By Blood We Live Part 39

My wife was a h.e.l.l of a lot younger than Sycorax. "Those two girls. Bring me their blood, Tribute. That's an order."

And that was the end of the argument. I turned to obey.

"Tribute."

Coming back around slowly, her gaze-catching mine-flat and pale. "Sycorax."

"I could just spike your pretty eyes out on my pinkie finger and eat them, lovely boy," she purred. "Hazel, aren't they?"

"Blue."

She shrugged and made an irritated, dismissive gesture, hands white as wax. "It's so hard to tell in the dark."

The girls made it to the street before Sycorax ended the discussion, but I had to follow them anyway. I paced my ordained prey, staying to the shadows, the collar of the black leather trenchcoat that Sycorax had picked out for me tugged up to half-hide the outline of my jaw. I never would have bought that coat for myself. You'd think anybody who'd been dead for any time at all would have had enough of blackness and shadows, thank you very much. Sycorax reveled in it. If she were three hundred years younger, she'd have been a gothchick.

It was a good night: n.o.body turned for a second look.

People are always dying, and human memory is short. In a hundred years, I shall probably be able to walk down any street in the world without raising an eyebrow.

As long as the sun is down.

Sycorax didn't bother to follow. I had no choice but to do as I was bid. It's more than a rule; it's a fact. I expected there were still a few women I knew who would get a kick out of that.

My girls staggered somewhat, weaving. One was a blonde, brittle dyed hair and a red beret. The other one had glossy chestnut brown waves and the profile of a little girl. I tracked them through the district toward the ocean, neon glow and littered sidewalks. A door would open and music would issue forth, and it wasn't long before I found myself mouthing the words to one particular song.

There's something gloriously ironic in a man charting a number-one hit twenty-five years after he's dead.

Otis Redding, eat your heart out.

My quarry paused at an open-air patio where a live band played the blues. Girl singer, open coat and a spill of curls like wicked midnight: performing old standards, the kind I've always loved.

Mama, tell my baby sister, not to do what I have done. I'll spend my life in sin and misery, in the House of the Rising Sun. A song that was already venerable when Eric Burdon made it famous.

There's all kinds of wh.o.r.edom, aren't there? And all kinds of bloodsuckers, too.

The singer nailed "Amazing Grace" a capella like heartbreak, voice sharp and gritty as little Mary Johnson doing "Cold, Cold Heart." I caught myself singing along and slashed my tongue with needle teeth before someone could overhear. Still no blood. I hadn't fed in a long time and it hurt more than it should have.

The girls sat down at a table and ordered food. I smelled beer, hot wings, eyewatering garlic. I suddenly very badly wanted a peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich and a milkshake.

Leaning against the high black iron fence, I watched the girls watching the band until a pa.s.serby in her fifties turned to get a startled better look at me. I stood up straight and met her gaze directly, giving her the crooked little-kid smile. It almost always works, except on Sycorax.

Trying to hide your face only convinces them they've seen something.

"Sorry," she said, waving me away with a smile. A moment later, she turned back. "You know you look like...."

"People say," I answered, pitching my voice high.

"Amazing." She nodded cheerfully, gave me a wide wondering grin, and continued on her way. I watched her go, chattering with her friends, shaking their heads.

The girls didn't stay for "King of the Road," although I would have liked to hear the version.

Kids.

I almost turned away when they walked past. They stank of garlic-stuffed mushrooms and beer. The reek of the herb knotted my stomach and seared my eyes. I actually tried to take a half-step away before the compulsion Sycorax had laid on me locked my knees and forced me back into pursuit.

They walked arm in arm, skinny twenty-year-olds with fake IDs and black vinyl miniskirts. Cheap boots, too much eyeliner. The one with the brown hair broke my heart every time she tossed her head, just that way. I let myself drift ahead of them, taking a gamble on where they would cut across the residential neighborhood near the ocean: a dangerous place for girls to be.

I ducked down a side street to cut them off and waited in the dark of an unlit doorway. Sycorax's control permitted that much. I leaned against the wall, scrubbing my face against my hands. It felt like a waxen mask, cold and stiff. My hands weren't much better.

They weren't long. I was unlucky. They picked the better of the two routes through the brownstones, the one I had been able to justify choosing, and just that innocently chose their fate.

The scent of bougainvillea and jacaranda filled the s.p.a.ces of the night. I watched them skipping from streetlight to streetlight, shadows stretched out behind them, catching up, and then reaching before. The brown-haired one walked a few steps ahead of the bleach-blonde, humming to herself.

I couldn't help it. It wasn't one of my standards, but every blues singer born knows the words to that one. h.e.l.l, I used to have a horse by that name.

I picked up the tune.

I had to.

"....they call the Rising Sun. It's been the ruin of many a poor boy. And me, O G.o.d, I'm one!"

Their heads snapped up. Twenty, maybe. I was dead before they were born. Gratifying that they recognized my voice.

"Fellas, don't believe what a bad woman tells you-though her eyes be blue, or brown...." I strolled out of the shadows, ducking my head and smiling, letting the words trail away.

The dark-haired girl did a double take. She had a lovely nose, pert and turned up. The blonde blinked a couple of times, but I don't think she made the connection. I'd changed my appearance some, and I'd lost a lot of weight.

The stench of garlic on their breath would have thickened my blood in my veins if I had any left. I swallowed hard, remembering all those songs about wandering ghosts and unquiet graves. Ghosts that all seem to want the same thing: revenge, and to lay down and rest.

I smiled wider.

What the lady wants, the lady gets.

"Oh, wow," the darker girl said. "Do you have any idea how much you look like...."

The street was empty, dark and deserted. I came up under the streetlight, close enough to reach out and touch the tip of that nose if I wanted. I dropped them a look that used to melt hearts, sidelong glance under lowered lashes. "People say," I answered.

And, sick to my stomach, I broke their necks before I fed.

It was the least I could do.

Poison roiled in my belly when I laid them out gently in the light of that streetlamp, in the rich dark covering the waterfront, close enough to smell the sea. I straightened their spines so they wouldn't look so terrible for whoever found them, but at least they wouldn't be coming back.

It was happening already: my limbs jerked and shook. My flesh crawled with ripples like fire, my tongue numb as a drunk's.

I'm going back to New Orleans, to wear that ball and chain....

Not this time. Struggling to smooth each step, to hide the venom flooding my veins, I hurried back to my poor, hungry mistress. I stole the brunette's wallet. I stopped and bought breath mints at the all-night grocery.

I beat Sycorax home.

A Standup Dame.

by Lilith Saintcrow.

Lilith Saintcrow's most recent books are Hunter's Prayer, the latest in her Jill Kismet series, and Strange Angels (as by Lili St. Crow), the first in a new series for young adults. The third Jill Kismet book is due out around the same time as this anthology. Her other work includes the Dante Valentine series, as well as several other novels.

Saintcrow says each generation invents and reinvents different variations on the vampire theme. "Blood, s.e.x, love, death, repression, liberation from the confines of civilization or meditation upon the link between Eros and Thanatos-vampires are tremendously versatile," she said. "They endure because we can (and do) remake them with every generation. To Bram Stoker's readers, vampires were about disturbing untrammeled female s.e.xuality, discomfort with modernity, and the excesses of colonization. Since then they've gone through several incarnations, as filthy corpses, investment bankers, androgynous s.e.xy avatars, you name it. The strength of the vampire is her ability to shapes.h.i.+ft for each new set of popular neuroses."

This story is an homage to the noir gumshoe greats-Hammett and Chandler. "I was working on a very dark, ugly book and needed something shorter and a little more hopeful," Saintcrow said. "Not too hopeful, though. Noir isn't very hopeful."

When a man wakes up in his own grave, he sometimes reconsiders his choice of jobs.

If he's smart, that is. Me, I'm dumb as a box of rocks and my skull felt like a cannonade was going off inside. The agony in my head was rivaled only by the thirst. Aching thirst in every nerve and vein, my throat scorched and my eyes hot marbles. It was raining, but the water from the sky falling into my open mouth did nothing for the dry nails twisting in my larynx. I struggled up out of clods of rain-churned clay mud, slick and dirty as a newborn pig. My clothes were ruined and the monster in my head roared.

I fell backward, still trapped to my knees in wet earth, padded hammers of rain smas.h.i.+ng along the length of my body, and screamed. The spasm pa.s.sed, leaving only the parched desert plains inside every inch of me.

A few moments of effort got me kicking free, the last of the wet clay collapsing in a body-shaped hole now that the body was above ground. I opened my mouth, rain beating my dirty face, and got only a mouthful of muck.

Coughing, gagging, I made it to hands and knees. My head was a swollen pumpkin balanced on a thin aching stick, and the headache receded between waves of scorching, unbearable, agonizing thirst.

There were pines all around me, singing and sighing as the sodden wind slapped them around. It took me two tries to stand up, and another two tries before I remembered my name.

Jack. Jack Becker. That's me. That's who I am.

And I've got to find the dame in the green dress.

Outside the city limits and I'm a duck out of water. The mud wouldn't dry, not in this downpour, it just kept smearing over the ruin of my s.h.i.+rt and suit pants. Even Chin Yun's laundry wouldn't be able to get it out of the worsted. Slogging and slipping, I made it down a hill the size of the Chrysler building and found the dirt road turned off the highway, and there was a mile marker right there.

Twelve miles to the city. Cramps screamed from my empty belly. Maybe getting shot in the head works up a man's appet.i.te. Every time I reached up to touch my noggin it was tender, a puckered hole above my right eye full of even more mud.

I wasn't going to get far. The idea of stumbling off the side of the road and drowning in a ditch was appealing-except for the dame in the green dress.

Think about that, Jack. One thing at a time.

Thunder rumbled somewhere far away. Miss Dale would be at home, probably talking to her cat or making a nice hot cup of tea. The thought made my insides clench like they were going to turn into a meat grinder, and my breath made a funny whistling sound through my open mouth. My nose was plugged, and in any case, I was gasping for air. Sometimes it rains hard enough to drown you out here.

That was when I saw the light.

It was beautiful, it was golden, it was a diner. Not just any diner, but the Denton's Dandy Diner, eleven miles from the city limits. I couldn't go in there looking like this. It took me a while to fumble for my wallet and I nearly ended up in the ditch anyway, my feet tangling together.

The wallet-last year's Christmas present from Miss Dale-was still in my pocket and held all the usuals, plus nineteen dollars and twenty cents. They hadn't taken any money. Interesting.

Think about that later, Jack.

My s.h.i.+rt was wet enough to shed the mud, my suit jacket nowhere in evidence. Stinging pellets warned me the rain was turning to ice.

But the crazy thing was, I wasn't cold. Just thirsty as h.e.l.l. Maybe the idea of the dame in green was warming me up.

Neon blinked in the diner's windows. It was closed, G.o.ddammit, and just when I could have used a phone. I could even see the phone box, smearing my muddy mitts on the window and blinking every time the Cold Drinks sign blinked as well. The phone was at the end of the hall, right near the c.r.a.pper.

My legs nearly gave out.

This is turning out to be a bad night, Jackie boy.

I found a rock I could lift without busting myself and heaved it. The gla.s.s on the door went to pieces, and I carefully unlocked it. The long slugtrail of mud I left toward the phone might have been funny if I'd been in a grinning mood.

A man like me knows his secretary's home number. Any dame dumb enough to work for a case like me probably wouldn't be out dancing at a nightclub. Dale didn't have any suitors-not that she talked, of course. She was a tall thin number with interesting eyes, but that was as far as it went.

Not like the dame in green, no sir.

I hung onto the phone box with fingers that looked swollen and bruised. Dirt still slimed my palms. Under it I was fishbelly white, almost glowing in the dim lighting. The Dentons were going to find their diner not quite so dandy in the cold light of dawn, and I was sorry about that.

"h.e.l.lo?" She repeated herself, because I was trying to make my mouth work. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Dale," I managed through the obstruction in my mouth. Sounded like they'd broken my jaw, or like I was sucking on candy.

"Mr. Becker?" A note of alarm, now. "

Jack?"

"You got to come pick me up, dollface." I sounded drunk.

"Where have you-oh, never mind. Where are you?" I could almost see her perched on her settee, that cup of tea steaming gently on an endtable, and her ever-present steno pad appearing. "Jack? Where are you right now?"

"Denton," I managed. "Dandy Diner, about eleven miles out of the city. You got the keys to my Studebaker?"

"Your car is impounded, Mr. Becker." Now she sounded like the Miss Dale I knew. Cool, calm, efficient. Over the phone she sounded smoky and sinful, just like Bacall. I might've hired her just for that phone voice alone, but she turned out to be d.a.m.ned efficient and not likely to yammer her yap off all the time, which meant I paid her even when I couldn't eat.

You don't find secretaries like that every day, after all.

"Never mind, I'll bring my car. Denton's Dandy, hm? That's west out of town, right?"

"Sure it is." My legs buckled again, I hung onto the box for all I was worth. "I'll be waiting out front."

"I'm on my way." And she hung up, just like that.

What a gal.

The pain in my gut crested as Miss Dale peered over the seat. I'd barely managed to get the door open, and as soon as I was in the car she took off; I wrestled the door shut and the winds.h.i.+eld wipers made their idiot sound for about half a mile as I lay gasping in the back seat.

The car smelled like Chanel No. 5 and Chesterfields. And it smelled of Miss Dale, of hairspray and powder and a thousand other feminine things you usually have to get real close to a dame to get a whiff of. It also smelled like something else.