Carla Van Buren looked to be fifty-ish. She had hair that was mostly gray but I could also see some of the thick, dark brown it had been at some point in the past. She was tall and dumpy and looked very Nordic in terms of her frame. I figured she'd come by the name honestly. For all I knew, she was an original immigrant. I didn't have any idea how old she was.
She was folding sheets in one corner of this particular patient's room. The woman was as pale as one of those sheets and Carla was watching her with the intent gaze of a predator sizing up the prey. I wondered whether she'd fed from this woman and left her looking like that or whether she was mulling over feeding from her and finishing her off. I didn't see a lot in her harsh expression that made room for anything else. She had to have seen us, had probably smelled me before I'd gotten there, but she didn't look over. She just kept folding until the sheet was sharp enough to slice through a two by four plank and then set it aside.
“She isn't going to make it through the night,” she sighed. Her voice was very soft, out of place in a body that big. It sounded like a much nicer person was being held prisoner inside. “I've called her family. I don't think they give a damn. She owns about two hundred acres a few miles that way.” Carla pointed with a thumb to one side. “One of the day nurses, she told me the other night when I came in for my shift that the family had a team of surveyors out there last month. They can't wait to see her go.” Carla nodded at the old woman. “They just want to sell to a developer and forget she existed.”
I looked around. The room was tiny, neat but crumbling, like it seemed everything here had gotten to be in the last fifty years. “They must need the money.”
Carla smirked at me and started folding another sheet. “So, I take it you're Withrow?”
I nodded at her, leaned my frame against the door jam. “I got your message last year. Thought I'd pay a visit while I'm in town.”
“Thought you'd make sure I'm not shacked up with the mayor and the chief of police with a finger in every pie, you mean.”
I shrugged at her, nonchalant. “Maybe,” I said.
“Don't worry,” she finally said with another heavy sigh. “I keep to myself.”
I nodded at her, looked down at the floor, kicked the heel of one boot against the toe of the other. “That's all I need to know,” I replied. “Just want to make sure everyone knows I keep an eye out and an ear to the ground even though I’m in Raleigh. If you have trouble, I'll help if I can. If you make trouble, I'll end it.”
She fluttered her lips in a half laugh, half scoff sort of way. “Big bad city vampire come to tell me what to do?” She looked me up and down. “You couldn't find me in these parts if I didn't want you to. I don't need to be talked to like a kid, neither. I bet you were knee-high when I was tits-deep my Last Gasp.”
I smiled a little, shrugged again, inspected a fingernail. “Maybe, maybe not.”
“Maybe not,” she said, and her eyes narrowed a little. “So how long are you going to be around?”
“A few days,” I said casually. “Just got a couple more calls to make on folks, figured I'd spend a few days re-familiarizing myself with the area, then head back to Raleigh.” I snapped my fingers – Smiles neither jumped nor spun nor looked away from Carla – and dug in my pocket, pulling out a little notebook. I flipped to a shopping list. I mimed reading the words there, or consulting them. The page read: light bulbs, fabric softener, dark fabric detergent, vacuum cleaner bags, rawhide treats. What I said was, “By the way, there's one vampire around whose number I couldn't find in Bob's stuff after I killed him, and for that matter I couldn't find a name, either. Somebody down in Asheville? Sounded old from Bob's notes but that's about all I've got.”
Her eyes stayed narrow. “Could be anybody,” she said.
I chuckled and scratched my right cheek. “Could be. Didn't get a chance to ask Bob himself, what with his being a puddle by the time I was done taking over. He might have had more notes but I torched his place in a fit of pique.” I smiled benignly. “Anything you can tell me would of course be appreciated.”
Carla went back to folding her sheet more intently, snapped it into place with quick hands, picked up another, stared at the dying woman in the bed. “Charles. Chucky, they call him. I hear he likes the bars in Asheville.” She sneered a little. “City vampires.”
I smiled politely. “Of course. I should've thought of that myself. What's he look like?”
She laughed. “I don't know. Haven't seen him. He could be anybody.”
I raised both eyebrows. “Not much of one for social calls, eh?”
She snapped that sheet together and into place, too, and put her fists in her armpits, arms crossed. “No,” she said. “That's not how I think we ought to work. We live our lives in isolation. We don't make trouble. We pick a people and we stick with them, blend into them. Is that against the rules now?”
I laughed quietly and put up both hands. “No,” I said. “Not at all. I think exactly the same way. I also don’t like to tell people what to do. I like to be left alone and I like to leave others alone. That’s why Bob Three isn’t here and I am.”
A quiet buzzing came from somewhere in Carla's pockets and she pulled out a little pager thing and looked at the tiny screen. She pressed a button so that it went silent. “Mr. Wilson in 203 needs something.”
I nodded and started to step out of the doorway to let her through but she moved to the old woman in the bed rather than towards the door. Smiles hadn’t followed with me: he’d read her body language before I did. I arched an eyebrow and she looked cross. “A little privacy?”
I made a small O with my mouth and turned my back. Smiles was less polite but she didn’t seem to care. I could hear, just at the edge of even my ears, the slicing of skin, suckling, then silence. I could hear the old woman die in her sleep. To be honest, it was a pretty peaceful way to go. It doesn't feel good to have someone bite open your neck and drain your blood, but if they do it on your right side you don't live long enough to feel much of anything: the brain starts to starve almost immediately. A vampire who wants his prey to live has to bite on their left so the brain keeps getting blood while the victims gasp and flail and bleed.
I could hear Carla lick the wound closed – the only reason any of us are still a secret at all is that our saliva makes it heal quick – and stand up and straighten her dress. When I turned back around she was using the old lady's mirror to check that there wasn't blood anywhere on her uniform. She looked back at me and I could smell... something. It smelled like lightning.
I had never seen a vampire use their Last Gasp abilities. I’d heard crazy bragging stories but the rarity of fact mixed in with all the self-aggrandizing, bullshit fiction made it impossible to know if I’d ever seen it really happen. I wasn’t even sure I believed the stories. I’d made it just fine without anything other than the hoodoo and the way the blood made my body supremely more able than that of any mortal man, no matter how fit and regardless of how I looked. The stories, though, said that when we drain the life out of a creature, actually take their life from them by drinking, we consume something special. I can’t say if it's the soul, exactly, or an essence or what: some metaphysical whatsit left over from the person's living blood leaving their living body to sustain us. I don't know any of that shit. I don't think about it much. The point is, supposedly when we’ve had our Last Gasp and we do kill someone by draining them – and the smart ones among us don't do that very often at all – we can do something unquestionably supernatural. It's different for all of us. If a vampire is very carefully raised up, so that they never kill, they never find out what that is. Their makers, if they're real careful, don't tell them it exists because then the kids would just want to do it as soon as possible to find out their super-secret power. Sometimes it's something useless; sometimes it's the ability to read minds; sometimes it's downright scary and magical. Like I said, unique for every one of us and no way to tell until we try it and see what manifests itself in our persona
l arsenal of abilities. I imagine there are vampires out there whose power is so obscure or useless or whatever that they never do find out what it is, no matter how many people they kill, because they don't have any reason to try boiling a kettle of water with their mind or turning everything in sight bright blue on command. Others, of course, milk it for everything it's worth. Agatha can live, complete with heartbeat and a need to breathe and an appetite for real food, until the next sunrise. I only know that because she did it once to fool a doctor for a life insurance exam when she was getting ready to dispose of one of her paper identities and she wanted it to turn a profit. She’s embarrassed by it. She’s ashamed that it’s even possible for her to live as a human again. On the other hand, lots of us learn to manipulate our bodies in interesting ways. I’d wondered plenty of times if she was just yanking my chain to gain some upper hand psychologically: to say, look what I can do that you can’t. After all, she’s the one who taught me how to eat again and there was nothing special about that but all the practice it had taken.
Until Clyde’s death, I’d never had the possibility of learning what mine would be, assuming I had one. I’d wondered, plenty of times. Maybe I would be able to turn everything real dark, just drown all the light in a place so that it’s pitch black and I’m the only thing that can see. That could be plenty cool, and I’d always seemed to see the lights flicker when I felt my emotions pulse in some way; on the other hand, it’s so obviously unnatural that I don’t see it would be much of an advantage when it comes to hunting and such. If it turned out I could turn invisible then I’d have use for it, of course, but that would mean killing people and I can't quite bring myself to think it's OK to murder someone just to take a joy ride.
Carla was starting to sell me on the idea this Secret Vampire Power stuff was for real, though. She’d just taken that woman’s life and the air all around her smelled like lightning fixing to strike. I blinked at her and she looked back at me in the mirror and smiled a little, mysterious, secretive. Her pocket buzzed again and she mashed whatever button made the pager go silent without even taking it out of her pocket. “Don't worry, Mr. Wilson,” she said to the air, “I'm coming, I'm coming.” She swept past Smiles and down the hall towards the other end of the building. We followed her. I was too curious to contain myself or act polite anymore and she hadn’t bothered asking me not to follow anyway. I could hear Carla's pocket buzzing again and this time she didn't bother to turn it off, she just picked up the pace to a sort of half-trot. I took longer steps to keep up, walking heavily, boots ricocheting on the cheap old tile. It felt a lot like the inside of that dead factory where The Transylvanian lived, for just a moment, and I pushed those thoughts aside and half-ran myself to see which room was 203. She got there two steps ahead of me and shot through the door. I stopped in the doorway, a hand on either side of it, leaning forward a little. She walked in and the room brightened with her presence. I mean it. Light was coming from her, from somewhere I couldn’t see, in some way I couldn’t see. The room was dark until she walked in and then it glowed a little with something pure and sparkling.
Mr. Wilson was a desperately old husk of a man with whispy white hairs on his head and a clean-shaven face twisted in agony. Both hands were on the buzzer and he had a death-grip on the call button. Carla's pocket was going crazy buzzing and I could see from the way his eyes bulged that Mr. Wilson was about to asphyxiate in the middle of a cardiac arrest. Carla had her back to me, then looked over her shoulder, smiled again and stepped around the bed so that it was between us and I could see. She had gone from propriety to exhibitionism in the span of one dead woman.
Carla put one hand on Mr. Wilson's throat then placed the other on his chest. Light spilled out from between her fingers. Mr. Wilson let go of the buzzer all of a sudden, as his face went slack and he started breathing again in fast, shallow, ragged gasps. His eyelids fluttered and closed, and his whole body relaxed so that he was finally slack and sleeping with the call button laying askew on his hip. Light shone in crazy patterns on the ceiling, shifting even though the man was completely still and Carla’s hand was pressed firmly to his chest. Smiles barked once, sharp and frightened. There was a hum in the air like the white noise of a TV screen turned up a thousand times. The light glowed so bright I thought it might hurt my eyes and I’d started to raise one arm when the light flickered, flashed red all of a sudden, guttered like a candle and died. The room was plunged into darkness and Carla lifted her hand away at long last to feel the guy’s pulse.
“You can heal people?” My voice was hoarse from surprise.
Carla didn't say anything right away. She checked a couple of beeping machines next to Mr. Wilson, then walked back over to the door so that both Smiles and I got out of her way and she closed it behind her. “Tomorrow Mr. Wilson will call his lawyer,” she whispered. “He'll change his will so that I get seven percent instead of six.” She smiled softly but distantly, somewhere between a matron and Mommy Dearest. “He owns the development company that woman's family wants to sell to.” Her smile stayed nailed in place. “I'm giving him until I'm up to ten percent. Any longer than that and his family will start to wonder how the hell he's hung on so long. They didn’t bring him to this shit hill because they couldn’t afford better or nothing: they brought him here to be ignored until he died.” She smacked her lips suddenly and turned to me. “Thanks for stopping by, Withrow. It’s good to put a face with the name.”
I said a polite goodbye and left as quickly as decorum would allow.
6
“So she's a nurse who heals for money and profits?” Roderick's tone was casual but his eyes were wider than normal and the way he licked one corner of his lips over and over gave the lie to all that nonchalance. “Big deal, right? Welcome to the for-profit medical industry. It’s kind of what private insurance companies do all the time.”
I had to smile a little. He had a point, sort of. “I still don't like it,” I grumbled. “It's a little... I don't know, a little squicky.”
“Squicky?”
I'd met up with him outside one of Asheville's low-rent nightclubs for college kids. If I'd had to guess, I'd say he'd been hunting. He likes the young ones. Emily tells me he very rarely does them any serious damage, so whatever. As long as he kept his nose clean, I didn't care. We all have to eat sometime. From there we’d walked most of the way back to his hotel in the middle of downtown.
“Squicky.” I shrugged a little. Roderick finished a cigarette and tossed the butt onto the sidewalk as we neared the doors to his hotel. “It's a word, isn't it?”
“It's a web word,” Roderick said with a smile. “You've been going online, haven't you?”
I shrugged again, trying to look like I didn't understand. “I've been using the email account you set me up with, yeah.”
Roderick shrugged in mimicry of me and grinned. “Look at me,” he said in a silly, high-pitched voice. “My name is Withrow and I’m a big mean vampire who doesn’t like anybody and I think computers are for pussies.”
“I use PayPal!” I blurted out, then I fluttered my lips and laughed. “I don’t think computers are for pussies. I just, I don’t know, I get self-conscious about all this stuff. I’m worried someone will expect me to understand it – like really get it the way guys stand around and talk about intake manifolds and get it – and I won’t and they’ll think I’m some old fuddy-duddy.”
Roderick’s eyes softened for a fraction of a second. “Oh, Cousin,” he sighed. “Guys don’t stand around talking about intake manifolds anymore, and nobody gives a shit how the Internet works.”
We were silent for a few seconds while he toyed with lighting another cigarette. I supposed he was right on both counts. A little piece of the way I’d had of understanding the world – a segment of the overlap between the world of my life and the world of my unlife – fell away and I had the impression we were both watching it tumble away into space. I broke the silence. “Hey, you didn't happen to notice anyone... else in that
bar, did you?”
Roderick wrinkled his brow at me and shook his head. “No. Anyone special?”
I sighed and waved a hand at nothing. “Maybe? Carla claimed there's one of us around who likes the bars, nightclubs, that kind of thing. Wasn't on Bob's list. I suggested to her that I’d heard about a vampire not being on the list. I figured it was a good way to maybe unearth one of The Transylvanian’s extended brood, like the six -“ I caught myself, counted again in my head and corrected it. “Like the five he was showing off back at the plant. She said there was one downtown who likes nightclubs but that’s all I’ve got.”
Roderick looked around theatrically, hand to his brow as though scanning a distant coast. “Last time I checked, Cousin Withrow, this was Asheville, North Carolina. There aren't a lot of nightclubs. He can't be that hard to find.”
I frowned at him. “Maybe not by Seattle standards, but by North Carolina’s it’s doing reasonably well.”
He smirked but didn’t let it distract us.
“Would you like me to... look for him?” Roderick waggled his eyebrows a little, excited at the thought of being let off the leash of guest-hood for a while.
I opened my mouth for a moment, closed it, then said, “No, leave it to me. It's not that you aren't capable, it's that I need to be the one to find him. It's my state. I still can't afford to have anything but a personal contact. I want to establish myself in their minds first.”
Roderick shrugged at me, that same mimicry, and smiled. “Your call, Cousin. Your call.”
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 14
