Vampire Eden (4 page)

"Quite a change from the woman pleading for her life only moments ago.
I am Aoleon and I am your death. Look upon me, for the beautiful sight I am shall be your last." She smiled and her hazel eyes gleamed. "We like people who aren't afraid to die. We draw their deaths out to the last drop. Keeps our feedings lively."

"Well, feast away."
I spread my arms out wide. "If you'd enjoy a fight, I'd just as soon give it."

"She kissed Patrick," the woman with raven hair and purple eyes said. "And he did not resist her. Then the whispers began. The whispers of the spirits whose tongues drive us mad when we hunt, to whom we cannot speak but who speak to our flesh bait. Let us keep this woman of the night, so she may tell us what they say."

"They condemn us," Aoleon said. "What else could they possibly say? You. Whore. Listen. Can you hear their words?"

"I understand them," I lied. "Do you think I'm going to tell you what they are saying? What good will it do me to help you?"
              "Yes, fool," Aoleon said. "What good will it do?" She lunged in my direction with hands splayed and long nails curled into claws.

Hushed voices whispered in the air above us, the sound coming from the space between the buildings. Aoleon hesitated and covered her heart with her hand. She gazed up at the sky with wide eyes. "The voices. I used to hear them but I could never understand what they said. They have secrets I want to know. Can you?" She stepped toward me. "Can you hear them speak?"

"They're saying..." I craned my neck upwards, listening harder to catch the words in their train of murmurs. "They're saying...her undoing. The time is near. The human, the human..."

I jumped as a whispered voice shrieked my name and the voices spirited away, leaving only the hollow noise of darkness, followed by the usual sounds of the Vegas night. Horns honking, drunken men calling out raucously, the lilting giggles of women, and somewhere behind the walls the ongoing bass beat of dance music.

"A prophecy," Lucretia said.

"Prophecy," Aoleon replied scornfully.

"Yes," Lucretia said. "Of the ones who have come to kill us."

"For years we had evaded the hunters," Aoleon said. "For years they have sought to do our harm in our last refuge. The only city we can call our own. Come now, ladies of the darkness. We shall leave this woman alive." She turned to me. "I persuade you not with the threat of death, but the promise of eternal life. All you desire can be yours, if you tell us what the voices say to you. Patrick pledged fealty to me, but he will not give me what I want. The voices know and yet I cannot understand their words. Listen to them when they return. Tell me what they say."

"Can you make me one of you?" I knew I looked pathetic, with my sun-damaged skin and bony body reminiscent of an old mare that had been ridden hard and was ready to be made into glue. "I'm dead as it is. I have no hope. No dreams left to live for. My life was stolen from me long ago by circumstances out of my control. I'm a casualty of a rotten existence, brought into this world by rotten people. I was beautiful once. Like you."

Her
followers jeered but Aoleon raised her hand once again. "She is the key to the King of the Dead, is she not? By the kiss she shared with our beloved flesh bait." Aoleon turned to me. "I am weary of hunting. Do you have someone to give to us? Someone to pay for your transformation? Blood pays for life, and we are ravenous."

"I do."

"Then do not run from me." She clutched me to her breasts. "My new daughter."

Her face spread out and became a bat’s, and her teeth elongated into yellow fangs
as she held out my arm. I shrank at the sight of her. I tried to scream but the oily, rubbery sheen of her wings bound my body so tightly, no breath could escape. She sank her teeth into my flesh. I screamed without sound for my voice had been whisked away. All around me the whispers grew louder.

Her teeth pulled out of my wrist with a popping sound as venom the color of pearls seeped onto the ground
from her teeth. My body swelled everywhere at once as the wound throbbed. The women surrounding Aoleon stepped toward me with garish smiles as I collapsed to the ground.

"Be still, little one," Aoleon whispered as she crouched next to me.

"The voices," I said through a throat filled with a substance that tasted like bile mixed with red wine. "Who are they?"

Aoleon looked above her at the eternally gray sky, always lit by the flashing lights of Vegas.
"Can you hear them?"

"Yes.
But I can't hear a complete sentence. Just...words."

"
They are the dead who speak to humans. Those with conscience. But you and I are creatures of the night. They have abandoned me. And soon, they will abandon you. But not before they lead you to the King of the Dead, in an attempt to reverse what has only been halfway done." She lifted up my slack wrist. Her teeth dripped with the pearl substance as her lips pulled back and she sank them into my skin again.

*   *   *

I opened the chipped wooden door to my apartment and stumbled in. "Hi, Kev," my voice warbled. "I'm home." My dress was ripped and my nylons were covered with runs. Kevin sat in a heap in his wheelchair as the images from the television screen flickered light onto his body. The sound of a helicopter came in through the crack in the window, and for a moment a spotlight shone into our home. "There flies the old ghetto bird." The vampires ducked into the hallway.

"Pull down the window coverings," Aoleon whispered.
I pulled the string and Kevin stirred in his sleep, his eyes blinking as he woke from the sound of the blinds being lowered.

"You're home early," he yawned.

"Yes. Are you hungry?"

"No
. What time is it?"

"Three
-thirty in the morning."

He smiled wryly.
"Slow night or did you hit the jackpot?"

"I made eleven
hundred."

"Good.
I need some new magazines."

I gazed into the wall
-to-wall mirror hanging behind Kevin's wheelchair. The heavy frame of fake gold was our last luxurious possession. My eyes had turned into a luminescent hue of teal, and my hair, once dry and over-processed, was long and supple and the color of milk chocolate. My skin glowed with the dewiness of youth. Kevin stared at the television and began to nod off.

I glanced to where the vampire women had stepped into the shadows of the hallway.
I heard their soft voices tittering. "Before you go back to sleep, Kevin," I said as I removed a box filled with first-aid supplies from the pocket of Kevin's wheelchair, "I need to tell you a story about what happened to me tonight." I pinched Kevin hard on the arm.

"What the hell, Eden!" He tried to heave himself forward and swing at me, which I easily dodged.

     "Listen." I relayed to him the story of Patrick and how he had disappeared, and the vampire women. He snorted and begrudgingly took a cotton swab in hand, dabbing at my wound with rubbing alcohol. "You know how you keep saying you want to die, Kevin? Do you really? Maybe you could call your dad and go back to Olar."

     "Maybe you could stop whining
and go back to stripping," he said in a snarky tone of voice.

     "Blame it on pop culture, but even well-bred girls, or those with college degrees anyway, are now working at strip clubs. You know I lost regular after regular to a prettier face."

             
"Pretty ironic now that we actually need the money," he said. "That shitty Mustang broke down again. You need to take it to the shop and get it fixed. Guess that blows the whole eleven hundred." He glanced over my head and turned up the volume, gaping at the wrestling match on television. "Oh! The guy in the mask just got pummeled."

             
"We lived the high life for so many years. Booze and drugs for us and all of our false friends, plus your steroids. I blame myself for what happened to you. We don't even have a car now, Kevin. We're losers. And I do what I do."

    
"You have to get off somewhere," he said as he continued to watch television over my head. "I'm impotent. And it's pretty hard for a guy to get turned on by a whore. A normal guy, anyway."

    
I sniffled as I wiped a tear from my cheek. "Well, about the vampires... "

    
“Shut up. I want to watch TV."

     "Vampires, Kevin."

     "Would you please just shut the hell up?"

     "There are vampires running around in this city."

Kevin shifted in his seat. "Eden, you're crazy."

"All is fine now
, Kev. I've met every other type of human aberration in Las Vegas. I was bound to run into something out of a horror show sooner or later."

"Sounds like
one helluva crazy night,” said Kevin as he sighed with resignation. "Could you move so I can see the TV? If I can't sleep I might as well watch." The after-effects of past drug and steroid use had left him so stupid, so slow.

"Sure
, honey.” I patted him on the hand. “By the way, I brought some girls home for you to meet.”

Aoleon and the vampire women stepped from the shadows.
Kevin picked up the remote and looked as if he had no idea what he was holding or why. Aoleon smiled.

"You didn't have to kill him like this," I said as I gestured at the pools of blood underneath
Kevin's wheelchair and the streaks of blood on the venetian blinds. My hands shook as I swallowed hard at the sight of the leg Aoleon had ripped from Kevin's torso and sucked upon as if feasting on a beef bone for the marrow.

"The kill is one of our only amusements," Aol
eon purred. Her vampires moved to stand in a line on either side of her. "The light of day is almost upon us. Burn the apartment so no one will find him. Lucretia has placed the rest of him in the tub. Set fire to his body first. You are still able to move about in the daylight, for now.  You will lose that skill over time. The sun will start to burn you. When you make your first kill, your transition will be complete. Then, when you are one of us, you will can camouflage in light and shadow. You can move the way we move, with speed and agility that can outrun and outsmart any human. But you will no longer be able to walk amidst the light of day."

"How long will it take for me to change completely?"

"That, my daughter, is up to you. The more kills you bring us, the more of my venom I will bless you with."

"Wait a minute," I said as I ran my hands through my hair.
"You didn't tell me I had to keep doing this. Bringing you humans to...feed on!"

"No.
I did not." Her lips pulled into a cold smile. "You are my flesh bait, darling. Same as the man who brought you to me."

"And if I refuse?"

"Death will come slow and torturous for you. Maybe in fifty years. Maybe a hundred. You shall watch yourself wither as you once did. Your beauty will fade as your skin puckers and wrinkles and your body spreads out and widens. You will live another eighty years, maybe ninety, see whatever friends you might have made buried, watch their offspring become so repulsed by your slowness and your hideousness that they disown you. Oh, and you shall grow old quickly without my blood. So quickly. Perhaps in a decade you will look one hundred years old. And you will stay that way for such a long, long time. Over and over you shall go through this, as generations pass. Unless you are given enough of my venom to turn completely."

I clutched my body with my upper arms and rubbed the chill from my bones.
"You didn't have to torture him," I said

"You'll grow used to it.
With time. We will go to the coven and I shall rest. Then you will deliver my meals tonight and every night. After a time of good and faithful service, I shall change you completely."

"How long?"

"Time is of little matter. You have plenty of time. We have an eternity. Enough questions."               She glanced at the window and the vampires disappeared instantly, leaving behind only their laughter as the blinds shielding the window lifted merely a crack, as if a strong wind passed through for but a second. They left me standing in the midst of blood and gore strewn all over my ruined apartment, and a millisecond later, I was whisked away behind them in a tunnel of wind heading toward a decrepit, abandoned hotel.

*   *   *

"Cressida," Aoleon said as she lowered herself into her coffin, "place the blankets over my coffin."
The rest of the women slept enclosed, their coffins shut. The sounds of field mice scurrying around the floors above and below us, and even the tiniest shake of a baby rattlesnake in a nest somewhere in the building, did not escape my keen ears.

"Yes, my queen
," Cressida said to Aoleon. She gathered thick coverings from the dusty floor. Spiders weaved their gossamer webs over the coven’s walls, in between the moldings of the abandoned Wanderlust Hotel and Casino. A sliver of a broken champagne glass crushed under Cressida's foot as she strode toward where Aoleon lay. She lifted up the blankets, ready to drape them over her when Aoleon sat up.