Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (55 page)

shower, Russell?”

“Wants
 
me
, Alex,” Russell sing-songs again, walking  backwards and pretending to shoot at them with unloaded  fingertips. “Bad.”

“Kindly retrieve the chains.” Alexander’s voice skirts  beneath the bridge like wind-whipped gravel, and Ina shudders  in pleasure. God, even his voice moves her. “Do her first.”

Russell is unhinged by the threadbare sound too, but he’s done this eight times before, and dismisses any threat of danger as he turns away, giggling something about freaks and peep-shows and shit. His boots slap at the grime-caked concrete reminding Ina of flippers or clown shoes, and she snorts. She likes clowns. Alexander tightens his grip again  and, though she quickly sobers, she doesn’t mind his small show of temper. He’s doing this for her, after all. For them.

So she thinks of Alexander’s footsteps instead of Russell’s, the light and assured way in which he walks through this world .  . . beside her. She’s written before about how the sight of him always calms her, and it  does that again as she gazes up to find him backlit in grey silhouette, a three-dimensional cut-out against a two-dimensional world. In artificial light he is unremarkable, if tall, and he comes from an age that valued a close shave at pate and neck, fortunate that it is fashionably classic. But in the dark, where he is at home, those smooth features blur into a block of unyielding stone.

Alexander follows his own whim; he is wearing rims he doesn’t really need and still sporting a light accent he adopted  in his time spent in Louisiana before finding himself, and Ina, in  New York. She only knows this because he was keeping record even then.

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Yet while no bald evidence of discomfort plays across that stoic face. Ina sees he isn’t entirely settled. There’s a  midnight knowledge of the deed to come lurking behind his eyes, a carnal flinch as Russell calls Ina forwards, though Alexander never even blinks.

Ina joins Russell at the midway point, where the darkness narrows into a span of only eight feet, the light  from each end of the tunnel flickering like tapers losing fuel. It’s not a proper bridge, mostly meant for run-off from the park, but it’s solid and remote and this perfectly suits their purposes. She drops her handbag along the incline of the wall where  shadows eat it whole, while flicking a cursory glance at the sacrifice, already there, slumped in the tunnel’s concave centre. It’s a woman and it has dull brown hair that’s muddy and matted, jagged fingernails and a bottom lip split from an unnecessary blow.

Ina slips her back to the wall, ignoring the way Russell feels her up on the way to manacling her wrists. She can’t help but bare fangs when he grinds against her, but Alexander, more controlled, glares at her. She swallows her fury and stares out

over Russell’s greasy head. His foul breath billows up like a  garlic cloud around her as he laughs. Garlic. Yeah, that’s really  fucking funny.

Russell isn’t so far drunk on drugs and power that he forgets  Alexander, unchained, at his back, and he doesn’t linger over  Ina. She imagines he’ll come  back once they’re both tightly secured. Ina’s knees had been caked with the alley’s dirt at her rebirth this year. The previous year, she’d written about semen in her hair. It’s thinking about this, and about all the indignities she can’t remember, that makes her start to shake.

Be strong, Ina tells herself, strong like Alexander. See how he seeks Russell’s gaze, his own expression carefully blank? See how compliant he is when his wrists are shackled at his side?  There’s more strength in one of those beautiful hands than in

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Russell’s entire body, yet he has pulled it back, hidden it deep and done it for you. No, Alexander has the hardest, lowest task by far. The least Ina can do is tolerate Russell’s prodding fingers.

Finally Alexander is bound too and his iron chains clank gently as he tries their hold. Russell turns back to her with a glint like acid rain sparking in his eye, and he steps over the sacrifice like it’s part of this wasted alley. He can go away now, his  job done, his financial life, his mortal life, secured for another year. He doesn’t need to stay for the rest, and indeed  –even though they’re both shackled to chains that’ll only give three feet in any direction  –  it’d be safer for him to be long gone by  then.

But Ina has a feeling Russell never leaves. She feels that he’s the freak he was giggling about under his breath earlier.  \he’s the one who likes his peep show.

“Tell me more about the build-up Ina. Tell me about how

you can feel the year folding  up around you  ”–

Folding up around me like a black silk scarf
.

Oh, God. She’d told him about that. Ina swallows hard, a reflex unable to keep from glancing Alexander’s way. He is indiscernible against his wall, but she knows he isn’t happy. He hats surprises.

Russell nudges the sacrifice with a toe, but he only has eyes for Ina. In the dark, they are mere pinpricks, even with Ina’s strong sense of sight. “You’ll do anything for it, won’t you?  Like some bitch in heat  ”–

“Fucking cliché.” The insult escapes as if on its own accord.  She hates clichés, and this capacity to hate silly things is one of  her weaknesses. Alexander hates nothing, therefore he cannot be

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moved to anger like this. He loves her, however, which Ina  supposes makes
 
her
 
his weakness.

She  hangs her head at her bad behaviour, but not before she  sees Russell’s chin lower, the pinpricks tightening upon  themselves. “Oh, because you bloodsuckers don’t deal in cliché?  Shit.” Russell is pacing now, working up his mad, as they say in  Louisiana. “You approached
 
me
, remember? No, of course you

don’t.”

And the forgetting, at least, wasn’t cliché. No paperback or  Hollywood flick had ever gotten that right. They just gloated over the compensation required to stay forever young, beautiful and strong. Odd  that it wasn’t obvious. It makes perfect sense to  Ina that mortals age under the weight of their memories  –  all they’ve done and, even more, what they
 
haven’t
. It is these regrets that make them old and wrinkled, wistful and bitter, that her death-day marches down upon her as their birthday’s do, wanted or not. However instead of  waking each year to a new wrinkle, she wakes to a literal stranger in the mirror.

That, Ina thinks, she can handle. But Alexander as stranger?  She looks over to where he is draped shapelessly in shadows.  That she cannot.

Meanwhile, the ignorantly ageing Russell is still ranting in front of her. “You
 
need
 
me, you bloodless husk. You need me to set all this up, find a sacrifice, chain both you fuckers apart in order to keep you together. And you’ll do exactly what I say if you want to get it.”

“Remember your humanity,” Ina warns, though she’s

chained like the bitch he compared her to.

“Remember the ‘man’ in that humanity, whore.” He is fast  with his words. His mind could have gotten him far if he’d been  a lawyer or a doctor or a comedian, and not a lazy, second-rate  crook skilled only at turning his own luck bad. “I know all your

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homicidal secrets. Bite me and you’re lost to each other in the  next lifetime. And for ever.” He has reassured himself at least,

and he stands before her, straight-spined, in a practised pose,  and within reach. “Now, tell me what it feels like right now.  How you lose control and start licking and sucking everything in  sight.”

If he were anyone else, she might, because this isn’t it at all.  Simple lust can’t describe the way emotions are suddenly spun like silk, the textures soft, but so multi-layered and startling that when Ina finally feels the weight of them she wants to weep. It is this awakening need to
 
feel
 
that is the true hunger, and Ina becomes so addled that she even puts food in her mouth.  (Her favourite chocolate on the tip of her tongue, its contrast and silkiness as it melts to coat the back of her throat. It is lovely all the way up until she pukes.) She eats this unnecessary subsistence, sightless and slightly manic, until colour suddenly blooms on her tongue. She looks down to find her finger in her mouth, her blood on the tip. Her blood, but no matter. Hunger soars like a bird of prey in flight.

But explaining nuance to Russell would be like reciting algebra to a dog. Besides, he’s right. He holds the keys to their fate, which probably explains his hard-on. He’s the fucker who demands they meet on the very last night, when decisions must be quick and absolute, and when he has someone more powerful than he’ll ever be by the metaphorical balls. It is the only time of

year  –  and probably in his pitiful short human life  –  when he

knows he can
 
squeeze
.

“Hope you took good notes this year, Ina, baby.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What? Ina?” he asks, with oily innocence. “But it’s your

name, isn’t it?”

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He tilts his head. His hair greased to perfection, doesn’t

alter, but the move exposes his neck. “Or is it?”

Alexander jerks his head once. Ina bites back her reply.

“’Dear diary’,” Russell mimes a cursive hand in the icy air.  “’Please don’t let me forget my true love after I suck the life out  of my last victim of the year. Please let us stay together for ever.  I really like the way he fang-fucks me.’”

“Fuck you,” Ina says before she can stop herself.

“Now there’s an idea.” Russell smiles crookedly. “But not a

very novel one.”

An admission now that they are both shackled and he knows she’ll soon forget. He looks at his watch and pushes a button so the  face lights up, then flashes her the time. Two minutes to midnight. In other parts of the city, party-goers are swilling drinks with bubbles, wearing shiny hats, hoping the mania they feel now will be a strong enough tide to ferry them across the threshold of the new year.

“But I have a better idea this year. Why don’t you let me  read that little book you pass back and forth? I want to see what  you remember. I want to see
 
how
 
you remember. It’s in there  isn’t it?”

He points to Ina’s bag. He knows they must have it close.  Their own belongings are the first things that call to them upon their rebirth, so it’s important to keep it all  together and keep it near. That’s how it works. Find Russell, the fleshy guide who will bind them, ensuring they stay where they are and share in the same blood without killing one other. Then bring along the written guide so they may find themselves after and, finally rediscover each other. Russell clearly knows all this, though again, Ina doesn’t recall telling him.

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“Don’t touch it,” Ina warns as he does just that. He leans  low and, when he rises again, he swings the bag side to side in  the air, laughing and nearly stepping on the sacrifice that  currently divides, but will soon reunite. Alexander and her.

Russell is rummaging  around inside the handbag now. It is packed as Ina instructed three years ago. She is only surprised it has taken him this long to think of it. “Where is it, you bloodthirsty bitch?”

Ina grits her teeth, holding in the now-strained silence. Far off, a chorus of cries is swept along in the wind like summer stalk, but it is Russell’s scream that blooms like a thick stem with thorns. A smile widens Ina’s face, stretching it, though her teeth are still clenched tight. The razors are sewn in every silken fold,  every pocket. And while the scream is gratifying, it’s the scent of his elixir, fouled though it is, that causes her appetite to rear. Suddenly a film is lifted before her eyes, like she’s wearing a gauzy veil, and the entire world is instantly reduced to  a two-toned wash of soothing sepia.

Alexander shifts into view and Ina gazes at him for clarity.  Indeed he smiles back steadily, completely in control. She loves that about him, and is wishing she could take a long, refreshing sip from that calmness when  she is slapped.

“Fucking whore.”

Fucking idiot. Russell leaves blood smeared on her cheek.  She feels the smile on her face alter. A lone man’s premature holler fills the sky. Without willing it, Ina leans forwards, testing. Her restraints hold, but Russell backs from the strike zone, suddenly, careful to keep her in view.
 
Goddamn straight
.

She hisses.

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The sacrifice screams in sepia.

“Where is it?” Russell tries to sound like he is still in

control.

“I have it.” And though the words were whispered, it is

Alexander’s warrior cry.

Russell’s eyes widen but it’s too late. Even the realization of death is a future event he won’t live to see. Just like the New

Year that will soon chime in the sky. The abrupt way life abandons him is jarring, but fascinating, like a pile-up on the freeway. Pain firecrackers across his gaze, then falls and fades and disappears.

The sacrifice shrieks when Russell’s larynx lands at its feet, then it scrambles backwards until its bonds catch. Ina thinks it should be grateful it  gets to watch the man’s demise, and she thinks of kicking it into silence, but its cries join the other, more joyful ones now hanging prettily in the city sky, and Ina doesn’t think anyone will know the difference.