Blood Oranges (9781101594858) (11 page)

I aimed the crossbow like I'd been born with it in my hand, like it was maybe a natural extension of my arm. I leveled it at the nasty, and I squeezed the trigger. I squeezed the trigger twice. And the vamp crumpled in an ebony heap mere inches from Bobby Ng. Me, I just stood there, shivering, suddenly freezing, my heart pounding hard enough it made me dizzy. My arm drifted a foot or so to the left, and I squeezed the trigger again. A third bolt whizzed from the crossbow and hit Bobby Ng just above his right knee. He screamed even louder than he'd screamed when the vamp rushed him. He called me a bitch and a few other things I won't waste time repeating. He rolled around in the snow, caught beneath the branches, clutching his leg and bleeding all over the place.

My pulse was normal again, and the dizziness passed as quickly as it had come.

“You really are a fucking moron,” I said, the February night making a puff of fog from each and every word. “I ought to put another of these right between your legs.”

I noticed he was trying to pull the bolt out, and I told him it would only bleed worse if he did, and he called me a bitch again. I lowered the bow, and stared at the dead vampire. It's not like in stories (she said, again). They don't turn into a steaming pile of goo, or quickly decompose as decades or centuries of decay catch up with them all at once. They sure as hell don't go up in a nice clean puff of dust. They just lie there, like any corpse. In this case, a corpse that only looked vaguely human, and that I knew Mr. B didn't want one of the Swan Point rent-a-cops stumbling across, a monstrosity he wouldn't be at all happy to see splashed across the front page of the
Providence Journal
. Me, I didn't give a shit. But, back then, I wasn't working for me.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “Guess I shouldn't have shot you after all, Bobby. Now I have to clean this mess up all on my own.”

“She was
mine
,” he whined. “They
promised
. She was supposed to be mine. You fucking cheated, Quinn. They swore Cregan was mine.”

At the time, I had no idea what he meant by that. Later, though, it would all be crystal clear.

“Yeah, well,” I told him, “now she's no one's. Now, she's just meat. Shut up, before someone hears you.”

I went back for my bag, dug out the huge hunting knife stashed there (
another
gift from B, cause he's such a generous soul and all), then walked back to the remains of Alice Cregan. While Bobby rolled around in the snow, managing to push away the branches that had fallen on him, whimpering and begging me to call an ambulance, I cut open the vampire's chest and sliced out its heart. It was the shade of red that comes just before black. I don't know a word for that color and don't feel like reaching for the thesaurus, but that's the color it was, and it was still beating. Weakly. I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been holding the thing.

“I've half a mind to make you eat this,” I told Bobby, and he stopped rolling in the snow just long enough to give me the middle finger.

“Raw,” I added.

There's not much left to tell. It went pretty much like the Bride said the night she turned me. I decapitated her, burned the heart to ashes (which is a lot harder, and takes a lot longer, than you might think, by the way), gutted the vamp's velvety black cadaver, stuffed it with stones (not bricks, as the Bride had claimed; where was I gonna get bricks?), then dragged it through the snowy cemetery, following one of the lanes leading down to the Seekonk River. Fortunately, it wasn't frozen solid. I pushed the body into the water, dark as slate. I was relieved that she had the decency to sink.

I wanted to wash my hands, but I'd probably have gotten frostbite. Instead, I followed my footprints (and the gory furrow the dead vampire had made) in the snow back to the mausoleum. By then, of course, the smack in the needle was ice. Oh, and Bobby was gone. There was a bloody trail where he'd limped off to lick his wounds. Maybe he'd wandered away to look for the conspicuously absent security guys. I slung the bag over my shoulder and hiked back to the place where I'd climbed over the wall. It had started snowing again, hard. In another couple of hours the sun would be up, and all I wanted was to get back home, fix, and sleep about twenty hours. I headed south down Blackstone Boulevard, hoping I didn't encounter any unduly curious policemen along the way.

And that's the night I killed Alice Cregan. At least, that's pretty much all I knew about it six months later, sitting there in the weeds beneath the interstate.

* * *

A
bout two p.m., maybe two thirty, I was pretty damn sure I'd puzzled out the answer to Aloysius' riddle. Also, I needed a cigarette so bad it hurt. Maybe Mercy had cured me of the need for junk, but my body still craved nicotine. Just something else that doesn't make much sense, right? Anyway, I called the number I'd given the troll, and after six rings, Mr. B answered. I told him I needed fifty bucks. He said no problem, and I was instructed to meet one of his mollies at the corner of Gano and Pitman. Which worked for me. Boy arrived in a candy-apple red C6 Corvette coupe. The top was down, and when he gave me the fifty, I almost asked for a ride. But I knew
he
knew what I'd become. I could tell by the way he flinched when he handed me the bill that he was scared shitless of me. I let him off the hook. I just didn't feel like bothering with the spooked kid.

I had the presence of mind to head back to my place, shower, and change out of the bloodstained clothes. I found a tank top and a pair of jeans that were merely dirty, then headed off in the direction of a shopping plaza just north of the rusty old drawbridge I mentioned earlier. Just north of where I'd awakened the day before. I ducked inside a grocery store and bought a pack of Camel Wides and twenty-four king-sized 3 Musketeers bars (and did my best to ignore the smell of blood wafting from the meat department). There's a liquor store next door, so I picked up a bottle of the ginger brandy Aloysius loved so much. I probably could have gotten a cheap prepaid cell phone at the Rite Aid across the parking lot, but I most likely didn't have enough money. I doubt he
wanted
the damn phone, anyway, and if it turned out he did, I could get it later. Instead, I headed down Gano again, stopping at a convenience store where I grabbed the latest copies of
Hustler
and
Juggs
(and that killed the fifty). The clerk made a joke about dykes. Then I lugged this veritable cornucopia of earthly delights back to the overpass.

The domino guys were out, and they shouted at me as I passed.

“Where you headed in such a hurry,
chica
?”

“Gotta see a man about a horse,” I shouted back, and they hooted and returned to their game.

I was beginning to feel hungry, a faint gnawing in the pit of my belly, even though vamps usually only need to feed every couple of nights. Maybe it was the loup bite throwing the schedule off, I thought, and tried not to dwell on my nagging stomach. The day was hot as fuck, the sun a white-hot bastard in the sky, and I'd started to feel that peculiar tingle on the back of my neck. I found myself grateful for the cover of the overpass. There was no one around, so I set the three plastic bags on the ground and shouted for Aloysius. The special shadows appeared, and, just like always, he trundled forth, those long ears dragging along, his elephantine feet raising dust as he came.

“Already?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow and frowning. “Already has my answer, Quinn lass?”

“I thought I wasn't me anymore.”

“Easier than making up some other name,” he said and shrugged his wide bony shoulders.

“Yeah, already. I figured it out, and I come bearing presents. So, don't look so glum.”

Aloysius peered in each of the three bags, then looked up at me. “Where's the phone?” he asked. “That was the deal, yes? What good's the number I got without the phone?”

I groaned and stared up at the steel and concrete overhead, towards all those unseen cars racing to and fro. “I was in a hurry. I'll get you the phone later.” I wasn't about to give him mine.

“But that was the deal, it was.”

“Jesus, dude. Look at all this shit,” and I motioned towards the candy, the booze, and the porn. “With all this shit, you can eat and drink and jerk off until you're half comatose.”

“But that wasn't the deal,” he protested, still frowning, picking at a huge mole on the end of his nose.

“It's gonna have to do for now. I think I know the answer, and I need to be sure I got it right.”

“You
think
? You call when you only think, not
know
for sure and unequivocal? I was fair busy, I was.”

Aloysius had never not been glad to see me. But I got it. I wasn't me anymore. I was a facsimile, a cheap imitation. I was this thing the Bride had made of me.

“I'll have the phone to you by tomorrow evening,” I said. He stopped picking at the mole and licked his lips thoughtfully, indecisively.

“Just tell me if I'm right, okay?”

“Fine. Can't expect someone dead and wolfish to play by the rules. Quinn girl always played by the rules, didn't she? Quinn lass, she never tried to cheat me.”

“I'm not trying to—”

“No more wasting of my time,” he grumbled, waving a hand at me. “You so smart, lass. What's my answer?” He pulled a candy bar from the bag, not bothering to remove the wrapper before he popped it into his mouth.

“The child of woman newly forged, that's an infant. And the pump that drives the roses—”

“Rosies,” he mumbled around the 3 Musketeers.

“Fucking
rosies
, that's a heart. The whole round about, round about business, that one was hard, but you were talking about the moon.”

He chewed and watched me.

“Bloody Breast, that was almost too easy. That was a gimme. It's a robin.”

“Soldiers come in single file?” he asked, reaching for the brandy.

“March. Specifically, the
month
of March.”

Aloysius nodded, then broke the paper and plastic seals on the bottle. He tossed the cap aside.

“The last line, that was the kicker. ‘Aphrodite's child tills loam.' Took me two hours, that one line, cause she had like a hundred children. But the one you meant was Hermaphroditus. And the line, that refers to earthworms.”

The troll belched. “Fine and true, one by one. But now you gotta add it all up, yes? Add it one to one to one and one, and tell me the sum.”

I crossed my arms, so fucking sure of myself I wanted to smirk. But I didn't. “A full moon, and specifically, the Full Worm Moon, the full moon in March. I can break the spell if I sacrifice an infant who was born on the night of the Full Worm Moon, and remove its heart.”

Now, knowing the answer to the riddle, like I thought I did, don't get it in your head that means I was too keen on the idea of murdering a baby. But I figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.

Aloysius took another swig from the bottle, then shook his shaggy head, all that lichen-colored hair whipping back and forth. “Nope. Wrong. Don't bother me again until you got the solution not for maybe, but for certain.” And the special shadows reappeared and began to slither towards him like a living oil spill.

“Bullshit! That's the answer.”

“Can't lie to you. Not on a riddle. You said yourself. You have intimate knowledge of Lady Underhill's rules. Gotta go now.” And he snatched up the bag of candy and the bag with the two magazines.

“Don't you fucking dare!” I shouted and seized his arm. He shook me off as easy as I'd flick a mosquito away, and I was left sprawling in the dirt.

“When you know. Not before,” he growled, his eyes burning like embers in his skull. The shadows swallowed him, and there I was, alone again.

And what do you say?

What do you do?

Me, I went back to my stinking, roach-infested apartment. I realized I was sleepy, maybe sleepier than I'd ever been in my whole life. Sure, I'd been up since twilight the day before. But I knew it wasn't just that. Maybe I'd gotten the riddle wrong, but I understood the sudden grogginess perfectly well. I went home, crawled onto the bare mattress lying in a corner of one room, and—like any good vampire—I slept the sleep of the dead.

CHAPTER FOUR

LIMBO AND CLEMENCY

J
ust read back over the first three chapters of this thing, and seeing everything that's been left out and told the wrong way round (never mind the bald-faced lies), I feel it's necessary to call attention to the fact that I'm not a writer. In fact, I am most
emphatically
not a writer. An actual writer, he or she probably wouldn't be making all these stupid mistakes right and left, the omissions and continuity errors and whatnot. For example, I didn't mention how B slipped me a pair of sunglasses when I showed up at Babe's on the Sunnyside (before the first kill, not after). They were a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers with fancy tortoiseshell frames, and I'm thinking maybe he'd had them since the 1980s. Don't know why I got that impression. They just had this 1980s vibe about them.

“Don't want anyone getting a good look at those peepers, kitten,” he'd said. “You're going to need to be as inconspicuous as possible, and those new eyes of yours just scream bad news.”

So, yeah. If you want a point A to point Z narrative, you're sure as hell not gonna get it here.

As for the lies, I'm guessing writers lie at least as much as junkies, and maybe more, so I'm gonna cut myself some slack in that department. Oh, and if you're thinking, “But wait, Quinn, she ain't a junky anymore. She's a vampire.” To which I would reply, only difference between the me of now and the me of those days before the Bride is that now it's blood, not heroin. As William Burroughs (yeah, I quote him a lot) wrote, “Once a junky always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.” So, there you go, constant reader. Straight from the horse's mouth. Anyway, just remember this is a book being written by someone who dropped out of school when she was twelve, and after that whatever she learned about grammar and composition was cribbed from library books.

Jesus, why do I even feel the need to explain such a thing. It ought to be obvious, right? And who do I think will ever read this?

Okay, so now it's the day after all that business with Aloysius. And I tried to call Mr. B, but all I got was this message telling me the number I'd called was no longer in service. Sitting on my filthy mattress in my filthy apartment, I must have tried the number twenty or thirty times in two hours. The sun was getting low, and I was starving half to fucking death, and I still had a boatload of questions no one had bothered to answer. I started to wonder if maybe Aloysius had gotten his paws on a phone after all. Maybe he found a pay phone somewhere (though I doubt any of those still exist), or maybe he'd eaten someone and, later on, found their mobile while picking his teeth. Maybe he'd been ringing Mr. B the whole time I was sleeping, and finally B had the number disconnected. Bought a new phone. Whatever.

I haven't really taken the time to say a whole lot about just how messed up Miss Mercy Brown had left me. I suppose I take it for granted people know this shit, when obviously they don't. They know the shit they read in books and see in movies, and that's about it. And, as I have been pointing out all along, most of that pop-culture lore is nonsense. Of course, you gotta take my word for that, and—don't forget—junkies are, by definition, liars. So you believe whichever parts you wanna believe and chuck the rest. Won't be no skin off my nose.

In between trying to get B on the phone, I'd go to the cruddy bathroom and stare at my face in the cruddy bathroom mirror. I kept hoping that I wouldn't be so shocked the next time I looked, but every time I went back to that mirror, same . . . ah, what would a shrink say? Maybe that I was experiencing intense dissociative disruptions triggered by a traumatic situation. Me, I'd say I was freaked out as freaked out gets, but I guess that's a case of six of one, half dozen of the other. All semantics. Anyway, my skin was already sickly pale, and those eyes Mean Mr. B was worried about, yeah, full-on vamp. Some of the identifying characteristics of bloodsuckers take years, or even centuries, to manifest. But not the eyes. The Quinn staring back at me from the medicine cabinet looking glass had eyes robbed of even the least trace of their former humanity. Only, there was a twist. These were not the shiny black eyes of just any vampire, devoid of pupil, iris, and sclera—shark eyes, like I said earlier on. No, these were
almost
those eyes, but shot through with amber threads. So, I guessed that was the loup part of me showing through. The sight of them made me dizzy, and did nothing good for the mounting nausea from the hunger. From the need to eat, or fix, or whatever you wanna call it.

Oh, and my teeth. We're not talking normal human teeth, only with elongated canines or incisors. Not Barnabas Collins or Christopher Lee. Oh, sure, the canines were longer than normal, but have you ever seen a piranha's teeth? Those tiny sharp-as-fuck triangles? Well, that's what the Bride had left me with. You can chew through bone with those teeth. Hell, you can chew through wood and linoleum and leather and lots of other stuff with teeth like that. White as milk, those teeth. Not a trace of the coffee and nicotine stains I'd had before she turned me. I wondered if my old teeth had maybe fallen out while I dozed there beside the railroad tracks, and then these had popped in. But I would have noticed a pile of shed teeth, wouldn't I? Maybe so, maybe not. Also, my gums were tender and would bleed a bit whenever I touched them. But that stopped after the first week.

So, there I am, alternately gazing at the monster in my mirror and trying to call Mr. B, and also beginning to think maybe I should crawl through that hole in my kitchen floor and stay there for a long, long time. Pretty sure that's exactly what I was thinking when someone started knocking at the front door. No one ever knocked on my door. That might have been the first time, and I'd have jumped even if I hadn't just joined the ranks of the walking, talking dead. I seriously considered not answering it, but the knocking continued, and after maybe five or ten minutes, I slipped the Wayfarers on and went to the door. I peeked out through the curtains first, and saw it was one of B's boys. Not the one who'd brought me the money. It was the kid with his hair dyed blue, blue with turquoise streaks. Most times, he was in drag, but maybe he'd been warned about the neighborhood, 'cause that day all he was wearing was a White Stripes T-shirt and an expensive-looking pair of jeans. When I unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door a crack, he didn't even say anything, just handed me a small paper bag.

“What this?” I asked.

“Contact lenses,” he said. He pointed two fingers at his eyes and wrinkled his nose, more likely at the smell wafting from my apartment than the sight of me. Mr. B's boys, they see lots of weird shit and so get pretty jaded pretty fast. “A pair a contacts and a bottle of saline. Benedict said you'd find them useful, if you get tired of those sunglasses.”

“Benedict?”

“
Le nom du jour
, dead girl,” he said and smiled. I wanted to punch him.

Instead, I said, “That's gotta be one of the worst he's come up with yet.”

“Ours is not to wonder why—”

“Speaking of whys, why isn't he answering his phone?” I asked, interrupting the boy (like I said before, vamps love to interrupt people). “I've been trying to catch him all day, and I keep getting a recording telling me the number's no longer in service.”

“Oh, that,” the boy said. “Yeah, Benedict is presently incommunicado. He was getting these weird calls, lots of heavy breathing and a bunch of other awful noises, so . . .”

So, I was right about Aloysius.

The blue-haired boy was still talking. “. . . he'll be out of touch until he's got a new phone. Said be cool, hang tight, and he'll call soon as he can.”

I told the kid to fuck off and slammed the door in his face. I knew damned well Mr. B had gone to ground, that it was more than the phone, even if I didn't know why. He does that, if the need arises. Rarely bothers to tell anyone why. Just
poof
, and he might as well be Jimmy Hoffa until he decides to resurface. I took the paper bag to the bathroom and looked inside. Sure as shit, there was one of those glass vials with a rubber cap, the lenses floating inside, along with a plastic case for whenever I wasn't wearing them. Right side blue, left side pink, as if the lenses should be separated on the basis of their gender. They were hazel green, never mind my own eyes had been blue before Mercy got at me. I don't suppose it made much difference. Obviously, it didn't to Mr. B.

I opened the vial and put in the contacts. They were the scleral sort, like you see used in films sometimes, so they covered over all the black (and hurt like fuck, by the way, but eventually I got used to that). They didn't exactly make me look normal, but I figured I could pass, long as I didn't smile, and I never was much the smiling type. If I picked up some makeup—a good concealer, for example, and some base and powder—maybe no one would stare.

So, I knew I wasn't gonna be talking with Mr. B any time soonish, and my guts felt worse by the minute. Or so it seemed. The nausea was being replaced by cramps. Didn't matter how badly I didn't want to kill anyone else, no way I could take the pain much longer. Still, I lay on the mattress and held out until dusk. Then I called a cab, guessing I wasn't in any shape for a stroll. The driver showed up in a silver minivan a couple of hours before sunset. Yeah, a goddamn minivan, like he'd come for half the block. He asked where to and I told him Federal Hill. First thing that came to mind. Anyway, we were on the Point Street Bridge, crossing the Providence River, when I realized I didn't have enough cash to pay the fare. I had maybe three or four bucks left from the fifty the day before. I told him to take Atwells Avenue, buying time to think through the money situation, and we passed all those restaurants: mostly Italian, with a few Chinese and Mediterranean places dropped in here and there. Used to, the cooking smells from those places would make my mouth water, and I'd long for pizzas and big plates of spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, whatever. But
that
night, it all smelled about as palatable as dog shit. I rolled the window up and tried not to think about it.

The driver asked for a specific address. Third or fourth time he'd asked, and I told him to turn right, onto one of the shitty little side streets. Fancy restaurants give way to slums real damn fast along that stretch of Atwells. By sheer stinking happenstance, I'd told him to turn onto Lily Street, and no, the coincidence wasn't lost on me. Anyway, it's only one block from Atwells to Spruce, and then you have to turn left or right. I said left, and then had him pull over in front of a deserted garage, between the yellow-white pools cast by the mercury-vapor streetlights.

I'd solved the money problem, as well as the need to hunt down a meal. Two birds, one stone. I killed the cab driver—tore out his throat and drank my fill—and the pain in my belly went away pretty as you please, just like a good shot of H after a few hours of withdrawal. I broke his neck, like Mr. B had told me to (don't think I mentioned that), tossed the corpse in the back, then drove around while I mulled over the best place to ditch the car. Oh, by the way, I'd brought a clean shirt, so I could change after eating. Or drinking. Whatever. Point is, you live and learn, right. Finally, I left the van in an alley. I was so high off my
new
H—hemoglobin, that is—I hardly even worried what the police were gonna think when they came across an exsanguinated cabbie. I walked home, wishing all the way I had wings like Alice Cregan's, wishing like hell that sensation of flying wasn't only in my head.

* * *

I
have never been, by nature, a paranoid individual. And I haven't ever been one of those people who claims they're just being “realistic” in an effort to cover up the fact that they're actually paranoid. Cautious, sure. I've always been as cautious as I could afford to be, and certainly after running away from home at the age of twelve. Oh, it just occurs to me that it might seem strange that a twelve-year-old kid runs away and her parents never come after her.

My first few weeks out on the street, I was shit-sure they would, that it was only a matter of time, right. I fully expected that the cops would snatch me up at any moment and deliver me back into my mom and pop's loving arms. So maybe that was being realistic, but it
wasn't
paranoia. For a while, maybe I even
wanted
to go home, that first year or so. Maybe I missed my mom and my warm bed and just being as close to a normal fucking person as I'd ever been allowed to be. Possibly, I forgot there were worse things than being a homeless girl. Regardless, no one ever came. Not the cops. Not a private detective. No one from child protective services. No one. And, eventually, I stopped expecting to be retrieved, which is good, because, obviously, I never was. I know my mother still lives in Cranston, and that she and Pop split a few months after the night I left. Isn't it illegal to let your twelve-year-old run off like that and not at least
try
to bring them home? Wouldn't my school have . . . hell, whatever. You get the gist of it. Or not. Hardly matters.

I woke late in the afternoon after the night I ate the cabbie, and, as the events of the previous evening went from murky half memories to crystal clear recollection, I sort of panicked. Plainly, I was an idiot. I'd left the minivan where anyone could find it. If it wasn't the police, whoever it was would
call
the police. The police would call the cab company (who might have already reported the driver missing), and they'd learn that no one had heard a peep from him after he was dispatched to my address. And so on and so forth, and I had no doubt what-so-fucking-ever that folks in uniform would be banging on my door any minute. Only question in my mind was why that hadn't already happened. It was almost four thirty in the p.m., and I was still scot-free. I got dressed and headed for the front door, suspecting I was safer just about anywhere but home. I thought maybe I could even count on the domino guys on the sidewalk to keep their mouths shut about seeing me leave. They certainly had no love of the law (not gonna get into all the whys of that). There were places I could hide. If there was one thing I'd learned in my time on the streets, it was how to hide.