The Girls With Games of Blood (22 page)

He turned to the motel bed, where a teenage boy lay asleep in the darkness. Clad only in his white jockey shorts, his erection straining against the cotton, he murmured and
tossed but did not awaken. In his dreams he was reliving his deepest sexual fantasy, but was unable to reach completion despite his best efforts.

Zginski touched the boy’s sweaty chest. He was handsome, with brown hair and a dimple in his chin. He played football, an American sport of great violence, so his body was muscular and supple. Zginski intended him to be a gift, something he and Patience could share the way a mortal couple might go out to dinner. Now Zginski was, as he’d overheard on occasion, stuck with the check.

And yet he couldn’t believe Patience would simply ignore him this way. He would reserve judgment until he spoke to her about it, he decided. He would give her the greatest, rarest gift that Baron Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski could give anyone: the benefit of the doubt.

But that still left him with the moaning boy. He considered the alternatives. He could leave him here, and assume he would return home too ashamed to speak about how he’d awoken in a strange motel in his underwear. He could not possibly connect this to Zginski; after all, he had only seen the vampire for a few moments in the gas station bathroom, before the vampire’s influence had rendered him helpless and oblivious.

Or Zginski could kill him.

The boy tossed his head, exposing his jugular. “No,” he whimpered, so softly it was barely audible.

Zginski smiled. Sometimes the universe made decisions for you.

B
EAMS FROM THE
orange sunset shafted almost horizontally through the frames of the long-shattered windows. In the dusty, pollen-heavy air they made irregular patches of illumination on the debris-covered floor. Pigeons trilled in the rafters. Rats scurried in the walls and under the warped floorboards. And the corpse of a stranger, someone who had overdosed alone and forgotten long ago, was now little more than rags and a skeleton in the oppressive heat. His bony fingers still clutched the remains of a violin, the punch line to an obscure joke.

Patience stood on the crumbling loading dock as she looked over the abandoned, decrepit cotton warehouse. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “So this was your home?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Fauvette said, suddenly embarrassed. She scuffed one tennis shoe self-consciously. “It was just where we slept, really. I found it, and the others joined me after a while. We used the basement and the boiler room for our coffins.”

Patience carefully picked her way around the debris, looking up at the roof. “And you picked this place because . . . ?”

Fauvette shrugged. How to describe the sense that when
you’re a walking corpse, the corpse of a building can actually be a comfort? “It seemed appropriate.”

“For a cockroach, maybe.” She instantly regretted the comment. “I didn’t mean that literally.”

Fauvette, shuffling along behind her, kicked at a piece of broken glass. “For a long time, that’s what I figured I was. Something that only came out at night, that had to stay in the shadows and run from the sun.”

Patience shook her head. “So you really thought the sun would burn you up if it even touched you?”

Fauvette nodded. “I never had anyone explain to me what I was. So the only information I could find was in the movies and on TV. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but under the circumstances it seemed kind of silly to put it to the test.”

“That must have been a terrifying way to live. So lonely.”

“I wasn’t living. And I wasn’t alone. I had friends, at least until Rudy came along.”

Patience’s eyes opened wide. “He
killed
them?”

“No, actually he saved us. And taught us what we are. But . . . some of them
did
die around the same time, but it wasn’t his fault. Not entirely.”

Patience looked out through the big, empty window frame at the overgrown field that surrounded the abandoned warehouse. She swatted at the gnats that filled the air. “He’s very intriguing, isn’t he? Your Mr. Zginski.”

“That’s one word for it.”

Both were quiet for a moment. Another rat scurried along the wall, its passage loud in the silence. Finally Patience said, “You said he saved ‘us.’ I met Leonardo, the colored boy. Who else?”

“Well, there was Olive, a colored girl. She died. And Toddy, who was a crazy white boy from the country. He died. And Mark, who . . .”

“Died?”

“I don’t know. He said he needed to find out some things,
and that he’d be back when he could. It wasn’t like him, but at the same time, with all the changes, maybe it was.”

“Were you and he . . . ?”

“I think we were about to. Then Rudy came along.”

Patience idly lifted a board, sending a fat corn snake slithering for new cover. “And what did Rudy do?”

Fauvette thought about the answer for a long moment. “He made me forget what I am.”

Patience looked up in surprise. “In what way?”

Fauvette stared into space as she spoke. “The vampire who made me took my life when I was still a virgin. This was up in the Kentucky hills, fifty-some-odd years ago. He didn’t mean to make me a vampire, I don’t think, he just didn’t take any precautions to keep me from rising. Only before I rose, but after I died, I was raped.”

It took a moment, but it finally registered. Patience’s eyes opened wide. “While you were
dead
?”

Fauvette nodded. “The Scoval brothers. The joke around the hollers was that no farm animal was safe when the Scovals started drinking. I was a sheltered little girl, I thought it meant they might steal them and eat them.” She smiled bitterly. “Apparently no corpse was safe, either.”

Patience could think of nothing to say. A virgin vampire was eternally spared any sexual feelings, remaining in a kind of prepubescent netherworld of amused detachment. But Fauvette seemed anything but that.

“Because of that,” Fauvette continued, “I have all the sensations you do. But my virginity is still there. And if I lose it, it comes back the next night.”

“Oh, my God, honey,” Patience said as she comprehended the horror of the situation. “That’s awful.”

She nodded. “It hurts, too. When I lose it. It’s the only thing that does. And it bleeds.”

“It
bleeds
? Like you were still alive?”

She nodded. “I don’t know why. I don’t know the ‘why’ of anything.”

Patience knelt and wrapped her arms around Fauvette. It reminded Fauvette of the way her mother would come to wake her up, the way she’d snuggle her body against her mother’s full, strong form. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the way that little cabin smelled, the way the wood creaked in the wind or her father’s footsteps across the hard floor. She could see them in her mind’s eye, but the actual memories seemed like mere photographs.

Patience stroked Fauvette’s soft hair. “Honey, I can’t change what’s happened, but I’ll try to make what’s coming a little better for you. I promise you that.” She stood back, kissed Fauvette on the forehead, and said cheerfully, “Now, enough of this. Let’s go back to town and get started on your first lesson.”

“Clora!
Clora!
”

Clora came down the stairs from her room, having to stop on the second floor as a wave of dizziness hit her. She’d visibly lost weight, although she’d made no changes in her diet or exercise. Along with the weight, it seemed she’d lost the energy or desire to do anything except at night, when
he
came to visit.

She stumbled into the living room. It was the hottest day of the year so far, and her father had turned off the window-unit air conditioner to save money. The windows were open, but the immobile curtains testified to the lack of a breeze. It was dusk, and the daytime flies were joined by mosquitoes that found every tear and opening in the screens. It often seemed to Clora that they might as well have lived out in the yard.

Jeb sat in his recliner, staring at the TV even though it
wasn’t turned on. The only light came from a dim lamp on the side table. A dozen beer cans littered the floor around him. “Yes, sir, Daddy?” she said.

When she saw his teary eyes, Clora knew what he was about to ask. Jeb’s voice was small and pitiful when he said, “Honey, you know what I need, don’t you?”

Clora licked her lips, tasting salt from the sweat. “Daddy, please, I’m awful tired.”

Despite his unruly hair and stubble, he looked and sounded like a little child when he whimpered, “Clora, baby, you’re all I got. Please?”

She felt a pit open in her belly, a mix of fear and excitement. “It ain’t right, Daddy,” she mumbled, hoping this time he’d let it go.

“What?” he snapped in the rage that only came with alcohol. “Are you talking back, girl?”

“No, sir,” she said. The man in the chair now, soaked in beer and lost in the past, was not the father she loved. This man would chase her down and beat her savagely if she back-talked. The other man would reappear in the morning, contrite and apologetic, but that wouldn’t make the pain any less. “I’ll be right back.”

She went into the downstairs bedroom, where Jeb slept when he bothered to leave the recliner. She closed the door and looked at the bed where her mother and father slept, and where she had been conceived. She stripped off her tube top and shorts, then opened the dresser and removed her mother’s sheer black nightgown.

Elaine Crabtree had been dead four years now. The first time Clora had tried on her mother’s clothes, she had felt grown-up and sophisticated, and flounced into the living room to show her father. His reaction had both puzzled and frightened her, and led to the little ritual she was about to enact.

She pulled the garment on, careful not to tear it: she was wider-hipped than her mother. The bottom hem came to the
middle of her thighs, and she replaced her own white cotton panties with the matching black ones from the drawer.

She adjusted herself in the mirror, then took the headband that her mother always wore and used it to hold back her bangs. She really
did
look like Elaine now; the picture on her father’s nightstand could easily have been one of Clora, if it had been taken years in the future and somehow sent back in time.

She turned, and a rush of nausea and dizziness hit her. She sat down heavily on the bed, startling several flies attracted to a stain she didn’t want to think about. She waited for her head to stop spinning. This was the fifth time in two days she’d nearly passed out. Was she sick? Or . . . worse? She’d know about the second option in three more days, since she was as regular as the sunrise. Until then, she did her best to put it aside.

She stood, shook her head to clear it, and turned out the light. Then she went back into the living room.

She stopped in the shadowy entrance and said in a throaty voice, “Turn out the light, Jeb.”

The recliner protested as he leaned over to hit the light switch. Her father could barely see her, but that was part of the trick. She leaned against the edge of the kitchen doorway and began to hum “Ode to Billie Joe,” her mother’s favorite song. Then she began slowly to dance.

“Oh, sweetie,” Jeb said, shifting in his chair. She heard his zipper slide down.

Once when she was a little girl, she had hidden in the dark under the kitchen table and watched her mother dance for her father. Jeb was handsome then, and proud of his wife, and when he took her there on the couch Clora had watched in both horror and wonder. The next time she tried to spy they caught her, but the image was already burned into her memory. Now she mimicked it perfectly, sliding her hands over her own body just as Elaine had done. She looked at the
water-stained ceiling, the warped hardwood floor, anything to avoid seeing what her father was doing in his chair.

Thankfully, it never took very long. When he finally croaked, “That’s enough, baby,” she scurried back to strip off the dead woman’s negligee and retrieve her own garments. Her father inevitably passed out after this routine, so she knew she’d have the rest of the night to herself.

This time she tossed the nightgown and panties back in the dresser, grabbed her own clothes, and rushed naked up the stairs to her room. She slammed and locked the door. She was dizzy again, and it was hard to breathe, and for some reason the bug bites on her neck throbbed and itched.