Vampires Never Get Old, page 2
Suddenly Seti was on her knees, crouched over me. She reached, grabbed my hair, and dragged up my head. Her vivid brown eyes were alight with passion. “Imagine what you can change in a hundred years!”
I sat as best I could, still in her grip. Her intensity transferred through her hands into me, and I felt like I was trembling at the edge of something important.
She said, “What are you angry about? We can make it better. We can shape history, because we can do it a little at a time, child. A heart here, a mind there, then another and another—around the world. Having a goal—that’s how you survive the years.”
“Seti likes to seduce community leaders and write angry blog posts,” Esmael said.
He was there behind me, faster than humanly possible.
“It works, you tax-paying stooge,” Seti snarled.
His hand gasped her throat and she released me. I scrambled away, but Esmael was smiling. “Socialist whore,” he hissed.
I grabbed a quilt from the foot of the bed and went up to the roof as their wrestling deteriorated into sex. It was frigid outside but oh so clear, and the pink in the east, past the rest of the city, wasn’t the color of blood at all.
* * *
I made a list for my mom of everything in the world that I’d change. It only had one line.
* * *
The fifth night of the ritual, Esmael came to the house, a bungalow from the 1920s two streets off from the millionaire tax bracket that surrounded my high school. I was in my bedroom smearing pastels to the light of a few candles that smelled variously of spruce, wassail, and orange juice. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.
“Did Grandma let you in?” I asked, handing him the heavy paper. Most people took my work by a corner, careful not to smear charcoal on their fingers, but Esmael took it like the gift it was.
“No, she is unaware I am here,” he said thoughtfully, studying the strokes of black and dark orange. It was a rough pomegranate, cut open in one ragged slash. It bled its thin juice, and five tiny pips lined the bottom of the page, little smears of red pressed there by my pinkie. If the light was better, maybe you could see the ghost of my fingerprints in it. I hoped so.
Esmael’s lips parted and he breathed in, smiling tenderly at me. “Very well, my Persephone, come for your next seed.”
I held out my hand and he lifted it, licked my palm, and drew a breath that tickled the fine hairs on my arm. He pulled me nearer and kissed my wrist, licking and sucking softly until my knees were weak and I dug my fingers into his hip bone. My art fluttered in his other hand as he settled it upon the bed and bit into me.
After, he held me in his lap as his blood swept through my system.
“You don’t have to say goodbye yet,” he murmured. “To any of them. Not until you want to. Or not until they do.”
That was nice, I thought, knowing I would say goodbye fast anyway. A lingering death sucked. A death you knew was coming—or a goodbye you knew was coming—sweetened everything to the point of pain. Waiting to say goodbye would be just like that. I ground my teeth together to stop thinking about it.
“Do you do this often?” I asked, eyes closed. We were both in my desk chair, and the candle nearest us on the desk smelled vividly like a fresh, unadorned Christmas tree.
“Yes.” His arms encircled me gently, supportive and cold. “Most don’t live past the first year, but those who do are nearly always young women. You need to live, I think, because of what’s been denied you. You’re already hungry, every young girl I’ve ever met has been hungry—that makes the transition easier. You know how to live with hunger. And anger—Seti is right about that. Not just any anger, not old masculine anger, sharpened with toxicity, but true anger, the kind that fills you up like a light.”
I said, “I don’t feel angry.”
“You are.”
* * *
I opened El Café the next morning and Sid came in to lean on the counter and flirt over Americanos and last-minute calculus.
When my shift ended, she drove me to school. That time of morning the lot was full, so we parked on a side street and crunched through slush to the main building. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shrugged. There were so many possible answers.
Sid had a knit cap pulled down over her ears so you couldn’t see any of her short hair. Her coat was long and her boots tall, but her bare knees were pink and chapped by the two-minute walk.
“Are you angry?” I asked her when we hit the wide sandstone staircase, stopping her with a gloved hand on her shoulder.
“With you? Should I be?” Her brow lowered.
“No, no, just—just in general. Angry at the state of the world. At, like, systemic oppression and the patriarchy and … what a shitbag this country is.”
“Sure.”
“Sure?” I pursed my lips, pretty sure that if your answer was so whatever, the real answer was no. I charged up the steps and slammed into the door, dragging its weight out and open.
Sid caught up to me. “Is this about your mom?”
I actually snarled, like a fucking vampire. Teeth bared.
“Shit,” she snapped, and shoved past me.
As she strode away, the swing of her short uniform skirt very clearly stated, Well I’m angry now, bitch.
I thought about Persephone and her six pomegranate seeds. She went with the god of death half the year and for the other half returned home to her mom. The best of both worlds. Maybe that was what I was angry about.
* * *
That night, the sixth night, I asked Seti, “What if I want to kill someone?”
“Do it with a tool a human could use, so as not to draw attention. Have a drink, but use a knife to the throat.”
I shuddered, wondering if someday I’d be so old a monster I could say such a thing so easily.
“It’s difficult to drink enough blood to kill a full-grown man,” she continued, pulling me down the stairs into a speakeasy. “Unless you do it slowly. We rarely get into the big arteries because they’re more difficult to control. Too much force and you end up gagging, and blood spray on clothing is suspicious.” She touched her finger to my bottom lip. In a sultry voice, she added, “It’s best for us when we have to suck a little bit.”
I snorted. “Okay, so you don’t get caught up in the pleasure of it and accidentally drain somebody dry. What about garlic and crosses and shit?”
“Garlic gets into the skin and blood and can be overwhelming, but it’s not dangerous. Crosses, salt, holy water, those types of things can be imbued with magic that disrupts ours, hurting us, but rarely these days. Almost nobody practices that sort of magic anymore. Just general protection spells and the evil eye and blessings.”
“Are there, like, slayers?”
“Sure, but you’re more likely to be struck by lightning.”
“Would that kill us?”
“I bet so.”
Seti charmed the bouncer and stole a table, and we perched on high stools drinking smoky cocktails out of little crystal coupe glasses.
“And the sun?” I asked.
“Deadly.”
“Why?”
“It breaks the magic, or kills the demon in our blood, I suppose. You won’t burst into flame, but all your blemishes and wounds since you died return with a vengeance, and you age. The sun breaks the spell, and you’re as dead as you should’ve been.”
“Direct sunlight? Or any?”
“Direct, or we’d be toast under a full moon, too.”
“Do you ever watch the dawn?”
“At the movie theater.”
“I should paint it while I can.”
Seti grinned slowly. “So you’ve decided?”
In that moment, I wanted to run.
* * *
When we returned to the gallery apartment, a little boy was there with Esmael. Eleven or twelve, white with rusty-red hair, cherubic is what his cheeks are called, and dressed like an adult in tight jeans, polished loafers, a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a vivid teal tie with tiny yellow flowers.
“This is Henry,” Esmael said, two spots of actual pink on his cheeks, so he was either elated, furious, or very full of blood.
The boy bowed at me like in a costume movie and lifted his huge, light brown eyes. Then he smiled, and the fangs that seemed tiny in Esmael’s mouth completely overwhelmed the delicate lips of that little boy. “Greetings, miss.”
“A little kid vampire!” I couldn’t help being rude.
Seti snorted. Esmael touched my cheek with one hand and put his knuckles to Henry’s lightly curling hair. “It’s a sign, darling: Henry is my oldest living progeny. He came to see me, just in time to speak with you.”
“So much for teenage girls being your biggest successes,” I said, laughing a little. I was stunned, as well as nervous. Here was such a little kid, who could rip my throat out in a snap.
“People raised as girls is exactly what I said,” Seti corrected me, grinning. “Isn’t that right, Hen?”
The little boy sighed like an old man and went to the sideboard to pour a glass of whiskey.
Esmael said, “I was living as a priest in France in the fifteenth century—within the Church was the safest place for monsters in those days—and served the family of a minor lord. Henry, my lord’s fifth child, came in to confess that he was angry at God and terrified to grow breasts and hips and belly like his sisters. He knew he was supposed to be a man, that’s what he dreamed, over and over again, even though it was a sin. I said, ‘I cannot make your body into that of a man, but I can make you as strong as one and keep you from ever growing into a woman.’”
“I thought it was a miracle, and Father Samuel an angel,” Henry said, heavy with irony.
I sat down on the chaise lounge. Henry brought me his glass of whiskey and allowed me a sip. I stared, and then asked a million questions about living almost five hundred years as a kid. He answered some of them.
Several hours later, I let Esmael give me the sixth seed.
* * *
I stared at Sid in Biology, feeling extremely old. I’d apologized to her, and she’d shrugged it off. “Make it up to me,” she’d said, and I’d promised. But I stared at her, wondering what she’d say and if she’d miss me for long. Would it be like I’d died? What would any of them say?
My mom told me that how people talk about you when you’re dead is your only real legacy. I hadn’t wanted to hear it then. I wanted more than anything to hear it now.
* * *
The seventh night—the last night—I went to the cemetery. It was easy, as always, to sneak in after dark.
Esmael knew somehow, the bastard, and was waiting for me. He leaned against a small granite obelisk several graves away from Mom’s. Wind fluttered the tails of his coat and the curls of hair at his temple.
I stopped, hugging myself.
“What’s holding you back?” he murmured. The night sky seemed to take his voice and carry it gently toward me.
“She deserved to live forever,” I whispered, trying not to cry.
For a long while, Esmael said nothing. Then he only gave me one word: “Deserved?”
“She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t a bitch, she always tried to help people. I’m nothing like that, so why me, why not her? Anger shouldn’t be the key to immortality, you dick. Shouldn’t it be compassion or kindness or something good?”
“Seti would say use your anger to make that true. Change the world, she says.”
“What do you say, Esmael?”
He stepped closer to me, silent and gray against the night sky. “I say anger is just as valuable as compassion, if it makes art like yours.”
I groaned, curling my hands into fists. I shoved them against my eyes until I saw red-sparking stars.
“Tonight,” he said, too close now, his words hardly more than a breath. “Tonight is the last night. If you come to me, all I have will be yours. If you do not, you’ll never see me again. Though I cannot promise I won’t look for your art, out in the world.”
I opened my eyes, but he was gone.
* * *
Back in September, swaddled in a blanket we’d stolen from the hospital, Mom had said, “You keep me alive, baby.” She’d shivered, eyelids paper-thin as she closed them and leaned into the wingback chair. “The things you say about me. How you remember me.”
“That’s too much pressure!” I’d yelled—actually yelled at her. “Too much responsibility. I’m just seventeen, Mom.”
“You carry the world on your shoulders,” she murmured, falling asleep. “You all do.”
* * *
All right, I was angry.
No, I was furious, curled against Mom’s headstone, legs up and arms hugging them against my chest. I knocked my forehead against my knees, face scrunched up.
It hurt how much I missed her. Actual, physical pain. What if becoming a vampire preserved that, too? This ache was just there, all the time. A part of me, in my bones.
“It’ll get rid of the zits on your forehead, but not the fat on your belly,” Seti had said when I asked. She was laughing at me. “The magic preserves us as we are, at our most ideal. Sorry you think that chubby roll isn’t ideal, but you’ll learn better. Trust the blood, the magic. Whatever it leaves you, belongs.”
Or what if I transformed and this pain was gone? Like it didn’t belong? What if the blood magic stripped it away? That would be worse, to lose it.
* * *
I opened the gallery apartment door slowly and shoved it with the toe of my snow boot. Esmael waited at the hearth, leaning there like some couture model. Seti lay on her stomach on the bed, legs up, feet kicking slowly back and forth. She smiled at me triumphantly.
I said, “Is grief like anger? Will I take it with me?”
Esmael said, “Come here, and I’ll show you, instead, how it’s all just love.”
That was definitely a line, but I believed it, too.
CREATION MYTHS Or Where Do Baby Vampires Come From?
Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C. Parker
Like so many supernatural creatures of the night, there are rules around the creation of a vampire. Those rules are rarely the same from story to story. In some traditions, all it takes is a bite from a vampire and, presto chango, you become a blood-sucking fiend! In some, you have to exchange blood with a vampire, in others a curse will do it, and in still others if a wolf leapt across your grave you would rise up as a vampire. The stories we tend to be most familiar with involve some kind of transformation: from human to vampire, good to evil, living to undead. Sometimes the choice isn’t up to the one going through the change. What we love about Tessa’s story is how the choice is completely up to our heroine and how she doesn’t have to make it in an instant, but over a span of seven nights.
If you had the choice, would you want to live forever?
THE BOYS FROM BLOOD RIVER
Rebecca Roanhorse
“It’s just a song, Lukas,” Neveah says, her voice heavy with disdain. “Nobody believes the Blood River Boys will actually appear if you sing it.” She leans a plump hip against the old-fashioned jukebox that squats in the corner of Landry’s Diner and runs a bright blue fingernail down the playlist, looking for just the right song to get us through after-hours cleanup.
I lean on the mop in my hands and watch her. She’s so confident. So easy in her body. Where I’m … not. I’m too skinny, too gangly, too tall. Caught somewhere between a baby bird and Slender Man, if Slender Man were a pock-faced sixteen-year-old boy whose hair wouldn’t lie flat no matter how much gel he slathered on it. If Slender Man weren’t even the least bit cool.
“Your brother believes,” I offer.
She shakes her head. “Honestly, Brandon is the last person in the world who knows anything about the history of Blood River, much less about the Boys.”
Her eyes dart to me and then quickly away. I know she’s avoiding looking directly at me, as if not making eye contact will mean she doesn’t have to acknowledge the purpling bruise circling my left eye. As if not seeing my black eye means I don’t actually have one.
But not acknowledging something doesn’t make it go away. Most of the time it makes it worse.
“You don’t believe in the Boys, do you?” Neveah asks me.
Neveah works here at the diner with me, and she’s the closest thing I have to a friend, but even she’s not my friend. Not really. She’s older than me, almost graduated from the community college, whereas I have another full year of high school. If I were going to classes, that is. I’m pretty close to dropping out. Neveah’s smart, way smarter than me. But she’s wrong about the Boys.
“Brandon sure knew all the details,” I challenge nervously. I don’t want to make her mad at me. She’s pretty much the only person in this town who even talks to me. But she’s wrong. I know it. “Their escape, their hideout up by the old mine, the things they did when the townspeople came for them.”
“What about the song?” she asks, eyes focused back on the jukebox. “Do you believe that part?”
“No.” That was the least plausible part. But even as I say no, I wish I were saying yes. “But—”
“Shhh … Here’s my jam.” She punches the little white button, and after a few seconds a song starts. But it’s not the one I expected.
The slow moan of a fiddle wails from the jukebox, joined by the heavy thump of a washboard drum and then a banjo, picked strings as soft as a weeping woman. And a man sings: “As I walked by the river, the moon my companion, I spied a young fellow, an amiable lad…”
Neveah frowns. “This isn’t the song I picked.” She slams a hand against the side of the jukebox, but the song plays on.
“He’d the face of an angel but the heart of a demon, and that night he did take the lone life that I had.”
