Suck It Up and Die (16 page)

Down on the avenue, the crowd chanted “M-O-P! Mortals only! M-O-P! Mortals only!” Portia and Cody moved around the edge of the crowd. Cody was shooting the angry faces, barking mouths, and jabbing stakes.

Varkos saw the twosome coming and slipped into the shadows of a doorway. Even in the darkness, his gray eyes and white teeth caught a glint of light when he smiled at the scene. As he drank in the hatred of the crowd, a master plan began slithering through his devious mind.

The next day, as sunset spilled orange on the Hudson, Zoë was giving a honeymooning couple from Chicago a Fanpire Tour. She had just shown them the old-fashioned barber pole in front of the 3Aces Barbershop on Ninth Avenue and was explaining its deeper meaning. “A long time ago, barbers did more than give haircuts. They applied bandages and did bloodletting, too. That’s what the red and white spiral on a barber pole is advertising. And the pole itself represents the stick customers would grip to bulge their veins out so the barber could find them with his lance.”

The couple giggled and entertained themselves with jokes about gripping sticks and bulging veins. Zoë closed her ears and pedaled to the next Fanpire attraction in Hell’s Kitchen.

She stopped in front of an old granite church with a new congregation. The ex–Catholic church had been converted to a nightclub called Goth ’Em. If you were a goth or a vampire wannabe, it was the hot spot in town.

While Goth ’em was a thriving business, Zoë had heard rumors that the aboveground club was just the tip of the fang. Supposedly, hidden somewhere on the same block was one of the secret dives for consensual bloodlust. It was where wayward Leaguers hooked up with Lifers who wanted to be nibbled on and feel the ecstasy of exsanguination. But not just anyone got in. It was strictly word-of-mouth; you had to know someone and get a special invitation.

Zoë encouraged the couple to go inside Goth ’em and check out the scene where Lifers and Leaguers mingled but kept their sipping to cocktails and legal blood drinks. She advised them to hit the bar and have the house specialty, Sang Tang, a mix of alcohols reddened with grenadine. The couple asked Zoë to go in with them, but, despite a few attempts, Zoë had never gotten past the front door. Even with a fake ID she would have a hard time convincing anyone she was twenty-one. She informed the newlyweds that waiting for them was part of the tour, as long as they returned in twenty minutes.

As the couple disappeared into Goth ’em, Zoë looked longingly through the big window. Her eyes fell on the back of a figure seated at the end of the bar. The person’s curly dark hair reminded her of Portia’s but shorter. The figure turned, revealing his profile. It gave Zoë a start. There was something in the man’s profile that was creepy-strange: a resemblance to Portia.

Zoë flipped open her phone and hit speed dial.

In the Village, Morning and Portia exited the only gelato shop that made flavors for Leaguers. L’Arte del Gelato offered Hemo Gobblin’ and Plasmania. Morning held a
cone of the former. As they walked, Portia handed him her Banana Cream Pie gelato and dug in her purse. Her phone was sounding off with Zoë’s ringtone, a bicycle bell. Portia answered her cell. “Yo, sista, wazzup?”

Zoë explained where she was and dropped her bombshell. “I swear, this guy could be your brother.”

Portia’s insides fired three different ways: she wanted to scream, call the police, or run off and go stake shopping. “That’s wild,” she said, trying to squash her fears. “Can you get a picture of him and send it to me?”

“Yeah,” Zoë answered. “It’ll take some doing, but I’m on it.”

Zoë fingered call history on her phone and dialed the newlyweds inside the bar. The husband answered. “Instead of a tip,” Zoë said, “could you do me a favor?”

Morning and Portia headed into Washington Square with their gelatos. Portia was so distracted she hadn’t touched her cone since Zoë’s call. She still teetered between panic and reporter mode. “If it’s the same vampire and he’s still here, maybe he … Should we call the cops?”

Morning led her to a bench and they sat. “His name is Varkos.”

“How do you know that?”

He told her about meeting Varkos on the bridge, and how the vampire had promised not to make any more attempts on her life.

Portia chucked her Banana Cream Pie gelato in the bushes. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I’ve been meaning to.”

“Lame excuse,” she snapped. “If it was
your
life on the line, would you like being on a need-to-know basis?” She didn’t wait for an answer as she keyed her phone, looking for the picture that hadn’t been sent yet.

Morning stared at the ground, his skin prickling from the sting of her words.

Varkos sat at the end of the crowded bar in Goth ’em and took in the scene with subdued pleasure. This was how the world of outed vampires was supposed to be. There was a profusion of black and red, even a few red-lined capes on the wannabes who revered Dracula as the sultan of sanguivores. The men ranged from a seven-foot Nosferatu with a cadaverous figure to a gnomish man wearing a stovepipe hat announcing
SHORT ORDER SUCK
. The women covered the spectrum from a curvy amazon in a red wedding gown to a pixie with a tattoo on her neck announcing
I BREAK FOR VAMPIRES
. And there were the Edwards and Jacobs from
Twilight
. The Edwards sported yellow contacts, anemic skin, and anorexic builds. The Jacobs showed off sculpted chests and twelve-pack Taylor Lautner abs. True, it was a potpourri of clichés from creature-of-the-night pop culture, but it was far more exotic and alluring than the whitewash Leaguers were trying to foist on the world.

What pleased Varkos the most were the snippets of conversation his ears had sampled. Furtive exchanges between Lifers and Leaguers revealed this to be an unusual pickup scene. Several pairs had made arrangements to meet later in the “tasting room.” This thrilled Varkos for two reasons. One, backsliding Leaguers craving a sip of their
cultural heritage was excellent news. And two, the notion of
consensual
bloodlust, as alien as it was to Varkos, had the potential to be shaped into a devastating weapon.

As he considered how to wield such a weapon against Leaguers, his eyes fell on two of the few people at the bar not dressed in goth or vampire attire. The young couple was happily drinking what the bartender called a Sang Tang. As the young man held up a cell phone to take a picture of his date, Varkos felt the heat of another body and turned. An attractive young woman pushed into his thermo-envelope as she slid onto the barstool next to his. Like Varkos and the young couple down the bar, her attire wasn’t vampire-chic. She wore a fashionable business suit.

She greeted Varkos with a friendly smile. “Can I buy you a drink?”

He took in her pretty face, framed by auburn hair. “I thought no one would ever ask.”

She laughed at his gender-bending joke. “Does that mean you’re a gigolo, or some time ago you figured out you were so gorgeous all you had to do was wait around till some lonely gal came along and bought you a drink?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s simply that”—he slipped into his best Bela Lugosi impression—“I don’t
buy
drinks.”

She laughed again. “Vampire bar, vampire joke. You’re good.” She got the bartender’s attention, ordered a Sang Tang, and asked Varkos what he wanted.

“Make it a deuce,” he instructed the bartender.

She leaned back and took him in. “I know why I’m not wearing a costume. What about you?”

“I’m working on my inner vampire.”

“Have you found it?”

“It’s still emerging. Your turn,” he said. “What brings the corporate look to Gothville?”

“I’m at the Javits Center for a trade show. I’m not into inner or outer vampires.” She looked around like an eager tourist. “I’m just here rubbernecking.”

“I wouldn’t bend that pretty neck too far, it might attract the real thing.”

She flipped a hand. “Pfff! All those rumors about consensual bloodlust, I think it’s a bunch of hooey.”

He held her gaze and deadpanned, “I couldn’t agree more. ‘Consensual’ has nothing to do with it.”

She snorted a laugh and punched his shoulder. “You are funny!”

The bartender delivered two Sang Tangs. She mouthed her straw and took a good pull. He watched the muscles in her neck contract. “Tell me about your trade show.”

“It’s the convention for the online dating industry.”

“Online dating? What’s that?”

She stared at him, unsure if it was another one of his dry jokes or if he was serious. “You really don’t have to work at meeting girls, do you?”

Morning and Portia sat on the bench, staring at the picture on the phone that had e-skipped from the newlyweds’ phone to Zoë’s to Portia’s.

Morning frowned. “It’s weird.”

“What?”

“It’s Varkos, but it’s not Varkos.”

She slid him a puzzled look. “What does that mean?”

“Maybe it’s the quality of the shot or the lighting, but he looks different from when I saw him yesterday.”

“I was thinking the same. In the second I saw him the other day, his hair was curlier.”

“Yeah, it’s just wavy now.”

She stared at the picture. “And I swear, the last thing I saw before he thralled me were his eyes. They weren’t gray, they were as dark as mine.”

Morning looked up. Portia did the same. Seeing her dark brown eyes hit him with a heart-stopping thought. “What if he’s not the brother of DeThanatos?”

She sucked in a gasp.

He finished his thought. “What if it
is
DeThanatos?”

“But we staked him,” she blurted. “We saw him burst into flames and incinerate into a pile of ash!”

“Yeah, but remember the cut you got on your shoulder during the dust storm, before we left the forest? What if when he took his final form—a seedpod—he rode the wind, stuck you, and collected a drop of blood?”

“That’s ridiculous!” she protested. “You can’t regenerate from a drop—” A flash of a memory cut her off. She had once revived Morning with a few drops of her own blood. She suddenly felt like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a bit of wreckage and losing her grip.

Morning pressed on, knowing they had to walk to the end of this dark corridor. “If a few drops of your blood can reconstitute me from a pile of ash, maybe DeThanatos could have done it from a seedpod.”

“But you never
looked
like me,” she protested, clinging to a last hope that might prove Morning wrong. “This Varkos guy ended up looking like me.”

Morning nodded. “I know, but I acted like you for a while, until my DNA reasserted itself.” He pointed at the phone. “Maybe that’s why he’s looking less like you and more like DeThanatos: his DNA is reasserting itself. ‘Varkos’ was a temporary hybrid of you and DeThanatos.”

She stared at him in confusion and fear. The bit of wreckage she had clung to was gone. She was being pulled under. “You’re saying DeThanatos is indestructible.”

“I don’t know what I’m saying because they don’t teach this at Leaguer Academy. The only one who can explain it is Birnam.” He pulled out his cell.

Portia closed his hand over it. “I don’t want any more explanations. I wanna go home.”

He put his other hand on hers. “DeThanatos isn’t going to kill you. That’s not his idea of revenge.”

She exhaled a bitter laugh. “Yeah, wouldn’t be
permanent
enough.”

Morning knew what she was implying, but he couldn’t go there. Not yet. The moment they voiced what DeThanatos had in store for them would be the beginning of the end.

Varkos listened with fascination as the young woman detailed the world of online dating. He was amused by the money, time, and effort Lifers devoted to connecting, dating, and seeking the holy grail of human relations: a soul mate. But there was something about using the Internet to bring people together to meet instinctual needs that heated Varkos’s brain with the fever of possibility.

As the young woman, whose name was Trudi, held forth on trolling the Internet for love, she sucked down three Sang Tangs, while Varkos hadn’t touched his drink. Her tipsiness helped her stagger to three conclusions. One, while the handsome man was captivated by her online dating summary, he was equally captivated by the summarizer. Two, the excuse he gave for not touching his drink—that he was allergic to grenadine—was totally viable, because Trudi had once gotten sick after a Christmas party that served red and green shooters made from grenadine and crème de menthe. Her third conclusion was so wild she was uncertain of it. In the hour they had been at the bar, his look had changed. His face had grown leaner, his skin tone was lighter, and his hair, which had started the evening wavy, was less so. Granted, Trudi had been on dates when
her carefully coiffed hair had fallen like a soufflé, but she had never had, or even heard of, tan loss or weight loss on a date.