The Eternal Kiss: Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire

“… burned to a crisp …”

“What’s going on?” Lauren asked.

Alex looked up, her face registering surprise. Her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. “It’s Brian.”

“Those bastards in the projects, they torched Brian,” Rakim said, his nostrils flaring in anger. “He went in to help them, and they paid him back by setting him on fire.”

Just then Johannes walked in. “If we get caught up in anger, we lose. Come on. Let’s remember Brian as he’d want us to.”

They formed a sharing circle, hands clasped. Lauren stood on the outside, watching. “We are the fallen angels,” they intoned. “We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega. Unto us is given this charge. Unto us will be the glory.”

They hugged and comforted one another, especially the newbies who had come to see Brian as their protector.

“We remember and go on,” Johannes said.

“Amen,” the others answered.

Brian’s death was front-page news. FALLEN ANGEL, the headline in the Daily News trumpeted, and there was a picture of Brian smiling out from under that shaved head full of tattoos. Everyone at the Farragut swore they’d had nothing to do with it, that nobody had even seen him around there and that it was all a setup by the cops or the real-estate developers or Angelus House itself. One anonymous source claimed that he’d seen Brian simply walk out into the daylight muttering “For the greater good,” before bursting into flame.

They held a candlelight vigil for Brian that evening, marching from Angelus House through Vinegar Hill to the Navy Yards, where the mayor spoke and promised that those who were guilty would be brought to justice. The cops hit the city hard, taking people in for any and everything they could. After Brian’s death, the tide of public opinion turned in favor of Angelus House taking over the empty warehouses along the waterfront.

“He sacrificed himself for us,” Lauren overheard Rakim saying a few days later. He said it to Dana, who had cleaned up nicely and was attending meetings every day. “That’s the Angelus commitment. That’s the extra step.” He broke off when he saw Lauren. “Hey Lauren Sauron. You mind going for some groceries? I think the newbies need more juice.”

“Sure.”

He smiled, but something in his eyes made her uneasy, and she found herself wanting to escape the too-cold recycled air. “Hey, who’s better than Kiliamanjaran?”

“Nobody,” she said and went outside.

In the grocery cart, Lauren found an envelope with her name on it shoved under the bags she kept there. Inside was the day’s paper with the headline: ANOTHER ONE BITES THE

DUST. Lauren scanned the story. The body, drained of blood, had been discovered in a dumpster behind a Burger King in downtown Brooklyn, the head missing. Another victim in an escalating gang war. The victim’s name was Isaiah Jones of the Farragut Houses.

Isaiah Jones.

A note had been scrawled at the bottom of the page: I need to talk to you. You can find me today on the boardwalk at Coney, in front of Deno’s. Tell nobody. A friend.

That afternoon, Lauren pretended she had a dentist’s appointment and biked down to Coney Island where she found the tagger on the boardwalk painting caricatures of tourists for extra cash. He looked up, shielding his eyes from the relentless sun. “Hey. What do you want—a drawing of you as Princess Leia or Barbarella? Personally, I think you would look hot as Wonder Woman.”

“Sorry about your friend.”

“Yeah,” he said, gazing out at some point on the horizon. “Come on. Let’s get outta this heat.”

The tagger, whose name, she learned, was Antonio, sweet-talked an aquarium volunteer into letting them inside for free. They took refuge in the cool damp, wandering through the maze of watery exhibits full of exotic creatures, stopping in a secluded spot near the moray eel. Antonio leaned against the glass. The blue-gray light turned him ghostly pale.

“Remember I told you about my cousin, Sabrina? Right before she died, she called me up scared out of her mind and said she’d seen some weird shit going down at Angelus. Bad shit.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head. “She wouldn’t tell me over the phone. But she mailed me this postcard right before she disappeared.” He pulled a card out of his back pocket. It was the Angelus House insignia. Across the front in a shaky script were the words los vampiros. “Two days later, she was dead. They killed her.” Lauren started to object, and he held up a finger. “Wait. Just let me tell you about Isaiah now. Isaiah ran with a crew out of the Farragut. He liked to smoke, deal a little weed, nothing major, only he gets caught for a second time—he’s eighteen now—and they give him a choice: Angelus House or time. So he joins up, does the program, but he doesn’t take it serious. He’s just going along till he can get out.”

Lauren felt hate rising. “Nice.”

“One night, he comes rolling back into the houses, smokes a blunt with his boys, and when he’s all loose, he starts telling them how he got tapped for something big, something secret, like the damn Mafia. He told ’em that Angelus wasn’t just a twelve-step program. They got a secret thirteenth step.”

Lauren remembered the tweaker who’d broken in that night. He mentioned a thirteenth step, but he was out of his mind. “What do you mean?”

“Isaiah said once you were tapped, you got the mark to prove your commitment to Angelus House—the tattoo they all wear. Then you had twenty-four hours to prove yourself on a mission, and once you did that, you were untouchable. A bona fide immortal.” He paused. “A vampire.”

The eel bumped against the glass, startling Lauren. “This is, like, crazier than crazy,” she said.

“Yeah? How do you explain what happened to that guy Brian?”

“The cops say somebody at the Farragut killed him.”

“That crazy bastard burned up in the sun.”

“You know this.”

He shrugged. “I heard it.”

“And that makes it automatically true.”

“You want to hear this shit or not?”

She crossed her arms. “Whatever. You asked me down here.”

“And you came,” he offered. “Think about it: If you wanted to work up a crew of vampires without being noticed, where would you do it? You’d get the people no one wants to be bothered with, the lost causes who already got a craving they can’t stop on their own so they’re, like, ripe for whatever you throwing at ’em. And then you’d make up some bullshit turf war and blame it on a whole bunch of other people nobody wants to be bothered with, let them take the fall.”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “Okay. Backing up. You said they had twenty-four hours after they got the mark to do a mission. What happens if they don’t?”

He lowered his voice to a strained whisper. “It’s like the worst withdrawal symptoms ever, and they never stop. You lose your mind.”

And again Lauren thought of the man who’d bashed his head into the glass of the filing room door.

“So either you do what they want you to do, or they kill you one way or another,” Antonio continued. “Isaiah said he saw it happen to this other cat, and that’s why he was out of there the next morning without getting inked. That’s why he went into hiding. But they got to him anyway. Just like Sabrina. And the worst part is, nobody knows. People are so blind they’ll believe whatever they’re told. Gang war.” He spat. “My Puerto Rican ass.”

The eel slithered along the bottom of the dark floor of the tank, back and forth. Lauren watched it searching for prey, and something hard and angry twisted in her guts. This guy and his bullshit theories was taking away the only good thing she’d had in three years.

“So let me get this straight. Some former drug dealer gets high and starts making up stories about vampires and you take it as gospel? You’re such an idiot. He played you. He probably owed money to somebody. Listen, my sister used to tell me all kinds of crazy lies, and I believed her because I didn’t want to know the truth. She’s still pulling shit on my parents all the time. So excuse me if I’m all out of gullibility. Go play your games with somebody