I left her to her street corner and made my way to South Station, where I hoped my bag was where I left it.
As I found out later, around the same time Brenda and I were negotiating the rent for a night’s stay, something unpleasant showed up at Gary and Nate’s. Something that was looking for me.
Brenda lived in Chinatown, a short three blocks from the corner she was working. It was a second floor apartment above a restaurant that specialized in something called “hot pot,” which I later discovered means “come boil your own dinner.”
The word “apartment” needed translating, too. It was one room plus a toilet that had evidently been installed in a closet, with a bucket and a sponge instead of a tub. I wasn’t getting that shower. I might have credited Brenda with being far enough along to realize she didn’t actually need to sleep in a coffin except that the place was so small it nearly qualified as one.
It did have a bed, though. Clean sheets, too. This made some bit of sense, especially if Brenda brought any clients to the place. Vampires have an acute sense of everything, but their sense of smell is particularly exceptional. I imagined she washed her sheets after every appointment, probably at the all-night laundromat around the corner.
She shut the hallway door, cutting us off from the dangling bare bulb out there and plunging the room into total and complete darkness. (The windows were heavily shuttered, for obvious reasons.)
“I told you it wasn’t much,” she apologized, moving freely in the dark.
“Brenda, I can’t see anything.”
“Oh, sorry. I figured you could see like me.” A flame sputtered to life in her hands, which she marched over to a candle resting on the windowsill. “I don’t pay for electricity,” she explained. “No phone either.”
“That’s okay.”
“Boy, you’re really a lot like them, aren’t you?” she observed.
“Like who?”
“Humans. You’ve… ass… what’s the word I want?”
“Assimilated?”
“Maybe, yeah.” She sat down on the bed. “No strength, no eyes… and hey, your heart is still beating.” Good hearing being one of the aforementioned heightened senses.
I sat next to her. “I’m not a vampire. The truth is, nobody knows what I am, exactly. I sure don’t.”
“Wild,” she said, with about as much sincerity as one can say that particular word. “So, you don’t drink blood or anything?”
“Nope. I eat rare steak from time to time.” I polished off the last of the vodka and started to roll up my sleeve. “I assume you’re still hungry.”
Her eyes lit up. “Yeah. But, you know, only if you want to.”
A point about vampires. They can and do have sex. I’ve tried it. It’s not bad. A little cold, a little dry… it’s kind of like screwing a very lively statue. Usually the vampire is doing you a favor because they’re not particularly turned on by intercourse, although that’s not always true with the younger ones. Drinking blood, however, is an orgasmic experience nearly every time, hence her enthusiasm. Yeah, she had to eat, but there was more involved. In a lot of ways it’s more fun watching them eat than having sex with them.
“A deal is a deal,” I said, extending my arm. “I assume you know how to stop yourself.”
“Oh sure. Haven’t lost a John yet.”
“How’s that work?” I asked. “Do you wait until after they’re done, or during?”
“During, usually. That way we’re both having our fun.”
“And they don’t mind?”
“Nobody’s complained yet. And when I do it well, they don’t even notice.” I found it hard to imagine not noticing one is being bitten, but that’s me.
She held my wrist lovingly.
“Cheers,” I said.
With a grin, she bared her fangs and dug in. It only stung for a second. Then the two of us leaned back slowly onto the bed, Brenda in a blind frenzy of rapture and me watching her. Lying there, it occurred to me how very much she looked like Eloise.
Chapter 5
I met Eloise in the winter of 1356 in France, while I was working in the castle of Enguerrand de Coucy in Picardy, the northern region near the border of the Holy Roman Empire. Picardy was almost perpetually snowbound, and the castle was 200 years old already at that time, so the damn place was as drafty as hell, but it did have a few things going for it. Foremost, it wasn’t Paris.
I have developed likes and dislikes regarding major cities over time, and one thing I’ve learned is you have to pick your spots. For example, Caesar’s Rome was a fine place to be, as was Aristotle’s Athens. But Paris and London up until the World Wars were almost completely intolerable, as was early New York and early Berlin. Basically, Paris in 1346 was one gigantic smelly sewer, which made some sense, as neither the flush toilet nor deodorant had been invented yet. And the plague only compounded the problem. Nobody knew quite what to do with plague victims, so they usually lay where they dropped and just added to the overall bouquet.
Altogether, I was pretty happy in my drafty old castle on a hill overlooking nothing in particular. It was quiet, not nearly as smelly, and the plague rarely made it to us. (Not that I personally had to worry about it, but stinky dead people are stinky dead people and I’d just as soon rather not have to deal with them.)
Strictly speaking, I was a servant. I don’t like to put it that way because Lord Coucy was a generous man who treated most people he met with a reasonable degree of respect, so I never felt much like one. And my singular talent, the one that got me the room in the castle instead of the hay loft in the stable, was that I was literate. Coucy could read and write as well as the next man but nobody else in the place could, which made me, simple peasant that I was, extremely valuable, especially when he was away.
And he was away all the time. This period was later known as the Hundred Years’ War on account of France and England kept fighting each other over French sovereignty. (Or something. They just didn’t like each other. Still don’t.) While he was off fighting various noble battles—which France invariably lost—I kept up correspondences and maintained the books, looked after Mme. Coucy, and basically hit on the staff whenever I could.
The castle was built on the peak of a hill, with thirty-foot walls that made three quarters of the keep
