Suck It Up and Die (34 page)

He stared at her, stone-faced and surprised by how little her words stung. “Are you done?”

She felt the vibration of her phone in her pocket. It was the signal she was waiting for. “No,” she answered as she shot a look toward Manhattan and spotted someone approaching on a bike. “I wanna apologize for coming out here and trying to stop you.” She gestured to his outfit. “I just wish you’d get out of that dress before you jump, ’cause if you’re still wearin’ it when they fish you out of the river, it’ll be an insult to every Hasidic woman in the world.”

Morning yanked off his wig. “Happy?”

She turned without answering and strode toward the approaching bike. It was Cody. As she passed him she whispered, “Stall ’im as long as you can.” Then she slipped out her phone and dialed 911.

Cody rode up and jumped off the bike as Morning climbed the anti-jumper fence. Cody climbed after him.

“Do you mind?” Morning snapped.

“It’s climb or look up your dress.”

Morning wasn’t amused. “Since when did suicide go buddy system?”

Undeterred, Cody climbed alongside Morning. “I know you don’t like me, but I wish you’d hear me out. I’ve got two reasons why you shouldn’t jump. One, if you do, and you die, I’m gonna steal your girl.”

“She’s not my girl anymore.”

“Okay, scratch that. Here’s my second reason. There’s a movie you gotta see.”

Morning shot him an incredulous look. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, really,” Cody implored. “The movie’s just like the situation you and Portia are in. It’s all about unrequited love. In fact, it’s the greatest unrequited love story of all time, and if you’d watch it, you’ll understand that you and Portia are just like Rick and Ilsa in
Casablanca
, and you’ll see that jumping isn’t the only way out of this. I’ve got the DVD and a DVD player in my jacket. We could climb down—”

Morning clambered up and stood on top of the fence.

Cody followed. “Or we could watch it up here, right now, together.”

Morning looked over as Cody stood beside him. “I’m outta here.” He sprang away.

“No!” Cody shouted.

Morning cleared the roadway and disappeared below the bridgework.

A shout snapped Cody’s head to the right. A heavily armed SWAT team ran up the walkway from Manhattan. His gaze turned to where Morning had disappeared. “Sorry, buddy, I’d jump in after you, but I’m no Jimmy Stewart, you’re no angel, and
It’s a Wonderful Life
this ain’t.”

Portia didn’t come out of her room for hours. She was inconsolable; she couldn’t silence the “if onlys” plaguing her soul. Even though she was convinced Morning was not the Morning who had fed on Zoë, she knew, too well, that it was her public outburst urging him to “vampire up and grow a set” that had inspired DeThanatos to frame Morning, which had then dominoed into his jumping off the bridge. She was equally devastated that her last words to him were the opposite of what eternal beloveds were supposed to say in final farewells. And the memory of those harsh last words provoked the loudest “if only” wailing inside her:
If only I could see him again!

The tiny ray of hope penetrating her black grief was the possibility that she and Cody had stalled Morning long enough for his resurgent immortality to make suicide a fool’s errand. This hope was reinforced by the fact that, for the short time Portia had stayed on the bridge and watched
police helicopters and boats search for him, Morning was nowhere to be found. The search didn’t last long because the police, assuming Morning was still one hundred percent vampire, figured he had shape-shifted into some kind of fish and made his escape.

Meanwhile, Becky-Dell stood before a vast crowd in front of the Capitol steps. “Morning McCobb has spoken for his race! He has shown their true colors! Red! Red! Red! No faked suicide will stop us from hunting down Morning and bringing him to justice. Nothing will stop us until we make sure Morning and all bloodsucking fiends are dead! Dead! Dead!” Her voice rose over the forest of wooden stakes stabbing the air. “I am here to tell you our great battle against the vampire conspiracy is far from over! There is still one more fang to yank from the unholy beast! And that glistening and dangerous fang is the outrageous notion that mortals and vampires can live together in peace!”

After midnight, Becky-Dell floated on such a cloud of triumph she made herself a double vodka to guarantee sleep. With drink in hand, she sashayed up to her bedroom.

When she entered her boudoir, DeThanatos was sitting in one of the armchairs. He was dressed in a cherry-red satin dress with a plunging neckline. It was the kind of dress he usually preferred his victims in.

She stopped short. “What are you doing in my dress?”

DeThanatos shot her an innocent smile. “You told me to stop wearing your hazmat suit.” He raised a languid
hand toward her closet. “This was the only thing in my color.”

With a scowl, she banished the thought that he looked better in it than she did. “You look so comfortable, it’s probably not your first time in a dress.”

“Oh, I don’t think of it as a dress, I think of it as one of your skins.” He stroked his satin-covered chest. “And I like what I feel under your skin.”

She harrumphed. “Is that supposed to warm the cockles of my heart, or send a chill up my spine?”

He took her in with gimlet eyes. “There’s only one way to find out.”

“Didn’t you guzzle a girl last night, or was skinny little Zoë Zotz just an aperitif?”

“Tastes great, less filling.”

She threw him a chuckle and concluded they had exchanged enough mortal-vampire banter to confirm there was nothing amorous about their alliance. She sat in the chair opposite him and sipped her drink. “So, what was it like being in Morning McCobb’s skin?”

“Very creepy,” he said with a shudder. “For a second, I thought I was going to have fang failure.”

“Do vampires have a cure for that?”

“We’re not so different from mortals. Sometimes we think of someone else.”

She laughed. “That’s rich! Who were you thinking of?”

He answered with his gimlet gaze again.

She shook her head at his shameless flirtation. “It just proves you can’t take the man out of a vampire. Men only want what they can’t have.”

“Vampires don’t do ‘can’t have.’ ”

She gave him a dismissive wave. “All right, get your
brain out of your fangs and tell me about our next move. It’s been a long day.”

“It’s so elaborate”—his eyes shifted to her bedside table—“I put it in writing.”

She spotted the folder on the table and looked back at him. “Then what are you still doing here?”

He smiled seductively. “Enjoying your company.”

“Enjoy it less.”

He exhaled the sigh of a spurned lover and started for the door.

“When do I get my dress back?” she demanded.

DeThanatos stopped with his back to her, undid the front of the dress, and let it fall down his slim body. He stepped from the pool of satin and glided out the door.

Becky-Dell stared at the empty doorway, then gave her head a shake. She pressed her cold drink against her chest and scolded her beating heart. “Don’t even think about it.”

Moonlight tinged the harbor. Tiny waves lapped at a narrow strip of Staten Island sand. A bouillabaisse of human relics littered the shore: tire, broken paddle, tennis shoe, buoys, rope, netting, a garnish of plastic bottles.

The water stirred offshore. A fin broke the surface. It raced shoreward as the top of a large fish emerged. In a clumsy amphibious landing, a five-foot catfish beached itself. With a couple of thrashes, the fish wiggled into Morning McCobb. His hopes for drowning had been dashed several hours earlier at the bottom of the East River.

While Morning had known his vampire survival instinct might overrule his wish to die by CDing into an aquatic creature after his jump, he had hoped his body would have retained enough reemerging mortality that his CD would be incomplete, he would lack gills for breathing, and he would drown anyway. But his transition back to vampire had been so swift his catfish CD had been one
hundred percent successful. When his firefighter dream had been dashed on the rocks of fate, its cargo of
pneumabrotus
had been lost along with it.

That was when he tried plan B. For hours he swam in the murky lower depths of the river, trying to shut down the little bit of human consciousness still nattering away in his brain. If he had eliminated his shadow-consciousness and gone into “CD blackout,” he would have gone brain-dead as Morning McCobb, not had the mental skills to CD back to human form, and eventually suffered whatever fate his catfish body met. But when you’re swimming in an underwater junkyard with everything from glowing eels to shipwrecks, human curiosity keeps the brain firing, along with the normal plague of thoughts such as:
Could Portia be right? I’ve not only turned into a catfish but a quitter?

After failing to achieve death by drowning or CD blackout, Morning went to plan C, which had delivered him to the junk-filled sliver of sand on Staten Island.

He wrapped his body in a makeshift coat of fishnet, buoys, and rope. While he looked like the Ancient Mariner, he wasn’t worried about being stopped by a local and told, “Hey, sailor, you look better without the albatross.” In the middle of the night, the streets of a neighborhood he had only seen once before were dark, silent, and empty.

After a multiblock voyage, he found the house he was looking for. It was still abandoned, not surprising given its history. Almost two years before, a couple sharing their Thanksgiving with an orphan from St. Giles had been turned into a liquid Thanksgiving for a Loner vampire named Ikor DeThanatos. While the vampire had drained the couple, when it came to feeding on the orphan, DeThanatos mistakenly turned Morning McCobb in a fateful moment of backwash.

Morning slipped into the darkened house, found the living room, and fell exhausted onto a dusty couch. As he lay there trying to quiet his mind, he remembered what Birnam had told him about how, as a re-mortal, Birnam had felt compelled to return to his place of turning, Tripoli, to die there. Morning wondered why he felt compelled to return to the place of his turning, even though the opposite had befallen him: he had returned to being all vampire.
Maybe it’s an ominous sign
, he thought,
and even though I’m back to being all vampire, some instinct knows I’m going to be slain anyway by outraged Leaguers or vengeful Lifers
. Of course, there was one more possible cause for his demise. He had returned to his place of turning because he was going to be the first vampire to ever be slain by the invisible stake of a broken heart.

Morning woke as splinters of sunrise stabbed through the curtains. It took a moment to recollect where he was and to realize that the previous day had not been a nightmare. To confirm this beyond a shadow of a doubt, he had to do something.

He went to the kitchen and found a knife in a drawer. Going into the bathroom, he instinctively reached for the switch and flicked it. The bathroom blazed with light. He got halfway to the mirror before he spun back and slammed the light off.
Why was there electricity in a house that had been abandoned for so long?

Besides being terrified that the neighbors might have seen the light go on, he wondered if the house
wasn’t
abandoned. He crept upstairs. The bedrooms were empty. The hallway was lit by a skylight. Glancing up through it, he solved the mystery of why there was electricity. Part of
a solar panel was visible above the skylight. Con Edison will cut you off for not paying your electric bill, but the sun doesn’t read your meter or send a bill.

Morning went into the upstairs bathroom, lit by the rising sun. He raised the knife, pressed it against his cheek, and sliced. It hurt for a second. The bleeding immediately stopped as the cut knitted itself together and healed quickly. He was one hundred percent vampire.

He went back to the master bedroom. A boxy old TV sat on the dresser at the foot of the bed. After making sure the bedroom curtains were shut, he turned on the TV. It flickered to life, powered by the solar panels. It didn’t have cable, but it broadcast snowy versions of the basic channels. Finding a news report, Morning watched in amazement at how badly things had gone south since, as the anchorman put it, “the IVL poster boy had jumped ugly on an innocent Lifer and crushed her sweet arc of mortality into the flatline of immortality.”