Lust for Life (11 page)

“Would you join me for a few minutes, please?”

I’ve never heard his voice so gentle. But his other hand, hidden from her, hovers
near the stake holstered at his ankle. I know from experience, Lanham is the world’s
fastest-drawing bureaucrat.

Deirdre stares up into his eyes. Maybe she trusts him, or maybe she can smell the
wood of the stake. But she grasps his hand and lets him lead her to Franklin’s office.
They shut the door softly.

A car rumbles into the parking lot outside. Lori’s, judging by the engine sound.

“I called Lori and told her what happened,” David says. “I figured she’d want to know
right away, and that you could use her support.” He gives me a grim smile, and I want
to hug them both.

Less than a minute later Lori jerks open the door at the bottom of the stairs. She
must have sprinted from the car.

“Ciara, oh my God, are you okay?”

She tackle-hugs me, once again forgetting how dangerous it can be to do that to a
vampire. But I just embrace her, holding my breath so I can’t smell her blood, close
to her skin from running.

“I’m okay. It’s good to see you. It’s good to see anyone normal.”

Lori examines me, picking over my shirt and hair, as if the trauma has left stains
or lint. “Did Jim hurt you?”

“He didn’t even touch me, thanks to Shane.”

She beams at him. “Our hero! A knight in flannel armor.”

“I don’t feel much like a hero right now.”

Lori puts a hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry. He was your friend.”

Shane looks at his feet. “Not for a long time.”

An uncomfortable moment passes. There’ll be a lot of these to come, I’m guessing.

Finally Lori says, “David told me that Jeremy saved Jim’s progeny. Denise?”

“Deirdre. He didn’t even hesitate.” I guess there’s more than one kind of hero today.

She moves toward her desk and peers at the
Cats of Greece
calendar hanging above it. “Weren’t you supposed to bite Jeremy this weekend? Wasn’t
Sunday the big day?”

I find it funny that she remembers that. Then again, I have been talking about it
a lot, out of nervousness and anticipation.

“Shit,” Shane says. “Now you can’t even drink from him for at least two weeks.” He
puts his hands to his head. “Worst possible timing.”

David and Lori each say a variation of “Huh?”

Shane gives me a gentle but pointed look. “Do you want me to tell them?”

“No, I’ll do it.” I suddenly need to sit down. On my way to my chair I search for
words that will convey the seriousness of my situation without throwing Lori into
hysterics.

I speak to the floor. “The same quality about me that let me heal holy-water burns
also . . . doesn’t want me to be a vampire. So I’m a crappy vampire. It’s maybe why
I hate to be bitten and why I can’t bring myself to bite a
human. And why I—why I’m already acting old, with the obsessive-compulsive business.
I’m fading.”

The room is silent except for the murmur of Colonel Lanham and Deirdre’s conversation
behind Franklin’s door.

I finally look up at Lori, expecting to see tears running down her face, or at least
filling her blue eyes. I expect whimpering.

Instead she gives Shane a sharp look. “Unacceptable. What can I do to help her?”

His smile is warm and wry. “Keep her up-to-date on all the latest everything. TV shows,
music, fashions. Take her to every new movie. Teach her all the—” He gestures to my
phone sitting on my desk. “—the technology things.”

“Got it. What else?”

“Be understanding.”

“Got it. What are you doing?”

“Racking my brain to find her a new donor. You’re pregnant and now Jeremy’s out of
commission for two weeks. I’ve gotta find someone for her to drink—and preferably
bite—as soon as possible. She needs the best nutrition she can get.”

Lori’s lower lip trembles. Great, now she feels guilty for not being my donor anymore.

“Just a second.” She turns on her heel and drags David into his office. Before shutting
the door, she reaches out to the volume control and cranks up the music in the upstairs
speakers.

“Ow.” I rub my ear as his office door slams shut. “It had to be Regina’s show, didn’t
it?” Bad Religion grinds their chords from the ceiling into my brain.

“Hang on.” Shane walks stealthily toward David’s office. He presses his ear to the
door. It swings open.

“Geez, a little privacy?” Lori snaps at him, then strides over to me. “Ciara, we’ve
agreed. You can bite David if Shane supervises.”

My mouth falls open. “Bite . . . David?” I can’t even look at him. The first time
I saw him after I turned, we practically jumped into each other’s arms. The attraction
wore off once I got into a regular feeding schedule and David got used to me being,
well, magnetic. But we have a history.

The love of his life—before Lori—was a woman named Elizabeth who broke his heart and
their engagement when she became a vampire, but fed on him (and only him) until she
died permanently. At which point he got me and her mixed up inside his heart, because
we looked sort of alike and he was lonely. At the time, I was insecure about my future
with Shane, so we almost—

“I can’t do that,” I tell them.

“Ciara,” David says. “It’ll be all right, I promise.”

“The important thing is to make sure you’re okay,” Lori adds.

Shane’s face displays a hundred and two emotions.

“What do you think?” I ask him.

He comes and sits on the edge of my desk, taking my hand. “I think we should do whatever
it takes to keep you well.”

I look at Lori. “Do you want to be there when I—”

“No.” She takes a step back. “I love you guys. I trust you guys. But I do not want
to see it.”

I lower my head, feeling relieved and grateful but also very sad. I can’t believe
it’s come to this.

10

Kashmir

Obsessive-compulsive disorder has at least a hundred different manifestations in both
humans and vampires. Shane sorts. Regina counts. Spencer cleans. Noah watches where
and how he walks, aligning his feet with the pattern of the carpet or grains of hardwood.
Monroe and I share an obsession with words, rearranging the letters on signs or parsing
definitions (he’s learned to do it all in his head, while I often blurt out a grammatical
correction in a rude and embarrassing way).

Jim? He was a hoarder.

I always knew this in the abstract, because he was such a trivia buff. But apparently
he collected more than facts. On my only other visit to his room, I was too busy trying
to escape to notice how much stuff he had. Besides, he kept most of it below.

Regina, Spencer, Noah, and I gather around the four-by-eight-foot trapdoor in Jim’s
floor. It lies open, revealing part of a tomblike cavity.

“How far does it go?” I ask Spencer.

“Bigger than this room. Pity is it’s not nearly so tall.”

“Can’t we just leave all that shit there?” Regina’s hands are twitching, and I can
tell she’s dying to jump down and count the boxes and their contents. “Nail the door
shut and put the rug back over? Pretend it doesn’t exist?”

“Adrian should have a clean place to live,” Noah says. “Free of Jim’s bad energy.”

The skeptic in me hates to admit it, but there’s some seriously unhealthy vibes in
this room. Then again, I almost died here, so I could be biased.

Spencer holds out a box of latex gloves in one hand and a box of garbage bags in another.
“Let’s get started.”

One by one we drop into the crap-oleum (like a mausoleum for crap, is where I’m coming
from, linguistically). I put on the gloves—not because I can get an infection or even
a cut that’ll last more than a few seconds, but because something down here might
be icky. Like I told Lori, I’m a terrible vampire.

“Ciara, do you need this to see?” Noah holds up a fluorescent lantern, the kind used
for camping.

I peer around at the darkness and marvel as the shapes and shadows come into sharp
focus. “No, my eyes are adjusting. But thanks.” Next to Shane, Noah’s by far the most
considerate vampire DJ. He’s too polite to say it out loud, but he seems to sense
my uneven development. One day soon (or one hour soon) I need to tell them all that
I’m fading fast.

The closest box has a distinct metallic smell, like stale blood. Ugh, did he keep
leftovers down here?

No one else is touching it, so, not wanting to be a wimp, I pull up the flaps to see
stacks of dark-blue cardboard folders marked “Lincoln Cents” in faint gold letters.
I open the top one.

Turns out that coppery smell actually was copper, not blood. Jim collected pennies.

“Wow.” I run my finger over the rows of coins, some shiny and gleaming, some as dull
as wood. The scent is making my fangs want to pop.

I pull out an older folder, from 1941 to 1974. Most of these are dark with age, Abe
Lincoln’s face barely distinguishable. But a single penny winks at me in flawless
silver. “How come this one from 1943 is different?”

Without sound, Spencer appears at my shoulder in an instant. I’m used to that by now.

“During the war, they needed copper for shell casings, so the pennies were all made
out of steel that year.” He brushes his thumb near the coin, wiping away invisible
dirt. “Jim’s daddy bought that for him on his eighth birthday in 1951. That’s why
it’s in mint condition. All the rest he collected himself.”

So he was a collector even as a human. My heart twists at the thought of an eight-year-old
Jim, maybe wearing a birthday hat, unwrapping this silver penny. Beaming at this relic
from the year of his birth, when evil came in obvious forms, like Nazis and kamikazes.

My American History professor told us that countries keep the basic personality of
the time in which they were born. The United States, formed during the Enlightenment,
has held fast to that era’s focus on individual freedom. Despite the efforts of religious
zealots and reactionaries, it still puts reason above blind obedience to authorities
like churches and kings and even presidents.

It’s the same with vampires. Though we all have individual personalities and characters,
we’re still the children of our times. Jim was made in 1970, a period
of great anger, when the sparkling hopes of the sixties were beginning to wither and
transform into cynicism and rage. Dr. King and RFK were dead and, for a while, so
were their dreams.

A heavy wooden thunk comes from behind me. “Bonus!” Regina shouts.

Spencer goes to her, peeling off his gloves and taking a new pair from the box (for
the third time). “What all’d you find?”

“Jim’s progeny trunk. Look at these files.”

Noah and I join her and Spencer at the trunk, made of heavy mahogany and lined with
orange velvet. Clearly purchased in the seventies.

“He had twenty-four progeny,” I tell them.

“Thanks for the info, Encyclopedia Brown,” Regina mutters. “Don’t you think we know
that?”

It kills me not to know who Encyclopedia Brown is. I’d look it up on my phone’s Web
browser, but no way I’d get cell reception this far underground.

“Looks like it’s in reverse chronological order.” Regina hands me a thick accordion
folder. “There’s your friend Deirdre, Jim’s latest and lamest.”

I run my thumb along the green card-stock covering. It’d be helpful to know more about
Deirdre to see if we can trust her, but it feels like a violation of privacy. “I’ll
give it to Shane. He probably already knows most of it, since she was his donor.”

“Whatever.” Regina pulls out progressively thicker file folders from the piles in
the trunk and lays them on the floor, where Spencer straightens their contents without
reading them.

I open the next box, which is nearly overflowing with
trinkets and pieces of paper, each tagged with a name and date.

I pull out a ticket stub from the Winterland Arena in San Francisco on June 17, 1975.
“Wow, Grateful Dead during their heyday.” A tag attached to it says, “With Carl and
Bonnie.”

“Oooh, look at this one.” Regina grabs another ticket stub. “The Place des Nations
in Montreal. I used to love that venue.” It’s rare to hear Regina speak fondly of
her native country. “But—gag—Jefferson Starship. One incarnation away from ‘We Built
This City,’ possibly the worst song ever.”

I lift the tag attached to it and read Jim’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “He went
to the show with someone named . . . Gary?”

“Oh God!” She yanks her hands away like the ticket is coated with holy water, leaving
me holding it by the tag. “Cashmere.”

Spencer and Noah gasp in unison and take a step back from me and the ticket.

“Cashmere? Like—” I rub my thumb and forefinger over the sleeve of my sweater, even
though it’s one hundred percent cotton.

“With a
K
!” Regina hisses.

“Oh, Kashmir.” I emphasize the second syllable, wondering what a Jefferson Starship
show has to do with the contentious Himalayan region between India and Pakistan.

Regina creeps closer to me. “Kashmir is the name Gary took after Jim turned him.”

I roll “The Vampire Gary” over my mental tongue. “I can see why he changed it. But
why Kashmir?”

Noah explains. “After the song by Led Zeppelin.”

Oh, right. I keep forgetting that’s the title. I think of it as the “dan-nan-nan,
DAN-nan-nan” song with the “ooooh, yeah, yeahs” at the end.

“That song used to make me laugh.” Regina twists the ends of her spiked black hair.
“It reminded me of
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
. But then I met Kashmir.” Even in the nearly nonexistent light down here, I can see
her pale. “He was batshit.”

“Crazier than Jim?”

“Yes,” Noah says. “He was far gone when we met him”—he looks at Regina—“ten years
ago?”

“Eleven years, two months.” She sends me a glare of warning. “Kashmir is Jim to the
Jimth degree.”

I swallow a whimper at the thought. A sped-up slide show flips through my mind of
Jim at his worst, and the way his eyes would simultaneously light up with joy and
go dead with treachery.