Vampire Eden (3 page)

His athletic
body stood between me and the alleyway exit. He took my chin in his hands, so soft and gentle I didn’t even flinch. Bringing me closer to him, he whispered in my ear. “All I want to do is talk first. Just talk.” I backed away from him, and he advanced. I heard something move in the blackness by the dumpster. I groped through my purse and lunged toward him. He stopped and looked down at the sharp end of a knife, held firmly against the soft spot between his ribs.

My hand gripped under the handle like
Kevin had instructed, so long ago when he cared. “We get a room,” I growled. “Or the deal’s off and you lose. I don’t return tips. Get it?”

Patrick put his hands up.
“Look,” he said softly. “I’ll show you what’s in my pockets.” He pulled both pockets inside out. “Nothing except the chips I gave you. Everything else I have is in my locker, and I don’t carry weapons. I’m not a violent man. I just want to talk. Just to tell you a story. Afterwards, I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again.” Holding the knife’s blade in his direction, I looked over my shoulder at the dumpster. A rat scurried from underneath it through a hole in the chain-link fence.

“How long is the story going to take?”

“Just a couple of minutes. You can keep the money.” He sank to the cold concrete, looking up at me plaintively. “You remind me so much of someone I loved the moment I saw her. I would do anything for this woman.” He gestured to the space next to him.

I crouched down and placed my knife on the opposite side of me, keeping my grip on it.
The sidewalk in the alley felt cool and even comfortable underneath my velvet pants, so I allowed myself to sit down.

“I used to deal craps outside of Poughkeepsie at one of the Indian casinos there. Before I married my wife, she had a baby with another man and I took care of him for a while. I was the only guy he knew as
Dad. I wasn’t a good father or husband, never was good at anything really. Except dealing. I could deal drunk, high, or stoned.”

A taxicab honked and screeched
on the street, its driver shouting obscenities in a thick accent. From the wide slat between the buildings, I saw a teenage kid running to the other side of the street. He held his middle finger up at the irate cabbie.

“Careful, kid!” Patrick shouted.
The kid looked in our direction, put his hands in his pockets, and shuddered as he walked briskly away.

Patrick’s concern for the boy relaxed me a little.
“Kinda like dancing for me," I said. "Or being a hooker,” I mused. He smiled at me wryly. I smiled back and my hand relaxed over the hilt of the knife and eased closer to my thigh.

“Suppose these are jobs that just happen to people,” I went on.
“Well, I’m good at sex, I guess. Or I was.” I heard a slight click by the dumpster at the end of the alley and gripped my knife once again, hiding it behind my leg.

“
This sounds pretty lame but I always wanted to be a craps dealer. My dad had a gambling set and I loved playing with the chips. Before he died, he'd show me pictures of me rolling dice when I was about three." I laughed as we locked eyes. He gazed at me for a minute, making my chest flush with heat.

"So tell me more about your ex-wife," I prompted as my lips twitched into a tight smile.

"She and I fought all the time and she just wasn’t the woman I married anymore,” Patrick continued. He took my hand and caressed my fingers, running the tips of his delicately over my knuckles up to my nails and back down to the palm of my hand. I closed my eyes at the feel of his delicate touch.

“If there’s one truth I’ve learned about women, they’re always changing: diets, moods. Moon cycles.”
He laughed to himself, taking a turn being amused at his own private joke.

“One night a lady came up to the craps table.
She had long hair falling into her face in waves, like yours, and when she looked at me her hazel eyes were flecked with gold. She had what looked like dancing flames in her eyes that took my breath away. Around her neck she wore a gigantic emerald, surrounded with diamonds and hanging from an engraved platinum chain. ‘Family heirloom,’ she told me. She had a stack of reds and greens, maybe about five hundred dollars total, and she put her money on the
Don’t
line. In craps, most people play the
Come
line and bet that the roller will hit their point. One guy grumbled and said playing the
Don'ts
is against the American way. The lady stood quietly at the corner of the table, watching seven after seven after seven roll and winning, tossing a black chip my way every so often." He set my hand upon my lap, patting me gently.

“Then this yahoo came and cleaned her out.
He rolled points like mad. I advised her to switch over to the point and catch the wave, but she refused. ‘It’s against my beliefs,’ she said. ‘I only root for the dark side. The only good reason to switch would be to spend more time with you, Paddy.’

“
‘You’ve got it bad for this one,’ a fellow dealer laughed. The lady with the emerald lost all her chips and left the table. My shift was just about over, so I called out to the pit boss that I was leaving. Before he could protest about the ten minutes I had left, I ran to her side. She tried to brush me off, but I insisted on getting her a drink. At the sound of the offer, she sat down at the bar with me. I ordered a Seven and Seven and she waved the bartender away, waiting for me to finish my drink as I asked her questions.

“She was kind of a drifter
, too, going from place to place. ‘Not leaving any tracks,’ she joked. Her beautiful hand, with its long, pointed nails, felt so soft on my arm when she leaned over to touch me. My heart started beating like an angel’s wings. She asked me to follow her and so I did, down an alley much like this one. She could’ve asked me to jump off a building. I’d do anything for her. I never felt that way ever again, until I saw you. I've been watching you for weeks now. Seeing you at the Mardi Gras. Watching you leave with a different man. Never noticing me. Never seeing me. At first, I thought you were with your husband. Some sweaty business guy in a suit. Then it was a guy in flannel, then guys in T-shirts and club clothes. Any hour. Almost everyday. A different man. Every. Single. Time.”

He paused.
I gripped my knife as his expression turned dark and morose. Fear gripped me by the throat and made my voice strain. “I need to go now.” I stood up. “It was a pleasure talking with you.”

He rose to his feet.
“Before you leave, let me finish my story. And then just one kiss. Just one. To say good-bye.”

“Make it quick,” I snapped.
I pressed the knife blade into his rib cage once again.

“We walked right to an area like this one
and she leaned toward me. I was so eager, so excited to feel her soft, beautiful lips on mine. I closed my eyes. All went black. I felt the most delicious feeling throughout my entire body, a feeling that comes close to the rush of cocaine and heroin but was far more intoxicating. It was paradise. And then I was in an emergency room and nurses were cutting off my clothes. ‘Another OD,’ I heard them say as they hooked me up to tubes and placed a respirator over my nose. Then I left my body and went up into the lights. That’s all I can remember.”

“What did she do to you?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice breaking. He grabbed my upper arms and growled softly. "You should leave. I've never done this before, and I'm sorry I brought you here."

"There's nothing to it," I said in a soothing voice.
"I can't return your money."

"Run away now," he said quietly.
"Please. You'll come find me again at the Mardi Gras Saloon, won't you?"

"What?"

"Forget it." The wind in the alley picked up, blowing my hair all around. "Just go now. Go!"

"Fine."
I shoved my knife back into my purse and clutched it to the side of my body, turning to walk away. I turned back toward him and impulsively brought his face toward mine. I placed a kiss on his lips. As I pulled away, I gazed into his eyes. Something electric shot through me as I ran my hand down the side of his face, and tears sprang to my eyes. "The least I could do," I whispered.

He placed his hand on my cheek and I held it there for a minute, letting my skin absorb the warmth of his palm.
The sound of whispers seemed to call out from the sky above us. I looked up and turned around in circles, hearing voices without faces to go with them.

He leaned forward and pressed his lips
to mine, embracing me as I gasped and returned his kiss. I waited for his mouth to open and his arms to pull me to him roughly, but his touch was light and gentle.

“You’re a really nice guy, Patrick,” I said as he pulled away.
“You deserve the best.”

“For all eternity,” he whispered, and his body dissolved into mist.
"Eden? Eden, something is happening..." I heard his voice say. I reached my hand out, feeling nothing but cool fog. At first, the mist that took his place remained in the form of Patrick’s face. I could see his brow line and the outline of the bridge of his nose and lips in tiny particles of dissipating water. He disappeared as if he never existed. I stared at the thin air in disbelief. The cacophony of whispers grew louder as the sound of my heartbeat filled my chest. Before I thought they were simply an auditory hallucination in a city rife with illusions. Now I knew they were real.

I pulled my coat around me tighter, breaking into a jog toward the lit street.
A creaking sound came from behind the dumpster and I broke into a run, my heels pounding on the pavement. The exit from the alleyway was steps ahead when blackness swooped down and landed in front of me. Her shape shifted in a millisecond and there she was, the woman with the amber eyes and the sparkling emerald. Her eyes were wide and open, feline, as they surveyed me with the look of a cat ready to play with a mouse before devouring it. With cheekbones high and perfect and lips as full and enticing as a rosebud, my breath caught in my throat as I surveyed her beauty. Her mouth slowly opened, with each fang stranded together by a string of saliva.

My body began to shake uncontrollably as I fell to my knees. I clasped my hands together in a position of supplication.
“Wha....what is this? What's going on?" A snarl emanated from the woman's open mouth, giving me all the answer I needed. "Don’t kill me,” I pleaded. “I’ll do anything you want.”

Her hands, long-fingered and witchy yet beautiful in their ugliness, reached out to grasp mine. The sharp points of her nails grazed my skin as she tightened her grip.

In rapid succession, four
more creatures flew from the shadows, the breadth of their wings lifting my hair from my shoulders. They landed delicately by the side of the woman with the sparkling emerald with a soft swish like the sound of autumn leaves settling on the sidewalk. Her amber eyes alit on mine as she surveyed me. Her mouth opened with anticipation, and her canine teeth grew longer as I watched. I shook my head and backed away into a pile of stacked, empty cartons. I tripped in my five-inch-high stiletto heels and fell into a heap with cardboard crashing around me.

The women laughed prettily.
Their hair was so long and thick it looked made of spun silk, and their eyes had that same luminescent quality as their leader, although they were in different shades of purple, blue, teal, and gray.

"Come here, my little meal," a
raven-haired woman with purple eyes taunted. "Come to Lucretia. Dirty little child-woman. What made you think you could place your wrinkled lips on our flesh bait? I shall punish you for that. Punish you gravely for the human oddity that you are. You bad, bad girl. I do believe you will like the pain. Perhaps if you beg, I shall change my mind and hasten your death."

"Painted fool!" screeched the flaxen-haired vampire.

"You bad, bad girl," said the redhead. "Now you will pay. Oh, how you will pay! We will tear you into pieces." They shrieked with laughter as they slowly advanced toward me, moving as one.

Anger rose up within my breast as my life flashed before my eyes. A lifetime of beating, of scorn, of my mother yelling at me as she walloped me with broomsticks and drew blood with her fingernails, of my father drunk and pushing me into the wall with the flats of his hands slamming into my budding fifteen-year-old breasts. A lifetime of begging for the pain to stop.

No more begging.
I picked myself up. Pulling the knife swiftly from my purse, I crouched into a battle stance. "All right. I fought my way through life and I'll fight you until you rip me apart. Give me the best you've got."

Their leader
, the woman with the hazel eyes and emerald necklace, held up her hand and the laughter stopped instantly. "Simpleton. You should fear us. Do you know what we are?" she asked.

"Sure.
I've seen the movies. You're a bunch of vampires. Vampires in Las Vegas. Why not? That's pretty funny, isn't it? Because everyone in Vegas wants to be a vampire. In one way or 'nother."

"You're not afraid to die."

"I've got nothing to live for but pain. Come a little closer and I'll give you a taste of some." I prayed silently that my voice would continue to stay steady and not betray the fear choking up inside.