8
Indoctrinated by years of secrecy, many older vampires have histories they may not want to share right away. It’s best to respect their privacy.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
I am not the kind of girl who trusts a man to tell her everything she needs to know in his own due time, so I did some research on my sire. You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.
Oddly enough, the limited information I could find on Gabriel Nightengale, (yes, that really was his name) started with a passage from my father’s self-published textbook on local history. I’d read that thing at least ten times, and I never paid attention to the well-bred boy born in 1858. Gabriel was around to see the Civil War transform Half-Moon Hollow from a grimy little river outpost to a major point of trade along the Ohio. His family owned a sizable tobacco farm on Silver Ridge Road. The family eventually amassed enough money to build a proper antebellum home they called Fairhaven.
The Nightengales were abolitionists, which I found oddly comforting. Beyond considerable wealth, the Nightengale family was utterly normal until Gabriel disappeared at age twenty one. He was healthy, hale, the pride of his family, and then suddenly he wasn’t. His parents told their neighbors that they had sent Gabriel abroad for a tour of the Continent. The sole reason for Gabriel’s inclusion in Daddy’s book was his rumored mauling at the hands—well, flippers—of a sea lion off the coast of Portugal. That was, and is, an unusual cause of death for rural Kentucky residents.
But it’s amazing what you can find out with the right Web browser. VampireArchive.com turned out to be deliciously gossipy, the Us Weekly of the underworld. According to the archives, Gabriel was a strapping young lad living a privileged, unremarkable life, until he took a strange girl out for a walk after a barn dance. I guess following strange women home is a bit of a habit with him. I couldn’t find any information about Gabriel’s sire, which was surprising, as I’d heard that vampire historians tended to be incredibly detail-oriented. They have this whole thing about preserving the vampire “family tree.”
The unnamed woman who turned him left Gabriel to rise in a cellar about a mile from his farm. Without guidance from his sire, Gabriel returned home after his traumatic first kill and hoped to return to his former life. Considering the times, his family took his being turned well. His brothers tied him to a tree, naked, to wait for sunrise. Gabriel broke free and ran away. When he didn’t descend on them in a fit of bloody vampire vengeance, his parents told everyone he was traveling. A year later, they cooked up the story about the sea lion. Apparently, sea lions were thought to be much more vicious back then. And people believed they lived in Portugal.
But Gabriel was traveling, seeking out European vampires to learn how to control his hunger and use his powers. His studies continued until his brothers died in a duel (with each other) a few years later. Having never fully recovered from Gabriel’s turning and her husband’s ensuing heart attack, his mother, Margaret, died of what my father called “shock and heartache.” According to the vampire archives, the undigested Gabriel returned to the Hollow with little fanfare, showing up at his family attorney’s office in the dead of night to claim his birthright: the house, the land, and the income. As soon as the papers were signed and sealed, he dropped off the radar again and faded from local memory.
For more than a century, Gabriel bounced between various vampire hot spots and the Hollow. He lived under an assumed name, pretended to die periodically, and then willed the house to himself under the name of a recently deceased young man. I would accuse him of stealing the trick from the Highlander movie, but he didn’t seem to take my pop-culture references very well. And he did predate the Highlander movie by about a hundred years.
Maintaining his faux inheritance technique, he rented his land to sharecroppers and developed a hand at real estate. As more local people began giving up their farms, he bought them. Before he knew it, Gabriel owned a good portion of what used to be the township. He sold it at an obscenely high profit during the Hollow’s strip-mall boom and now lived like a sort of vampire gentleman of leisure, without the smoking jacket.
Gabriel returned to the Hollow in late 1999, though it’s unclear whether it was because of the Coming Out or that he just missed his ancestral homeland—his strange, somewhat backward ancestral homeland—where he eventually vamped out yours truly. I’m sure there was more stuff in the middle there, but Gabriel was good at hiding it, which was just driving me nuts.
Aunt Jettie, who practiced moving dining-room chairs while I was elbow-deep in cyberspace, informed me that for as long as anyone in the Hollow could remember, the only people allowed on Nightengale property were the tenant farmers. And even they never met their landlord, who was reported to travel frequently. Less and less was said about the Nightengales and their farm over the years, until no one could remember ever actually meeting a member of the family or seeing the house. It was as if a significant historical property had just faded out of the local consciousness, a difficult feat in a town full of rabid Civil War buffs.
While I was in research mode, I looked up the companion Web site for the Guide for the Newly Undead. The features were impressive, with links for buying artificial blood online, a virtual global map to help track the sun at all times, and a handy translator to help newbies understand the Language of the Dead. It’s a language beyond the realm of human comprehension. It predates living speech, even humanity. It was whispered in the darkness before God said, “Let there be light,” and one of the few true ties between vampires and demons. And sadly, it sounds a good deal like Pig Latin.
For instance, Ihbiensay thethsay carthax vortho inxnay tuathua means “I believe I left my rapid infuser at the last pot luck.” I’m still learning. Vampires use the language to communicate under the human radar…and to say rude things about living people without their realizing it. There are some things that you just don’t outgrow, no matter how evolved you are as a life form.
The best part of the site was the quiz to help determine your special vampiric gifts, although it didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know. My abilities included being able to see my elderly phantom roommate and, of course, superhuman speed, strength, and agility. It was a nice turn of events for someone who used to get traded from kickball teams. I had influence over certain people, though I hadn’t figured out the formula for which people. Dang it. And according to my “human-vampire relations” score, I might eventually develop some-mind reading skills. There was something to look forward to.
I couldn’t shape-shift, like some of the ancient vamps. I couldn’t fly. And I envied the vamps with off-the-wall powers, such as finding lost objects or being able to tell when people are lying. Then again, some poor suckers were stuck with being able to feel the pain of every living thing around them or communicating with squirrels, so I felt relatively fortunate.
The site also included a listing of vampire-friendly businesses in and around my zip code, the types of places that didn’t exactly advertise in the Yellow Pages. You had to know they were there in the first place to find them, apparently. There were the expected clubs and bars but also an occult-focused hobby store called the Stitchin’ Witch and a salon that catered to our special grooming needs. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to file down vampire nails.
I was eager to make my debut in vampire society, because surely, shopping stealthily at Wal-Mart didn’t count. Knowing only one other vampire couldn’t be healthy, especially when he could turn out to be the vampiric version of my mother. Gah, I had to stop thinking that.
I needed someone who knew their way around, someone who was not Gabriel. I would have taken Zeb, purely for entertainment value, but he had an actual date, with a real girl. That hadn’t happened in a while, so I was a good friend and put my own needs second to the possibility of him having actual sex with a real girl.
“Aunt Jettie, feel like dusting off your dancing shoes and hanging out with some people who can see you?” I asked, looking up in time to watch my dead aunt try to levitate the china hutch.
That did not bode well.
“Are you sure I’m dressed OK?” I asked, fidgeting with the plain navy T-shirt and jeans I’d been wearing when Andrea, who was even more pale and elegant than I remembered, arrived at my door an hour early. She’d insisted I was fine, though she was wearing a cashmere sweater and beautifully cut gray slacks. I was starting to wonder if this was some sort of attempt to humiliate me for hurting her feelings. She’d probably take me to the club and all of the other vamps would be in black tie. And then she’d dump a bucket of pig’s blood on me.
“You look great,” she said, stopping just outside the door of the Cellar, a respectable looking cement-block building in an unassuming corner of Euclid Avenue. “You know that nobody’s going to be wearing black leather and dog collars, right?”
I shrugged. “I’ve never done this before. I didn’t go to human bars. Mudslides aside, I’m not much of a drinker. Club people are not my people. Now, book-club people—”
“These are your people, Jane, more than I am,” she said, her voice thinning as she pulled me toward the door.
“Is there a secret handshake?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “I stay two paces behind you, because I am but a lowly human. You walk into the room as if you know that you belong, that you’re one of them. Make eye contact with as many as possible. Keep your body language aggressive and rigid. You’re an aloof, indomitable warrior queen who could fend off attacks from anyone in the room.”
She reached for the stainless-steel door, repeating, “Aloof, indomitable warrior queen.”
I tensed every muscle in my arms as if I were going to punch the first person I saw, undead or otherwise. Of course, that person was a cuddly, sixty-five-year-old bartender, ironically named Norm, who was clearing pilsners off shiny bar tables.
It was a sports bar, a smoky, noisy, all-American sports bar with dart boards and neon beer signs on the walls. Nobody looked remotely interested in kicking my ass. In fact, nobody even noticed when I came in. They were too busy watching the Cardinals game on an obscenely large plasma screen.
I whirled on Andrea. “You suck.”
“No, technically, you do,” she said, giggling. “I’m sorry, it was just so easy. You should have seen the look on your face.”
“Just for that, I’m not biting you later.”
She sighed heavily. “Spoilsport.”
We sat, and Andrea ordered a dry martini and a “special” for me. I didn’t know what that was, but Norm seemed to know her and didn’t seem like someone who was going to slip garlic (or Rohypnol) into my cocktail. I scanned the room, making a game of separating the vamps from the nonvamps.
Norm was definitely human. He was familiar in an “I think I’ve seen you at church before” way. And he seemed happy and comfortable slinging doctored beers to vampires. Somehow that made me relax. There were two human men mixed in with the crowd watching the baseball game. The vampires were your typical enthusiastic sports fans, cheering, hooting, and sloshing their drinks. The occasional splash of synthetic blood on their shirts was the only sign that something was amiss—besides the vampire Cubs fan sulking in the corner.
A dishwater-blond male vamp wearing faded jeans and a “Virginia Is for Lovers” T-shirt sipped dark lager at the bar, ignoring the hullabaloo behind him. The rest of the tables seated groups of vampire women, immersed in pastel drinks and naughty conversations. Maybe these were vampire housewives?
Seriously, the scariest thing about this place was the sign advertising “Karaoke Tuesdays.” The idea of a drunk vampire belting “I Will Survive” off-key was somehow both compelling and terrifying.
I was calm, comfortable, and ready for a good time when Norm returned with a martini, which he declared “dry as dust” with a fond pat on Andrea’s head. I got something frothy and the color of ripe cantaloupe.
“Um, what is this?” I asked Andrea, waiting for Norm to pass out of hearing distance.
“It’s a smoothie.” Andrea watched as I took a tentative sip. It was good, fruity with just enough coppery aftertaste. Andrea continued, “A special smoothie. Fruit juice, vitamins, minerals, protein powder, and a little bit of…um, pig’s blood.”
“Pig’s blood!” I yelped, spitting the smoothie back into the glass. Andrea shushed me. “You let me drink pig’s blood?”
Well, at least she didn’t dump it on me.
“Shh,” Andrea hissed. “Look, Norm uses pig’s blood because the artificial blood doesn’t mix well with the fruit juice. The enzymes make it go brown. And Norm has some ethical issues with serving human blood. Just try it. You’ll like it. It’s like a zinfandel, light and sweet. At least, that’s what I’m told.”
“I’m not loving you right now,” I growled at her, swallowing a mouthful. It wasn’t bad, but I just couldn’t get the visions of a pleading Porky Pig out of my head. This attitude was pretty hypocritical given my before-death enthusiasm for bacon.
“See?” Andrea asked brightly as I took another sip. “Good girl.”
“Kiss my ass,” I grumbled.
Andrea ignored my grumpiness and gestured to the smoky barroom. “So, what do you think?”
“It’s OK,” I admitted. “Even with everything I’ve learned about vampires, I still expected moody lighting and Goth kids reciting bad poetry. Consider me pleasantly surprised.”
A lovely rose blush tinted Andrea’s cheeks. If she weren’t such a nice person, it would really piss me off that she looked like a redheaded Grace Kelly. Andrea was as out of place here as, well, me in a gym. Andrea was probably not the type of person I would have spent time with when I was living. She was too put together, for one thing. She made my sister seem rumpled. But she was the safest person I knew who could navigate her way through the vampire underground. And I really wanted to make up for making her feel like a hooker.
I’d already decided that if I was going to develop a healthy friendship with Andrea—whose last name was Byrne, by the way—I needed to know more than her deliciously rare blood type. I was not going to be able to feed from her again. It was far too intimate an experience, like making out with someone at the office Christmas party and spending New Year’s week pretending that person hasn’t felt you up. Not that I know what that’s like.
“What I want is some answers,” I said, picking a pretzel from the bowl on the table. Then, remembering the pot pie, I dropped it. “You know, basic stuff. Who you are, where you’re from, how you got into this line of work. You owe me, lady. Let’s start with why you can pronounce all your vowels separately, oh ye of little accent.”
I dutifully sipped my pig’s blood as Andrea told me a sordid tale worthy of her own country song. Andrea was pulled into the vampire world just before the Great Coming Out. She was a sophomore studying information systems at the University of Illinois when she met a vampire professor. Maxwell Norton, age 321, taught history, which was pretty unfair considering he’d been there when most of it happened. Norton, whose real name was Mattias Northon, scented Andrea’s rare vintage blood type on the first day of class. He separated her from the class like a wounded gazelle and nurtured her as a pet. She watched over him during the day, fed him, picked up his dry cleaning, graded his papers. And in return, she was introduced to vampire society—like a debutante with really big veins.
Norton taught her how to dress, to speak, to behave in a way that pleased his sophisticated undead friends. Then, seven years later, Norton found a newer, fresher freshman pet and tossed Andrea aside, despite the fact that she’d dropped out of college and given up her life to be with him. Men, even dashing, mysterious vampire men, can be such bastards.
Andrea had suffered from her own overbearing helicopter parents, the kind of people who calculated how every breath Andrea took reflected on them and their family. They accompanied her to job interviews, called her dorm room at least once a day to make sure she was up-to-date on her assignments and her flossing. But as soon as her loving relatives found out she was consorting with vampires, Andrea was unceremoniously pruned from the family tree. Her dad stopped payment on the tuition check, and her mother let Andrea know she was no longer welcome in the Christmas-card picture. This may have been the point of her taking up with Norton in the first place. Vampires may bite you, they may bleed you, but they don’t judge you.
Andrea remained in the underground vampire community more out of necessity than anything else. Broke and lacking a degree, she found her rare blood type was the easiest and most lucrative way to make money. She moved to the Hollow to be near a friend she’d met through an online vampire pets’ community. She got a job in a boutique downtown that catered to riverboat tourists and the top one percent of Half-Moon Hollow’s socioeconomic caste. But her real income came from “protectors” who enjoyed her blood. She’d get a page, go to the client’s home, and offer up her veins. She said many of her clients were lonely and often asked her to stick around to talk for a while. They were generous and more than happy to pass her name on to other respectable vampires. Apparently, her line of work was all about referrals. The only occupational hazards were the constant need for turtlenecks and trying to fit enough iron into her diet.
I stuck with smoothies through the night, because after the Kahlua episode, I decided that alcohol and I weren’t friends anymore. It was nice just to sit and talk as we discussed childhoods, family dynamics, and men—with the exception of the one man we both wanted to talk about. I deliberately skirted the issue of Gabriel and his relationship with Andrea, whatever that might be. It was cowardly, but Andrea seemed like my first shot at a friend who truly understood this new world I’d been dropped into. I didn’t want to run the risk of alienating her.
“So, your experience hasn’t made you want to avoid vampires altogether?” I asked. “I’d probably be out burning the undead in effigy. Not that I want to give you any ideas or anything.”
“Vampires are just like humans,” Andrea said. “You meet good ones and bad ones. Pulse has very little to do with it.”
“Have you ever wanted to be turned yourself?”
“You know, I’ve never had a vampire offer to turn me,” she admitted. “They can feed off me if I’m undead, but it’s not as much fun, and the nutritional value of my blood drops. I guess they don’t want to kill the golden goose, if you know what I mean. But I like living. I’m not afraid of death, which seems to be a problem for people who get turned. No offense.”
“None taken,” I assured her. “I was afraid. I wasn’t ready to die. When I thought of the ways I preferred to die, I wanted to be a hundred years old and surrounded by generations of adoring descendants. Though a hair dryer and an ill-timed fall into a tub was far more likely. I never considered deer or drunk drivers.”
“Well, it’s certainly a more interesting story than a hair dryer and a bathtub,” she said. “What about you? Tell me everything. Do you have a boyfriend or…”
“I’m definitely in the ‘or’ category.” I snorted. “Let’s see, the last guy I dated—is there a word for someone who’s sexually attracted to Muppets?”
Andrea’s elegant persona was destroyed as she laughed so hard martini shot out of her nose. That made me feel pretty good. I regaled her with my epic tales of dating men too bizarre to allow past second base—the jobless, the spineless, the one who brought his mama on our first date. By the time I got to Derek, the man with an unnatural interest in Miss Piggy, most of the crowd had drifted out. It was just us, Norm the teddy-bear bartender, and the Virginia-loving lager drinker.
I don’t think Andrea had been out on many girls’ nights, because she went whole hog on the martinis. Given the late hour, the amount of vodka consumed, and her regular blood donations, it was impressive that she was still upright. But once she started actually watching the Australian competitive darts championship on the big screen, I called for the check. We wandered out just as a gaunt, semimulleted vamp in a faded Whitesnake T-shirt came barreling in. Andrea, already unsteady on her feet, mumbled drowsily as she bumped into me.
“Excuse us,” I muttered, retrieving Andrea from her 130-degree lean. I had my droopy new friend tucked into her passenger seat when I realized I’d left my purse behind.
I jogged back into the bar, opening the door on Mr. Whitesnake literally holding Norm upside down by his ankles and shaking him. The lager drinker was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s the cash, you useless sack of meat?” Whitesnake snarled, his fangs in full play. Norm, who looked oddly resigned to this treatment, pointed to the wall behind the bar.
“Hey! Put him down!” I yelled, rushing to catch Norm when Whitesnake complied.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, setting Norm on his feet.
“Punching some nosy bitch in the face.”
“Wha—?” I managed before Whitesnake’s fist collided with the bridge of my nose. Whitesnake stood six feet tall and looked as if he’d been blown out from a straw, and yet the sheer force of the blow threw me back through the bar door and skidding into the gravel of the parking lot.
That did not feel good.
My face felt as if it were located somewhere near the back of my head. I sat up, rolling my neck. My stomach dropped greasily at the sound of my vertebrae snapping back into place. I was shaking off that new entry in the ick files and wondering how the hell Andrea was sleeping through this when Norm came flying out the door.
I loved that I was able to spring up and catch Norm’s pudgy form before he was a smear on the parking lot. I did not love the look on Whitesnake’s face as he came storming out of the bar.
“Run!” I hissed as Whitesnake advanced. Norm, obviously accustomed to this occupational hazard, scurried to his nearby car, found his magnetic Hide-A-Key, and pulled away in less time than it takes to say “Gratuity included.”
I turned my attention back to my face-rearranging buddy, who was seconds from slamming me like a rag doll into the hood of an old Mustang. Let me tell you, solid American engineering hurts. My legs flailed as I thumped back against the hood, landing a lucky kick to the side of his head. He flinched, letting me land another one, planting the toe of my canvas sneaker in his ear. It also gave me time to shove the heel of my hand under his chin, not to hurt him but to direct his breath away from me. How could someone who didn’t eat or, for that matter, need to breathe have breath that smelled like expired Parmesan cheese?
The breath, combined with chapped lips and eyes that were “I just ate special brownies” red, added up to someone I didn’t want hovering close to my nose. I gave Whitesnake another quick punch to the mouth, his teeth scraping deep across my knuckles. I must have hit him hard, because one of his canines clacked to the ground.
I quickly surmised that fangs are the one thing we didn’t grow back, because he was really, really pissed about it. I barely got out an “Oh, cr,” before I was splayed over the hood, gaining intimate personal knowledge of the hood ornament in a manner I’d rather not discuss again.
With the pummeling, my head snapped back, and I caught a glimpse of Andrea dozing blissfully in the front seat.
“A fat lot of help you are!” I yelled just before Mr. Whitesnake took this lapse of concentration as an opportunity to try to crush my skull with his bare hands.
The popping noise my cranium made was something that would make my skin crawl for the rest of my long, long life. I made an embarrassing girlie squeal as I tried to pry his fingers away from my scalp. Having exhausted my limited fighting skills, I resorted to the one thing that always worked in elementary school.
I kicked Whitesnake in the nuts.
And I was thrilled to find that it worked on men both dead and alive. He crumpled to the ground, howling. I sat up, postponing running and screaming long enough to let my skull knit back together.
A bemused voice sounded from behind the car. “OK, honey, I don’t care what he’s done to you, you just don’t kick a man in his goods. It’s just not done.”