Blood Oranges (9781101594858) (12 page)

Okay, so I headed towards the front door (in retrospect, a smarter woman would probably have headed for the back door), and there, on the fugly yellow carpet was a white envelope. While I slept, apparently someone had come along and slid it underneath the door. I stood staring at it—I don't know how long; longer than I should have. When I finally did pick it up, the envelope was heavier than I'd expected. Also, it stunk of cologne. Maybe that was just my preternatural vamp-loup senses kicking in, but the smell was so strong it briefly managed to mask the reek of the apartment.

“Well,” I heard Mr. B say from inside my skull, “are you just going to stand there gawking, or are you going to look inside?” This wasn't unusual. I often imagined Mr. B's voice in my head. It's like, after he scooped me up and made me his own personal junky (because who doesn't need one of those?), the voice of my own conscience or common sense or whatever was subsumed by that purling, snide way he had with words.

“Are you going to look inside?”

I ripped the envelope open, and, lo and behold, there was five hundred dollars. Five hundred fucking dollars, and a handwritten note. I recognized B's handwriting straightaway. There's this thing he does, so all the letters lean back to the left, and the way the dots on his j's and i's lean right. Anyway. The note from the envelope read:

Dearest Siobhan,

Don't worry about the fellow in the taxi, but know that I'll not wipe your ass a second time. One more bit of mayhem like that, and, I can assure you, you'll have much worse than the police about which to worry your pretty head. Also, do not attempt to contact me. When I can do so safely, I'll find you. But not before. Meanwhile, here's a little spending money. Use it wisely. Must go now. Ta.

Affectionately,

Bartholomew

“Fuck you, Bartholomew,” I said, and sat down on the carpet. I think maybe I just sat there counting the money over and over. Don't know how long, but it finally occurred to me the first thing I ought to use the money for was to do something about the way I looked. My face. The countenance of the Beast and all. The blue-haired boy had brought the means with which to hide those black-and-amber eyes. Short of a good cosmetic dentist (and a lot more cash than five hundred dollars), I was just going to have to deal with my newfangled piranha teeth. But, my complexion, that was something I
could
address.

I made myself as presentable as possible (which included a shower and washing my hair, though I didn't have any shampoo and had to make do with Ivory soap). I changed my T-shirt again, but the jeans I'd slept in had to suffice, as I only had the two pairs (the ones from two nights back were still caked with the “sanguine juices” of my first victim). My pink converse sneakers looked like a train had run over them, and, besides, I noticed there were bloodstains on them. So, I pulled on my battered old Chucks, pocketed the money, and headed for the mall. Which felt utterly fucking ridiculous, by the way. And now, fresh from her latest slaughter, the undead, lycanthropic fiend goes shopping, like any other good American girl.

There's a MAC counter in the Nordstrom's at the Providence Place Mall, and the walk only took me about half an hour. You can't get winded when you don't have to breathe. Oh, but you do have to
pretend
to breathe in order to talk, and also . . . it's amazing how people pick up on something as subtle as the person sitting next to them on the bus not breathing. Anyway, at the mall, I went directly to the MAC counter. I told the woman who waited on me I had a very rare skin disease, a nasty case of cutaneous porphyria (from time to time, all that reading at the Athenaeum pays off), which is why my skin was so pale, and why you could see the veins so clearly here and there. She looked alarmed until I assured her my condition wasn't contagious (at least that part was true), but then she noticed my teeth and wanted to know if the disease had caused that as well. I told her it had.

“I am so, so sorry,” she said, doing a halfway decent job of actually looking so, so sorry while still maintaining her original expression of revulsion. Since things were going so well, I figured why not fuck with her. Her name was Allison. She looked about my age.

“My boyfriend left when he found out,” I told her. “But you can hardly blame him, can you?”

So, I earned myself another round of “Oh, that's just awfuls” and “Oh, I'm so sorries” and “poor dears.”

“We'd just gotten engaged,” I added, no longer trying to hide the teeth. “The wedding would have been next June, once he returned from Guatemala.”

“Guatemala?” she asked.

“He's a Presbyterian missionary,” I replied. How I got through this without laughing, I'm still not entirely sure.

Fast forward past my lies about losing my Presbyterian missionary fiancé, though it went on awhile longer. She sat me down in a chair and proceeded to demonstrate how she could have me looking good as new, quick as a flash. Mostly, I remember her whipping out a concealer that she claimed was so good the Mafia used it to cover up bullet holes. I assumed she was joking, though she dropped her voice to just above a conspiratorial whisper when she said it. After that, I sat still while she smeared this on my face and brushed that on my cheeks and talked incessantly about how sad it all was, my diseased situation.

“Maybe, when he sees you now,” she said, obviously pleased with both the quality of her artistry and the product she was selling, “perhaps then he'll have a change of heart.”

“I seriously doubt it,” I said. “After all, cutaneous porphyria is hereditary. Think of the children.” I'm pretty sure I had her close to tears.

“Dear,” she said, as her knuckles and fingertips lightly brushed across my skin while she worked, “you're so cold.” Never mind that the AC in the department store must have been cranked down to subzero, and it's a wonder the place wasn't crawling with hypothermia cases.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Lower body temperature. The megadoses of vitamin B12 do that,” at which point I was no longer even trying to make sense. Still, it sounded good, and near as I could tell, she bought it.

When she was finished, she handed me a mirror. And right then's when I realized something I should have fucking realized the day before, if not sooner. I cast a reflection. I was a vampire, but
I cast a reflection
. There I was in the mirror, gazing back at myself with eyes of phony hazel green, and I could see that Allison had done a fine, fine job.

About three seconds later I dropped the mirror, and it shattered loudly on the floor between us.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh my goodness.” No, really. That's what she said. Not “shit” or “damn it” or a good ol' “what the fuck.” Allison the MAC consultant, she said, “Oh my goodness.”

“Sorry,” I all but squeaked. “Sporadic momentary paralysis. Never know when it's going to happen.”

She stared at the shards of glass and sighed. “Well, don't you worry. I'll have someone sweep it up right away.”

So, I bought from Allison a compact of Studio Tech NW20 foundation (“a tri-system of water, emollients, and powder”), a small container of Studio Finish NW20 concealer and another of matte buff-colored blush. She even threw in a special bonus pity gift, a black suppository-shaped tube of lipstick (a shade called “hug me,” and, again, I shit you not). Exiting Nordstrom's, seventy dollars the poorer, I made a mental note not to forget the porphyria story, as it might come in handy in the future.

* * *

S
o, another day goes by. I sit in my apartment and stew. I walk the streets. Another night passes, then another day, and I have to feed again. This time it's a street crazy, the sort who ought to be in a mental institution, but he's not, because Mr. Ronald Reagan ruined that safety net before I was even born. I rationalized his murder by telling myself he was better off dead. I did a decent enough job of disposing of the body, but I see no good reason to go into the lurid details. Another day. Another night. Another day. Another night. Another victim. And it went on like this for a week. A week became two weeks, and August was about to become September. Still no sign of Mr. B. No sign of Aloysius, either, and no more envelopes pushed under my door. The latter's of no particular concern, as I still had a third (give or take) of the five hundred. After the visit to the MAC counter, I bought some clothes at a secondhand shop on Thayer Street and picked up a few things from a hardware store to assist in the disposal of my meals. I worried just a little about what was going to happen when the rent came due at the end of the month, but I was so busy fretting over other shit
and
staying well fed
and
ditching the bodies, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of time left over to worry about things like rent. I'd been homeless before, I could do it again, especially now that I'd been relieved of my mortality (though, to be honest, fleecing my victims of green, folding money was helping out; I steered clear of credit and ATM cards). I kept an eye on the papers and local television newscasts (I had a tiny color TV with a built in DVD player, which was in the apartment when I'd moved in, placed there by B, I always assumed) for any news of the spoils of my appetite, but there was nothing.

It did occur to me that if police
were
finding the bodies, and maybe they had gotten it in their heads there was a serial killer on the loose whose modus operandi was bleeding out his quarry, they might be keeping a lid on it for any number of reasons. By the way, here's another by the way. I never have yet seen any reason to distinguish vamps from serial killers. Same damn thing, near as I can tell. Sure, vamps
need
the blood. But then, seems like an awful lot of mortal serial killers are driven by their own needs, impulses, compulsions, whatever, and that those compulsions can be as maddening as a bloodsucker's need to feed. Which, of course, makes
me
a serial killer. We call this avoiding denial and self-delusion. We call this keeping myself honest. I simply see no reason to lie, not in this instance. Way I see it, I'm not a predator, not like a grizzly bear or a lion or a great white shark, I'm just a killer, and me being dead and still walking about might make me a different sort of killer, but if we believe Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy had a choice, I sure as hell do. Questions of the existence of Evil—capital E—arise. Anyway. You believe the nineteen-year-old murderess who, last count, has chewed her way through some three hundred (yeah, I keep score) human beings, or you don't. Not my problem.

Back to our story, already in progress.

Two weeks come and go. On the one hand, I was getting the hang of the vampire thing. On the other, I was waiting to get fuzzy with no warning whatsoever, wondering how that would go, and also wondering where the fuck Mr. B was holed up. Finally, last week of August, I decided it was high time that I at least tried to get a few answers from someone who wasn't a troll who preferred to speak in unsolvable riddles.

Now, my first trip to a demon whorehouse (or bordello, or bawdyhouse, or house of ill repute, or whatever strikes your fancy) was not that night B dragged me down to meet Drusneth, a.k.a. Madam Calamity, the night we all had a laugh at Bobby Ng's expense. A couple of months before the disaster by the Scituate Reservoir, B had me tag along with him to this dump over in the Armory District. If you're not from Providence, I know that means fuck all to you, which is why Rand McNally sells maps; find one, if you actually care. This place was in an old Victorian, about as rundown as they come. The ladies were mostly, as you'd guess, demons of various stripes, while the clientele consisted not only of other demons, but also a motley assortment of human mystics, warlocks, and necromancers. They even tolerated the occasional vamp. Oh, but all these joints have a very strict, zero-tolerance no-loup policy. Anyway, while I was waiting for B to finish up whatever dubious transaction had brought us there, I got to talking to one of the girls. Turns out, she wasn't such a bad sort, despite her pedigree and her specialty, which was taking the souls of mortal customers in exchange for a single night of unspeakable pleasure of the carnal variety. She went by the ironic anonym Clemency Hate-evill. I've already pointed out how demons don't use their real names, and a doozy like that, you know she cadged it off a Puritan headstone somewhere like the Old North Burial Ground (ca. 1700). Before we left, I was on friendly enough terms with Clemency, she'd even offered me a freebie should I ever find myself in the mood. She kindly pointed out (as if I didn't know) that the age of consent in Rhode Island is sixteen, so whether or not there might be a law somewhere governing transplanar prostitution, at least no one could cry statutory rape.

Since that night, I actually had visited her a few times. Though, for one reason and another, I'd never taken her up on that generous offer (mostly because I suspected there was a loophole that would land me in whichever realm of eternal torment she called home). So, maybe Aloysius
wasn't
my only friend-type-friend in those days. Maybe Clemency Hate-evill was, too. Which, as you'll soon see, was enough to get her killed (or banished to another dimension, or whatever it is happens to demons when they “die” here on Earth).

It was a Thursday, and I knew the whorehouse was closed on Thursdays. So I called her. Clemency said she was “relieved” to hear from me. I didn't ask why, though it did nothing good for my nerves. I figured I could ask her face-to-face. I took the bus cross town, got off on Westminster, and walked the rest of the way, past the green swath of Dexter Training Ground and the bizarre towers and turrets of the Armory itself. The sun was setting by the time I reached the rundown house on Cranston Street. I went around to the rear entrance (only customers are permitted to use the front, and no one uses it on Thursdays, no exceptions). There were the usual wards to keep just anyone from strolling in, but Clemency had given me the incantation that would grant me access. Then I got a thorough patting down by the
se'irim
bouncer. Once I was pronounced clean, I was led through three parlors, their walls plastered with velvet wallpaper, each room a different garish color, and each decorated with a confusion of threadbare antique furniture. Clemency was waiting for me in the foyer, at the bottom of the staircase.