Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  They stop and look at me running across the street at them and the first thing they see is the blood, of course. This would scare anybody but them (or me, naturally). I trip myself on the curb and collapse practically at their feet. “Can I use your phone? Please? I’m scared to stay out here, my car won’t start, they might be still around—”

  The man leans down and pulls me up under my arm. “Of course. Come in, we’ll call the police. I’m a doctor.”

  I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing at that one. He’s an operator maybe but no fucking doctor. Then I taste blood, so I let it run out of my mouth and the two of them, the man and the kid get so hot they can’t get me in the house fast enough.

  Nice house. All the Victorian shit restored, even the fuzzy stuff on the wallpaper, watchamacallit, flocked wallpaper. I get a glimpse of the living room before the guy’s rushing me upstairs, saying he’s got his medical bag up there. I just bet he does, and I got mine right in my hand, which they do not bother wondering about what with all this blood and this guy with no ID and out at four in the morning, must be a criminal anyway. I used to ask Villanueva, don’t they ever get full, like they can’t drink another drop, but Villanueva told me no, they always had room for one more, it was time they were pressed for. Dawn. I’d be through long before then, but even if I wasn’t, dawn would take care of the rest of it for me.

  They’re getting so excited it’s getting me even more excited. I look at the kid and man, if I’d been anyone else, I woulda started screaming and trying to get away, because he’s all gone. I mean, the kid part is all gone and just this fucking hungry thing from hell. So I stop feeling funny about there being a kid, because like I said, there ain’t no kid, just a short one along with the tall one.

  And shit if he don’t twig, right there on the stairs. I musta looked like I recognized him.

  “We’re burned! We’re burned!” he yells and tries to elbow me in the face. I dip and he goes right the fuck over my head and down, ka-boom, ka-boom. Guess what, they can’t fly. It don’t do him, but they can feel pain, and if you break their legs, they can’t walk for a while until they can get extra blood to heal them up. The kid’s fucking neck is broke, you can see it plain as anything.

  But I don’t get no chance to study on it because the big one growls like a fucking attack dog and grabs me up from behind around the waist. They really are stronger than normal and you better believe it hurt like a motherfucker. He squeezes and there go two ribs and the soft drinks I had on the plane, like a fucking fountain.

  “You’ll go slow for that,” he says, “you’ll go for days, and you’ll beg to die.”

  Obviously, he don’t know me. I’m hurting all right, but it takes a lot more than a couple of ribs to put me down and I never had to beg for nothing, but these guys get all their dialog off the late show anyway and they ain’t thinking of nothing except sticking it to you and drinking you dry. Fucking undead got a, a watchamacallit, a narrow perspective and they think everyone’s scared of them.

  That’s why they send me, because I don’t see no undead and I don’t see no human being, I just see something to play with. I gotta narrow perspective, too, I guess.

  But then everything is not so good because he tears the bag outa my hand and flings it away up in the hallway. Then he carries me the rest of the way upstairs and down the opposite end and tosses me into a dark room and slams the door and locks it.

  I hold still until I can figure out how to move and cause myself the least pain, and I start taking off my shirts. I’m wearing a corduroy shirt with a pure linen lining sewn into the front and two heavy one-hundred-percent cotton T-shirts underneath. I have to tear one of the T-shirts off, biting through the neck, and I bite through the neck of the other one but leave it on (thinking about the guy biting through necks while I do it), and put the corduroy shirt back on, keeping it open. Ready to go.

  The guy has gone downstairs. I hear the kid scream and then muffle it, and I hear footsteps coming back up the stairs. There’s a pause, and then I see his feet at the bottom of the door in the light, and he unlocks the door and opens it.

  “Whoever you think you are,” he says, “you’re about to find out what you really are.”

  I give a little whimper, which makes him sure enough to grab me by one leg and start dragging me out into the hallway, where the kid is lying on his back. When we’re out in the light, he stops and stands over me, one leg on each side, and looks down at my crotch. I know what he’s thinking, because I’m looking up at his and thinking something not too different.

  He squats on my thighs, and I rip my shirts open.

  It’s like an invisible giant hand hit him in the face; he goes backwards with a scream, still bent at the knees, on top of my legs. I heave him off quick. He’s so fucked I have time to get to him, roll him over on his back and give him a nice full frontal while I sit on his stomach.

  It is a truly def tattoo. This is not like bragging, because I didn’t do it, though I did name it: The Power and The Passion. A madwoman with a mean needle in Coney did it, one-handed with her hair standing on end, counting her rosary beads with the other hand, and when I saw it finished, with the name I had given it on a banner above it, I knew she was the best tattoo artist in the whole world and so I did not do her, I did not. It was some very ignorant asshole who musta come in after I did that split her open and nailed her to the wall with a stud gun, but I caught the beef on it, and the tattoo that saved her from me saved me from the quick shot and gave me to Steener’s people, courtesy of Villanueva who is, I should mention, also Catholic.

  So it’s a tattoo that means a lot to me in many ways, you see, but mostly I love it because it is so perfect. It runs from just below where my shirt collars are to my navel, and full across my chest, and if you saw it, you would swear it had been done by someone who had been there to see what happened.

  The cross is not just two boards, but a tree trunk and a crossbar, and the spikes are driven into the forearms where the two bones make a natural holder for that kind of thing—you couldn’t hang on a cross from spikes driven through your palms, they’d rip through. The crown of thorns has driven into the flesh to the bone, and the blood drips from the matted beard distinctly—the madwoman was careful and skilled so that the different shades of red didn’t muddy up. Nothing muddied up; you can see the face clear as you can see where the whips came down, as clear as the wound in his side, (which is not some pussy slit but the best watchamacallit, rendering of a stab wound I have seen outside of real life), as clear as you can see how the arms have pulled out of the sockets, and how the legs are broken.

  You just can’t find no better picture of slow murder. I know; I seen photos of all kinds, I seen some righteous private art, and I seen the inside of plenty of churches, and ain’t nobody done justice to nothing anybody ever done to someone, including the Crucifixion. Especially the Crucifixion, I guess.

  Because, you see, you cannot take a vamp out with a cross, that don’t mean dick to them, a fucking plus-sign, that’s all. It’s the Crucifixion that gets them, you gotta have a good crucifix, or some other representation of the Crucifixion, and it has to be blessed in some way, to inflict the agony of the real thing on them. Mine was blessed—that madwoman mumbling her rosary all the way through the work, don’t it just figure that she was a runaway nun? I wouldn’t a thought it would matter, but I guess when you take them vows, you can’t give them back. Sorta like a tattoo.

  Well, that’s what that madwoman believed, anyway, and I believe it, too, because I like believing that picture happened, and the vamp I’m sitting on, it don’t mean shit if he believes or not, because I got him and he don’t understand how I could even get close to him. So while I go get my bag (giving a good flash to the kid, who goes into shock), I explain about pure fibers found in nature like the linen they say they wrapped that man on the cross in (I think that’s horseshit myself, but it’s all in it being natural and not watchamacallit, synthetic, so that don’t matte
r), and how it keeps the power from getting out till I need it to.

  And then it’s showtime.

  I have a little fun with the silver for a while, just laying it against his skin here and there, and it crosses my mind not for the first time how a doctor could do some interesting research on burns, before I start getting serious. Like a hot knife through butter, you can put it that way and be dead on. Or undead on, ha, ha.

  You know what they got for insides? Me neither, but it’s as bad for them as anyone. And I wouldn’t call that a heart, but if you drive a pure wood stake through it, it’s lights out.

  It lasts forever for him, but not half long enough for me. Come dawn, it’s pretty much over. Them watchamacallits, UV rays, they’re all over the place. Skin cancer on fast-forward, you can put it that way. I leave myself half an hour for the kid, who is not really a kid because if he was, he’d be the first kid I ever killed, and I ain’t no fucking kid killer, because I seen what they get in prison and I said, whoa, not my ass.

  I stake both hearts at the same time, a stake in each hand, sending them to hell together. Call me sentimental. Set their two heads to burning in the cellar and hang in just long enough to make sure we got a good fire going before I’m outa there. House all closed up the way it is, it’ll be awhile before it’s time to call the fire department.

  I’m halfway to the airport when I realize my ribs ain’t bothered me for a long time. Healed up, just like that.

  Hallelujah, gimme that old-time religion.

  “As usual,” Steener says, snotty as all get-out, “the bulk of the fee has been divided up among your victims’ families, with a percentage to the mission downtown. Your share this time is three hundred.” Nasty grin.

  “The check’s in the mail.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “you’re from the government and you’re here to help me. Well, don’t worry, Steener, I won’t come in your mouth.”

  He actually cocks a fist and Villanueva steps in front of him. The woman with them gives Steener a really sharp look, like she’s gonna come to my defense, which don’t make sense. Villanueva starts to rag my ass about pushing Steener’s hot button but I’m feeling important enough to wave a hand at him.

  “Fuck that,” I say, “it’s time to tell me who she is.”

  Villanueva looks to the woman like he’s asking her permission, but she steps forward and lets go of her coat, and I see the marks on her neck are all gone. “I’m the mother. And the wife. They tried to—” she bites her lips together and makes a stiff little motion at her throat. “I got away. I tried to go to church, but I was … tainted.” She takes a breath. “The priest told me about—” she dips her head at Villanueva and Steener, who still wants a piece of me. “You really … put them away?”

  The way she says it, it’s like she’s talking about a couple of rabid dogs. “Yeah,” I tell her, smiling. “They’re all gone.”

  “I want to see the picture,” she says, and for a moment, I can’t figure out what she’s talking about. And then I get it.

  “Sure,” I say, and start to raise my undershirt.

  Villanueva starts up. “I don’t think you really want—”

  “Yeah, she does,” I say. “It’s the only way she can tell she’s all right now.”

  “The marks disappeared,” Villanueva snaps. “She’s fine. You’re fine,” he adds to her, almost polite.

  She feels the side of her neck. “No, he’s right. It is the only way I’ll know for sure.”

  I’m shaking my head as I raise the shirt slowly. “You guys didn’t think to sprinkle any holy water on her or nothing?”

  “I wouldn’t take the chance,” she says, “it might have—”

  But that’s as far as she gets, because she’s looking at my chest now and her face—oh, man, I start thinking I’m in love, because that’s the look, that’s the look you oughta have when you see The Power and The Passion. I know, because it’s the look on my own face when I stand before the mirror and stare, and stare, and stare. It’s so fucking there.

  Villanueva and Steener are looking off in the opposite direction. I give it a full two-minute count before I lower my shirt. The look on her face goes away and she’s just another character for a flash-movie again. Easy come, easy go. But now I know why she was so scared when she was here before. Guess they didn’t think to tell her about pure natural fibers.

  “You’re perfect,” she says and turns to Steener and Villanueva. “He’s perfect, isn’t he? They can’t tempt him into joining them, because he can’t. He couldn’t if he wanted to.”

  “Fuckin A,” I tell her.

  Villanueva says, “Shut up,” to me and looks at her like he’s kinda sick. “You don’t know what you’re talking to. You don’t know what’s standing in this room with us. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, and I was a cop for sixteen years—”

  “You told me what would have to be done with my husband and son,” she says, looking him straight in the eye and I start thinking maybe I’m in love after all. “You spelled that out easily enough. The agony of the Crucifixion, the burning and the cutting open of the bodies with silver knives, the stakes through the hearts, the beheadings, the burning. That didn’t bother you, telling me what was going to happen to my family—”

  “That’s because they’re the white hats,” I say to her, and I can’t help smiling, smiling, smiling. “If they had to do it, they’d do it because they’re on the side of Good and Right.”

  Suddenly Steener and Villanueva are falling all over each other to hustle her out and she don’t resist, but she don’t cooperate either. The last thing I see before the door closes is her face looking at me, and what I see in that face is not understanding, because she couldn’t go that far, but acceptance. Which is one fucking hell of a lot more than I’ll ever get from Steener or Villanueva or anybody-the-fuck-else.

  And Steener and Villanueva, they don’t even get it, I know it just went right by them, what I told her. They’d do it because they’re on the side of Good and Right.

  I do it because I like to.

  And I don’t pretend like I ain’t no monster, not for Good and Right, and not for Bad and Wrong. I know what I am, and the madwoman who put The Power and The Passion on my chest, she knew, too, and I think now she did it so the vamps would never get me, because God help you all if they had.

  Just a coincidence, I guess, that it’s my kind of picture.

  THE UNICORN TAPESTRY

  Suzy McKee Charnas

  Suzy McKee Charnas has won the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. Her Holdfast series, a tetralogy written over the course of almost thirty years (the first novel, Walk to the End of the World was published in 1974; the last, The Conqueror’s Child in 1999) is considered to be a germinal work of feminist science fiction. Perhaps even better known is The Vampire Tapestry, a book that grew out of the following novella, “The Unicorn Tapestry.” [The Vampire Tapestry has also been adapted (by Charnas herself) into the play Vampire Dreams.] Considered a classic ever since its publication, the Oxford Times called The Vampire Tapestry: “Probably the best vampire novel ever written.” As “Rebecca Brand” Charnas wrote the considerably more traditional vampire romance The Ruby Tear. Many of her stories are collected in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms (2006). She lives in New Mexico.

  Now, please meet Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire unlike any other you are likely to encounter…

  “Hold on,” Floria said. “I know what you’re going to say: I agreed not to take any new clients for a while. But wait till I tell you—you’re not going to believe this—first phone call, setting up an initial appointment, he comes out with what his problem is: ‘I seem to have fallen victim to a delusion of being a vampire.’”

  “Christ H. God!” cried Lucille delightedly. “Just like that, over the telephone?”

  “When I recovered my aplomb, so to speak, I told him that I prefer to wait with the details until our first meeting, which is tomorrow.”


  They were sitting on the tiny terrace outside the staff room of the clinic, a converted town house on the upper West Side. Floria spent three days a week here and the remaining two in her office on Central Park South where she saw private clients like this new one. Lucille, always gratifyingly responsive, was Floria’s most valued professional friend. Clearly enchanted with Floria’s news, she sat eagerly forward in her chair, eyes wide behind Coke-bottle lenses.

  She said, “Do you suppose he thinks he’s a revivified corpse?”

  Below, down at the end of the street, Floria could see two kids skidding their skateboards near a man who wore a woolen cap and a heavy coat despite the May warmth. He was leaning against a wall. He had been there when Floria had arrived at the clinic this morning. If corpses walked, some, not nearly revivified enough, stood in plain view in New York.

  “I’ll have to think of a delicate way to ask,” she said.

  “How did he come to you, this ‘vampire’?”

  “He was working in an upstate college, teaching and doing research, and all of a sudden he just disappeared—vanished, literally, without a trace. A month later he turned up here in the city. The faculty dean at the school knows me and sent him to see me.”

  Lucille gave her a sly look. “So you thought, aha, do a little favor for a friend, this looks classic and easy to transfer if need be: repressed intellectual blows stack and runs off with spacey chick, something like that.”

  “You know me too well,” Floria said with a rueful smile.

  “Huh,” grunted Lucille. She sipped ginger ale from a chipped white mug. “I don’t take panicky middle-aged men anymore; they’re too depressing. And you shouldn’t be taking this one, intriguing as he sounds.”

  Here comes the lecture, Floria told herself.

  Lucille got up. She was short, heavy, prone to wearing loose garments that swung about her like ceremonial robes. As she paced, her hem brushed at the flowers starting up in the planting boxes that rimmed the little terrace. “You know damn well this is just more overwork you’re loading on. Don’t take this guy; refer him.”