Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (52 page)

In the morning, they went to look at some church or another, and in the afternoon, they went to some museum or another. They found a fountain. Donald said he’d read that if you tossed a coin into a fountain it meant you’d come back to Paris, but he wasn’t sure it was this fountain—and Chrissie laughed, and said he’d got it wrong, that was Rome—and Donald said, why would tossing a coin into a fountain in Paris mean you’d come back to Rome—and Chrissie said he was a silly darling man, and hugged him. And it was all very nearly normal. It was all very nearly loving. And they
both tossed coins into the fountain anyway, and Donald knew it meant they were leaving Paris after all, they were going home, it was decided.

They ate at little bistros, and Chrissie ate only vegetarian food, and Donald ate meat, but the meat seemed to him so dull and so flavorless.

T
hey spent three more nights in Paris.

T
he cab to the airport took a particularly circuitous route, but Chrissie didn’t seem to mind, she stared out of the window and pointed out all the parts of Paris they hadn’t done yet, Paris had more to offer after all. And Donald sat, and held her hand, and mused, and realized what he really wanted to say to her in that still-unfinished letter.

The airport was very busy. Everyone was trying to escape Paris. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the woman at check-in, “the flight is very full, I don’t think you and your daughter can sit together.” Donald got very forceful, and said that his daughter was a very bad flyer, and if she wasn’t able to sit with him, she’d scream the plane down. They got their double seats, and Donald was quite proud of himself.

As the plane took off, Donald listlessly leafed through the in-flight magazine, and Chrissie looked at some revision notes for her GCSE exams.

At around ten thousand feet, and somewhere over the English Channel, Donald proposed to her.

“What?” said Chrissie.

“You said I wasn’t a bad man. I’m not a bad man, am I?”

“You’re fine,” said Chrissie.

“Marry me,” said Donald. “I’ll make you very happy. I’ll give you whatever you like.”

“Can we live in Paris?”

“Yes.”

“Or somewhere else?”

“Whatever you like.”

Chrissie thought about it. “All right,” she said.

“We can’t get married
now
,” said Donald. “We’ll have to wait until you’re older. But it’s a commitment, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” said Chrissie. “For when we’re both older.”

“I love you,” said Donald, and Chrissie said she loved him too, and Donald felt relieved, she hadn’t said it in ages.

After the stewardess announced they were coming in to land, Donald once more interrupted Chrissie’s schoolwork.

“This is a big mistake,” he said. “We shouldn’t leave France.”

Chrissie laughed. “Silly! We’re on the plane!”

He said, “Then we can get straight onto another plane, can’t we, and fly back? We can get our suitcases, and then we’ll buy some tickets for the very next flight to Paris. We don’t even need our suitcases, I can buy you a new suitcase, brand-new. Please,” he said, and he squeezed her arm, “Please.” He squeezed hard until at last she put down her work and gave him her full attention. “If we go back to England, I’ll lose you.”

She looked at him with such innocent eyes. “But we have to go back to England,” she said. “I’ve a friend meeting us at the airport.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to disappoint my friend.”

Donald had thought there might be policemen waiting for him as soon as he put foot on British soil. There weren’t. Instead, a man holding up a placard for
M AND MME MACALLISTER.
Chrissie squealed when she saw it, and ran straight into the waiting man’s arms, and for a moment that wasn’t what made Donald jealous at all, what made him jealous was that the assumed names they had thought up
together, that had been
theirs
, had been stolen. He wondered how the man had found out what they were.

“Well, well!” said the man. “And did you have a good holiday?”

“I did!” said Chrissie. “Paris is as beautiful as ever. Oh, and this is Donald, he’s my friend.”

“Is he coming with us?”

“We can give him a lift, can’t we?”

The man nodded. “As far as he wants to go, as far as he wants to go!” The man was probably older than Donald but still looked better—he was tall and slim, he was confident, he had the sort of pencil mustache that only pure Englishmen of a certain background can get away with.

Donald said, “I’m not just her friend. I’m her fiancé.”

“Indeed?” said the man. “Indeed! Well, I’m sure some sort of congratulations must be in order. The car’s waiting, so come along, Monsieur MacAllister!”

They set off for the car, Chrissie and the man linking arms, Donald wheeling the little pink suitcase behind.

When they reached the car, Donald got into the backseat. He assumed Chrissie would join him there. She didn’t.

“
On y va!
Now, where oh where shall I take you both?” And the man laughed, as if he’d made the funniest joke in the world, and Chrissie laughed too. The engine roared, the car started, and Chrissie was full of stories of her adventures in Paris, how tall was the Eiffel Tower, how small was the
Mona Lisa
, how wet the Seine—and it was odd, but none of the stories ever seemed to include Donald, but Donald couldn’t be sure—to hear her he had to lean forward uncomfortably, and to join in the conversation he had to shout. But no one was listening to him, and his head was hurting, so he soon just sat back and was silent. If he stared ahead he could see how animated Chrissie was, and he didn’t want to see that—and he could also see how her friend had stretched out his hand and was brushing
the hair off her shoulders and was stroking the nape of her neck. He didn’t want to see that either, not any of that—and so instead he looked out of the windows at the English countryside, and he didn’t recognize any of it, not a bit of it, and he wondered where they were taking him.

“L
ady . . . ,” I whispered.

My sister stood there in the doorway of the Freebirds’ clubhouse, the fall wind blowing dead leaves in a dervish around her sandaled feet, ruffling the hem of her dandelion-bright sundress, and suddenly the laughing and roughhousing stopped. All the bikers and their sunburned old ladies just stared at the girl.

The silence probably only lasted twenty seconds, but in my mind it stretched out to an agonizing hour. I didn’t know whether to trust my own eyes. She didn’t look like the sister I remembered, but she’d only been twelve when I ran away from home. And that was eight years ago. A lot can happen to a girl in nearly a decade. Adolescence, for instance. And also the apocalypse.

The young woman in the doorway was tall, nearly as tall as me, but slender and elegant as any of the ballet dancers we used to admire as they walked home from the theater. Her dark hair looked impossibly clean and cascaded down past her shoulders. The bikers called me Beauty to mock my scars, but they’d call her that because they hadn’t the words for anything better. Any old French poet would spend sleepless nights trying to capture this strange
girl’s pulchritude in serifed letters. But she had the same cornflower eyes and she gave me that dreamy smile I remembered so well. I didn’t wonder how she’d tracked me down. She’d always been the one to locate the missing book behind the couch, our mother’s lost earring in the drain, forgotten song lyrics in a notebook in her bag.

“Hey, Louise.” The years had turned her voice seductive, husky. Pure aural sex. I could practically smell the men’s sudden desire, a musky pheromone note cutting through the stink of beer, motor oil, and tobacco. And I could feel their old ladies’ anxiety and jealousy build alongside it, like the charge in the air before a lightning strike.

“Found you,” she said, and made a languid motion as if she were tweaking my nose.

My brain teetered between joy and terror. Because if that wasn’t Lady? We were probably all fucked five ways to Sunday. I craned my neck to try to see past her, see if the prospects on guard duty were still up on the wall or if their guts were scattered across the concertina wire. I saw nothing but the glaring floodlights and darkness beyond.

The problem with vampires is that before they get inside your veins, they crawl inside your mind. You think that you’ve opened the door to your neighbor or your aunt Heather, but in reality you’ve just let in a pallid, toothy monstrosity that’s about to rip your jugular out and drain you like a juice box. If you’re lucky. If you’re not so lucky, the local hive needs more hunters and it’s just there to nip you, grab a quick drink, and flap away, leaving you to your slow, torturous metamorphosis.

I knew what that looked like better than most living people. My fiancé, Joe, got bitten in the first wave, right before anyone outside the CDC had any inkling there was a problem. He’d carried the trash out to the alley in the dark. Something hiding in the ivy covering the low cinder-block wall attacked him. He never got a good look at it, or even a sense of its size, so we figured it was a rat. We washed the
bite with peroxide and got him to the doctor the next day. Antibiotics and rabies shots cleared out what was left in our bank account, but we imagined he’d be fine after that.

He ran a low-grade fever—the doctor’s office said the rabies vaccine could cause that—and his mood went straight to hell. Joe was normally pretty
hakuna matata
about money, even when we were flat broke, but suddenly he wanted to count every miserable cent coming in or going out. It was almost enough to make me call home and beg forgiveness just so we’d have access to the trust fund I’d given up years before. Almost. I accidentally spilled some Tylenol down the drain one day and he made me wait while he counted and re-counted the rest in the bottle so he’d know exactly how many we had to replace. It didn’t matter to him that we still had plenty. He was losing his mind right in front of me and at the time I figured he was just cranky.

When his eyes turned yellow from jaundice, it seemed like a side effect of the antibiotics. He refused to go to urgent care, because that would be fifty bucks we couldn’t afford. It was only four more days until his next doctor’s appointment for another rabies shot anyhow. I was worried, but I let it ride.

That night, he woke me up around four a.m. when he started going berserk in the living room. Joe was yanking books and movies off the shelves and throwing them around. He’d smashed the big blue sunfish lamp he made in ceramics class and the floor was covered in jagged shards. The bottoms of his feet were in tatters, but somehow he wasn’t bleeding. He picked up my special-edition Blu-ray of
Sorcerer
and made a motion as if he was going to snap it in two.

I tried to grab it away from him. He slugged me in the mouth and I dropped like a sack of potatoes; I didn’t know how to take a punch back then. The sight—or maybe the smell—of the blood from the gash on my lip then sent him into a whole new orbit of madness.
He grabbed me by my hair, dragged me screaming to the radiator, gagged me with a dirty handkerchief, and lashed my hands to the pipe with the cord from the busted lamp.

Joe stared down at me for a long time, not saying anything, his expression shifting between rage and confusion. He paced back and forth, asking me who I was and if I’d seen the sign. I was on my back, my head and neck pressed against the radiator and my hands tied high to the top pipe. Stuck. There was no way to pull myself up to reach the rag in my mouth to try to yank it out to talk to him, so I just lay there, waiting. A dog started yapping a few houses down. So then I thought, well, we’d both made a whole lot of noise after he hit me. Surely someone had heard him and called the cops.

I felt a surge of hope when I heard a police siren, but it passed us by. And then I realized that what I’d thought was a dog was really a woman barking, “
Fuck you!
” over and over.

Joe abruptly stopped interrogating me and flopped down on the couch. He turned on the TV—the one thing in the room he hadn’t tried to wreck—and just started flipping through channels as if nothing had happened. The local station was showing a live feed of a female reporter standing near a police car in some other neighborhood. I started trying to work the stiff cords off my wrists, as quietly as I could.

“
We’re here at the site of a hostage situation on Grant Street,
” the reporter said. “
This is the tenth such situation that local police have been called out to in the past three hours. News Ten is sending teams to the other locations. We will update you as we get more information. It’s not clear if this is some terrible, violent coincidence or if it represents coordinated terrorist activity. Police are asking that people stay in their homes—
”

My boyfriend switched off the TV and stared at me. The madness was wearing a new face, and he seemed to recognize me again.

“They’ll kill you,” he whispered. His eyes had turned so yellow
they looked like they’d been carved from brimstone. “You’re not of the body. You’re not in His image.”

Joe went into the kitchen and came out with a sharp boning knife. “If they don’t see the sign, they’ll kill you.”

I started struggling in earnest then, desperate to get loose, but he dodged my kicking legs and sat on my chest, pinning me to the scarred hardwood floor. He grabbed my hair with one hand and slashed the left side of my face with the other. The pain of the blade razoring through my flesh was bright, intense. The second slash nearly made me vomit. The third made me pass out. I came to a little while later. Joe was licking the tarry pool of my blood off the dirty floor. When had his tongue gotten so long?

“I saved you.” He grinned, pleased, his teeth red with gore. “I’m your savior.”

I passed out again.

The next week or so is still pretty hazy; I can’t sort out what was a hallucination, reality, or nightmare. I heard voices and screaming. When I was finally fully conscious, my head was baking with fever and the slashes on my face were a throbbing agony. My left eye was swollen shut, and for a while I was scared he’d cut it out.