mind-set still holds sway in those woods and fields, behind the crumbling drystone walls. I get this same vibe from Moosup Valley. Like, you know, those annual corn festivals maybe get all Harvest Home or Wicker Man or . . . listen to me, will you? Regularly rubbing shoulders with demons and trolls, and then getting all wigged out over the secret habits of rednecks.

  But I can be embarrassed, ashamed, perplexed—whatever—by my reactions, but that don’t change them, does it? The good folks of Exeter would likely take offense to how their town makes me feel, but that doesn’t change nothing, either. There are places that make my skin crawl for no particular reason, and there you are, the long and short of it. Hell, I never have understood why people get freaked over spiders and snakes and the dark. To each his or her own irrational reactions. Which is not to say I have a phobia of Exeter. I don’t, it’s just that left to my own devices, I’d stay away from the place.