The Eternal Kiss: Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire

you there.”

“Okay. Okay,” he said.

Heart thumping, she led him to the filing room.

“The thirteenth step,” he muttered. “I didn’t finish it. Now I hurt so bad—worse than ever, and they’re going to kill me.” He showed her his arm where he’d scratched it to ribbons. Under the blood, she could just make out the ink of a tattoo.

“It’s okay.” Lauren opened the door to the filing room. She could hear the wail of sirens in the distance. “In here we’ll be safe.”

She let him go in ahead of her. Quickly, she locked the door behind him, the keys shaking in her hands. He screamed and flung himself against the door. Lauren jumped back.

“I’m not doing the thirteenth step! You hear me!” He bashed his head into the frosted-glass panel of the door once, twice. The sound of sirens grew closer. Lauren slid down the wall and placed her hands over her ears. The third time he bashed against the panel, a crack appeared in the glass like a flower stem dotted by petals of blood. Someone had gone for Johannes, and he was running down the hall toward her, beautiful and fast.

“You okay?” he asked, touching her shoulder.

“Sure,” she said. Then the guy broke through the glass with his head and Lauren blacked out.

Six

AFTER THE PARAMEDICS left and Lauren had given a statement, Johannes insisted on taking her for something to eat. They settled on a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop called Lisa’s Pieces where Lauren ordered a bowl of hot broth with noodles that felt slippery and good going down.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked for about the tenth time.

“Yeah. I’m okay. Who was that guy?”

“I heard he was in the program a long time ago, before I came in. Sometimes people go back out there—it’s rare, but it happens.” He reached over and rubbed her arm. “I heard you were amazing. How’d you think to do that?”

“You really want to know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

She stared at her spoon. “My sister Carla used to get like that when she was tweaked out of her head. If she wasn’t giddy and planning to become a famous movie star, she was paranoid and ready to take your head off.”

“I’m sorry,” he said so sincerely that Lauren blushed a bit. “This job must be hell for you.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s cathartic, you know?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I know. I killed my best friend, driving drunk when I was sixteen. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about that. Not a day that goes by that I don’t pray for forgiveness. But with each person we save, I get a little closer to it.” He looked so sad and helpless then, and Lauren wanted to throw her arms around him, save him with a kiss. “I guess my penance became my calling.”

Lauren felt a sudden twinge of envy that he seemed to know his place in the world. “I guess I haven’t found my calling yet.”

“Maybe your calling will find you.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s here at Angelus. Maybe you’ll even run some missions with us. I know I’d love it if you stayed on.”

He reached past the bowl of untouched fried noodles and took her hand in his. His fingers were long and swallowed hers easily.

“They found another one,” the waiter said, and somebody turned up the TV mounted over the bar.

“The decapitated body of sixteen-year-old Shawna Lenore of the Farragut Houses was found down by the Navy Piers,” the lacquered TV reporter said. “Police had no comment about whether this murder is related to a string of brutal killings that have terrified New York for the past several months, and which some are speculating could be part of an escalating gang war.”

On the flickering TV screen, a crowd of angry residents shouted at police from the sidewalks in front of the Farragut Houses. “How come they don’t do nothing to help us?” a lady holding a baby said to the camera. “They blaming us and we didn’t have nothing to do with it. They just gonna let us die.”

The report switched to one of the fancy restaurants a few blocks away and a couple enjoying a meal at a table outside. “It’s so scary. Makes us wonder whether we should move to the suburbs.”

“Hey,” Johannes whispered, stroking his thumb against Lauren’s palm in a way that made her heart beat faster. “You want to get out of here?”

They walked along the water. Across the river, Manhattan had restructured itself for night as a fractured geometry of light. A homeless couple argued in the street: “You made me do it!” “I didn’t make you do nothing!” “You coulda stopped it.” “It don’t never stop.”

The woman fell on the pavement and started crying like a child.

“Should we do something?” Lauren asked.

“Nothing to be done,” he answered and drew her into the velvet darkness of an alley. He backed her against the brick wall with a mural of two towers under the words “Never Forget,” and then his mouth was on hers, sweet and warm and obliterating.

“Don’t you touch me! Leave me alone—I never did nothing to you!” the homeless woman half-yelled, half-cried, but they were moving away now, out of sight and caring. Johannes leaned into her and pressed his body against hers. He tilted her head with one hand and sucked down the length of her taut neck until it was almost painful, but Lauren refused to cry out. She never wanted him to stop. Nothing else mattered but this. The sounds of the city—the shouts, the taunts, the threats, the distant cries—faded away, and when the police cars screamed past, red lights flashing a warning on their way to some new horror, Lauren didn’t even flinch.

Seven

LAUREN’S FIRST MISSION with Angelus was on a Friday night, second week in August. She, Johannes, Rakim, Alex, and a few others headed down to Admiral’s Row, a length of street marked by dilapidated row houses protected by an iron fence that did nothing to keep them from becoming shooting galleries. The houses were so decayed Lauren could smell the rot. Inside, it reeked of shit and piss and they had to step over the bodies of people half-dressed and barely conscious.

While the others fanned out trying to see if they could get anybody to come with them, Johannes leaned over a petite blonde girl in an NYU shirt. She looked like she’d been there for days. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Dana,” the girl slurred, her eyelids fluttering.

“Listen, Dana. We’re with Angelus House, and we can get you a bed for the night. Would you like that?”

She tried to grab for Johannes’s crotch. “You got any glass? I’ll do whatever you want for it.”

Lauren imagined Carla like this, offering her body to anybody who could get her high for another hour or two. She wanted to kick the girl, not save her.

“Come on, Dana. We’re taking you some place where you can get cleaned up,” Johannes said evenly. “You guys get her in the van. I’m gonna see if I can save anyone else.”

Alex and Rakim draped the girl’s arms across their shoulders and stepped carefully over the shattered bottles and rusted syringes to where they had a van waiting.

“What was that?” Lauren asked, suddenly startled.

“What was what?” Alex asked.

“I heard screaming.”

Alex craned her neck skyward. “Must’ve been the birds.”

Lauren saw the birds outlined against the perpetual hazy glow of the New York night. They were enormous with what looked to be six-foot wing spans. That couldn’t be right, she thought, as she watched them dive down