This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any events or situations are entirely coincidental. Some use is made of actual locales, landmarks and institutions. All of these usages are fictional in nature and intent, and are not to be misconstrued as attempts to disparage or recommend.
She'd had to leave in a big hurry, it had been much too close to her time of need. She might have killed him had she stayed, and she couldn't have lived with herself had she slain him. She couldn't have died, either.
She couldn't forget, though, the look of terror on his face, couldn't forget the way he'd felt... a slow creeping of paranoia when he discovered her in his locked apartment, a wash of relief as he identified her, followed by a deeper wave of feeling as the affection he'd almost walled away within himself began to rise again to the surface.
Her own feelings surprised her. She wanted to smart-ass him at first, oh how've I been, oh, just fine for a creature of darkness, where've I been, oh, living like a slug under the rock of society, hiding out in absolute dives from hell... but that wouldn't be fair to either of them, and she realized with that thought that she was warring with her Hunger, and for now, winning.
Even as she put what should have been the scare of his life into him, she wondered at herself, and at him. Somehow he wasn't as scared as he ought to be, which fit right in with the low emotional states she'd always felt from him. She couldn't help sending mixed signals.
She was at least as happy to see him as he was to see her.
She fought her urge to go to him. This close to killing time, she couldn't tell exactly which urge was moving her, emotional need or something more physical. When she did finally go to him to give him a final goodbye hug, she felt herself kissing him, and what she had meant to be a soft touch of lips was a kiss with razors in it. The taste of his blood was as sweet as she had meant that kiss to be, and she had thrown herself into the night like a man flees a burning ship for mid-ocean's blue depths.
How the hell, she wondered, shaking her head as she headed back to the Dives' Motor Lodge, could a man find himself liking a vampiress? He had to be nuts. She pondered everything she could recall (not much) about the psychology of teacher-student relationships. Oy, she thought, that could have something to do with it. The man must have powerful parental instincts. She had heard something about "Auntie Syndrome", ummm, yah, displacement behavior from a thwarted parenting drive. It sort of made sense.
At the Dives', she had to push her way through a group of kids, little fourteen year-old crack dealers, man-tall but monkey-minded. They'd learned to not bother her, as each and every one who had ever even spoken to her had suddenly developed blinding headaches as she mindstruck them. There was the occasional new guy on the block, and one of these tried to block her way. She was not in the mood for anything stupid from any kids, so she just locked eyes with him, and she watched as his pupils contracted with fear and pain. She squeezed his mind a bit harder than was needed, and he staggered a bit. She went upstairs to her room.
What was she feeling for Ron, now?
Was it contempt? How could she respect a man who knew what she was and didn't care? Maybe a bit of contempt... but the thoughts that came to her mind were thoughts of that kiss she had given him. She remembered how much she'd wanted to stay, and not to satisfy her Hunger. Couldn't she ever be at peace with a man, to let her guard down, to dismiss her self-control for a time? His cheek had been just a bit stubbly, and his smell (beneath the odor of sudden fear) had been the slightly musky odor of a healthy man, and she had wanted both to flee the smell of terror, and to bury her face in his man-smell.
Those desires had mixed, though, with a desire to bury her teeth in his shoulder. Much of her contempt, she decided, was really for herself. Couldn't she ever see a man as something other than food or danger? He definitely didn't fit into the food category, or at least she certainly didn't want him to fit there... and he was a nice guy, and patently not a danger to her, unless he told somebody about her. Who would he tell, anyway? Who could believe such a thing? Even she had troubles believing in vampires, and she was one.
Finally, after hours of TV and exercise, she was able to sleep. Dreams came to her, the dreaded trapdreams, but mixed with those terrors were fond dreams of a kiss that didn't bring blood onto her lips, and dreams of warm arms about her, and of man-smell, and of comfort.
Lace would find herself peering over a roof edge, watching the man she was so obsessed with as he aimlessly wandered the streets of the District. He was a funny sort of guy, with a distinctive walk, and a funny, crane-like way of turning his head as he scanned the streets. There was no doubt in her mind that he was indeed searching for her.
She could almost understand the affection she had for him. Gratitude for what he had done for her was not surprising. He had been really instrumental in her slow return to sanity of a sort. Her dreams of him had become more recurrent. So Lace followed him, and continued to watch over him like a deadly angel.
When she was not following Ron, she spent a lot of time at those places in town where she could simultaneously be out of the Dives' Motor Lodge, out of the sunlight, and into a worthwhile experience. She spent a lot of time at the local public libraries.
She had always been a voracious reader, and her early love for science fiction had translated itself (now that she could think in a straight line for more than a second) into a love of non-fiction science.
She particularly wanted to understand herself. What was she?
She had flat (if ridiculously strong and sharp) nails, binocular color vision, and no tail. So she was an ape. Duh... She certainly looked like a human being, and most of the time, she acted like one. So that made her a hominid. (No shit, sherlock, she told herself) Homo Sapiens? Well, she made and used tools and language in purposeful, goal-oriented behavior. She didn't have massive brow ridges, and she didn't walk stooped over with bowed legs, so she was pretty sure she wasn't a Neandertal... but she had read that the Neandertals were very strong compared to modern Men, and that seemed to fit.
Was she intelligent?
Was anybody intelligent? What was intelligence? She found a useful definition: intelligence was the ability to accurately identify factors in one's environment which could be modified, and to assess and select the best methods for modifying those factors. Maybe she was intelligent, after all. She had been resigning herself to acceptance of her mental skills as mere mimicry and cunning. Maybe it was a lack of common sense that overly troubled her.
Perhaps she could apply her tendency towards introspection as a substitute for common sense, instead of lapsing into mere brooding.
She read absolutely everything she could about comparative primatology, and was particularly fascinated by a Scientific American article on the evolution of walking, which compared chimpanzees, humans, and "Lucy"-type australopithicine.
There was a mention of the relative lengths of the short-arm of the thighbone, where the bone extends from the ball joint. The "Lucy"-types had a much longer segment of bone there, enabling much greater strength, and more effective bipedalism. The article concluded that the reason for the apparent evolutionary backtracking was explicable in terms of selection for wide hips permitting passage of the ever-growing infant cranium of evolving modern humanity, coupled with a shortening of that short-arm of the femur, preventing ungainliness. She was quite sure that she had that longer short-arm, and that would explain the impossible angles that she could get her legs into when practicing her sweeping-cross back-kicks. What would happen to her, though, when the time came for her to bear children? Would she be able to give birth only with extreme difficulty, in great pain? Perhaps her hips would widen as she matured more. At any rate more than a million years of evolution had gone by since "Lucy"'s time.
She also came across a mention of species divergence, within the context of genetic similarity as determined by histaminic reactions comparison. There was no clear species division between some of the more recent non-Sapiens hominids. Current theory was that predecessors as far back as Homo Habilis might not actually be a separate species, but might be better considered as members of races that had simply been supplanted by better-adapted races. Certainly that was the case with the Neandertals.
Again, she asked herself, this time with a different emphasis, what was she? Was she an evolutionary dead end, a throwback to a more violent time, or perhaps a new and better thing?
Better watch the definition of your definitions, Lace. What are your hidden assumptions? Where are your fallacies of argument?
What was better?
Well, she certainly couldn't be beaten by anybody in a fair fight, at least not by anyone she had so far encountered. That was better...
She had a memory so flawless that it was an absolute curse in some ways. Things she wished to forget often stuck in her mind merely because she wished to forget them. She rarely made the same sort of mistake twice, and never exactly repeated an error. No, that was not true, she had great difficulty in breaking herself of habits that had worked, even when presented with more appropriate or effective methods. She learned very rapidly, however. Though she might in a hurry fall back upon older, less efficient ways, with a little effort, she could consciously enable preference for newer, better ways.
She was incredibly strong, strong as an ape, she thought. Strong as a Neandertal, anyway. A book on primate comparative anatomy had a lot of diagrams on variances in shoulderblade location and size, and illustrations of ligament attachments, and charts relating those factors to degrees of mobility. Her shoulders were widely set, and she had small shoulderblades, and again, the short-arm of the humerus seemed proportionally longer. She knew that she could easily reach directly behind her without the restrictions that other people seemed to experience.
She recalled reading that the eyes of carnivores tended to be binocular and forward-facing, while the eyes of herbivores tended to be side-facing as an evolutionary response to the tendency of carnivores to sneak up on prey from behind. This didn't seem to make sense as far as primates (which for the most part seemed to be primarily herbivorous) were concerned, but the binocular vision was an adaptation to, and a requirement for, arboreal life. Her own unusual ocular mobility could readily be explained in a similar light, as a response to a need to disarm prey by feigning disinterest.
Better? Oh, yeah, sure better. Much better, at hunting other people. How appealing. Certainly she was evolutionarily superior, if she had been a wild person, living in wilderness, hunted by others as she hunted them. She would have been much superior in such a situation, but she was not in the wild, she herself was not wild (or certainly, she didn't want to be wild) and therefor, she was not better.
Think comparatively, Lace. Where are all of my kind? Why are normal people so successful? Why are they all around? What makes them so good?
Goodness, Lace. Simple goodness. They can trust one another. They don't have to eat each other. They care for their sick, their old. They cooperate. They can build a civilization, they don't have to compete, and when confronted by people like me, or people like I would be if I wasn't raised like I was, they would have to cooperate, would have to build a civilization.
Lace considered the fact that she had long ago qualified for Mensa, the organization of the intellectually gifted. She reflected that, compared to most people, she was vastly superior in almost all ways. She was smarter, faster, had better perceptions, was healthier, stronger, and judging from her slow maturation, probably longer-lived. Without the Hunger, and the enmity it brought, she and her kind would have long since supplanted these Men who so greatly outnumbered her kind.
It seemed to follow that her kind could never cooperate (except perhaps as a hunting unit), would not find cooperation, caring, or empathy survival traits... unless she were to hypothesize a kind of caring analogous to the human quality of humaneness... the kind of quality that makes a successful herdsman.
"Why, shore Ah eat cattle," a mocking hick voice said inside her head, "But I ain't cruel to 'em whilst they live..."
Damn.
I guess I know what kind of vampire I'm descended from, Lace thought... the kind that treats her cattle humanely, slaughters them efficiently and cleanly...
I wonder if I can be a kinder, gentler bloodsucker, she thought, then checked herself, appalled. Intelligent cattle?
Her mind began to whirl. She recognized the feeling... her madness was returning. Why had she opened herself up to even more confusion and psychic pain? She somehow must have had an inkling where this line of reasoning would lead, what it could do to her...
As a wall of madness again closed in on her, she realized that her unconscious mind had led her down this path for one simple reason...
Her unconscious mind could parse out all of the logic in the world, but it couldn't make ethical or moral decisions. It left that up to her conscious mind, but it had plenty in the way of feelings and desires... It wanted her to do the right thing.
Outside, darkness gathered, close upon the heels of fleeing daylight, and as Lace whirled again towards a functional adaptive near-psychosis, one thing came into her mind, and almost tipped her over the edge.
She knew it was common for a farmer to choose one calf or lamb, a calf or lamb that would live its full life, that the farmer would use instinctively to assuage whatever guilty feelings might lie unresolved on the subject of eating members of a captive species, a species so domesticated that it couldn't long survive in the freedom of the wild...
For months now, Lace had whiled away the time between slaughters following her one lamb from the herd... and she knew the effects that cats and dogs had on the imprisoned, and the afflicted, and especially the mentally ill...
Lace, outwardly calm, inwardly blasted, faded into the darkness, became a part of the night. She went looking for her lost lamb, thinking that his mere nearness might lower her stress-levels a bit.
When Lace found her pet, he was being stalked by wolves.
It was a trip, for her, how he seemed to be able to take in stride something that had been making her crazy for three years. Perhaps it was just gratitude. She was afraid to "peek", afraid that she might find that it was all just a pose of confidence, so she just carried on as if she were a normal girl, and he a normal guy. They were both almost ridiculously polite, and rather than consider the real ramifications of the situation (would she kill him or not?) they just chatted. He was nervous, obviously, but she was as disarming as possible. Sooner or later, though, he must ask the question that she dreaded hearing, and he did ask it, was she toying with him?
She didn't think so. It pissed her off that he even asked. Why should she toy? She could kill him like that, couldn't he see that? If she'd wanted to hurt him the thought and the action would have been almost simultaneous, and instantaneous. She had come needing advice, and comfort, with a new idea in her head, and madness crowding close behind that idea. She had wanted to see the only person to be actually kind to her in years. She'd only wished to look at him from a distance, and she had been forced to a greater degree of involvement than she had ever conceived. When she had done her "visitation", she had merely revealed her nature. Now he'd seen her in action, and despite her efforts to shield herself, she couldn't ignore the radiations of awe from him. Fear was the last thing she wanted, so she tried to set him straight.
Thus it was that she checked out of The Dives' Motor Lodge, and moved in with Ron Smith.
She didn't tell him anything about her past, really, not where she came from, not what she'd been doing... she realized that, on the edge of a breakdown, she'd probably revealed far too much about her past too him. She felt a creeping sense of personal danger, the first in a long, long time, but as they talked, she came to realize that this strange man really did mean her no harm.
She really couldn't figure it out. She had grown up on the typical Hollywood fare of vampires versus vampire hunters, and the idea of sitting down and casually talking with someone who should have been a mortal enemy did nothing to ease the whirling of her mind... but her feelings were rather more settled.
Ron himself did not seem to mind. She did her best pretty girl imitation, which came with some difficulty, considering that she was a year out of practice, and had been doing her best to be shapeless and unattractive for months. (She also reminded herself that she didn't want to overdo it, lest a positive feedback cycle should be initiated, with God alone knowing where that could end...) He warmed to her, and she warmed to him. They found themselves sitting together on the couch, MTV on the television, laughing at the inanity of videos when seen without music. She found herself gazing at the scars on his cheek, tiny scars that hadn't faded yet. They found themselves looking into each other's eyes, and moving closer, and she was able to entirely forget how different she was, and it seemed that he had forgotten as well. She liked that feeling, and basked in acceptance. The man-smell was entirely devoid of the overlay of fear.
Somehow, they both relaxed enough that he fell asleep while watching TV, and she didn't have the heart to wake him up to ask about sleeping arrangements, so she had merely sat next to him, flipping through cable channels with the remote control. She admired his bravery for a moment (fall asleep next to someone you know is a vampire?) then decided he must have been incredibly tired. It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon, and she was exhausted, drained emotionally and physically, and she decided to be brave as well, and sleep next to someone who knew she was a vampire.
When she woke, Ron was in the next room, asleep on his bed, and she didn't have a pointed stick sticking out of her chest, so she decided to let him sleep.
Past the back-door bars, she crossed the bridge, and descended the bank to the "R" street cemetery. This was a nice place for her to hang out and reflect. She passed within ten feet of a couple of young men engaged in homosexual rituals. They thought they were well hidden. She had heard them from the bridge, had seen them almost as soon as she had left the bridge. She watched them for a while, then silently crept away.
She found a secluded spot near a mausoleum, and laid back. She had no superstitious dread of the dead; she certainly wasn't afraid of other night people. She had often thought that this would be the place to meet others like herself. She never had, though she wasn't quite giving up hope.
Lace had spent many dull nights between her killing times trying to relieve the boredom of it all by following people on their social rounds. When she had been mooning over Ron from afar, she had sometimes found herself following lovers to their assignations, had sat outside windows through which drifted the sounds of passion's fulfillment. It hadn't helped her a bit, had in fact reminded her of what she was missing in her life almost unbearably, but it did pass the time.
She decided that Ron had accepted her. She had set her sights on him, had tried to get over it, had tried to get his mind off of her, to get her mind off of him, to get on with her strange life... yet she had become ever more inextricably involved in what had to be one of the world's most unlikely possible affairs.
Ron didn't hate her for what she was, and she couldn't figure it out, but she now had comfort, a confidant (to a degree, anyway), and possibly even a very good friend. Could she increase the level of that friendship? Could she take it to the next level of intimacy? She remembered her studies of the days before, (and flashed back to some of the more lame classics of bad science-fiction she'd read as a youngster) and asked herself if this was yet another doomed interspecies romance. She honestly couldn't know if she was contemplating what might or might not amount to bestiality, or if this might become just another biracial affair. She knew Ron was getting really attached to her, especially considering the short time they'd had recently to get to know each other, but he had wanted her fiercely back in class, and he had hunted the streets for her at great personal risk. She was pretty certain that if she made a move on him, she could probably get the action she needed so desperately. In the absence of a male of her own kind, she would have to "go native", she supposed, and she had just the "native" that she wanted in her sights.
Like any woman contemplating the man she wants, she asked herself if she could make him want her.
Why not? she thought. I'm not that bad a person, I do some horrible things that I have to do, but between times I'm a nice girl... Can he really like me? Maybe he can like that nice girl... I think I could be especially nice...
She rose, and stalked off through the woods back towards the bridge. As she passed the two guys, she saw one of them counting money out for the other one. She zipped over to them, still quite silently. She seemed to them to materialize out of thin air.
"Good evening," she said. "Didn't your mother ever tell you about being in cemeteries after dark?" She snatched the bills from the man's hand, giving him a nasty paper cut. She grinned engagingly (and frighteningly), and yelled, "Boo!" She stepped into the night, her rapidity and dark clothing making her seem to dematerialize, leaving only her laughter behind.
Victoria's Secret wasn't far away, and shopping was fun.
He wrenched himself out of dream, and sat up with a start. There was a shadow-woman sitting on his bed. "Oh, Lace! Jeeze. I was having a nightmare... oh never mind! How are you?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Ron, do you trust me? Do you think I'll ever hurt you?"
"I hope not. Do you think I'll hurt you?"
"I hope not. Ron, you acted as if you could love me, before I confronted you with my... condition. Can you still feel something like that for me?" She cheated. She "peeked". She could feel him composing himself from his nightmare, which must have been pretty bad, but he was happy and surprised to see her. He was also feeling pretty horny, it seemed.
"If there wasn't something between us, I wouldn't let you stay here. I wouldn't trust you. You wouldn't trust me. I would be a potential liability to you, and you'd know that I'd know that. I surely care. As for love, I don't really know what love is. I think I'm getting over my infatuation with you. Maybe. You have certainly given me reasons to be, ummm... (he grinned) cautious about my feelings."
"I have to be awfully cautious about my feelings, also. Ron, you know I feel gratitude, and well, I feel strangely protective of you, but there's more... Am I attractive?"
He looked at her. He really, for the first time since she'd first appeared in this apartment, really looked at her. She was, of course, very hard to see in the dim streetlight filtering in through the venetian blinds, but easy to look at. He studied her silhouette. She had incredible musculature. Her shoulders, if a bit pointy, were quite shapely. Her back was, for a woman, quite broad, but tapered gracefully to a tiny, high waist. Her slim hips were well padded in all of the right places. He laid a hand on one of them, and felt the awesome power of her as her flanks quivered (about five times as fast as one could reasonably expect).
"Don't you know that you are?"
She turned on the light. She was wearing a black satin teddy. It covered most of her, but not very well. He had personally never seen a real garter belt with mesh stockings before. Her legs, as always, were incredible. He watched the muscles shift as she hooked one of her knees over his thigh. She moved a little closer to him, and laid a hand on his leg. She stroked her hand up his leg... He looked up, and met her eyes, and was caught by her gaze. "You're beautiful," he breathed.
She caressed his head with her other hand, took a deep breath, and said, "If it's OK with you, Ron, I want you... If it's not against your religion or something..."
"I'm not feeling particularly religious right now," he said. He fell into her eyes as he kissed her, and thought ceased, and only sensation remained as her hands caressed him, as her lips nibbled his shoulders, as she raised herself over him, as she presented her love to him.
It quickly became very obvious to Ron that incredible fighting reflexes weren't all she came equipped with.
"Mmm... Hi." Lace was lying in bed with her sunglasses on.
"Where did you learn all of that?"
"I didn't hurt you, did I? Sometimes I worry when I touch you... Did I move too fast, did I cut you with a nail? Did you like it as much as I did?"
"Let me check myself for broken bones... No, I'm not hurt! Not a bit!"
"That was great. I mean it. Can we do it again?"
"Sure, later. But how did you do it? Like in the movies? I was just thinking about if I would, and zap! Do you know how much power you have in your eyes? Just like "The Count"! Shazam!"
"I didn't do anything! I just wanted you so bad, and you just came to me..." She looked a bit horrified, and continued, "I hope you're not mad at me."
"For what?"
"Raping you, I guess..."
"I loved it. That'll get you off in court."
"Can we do it again?"
"I will gladly volunteer."
She was some lover. She could melt him with her kisses, could burn him as with fire, could roll like the ocean at stormtide. Her skin was soft as the skin of a ripe peach, but beneath, her muscles were like steel. Sometimes, as she cried out in love, he would feel as if he could be crushed at any second, but she always managed to restrain herself. She never hurt him. Quite the opposite. He had never before found such satisfaction with a woman.
Ron made up his mind. He had postponed any decisions regarding Lasce, rather allowing himself to fall in love mostly by default. She was a joy to be with, a truly compatible personality, so far as he could tell. When he was in one of his quiet moods, she could tell, and allowed him lots of personal space, and when he needed the close comfort of another warm body, she was there for him. Their moods seemed synchronized, and the woman he loved was probably the closest thing to a true soulmate that he would ever find. Am I in love? he asked himself, and he also pondered other matters. Yes, I am indeed in love with this woman... but is this right or wrong, considering the kind of woman she is? He wanted to be in love, and he wanted to be in love with Lace, but there were obvious moral questions to be resolved. What exactly am I in love with? he wondered, and he realized that he could not have been given a better match through anything less than divine intervention. She looks like a woman, acts like a woman, and I am in love with her. His decision had been reached... to Ron Smith, a woman was what she was.
There were many different kinds of white people, he reasoned. Evolution had dealt each individual a different hand in the genetic poker game, and different strains of trait-sharing people would either adapt into new niches, would adapt the new niches to themselves, or would be culled by harsh nature, or the competition. That's was what had happened to the Neandertals, they'd simply been less successful than the Cro-Magnons and Moderns had been, and the Neandertal were technically human... and Lace sure seemed a whole lot more Modern than a Neandertal would have seemed. He decided he could stop wondering (through his medicated haze) if he was engaging in bestiality.
What if a group of people grew isolated from the mainstream genetic pool (as did the ancestors of all of the modern races, each in their own way specializing with improved survival traits) and lived in such privation, or constant recurring wars, that cannibalism often provided the only available sustenance? He'd heard that dietary intolerances were genetically established within each of the races, lactose intolerance for some blacks, wheat intolerance in some Orientals, alcohol intolerance in Native Americans, and all sorts of things within the Caucasian racial groups. Why shouldn't the reverse of intolerance, dependencies, also occur? Though this was a pretty scary dependency... there had to be some way of determining exactly what factor the dependency required, and supplying it artificially. He'd have to look into that... as soon as he could muster up the necessary motivation from within his artificial tranquillity. Thus he reasoned (forgetting that some things just aren't really amenable to reason): He could finally forget the supernatural overtones of the affair.
He then grew much too complacent about the whole situation.
Ron had never been one for looking a gift horse in the mouth any more than was Lace.
After dinner one night, a dinner marked by much fidgeting on Lace's part, he got up to do the dishes. He was just finishing up, turning off the water, when he felt her behind him.
He hadn't heard a sound, nor even felt a stirring in the air. He was just suddenly aware of a presence behind him.
He turned, and she was standing there in black, her pupils slightly dilated. Her hands twitched for a second and she shivered, and then she spoke.
"Ron. I'm going out."
He started to say something, but she put her arms around him, and kissed him to cut him off.
"I need to go out. I can't stay here much longer. If I stay..." she trailed off.
You'll kill me, Ron thought.
"I should have been out on the street hours ago, starting a stalk... We both should have seen this coming. You look too good to me, babe."
She hugged him tighter, and he felt bones moving in his back. She released her hug, then took him by his shoulders and stared at his neck as her pupils dilated again, and her lips began to curl away from her teeth. Then she snapped out of it, and dropped him. She looked furious, as if locked in some intense emotional battle within herself, and grunted as she pulled away from him, raising her fist to her mouth. She bit her fist, and seemed to regain some control. She looked up at him, and in her lasergreen eyes, he seemed to see himself silently screaming.
"Bye!" she spat at him, as she gave him an evil smile. She turned and walked her best walk over to the door. "I'll be back," she whispered.
Her hand on the knob clenched suddenly, and he heard her nails screech quietly across the finish, and a quiet creaking of stressed metal, and she said, "Be glad I love you."
She composed her features and made a kissy-face at him that turned into a snarl as she turned from him and left.
He turned to her then to comfort her. She looked at him, her eyes bloodshot, and when he tried to hold her, she effortlessly pushed him back onto the bed. Her sobs deepened.
"Can we talk, babe?" he asked.
"I'm sorry! You can't know how sorry I am! He - he was -oh! Remember how you once told me that if I wanted to do some good, if I must kill, eat the evil? I've always selected the wicked as prey, but I don't think this guy deserved to die! He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, and he's dead!"
"Who?"
"Someone just like you - some poor yuppie. I should have gone out last night and found someone nasty... just hung out in the worst parts and looked for an asshole. I could have gone right there tonight, and just made my move when the time was right. But no! I was too proud. I thought I had self control.
"I almost ate you tonight."
Ron felt weird. The dope was still giving him this feeling of unreality, of detachment, and he found himself asking, "What was it like for you? What did you feel when you were looking at me so... hungrily?"
"Damn you Ron, how can you sit there and ask me that? You must be on drugs! OK, like there was something you were keeping from me, something I needed desperately. A flash of anger, and then something very old and vicious was within me. It knew what to do with you! Just a moment of inattention, and I found myself starting to kill my lover, my only friend.
"It took all of my will to leave you. I almost didn't. Twice. I hit the streets going crosstown, to look for some thug, and here was this nice yuppie coming out of his house. I could feel that there was nobody there but him, and I jumped inside and dragged him in with me. I threw him against the wall and slammed the door, locked it.
"I turned, and he was coming at me! He almost got me with a kick at my knee, and as I leapt past him to avoid that, he threw a spear-hand strike at my throat. He almost connected. I broke his arm, and then slashed his eyes. He didn't get a chance to scream; I tore his lungs out."
Ron was speechless, paralyzed. As Lace recounted her hunt, a fire flickered deep in her eyes, and her face tightened into a fierce smile. Then she was sobbing again.
"You know, I hate myself after almost any kill, and this was the worst. I shouldn't be able to feel guilt or remorse, it makes me crazy, because I don't have any choice! Crazy enough that I can't stand myself... I've tried to kill myself a few times. I couldn't. It just wouldn't work! I've slashed my wrists, and I've healed within hours. I've tried overdosing on almost everything, but soon I puke, and pass out, and I wake, and I feel OK again.
"I've tried sitting in a running car in the garage of one of my victims, but I couldn't make myself stay! I don't know how to kill myself. I have tried almost everything... Explosives, maybe? Oh. Here. I got this off the guy I... y'know... I broke one of my fingers on it. I'm almost healed already. Whenever I hurt myself, I heal very quickly," she added. "I guess that's why I can't suicide."
Lace reached under her oversized black sweatshirt and pulled out a pistol.
"Shit!" said Ron. "Lemme see that..."
He checked it. 9mm Baretta, brand new US Armed Forces issue, clip full, round chambered, half cocked. He popped the clip, jacked the round out of the chamber, and looked for the serial numbers. There weren't any. It looked as if there had never been any.
"Don't be so sure you have to feel so bad about killing an innocent, Lace. Are you sure nobody saw you leave?"
"Sure. I went out the back way. I didn't see anyone."
"Talk about coincidence! This guy was a spook."
"Spook? I thought I was a spook!"
"No, you're a, you know, v-word? This guy was a spy, secret squirrel, G-Man, closet creeper. A window-watcher. CIA, DIA, NSA, who fucking knows! This is deep shit."
The return from the locator squawk was triangulated by the ubiquitous microwave repeaters and reported to the office. Scatelli was at home, and not breathing. Else, he had a masker on him. Scatelli hadn't been issued a masker, had no need for one, so it could be presumed that he might be undergoing interrogation. The house was gassed by remote trigger, and a response team dispatched.
Inside was a mess, as was Scatelli. Scatelli had been ripped open. Scatelli was not a pretty sight. His chest cavity had been opened, evidently by a chainsaw. His lungs were sitting on the floor, crumpled in a heap next to the wall beneath a bloody splash mark. His vena cava had been severed at the heart. He hadn't cooled much, and some of the blood was still semi-liquid.
Winslow picked up the kitchen phone, and dialed the local burner exchange. The line rang, answered, and he dialed "9". He held the phone away from his ear, and dialed "9" again. A loud popping sound came from the handset. It made his ears hurt. Any surveillance equipment would be hurting a lot worse.
He dialed a Shop number.
"E-Mail," said the synthvox.
"Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well," said Winslow.
"Forwarding. Please hold for your number." The phone rang. Exactly once.
"What the Fuck?" A human voice this time.
"What the Fuck."
"Chicken-fried shit on toast. You don't fer gossakes mean?" asked the heavy Gulf Texas accent.
"I mean."
The morgue crew was there in less than ten minutes.
This was serious. Real serious. This tended to indicate that one of the Shop's own personnel had been involved. Anyone who could have done Scatelli must have been one of the Instructor's pupils. "Get me the Instructor!" The Texan screamed into the phone. The operator on the end questioned his priority.
"I'll prioritize your ass to isolation pay in Nome, ya pissant-eatin' horned-toad! Now gimme that line!"
"I cannot comply unless you give me sign!"
He held his breath, counted to .0125. Then he gave his code.
"Ohmigawd, chief, I thought..." the line filled with computer-bleeps, and the chief made a note to give someone a raise.
"Hi!" said a young-sounding voice. "Whozzat?"
"Howdy, teach? This is your grandpa."
"Well, sir, to what do I owe this pleasure?" came the mellow tones of The Instructor.
"Ain't no damn pleasure, Fred, least not from where I sit."
"Indeed. What is the difficulty?"
One of your students has been slaughtered, he thought. "The Cat just got run over. And not in traffic."
"I shall visit you immediately."
"I'd 'precciate the hell out of it."
A gook dived into the foxhole, getting a bayonet in the foot as he landed. That made him drop his rifle. The Texan slit him open from crotch to chin with the Bowie, and pulled the bayonet from the twitching man's foot. He tried to avoid the sloshing mess now in the foxhole bottom.
It was a while before another came in, spraying rapid semi-auto fire into his erstwhile compatriot's stiffening corpse. The Texan shot him, and pulled him down into the hole. He'd heard that the best way to draw a grenade was to have too many of the enemies' bodies piled up near your hole. They considered that a sign that you were too good. You'd get concentrated fire that way.
The main rush seemed to be over. He stuck his home-made periscope up over the edge of the hole and looked around. Nothing. He poked his head up and saw nothing unusual, that is, he saw dead and dying men on the ground. He heard no feet running towards him. Badger lay half out of his foxhole, blown to shit. There was a big pile of gook bodies around his foxhole, so it had gone like the legend said with Badger. Now how about the kid?
He needn't have worried about the kid. As he approached the hole he heard a wet noise, like a sucking wound, and nerved himself for the expected sight of the kid with a good piece of his chest blown away. He looked over the edge of the hole.
The kid was on top of a gook, who was on top of a small stack (four more, he reckoned) of dead men, with his face buried in the man's neck. A trickle of blood ran down his cheek, and his hands were locked on (Shit! In) the man's shoulders. There were bullet holes in the back of the kid's clothing, and a lot of blood, but the kid didn't seem to be badly hurt. He gulped and slurped, and in his shock, the Texan did something he hadn't done in months. He stepped on a branch. It snapped, and the kid whirled.
Blood crusted his face, and he snarled like a devil-dog. The Texan heard shouts, from behind him, and the kid leapt at him. He didn't have a chance to use his rifle.
The kid slammed into him, then suddenly they were in the hole. He shrank back from the kid, who suddenly pinned him, whispering, "They're coming!"
The kid backed off, popped a grenade out of the hole and handed the Texan his rifle. He grabbed his own as the grenade burst, popped up and started shooting. The Texan popped up and cut loose too.
"Yer a fuckin' vampire!" he remarked as he dropped a gook. The gook dropped the grenade he was carrying and they ducked.
"Don't call me no names, Sarge..." The grenade went off, and there were screams. The gook had fragged a couple of his own boys. Halleileuia.
"Well, what the fuck are you, then, kid?" A gook jumped over the foxhole. The kid spun and fired, faster than the Texan could see, spun and fired again.
"I'm just me. I do what I've got to do. Like this." A grenade arced into the hole just as the Texan was popping off a few rounds, and the kid dived for it like a hawk stoops for a dove. He bounced up like a yo-yo, and fastballed it into a gook just standing up to rush. The grenade knocked the man silly, bouncing neatly straight up above his head, then detonated. The kid's ears twitched visibly.
"That's it," said the kid. "Look, don't get grossed out, but, I've been starving for years, and there's a lot of free, legal food here... Please don't stop me.." He turned and leaped out of the hole. Suddenly there was a scream and a sound like butchery. Shortly, it stopped.
The Texan decided that he didn't want to see just what was happening up there. Then he looked around him, in the kid's foxhole, and saw what the kid had done to the gooks.
The one he'd been feeding on had had his heart neatly punched out of his chest, and little remained of his throat... and there was not much blood. The others seemed to have been merely beaten to death.
Maybe he would take a look.
The kid had made one of the all-time stupid moves of war. He had gotten interested in something, had set down his weapon, and was letting the enemy sneak up on him from behind.
The gook got cocky, or wanted to save ammunition. He was sneaking up on the kid with a knife in each hand. From the way he was creeping, it looked like he was one of those Tae Kwon Do fighters.
The kid whirled on him. The gook threw a feint, and whirled into one of those reverse kicks which had fooled so many of the UN troops, looking as it did just like a man turning to flee. The kid jumped right into it, getting his nose smashed. The Korean reversed with a crescent kick, then came in onto the falling kid with a knife thrust. The kid twisted in his fall - the slash passed his throat, and then the kid moved fast.
One hand grabbed the wrist holding the knife, and pulled. Then it appeared that the kid had a fit. He whirled on his back on the ground, his windmilling legs knocking the Korean's feet out from under him. The Korean hit the ground hard, accompanied by the snap of his arm breaking. Then the kid was all over him.
The Texan was clearing his weapon of the jam that had prevented him from dropping the enemy in the first place, working as if in the dark so that he wouldn't miss any of the action. He had just cleared the action when the kid jumped up, snatching up the gook's cutlery and glared at his sergeant. He did a little hop-step, and incredibly, twirled the knives overhand about his hands, in some strange martial-arts juggling moves, and with a snap of the wrists, converted the whirling force into linear motion, and let fly. The Texan was too stunned to move. The blades flew past him, and crunched home into two gooks who had almost snuck up on him while he was distracted.
He whistled. The kid could rumble. It also looked like he and the kid were about all that remained of their unit. He clicked a round into the chamber of his weapon.
"Looks like just us," he remarked.
"Yeah. I think we got most of them, though," rejoined the kid, pointedly ignoring the rifle which wasn't quite levelled at him.
"Yep. Say, kid, where the hell did you learn to fight like that? You look awful young to..." he trailed off.
"I've been around. For a long time." The flow of blood from the kid's nose had stopped, and the kid hooked his fingers into the nostrils, and pulled. The kid's nose was straight now, and the black eyes which accompany a broken nose began to fade as the Texan watched.
"Uh, yeah."
"I've been a twenty year-old kid for sixty-five years. You learn things after a while."
"Ah bet."
"People like to pick on twenty year-old kids. I get no respect..."
"You damn sure got mine! You saved mah damn life a time or two today."
"Least I could do, Sarge. You been fair to me all this time I've been with you. And to me, fairness means a lot." The Texan let the business end of his rifle droop. The kid made no suspicious moves, and the Texan almost relaxed.
"If you say so. Say, do you think you could teach me to fight like that?"
"I don't know. Usually, if someone throws a punch at me, I just make a decision, fight or no fight. If I decide no fight, I just stand there and get my ass kicked. If I decide fight, it's over before I can think about it. I don't want to put myself in the position of maybe hurting someone without a damned compelling reason."
"How about if I move slow?"
"We'll talk about it later."
The Instructor was buzzed in from the reception area.
"Howdy, gramps!" he said cheerfully, minding his cover.
"Come on in, and shut the door behind you, kiddo..."
"So what seems to be the problem? Scatelli's dead, eh?"
"Dead as a doornail. Your kind of dead."
"Renegade, do you suppose?" he asked.
The Texan went over the M.E's report. The kid looked it up and down. He called through channels, and the fingernail was sent up.
It arrived in a sealed envelope. He opened the package and checked it out. It was thick, only slightly flexible, smooth, with no striations, and it sliced easily through his skin. He looked at the Texan.
"Not a renegade," he said. "Wild Child."
She was comfortable, and well-fed, and she had someone to care for for the first time in her adult life. She was growing to actually love this man, with his funny ways and laid-back attitude... and she had come close to killing him, drawn by her Hunger and need. Only her love for Ron had enabled her to leave him at all... why must her Hunger always cause her this confusion and torment?
There had to be some way of handling the need. She had killed too many times. One killing was too many. Why did she kill? Because she was starving. How to prevent killing? Prevent starvation. How to prevent starvation? Fresh blood, hot from the body. How to get fresh blood? Easy... stalk and kill. The killing had to stop. It was simple enough, in theory. She wasn't too sure about practice.
How about not killing? Just fine. She had never been able to stand fighting when she was a child, had cried for each squashed bunny she had passed on the highway. Yet she had killed once a month for the last three years.
Her need became apparent to her with a wild hopeless rage, slowly building over a period of time. She had managed to hold out against that rage for six days, once. She didn't want to go through that again. No, she could not starve herself. As long as there were people available, she would have to feed. If there weren't people available, she would have to find some.
She decided she needed finesse. Do it like The Count. Right. Since she had become as she was, she had done her best to avoid anything remotely clich‚ as regarded her hunting techniques. It was probably obvious to the authorities that there was a serial killer in the area, despite her best efforts to disguise her kills as drug-related murders and suicides. Someone was almost certain to notice the common thread of exsanguinations occurring almost exclusively at the new moon. It seemed foolish to toy with the idea of leaving victims to verbally corroborate the mute testimony of her leavings with tales of vampire seductions.
Wasn't that a plot element of all of the genre? The vampire foolishly getting the idea that it could settle down and pretend to be a member of society? (A prime example of living in a box!) The vampire even more foolishly falling in love with a mortal who must of course realize what threat came courting? To put an evolutionarily deserved end to a foolish bloodsucker? (Why do you think they call a sucker a sucker anyway?) Uh-uh! But Lace couldn't stand the thought of more killing, hadn't been able to stand the thought of it since she had first slain a man for the drink of life.
Fuck it. She bounced up off of the bed, disturbing Ron, who muttered in his sleep. She kissed him on the cheek, then went to the bathroom. She brushed her hair, donned her nightwear, and went in to check on Ron.
Ron thrashed in his sleep, and spoke, quietly and rapidly in the grip of a dream.
"Not my neck... No! I..." he trailed off into somnolent incoherence. Ron had been having dreams about vampires more and more often. Lace was worried about this. Ron might be her only friend, and her lover, but it seemed as if his equanimity about their situation was slipping. She would have to wake him during one of those dreams to ask him about it, but not right now.
This particular dream, judging from Ron's vocalizations, was about the classical vampire, one who nightly visited some poor person, feeding again and again until the poor soul wasted away, themselves to join the ranks of the undying. Lace knew from experience that whenever she got that first taste of blood in her mouth, all reason fled, and she always found herself gnawing, gulping, lost in animality... but then again, she always went to the hunt driven by her need, by perhaps a week or more of fighting the Hunger. However, she had recently fed, and her hunger was not now forcing her into her predatory mode. Perhaps now was the time to feed, to feed lightly, and thus forestall her next killing. It might be cliche, but for tonight she would be The Countess.
A kind of excitement rushed through her as she began to make plans. Usually she went to the hunt driven, with a sense of foreboding, dreading what she must do, hating herself as the horrible rage that was her building thirst began to color all of her thoughts the red of violence. Tonight it was different. She felt like dancing a little jig, instead of one of the Kali-dances which so rapidly fed her.
She left by the front door, and caught the last train uptown. She got off at Cleveland Park, and crept through some back yards. It was perfect sleeping weather, and the windows to many houses were open. She clambered up a few walls, looking for people sleeping alone.
At last she found a window opening onto a room with a single occupant. She waited for ten minutes, and heard no sounds of stirring other than from the sleeper within. She pried the screen from the window and then let herself in.
She crept across the room on her fingers and toetips, and crouched at the foot of the bed. A strange glee filled her. Not savage hunger, nor her cold cunning that replaced the hunger immediately before all of her previous kills. A small twinge of her hunger pervaded that glee, though in very small measure. She fixed her eyes on the sleeping man's forehead, and willed him to keep sleeping.
Wrong move. He started awake, to see her tapetae reflecting sodium-arc light from outside. He opened his mouth to shout, but Lace's Power took hold, and she said, "Be still!"
He was frozen, between her power and his fear. She got up, and sat noiselessly on the edge of the bed, and took his arm in her hand.
"Hi." she said. "I guess it's too much to ask, but don't be afraid? I don't want to hurt you, I just want to take a little blood for nourishment..." She looked at his wrist. He had nice vascularity, the veins stood out nicely, glowing with their heat. She pulled his arm to her mouth and said, "This won't hurt that much, I hope."
The man's eyes widened, and she could feel him attempting to break free of her control. She said, "Boo!", to distract him, and dipped her razor-sharp thumbnail into one of the medium-sized veins on his wrist. A small flow of blood began, and she began to lick it off of his arm. The man's eyes were about to pop out of his head.
Her sensation of slight Hunger was fading fast. About one cup of blood was all she had needed.
"Thanks!" she chirped cheerfully. "You just saved two lives! My own, and someone else's. Listen," she said as she tore a strip of cloth from his sheet and made a hurried field dressing, "I really must advise you to take it easy for the rest of the day, and to drink lots of orange juice... Oh, and be sure to scream as I leave. Wake all of your neighbors up, and don't forget to tell them you were just vampirized." She released the man's arm, and got up to leave.
"Oh," she said, as the man regained control of himself, "By the way, I don't have any diseases, but put some disinfectant on that cut..."
No screams followed her out of the window. She scrambled out of the neighborhood, admiring the judgment of her donor. Of course he wouldn't yell about it at all. Vampires were silly.
They were watching a Karate championship match on ESPN. Lace paid rapt attention. At certain junctures, she would laugh almost hysterically.
"Tell me, darling, Ron said, "How do you do it?"
"Are you sure you want to know? You'll be infuriated. It's all so simple. I'll go slow."
She went slow for Ron. Ron was pissed. It was, as she explained it, a case of there being a single correct move for each defense, which varied on the move before it, and the intended move to follow. She was right. Ron tried everything he could think of, and she simply stepped out of the way, and casually put her arms through the "holes".
"Watch the feet. That's one of the first definitions of form. Look," she held her arm out at an Egyptian angle, upper arm straight from the shoulder forward, fingers pointing to the crown of her head, and rotated her shoulder through the horizontal plane.
She pointed with her other arm. "It makes a circle, like a doughnut. See the hole? If you put your hand through the hole, and deflect at the joints, any move can be countered."
Ron tried boxing, Tae-Kwon Do, everything he could think of. He always ended off-balance, with Lace holding one of his wrists, a hand at his throat.
"Damn! I thought you were going to go slow!" he swore.
"I am going slow," she retorted. I'm just being tricky. You know about your blind spots, here, and here?" She put her hands into them. It seemed as if her hands had disappeared. If he looked at one, the other was simply invisible. She wiggled her fingers on one hand, and when he looked at it, she wiggled the fingers on the other hand. His eyes shifted back and forth, and had nothing to fix on. He felt he would go nuts at any moment.
"Don't do that!" he shouted.
"Sorry," she said, and giggled. "You're so defenseless. Here's something else... Look." She had come around to his right side, and said, "Come over here." As he turned to his right, she pivoted on her left foot, and brought her right leg up in an arabesque to the back of his head. As he bent over away from the kick, she hopped her left foot up towards his face. He tried to straighten up, and her left hand palm-smacked him.
"Shit!" he said, heartfeltly. The first kick had come up in a spot he couldn't see, it being in the back of his head.
"And now for the real mean shit..." She walked close to him, and then turned away. As she turned, her hips rotated through a humanly impossible angle, and a savage back-kick snapped just below his jaw. Had the kick connected, his head might have been entirely removed from his neck. "Now, this," she said, stepped in, and turning away, brought her heel up towards his crotch. Again, he felt a feather touch that could have been deadly or at least incapacitating come from a blind spot. "And if you are looking at the expected foot," she said, I bring my hand around like this", and as he looked at the foot, she brought her hand around like that, in a hammer blow from over his head. She said, "If I feel really mean, or so damned hungry I can't control myself, it could be like this..." She whirled, and struck low and high with edgehands, lifted his chin with an elbow, and struck for the throat with outside, inside and hook, and did it before his eyes could close in reflexive eyeblink.
"Where did you learn all that?" Ron was not only infuriated, but perplexed. He had never seen the like, except for the last, which was almost pure Tae Kwon Do technique combined with Lace's inherent speed. She turned and headed for the kitchen. He started to follow her, and she let him take a step, and then she turned a quarter turn to the left, and suddenly bent into the position of a swimmer's racing dive. Ron almost impaled his own neck on one of her back-flung hands. She straightened up, pivoting three-quarters around to her right on her right leg, and her left- leg crescent kick followed a strange, deceptive looping trajectory towards his throat. He stood there like a complete fool, and she stepped forward, and kissed him. She tweaked his nose lightly, and then she was smiling a glittery-eyed smile, all of those teeth showing, as she stepped away. Ron recognized that smile. It was the smile one kid gives another kid who's just been hoodwinked. He started after her again, and as he was in mid- stride, her rearmost leg came up in that impossible Arabesque again, and swept before his throat. "Dammit, Lace!" he started to say, when they were in the kitchen, and she turned around and walked past him. He turned his head in time to notice to closest foot sweeping at his ankle as her closest arm extended directly towards the back of his head. Her opposite arm came flashing back at him, from directly beneath his nose, and she tweaked him again. Her smile wouldn't go away, and the colors of her eyes seemed to have all run together into a strange mirrorshade hue. Dummy, those eyes seemed to say, with some justification...
"I never really learned any of it I just sort of thought about it. It seemed to come naturally. I guess it should. I mean, look at my hands. (She held them out) See how the nails are angled perfectly for skin penetration? How the bones lock into all of the claws?" Her hands writhed into several different configurations. "I'm mainly made to kill. Why shouldn't I have instincts for that? It sort of came to me in dreams... Look, there's a maxim in biology that species are adapted by feeding modes, and just look at me. I could punch out a gorilla. I can see just fine in the dark. It would take a serious fall to break my bones. There is nothing wrong with my hearing, except for all the noise people make. I'm made to sneak up on primates in the dark, and dine on them. Evolutionarily, very successful until societal continuity developed. However, I'm now a dinosaur. The first great ape to become extinct in the twentieth century."
Ron was still smarting from the entirely painless ass-whupping he'd just gone through. Few things are worse for a man's pride than being showed that he can't win. He actually felt exasperation, and said, "You just thought about it. And don't get to sniveling, OK? If rumor can be believed, you've got an amazing life expectancy. Your strength is incredible and the skill you just demonstrated is something I would have never thought possible. Anybody else would just about kill to have what you've got. A lot of people would kill."
"It wouldn't get them anywhere. It would just make them murderers. And cannibals. I don't have a choice... unless it's a choice of hard or soft option. Ron, I did something last night. I hope it'll continue to work for me. I went out for a snack, and that's what I had, a snack, not a meal. I didn't kill anybody. Some yuppie made a contribution to the cause, and I didn't get caught, and he's still alive. I don't need to kill!"
"What does it mean to you, to not have to kill?"
"Oh, Ron! You must be on drugs! You really must... It means everything to me. You know, I wasn't raised to be a murderess! It's always been horrible for me to go out and eat someone; I do it only because the alternative is more horrible. The worst was when I realized that I was a monster, a freak, that I could never expect to have a friend, that I could never be a friend..."
She was watching TV with Skasha, one of her best new friends. It was a re-run of an old made-for-TV movie called The Night Stalker. Lace knew that it was all so much bullshit, but she was fascinated anyway.
On the Portavid she watches the plot unfold. Skasha comments on what a bad mother the vampire is, and on his dickliness for picking on transients and hookers. Lace has never picked on hookers or junkies, because of the AIDS risk.
"Jesus, lookit him run! Damn!" Skasha yells. Lace's senses enhance momentarily, the video image becoming a series of dots lit up and fading behind the raster. Her hands lock into claws, and she feels the strange feeling of her fascia tightening, readying her for combat. Not Skasha! Skasha has accepted her, brought her into the group, befriended her. Skasha has helped her keep the boys off of her back (not that she couldn't have defended herself had push come to shove). Skasha does not deserve to die. Lace rises to her feet, shaking. Her need, slowly building for the last two weeks, is beginning to control her behavior, but not yet completely. She turns silently, and creeps out of the house.
Out among the abandoned flats, she runs furiously, trying desperately, despairingly, to scent human flesh. She has killed a dozen times now. She knows just what she is, just what she needs, just how to get it. Like Diana, the moon-huntress she is, and her quarry is eluding her. Except, she knows where food is, and the intensity of her hunger is such a motivator, and her memories of satiation of that hunger such an anticipation. So stupid, so wrong, but her instincts turn her to the house where Skasha waits alone.
As silently as she had left, she enters, climbing the stairs on her fingers and toes. At the top of the stairs she is salivating. Her hands are talons behind her back, and she wants to bare her teeth, to claw, to tear. To bite. But Skasha is her friend! Her friend is watching a vampire on TV, never dreaming that she has befriended one, is alone with one hungering, is scheduled to be a meal. Lace forces herself to sit behind Skasha, to watch TV with her.
"Ee-ooh! Gross! He's using them as blood-banks!" cries Skasha.
Lace forces herself to a more normal perceptual speed. She sees a woman strapped to a table with a transfusion line hooked into her arm. Stereotype bite marks on the young woman's neck. Ooh, sick!
On the screen, she sees a guy with teeth kind of like hers on the ground getting the Hollywood stake-and-cross treatment. The movie draws to a close, with Kolchak getting run out of town by politicians, and of someone laughing as the tape of his story runs out. The credits roll. Skasha turns to her, laughing off the chill of the movie.
"Lace! You've been awful quiet! So what do you think? It's supposed to be a classic..."
Lace's control has just about run out. "I think it was pretty good. Did it scare you?"
"Kinda, but everybody knows there's no such thing. I mean, like, get real! People living in coffins, burning up in daylight, afraid of crosses, c'mon!"
"What would you do if you thought someone was a vampire? How would you go about proving it? What could you do?"
"I don't know... You really think that there really are such things?"
"Skasha... Skasha. There are. I've seen one."
"Aw, go on! Have you been eating speed or something?"
"No, really. She was just like anybody else, OK? but she had big, frightening teeth, and fingernails that could cut through wood, and she could kill you before you could blink, and she was awful hungry..." Lace stood up as slowly as she could manage.
"How did you get away? Where did you see her?" asked Skasha, turning off the TV, then rising up herself.
"I didn't get away," said Lace, unable to cry as her need swelled in her, making her rage against this wonderful, inoffensive person, who had been like a sister, like a mother to her in this strange land, where poverty and dispossession were the rule, where all faces were those of strangers, where the streets had no name. A haze filled her mind, and Skasha was no longer a friend, just an animal whose blood would put this rage, sickness and delirious hunger behind her for another month.
"I saw her in the mirror," she said, and tears came.
"In the mirror..." Skasha saw her friend crying, knew that Lace had a problem, but that she could comfort her. She moved toward her friend, and blinked at a sudden motion, then realized that there indeed are such things as predatory people, realized it as she heard the sound of her vertebrae snapping as she saw Lace's locked fingers holding her trachea in front of her face as she fell to the sound of weeping.