Annie of the Undead (35 page)

Mr. Robicheaux, the familiar gray-eyed man who
seemed to get hounded by the press more than anyone else about the
Werewolf, and who I now learned was the head of the task force,
sent down by none other than the FBI to run the Werewolf
investigation, was on TV again. In his long-suffering manner, he
explained to the press of news people that there was no need to
jump to conclusions, and that Annie Eastwood was only being sought
for questioning on the matter of Danes’ death. As far as he was
concerned, he said, I wasn’t guilty of anything, not until I had
been convicted in a court of law. The news people found this tact
less than exciting, but I realized that it wasn’t meant for them at
all. It was meant for me. The man was holding out hope that I’d be
found and be useful to his investigation. Smart man. I wondered how
he’d like to know that the Werewolf was actually a pack of vampires
that had been infesting the city like fleas.

Yoki had still not been found, which meant that
she was either caught by the bad people or hiding. One was fine,
the other really not fine, and I had no way of knowing which was
reality.

Eventually, I lost my taste for news.
Imagine.

I wandered outside to be alone. I had avoided
the merry men all that day. I didn’t feel up to their energy. I
needed to be alone, to think, to remember. I never saw Andy. He was
apparently avoiding me too.

I sat in the garden outside, something I
couldn’t remember having ever done in my whole life, unless you
count hanging in the city park and getting into trouble after
school. There was something incredibly soothing about a garden, I
thought. A cold front was finally moving in, bringing a cool breeze
to the grass and trees and to me. Butterflies danced about kissing
flowers and sucking out their juices. A mockingbird, the noisiest
bird in all creation, tripped around the yard, singing and stabbing
things with its long, sharp beak. A huge holly tree dotted with
gleaming red berries provided me shade. I pricked my bare feet on
its sharp fallen leaves only once.

Night came on subtly, the change and eventual
loss of color in the sky, the loss of radiant heat from the sun, a
drop in butterfly activity, the emergence of the hummingbird moths,
fat insects that also drink from flowers but do so with a far more
mysterious air than their daytime cousins. En masse, they sound
like tiny helicopters. Soon, my vampire would be waking to tap his
flowers and then come to me.

I did not realize that I had drifted off to
sleep, until I smelled blood.

I took a sharp breath as I awoke. I started up
out of the sedan chair. There’s nothing like the scent of blood
near your nose to fire up the fight or flight response.

I never got my feet on the ground. I was yanked
out of the chair by two hands with the grip of steel and slammed
onto my back in the grass so hard that the wind was knocked out of
me.

An arm was clamped over my mouth and I was given
the instantly familiar ultimatum:

“Drink.”

It didn’t feel like a drill; it was terrifying
–you think of waking up to that. But the conditioning was there. If
anything had been stressed to the point of absurdity during my time
with Miguel, it was to drink when I was commanded.

So I did. I bit my little teeth down into the
tough flesh of that arm as deep as I could go, and I sucked. Blood
flowed into my mouth, from that flesh that was ever before so
devoid of it. The blood was salty and ferrous…and hot. My vampire
reeked of blood. It seemed to seep from every pore.

After a moment, and a strong compulsion to gag,
I ceased drinking and tried to draw back. But Miguel pushed me back
against his flesh and commanded once more, “Drink.”

I sucked again, and this time, he let me go. I
lay on the grass coughing, blood smeared on my face.

Miguel sat on the earth beside me. I coughed and
wiped my face.

“Missed you too,” I said.

“You are ready,” he replied, his voice strangely
resonant, even for him.

“That’s good. I’d hate to suck at this.”

“Ha.”

“You know, you smell like all the people you’ve
killed.”

“Humans, beasts. Many were needed to prepare,”
he answered with a voice that sounded like two people singing in
perfect harmony. “It is time.”

His hand rested on mine, and I felt the borrowed
heat within him. It was strange indeed. Last night had been the
final time I would ever warm his flesh.

“I need not remind you of the danger.”

No.

“Think of a signal for me, a word that you can
say after which there can be no going back, one that you would not
say casually.”

I thought about that.

“Skittles.”

“Skittles?”

“Sk…” I’d better not say it. “They’re a candy.
They’re disgusting, but they had this advertisement a few years ago
where this guy follows a fairy to a rainbow and he sticks his face
in, but it freaks him out too much, and he hesitates. When he goes
for seconds the rainbow is gone. He missed his chance.”

“Clever advertising.”

“If you say so.”

“You remembered it.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t make me buy them. Those
froufrou fairies can keep their damned candy. I’ll be too busy
infiltrating their rainbow. I won’t miss my chance.”

“Your signal is well chosen.”

“Miguel?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got a kind of God-voice going on. Will
you come into the light, so I can see you?”

“Yes.”

We walked up out of the shadows to the lighted
patio and I beheld the creature that was Miguel.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw Miguel
as I had never before seen him. Even the previous night’s thorough
feeding could not compare with what he had done this night. He had
gorged so completely, that every last vein beneath the surface of
his skin stood out a dark wine red, the color of blood that has
been transformed within a vampire’s body. His lips were so flooded
with burgundy that blood could almost have dripped from them. The
whites of his eyes were awash in changed blood, and those peculiar
irises seemed to radiate several layers of depth, straight down
into his soul. The little bite wound I had put in his arm, I
noticed, was already healed.

And there was a mien about him that was more
than unearthly. It was as different from the vampire to which I had
become accustomed as that vampire was from a human. He was so
still, so incomprehensibly comported, that it seemed he might just
dissolve into thin air at once, as though he could not be a solid
thing, but of ethereal substance, to be snatched into another world
without a moment’s notice. And when he smiled at me, revealing gums
laid like red velvet over a fanged row of teeth that flashed like
alabaster pearls, I nearly cried. The faultless fluidity of his
movements, the terrifying beauty of him, hinted of things so far
beyond me that I could not begin to comprehend their nature. For
the first time, I was fully gripped by the true pain of my
mortality, that no matter how close I got to the rainbow, no matter
that I took it to my very bed, I could never enter it as I was.

Moved beyond words –a rare thing in my life, I
took both his hands in mine. He knew my answer.

We headed into the night for the last time as a
girl and her vampire. Miguel carried me, because, after that night,
I would not need wheels to traverse great distances. I would not
need to be carried home. After that night, I would run by his side.
I too would scale walls like Spiderman, leap tall buildings in a
single bound. Well, maybe not quite.

My mind churned on some of the thought processes
of a person facing imminent death. There was so much living that I
would miss out on, even if I did survive. I would never taste
escargot (at least, I’d never like it). I would never get invited
to the Playboy Mansion or the White House. I would never get
pregnant. I would never get arrested again or stuck with a shiv or
wasted in a drive-by. I would never get dentures. My skin would
never wrinkle with sun damage and age, and my ovaries would never
deplete and send my body into the throws of menopause, leaving me
“Angry” Granny Eastwood, living off food stamps and sitting on her
porch, throwing flower pots at neighborhood kids for stepping on
her tulips. …On second thought, maybe there wasn’t a lot of living
I wanted to do, except maybe getting my teeth straightened. That
would have been nice. I would have liked to have nice teeth for
eternity.

But none of that was to be. This one change
would supersede all of it. This clean, swift end would deprive me
of straight teeth and spare me the gruesome, lingering death that
claimed most humans. I would never confront sickness, old age, or
the question of whether anything lies beyond the final threshold of
a mortal death. Perhaps one day I would perish at the hands of one
of my own immortal people, but that was an end far beyond my
vision. It wasn’t a bad trade off. Not too bad at all.

A new creature would be born when the human met
its end, and I was ready. If ever anyone was ready, it was me. So
what if I hadn’t made it to one thousand crunches? My vampire had
said my stomach looked like a cheese grater.

We went across rooftops and fences and roads,
out past the sprawl of the city until no engines roared in the
distance and the city was only a vast glow above the trees. Miguel
had chosen a quiet place in the country for me to die, somewhere
down by the bayou. I knew not which or where. Amidst the primeval
tangle of sweet gum, cypress, and hackberry was our clearing.
Tarzan-esque vines draped the trees, and tall cattails spread out
from the shore in droves, nodding their fat seed heads and stiff
leaves in the gentle night breeze.

Miguel set me down in the soft wild plants and
earth, in the shadow of a mammoth magnolia tree whose leafy
branches swept all the way to the ground. The spot was a raised
slope, not a common thing so close to the water in the bayous near
New Orleans. It was the sort of earth that would have been
constantly saturated with water under normal climate conditions,
supporting low-growing, semi-aquatic vegetation and massive cypress
trees whose knees jabbed out of the earth like a garden of stakes
in a vampire’s nightmare. Old runnels in the earth told of the
spring that must lay dormant beneath the clay at its summit, but in
that year of drought the ground was spongy and dry. It was a place
of perfect natural beauty, unadulterated by the hand of man.

Due to the lengthy drought, the mosquitoes were
not bad, which means only a few dozen whizzed about on whining
wings, trying to sink their needles into my skin. I stood in the
pale light of the nearly full moon and breathed in the perfume of
the vegetation, the bayou, and the earth. Yes, this was where it
should happen. This place was not of concrete, glass, and metal, of
honking horns, angry neighbors, and jail cells. This was a good
place to die.

The plaintive bleat of a goat drew my attention.
Beneath the largest of the cypresses were tethered three little
creatures in the darkness, two dark, and one piebald. Their bright
eyes glittered in the moonlight. I knew their purpose. They stood
in a row like three little Happy Meals. Miguel had brought them. He
had prepared the place that our scene would play out and filled
himself to his greatest strength that he might have enough changed
blood to pass his legacy to me.

He stood beside me in silence, giving me
whatever time I needed. I watched the moonlight shimmer on the
placid waters.

“Shouldn’t we be concerned about large aquatic
beasties with lots of teeth dragging us in for a death roll?”

I had never seen a gator, but they didn’t sound
like pleasant neighbors.

“I will not let them harm you.”

His voice rolled like thunder over the space
between us. He stood then in silence beside me, waiting.

Clearly, he was not going to force me into
anything. I must count down to zero, I must utter the code word, or
the mission would be a no go. And once I did that, there was no
turning back. There was no plan B, no abort. And when I fell, there
was a very real chance that I might never get up again.

I liked waiting about as much as I liked
politics. There would be no long warm-up in the moonlight for me.
No, sir. I stripped off my clothes and laid them neatly upon the
broad side of an old, fallen tree. I came back to Miguel and stood
naked in the dark before him, fending off the other creatures come
for my blood.

Miguel then disrobed himself, until he stood
before me, every inch of his profound inhumanity exposed to me. His
beauty was thorough, consuming. He stood solid as an atlantid. His
eyes refracted the moonlight like intricately cut gemstones,
glancing silver in shards from their depths.

There I was, mortal as could be, a creature
hardly enough noticed by its own kind for twenty-six years for them
to shove me back into the dust in which I’d scrabbled most of my
life. In a few short years the sands of time would have buried all
trace of my passage, but for my savior, my lover, my vampire.

In the emotion of the moment, my brain tripped
over words. I touched his face. There was but one thing left to
say.

“Skittles.”

He bore me to the ground in one swift motion.
The impact was gentle as could be, but his press was implacable. I
felt the cool clover against the skin of my back, and the next
instant his teeth were at my throat. He was going for the jugular.
I felt the sharp fangs penetrate and the cold incisors clamp down
on my flesh. I winced at the pain but at first uttered neither cry
nor whimper. I had endured more severe pain in silence before.

But the sensation of his lips pressed tight
against my throat, his wet tongue undulating as he sucked draughts
from the core of my body, was unspeakably strange. I felt the first
hint of weakness drawing near, lightheadedness though I was lying
down, the desperation of my fast-beating heart.
Too much
, my
body warned.
Too fast. Enough! Enough!