The Girls With Games of Blood (41 page)

“Yes.” He studied the dilapidated structure, wondering if repairs were best started from the ground up, or the roof down.

Leonardo was silent for a moment. “Can I ask you something? And if you say ‘you just did,’ I’ll get really pissed off. You got Fauvette draining Gerry Barrister so you can take over his club when he finally croaks, right?”

Zginski said, “Yes.”

“Did you sic me on Clora for the same reason, so you could get this house?”

Again Zginski said, “Yes.”

Leonardo sighed, and shook his head. “Well, fuck me.”

“It served both our purposes. You learned the value of a long-term victim, and I was able to acquire a home suitable for my needs.”

“You yanked my fucking chain,” Leonardo corrected.

“I did what was necessary to get what I wanted.”

“That’s cold-blooded, man, you know that? Really. And I was starting to like you.”

“I neither sought nor desired your approval or affection.”

Leonardo laughed. “No, you sure didn’t. Just like you never did with Fauvette, either.”

Zginski was in no mood to discuss that topic. Since the day at the Ringside Fauvette had not spoken to him or even really looked at him. There was a hardness to her now, a brittle rage that had replaced the ineffable kindness she used to possess. Still, he felt an odd relief each time he saw her, as if just knowing she still existed was enough, for now.

“Leonardo,” he mused, “do you recall the day we mingled our blood at that old warehouse?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you saved our lives, we owe you, blah-blah-fucking-blah.”

“That is not my meaning. Since that day, have you felt any change in your thinking?”

“What?”

Zginski shook his head. “It is no matter.”

“You know what, Mr. Z.? I don’t think I want to hang out with you anymore. You may be the fucking James Brown of vampires, but as a friend you’re a jerk. Maybe someday you’ll figure that out.”

He went to the pickup, started it, and drove away. Zginski put his hands in his pockets and climbed the steps to his new home just as the first rain began to fall since Patience Bolade arrived in Memphis.

Fauvette stood in the rain beside the Bolade family plot. With neither umbrella nor coat she was soaked to the skin, but in her case that meant nothing. Behind her, all that remained of the house was a stone foundation and a pair of unbroken chimneys rising like rib bones from the muddy ruins. It had rained for a week, causing flash floods and ruining what few crops had survived the drought. The air smelled of life restored, but was nearing the rancid quality of damp things about to rot.

Water beaded on her eyelashes, standing in for the tears she could no longer create. The bodies of the Bolade sisters had crumbled to dust, but these stone markers remained, and they would do for her purposes. After all, mourning was for the ones left behind.

Suddenly, she looked around. She sensed someone approaching, a vaguely menacing yet familiar presence. The urge to flee hit her so hard she froze, unable to pick a direction.

Then Zginksi emerged from the trees clad in a black raincoat and protected by a smiley-face umbrella. She sighed as disgust and hatred dissolved the fear. His platform-booted feet methodically squished in the mud as he joined her, his umbrella blocking the rain over them both.

“Are you following me?” she asked flatly as she looked up at him. “Because if you are, that’s really pathetic.”

“I have acquired property on the other side of this forest,” he said by way of explanation.

“Lucky you. And you just happened to be watching this graveyard, I suppose.”

“I have a sense of your nearness.”

She thought of her own momentary premonition, and wondered if she might be able to improve it so she’d have more warning when he approached. Probably about as well
as she’d learned Patience’s energy trick, she thought bitterly. Yet she
had
felt him before she saw him.

“I have things I wish to tell you,” he continued.

“I got no interest in hearing them.”

“I would like you to nonetheless.”

“Then make me. You can make me want to fuck you, so making me listen ought to be a snap.”

He said nothing. Only the pattering on his umbrella and the distant highway noise broke the silence.

Finally she said, “If you’re just going to stare at me, then take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

He smiled. Then he plunged the golden crucifix dagger, the one that Sir Francis Colby used to send him to limbo six decades earlier, into her heart.

Zginski tossed the umbrella aside and held her close to him as she stiffened and withered. The light in her eyes faded to milky obliviousness, then blackened to nothingness. Her body shrank within her clothes, her arms and legs growing stick-thin. He felt her rib cage and the individual bones of her spine through her tank top. An intense rotting smell filled the immediate area, but quickly faded as Fauvette passed rapidly through decomposition.

He was careful to leave the dagger in place, just as Colby had done. He lowered the now-fragile corpse to the muddy ground.

Quickly, he wrapped her in a plastic drop cloth he’d brought just for this. He scanned the area for any onlookers. Then he scooped up Fauvette’s feather-light remains and strode down the hill, toward the forest and the trail to Dark Willows.

Two cinder-block walls blocked off the cellar’s corner, creating a space roughly the size of a walk-in closet. It had been filled with empty Mason jars and stacks
of pornographic magazines before Zginski cleaned it out. The room had a lone overhead light, but he did not need it.

He unwrapped Fauvette’s remains and placed her on the bare earthen floor. Then he removed her modern clothes, careful not to dislodge the crucifix dagger. The garments would be burned in the fireplace upstairs, erasing all evidence of her contemporary identity. Should anyone discover her, they would find only an unidentifiable corpse, clearly left here long before Zginski bought the house.

He leaned over and looked into her face. The flesh had turned withered and leathery over her cheekbones. Her eye sockets were mere pits. The dehydrated tendons had pulled open her jaw and revealed her fangs. The rest of her body was similarly desiccated, but otherwise intact, just as he had been all those years in Colby’s storage.

He punched the point of one fang through the tip of his index finger. A single drop of blood beaded there, and he let it drop into the gaping mouth.

There was no visible change. But something intangible shifted in the room, and he swore he heard, faint and at the back of his mind, Fauvette’s scream as the blood pulled her from limbo back into the helpless, immobilized corpse.

After a moment he said, “I know you can hear me. My blood will bind you to your physical self, and I will return periodically to repeat the process.”

The dead features did not move, but the faint voice seemed to cry,
“No . . . no. . . .”
Was he imagining that?

“I gave you the chance to listen to me. You refused. Now you have no choice.”

“Bastard . . . no!”

“It may take decades,” he continued. “Or centuries. Eventually, though, my blood will overcome your hatred for me.
Then
I will allow you to again walk the earth.”

He stayed on his knees beside her until he realized he was expecting a reaction which, of course, could never come. He
rose to leave, but stopped in the doorway. The scream was still there, like the indistinct voices conjured by the whirring of a fan.

He returned to the corpse on the floor. Already he sensed vermin stirring in the soil, disturbed by the rising groundwater and drawn to the new feast above them. He was unconcerned; whatever they devoured, his blood would restore. “Once I told you that for men time is a river, with a beginning and end, while for our kind it is an ocean with an infinity of shores. You are adrift in it only as long as your will resists mine. So
you
will decide when your exile ends.”

He ran his finger along the dry, brittle lips. He was uncertain if she could feel physical pain in this form; if so, the sense of her ongoing decomposition should add urgency to her acquiescence.

He closed the heavy wooden door and locked the three padlocks he’d installed. Then he put an old piece of tin roofing over the door to hide it. It now blended in with the rest of the detritus-ridden cellar, and gave no sign of the small room.

Standing in the darkness, he allowed himself a smile. He had an era to make his own, and a future waiting for his domination.

As he climbed the stairs, the voice in his mind grew fainter but conversely more distinct. He paused at the cellar door, shook his head, and finally decided the voice
must
be his imagination. She could not defy him so strongly.

“Never,”
the voice seemed to say.
“Never!”