The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (17 page)

“I am. Everything’s fine.”

“So?” Her voice was excited. “How did it go? With Edwin?”

“Good. It was… practically a date.”

“Wow! Maybe we should have gotten you a dress, too—you guys should come to the dance with us!”

“I’m not sure he’s the dancing type,” I said. I yawned artificially. “J, can we talk more tomorrow? I’m pretty tired.”

She let me go after only five more minutes of attempting to pry, and promised to let Kelly know I’d made it home safe.

I stretched out on my bed and did a mental inventory. In a world full of uncertainty, I had three absolutely solid touchstones:

First, Edwin was a vampire.

Second, he loved me—or at least thought my blood smelled delicious, which, for a vampire, was probably the next best thing.

And third, I would get him to turn me into a vampire too, no matter how much scheming, manipulation, or treachery it required.

MEADOW LARKS

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

I
won’t bore you with talk of how happy we were in the next week, being publicly a couple, spending every waking moment together, holding hands at school, eating lunch together (not with my crowd or his—I got the feeling I wasn’t welcome with his, and I didn’t want to bore him with mine), being the subject of gossip, not even having to fake the giggling girl talk with J and Kelly and the others, and with Edwin sneaking into my room every night (and steadfastly refusing to sleep with me, much to my dismay—more about that later), Harry completely oblivious to his arrivals and departures. Being able to leap up to a second-story window has its advantages.

But Happiness in a story is boring: almost as bad as listening to someone else’s dream. You want “blood and ructions,” as my old granny used to say—actually that’s how she characterized every entertainment in the world other than the Bible, though from the little I’ve read the Bible has enough blood and ructions to match a hundred action movies. Still, I should cover a few things, some snippets of that happy time before the hockey game and the evil vampires trying to kill me (a few weeks before I would have considered that a tautology: saying “evil vampire” should be like saying “big whale” or “little microbe,” absolutely redundant, but that just goes to show, you never know as much as you think you do, even when you’re me). So:

Edwin liked to play this game when we were in my bed together,
not
having sex, and no, it wasn’t a game that involved dry humping. It was called Questions, but it wasn’t the same as the Questions game from that movie
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
. It was pretty simple. He got to ask three questions, and I got to ask three questions, and follow-up questions or requests for clarification counted against your total—but only if they were actually phrased as questions, so you could make leading statements and try to tease out more information. My kind of game, really, as it turned ordinary conversation into something you could
win
, by getting more out of your opponent than he got out of you. Edwin asked me questions like, “What’s your favorite ice cream” and “What’s your favorite color” and “If you were a verb, which verb would you be?” (I didn’t say “murder,” I think I said, “sparkle.”)

My questions were more like this: “So how does this whole vampire thing work—I mean, like, physically?”

He stirred beside me on the mattress. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Your heart doesn’t beat, I can tell when I press my ear to your chest, and you only breathe when you remember to, so how does that
work
? Come on—your dad’s a doctor, surely he’s spent some time exploring this problem.”

“Ah,” he said. “I see. Hmm. Well, you must understand—Argyle is interested in the question, but it’s not as if vampires stand still to be dissected.”

“Vivisected,” I murmured. “When you cut them open when they’re still alive, it’s vivisection—but, wait, if you vampires are technically dead, I guess it is dissection, never mind.”

He smiled in the dark: I could see his teeth gleam in the moonbeams through the window. “Quite. Well, Argyle has theories, but precious few opportunities to test them. Our blood doesn’t circulate under normal circumstances, and so it doesn’t circulate oxygen, and so our brains shouldn’t work, but—they do. He thinks the oxygen in the blood we drink replenishes us, somehow—and, yes, I know, drinking blood should just fill our stomachs with blood, not affect the blood in our veins or brains, which doesn’t circulate anyway. My mother—well, Argyle’s wife—Ellen has a rather more mystical view: we take in life force, and that force sustains us.”

“Huh. So it’s woo-woo shit.”

“Was that a question?”

I sighed. “No. I’m just surprised at Argyle. I thought he was more of a scientific vampire.”

“Understand, Argyle was born six hundred years ago. He was shaped by the worldviews of the time—he still, deep down, believes in demons, and magic, and gods, and all manner of such things. And our very existence is a powerful argument in favor of that worldview. There’s also the matter of… our powers.”

That perked me up, but I could tell he wanted to go on, so I didn’t waste a question, just waited.

In a moment he said, “Some of us have… abilities. They develop after we turn. Not
all
of us, but some. Pleasance has the power of psychometry—she can hold an object and discover things, psychically, about its history, and about its owner. That power even works in the present, assuming the affinity between object and owner is strong enough. If she picked up my favorite sweatshirt, say, at home, and held it in her hands, and concentrated, she would receive a vision of where I am now, here, in bed with you—she calls it sympathetic magic.”

“Wow,” I murmured. Mental note: never let Pleasance get her hands on
anything
of mine.

“Yes. Garnett can make people forget they’ve seen him. It’s not invisibility, exactly, but… well, you just don’t notice him, and if you do, you soon forget you did, if that’s what he wants. There are other powers. My own, well…”

I could sense he was trying to pull a question out of me, but I stayed quiet.

“I can see through the eyes of others.”

“Ha!” I said. “So you
were
spying on me. That’s how you knew that guy who talked to me outside the bar in Bemidji was staring at my boobs the whole time—you looked through his eyes! And here I thought you were just following me around.”

“It’s true. Argyle thinks the powers we have are… enhancements of the powers we had in life. I was always good at seeing things from someone else’s point of view—and so I can
literally
see things from their point of view, now. Only humans—or things that used to be human—alas, not animals. I can’t control them either, it’s completely passive, but anyone within, oh, a hundred miles, I can dip into their senses and see through their eyes, as if they were cameras. I was keeping an eye on you as best I could when you were in Bemidji, but I lost sight of you when you were alone, so I jumped from person to person for a while until a barfly caught sight of you.”

My very own super-stalker. It should have been creepy, but mostly it was cute. It did have certain troubling aspects, though. If he could see me
all
the time… But apparently he couldn’t, so I decided to waste a question. “Why not just look through
my
eyes?”

“Ah, there, you see. It’s not just your delectable smell or your powerful personality that fascinate me, Bonnie. For some reason—I can’t see through your eyes. You are largely a mystery to me, you see—what you do when you’re alone is utterly unknown to me, and that is wonderful. When you can so easily satisfy your curiosity as I can, finding someone who resists such casual prying is wonderful.”

“Oh, too bad,” I said, but I was really thinking:
Thank the nonexistent god.
It would mean, if I ever killed anyone else again, I’d need to make sure they didn’t get a look at me, just to be on the safe side.
But it should be okay. Edwin’s attention couldn’t be everywhere at all times. He could only see through one set of eyes at a time. “I was thinking I’d spend a lot more time staring at myself in the mirror after I took a shower, maybe fondling my breasts, give you a little show, but since you can’t see through me—you’ll have to use your imagination.”

He moaned in a very satisfying way.

“So I’m unique, then. I always suspected. That’s satisfying.” I wondered if the limitation had something to do with my… neurological situation. If my own lack of empathy made his apparently empathy-based power go haywire. It was a theory, and as long as we were embracing magic, it made as much sense as anything else.

“That wasn’t technically a question, but I’ll answer anyway, since you’ve given me such a nice mental image to dwell upon,” Edwin said. “No, you’re not entirely unique. I’ve met a few other people who were resistant to my power over the years—there are two of them in this town, actually. Mr. Levitt, the principal at school, and the mayor’s wife, I think her name is Eileen. I don’t know why. Just one of those things.”

“You sure know how to make a girl feel special.”

“Believe me—a middle-aged woman and a seventy-year-old man don’t have quite the same appeal for me that
you
do.”

“I’ll be middle-aged someday too, old man,” I reminded him. “Unless you take steps to make sure I live forever young with you. I don’t know why you won’t just go ahead and do it already. We both know you’ll give in eventually.”

He stiffened. “Argyle’s theories, about magic, about the supernatural, about redemption and damnation… I am not as old as he is, but they make sense to me, too. I am a creature without a soul, Bonnie. A monster who takes life from the living to sustain my own existence. I love you—I don’t want to make you into a monster too.”

“You’re no monster,” I said, glad he couldn’t see through my eyes, because those eyes were
rolling
. Souls. Monsters. If there were souls, the angels ran out of them before they got to me, and by most definitions, I was more a monster than he was already. Maybe better not to let him know that though. I decided not to push the issue—not yet. “You’re wonderful, and strong. And I have one more question, which is: How do you get erections? Because I
know
you get them. And don’t say ‘magic.’”

He coughed. He was so shy about some things. Pretty adorable, though also frustrating. “Ah. Well. The blood flow situation is, of course, problematic, but it’s possible for us to reach… arousal… as long as we’ve fed recently. Fresh blood seems to do the trick.”

“Huh. Blood as magical Viagra. Interesting. So have you fed recently?”

“You’re all out of questions,” he reminded me.

I slipped my hand under the bedspread and reached down toward his pants. “I’ll just have to rely on experimental data, then.”

He swatted my hand away with his usual bullshit about how he couldn’t trust himself, in his excitement he might bite me and tear my throat out, etc. I argued that made an even
more
compelling case for him to turn me into a vampire already, so we could have hot invincible vamp sex, but he was adamant, and we ended up sleeping with our backs to one another, each of us sulking through the night.

Over the course of other games of Questions throughout the week, I found out a few more things: boy vampires ejaculate just like normal guys. Which is good, as I’d worried they’d spurt blood, but also bad, because I’d sort of hoped they’d have magical spooge-less ejaculations—I mean, I don’t mind giving head, totally controlling a boy with your mouth and hands can be fun, but neither spitting nor swallowing ever appealed to me a bit. Ah well. You can’t have everything. (On the bright side: girl vampires don’t menstruate—he was embarrassed answering that one!—I guess because their bodies are loathe to give up even that much blood, and thus, they can’t get pregnant, which is pretty intuitive but it’s nice to have confirmation.)

I also discovered Edwin was a
virgin
, which explained a
lot
, and I was glad I hadn’t been forthcoming with him about my own sexual history, because I quickly assured him I was a virgin too, of course. He had this whole “My first time must be with my true love” schtick going. Edwin can be such a girl sometimes. But I was his true love, he said, so it was only a matter of time, and once I got him once, I’d have him as often as I wanted, I figured. He just didn’t know what he was missing—whereas I could guess what I was missing. Sex with a creature with supernatural stamina.

One day we were out taking a walk in the woods—Edwin said the whole town would be encased in ice starting from November or so, and we’d better enjoy the air while we could—and I asked him about his hunting. “So, what, do you eat pocket gophers?”

“My own weakness is deer,” he said. “Though we all have our favorites. None of the animals in the world can compare to human blood, but it’s good enough.”

“Carob’s not as good as chocolate,” I said, “but if there’s no chocolate—you eat carob.”

“Just so. We toyed with the idea of raiding a blood bank, getting bags of old donated human blood just before it’s going to be thrown out, but Argyle refused, saying the taste might be too potent, and send us out hunting again. It’s very tiring to be good all the time, Bonnie.”

So why bother?
I thought, but there was no reason to let him know I valued human life a lot less than he did, despite the fact that he was a
vampire
. It’s not like humans are rare and precious. There are billions of them, and more being made every day. “I guess deer don’t stand a chance against your body, what with the super speed and all.”

“Yes. It’s quite unfair. Garnett sometimes hunts blindfolded, by smell alone, just for the challenge. Hermet likes to hunt bears, and once flew to Africa to hunt predators like lions, but the taste didn’t agree with him. In a way, it’s a shame, though. We’re exquisitely engineered—or evolved, who can say?—to hunt
humans
. Hence our… well, I hope this doesn’t sound immodest… our
beauty
. Our powers, whatever they may be, almost always help us hunt—even Pleasance’s psychometry is excellent for learning about a human subject, to more effectively stalk them. And there are… other factors.”