“I want you to invite him by—tomorrow, next night , maybe. The uptown graze.” Snapping her claws against his cheek, sharply: “You hear me, Flynn?”
“ . . . sure.”
“Say it like you mean it, then. Just for my own personal peace of mind.”
Flynn wheezed, whimpered; Ulrike, hovering on the raw edge of climax herself, made time to force a last bark of laughter at his obvious distress. And then they were hugging each other, instinctively, bone-crack hard, crushing Elder fast between them—their mutual convulsions sending their victim’s corpse sliding to the floor beside the bed, limp and pale, drained to nameless anonymity.
Already forgotten.
“I mean it, man,” Flynn whispered, finally, his sticky mouth glued to Elder’s ear. And fell immediately asleep.
“Quel moron,” Ulrike muttered, face-down in Elder’s lap. Then: “If you really want something done, you know, you can always send me.”
Elder just shrugged. And kept on stroking her “daughter’s” spiky blue hair, until the blood-daze overcame Ulrike as well.
Thus freed from her spawn’s distracting attentions, Elder lay looking up at the mirrored ceiling of her bedroom for the rest of the day, choosing to forgo her usual diurnal hibernation period in favour of thought rather than rest—something neither Flynn nor Ulrike would ever consider doing, even sheltered from the sun as they all were, here behind the penthouse’s triple-layered steel shutters.
Bed-bound, Elder studied her own reflection at length, scanning in vain for any subtle hint of change. Everything was exactly as she remembered it, however: Her clean-lined jaw and flat cheekbones, the thick, roan fall of her hair. The thin scar bisecting one eyebrow, where the village priest’s ring had cut it open with a backhanded slap after she’d blurted out that—with his dark locks and sorrowful eyes—the image of Christ crucified looked just like those Savages she’d seen trading furs down at the Post. The curve of her profile, incongruously elegant; a courtesan’s nose, Eudo used to say, accidentally misplaced onto the face of a feral child.
Elder opened her narrow eyes wide, lips curling back, fangs extending: Her ancient’s stare, androgynous and blank, an empty blue-green like teal touched with milk.
Well, she had to admit, Eudo did have one thing right—her story, sad as it might seem in retrospect (to her, at least), really was nothing new. Every night, the vampire nation increased exponentially just because some Old Guard-member found a piece of prey pretty enough to want to keep around forever. Yet these same parasite aristocrats remained, as a class, almost constitutionally incapable of realizing that no one could stay a toy for more than one lifetime.
Eudo, for example, had wanted first a quick meal, then a catspaw, a curiosity gained on his tour of the Americas—a real, unlive wild Colonial girl to dress up and show off, to play with and teach to sing, to dance, to read and write and make herself entertaining. And for fifty long years, at least, Elder had been utterly content to feed on his livestock and act the chosen whore for his delight: Ash-gal at the shindy, as her relatives’ later Western descendants would have put it, by the colorful early 1850’s.
To a point, though. Only to a point. And no—fucking—further.
Poor Eudo. It really couldn’t have been too amusing, for a creature so ancient he craved amusement in almost the same immediate, desperate way he craved blood, to look into his pet’s eyes—one night, in an endless string of nights—and suddenly see an equal staring back at him. Like a dancing dog, a preaching hen, a singing rose: Depressingly, confusingly, terrifyingly improbable.
And yet . . .
. . . that’s what happens, isn’t it? She thought, with a certain contemptuous impatience—restless, reckless, heartless as ever, by poor Eudo’s wounded estimation. When your children grow up, I mean.
Though, as God knew (or didn’t, depending on who you asked), she sometimes did wish hers would—just to add even some small hint of variety to the well-established pattern.
Eudo again, sniffing, at her mind’s ear: Fools. Freaks. Flesh-drunk addicts. Cannon fodder.
Oh, yes. All that, and far, far less.
But herein lay the difference: Only choosing spawn who came with clearly-marked expiry dates was the safest and most certain way Elder’d yet found to make sure they’d burn out long before you ever had to drive them away, or kill them. Which, in its turn, all but guaranteed you’d never again have to spend even a moment of your eternal life alone . . .
. . . unless you wanted to.
* * *
Tomorrow, next night: Upstairs, where a floor-full of ‘Nought-i.e. nightcrawlers jigged and jumped, taking turns posing for each other while Elder watched, sipping her usual blood-and-tonic mixer, overcranked still center of their pathetically stop-motion world. And taking a certain secret pleasure in the knowledge that, all the while, a similarly stylish set of vampire younglings were going mosh-wild in the Tank beneath her feet, nipping and howling at each other as they jockeyed to get first bite at whatever tapped-out ex-Familiar the handlers threw in on top of them next. Flipping back and forth to deejays scratching 300 BPM, frenzied with white noise madness mixed far too fast for mere humans to hear, let alone follow . . . doing sept-, oct-, nonotuple twists in mid-air, upright and mid-step again before they even hit the ground . . .
Now, that was a fuckin’ party, like this was just work under a different name: Nothing less than necessary, but definitely nothing more. Waiting, barely patient, on Flynn to sweet-talk the NASA guy through her front door and into her clutches—Elder could hear them clearly, music notwithstanding, and it didn’t sound like any known version of a sure thing, as yet.
“You know it, G. She’s, like, sooo totally hot for you—tellin’ me just the other day how she wanted to meet you, dude. No lie.”
“And what’s her name, again?”
“Elder, man. Like the sign says.”
Waste of time, unless the geek in question was even squarer than he look from where she stood. Which was—well—
—always possible.