The Girls With Games of Blood (36 page)

P
ATIENCE HAD TURNED
out the bright house lights in the Ringside dining room and noodled at the piano in the semi-darkness. It really did sound like a whorehouse instrument; she remembered playing one very similar when she had actually worked briefly as a whore. It was during that time she learned to love both music and sex, although music eventually won out as a priority. However, since meeting Rudy Zginski, she wondered if she needed to reevaluate.

Something indefinable changed in the empty room’s atmosphere. It now felt icy and dangerous. She looked up and gasped.
“Prudence!”

Her sister was a silhouette in the kitchen door, still but unmistakable. “Hello, dear Patience. It’s been a long time. My, how you haven’t changed.”

Patience stood, instantly on her guard. She looked around the room to make sure they were alone. “I saw you here last night,” she said, hoping she sounded casual. “You ran off before we could speak.”

“What on earth would the two of us have to talk about?” Prudence said with mocking frivolity. “Everything we needed to say should’ve been said a hundred years ago.
Saying it now would just make a mockery of a good man’s death.”

“A good man?” Patience snapped. “Vincent? What kind of man proposes to one sister and then seduces the other?”

“A man who needed more than his fiancé could give him,” Prudence shot back.

Patience clenched her fists. “What do you want?”

“Why, to settle accounts. Even the score. Balance the ledgers. Choose the metaphor you like.”

“Can’t we put the past behind us?”

“The past is what we
are,
dear sister. The past, when our hearts beat and our blood raced. Everything since then is just one long, breath-holding
moment.
”

Patience moved through the empty tables toward Prudence, who was still a sharp black outline against the harsh kitchen light. “So what do you want me to do? Go away again?
Stay
away?”

“Good heavens, no. I want you to stay right here, close to the bosom of your family. I want us to play our games again, like we did before. But as it stands now, you are ahead by one, and it’s time for me to even the score.”

She held up something shriveled and black that crumbled even as she displayed it.

“What is that?” Patience whispered.

“Something you once had, and don’t anymore. You made it so easy, Patience, just like with Vincent. You opened yourself up wide to let someone in, which gave me plenty of room to reach in myself and yank them out.”

Patience felt a jolt of fear. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ll find out. And then we’ll be even, and we can begin again. Like the song says, we can play our games of blood. See you soon, big sister.” She backed into the kitchen and the doors swung shut behind her.

Patience rushed to follow, fast enough to hear the back door slam as Prudence fled. When she passed the women’s
restroom, though, she froze. Something lay on the floor and blocked the door open.

She stood over it, staring. She switched on the hall light. It took a moment for the withered, musty corpse on the floor to register on her. Only the incongruous little skirt and tattered remains of the white blouse identified it.

She should have screamed, or wailed, or smashed something. She should have chased after Prudence, who was no doubt nearby, gloating and listening for the cries of rage.

Instead she gently picked up Fauvette’s withered corpse and carried it downstairs into the cellar. One leg broke off at the knee when she bumped into the rail.

When Zginski reached the Ringside just after sunset, he immediately sensed something wrong. One clue was obvious: the place should’ve been packed, but the parking lot was empty and the
CLOSED
sign still hung on the front door.

He drove around back and parked in his usual spot. The kitchen door was unlocked. When he opened it he immediately smelled blood, but it took him a moment to identify the peculiar tang to the odor. It was not, he realized, living human blood or the animal scent carried by some of the raw meat. It was unmistakably
vampire
blood.

He closed the door silently behind him. The odor seemed to come from the women’s lavatory across the narrow hall, so he carefully peered inside.

Something lay in the middle of the floor. It looked like a chunk of animal tissue, perhaps a string of sausage, which had somehow crumbled to dust. He touched one intact section, and it collapsed into black ashlike powder. A similar, smaller lump lay in the sink.

He felt a pit of feeling open inside his own chest. But he resolutely refused to let the thought form. It
must
be something else.

He went through the empty kitchen to Barrister’s office. None of the appliances were turned on to prepare for the evening. He pushed the swinging doors open, and saw that the chairs were still atop tables in the darkened dining room.

He knocked on the office door and said, “Barrister? It is Zginski.” Without waiting for a reply, he opened it.

Barrister sat behind his desk, head down on his folded arms.

“Barrister?” he repeated, but got no response; the man was under a vampiric spell. “I did it,” a voice said behind him.

He turned. Patience stood there, dressed for work, but with a smear of blackened blood across her pale cleavage. Her expression lacked its normal wry amusement. “First I had him call everyone and tell them not to come in. Then I put him to sleep for a while.”

“Why?” Zginski demanded.

Patience’s voice was quiet and even. “Because Fauvette is dead, Rudy. Really dead.”

Zginski’s world tilted around him, but he did not let it show. “Are you certain?”

“Yes.” Her voice cracked as she added, “She’s in the basement where no one can disturb her. I knew you’d want to tell her good-bye.”

He followed her down the stairs. The withered thing that had once been Fauvette was laid out on an old wooden door placed atop two beer kegs. A ring of fine dust already outlined the body, and more fell as it slowly crumbled to bits.

Zginski felt as if gravity had tripled beneath him. The three steps to the corpse were the hardest he’d ever taken. The adorable face he’d first seen drinking blood in the back of a pickup truck now consisted of cords of blackened flesh stretched tight over a skull so small it was heartbreaking. The teeth, including her slightly curved fangs, were white and plain through gaps as the cheeks flaked away. Eyes that had
gleamed with sadness, desire, hope, and a love he could never acknowledge, were now orbless pits.

Patience remained respectfully at the bottom of the stairs. There was nothing to be done, and Zginski no doubt knew that.

He touched, as lightly as possible, Fauvette’s nearest hand. The skin felt like dry tissue paper that crackled under even the feather-light pressure, and black ash puffed out through a multitude of tiny splits.

Zginski withdrew his fingers and stood silently for a long moment. He asked calmly, “Who did this?”

“My sister,” Patience said. “She did it to hurt me.”

“And why would this hurt you?”

“Somehow she knew I loved Fauvette like a sister more than I ever loved Prudence.”

He turned to her. His voice and demeanor stayed the same, but something terrifying burned in his eyes. “So you drew her into this blood feud between the two of you?”

“Not on
purpose,
Rudy. I never even told Prudence I was back. I have no idea how she found out.”

“But you knew she was capable of this.”

Patience nodded.

Zginski’s backhand knocked her into the concrete wall so hard it cracked, rupturing a pipe above her. Water cascaded down on them. Stunned, she tried to move away, but her shoes slipped in the water and Zginski caught her by the hair. He pulled her to her feet and hissed, “I will not
allow
this. You have come into my world and brought destruction. This will not happen again.”

Holding her by the hair, he picked up a discarded wooden chair and smashed it to pieces against the wet floor. He took one of the legs, now jagged and sharp, and raised it over his head.

“No!” Patience screamed and struggled to escape. The rising water was now ankle-deep, and the empty kegs began
to float. He slammed her face-first into the wall and pressed her there until she stopped struggling.

“You deserve a slower death for the danger you have brought,” he snarled. “But expediency has granted you mercy.”

He drove the makeshift stake through her back. The jagged point erupted from her chest and buried itself in the wall, pinning her there. She stiffened as long-delayed death immediately seized her. By the time Zginski stepped away, her skin was already withering and turning gray. The water sluicing down on her quickly sheared the collapsing flesh from her skeleton.

Zginski again stood still for a long moment, watching the water dissolve Patience into sludge. A scraping sound made him turn as the kegs supporting Fauvette began to float, and the door fell to one side. Her corpse slid toward the water.

With no thought he rushed over and caught it. The water had the same effect as it did on Patience, and the body fell apart, sifting through his fingers as it dissolved. He clutched at her clothes, the only things that remained. But they were mere empty garments.

The next moment he was driving down Madison, with no memory of leaving the Ringside and getting into his car. But he knew exactly where he was going.

Byron Cocker pounded on the door of the Bolade mansion until Prudence opened it. He started to speak, then did a double take at the beautiful young woman before him. At last he said, “I need to see Mama Prudence.”

She laughed at his discomfort. She wore a low-cut gown and her hair was brushed loose and shiny around her shoulders. “Why, Sheriff, don’t you recognize me?”

He was too distraught for games. “I don’t know who the hell you are but I
need
to see Mama Prudence!
Now!
”

She stepped back at this hostility. “Byron Cocker, you
will behave like you’ve been to town before or I will send you on your way. What is it you want to see me about?”

His eyes, red and blurred from crying, finally saw the truth. “Mama Prudence?” he said pitifully. “Is that really you?”

“Given your attitude, you may call me ‘Miss Bolade,’ ” she sniffed. “Now state your business.”

With a wailing cry he fell to his knees, his great weight making the floor tremble. Something crashed and broke in another room. He bawled,
“My boy is dead!”

She stepped away from him as he blubbered, his red face a contrast to the white scar tissue. “And what is that to me, sir? I certainly didn’t kill him.”

“But you can bring him
back
! You’re a witch-woman, everybody knows it! My God, look at what you’ve done to
yourself
!” He gestured at her as if she had somehow missed the fact that she was now young and beautiful.

She laughed coldly. “I’m not a
witch,
Sheriff. I know a few Gypsy tricks and scams, but that’s all. It’s enough to keep you simple rednecks at arm’s length, and that’s what I need.”