Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (47 page)

Suddenly she could breathe again. She slid to the ground panting, and watched the two men come to grips. No one could mistake this for an embrace. Her attacker, the larger and heavier man, had one hand around Nathan Court’s throat, holding him off. And Nathan’s body changed, as though he now were miming, heavier and more centred, but fast. Letitia began to inch backwards, away from their straining bodies, keeping her eyes on them. ‘Monster’, the guy hissed, “You blood-sucking  ”
–

Nathan opened his  lips and his fangs showed clearly, a set that put her own to shame. He sank them deep into the wrist at his throat and there was no pretend about it. The attacker screamed in pain and, among the passers-by, someone yelled,  “I’ve called the cops!”

It galvanized both men. Nathan let go of the hand and drew his head back again, but her attacker’s hand now held a glinting blade and he drove it home in Nathan’s chest. Instead of reeling back, Nathan head-butted the taller man in the nose then punched him in the throat. Almost absently, his left hand pulled out the knife. There was surprisingly little blood, less than she’d seen last night.

He was a vampire. He had blood on his mouth. She saw the

tip of his tongue lick it away.

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“Letitia
 
–
” He put the knife in  his pocket and kept his back  to the people still watching at a distance and holding up cell  phone pictures. “Call 911. You were attacked  –  he’s been  hanging around. A bystander punched him. I wasn’t here.  Clear?”

He was a vampire. He saw she knew. “I can’t  stay. It’s too

close to dawn for a police station, and besides ”
–

Now they heard a siren. Letitia nodded, unable to make a sound. She looked away towards the flashing light and when she looked back, he was gone. Her obvious trauma, once the police arrived  moments later, convinced them more than any explanation, but by the time they drove her to the station, she had come up with one.

She was a street performer, yes. She’s answer all their questions. With the tour, and she recited contract information.  Sometimes men in the audience were drunk. Sometimes they acted out. She described the man’s actions the night before omitting Nathan. Tonight the same man had followed her from a restaurant where a journalist had been interviewing her. Yes, she had the journalist’s number at home. She’d been calling a taxi when she was attacked. She described everything except the bite and who had intervened. A stranger, she said, who’d gotten a lot more than he bargained for.

Letitia knew that bystanders must have seen him speaking to her. He had said, she told the police, that he couldn’t get involved. Didn’t explain otherwise. Just said, “You’ll be all right now,” and took off. He might know martial arts. An effective fighter, anyway. The bite wound she didn’t know anything  about, except  –  the guy seemed to be nuts on thesubject of vampires. Kept saying she was the monster’s, uh, girlfriend. Maybe he actually believed she was a vampire.  People believed all kinds of things.

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At long last they released her. She called Kip and  had called the tour, and their lawyer would contact her tomorrow. Today, almost. And she was excused from performing that evening, though they hoped she’d be able to complete her contract. In an early, faint dawn she took a taxi home, and let herself into  the apartment.

The first thing she saw was the note. It was stuck with tape to the doorknob. Lettie peeled it off and locked herself in. Her heart sped up the second she opened it.

Letitia

Forgive me for coming here. I was in no state to cross ahotel lobby. I apologise for frightening you. I mean you no harm and I am helpless until sundown in any case. I’ll go then.

I imagine the police will want to interview me. Tell them you’ve left me a message  –  and really do leave one, in case they check.

As I told you, the article is real. I’ll email it to you and let you know when it comes out.

I wish we’d had more time together before you found out about me. You must be very shocked and I only add to that by being here. Please use my room  at the hotel  –  the key is on your all table  –  if you’ve no one to stay with today.

I wish . . . I wish many things.

Nathan

She dropped the letter and darted to her bedroom. No, not there. He had better manners than to sleep in her bed like  Goldilocks. She almost laughed. And, of course, he was in her costume room, along with all her personas, a sewing machine

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and her make-up table. He had unrolled the futon she kept in  there and lay like a corpse upon it, on one side, face turned away  from her. She noted that he’d drawn down the shades and pulled  the curtains closed as well. Of course he had.

She tiptoed across the room. She couldn’t help feeling as though she’d wake him. She snapped on a light and sat at her make-up mirror and looked at him.  He was even more corpse-like. Eyes closed, oblivious. Vulnerable. She could call the police, stake him, roll him out in the yard, whatever she chose.  He had trusted her. He had saved her.

And thinking through this, she realized she was not afraid of  Nathan Court, Yankee vampire transplanted south. What kind of woman, after all, poses as a vampire? What kind dips her fingers in the blood on a man’s shirt front in a dark doorway? Not the easily spooked.

Letitia left the light on  –  wasn’t going to disturb him  –  and put away her costume. Then she creamed her face at the dressing table, which also reflected his motionless form. Not breathing, either. Probably didn’t eat, except blood. Was he going to need some when he woke up? Unknown whether hecould have sex  like in the books. Lots of unknowns.

Cross those bridges later. She went to her room and changed into a long T-shirt and brushed her hair. Made some hot chocolate. She didn’t feel alone, the way she usually did, even though her houseguest was completely  out of it. Dead to the world, in fact. She snorted into the cocoa, and then yawned.

She set down the mug and got out spare blankets from the hall that she tucked around the curtains. Then she lay on the floor beside him, her body mirroring his. Slightly on one side, one arm under his head and half stretched out, the other curled.  His body did not look relaxed into sleep. He seemed to be holding a pose impossibly long. Lettie made her own breathing

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minimal. The sleeping vampire: too static to perform. But she’d  like to move the way he did; the suddenness and apparent lack  of effort were worth her study.

If the article was real, so was the journalist. And how different was that from an agent? They both knew what sold and dealt with marketers. She would explain that to him tonight.  After he’d talked to the police. It would make sense: danger had thrown them together. You found out about each other fast that way. Got involved fast. But he’d need to sleep in the other room after tonight, so she had access to her  stuff. It was going to take some rearrangement. She left the door open, brushed her teeth and got into bed, and, because she was only a temporary vampire, set the alarm for noon.

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Overbite

Savannah R us s e

W
 
ho can say what shapes  a man’s fate? In this case it was an incisor painfully split right into the gum line. The tooth was large and as dangerously pointed as an ice pick. Its owner, a slender young man with long hair, several earrings in his right ear and a dancer’s slender body, looked  Goth. For that reason, Sol Tytel, dentist, figured he’d probably had it sharpened.

You wouldn’t believe the stuff dentists see, Sol thought as

he set the guy up for X-rays. Humanity is twisted.

When Sol’s answering service had called him earlier that hot July night, a mist had risen from Gowanus Bay to spread across Brooklyn. It softened the shadows of cars and stinkweed trees under the street lights. Footsteps became muffled. Old nightmares crept along the kerbs and swirled around the drains.

The chirping voice at the service said some guy had broken a tooth and wouldn’t go to an emergency room. Sol’s Aunt  Blanche had told the guy to call her nephew, the dentist.

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Sol’s chubby fingers tightened around the cell phone. You didn’t refuse a request from Aunt Blanche. Sol’s sister Glenda  Faye once brushed off a request  to pick up some  smoked whitefish from a store on Eighteenth Avenue, saying she didn’t have time. Ten years later Aunt Blanche had gone through the reception line at Glenda Faye’s wedding, given the new bride her dry hand instead of a kiss and said, “So? You are still so busy you can’t spare ten minutes to help an old woman whose arthritis is killing her?”

So Sol quickly agreed to take care of the emergency, even though it was a Saturday night, well past the witching hour. Sol didn’t really mind. He had his eye on a plasma TV out in Circuit  City and mentally added up what he could bill this schlemiel. It being a date night didn’t matter either. Unwed and unattached,  Sol was alone, again.

Not that he was a loser in the game of love. Hell no. In dental school his nickname was The Driller, and it had nothing to do with dental caries. Yet for Sol, his love life had stalled and sat unmoving and the dank, empty garage of his existence. His only option at the moment was hooking up with one of the earnest 30-something Sarah-Lawrence graduates he met at  Temple.

Tits sagging, greying hair worn as a political statement, rear ends broad and soft as sofa cushions, the women had opinions about everything, from the use of feng shui for his waiting room to the dire health risks of his ordering pastrami. One by one they came to him with biological clocks ticking and dollar signs in their eyes.

Sol Tytel did not respond. He had a desire both secret and

profane that kept him from smashing the glass under the  chuppah. It drove him to the news-stand at the subway station  for the current issue of
 
Playboy
;  it made him spend far too much  on certain premium cable stations. The truth was Sol dreamed

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only of blue-eyed blondes with tiny noses and names like  Bunny. In other words, his dark Sephardic eyes wished to  behold goys, preferably naked.

So this particular Saturday night, with a Goth-type guy dressed all in black lying prone in the dentist chair, Sol hummed

a  tune from
 
Phantom of the Opera
 
and looked at the X-rays. He

decided he could save the tooth, but it was going to need a cap.

With a practised spiel, the same one he had given dozens of times, Sol explained the situation to his emergency patient and talked  about payment plans. But he also had a question. Should he replicate the point? Or could Sol take this opportunity to make the tooth look normal, cap the opposing incisor the same way and give him a nice smile?

Sol grinned to show him his own perfect pearly whites.

Even with his mouth stuffed with cotton, the patient let out a laugh that sounded like ice cracking. The strip of dental X-rays shook in Sol’s soft hand. That’s when Bryce Canyon, or so he called himself, told Sol he was a vampire. He needed his new eye tooth as sharp as Sol could make it  –  for obvious reasons.

Sceptical, curious and at least a little fearful, Sol nevertheless maintained his professional demeanour. His mind raced. He weighed the risks, the pros and cons. Finally he spoke.  “For  someone such as yourself, dental health is especially critical.”

“You’ve got that right,” Brice Canyon muttered through the

cotton.

“A person such as myself, an excellent dentist, might fill,

pardon the pun, a need among your . . . your kind? Am I right?”

Brice Canyon nodded.

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“Then perhaps we should talk,” Sol said.

Brice Canyon, whose real name was Cormac O’Reilly, was an occasional Broadway hoofer and an ageless gigolo. Even with his senses dulled by several injections of lidocaine, he saw the profits that potentially lay in a partnership with the slubby dentist. Brice could recruit vampire patients, for a fee of course, and Sol could practise his trade with great discretion.

“I think you need to become a vampire yourself,” Brice  suggested later that night as he leaned back on a dull brown,  imitation-leather sofa in Sol’s office. He stretched his long,  skinny legs atop the coffee table piled high with weekly news  magazines. “Business-wise, it would increase the trust factor,  you know.”