“This is one of those social/charity/fundraiser thingies,” I continued, ignoring her, “and you need to dress nice.”
“You need to lie down and rest,” she retorted. “After all that you’ve been through, you should be lying on the couch with those two blood packs in your arm instead of hers. Better yet, you should have taken her up on her offer! You need fresh blood and she’s done everything short of forcing it down your throat.”
“I’m going to run through the shower and change. Be ready when I get back.”
I stalked into my bedroom but left the door open—like I really had any chance of monitoring the stairs while I was back in the master bathroom. If Deirdre snuck downstairs while I was in the shower, well . . .
I should have just stayed out of it. Theresa was safer when she just had Rod to shove her around. Damn! I hadn’t planned on attending BioWeb’s Halloween social do but Theresa needed to lie down for a couple of hours while her blood loss was replenished and I didn’t trust Deirdre—or myself, for that matter—to stay here while she was so enamored of the idea of being somebody’s entrée.
I started the hot water and then felt my jawline so see if I needed a shave, yet. It had been a week or so since I had last applied the razor and I imagined that I was just about due: My screwy metabolism hadn’t put my follicles into a total state of stasis but it now took me about five days to get a five o’clock shadow. I was thinking about growing a beard: When your reflection in the mirror starts playing hide-and-seek, shaving is a bitch.
On the other hand, beards have to be trimmed and a pair of scissors might well prove more challenging than a razor.
I hurriedly lathered up and raised the tri-part blade. Closing my eyes, I tried to invoke a Zen-like state: my face and the razor are one, my face and the razor—
The razor disappeared from my fingers. “Here, let me help you with that.” I opened my eyes as Deirdre turned me away from the sink and tilted my chin up.
“I don’t understand you,” she said as she scraped lather and stubble from the sides of my face. I started to open my mouth but she pushed up on my chin. “No, don’t talk. You don’t have the juice to spare if I nick you.”
I stared up at the ceiling while she worked her way down to my throat. “She’s the perfect donor,” Deirdre continued. “And she’s way beyond willing. You wouldn’t need any kind of mental domination with this one. Your mouth on her arm, on her throat—just the thought of it and her nipples are ready to tear through her bra.” She rinsed the razor in the sink and checked for any missed patches of skin. “You can rinse.”
I looked down at her. “Go get ready,” I growled.
She left and I stripped down and jumped into the shower.
I promised myself I’d be in and out in less than five minutes but the hot water felt so good against my too-cool skin that I braced hands against the tiles, bowed my head, and let the warmth work its way into my tepid flesh. I nearly jumped as cooler hands came to rest on my shoulder blades.
“The heat is pleasant, isn’t it?” Deirdre said.
“What are you doing?”
“The same as you: getting ready. If you’re in such a hurry and don’t want to share, I can use the downstairs bathroom—the one just around the corner from your excitable groupie.”
“No!” More reasonably: “I’ll be done in a minute.”
“I’ll wash your back.”
“Deirdre . . .”
“And you can wash mine—it’ll save time.” She started soaping my shoulders.
I had visions of Lupé arriving home unannounced to find a disheveled co-ed on my couch and a redhead lathering me up in the shower. The heat from the water seemed to be penetrating too well: I felt a pleasant burning sensation in my solar plexus begin to radiate out toward my extremities.
“If you don’t think that she can spare it, why don’t you drink from me? I topped off last night.”
“What?” My skin was starting to tingle and a pleasant knot was starting to tighten in my groin.
“Vampire blood, second generation,” she elaborated. “More potent than a homogenized human.”
I wrenched the shower handles so that the water turned suddenly cold. The pleasant knot unraveled. “Vampire blood? Deirdre, what happened to Pagelovitch’s watchdogs last night?”
“I took them out.”
“Took them out? You were just supposed to distract them!”
“They got a little rough. It got out of hand.”
“Out of hand? Pagelovitch is going to be pissed!”
“He’s already pissed. But he’s not going to do anything to you unless he runs out of options. I’m a different matter, but he knows the rules and understands that it is my place to protect you. He won’t punish me for acting within the law.”
“The law,” I repeated as I grabbed the shampoo and smeared a dab into my hair.
“Your ideas of honor and propriety are going to get you killed. And me along with you.”
I was incredulous. “You feed off of two of Pagelovitch’s enforcers—kill them—and tell me that my refusal to use violence is going to cause trouble?” The shampoo stung my eyes. I rinsed and groped for the washcloth. Encountered something I shouldn’t have.
“That’s nice . . .” she said, and sighed. “Look, it’s a wolf-eat-wolf world. I don’t just disagree with your refusal to fight your way to the top of the food chain, I’m at a total loss to understand how you can turn down the gifts that are freely—even fervently—offered.”
I got my eyes cleared and started soaping my other necessities. “How about this,” I tried. “A masochist and a sadist are shipwrecked on a desert isle. The masochist gets down on his knees in front of the sadist and says: ‘hit me, beat me, slap me, kick me, abuse me, hurt me’?” I turned and looked at Deirdre, who lifted sudsy mammaries in my direction.
“Bite me,” she invited.
“And the sadist just looks at him, then crosses his arms,” I continued, crossing my arms, “and says: ‘No’.”
Deirdre studied my face for a long minute and relinquished her grip. “I don’t get it.”
“You see, the masochist wanted—”
She waved her hand. “I get the joke. I don’t get the analogy.” Her mouth hardened. “Other than the fact that you’re both a sadist and a masochist. Do my back.” She turned around.
“I think you’re puzzled because Theresa seems to be offering me what I need and appears to do so of her own free will. You want to invoke the consenting adults clause but I’m afraid that just doesn’t wash.” I washed my way down to the small of her back.
“Why not? She’s of age. And if it does no one any harm—”
“Who says it does no harm?”
“Yes, who says?” She whirled around so that my hands were suddenly soaping her belly. “You? Who are you to say?”
I handed her the soap. “Who is she to say?”
“It’s her life.”
“No man is an island,” I said, stepping out of the shower and snagging a towel off of the rack.
“Donne? You’re bringing John Donne into the argument?” She followed me out, dripping water. There was no extra towel.
“Look, the concept of the ‘victimless crime’ is an engaging myth,” I said, heading for the linen closet, “but it just isn’t true that ‘what goes on behind closed doors’ never comes out from behind closed doors.”
“I should have seen this coming: you’re a ‘rules’ person.” She said it in the same tone that some people reserve for pederasts and IRS agents.
“Even if we want to break the rules of our society, those rules still define us.”
She followed me down the hall. “Is it always so wrong to defy what defines us?”
I tossed her a clean towel. “Is it so unthinkable that human society must have standards of conduct for the common good?”
She caught the towel but made no move to use it. Not even to cover herself. “Maybe the ‘common’ good isn’t the ‘best’ good.
Who gets to decide those standards?”
“Hey, I know it gets dicey the moment we try to establish a central moral authority,” I agreed, walking back into my bedroom. “But is the alternative any safer?” I closed the door.
I dried and dressed hurriedly, went back to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, then scurried down the stairs.
The couch was empty.
I looked around the living room: no Theresa.
Sounds behind me.
I turned and saw Theresa mopping the dining room floor. “I’m afraid the paper towels didn’t get it all,” she said.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
She turned those large eyes upon me like deep blue searchlights. “I’m still upsetting you. I don’t mean to upset you. I don’t want to be a bother. . . .” Her eyes were luminous. “I want to serve you.”
“Theresa . . .”
“Call me ‘T’.”
I went to her, took the mop from her hands, and led her back to the couch. “Where are the blood packets?”
“I put them back in the refrigerator to keep for you. Your thrall said you need more blood—”
“My what?”
“Thrall. That beautiful redheaded creature. Will I transform so beautifully when I become your thrall?”
“Deirdre!" I bellowed.
The beautiful redheaded creature came stumbling out of the guest bedroom and hopped to the head of the stairs. “Yes, O Dark Lord and Master?” Her little black cocktail dress was askew; a black high-heeled shoe dangled from one hand.
“Never mind.”
She looked down at us, perched precariously on one foot and tugged an errant spaghetti strap into place. “What is it?”
I sighed and stared at the carpeting between my feet. “Please tell Theresa—”
“T,” she whispered.
“—that you are not my . . . ’thrall’.”
Deirdre’s mouth twisted into a lopsided grin. It looked as if she was trying very hard to not laugh at one of us. I wondered which.
“Oh . . . no . . .” she said. “I am not his ‘thrall,’ T.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I am his blood slave,” she finished lasciviously.
“Deirdre!”
“I serve and pleasure him in untold ways!”
“Dammit, Deirdre!”
“Honey, you just lie down and rest for now and let’s see how things work out when we get back.” Deirdre turned and bent down to slip on her other shoe. It looked to me as though she was deliberately presenting her backside and suggesting via body language that I kiss it.
T lay back down with a sigh as my “blood slave” walked back to her room with an exaggerated wiggle. I consulted my watch as I fetched our tickets from the counter between the kitchen and the dining room. “We’re gonna be late!” I yelled toward the upstairs as I walked back toward the couch.
“Theres—T,” I said. “She—Deirdre—was just joking with—”
She gazed up at me with those haunted sapphire eyes.
“—you can’t—T—oh hell, look into my eyes.”
She did.
It didn’t do any good.
Maybe I was the one having trouble concentrating.
Or maybe she had a psychic immunity to mental domination—Rod notwithstanding. By the time Deirdre came down the stairs I had given up on getting Theresa to do anything via mind control.
Maybe after we got back from the party, I could get her drunk enough to shove into the backseat of a cab.
Or maybe I could just quietly leave town and start all over again somewhere else.
“Ready?” Deirdre asked, opening the front door.
“Don’t invite anyone in while we’re gone,” I said over my shoulder as I followed my “thrall” outside.
“I think your problem,” Deirdre said quietly as I fumbled for my keys, “is that you’re still struggling to define your place in human society. What does human society have to do with either of us?”
I sighed as I locked the front door. “Well, one of us is still trying to hold onto his humanity.”
“One of us,” she agreed. “Though it seems a poor excuse to be so judgmental.”
“You say that as if I am and you’re not,” I argued as we stepped off the front porch. “What makes you think you’re making any less of a ‘judgment’? And,” I added, “did you check to see if the coast was clear?”
“I did,” she said. “And you’re the one who turns every pleasurable opportunity into a prissy exploration of the ‘just say no’ ethic.”
I stopped and grinned at her. “Prissy exploration of the ‘just say no’ ethic?” I shook my head at the thought and then looked around at the sloping yard and the car parked a few yards away in the circle drive. “I’m surprised the Doman didn’t set new sentries around the perimeter.”
“He did.” Deirdre continued to promenade toward the car, her long, pointy heels necessitating a slower, strolling gait. What was lost in speed was compensated for by the esthetics.
“He did what?” I asked, trying to shake off the distraction of the “piston effect” in her locomotion.
“Set more sentries,” she said casually, stopping to lean over and adjust one of her shoes.
“What? Where? I thought you checked!”
“I did. And they’re out here.” She pulled the shoe off and then reached down to adjust the other. “Look, that girl offered you fresh blood when you needed it the most. When taking it was not only logical—and let’s not forget pleasurable for you—but would have given her pleasure, as well. What could possibly be wrong with that?”
“It would be like having sex with a nymphomaniac.” I looked around. No vampires were in sight. Ditto on the zombie front.
She put a hand on my shoulder for stability as she fiddled with the other spiked heel. “Obviously, I’m not getting the point, here.”
“Okay, it would be like inviting a kleptomaniac over to your house and leaving things out and readily available while you were conveniently absent.” It wasn’t a very good analogy but my mind was more on the Glock in the glove compartment of my car. “It would be exploiting someone’s sickness, someone’s vulnerability, for selfish reasons. Theresa is young and inexperienced and impressionable, and she’s been involved with someone who has exploited and manipulated her for his own, selfish ends. I’m not going to be another reinforcement for her self-mutilation fantasies.”
The vampire that had been hiding behind my car came vaulting over the hood like a psychotic jack-in-the-box sans container. Before I could react, Deirdre spun with superhuman speed and swung both shoes with deadly accuracy. The three-inch stiletto heels nailed him in the throat and chest. She went down under the impact of his body but he was already crumbling to dust as she hit the ground.
I ran over to help her up.
“And what about me?” she asked as I reached down and took her hand.
“I’m your Sire,” I reminded her as I pulled her to her feet, “your so-called Master. If I would not validate Terry’s self-destructive behavior, I certainly wouldn’t permit—”
“That’s not what I mean,” she snapped, slipping her shoes back on. “I’m not young and impressionable. Do you think it symptomatic of some sort of mental or emotional aberration when I offer myself to you?” she added.
Careful, Cséjthe . . .
I glanced up and noticed the second vampire, crouching on the edge of the roof, just ten feet away. “Would you be terribly offended,” I asked, trying to signal Deirdre by rolling my eyes, “if I were to say that I don’t feel desire for you?”
The vamp launched herself but we dodged easily as she came down between us. Deirdre even had time to fumble with her purse as this one was turning her attention on me. I backpedaled, trying not to trip as I leaned away from her taloned grasp.
“I’d be offended that you’d lie to me,” Deirdre answered with some heat. She snapped her purse strap over the vamp’s head and jerked the gold chain acr
oss our assailant’s throat. “You’ve transformed enough to know how easily I can read your physical responses. . . .” She twisted the chain-strap and pulled her arms in separate directions, tightening the golden loop. “ . . . Your pupils and blood vessels dilate, your pulse quickens, your breathing deepens, your flesh betrays you through the pores of your skin, the autonomic reflexes of specific muscle groups!”
The vamp was tearing at the fine links, trying to dislodge the chain-strap from her windpipe but the muscles in Deirdre’s arms flexed and the golden garrote continued to sink into that undead throat.
“You do desire me!” she insisted. “But you refuse me just the same!” A final yank and the chain closed its deadly circle: the vamp’s head popped right off. “At least be honest about it,” she finished, brushing more ash from her dress.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the car. “Let’s go! Before Pagelovitch sends any more our way!”
“They weren’t Seattle’s hounds,” she said, recovering her shoes. “Our watchdogs are still watching.”
“Then whose were they?” I slid behind the wheel and reached over to unlock the glove compartment.
“Hey, you’re the gumshoe,” she said, slipping into the passenger seat. “I’m just a leg breaker.”
I slapped the zippered pouch onto the leather upholstery between us and started the engine. “Any more out there?”
“What do I look like? Miss Cleo? Drive, O Dark Master!”
I growled at her but slammed the gearshift and spun the car around the circle and headed down the drive at highway speed. Another fanged intruder erupted from the darkness and launched himself across my hood. He landed with his face pressed to the windshield, his hands clawing for purchase in our open side windows. I hit the retrofitted wiper controls and twin streams of fluid spurted up and onto the glass and ghast.
“I think you’ve thrown a rod,” Deirdre said as smoke began to billow up in front of us.
“Naw, Rod’s probably cowering under his bed right now; I don’t know this guy’s name.” I hit the brakes and the vampire slid back down the hood and fell off the front of the car. A moment later he popped back up, the white planes of his skull glistening in the headlights where his face once was. Deirdre’s foot stomped down on top of mine, pressing the gas pedal to the floor. A bump and a thump and we were moving again. The smoke had disappeared with our “hood ornament” but I gave the windshield a few more squirts and turned on the wipers.
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 20
