The Girls With Games of Blood (7 page)

He did as she asked. She had long gray hair in two
braids, and wore a shapeless housedress beneath a tattered apron. Big rings glittered on her long, bony fingers. Her face seemed not so much wrinkled as
sunken,
like she was drying out instead of aging.

As always, once she closed the heavy front door the house was almost totally dark, the only light sifting in around the heavy curtains. It smelled like a museum, all musty and stale, but with a weird fruity tang that Byron could never identify. He’d finally decided that rather than clean, Mama Prudence simply sprayed air freshener everywhere on the days she knew he was coming.

“How about this drought we’re having?” Byron said as he waited for his eyes to adjust. He doubted any of the lamps even had working bulbs anymore. The surprising thing was that all the flat surfaces seemed to be free of dust. Did the old woman spend all her waking hours wandering the house with a chamois cloth and a can of Pledge?

“A drought’s just a sign the world’s out of kilter,” Mama Prudence said as she moved delicately across the foyer. Her steps made no sound on the hardwood floor. “Something isn’t how it’s supposed to be, and the world is just going to wait until it rights itself. Then we’ll get the rain back.”

“Never heard that one before,” Byron said. She moved at a snail’s pace; he could’ve crossed the room in three strides.

“Oh, us old folks have great stores of wisdom about things you youngsters have forgotten,” she said in her genteel Southern lilt. “You do yourselves a disservice by shutting us away in homes for the elderly. You think that when our bodies go, we have nothing left to contribute.”

“You’re taking care of yourself pretty well,” he observed.

“I do all right. But it does get lonely.”

He glanced into the living room, and stopped. He supposed the large painting over the mantel had always been there, but now a shaft of sunlight broke through a gap in the curtains and illuminated it like a spotlight. The brushstrokes
sparkled in relief, and the heavy wooden frame shone with ornate gilt work.

Mama Prudence stopped when she saw his reaction. “Are you just now noticing that picture, Sheriff?”

“I reckon so. Have you always had it there?”

“That’s where my great-grandmother placed it, and that’s where it will stay as long as I’m around.”

“Is she a relative, then?”

“Oh, yes. That is the infamous Patience Bolade. Have you heard of her?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“In 1864 she took her own life when she was abandoned at the altar. It was quite the scandal. And, from what the family always said about her and her ways, it was a lucky escape for the groom.”

He looked more closely at the painting. The woman in it had kind eyes, or at least the artist had painted her that way. Her skin was pale, and her ample décolletage stood out sharply against her dark dress. “Was she really that bad?”

“Oh, she was a monster,” Mama Prudence said vehemently. “She lived to torment her sister, my namesake.”

“Prudence?”

“Oh, yes. If Prudence had anything she valued, Patience would take it away. It was a reflex for her, like drawing a breath.”

“Sounds like you’re still angry about it.”

Mama Prudence snapped around and glared at him with an intensity doubly surprising in such an old woman. In the dim light, her eyes seemed to suddenly glow red. It only lasted a moment, and then she smiled, revealing oddly long canines. She nodded toward the painting. “I’ve heard about Patience my whole life, and I carry the name of her victim. I suppose I do take it a bit personally. Kind of silly, isn’t it?”

“Family never lets you go,” Cocker said sadly. “Not even the dead ones.”

“
Especially
not the dead ones,” Mama Prudence agreed. She stood on tiptoe and patted Cocker’s face. He jumped at her ice-cold touch. “Now bring those groceries into the kitchen before your arms fall off, young man.”

Compared to the rest of the house the kitchen was brightly lit. The brittle white curtains had yellowed so that the whole room looked vaguely jaundiced. The ancient refrigerator’s compressor hummed and rattled.

Cocker put the bags on the counter and began unloading them. He put a stack of glossy periodicals on the counter. “Here’s your women’s magazines. People sure do look at me funny when I buy those,” he said with a chuckle. He opened the pantry door and added, “Doesn’t look like you’ve made much of a dent in last month’s groceries.”

She waved her gnarled hand dismissively. In this light, she looked even more like one of those dried-apple dolls for sale at the flea market. “At my age, Sheriff, I have a limited palate.”

“I done told you, Mama Prudence, I’m not the sheriff anymore.”

“I think most people will always think of you as the sheriff, Byron. You’ve certainly earned it, losing your wife the way you did.”

Cocker winced slightly, as he always did when someone brought up Vicki Lynn. “That’s all in the past now. I’m just a private citizen, trying to get by.”

“And a movie star, don’t forget.”

“Now, Mama Prudence, that wasn’t
me
in that movie. Bo Dan Butcher was a lot prettier than I ever was. Besides, you know I never jumped from the bed of a pickup onto the hood of a car. That’s just foolishness.”

He put a box of cornstarch in the cupboard, and when he turned around Mama Prudence stood right behind him, so close their bodies almost touched. He jumped, startled, and dropped a bottle of vanilla extract on the counter. It shattered.

“Lordy, Byron, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you
again,” the old woman said, but her smile betrayed her amusement.

“You’re gonna turn me gray before I leave the house,” Cocker said, laughing despite his pounding heart. He picked up the broken glass, then winced as an edge bit into the soft heel of his hand. “Dang! You got a Band-Aid, Mama Prudence?”

He turned to her, and for a moment thought her eyes blazed red again, as they’d done before. Then his vision blurred and everything went dark.

It seemed only a moment passed, but when Cocker opened his eyes again he found himself sprawled in one of the big leather chairs in the living room. The sunbeam had moved off the painting of Patience Bolade and shone almost horizontal across the room.

His body felt heavy and sore, like it did some mornings after serious drinking. His various injuries all tended to seize up when he slept, and adding a hangover merely aggravated them. But he hadn’t been drinking . . . had he?

He forced himself to sit upright. The chair made loud, rude noises beneath him as the stiff leather protested the movement. He shook his head, immediately regretted it, and sagged back into the upholstery.

“Back among the living?” a brittle voice said cheerily. Mama Prudence appeared from the shadows carrying a cup of steaming liquid. “I made you some green tea. It’ll help get you back on your feet.”

“What happened?” Cocker asked, his voice oddly thick and subservient, like a child’s. He felt weaker than he had since the last time he was shot.

“You cut your hand, saw the blood, and passed out.”

“I
passed out
?” he repeated in disbelief.

“I guess anyone can be a little squeamish at the sight of blood, can’t they?” Prudence said as she put the cup on the little side table.

Cocker frowned. “I never . . .”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has a secret fear of some sort.”

He reached for the cup and saw the new bandage wrapped around his palm. It was made of gauze yellowed with age, and old tape that was coming undone. He took the cup with his other hand and said, “I’m real sorry, Mama Prudence.”

“Oh,
pshaw,
” she said with a wave of one long bony hand. Except it no longer looked as bony as he recalled. Nor, he realized, did Mama Prudence’s face appear quite so withered. Then again, he couldn’t trust anything his brain told him at the moment. The tea, hot and sweetened with honey, seemed to muddle his thoughts even more.

“You be sure and clean that hand good when you get home,” she said as she patted his arm. “My first-aid supplies are a bit out-of-date, as you can see. Oh, and see if it still looks funny, too.”

“Funny?”

“Yes. There’s the big cut, and then two little cuts right beside it. Looks like teeth marks, almost.” And she smiled, but her face was in shadow.

Prudence watched Byron Cocker drive away slowly and carefully, with none of his usual flamboyance. She closed the door, turned out the unnecessary lights, and walked back into the living room.

The afternoon sun heated the air, but had no effect on her. Neither did time, nor the elements. Only two things affected Mama Prudence: the blood of the living, and the proximity of her sister.

She gazed at the painting as if it might give up some secret she’d missed in the past century. Every drought caused her to anticipate this moment, but decades had passed before the right
kind
of drought, the kind that appeared only when a
vampire’s malevolence neared, finally occurred. She knew with certainty in her cold unbeating heart that Patience was, at last, coming home.

She sighed in almost sexual contentment as Cocker’s blood coursed through her. She seldom fed anymore; it would attract too much attention in this modern world, and her choice of convenient victims was limited. But the big man’s injured hand caused her hunger to unexpectedly flare, and now she understood it as yet another providential sign, like the drought.

“Soon, dear sister,” Prudence said aloud, “the games begin again.”

Z
GINSKI AND
L
EONARDO
stopped at a gas station just before the Shelby County line. The bell connected to the pressure hose pinged twice as Zginski parked at the gas pumps. He revved the car’s engine several times, luxuriating in both the sound and the rumble that traveled through him. Of all this era’s unexpected delights, the evolution of the automobile was the most exquisite. It almost made the sixty years he’d spent in hellish limbo worth it. Almost.

The night he’d first encountered “Eleanor,” in the movie
Gone in 60 Seconds,
had been unusual for a couple of reasons. It was the first time he and Fauvette had attended a cinema since they’d impulsively viewed
Blacula
and
Vanishing Point
some weeks earlier. It was also the first time he’d experienced an institution known as a “drive-in,” where cinemas — no, he corrected himself, they were now called
movies,
a corruption of the term motion picture—were publically displayed on a common screen before a group of people in parked vehicles. As they drove the truck into the fenced-off exhibition area, they passed a flatbed trailer with a wrecked car on it, and a sign that said, “Meet Eleanor, star of
Gone in 60 Seconds
.” At first Zginski assumed this referred to an
ingenue, but once the movie started he understood that the car was the attraction.
It
was Eleanor.

And by the time the movie was over, Zginski was in love: with the speed, with the dust, with the roaring engines and the blistering movement. With Eleanor. Each crash of metal against metal, each scream of rubber against pavement, reinforced the feeling that he’d skipped the last sixty years for a reason. If he’d watched the development of the automobile, seen it grow from uncertain horseless buggies through each stage of design and manufacture, he might never have grasped how thrilling these vehicles could truly be. He had the unexpected thought that he should be
grateful
for the night Sir Francis Colby drove that golden dagger into his heart, removing him from the world for the next six decades.

That feeling didn’t last, but his fascination with all things automotive did. He learned how to drive as quickly as possible, and once he’d mastered the skill looked around for a suitable vehicle. It never occurred to him that he could truly
own
Eleanor; the vehicle on display that night bore the damage sustained during the making of the film, and would never travel the highways again. But then he realized that automobiles were, in fact, mass-produced by the thousands. He could not possess
the
Eleanor, but he could own
an
Eleanor.