La Vida Vampire (2 page)

I’m a vampire. The only one in town, but big deal. I do have self-control, never mind self-respect. Last fall, the
St. Augustine Record
ran a story on how Maggie found me in King Normand ’s own coffin, the almost petrified wood still bound by silver chains. We didn’t tell the reporter the coffin had a false bottom filled with real treasure—King Normand’s version of stuffing money under a mattress—or that I’d shared the bounty with Maggie and Neil. The writer made a sensation enough of Normand being a then-hated Frenchman that local history had omitted from the records. The article went on to paint me as the spunky hometown girl who defied the vampire king, was punished by burial, and was then forgotten when Normand and all his vampires were killed by the villagers. Suddenly,
wham!
, I was the oldest citizen, a heroine who’d given
time-out
a whole new meaning and an added tourist attraction in the Oldest City.

Big whoop. I shrugged off my fifteen minutes of fame, studied my tail off in tour guide training, and was ready to be all I could be on every shift. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday this week. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday next week. Wednesday is bridge night. Forget being a fiend for blood. I’m a fiend for bridge. But the tourists didn’t know that. I smelled real fear from some of them. I wasn’t quite sure how to put everyone at ease but I hoped inspiration would strike.

The night-glow Timex Maggie gave me read eight o’clock straight up. It was showtime. I pulled my fragile psychic shields up, squared my shoulders, and—

The humans clustered near me jumped.

Except for a cute towheaded boy of perhaps five years and a fiftyish stone -faced man with a scar trailing down his right jaw, who drifted up to stand near the newlyweds.

The boy gave a single nod, wiggled his shoulder from his mother’s grasp, and dashed up to tug on my skirt.

“Hey, lady ma’am,” he yelled, “are you a real vampire?”

His mother surged forward and croaked a frightened, “Robbie, get back here.”

I held up a hand to reassure her he was safe and looked down. The child didn’t blink, didn’t budge. Streetlights made a halo over his blond mop of hair.

I smiled, sank into a crouch, and answered as loudly as he had asked, “Indeed, Master Robbie, I am a vampire.”

“Huh.” He cocked his head at me, obviously thinking. “My babysitter says vampires are monsters that ’thrall you with their eyes and then they—” He chomped his teeth twice. “—bite you. Are you gonna bite me?”

This kid needed a volume knob, but he was a cute corker. “Well, sir, I’m not good at enthralling because my eyes always cross. Like this.” I crossed my eyes hard. Robbie laughed the way the children of the old Spanish Quarter used to. A sound I ’d missed.

“And you’re not gonna bite me either?” he asked, not quite as loudly.

“Ewww, no way.” I pulled a face that made him laugh again. “I don’t like biting people. It’s icky.”

The mother released the breath she’d been holding, a few in the crowd chuckled, and Robbie grinned.

“You’re not much of a monster, are ya?”

“Nope, but you’re a fine young gentleman.” I ruffled his hair, and stood. “Now, if you’ll scoot back to your mother, we’ll start the tour.”

He did, and I faced a marginally less wary, more attentive crowd. Problem was, between the group ’s high emotions and intense curiosity, they shattered my psychic shields. Thought-questions flew at me left and right. What was my heritage? Where did I live? Where was I buried? Do I like this century, what do I do with my spare time? Do I show up on film? Does the tracker hurt?

How do I eat? Do I shave my legs?

Shave my legs?

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly who thought each question, not this close to the new moon. Heck, with the dark moon so close to shutting The Gift down entirely, I was surprised the impressions were this clear. Then again, they ’d handed me inspiration. If knowing more about me would calm fears, I’d handle their avalanche of questions as part of my spiel. Only Stony—who looked like he’d have more fun getting his teeth extracted with a crowbar—and the newlyweds didn’t seem to mentally bombard me. The petite brunette bride tossed her long hair back so often, I wondered if she had a kink in her neck. She wore skintight black slacks and a semi–see-through black camisole. If that was the fashion in Paris, I’d pass. Her hubby wore gray trousers and an Oxford striped shirt. Their long, speculative glances at me didn’t hold fear. In fact, I could’ve sworn they leered. And the bride’s head tossing? It almost looked flirtatious. Sure had Gomer gawking at her. Too creeped to try taking a psychic peek at them, I focused on being tour guide extraordinaire.

“Welcome to the Old Coast Ghost Walk. I am Francesca Melisenda Alejandra Marinelli, your guide, born here in St. Augustine in 1780. I know you have questions about me, and I’ll get to those in a second. First, let me introduce my friends and assistants, Janie and Mick. Janie’s dressed in a Minorcan ensemble of the late seventeen hundreds, and Mick’s wearing a Spanish soldier’s costume.”

“Why are you wearing an Empire gown?” the Shalimar Jag Queen asked. “Isn’t that from the Regency period?”

“Yes, ma’am. Mine is circa 1802, and I chose it because I love the style. ” The two oldest Jag Queens tittered, and I continued.

“We’re standing at the north end of what used to be the Minorcan Quarter, or the Spanish Quarter, or simply the Quarter. We’ll go through the city gates to the Huguenot Cemetery, then loop through the historic district to end our tour on the bay front. You’re welcome to ask questions as we visit the sites, but let ’s see if I can address some of your personal questions before we start.

“First, please call me Cesca. You
can
take pictures, I
do
show up on film, and I
hope
you’ll get my best side.” The loud wiseguy waved his camera and laughed. “Seriously, if you get any ghostly photos of the haunted sites, the tour company would love to have copies.”

“Ghost pictures?” Gomer breathed, goggle-eyed. “Honest to goodness ghost pictures?”

I nodded.

“Goll-lee.”

Biting the inside of my lip to keep from laughing at the Gomer-ism, I turned toward the Jag Queens and regrouped.

“Now, I mentioned this was called the Quarter. My parents were among those immigrants from Minorca, Italy, and Greece who came here as indentured servants to work the New Smyrna Colony. When the immigrants didn ’t get what they were promised, they fled to St. Augustine for asylum. My mother was Minorcan Spanish, my father an Italian mariner, and my family home was on the bay front. The house we lived in is long gone, but I’ll show you where it was when we get there.

“I was buried for two hundred and four years,” I continued as twelve pairs of eyes got rounder, “in a tiny basement of coquina that had a small trapdoor flush with the ground. The original house over the basement was coquina stone and wood. It ’s also long gone, and a late eighteen hundreds Victorian house is on the site now. My friend, Maggie, is restoring the house, so it’s a construction zone and not safe to visit.

“I love living in this time, ” I said to the goth gang, “and the GPS tracker I wear is in my arm. I don’t get headaches like Spike got in
Buffy.
I do watch a lot of TV and movies, and I read a lot. Classic TV, old movies, and mystery novels are some of my favorites. Oh, and I truly don’t bite people. I get artificial blood from the health food store, and it’s bottled just like cola, except they come in six and eight ounces instead of larger sizes.”

I paused for a breath, and Shalimar jumped in.

“Ms. Marinelli, Francesca, you just answered half the questions my group planned to ask. I’ve heard vampire senses are sharper than human ones, but this is ridiculous. Do you read minds?”

“Not exactly,” I fudged, “but I am a bit psychic when certain moon phases don’t fritz me out.”

“A
bit
psychic, my best pearls! Invite us along next time you play the lottery.”

The group laughed, and Skinny Goth Boy spoke up.

“Hey, the newspaper said you were a princess before you were, you know, in the basement. Were you really some kind of royalty, like from Spain?”

“No. The head vampire here called himself a king because he could get away with it. He declared me the princess because he sort of adopted me.”

“So you were heir to the bloodsucker’s throne?”

Stony asked the question, his voice grating like coquina on a chalkboard. Dressed in a black turtleneck, black Wranglers, and black sneakers, his hard eyes were a startling pale blue. I didn’t mind the other questions, but his annoyed me.

“I’d appreciate it, sir, if you’d use more tactful language in front of the young children,” I said polite as could be. The tour company and my mother would’ve been proud. “To answer you, in a sense I suppose I was being trained, but I was a most unwilling and uncooperative heir.”

“So, eh, Princess Vampire,” the loud wiseguy said, “you see dead people?”

Corny, but I could’ve kissed the man for asking the perfect question to get us on tour-track.

“I do see our ghosts when they want to be seen,” I said as I retrieved the battery-operated lantern from the substation’s small storage shelf. “Let’s get along with our tour and find out if they ’re active tonight. Now, please watch your step, watch the children, and stay together as I tell you of the ghosts of St. Augustine.”

An hour and thirty minutes later, the fog began to thicken, and the air was cooler, but the tour had been successful. Wildly successful, judging by the unusual number of sightings. I mean, the disturbed energy of storms can bring our ghosts out of the woodwork, but plain old fog?

Nevertheless, Wiseguy saw Judge John B. Stickney’s ghost in the Huguenot Cemetery, my little friend Robbie saw both a cat and dog ghost, and two teens swore they saw an angry woman in the window of Fay’s House on Cuna. Gomer must’ve seen her, too. I almost lost it when he uttered a shocked, drawling, “Shazam.” He sounded too Gomer-ish to be for real, but he did look shaken. The French couple actually took their eyes off each other long enough to exclaim over orbs of light zipping around the Catholic Tolomato Cemetery.

I saw my favorite spirit, the Bridal Ghost, in the Tolomato and told her story, the one I’d “seen” from my basement grave. It wasn’t a tour-sanctioned story, but the ghost nodded as if satisfied I had gotten the basics right. I hoped neither Janie nor Mick would turn me in for telling a tale not backed by specific historical data.

Then again, I could argue I
was
the historical data.

I wrapped up my last ghost story at the final stop and scanned the crowd. We’d covered less than a square mile on the tour, but the children were drooping or sleeping in their parents’ arms. Wiseguy and his friends were quiet, and even the teens were subdued.

The newlyweds and Stony hung to the left side of the group. In fact, Stony seemed to be shadowing the couple during the tour. I didn’t lower my reinforced shields to read the dynamics there. Nope, no idle snooping for me. I curbed my curiosity and conducted myself professionally.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our tour, except that I wanted to answer the lady’s earlier question about where I lived.”

I pointed at the newest bayfront hotel, pleased that seeing the site where my family had lived no longer gut-punched me.

“My home was about in the middle of this stretch of property. This hotel is new, but it replaced a motor inn where Martin Luther King, Jr., once jumped or was thrown into the motel pool.

“Thank you for joining us on the Old Coast Ghost Walk this evening. If you ’d like to leave from here, you may, but I’ll escort those who wish it back to our meeting place. Also, if you want to turn in an evaluation form, you can get a discount on a future tour.”

The parents and children headed north toward the new tourist center parking garage. Wiseguy’s group started south. That left the goth gang and Gomer, the Jag Queens, the newlyweds…and Stony, who stalked toward me.

“Hold it,” Stony’s gravel voice rumbled. “I want to know what happened to your family home. Why didn’t it survive like these others did?”

I gave him my polite demeanor, just as I had before. “Many homes here were destroyed by fire over the years and have since been rebuilt. My home burned in 1802.”

He took another step. “And you became a vampire in…?”

I gave him
very
polite. “Eighteen hundred.”

One more step put him and his bad breath nearly in my face. “Did your family die in the fire?”

The Jag Queens gasped en masse, and Mick moved away from Janie to help me, but I held up a hand to show I’d handle the problem myself.

I gave Stony a polite smile so tight my teeth ached. “My parents were out visiting at the time of the fire and weren ’t harmed.”

“Bull. I bet you slaughtered them. That’s the truth, isn’t it? You tore out their throats like the undead monster you are and set fire to them, didn’t you? Didn’t you,
brusha
!”

He grabbed my shoulders and shook me so hard I dropped the battery-operated lantern. That’s when I ran out of polite.

TWO

I may not use my vampire strength or speed, but in that moment I could’ve cheerfully snatched Stony’s head clean off and handed it to him before he fell.

My good manners, good sense—and his breath—stopped me.

Mick moved behind Stony, but I waved off his help again and glared into the man’s pale blue eyes.

“You’re invading my personal space here, and you need a mint, jalapeño breath.”

He smirked. “It’s garlic, bloodsucker.”

“It’s both,” I shot back, “with the underlying scent of cheap cigar. And for the record, I’m a blood sipper not a sucker. Starbloods caramel macchiato, if you want to apologize for this outrage with a case or two. Plus,” I added, ducking easily out of his grasp when he didn’t have the courtesy to let go, “I don’t consider myself undead, just
underalive.
I mean, zombies, now those things are undead. And they stink almost as much as you do.”

“We’re locked and loaded and have him covered, dear,” Shalimar Lady said. “Shall we phone the police, too?”