Eternal (20 page)

I’VE SURPRISED US BOTH.
I want to dance with her, though. Just once. The universe owes us that. Besides, she’s never had a real date. It’s not that guys didn’t notice her. Though she held back, my girl had a faerie-like beauty and shy sparkle. But her obsession with Geoff Calvo was as transparent to the masses as it was a pain in the ass to me.

At the checkout counter, we have the books shipped to the castle so we don’t have to carry them. Outside, back on the sidewalk, the temperature hovers at around forty degrees. But Miranda doesn’t seem to notice, and I’m okay. The wardrobe she had delivered to my room included a black leather jacket worthy of James Dean.

A CTA bus rolls by. A young couple strolls arm in arm, speaking Russian. Two pissed-off-sounding guys, one behind the other, shout threats at each other and kick at pigeons on the sidewalk. A fair-skinned, distinguished-looking man carrying a black umbrella tips his hat at me as he walks by. I consider hightailing it to the 900 Shops on North Michigan to pick out dressier clothes for the occasion. But the castle is so much about wardrobe. I like the idea of looking like regular people.

We hop a cab with no shocks south to the Edison Hotel. As the cabbie complains about the Bulls, Miranda snuggles against my arm and her thigh presses against mine. I doubt she’s doing it on purpose.

Miranda apparently still has no experience with guys. I, on the other hand, am decades older. Plus, I let it rip, drowning my sorrows in earthly pleasures in the months before I woke up on the Amtrak train. But she’s really getting to me.

I hold it together as the cab passes the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. At Millennium Park, I shift in the seat and clear my throat. Finally, I take her hand and gesture toward the Art Institute. “I’d like to take you there sometime.”

Once the words are out, I realize I mean them.

“I’d love that,” she says, like we’re a normal couple. “How about next week?”

White lights dot trees growing from the medians and along the sidewalks. Old-fashioned-style streetlights glow golden. It’s a romantic night.

But Miranda and I, whatever we’re doing, it can’t last. According to the Auto Shop and Body Repair calendar stuck to the cab’s dash, Drac will return in just under three weeks.

Now that I know where he sleeps, I can’t help wondering . . . When I destroy him, will she try to stop me? How big of a dent have I made in her loyalty to the master vamp?

I know the Edison Hotel because it was Danny’s fave hangout. I’m relieved to see the sign. Good news. It’s still in business.

“What do you think?” I ask as a bellhop holds open the thick glass door.

“Swanky,” Miranda says.

The 1927 twenty-five-floor hotel has a forty-foot lobby ceiling, comfortably worn antique furniture, breathtaking crystal chandeliers, and an A-list clientele. Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and a mixed bag of heads of state, including every president since FDR, have stayed here. The carpet is red, the walls gold, and the columns carved from gray marble. Even the trash cans are made of gray marble.

It’s the kind of place where you expect to see a slinky doll with a long white feather in her hair walking a cheetah on a thin gold leash. It’s also off the supernatural grid. Or at least it was back in the day. I can’t think of a better, safer place that would welcome both of us.

IT’S NOT LIKE THERE
aren’t any grand historic hotels in Dallas, but my family didn’t go to places like this. When my relations came to visit, they stayed at our house. When we visited them, we stayed at theirs.

I’ve been to one wedding reception, my cousin Molly’s, and it was at a Doubletree or someplace like that in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also was invited to Shira Levine’s bat mitzvah at the Marriott in Plano because our moms are friends. They were nice hotels, clean and new, but not the kind of places where you could imagine running into movie stars or presidents or, now that I think about it, undead royalty.

Zachary accompanies me up a sweeping red carpeted staircase with gold banisters to a four-star, candlelit seafood restaurant with a generous dance floor off the bar area and a five-piece band playing old love songs. We’re underdressed — me in my black turtleneck and black jeans, Zachary in a white, long-sleeved shirt and black cargo pants — but no one seems to mind. I free my hair from the ponytail, glad I wore the three-inch dress boots tonight. I’ll stick with my higher heels from now on.

When we take our places among the swirling couples, most of them in their sixties or older, he looks at me, sheepish. “Uh, do you know how to dance?”

I can’t help smiling. The moment I’m feeling out of place, Zachary reassures me that we’re not so different. I relax against his chest, my cheek on his shoulder, and breathe him in. Zachary smells so good, like vanilla and musk. Like sex and Creation. Or at least what I imagine them to be.

Somehow, he knows most of the songs.

“I can’t sing worth crap,” he says.

I’m playing with his feather-soft curls. “Most people can’t.”

He sidesteps. “Not most
people,
that’s true.”

We seem to float between the dance floor and our table.

When Zachary spills red wine on his white shirt, it’s an excuse to fuss over him with soda water, to bring my lips close to his, until he draws me up to dance again.

I’m not the only one who admires him. Everywhere we’ve been tonight — at O’Conner’s, at the bookstore, on the street — humans have noticeably marveled at Zachary’s beauty. It doesn’t bother me, though. After all, he’s mine to keep.

Finally, we’re the last couple on the floor, and the bartender is putting the chairs upside down on the tables. The band stopped playing a few minutes ago. A hostess turns on the vacuum cleaner.

As we exit the coat-check counter, arm in arm, inspiration strikes. At just past two
AM
, most of the human world may be sleeping, but it’s still early for us. “Let’s stay here tonight.”

Zachary stumbles. “I don’t know —”

“Please. I want to pretend like I’m alive.”

Saying the words out loud was hard enough. I won’t make it an order.

He runs a hand through his thick hair, blinks at me, and, for a heart-wrenching moment, looks away. “Just tonight,” he says.

When I show the hotel manager my Dracul platinum card, he hastens to assign us to the bridal suite, no charge, and says he’ll put us down for a late checkout.

Moments later, perched on the gray marble counter in the bathroom, I twist to face the Hollywood-style mirror, framed in lightbulbs.

I look paler than usual. I skipped the pig’s blood before we left. I hadn’t been planning to stay out all night.

“In here!” I call to Zachary, who was flipping through channels when I left him in the seating area. “You need to soak that stain.”

What I know about laundry could fit in a thimble, but my mom was big on soaking. More important, it’s a workable rationale to get him out of that shirt, an occasion I’ve been longing for since the night of the fire when I was too distraught to fully appreciate the view. His fanged smiley-faced boxers were fetching, though.

When Zachary slides the shirt off his shoulders, I’m so distracted that it takes me a minute to notice the tattoo over his heart. I must’ve missed it the night of the fire. I reach out with my fingertips, reminded of our earlier conversation at the bookstore.

Zachary moves my hand from his skin and gently squeezes it before letting go.

“Where did that come from?” I ask. “The tattoo, I mean.”

He runs water over the wine stain. “Austin.”

“You were in Texas? Are you from Texas?”

What with the stress of pleasing Father and warding off batty Elina and beheading Theo and dealing with the runaway servants and Harrison’s bloodlust rampage and the nursery fire and the French and negotiating my diet and meeting with Freddy, I’ve neglected to look deeper into Zachary’s background.

“I was in Austin before Chicago. I was in Dallas before that.”

Virginia artifacts aside, Father doesn’t encourage references to human lives. We’ve had only that one phone conversation about his human daughters, about that aspect of his past. However, he’s not here. He’s not even on the continent. “I’m from Dallas originally. Wouldn’t it be funny if we were there at the same time?”

Zachary massages soap into the stain. “I don’t think this is coming out.”

I take the hint and try another line of inquiry. “Why the tattoo?”

His smile is wry. “Would you believe I was so drunk I don’t remember?”

“You don’t remember getting a baby angel tattooed on your chest?”

Exiting the bathroom, he says the oddest thing: “There’s no such thing as baby angels. Angels are created full grown and look the same forever.”

Like eternals. No, that’s a blasphemous thought. If there are angels, they’re not like eternals at all.

I follow Zachary into the suite, where he lounges on the sofa. The lights are all on, the television is turned to a dinosaur program, and he’s flipping through the room-service menu.

“Do you want popcorn?” he asks. “It’s a twenty-four-hour kitchen.”

I’m briefly reminded of movie nights with Lucy. The mood here is different, though. Much. “Buttered,” I say. “And a bottle of Shiraz.” I’ll pretend it’s a blood mix.

While Zachary — still shirtless — phones in our order, I channel surf.
Urban Cowboy
wouldn’t be my first choice. However, the hotel only offers a handful of channels, the movie is romantic, and I miss seeing people in boots and hats.

I douse the lights.

“It’ll take forty-five minutes to harvest and pop the corn, uncork the bottle, pour the wine, and bring it all up on an elevator,” Zachary says, amused. Glancing at the screen he adds, “I love this flick.”

WHEN I TOOK THE SHIRT OFF
, I figured there would be a complimentary robe. But the closet is empty. I ask for one when I call room service.

By the time I hang up, Miranda’s found a movie to watch. The Texas setting of
Urban Cowboy
fits in with my theory that she’s homesick. She misses the girl she used to be.

Sissy and Bud are dancing in their wedding duds at Gilley’s when Miranda begins tracing my collarbone with her index finger. This time when she touches my chest, I can’t bring myself to stop her. Using the remote, she turns off the movie.

I was there when Miranda took her first breath. Her baptism. Her first step. On her first day of school and when she had the chicken pox. In the middle-school girl’s locker room when Denise Durant made fun of her bra size. In algebra when she mooned over Geoff Calvo and got a C. When she wrote
BFF
on Lucy’s arm cast and when she adopted Mr. Nesbit. I was there when Grandpa Shen was buried with military honors. When Miranda chickened out of going on the Steel Eel. When her MBA dad and beauty-queen mom told her that their fairy tale had gone bust.

The night, maybe the moment when Miranda was closing out the cash register at the mall movie theater and, suddenly, I realized that she wasn’t a little girl anymore and that I didn’t just love her. I was
in
love with her, too.

Tonight the bridal suite of the Edison Hotel is lit by the glow of city lights. They shimmer against a Baccarat chandelier and reflect in the mirror over this sofa.

Tonight I kiss Miranda for the first time. I taste mocha and black pepper from the wine. Heat from the mango salsa. The kiss is tentative. Uncertain.

It doesn’t feel wrong.

Then she says, “It’s one thing to die a virgin. It’s another to be an undead one.”

It’s her turn to initiate a kiss. Miranda sweeps her tongue across my lower lip. Through the turtleneck top, her small breasts press against my bare chest. I inhale. Expect the lemongrass scent of her onetime body wash. She smells like lavender instead.

I remember Nora lighting lavender tapers in the dining-room candelabra. The master’s favorite, the chef explained. Like Miranda. She’s his favorite, too. What did she just say? “Die a virgin.” “Undead.”

I scramble to my feet. It was stupid of me to let things go so far. I may have known her from day one, but Miranda just met me. To her, I may look twenty-two, but I’m a hell of a lot older than that. And together we’re impossible. Forget love. Forget passion. The absolute last thing I should do is deflower the undead.