Blessed (18 page)

“I didn’t let anything loose. I just climbed up a wall.” I glanced down at my hands, one smooth and one scarred. The nails looked normal again. “I thought you were going to explain yourself,” I prompted. “What got into you tonight? What are you doing up here?” I frowned. “And what’s that you’re holding?”

He strode across the roof and handed me a wallet-size picture.

I moved forward where the light was better. “This is her, your girlfriend?”

“Miranda Shen McAllister,” he replied. “Her junior-year photo.”

She had freckle-free skin, blue eyes, and nearly black hair. Chinese and Scottish heritage, not that you could always tell by names, but her looks matched. “She’s pretty.” Such a lame, superficial thing to say. I handed back the picture.

“My girl.” Zachary’s fingertip traced her heart-shaped face. “This was taken before she became a neophyte.”

Oh, God, no wonder he was so pissed about Sanguini’s vampire theme. Not to mention obsessed with saving neophytes. I remembered how Freddy had mentioned Zachary needing extra TLC. I should’ve guessed.

“Miranda had been shy,” he said. “An only child. Bullied at school. Nothing like you — so sure of yourself.”

He thought I was sure of myself? I must’ve been doing a better job of faking it than I’d thought. Or at least of covering up my insecurities by keeping busy.

“Her parents had just broken up,” Zachary continued. “She had a gerbil named Mr. Nesbit and a best friend that she loved like a sister. Miranda’s mother made her crazy sometimes. Most of the time. She’d dreamed of becoming an actress. Then . . .
then
doesn’t matter, except for the few weeks we had together. Her soul was flown upstairs. And now we’re apart.”

Upstairs
as in heaven? So she was
dead
dead, not undead, not anymore.

“I know we just met,” I said, touched, “but if it helps to talk . . .”

He slipped the photo into his shirt pocket. “Does it help you, talking about Kieren? It can’t be easy dealing with your new existence, what happened with your uncle and Brad, and Kieren’s leaving, too.”

“How did you —?”

“The staff here loves you, Quincie. They’re worried. When you’re not around —”

“They talk.” Nora had told him I was undead, and that, plus Sanguini’s gossip mill, had hinted at the rest of the story. I didn’t blame the Chicagoans for asking around about me, especially Nora, given what had happened to Vaggio in the kitchen.

Zachary kept his gaze steady, waiting for an answer.

“No,” I admitted. “It’s not easy.” And then, I wasn’t sure why, I started telling Zachary all about the two of us. About Kieren and me. Not the werewolf-vampire thing, but other, more important stuff. How Kieren had always talked to me like I was just as smart as he was. How he was so serious but, after my parents’ death, also the first person to make me laugh again. How nothing ever felt totally real or complete until I told Kieren about it, and that trying to go on without him had been a walking nightmare.

How sometimes I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

Later, when I returned to Kieren’s bedroom, most of his books had reappeared on the shelves. Thank you, Meara! She was still at the wedding in Round Top, but she must’ve called Roberto from the road, and he’d taken it from there.

I hadn’t inventoried the library, so I couldn’t tell what might still be missing. But I did spot the pristine copy of
Dracula.
The Moraleses had dismissed it as fiction, too.

On Sunday afternoon, Nora, Freddy, and Zachary met me at my house for a tour.

She presented me with a porcine-blood Popsicle. “Here you go!”

I couldn’t help being amused. With Nora on the job and Sanguini’s open six days a week, my liquid diet had become far less challenging.

On the way upstairs, Freddy paused to admire a painting by an artist from Léon who’d been a friend of my parents’. “Your father was an archaeologist?”

“An academic,” I replied. “Not so much with the whip and fedora. He traveled a lot. If you don’t like the baskets and rugs and stuff, I could pack them up.”

“Oh, no!” Nora exclaimed. “Don’t even think it.”

Seeing the house through their eyes, I felt a pang of loneliness. I missed my parents. I even missed Uncle D. “When my mama was alive, there were plants everywhere. But they’ve died off over the years.”

The Moraleses had made a couple of runs for more of my clothes and a few family treasures — my parents’ wedding album, Grandma Morris’s Bible, my engraved silver baby spoon from Vaggio — but this was the first time I’d been home since the police had come for Uncle D’s body and the cleaning service had done its job. The lilies from Brad, I’d noticed, had been removed.

“You’re welcome to look around.”

Freddy and Nora strolled into the master bedroom, chatting about closet space.

Zachary, who’d been oddly quiet, chose my room instead. He looked extraordinarily male in contrast to my canopy bed with its calico-print bedspread, the eggshell-ivory-painted nightstand and dresser, and my moth-chewed Oriental rug.

I sank into the rattan chair in the corner as he studied the space.

“Mrs. Morales mentioned something to Nora about a finished attic,” Zachary said.

“You don’t want my room?” I teased. “You could take down the canopy if it’s too girly for you. Really, I don’t mind if —”

“It’s not that.” He briefly studied a picture of Mama on my nightstand. “Your room is
your
room. You may need it back before our lease runs out.”

“The Moraleses expect me to live with them at least until graduation, and —”

“Quincie . . . as time goes on, it may not be safe for them to have you there.”

It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about that. I still carried the holy water with me everywhere. I remembered too well biting my own thigh.

Zachary rested his hand on one of the bedposts. “They don’t know, do they?”

“No, they don’t.”

“And they have a daughter?”

“Meghan,” I said. “Kieren’s baby sister. She’s four. She knows about me. Or, I mean, she suspects, but she’s so young. Right after I transformed, she saw me . . .” I gestured to my face. “You know. I was pretty out of it.”

“But you didn’t drain her,” Zachary said, brightening a bit.

I looked down at my blood Popsicle. “I ran away to the lakefront instead.”

I was sure he’d heard about killings on the hike-and-bike trail bordering the lake. Mitch’s work, I suspected. I didn’t want to have that conversation, though, or point a finger at my old friend. Not yet, anyway. Besides, there hadn’t been a new murder reported in nearly two weeks. I took comfort in the fact that it was a start.

At least until Zachary said, “You know, even angels are fallible.”

There was something about the way he said it. . . .

But then I remembered: Jesus freak.

Later, I sprawled across Kieren’s denim comforter and opened
Dracula.

The focus shifts from Jonathan, still trying to escape the castle, to his fiancée, Mina, and her vivacious friend, Lucy, who’s received three marriage proposals in one day.

One of the suitors is her choice and ultimate fiancé, the Honorable Arthur Holmwood. The other two are Dr. John “Jack” Seward, who works at an insane asylum, and a Texan named Quincey P. Morris.

My name. Or at least my name if I’d been a boy, though somehow I suspected that his
P
didn’t stand for
Patrizia.

My parents had always told me that I’d been named for a generations-ago great uncle and described him as “a Texas war hero.” It had never occurred to me that they’d been talking about the War between Good and Evil.

I’d always been so focused on the restaurant, Fat Lorenzo’s and then Sanguini’s. The Crimi family legacy. But this was my family history on Daddy’s side.

In England, Mina worries that she hasn’t heard from Jonathan and frets over Lucy’s sleepwalking. A ship carrying fifty boxes of soil wrecks onshore. A dog, which goes missing, is the only survivor.

One night, as Lucy is sleepwalking at a nearby cemetery, Mina follows and sees something shadowy hovering above her friend.

When Mina reaches Lucy, it’s vanished, but Lucy’s neck has been punctured. The two wounds are tiny. Mina writes them off as pricks of a safety pin. (Really.)

Over time, Lucy’s health gets worse. Dracula is obviously “visiting” her. (By
obviously,
I mean to me, not to the characters.)

Then Mina is called away to nurse Jonathan after his ordeal at the castle, and Jack contacts Dr. Abraham Van Helsing to request his help with Lucy’s condition.

Van Helsing, who’s a total windbag, is upset about the wounds on Lucy’s neck and the fact that she needs several blood transfusions. The donors are her former boyfriends, Quincey included, and also Van Helsing himself.

The transfusions have an oddly sexual vibe. Like all the men have become Lucy’s lovers because their blood flows in her veins.

Each time, Lucy improves for a while and then weakens again. Van Helsing seems to get what’s happening and tries to protect her with garlic flowers to ward off the monster, but he doesn’t tell anyone else.

One night a wolf smashes through Lucy’s window, and her mama, who’s also been sick, dies of a heart attack.

Finally, Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur, is summoned to her deathbed, and when he bends to kiss her good-bye, Van Helsing tears him away. “Not on your life!” Van Helsing says. “Not for your living soul and hers!” And then: “He stood between them like a lion at bay.”

At first, Lucy doesn’t take that well. “A spasm as of rage flit like a shadow over her face. The sharp teeth clamped together.” But later she’s thankful.

Before death, Lucy’s gums have already begun to retract, and her teeth are noticeably sharper.

It hadn’t been that way for me, or at least I hadn’t noticed any changes in my smile before I’d died. I hadn’t been weak, either, just moody. One moment I’d felt emotionless, the next euphoric.

Not long after Lucy dies, news reports begin to appear about a “bloofer lady,” who’s been attacking village children.

Finally, Van Helsing tells Jack, Arthur, and Quincey that Lucy has vamped out (he really should’ve mentioned it earlier), and the four of them confront her in her tomb.

As a vampire, Lucy is no longer sweetly high-spirited (and kind of a bubblehead). Instead, she’s as wanton and voluptuous and evil (or so she’s described) as the female vampires at Castle Dracula. “Never did I see such baffled malice on a face, and never, I trust, shall such ever be seen again by mortal eyes. The beautiful color became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese.”

What’s more, “the woman, with a corporeal body as real at that moment as our own,” can “pass through the interstice where scarce a knife blade could have gone.”

Plus, in keeping with her early fangs and blood-lusty behavior, she’s been working her sultry thrall for a while. Quite the undead achiever, not that it helps her.

The men stake Lucy, cut off her head, and fill it with garlic.

It’s Arthur, her fiancé, who hammers home the stake. (How romantic.)

That’s when they decide to hunt down the count. (About damned time.)

Along the way, Mina and Jonathan, now married, return to England. He’s still shaky from his ordeal at the castle.

The heroes study one another’s journals, correspondence, and whatnot. Mina — who gets bonus points for being able to work the newfangled gadget that is the manual typewriter — compiles and organizes all the information for them. She also pulls the sobbing mess of guys together despite their grief over Lucy’s death.

The men spend quality time tracking down the count’s fifty boxes of Transylvanian soil, purifying them with holy wafers. Meanwhile, Dracula moves on to Mina, who looks “too pale” for a while before anyone figures out what’s going on. (Didn’t they just go through all this with Lucy?)

One night, Mina and the count are discovered together. “Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.”