Outsider (22 page)

Sid stood up to walk away from the sofa, but
Joy's authoritative hand stopped her.

"I'm hungry."

Her facial expression was both a snarl and a
smile. Sid stared back at the fire in Joy's dark eyes. Right on
cue, a light bulb gave up the ghost and shed dimness in the living
room. The only light was now coming from the lampposts outside on
the street, behind Sid. Sid didn't notice.

Sid's curiosity had been direct; Joy decided
her hunger should be direct, too. Eyes riveted to the brown irises,
she let her hand fall down in a caressing motion. She could feel
something inside Sid pulling at her, like a gentle tug. She
recognized the feeding intent. She was also aware of Sid's
ignorance and lack of control over the psychic attempt. She let it
be, the writer was such a harmless predator, and refocused on her
own hunger.

Fingers unfastening the trappings separating
her from dinner, she wondered how Sid could be so fearless, how Sid
could sit there, unflinching, when so many of her victims,
one-night-stands and other donors, those who had had the privilege
to know about her real nature, had expressed fear, or in some rare
cases a feverish anticipation.

Sid vaguely noticed the unexpected angle of
the light bathing her front room but paid it no mind, she felt too
aroused by the touch of this undead.

* * * * * * *

Later, Joy unfolded her body, stretched with
satisfaction, and turned her back to the street. Sid sighed deeply
and opened her eyes, sated, too, relaxed and restored. She looked
at her front room and only when she spotted the unlit light bulb,
hardly blurred, realized her night vision was exceptionally good,
but Joy left her no time to ponder over this new mystery. She
started talking, a bitter edge in her voice, while Sid zipped up
her trousers in a successful attempt at decency.

"If you were to ask every vampire if they
chose their existence, and they were to answer truthfully, you
would find out that most of them never asked for their life to be
turned upside down and destroyed. The vampire who made me was so
ancient that I can only suppose he had seen over a millennium of
civilisations come and go. He was an arrogant and abusive bastard.
This arrogance turned out to be his demise. I destroyed him." She
snarled with anger. Her abrupt silence triggered an eyebrow-raising
from Sid. Joy walked a few steps before resuming.

"A vampire's existence is generally solitary
because a vampire is a predator, a territorial and selfish
predator. Older vampires can be most dangerous. They often destroy
young blood drinkers, not even for sport or fun, they do it because
they can and they like watching a fledgling coward at their feet.
Most often than not, vampires kill each other on sight. They are
very competitive." She laughed suddenly. "Can you imagine a Vampire
Convention? It would be mayhem and slaughter!" Behind features
rippling with cruel laughter, Joy remembered that there were
possibly two other vampires in town. Toni, powerful, older and
unreadable; and probably Dee-Dee, very young, but almost as
powerful as her maker, and probably still very angry. Enough for a
very gory convention if reunited in the same venue.

"Where do vampires come from? If Transylvania
was, it was only a pit stop. The general belief is Egypt. However,
don't take my word for it, I'm no scholar. Anne Rice's theory is
quite compelling. I sometimes wonder how she got so many details
right.

"Do vampires spend the daytime in coffins?
And in crypts? Very gothic, but not necessarily the case. I have a
round bed in a lightproof room somewhere in London. Vampires'
healing powers? Oh yes, we do heal quickly. It's absurd, I know,
but it's true. Usual means of killing don't work. Except maybe if
you aim something big and long at the heart. Absurd too and I've
never tried it myself so I cannot totally guarantee it. The
possibility of destroying a vampire with fire and sunlight? I've
seen it happen. Do they turn into ashes? When it comes to fire, I
can definitely say yes. But it's true for anything else. Sunlight?
Yes, it works. Do not believe everything they show you on "Buffy
the Vampire Slayer". Josh Whedon has never met a vampire, but he's
got some imagination. Does every vampire fly? No." A silence
ensued, making a point. Sid's eyes, that she was now carefully
avoiding, questioned some more. Joy went on:

"As a vampire, I am just a little bit over a
century old. I do not socialize with other vampires, they rarely
come my way and I don't get on with them anyway. Besides, vampires
don't necessarily stay in the same place very long. Some of us can
be a bit messy when we feed. Or deliberately messy," she conceded,
wondering for how many years she'd been in London now. "We don't
necessarily want to attract attention from humans. We're not
interested in public and legal recognition like in Laurell K.
Hamilton's Anita Blake novels."

Joy felt restless now. She also felt worried.
She needed to see for herself if Dee-Dee was back in London too or
not.

"Ok, I'm bored now. You wanna know more about
vampires? You wanna know what is reality and what is literature?
Have you got a DVD player?"

Surprised, Sid scratched one freshly shaved
side of her head before answering: "I think I've got one in a
closet."

"Get it out for tomorrow night. I've got this
little gem on DVD. The guy who wrote it is surprisingly accurate on
a few facts. I always wondered if he ever had a chat with a
vampire." She smiled: "Like Christian Slater in ‘Interview with A
Vampire’."

* * * * * * *

Sid had spent her day writing. She had gone
against her habit of writing short to favour a novel. As usual, she
had no idea about its main plot, and even less about its outcome.
She knew enough about the main character to start and had twenty
scribbled pages peppered with badly crossed T's and randomly dotted
I's by sundown. She also knew that if she had knowledge of every
detail between Alpha and Omega, she would never write it. Thus,
confident in her wisdom, she had never learned ancient Greek.

By the time Joy showed up at her open window,
TV and DVD player were taking center-stage in the front room. Sid
didn't own many DVD's. She was more likely to borrow. The rare
movies lining up on one shelf were more like essential references
of various kinds: "Nightbreed" (albeit the North American DVD
region, that she could only watched at some friend's house),
‘Shadow of the Vampire’, ‘House of Frankenstein’ (a pirate copy
someone had downloaded from the internet), ‘The Lost Boys’,
‘Interview with a Vampire’, "Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters’ (internet
piracy again), ‘The Colour Purple’ (a pirate copy from her local
market) and Second Look, of course. ‘Flatliners’, ‘Strange Days’
and ‘Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café’ were on loan
from Jessie.

"Now," Joy said, sticking ‘Razor Blade
Smile’, a low-budget movie bred and raised in the UK, into the DVD
player a while later. "Let's introduce you to Lilith Silver, the
vampire female James Bond. And pay attention. The guy who made this
movie is more clued-up than his more famous peers."

The movie started in black and white,
relating how the heroine had been turned into a vampire, back in a
time of daily horse-riding and pistol duels. The villain was a
scarred face going by the name of Sethan Blake. Cue to modern
times, in colour. Our heroine Lilith Silver is an assassin known as
the Angel of Death. Her favorite hangout, in between hit jobs, is
darkling venue the Transilvania Bar.

"Cool place," Joy commented with a hint of
nostalgia in her voice. "It was great for easy pickups. Now, open
your ears wide: it is time for Lesson 101."

On cue, Lilith Silver set about educating the
goths sharing her table, and more especially the young woman
sporting upper fangs and know-it-all attitude, trashing mythical
beliefs one after the other.

Vampires couldn't shapeshift. Nope, no
turning into mist, not even into bats. Joy surprised Sid by
bursting out laughing and almost rolling on the floor, at the black
and white sight of a Hallowe'en rubber bat dangling from the
ceiling of a cellar.

When Lilith turned out to be a daywalker,
albeit with eyes greatly sensitive to sunlight, Sid looked at Joy.
The vampire acknowledged with a hint of embarrassment: "It's a
recent evolutionary factor."

In the movie, a mysterious client had hired
Lilith to eliminate people from the order of the Illuminati. Almost
each kill was matched with a feeding session, and feeding sessions
almost every time involved sex. Each time the silver-screen vampire
commented on the quality of the blood, Joy echoed her in Sid's
front room.

One illuminati: "C-minus. Too ironny." The
bodyguard of the previous dead: "F-grade. Druggy shit." Goth woman
from the Transilvania Bar: "Nice and salty. B-plus." Photographer's
blood: "He never looked better than a C, anyway." Sethan Blake's
prognostic on Lilith's lover: "Smells good. I think he'll make the
grade." At the end of the movie, when Lilith, after defeating
Sethan in a sword fight, fed on his blood, Joy once again echoed
her: "A-plus, oh at last, some full-bodied vintage stuff."

Credits rolling out on the small TV screen
revealed to Sid the name of the actress incarnating the vampire in
PVC. Joy smiled appreciatively: "Eileen Daly. Tasty blood."

"I dream of a world where I can be a drag
king and have my motorbike, as I'm so tired of this world, no love,
no understanding, so merciless that I work as a mercenary" (Sid
Wasgo)

Sid rode alone to the Breakdown, a bikers'
café in West London, where she enjoyed being anonymous. Joy had
been very vague and for a few nights, off to adventures she would
never mention. It was her pattern. Sid had gotten used to it. It
suited her: she didn't want to get attached.

So, there she was, by a beautiful evening in
May, looking at the sky still a bit too pale to please most
vampires, in the shade of a building sporting racing colours and
easily passing for a garage. Plethoras of motorbikes lined on and
off across the front yard.

She was not a regular at this friendly venue,
it was only her second visit, but she had been looking forward to
an opportunity to leave her crash helmet among other crash helmets
under a staircase again. Parking her Eliminator, she scanned the
various groups of people chatting and enjoying the spring evening.
She smiled lightly: hairy bikers were not the fabled trend of the
moment. Leather was paramount; age was spanning every possibility
with extremes reaching sixty-something. You were never too old for
a motorbike.

She crossed the threshold and a medley of
rock classics welcomed her, starting with
Rock me, Shock me
,
an eighties number by the immortal Girlschool, a band whose albums
hadn't had the opportunity to grace her stereo yet. Blissful
ignorance.

A smell of hot chocolate tickled her nose
while she paid her entry fee to a leather-clad man with a handlebar
for mustache over his friendly smile. She scanned the still quiet
room with her myopic eyes, spotted two women talking and standing
in front of the stage stuck at the end of the room. One she
recognized as Terry Harley, as animated and enthusiastic as ever,
the other one was a stranger whose lanky frame was barely covered
by tight pieces of clothing, and whose aura betrayed as another
singer. She was towering a head above the freckled face. Sid was
looking forward to see her band perform. She had never seen
Emotionally Wrong but had spotted their name on gig listings
countless times and wondered.

* * * * * * * *

Dee-Dee crossed the threshold of the public
venue, dropped a bank note on the table in front of the man with
the handlebar, and moved on in, knowing she was underpaying her
entry fee. She was in a bad mood, the same bad mood that she had
been carrying for the last twelve years, and her blazing eyes had
said so to the man.

The sky was now dark and she could mingle
with the crowd of oblivious potential meals. Her ears recognized
the tune at this moment of the soundtrack:
Hotel California
by the Eagles. It was almost like a trip back in time, the venue
had not changed a decibel.

She was wearing one of her many white shirts,
a stark contrast among the flurry of leather jackets. Her wild hair
was mostly hiding her storm-grey eyes and her hands were trying to
dig holes in the pockets of her standard tight, faded jeans. She
meandered among the beer guzzlers and the tequila aficionados.

She remembered the venue. She remembered the
petrol tank hanging above the bar ready to collect patrons' tips.
The Fireheads had been there, on this very stage, and the drummer
had felt cramped at the back. Their singer had just had enough room
to jump and crawl.

She heard the short burst of drums
underscoring the Eagles' hit. The support band was getting ready.
She made her way to the stage to check them out. Musicians had been
the bloody treats she enjoyed the most all over the world since
becoming a vampire. She hated her need to feed, but at least, she
could control it long enough to carefully select her prey and not
kill it. Her. Her preys were always female. In sight of the stage,
she froze and double-backed, shocked. But what did she expect? That
the Fireheads would fold back and die after her mysterious
disappearance and everyone would retire into nine-to-five jobs?
Yes, the Fireheads had folded, but not died. Here were the singer
and one of the bass players she had rocked with. The drummer was
familiar, too, despite her shaved head, but who was she? Dee-Dee
had bled the Fireheads drummer to death……. A peroxide blonde was
tuning an electric guitar. A cordless electric guitar. She was all
leather-clad and looked classy, almost a joke among the ……. What
was the name of the band? Not the Fireheads, she would have noticed
that on the flyer. Maybe the guitar player was not a classy joke,
maybe the singer had left her punk roots behind and gone all rock
'n' roll. Music is a world of intensity. One of your mates
disappears, another one is killed, the shock can do that to you:
overnight shape-shifting.