He did, but said reasonably, “Dianne, what good can we do without showing ourselves for what we are?”
“I could change here and no one would notice.” I opened the car door and stepped out despite Dad’s protests that I might get hurt. I thought about how much I would like to be a hero and save everyone. No reaction. I tried harder. Still no reaction. Then I thought about Tammy, how much I hated her, and how much I would like to hurt her and her boyfriend. I thought about what Demetrius might have done to me if Matt and Dad hadn’t come. . .
Suddenly I was on all fours, and I calmed myself before my mind changed as well. Now, let’s show them what a real vulpine is, I thought, half-wolf and half-human. I ran towards the dogs. There were more screams as I showed up, but the dogs converged on me rather than the kids. It was a tangle of biting, scratching, tearing, and snarling. I had the advantage of intelligence over them, and was able to use it to my benefit. I sent three running away, but I was getting tired and the remaining two were overwhelming me.
Then Dad came in like an avenging angel, forcing the dogs off me. He shouted at them to leave, and to my immense surprise they did, obediently, with their tails down.
Then Dad bent down to me, whispering, “Come back to me, Dianne. You did well. Think about hugging me. Think about your mother.”
I thought about it and. . . I was standing. I had a dozen cuts and bruises, but there was nothing a first-aid kit couldn’t fix. “How did you do that?” I asked.
“How did you?”
“I don’t know. . . but I did it! I can control it now!”
“Try changing just your eyes.”
I imagined Shawn hurting Mom, picturing it vividly in my mind. “Are they yellow now?”
“Yes, they are!” Dad gave me a hug. “You can control it! You really can! I’m unutterably proud.”
A warm glow was filling me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. “But how did you call off the dogs?”
“You have read Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, right?”
“Right.” We began to walk back to the car.
“Remember when he commands the wolves?” He unlocked the door.
“Oh! So you can tell vulpines what to do, and they’ll listen to you? That’s amazing.”
“You are amazing, my dear daughter.”
“It’s been a busy two days.” I got in the car, grinning from ear to ear. “I think this calls for ice cream, or a Plasma Pop in your case. Don’t you think?”
On the following Saturday morning, I couldn’t find Mom anywhere. I checked the living room, her room, the loft, my room, and the basement. . . I eventually had to creak open Dad’s coffin and ask him if he knew, which was no simple matter. Vampires sleep very well. It’s possible to hit a vampire with a dictionary, rub ice cubes on his face, and tickle his feet, and he still won’t wake up. I know because I’ve tried all these things. Nat said that Dad is mostly dead, but he sleeps like he’s completely dead. Every five minutes one might see him breathe, but that’s it.
The only thing that worked for me is to squirt a little blood onto him. He immediately sat up and rubbed his eyes sleepily. He sounded petulant. “Dianne Cassandra, don’t waste blood! It doesn’t flow in rivers, you know. And why did you have to wake me up? I was winning the Pulitzer.”
“No. Now leave me alone.” He’s cranky at midday. I whispered an apology and closed the lid, tiptoeing away.
I eventually found her in our tiny garden behind the house. Mom was there, wrapped in a blanket and rocking on our second-hand porch swing. She was staring at the scarlet roses Dad planted and seemed to be thinking deep thoughts. From the bits of clothes sticking out from underneath the blanket, I could see she had dressed comfortably in a blue wool sweater and jeans.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” I said, approaching her.
She turned her face up to me and observed my expression for a moment, as if trying to guess what I was going to say. “I’m sorry to worry you. Come sit.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, sitting down and pushing off slowly with my feet.
“Oh, I don’t know, twenty minutes maybe? Your father has done a lovely job with the plants. Why were you looking for me?”
It was now or never. I let out a deep sigh before beginning. “This week has been pretty wild. It’s great that I can control my changing now and that the school staff has been kind to you, and that the kids at school just ignore me instead of bugging me to find out what’s going on. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to die.”
Mom rubbed my back. “Dianne, we’re all going to die sometime. I’d rather have had a shorter, happier life with your father than a long, dull life with. . .”
“Shawn?” I suggested.
“You were listening when I talked to him, weren’t you?”
“Well. . .”
She smiled. “I was feeling lost at the time, and I must admit that I did think about what life might have been like if he hadn’t broken up with me. But you know what? He did. After talking to him I realized how sweet and upright your father is. Shawn was insinuating horrible things about him when Andy has never insulted Shawn all the eighteen years we’ve been married; never questioned my judgment in choosing him as a former boyfriend and never compared himself to him. Also, your father would never act in such a way towards a married woman, no matter what his past was with her. I lost all the respect I had for Shawn.”
“You had some respect for him?” I asked, making a face.
“He did apologize, and for him, apologizing is a very difficult thing to do. I respected that,” Mom replied with a shrug.
“You did cry on his shoulder, though,” I pointed out, “when you weren’t opening up to Dad at all.”
“Di, I hate to spoil your illusions, but your mother is, frankly, a crybaby. In the past month I have cried to the mailman, my hairdresser, your geography teacher, two secretaries, and the Calvin’s dog.”
Involuntarily I began to laugh, relieving all the anxiety and fear in the tight knot that my heart had become. Mom joined in, and we hooted and roared until almost every thread had unraveled and the tightness in my chest relieved. Then we looked at each other and started up again.
“Seriously,” Mom said, wiping a tear from her eye, “nobody but your father could have managed to stay as handsome as the day I married him.”
That was a very comforting statement, I found. However, a last tangle was irking me. “If you don’t want Dad to bite you, Dad never will, but why don’t you? If we could get money some other way, I mean. When you start getting really sick you won’t be able to work in any case, so it wouldn’t make such a big difference. It would be really weird to have a were-vampire for a mom, but that would be better than a cemetery plot for a mom.”
Mom put her arms around me and kissed me right behind the ear. “It was a hard decision, honey. I don’t want to die any more than you want me to. I—I want to see you go to college, get a job; get married if that’s what you want. . . I want to have grandchildren and retire and bake brownies and learn how to knit, even. It’s especially rough on you two. Andy will be there for you forever, though, and you’ll be in excellent hands.”
“But I want you.” I choked out, trying to get the words past the lump of clay in my throat. “Don’t you love me enough to stay?”
“Ssh, ssh. It’s because I love you that I won’t be a vampire. Listen carefully. You’re a smart girl, and I know you’ll understand. It’s not the having to hide vampirism that would be unbearable—it would be the temptation. Your father doesn’t just drink blood, he craves the human kind constantly, dreams about it, writes poems about it. You know full well that he can hardly bear being around a menstruating woman.”
I nodded, swallowing my tears. When I have my period, Dad always keeps a few feet away from me in a self-imposed restraining order. Vampires are like sharks—the smell of blood drives them into frenzies. “So it would be like living with everyone else’s veins running with chocolate?”
Mom shook her head. “It would be like everyone else’s veins running with heroin. Even a sick vampire is stronger than the average human, so all you would need to do was reach out and take it. Your father possesses a heroic amount of self-control, much more than I do.”
I understood now. “All right, Mom. I wouldn’t subject you to a life of being in constant withdrawal.”
“There’s even more to it than that. I’m a very emotional person—I think most werewolves (yes, shapeshifters too, I haven’t forgotten you) are, for there is a wild creature within us night and day, even on the other twenty-nine nights of the month. I know for a fact that my morality would crumble if it were that easy and that desirable to eat people. I’d rather keep the pain in this family than inflict grief on others.”
Her logic had no holes in it that I could see—which was a little disappointing. I had been half-hoping that she had faulty reasons that I could talk her out of, so that I could have a chance to have Mom with me all my life. Realizing now how selfish a wish that was, I picked a wilting rose and plucked off its bleeding petals. “That makes sense. It’s still massively unfair.” Mom opened her mouth and I quickly added, “Yes, yes, I know, life isn’t fair.”
“Remember the four family sayings, Dianne?”
I shredded one petal for every motto. “Number one: ‘It doesn’t matter if a man has fangs if he has manners. ‘Number two: ‘The stars shine for us.’ Number three: ‘Nothing is too frightening when somebody loves you.’ And the last one is: ‘If you don’t like it, then bite me. ‘ “
Mom clapped. “Excellent recitation. Now I think it’s time to add a fifth.”
“What’s the fifth?”
“‘Life isn’t fair, but you’d be surprised how often it’s bearable.’”
“Sometimes even pleasant?” I asked, tossing away the rose.
“Sometimes even pleasant. We’ll make it through whatever comes; don’t worry.”
“What about the mortgage?”
She looked pained. “We’ll figure that one out somehow. I think maybe. . .”
At that moment the doorbell rang, and both of us jumped up and ran back through the back door. Mom unwrapped herself and dropped the blanket onto the floor, sprinting after me. We made it a little race. I got there first and opened the door.
Nat Silver stood there, wearing a sweater, slacks, and shoes that looked like he’d owned them since the fifties. He was protecting himself from the 11:00 sun with a straw hat from the thirties or forties and a psychedelically colored umbrella that screamed sixties, along with the ubiquitous sunglasses. His little red Beetle car was parked next to our car, and his arms were burdened with a briefcase and a duffel bag. On the doorstep sat two immense suitcases.
“Um, excuse me?” I asked after recovering from the visual shock.
He sounded frantic. “Can I come in? The sun is going to take years off my life. And I’m getting a headache. They’re after me, you know.”
“We gave you an invitation before,” Mom said.
“Well, there’s no harm in some manners even when there’s no force field there, right? Just because I’m nearly a hundred years old doesn’t mean I can’t be polite.”
I had to smile at that. “Come on in, then, Nat. What’s the situation? Who’s coming after you?” He gratefully entered the relative darkness of the house, shed the hat and umbrella, and zipped towards the kitchen. Mom and I dragged his luggage into the foyer while he was taking bottles out of the refrigerator.
“I’d wait for your permission,” he apologized after chugging half a gallon of blood in thirty seconds flat, “but I’m starved. The deal is that I’ve lived for twenty years in the same apartment. My landlady was an old, nearly blind woman, so she never noticed that it was taking five or six times as long for me to age than it would for a normal person. Last week she died, and her son took over the house. I had to throw out all my suspicious drinkables because he inspects the rooms of all his tenants every other day. I think he must be obsessive-compulsive or something. Two days ago, he was looking through his mother’s photo albums, and there was a picture of me that was taken when I first moved in. He pretty much panicked after that, throwing holy water on me and ordering me to eat something in front of him to prove I was human. I did eat a sandwich, but I threw it up later and he found out. Last night he called the police, so I ran to my apartment, locked the door, and packed up all my stuff.” Nat paused for breath and another drink.
Mom sat down on one of the kitchen stools and folded her arms on the counter. I pulled up another stool next to her. Nat remained leaning against the wall, gulping fast enough for me to worry that he might hurt himself.
“So why come so late in the day?” Mom asked.
Nat wiped the blood off his chin and then licked his fingers. His outfit made him look like a redheaded, vampire version of Darrin from
Bewitched.
. . and with that thought I realized that I would never be able to watch that show again. “The police didn’t believe my landlord’s story of him having an undead tenant, but he sat in front of my door all morning, yelling at me to come out. I managed to slip away when he went to get some lunch. He thought I was asleep, you see. I snored pretty convincingly.”
“I suppose you’ve come here for sanctuary, then?”
He threw away the now-empty plastic gallon jug. “Actually, I have a more permanent proposition in mind. The time I made a house call I noticed that you had a large spare bedroom, and I was wondering if I could rent it, maybe indefinitely.”
I wondered if Mom was going to object, since such an idiosyncratic individual might drive us crazy after a while. Nat was fun and I liked him very much, but would my parents lose patience with his eccentric charm in a few months? However, Mom reached over and shook his hand. “I think we can arrange that.”
Overjoyed, Nat nearly shook Mom’s hand off and then kissed it. “Thank you so very much! Should we write up a contract of some sort, make it official? I’ll write it right now. I don’t hold with computers.”
Before Mom had time to answer he had run over to the chest in the living room where we kept our stationery and whipped out a piece of paper and a fountain pen. After a few minutes of scribbling he glided back and handed it to Mom. “I know my handwriting is abysmal, but the gist is that if you sign here you agree to provide me with the use of the spare room with a twelve-day warning before evicting me, which I hope you never do, use of your upstairs bathroom, TV, and all appliances. In return I will pay—see here,” he pointed at a set of numbers, “this much rent, charge the usual fee for any medical care that any of you require but provide it at any time you wish when I’m not at the clinic, and I will also keep Ferdin from brooding too much. I’ll get my own groceries, too, and reimburse you for what I just guzzled. We can go wake him up and use him as a witness.”
Mom nearly dropped the contract. “Dr. Silver, you can’t be serious about the rent. That’s more than my monthly salary!” She tried to return it.
“Wow, I knew our public schools were under-funded, but I didn’t know the pay was bad enough for you to be gaping at my fee.” He shook his head firmly and slid the sheet of paper back to her side of the kitchen counter. “The housing market has gone way up in the past two years, Selene (may I call you Selene? I forgot whether you said I could) and people are paying that much for a half-decent place.”
“But we’re nowhere near your office, Nat. You’ll only be getting one room. . . .”
“Ap-pap-pap! I won’t hear any more of this. This is my final offer.” He stepped over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I think I’ll be getting a lot more than a room. I’ll have the freedom to be myself, and more importantly, I’ll have you kids. Look, I haven’t got any family at all, and hardly any friends. I was hoping I could find a family in you three. You’re a very special trio, you know, and I want to help you out as much as I can. I don’t really have anything else to live for. My parents, siblings, and all are dead, and being a vampire with AIDS is killer on the love life.”
Mom and I chorused, “You have AIDS?”
He put his hand to his mouth. “Whoops. Heh. I didn’t mean to let that slip. I hope that doesn’t change anything?”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Mom said, “I was just surprised. You seem so. . . energetic.”
“I was getting up the guts to tell you the way a vampire with AIDS can be at full capacity, but I was afraid that it would be bad to let Ferdin know while he was angsting about you and might have done something desperate.”
“What’s the cure?” I asked urgently. If we couldn’t heal Mom, at least we could make Dad strong again.
“Don’t say anything for a moment, let me explain. First, you need to know that drinking animal blood makes a vampire more fragile than he or she would be on the standard diet. Can’t fight off several attackers at once, can’t climb walls, can’t do the cool turning-into-whirlwind thing that is so much fun. . . but I’m getting off the subject. Also, animal blood makes one vulnerable to illness. With human blood, however, you’re invincible to everything but garlic and bright light—which don’t kill, as you know, only incapacitate–stakes, starvation, and beheading.”
I got off the stool and backed away from him. “So you’ve been drinking human blood?”
He sighed and waved me back. “It’s not what you think. Just one glass every evening is enough to bolster your immunity. I just don’t throw away the blood samples I take. After the lab is done with them I take them home and put them in the fridge. Even if they have viruses in them it’s okay.”
Mom said, “Do you happen to have any of your needles on hand, then? You could give one set to us and I could give Andy a little of my blood every day.”
I interrupted vehemently. “No, no, and again, no. Mom, you’re going to be ill enough as it is, and you won’t be able to spare any. I’ll do it. Nat can teach me, right?”
“Oh, of course, sweetheart. You’ll need to have a second person helping you, but it’s simple enough. Sound good?”