but those girls were so scared. And I didn’t know anything. I hurt that one girl real bad because I didn’t know how tight to knot the rope. And another girl just sobbed for the whole five-hour drive. I hate it. I’m not doing it again.”
“That is the very point of etiquette, Charles. It instructs us as to how to do things we don’t want to do.”
“I
“That is very rude. And you know I do not tolerate rudeness.”
“What’s going on?” you say, tremulously, from behind me.
“He’s going to kill Charles,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound all that different from yours.
“What are you?” you ask. You must be sobering up. “What’s
I bare my teeth at you. It’s the easiest way, really, to show you what I am. I’ve never done it before in front of someone I wasn’t intending to kill right away.
Your eyes go wide when you see the fangs, but you don’t step back. “And
You’re so stupid. I already told you. “He’s going to kill him.”
“But. why?”
“For not following the rules,” I tell you. “That’s why rules are so important.”
“But you’re just kids,” you say. You’re used to second chances and next-time-there’ll-be-consequences- young-lady. You’ve never had your mother killed in front of you. You’ve never drunk your brother’s blood.
“I’m old,” I say. “Older than you. Older than your mother.”
I know why Charles didn’t tell me about the tribute, though. It’s because some part of him still thinks of me as little too. He’s been protecting me from that, just like he’s been protecting me by staying in the old house, even though he no longer wants to. It’s not fair. He was right before when he said he was a good brother. He shouldn’t get killed for that.
“Well, do you have a stake?” you ask.
I don’t point out that this is like asking a French aristocrat if they have a guillotine around. Instead I point toward the fireplace.
You are surprisingly quick on the uptake. Not sophisticated, of course, but with a sort of rough intelligence. Street smarts, Mr. DuChamp would say. You grab the fireplace poker and without a second glance head out the door into the dining room.
I lean around the door. Mr. DuChamp has Charles up against the wall. His big hand is around Charles’s neck, and he is squeezing. He can squeeze hard enough to crush Charles’s neck if he wants to, but that wouldn’t be fatal. Right now he’s just having fun.
When we were just starting to learn how to feed, the hardest part for me was moving out of the stalk and into the strike. There’s an awkward moment when you get close to your victim but haven’t actually lunged. It can seem an impossible gulf between planning and actually doing, but if you hesitate, you’ll get noticed.
You obviously don’t have that problem. You swing the poker against the side of Mr. DuChamp’s head hard enough to make him stagger back. Blood runs down his cheek, and he opens his mouth in a fanged hiss.
Before he can get his bearings, I clamp my mouth on his throat like a lamprey. I’ve never drunk the blood of one of my kind before. It’s like drinking lightning. It goes zinging down my throat, and all the time Mr. DuChamp’s fists are beating on my shoulders, but I don’t let go. He’s roaring like a tiger in a trap, but I don’t let go. Even when he crashes to the ground, I don’t let go, until Charles leans over and detaches me, pulling me off the corpse like an engorged tick so full and fat it doesn’t even care.
“Enough, Jenny,” he says. “He’s dead.”
A lot of people think that when vampires die, they explode or catch on fire. That’s not true. As death sets in, our kind subside slowly into ash, like a bowl of fruit ripening into mold and rot on speeded-up film. We all stand in a sort of triangle, watching as Mr. DuChamp starts turning slowly black, the tips of his fingers beginning to crumble.
You start crying, which seems ridiculous, but Charles takes you into the other room and talks to you softly like he used to talk to me when I was little.
So then it’s just me, witness to Mr. DuChamp’s final end. I take the little broom from the fireplace and sweep what’s left of him among the scorched wood and bones.
When you and Charles come back out, I’m standing there with the broom like Cinderella. Charles has his arm around you. You look blotchy and red nosed and very human.
“We’re going to have to run away, Jenny,” he says. “Mr. DuChamp’s master knew where he was. He’ll come looking for him soon enough. I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out what happened.”
“Run away?” I echo. “Run away to where?” I’ve never been anywhere but here, never lived anywhere but in this house.
You explain that you have an uncle who has a farmhouse upstate. You and Charles plan to hide out there. I am welcome to come along, of course. Charles’s creepy little sister.
This is what Charles always wanted — a real girlfriend, someone who will love him and listen to music with him and pretend that he’s a regular boy. I hope that you do. I hope that you will. You might be stuck with each other for a long time.
“No,” I say. “I’m okay. I’ve got somewhere else to go.”
Charles furrows his brow. “No, you don’t.”
“I
I guess he doesn’t really want me to come to the farmhouse, because he actually drops it. He goes upstairs to pack up his stuff, and you go with him.
The remains of dinner are still on the table. The glasses full of wine. The four plates, only one of them with food on it. The remains of our last dinner party.
When I’m done cleaning up and I’ve said good-bye to you and Charles, when you’ve given me the address in case I change my mind, when you’ve hugged me, even, my neck so close to yours that I can smell your blood through the pores of your skin, then I’m going to get ready, too.
Six girls is nothing to me. I can ask them to help me find my mother in parking lots, to look for lost kittens, to pick me up after I fall from my bike and skin my knee. I don’t care if they scream or cry. It might be a little annoying, but that’s it.
The hardest part is going to be driving while sitting on a phone book. But I’ll figure out a way. If I want the job, I’m going to have to show the master I’m just as good as DuChamp. I know every detail of the story of his rise to power. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Everything he did, I can do.
As I leave town, I’ll drop this letter in the mail, just so you know what my plans are.
Thank you very much for coming to my party. I had a lovely time.
Slice of Life
by LUCIUS SHEPARD
I’ve never done it with another girl, but Sandrine gets me thinking how it would be. She’s got the kind of body I wish I had, long legged and lean, yet with enough up top to keep boys happy. Her nose is too big and beaklike for her narrow face, but after you study on her awhile, it seems to settle in above her generous mouth, becoming part of her beauty. The light that shines her into being, reflecting off God knows how many shards of mirror, makes it difficult to judge — most times she’s scarcely more than a sketch with a few hazy details — but I figure if all her color was restored, her hair would be jet-black and her eyes dark blue like the ocean out past the sandbar on a sunny day.
She says I’ll never leave her, that we’re two of a kind, and who knows, maybe she’s right.
If you’re born in these parts, in one of the sad, savage, broken towns along the St. John’s River, now reduced to cracker slums. shells of old mansions with fallen-in roofs and busted-out screens on the front porch and people
