Blood Oranges Read online

  “How about this, Mercy. You toss me my kit, I’ll retire from the demon-slaying business for good. That sound fair enough to you?”

  “No,” she said flatly, and I told her to go fuck herself. Not that she could have, not literally, anyway. Another fun fact about vamps: as they age, their genitals quickly atrophy, and after fifty years or so, they’re as smooth down there as Barbie and Ken.

  “Then why don’t we stop playing games, and you tell me what I got coming?”

  “It isn’t a game, Miss Quinn. Nothing of the sort. It’s only me taking delight in your dread of the unknown.”

  I called her a sadistic bitch then, which was even sillier than telling her to go fuck herself. Hello, Captain Obvious.

  “But if you insist,” she added, and stood up. Her feet made no sound on the cement. I’m not even sure they were touching the floor. Maybe she was able to float along an inch or so above it. I’ve seen that sort of shit before. So, I gave up on the bag, once and for all, and somehow succeeded in sitting up enough to scoot a foot or so across the mattress until my back was pressed against the clammy basement wall.

  That’s when she began to sing. It was the high, sweet voice of a child, and the sandpaper voice of a very old woman, maybe the oldest woman in the entire stinking universe. It was the voice of the void, and, if Death has a voice, it was the voice of Death, as well.

  Where are you going, my pretty fair maid? Where are you going, my honey?

  She answered me right cheerfully, I’ve an errand for my mummy.

  My shaking hands scrambled about for anything that might serve as a weapon, but there was nothing within reach, and I was pretty sure tossing a pail of puke at her wasn’t going to help.

  How old are you, my pretty fair maid? How old are you, my honey?

  She answered me right cheerfully, I’m seventeen come Sunday.

  Since my days on the streets, I’d gotten the notion I was tough as they come, one hardcore bitch who didn’t flinch at anything. Killing those first two ghouls, the one killed Lily and the one I found asleep, well, that only made me believe it that much more. And over the years, facing down the shit I’d faced down, my little crusade against what Mercy called the Rakshasas, I’d finally been left with no doubt that I could stand up against the worst Hell had to sling my way (maybe I didn’t believe in God, but I sure as fuck believed in Hell) and stand my ground. But here was this one vampire, who’d been a child centuries before I was born, and who’d been trapped in that child’s body forever, here was her and her creepy-ass voice singing that creepy-ass song, coming nearer and nearer. And here I was losing my cool. Here I was flinching. Here I was, hiding in the closet while my drunken asswipe of a father did his best to beat my mother to death.

  “Stop! Please, just fucking stop!” I pleaded, and then I screamed. Yeah, you bet your life I did. I screamed, as loudly and shrilly and as pathetically as any victim in any slasher flick ever screamed. And it made no difference whatsoever. Whatever dignity might have remained, after the werewolf and after coming to a la canona in the doll’s dungeon of horrors, feeling like my innards were being scraped out with a grapefruit spoon, that smidgen of dignity was gone now. Everything was gone but the fear, and the noises the fear could make.

  But if you come round to my mummy’s house, when the moon shines bright and clearly,

  I will come down and let you in, and my mummy shall not hear me.

  By the time she reached me (and that seemed to take forever), I’d stopped screaming, and was sobbing and begging. I’d have gotten on my knees if I’d been strong enough. She reached out with her right hand, her razor-blade nails and palm cold as marble, and she ran her fingers through the blonde snarl of my sweat-drenched hair.

  So I went down to her mummy’s house, when the moon shone bright and clearly,

  She did come down and let me in, and I lay in her arms till morning.

  Finally, she stopped singing, and kneeled beside the mattress. She was so small, and seemed so impossibly frail. But she’d dropped out of the limbs of that tree onto the back of the biggest, meanest loup I’d ever seen. She’d killed it, and there wasn’t a scratch on her anywhere. I thought these thoughts, and gazed into her eyes, and knew I’d never really seen evil before I’d seen her. Here was a whole new ballgame. Here was the end of me.

  Words squeaked out of my mouth—tiny, ruined shards to pass for words. “What are you going to do?” I asked her. “Please, just say it. What are you going to do?”

  Those claws brushed my cheek as gently as they were able, but still cutting me, drawing blood. Compared to the freezing air coming off the vampire, my own blood felt hot as molten steel. It ran down my face and chin and neck and pooled wetly at the collar of my T-shirt. She leaned close then, and a wintry gust of breath washed over me.

  “Alchemy,” she whispered. “I like to think of it that way, Quinn, as an act of alchemy. The birth of a new being, transmutation from one state to another. My gift to you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, though maybe by then I did.

  “When I’m done, you’ll be something marvelous. You’ll be something held so taboo by my race, you may even be the first of its kind we’ve ever seen.”

  There wasn’t so much as a hint of malice in her voice. She could have been any little girl, describing nothing more wicked than a tea party.

  “And you’ll be my pet,” she said, and a few seconds later, I felt her teeth against my throat. I didn’t struggle. I made no sound whatsoever.

  Bride of Quiet.

  Yeah, okay. Maybe that’s not so far from the mark after all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SONGS FOR MY FUNERAL

  I came to in a weedy ditch. Specifically, I came to in the weedy, garbage-filled ditch on the south side of the abandoned train tracks that lead out over the Seekonk River to the old drawbridge. You know the one. Everybody in Providence does. Been stuck in the up position since, like, 1976, I think. A hundred feet high, if it’s an inch, and there’s nothing much left of it these days but rust. Tons of rust defying gravity. Anyway, fuck the bridge. Who cares about the drawbridge. There I lay in the stinking, wet ditch, dreaming about puking until I woke up and did exactly that.

  When I was done, I wiped my mouth on my T-shirt and climbed out of the ditch. I sat curled up on an old sofa someone had left sprawled across the tracks. Knees drawn up beneath my chin. The sun was starting to set, and I wondered how long it had been since that business with the loup, and how long it had been since the mattress, and the basement, and the rotten old china doll calling itself Mercy Brown. Reluctantly, my fingers went to my throat, and right there on the left side, just below the line of my chin, there was a seeping welt. Felt like the bull-bitch of all wasp stings. So I knew, right? Pieces, meet falling into place. First, I’d gotten myself bitten in the ass by a werewolf, and then I’d been bitten in the neck by a bloodsucker. Lucky as lucky gets, that’s me—damned, and damned again. I sat there on that reeking, mildewed sofa, and I shivered and cramped and watched the sky fading from blue to indigo. Mostly, I was trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next, only I was sort of also trying not to think about the very same thing, what was gonna happen next. One thing I knew for sure, it was gonna suck (hahahahaha, I know, wicked funny).

  Now, let us pause right here for a moment of quiet reflection. Let’s pause here, me and whoever’s reading this, and I’ll try to come clean on a few of the lies I’ve been telling you. (Come clean. Yeah, the puns, they’re flowing outta my pen like Biblical rivers of milk and honey, like shit from a dog’s behind.) Firstly, junkies lie. No exceptions. Show me a junky that doesn’t lie, and I’ll show you a lobster doesn’t turn bright and shiny red when you drop it in a pot of boiling water. Junkies lie, and they’ll rob you blind given half the chance, and about all that matters to them is the next fix. But let’s stay with that first point for now, junkies being liars. Sometimes I think we don’t even mean to; we just can’t help ourselves. We
open our mouths, and lies come out.

  So, to start with, you might be wondering how this chick with a monkey on her back about the size of King Kong is running about staking nasties and whatnot. Well, truth be told, I’ve been stretching the truth like it was a big handful of raspberry-flavored saltwater taffy. Let’s start at the beginning. That ghoul back in the warehouse, the one killed Lily when I was sixteen. I didn’t beat it to death with a two-by-four I pulled from that burning barrel. It saw me, dropped Lily, and lunged. I screamed and tried to crawl away. Actually, I scream a lot. I’m a pretty good screamer. The ghoul (get this) tripped over Lily’s corpse and landed headfirst in the barrel. That is, the beast set itself on fire. I didn’t do the deed. I just ran. And then the nasty’s death throes must have involved quite a lot a flailing about, because the whole place went up like a Roman candle, and by the time the fire department arrived, there wasn’t much left to save. If anyone found Lily’s body, or the ghoul’s, I never heard about it. Oh, and that second ghoul I supposedly sought out and killed, that was a lie, too. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Did you know it wasn’t Shakespeare said that? Lots of folks think it was, but it was really Sir Walter Scott, some other fancy-pants English playwright. Read that one day when I was camped out in the Athenaeum. Anyway, here’s my tangled web, me having practiced plenty to deceive in the first chapter. Forget my purported heroics. The ghoul fucked up, and everything that came after was a cut-and-dried, open-and-shut case of self-immolation. Let’s call that lie Numero Uno.

  Now, moving along to Numero Dos: In the months leading up to the night I drove out to the Scituate Reservoir, you’ll remember I’d killed exactly two vampires, and the first was an accident. Of course, that was after I met Mean Mr. B (and you’ll meet him shortly) and after he’d put all these bullshit ideas in my head (which kinda—but not quite—means I lied about the mentor thing, too). But, back to that vampire, that first vampire. I think it (she) might have heard about the thing with the ghoul, because this wasn’t long after. I’d taken to carrying around a plastic crucifix and this pocket-sized copy of the New Testament some Hispanic woman over on the West Side had given me, just for listening to her spiel about la Virgen de Guadalupe. The vamp jumped me in an alley next to the Starbucks on Thayer Street, sometime after midnight. I was picking through the Dumpsters for whatever pastries and muffins and shit might have been thrown out that day when the fucker came at me. She was tall, and naked, and smelled worse than the trash I’d been rummaging through. I screamed (I bet you saw that coming) and, like the best horror movie cliché, I tore that cruddy plastic crucifix from around my neck and thrust it at her. The string snapped and cheap pink plastic beads went bouncing everywhere. The vampire wasn’t the least bit taken aback by suffering Jesus and INRI and the crown of thorns. No, really. The motherfucker laughed. I threw the crucifix at it, she ducked, slipped on the beads, and fell backwards, impaling herself on a two-foot section of PVC pipe jutting from the side of the building. Oh, and she didn’t go poof like in some of the movies, and she didn’t burst into flames, and she didn’t dissolve into a green puddle of goo. She just looked surprised, then died. Well, died again, or died the rest of the way. Whatever.

  I didn’t stick around. I spent the night in a squat down by the river (the Providence River, not the Seekonk River). Next day, bright and early, Mr. B found me. Someone offs a vamp, even without meaning to, and she’s the same someone inadvertently offed a ghoul, that has a tendency to attract attention, most of it from distinctly unsavory circles. That’s just how you might describe Mean Mr. B—distinctly unsavory. Short little sawed-off son of a bitch, faintly effete Brit accent, looks like the far end of fifty, greasy black hair, and he wears these suits might have been in style back in the 1940s. Don’t know where he gets them. Maybe he has a tailor, because they always look brand spanking new. Also, he’s a total faggot, which is neither here nor there, except he’s usually got a pretty young chicken or two with him. He has this manner about him, like the Big Bad Wolf, all dainty, fucking manners and smooth talker, right. Real suave, with his voice like melted butter. Always a white handkerchief folded tidy in his breast pocket. Shoes shiny enough to blind you. But, make no mistake, he’d slit your throat in half a second and not think twice, would Mean Mr. B (I don’t call him that to his face, not ever, but we’ll get to the matter of his “name” in just a minute).

  So, stupid clumsy vampire up and stakes herself, and this dude comes around telling me how I’ve set tongues to wagging, tongues in certain unwholesome circles, and maybe I’d benefit from a long talk with him. That is, if I wanted to stay alive. Sure, I said, why the hell not. Nothing better to do, right? Only, I told him I had to score and shoot up first, and that’s when he produced a Baggie seemingly out of nowhere, abracadabra, and smiled that slick, ugly smile of his.

  I stared at the smack, and said something like, “You’ve done your homework, mister.”

  And he said something like, “You’ll find I usually do, Siobhan.”

  I told him straight off not to call me that, not ever again. I told him he could call me Quinn, and so that’s what he calls me. Usually. Except when he’s trying to piss me off, which, come to think of it, is quite often. Anyway, since then he’s been my sole supplier (or pusher, if you must, but you spend five minutes with the dude, meet him, and you’d never call him a pusher). Most times, he doesn’t even charge me for the dope. Not so long as I eat at least one meal a day, and listen when he talks. I slip and mouth off, though, and it’s street price for a week.

  God almighty, how about I stop reminiscing and get back to that evening I woke up in a ditch sick as a dog?

  By the time the sun was down, I’d managed to crawl off the sofa and get my wobbly legs working. There was ground glass between every joint, and my stomach was Narragansett Bay on a stormy day. I knew full well it wasn’t the tail end of withdrawal. By then, denial was a luxury I couldn’t afford, and, unless I was going to take the easy way out, there was just the one person I knew might have some inkling of a clue what I was supposed to do next. So, on beyond miserable, I dragged my sorry self the mile and a half from the old tracks by the river, north and west across Fox Point, to the dive on Wickenden Street where Mean Mr. B hangs out most nights. Babe’s on the Sunnyside, total fucking dump where blue-collar sorts gather after work. Precisely the opposite of the sort of place you’d expect a latter-day fop like him to plant his ass every evening, but he claims it has “an undeniable je ne sais quoi.” Right. Anyway, I stuck to the sidewalks, hoping I only looked suspicious and not like some sort of rabid coyote slinking through the shadows. I did my best not to meet the eyes of anyone I passed along the way. It’s pretty much all residential through there, Monopoly houses from the 1800s and 1900s lined up in neat rows with huge oaks and manicured lawns out front. The sort of places I’ve never seen the inside of and figured I likely never would. Anyway, my belly rumbled whenever I did pass someone, rumbled loudly enough I imagine they heard, and my mouth watered so much I caught myself drooling a time or two. They all smelled like dinner, and the most delicious dinners I’d ever smelled. By the time I made it to the bar, it was almost impossible to think about much else but food. Except food didn’t mean what it once had. Now, food meant killing. I have to admit, the thought of killing hardly seemed to bother me as much as it once had, and did nothing whatsoever to dint my appetite. I stumbled into Babe’s on the Sunnyside, and then stumbled some more, all the way to the booth in the very back, where Mr. B sat in a pinstripe suit, nursing a Cape Cod.

  “Well,” he grinned, “looky what the cat dragged in. You’re terribly mimsy tonight, Miss Quinn.”

  Right off, I knew he knew, because he didn’t seem the least surprised. Then again, Mr. B doesn’t really do surprised, so never mind. I sat down across from him and told him to fuck off.

  “Sweating like the axiomatic pig of yore,” he said, then took a sip of his drink.

  My stomach lurched. I groaned, then growled, “Last I heard, ‘fuck you’
ain’t exactly an ambiguous statement.”

  “Touché,” he replied, and set his glass down. In the dim light, every bead of condensation sparkled like a diamond, and I could smell the cranberry juice and cheap vodka, and when the base of that glass met wood, it made a sound like a goddamn hammer. See, that’s one thing some of the books and movies get right. A vampire’s senses are off the scale, which I suppose comes with being a predator. And right then, I was carrying the weight of enough noises, sights, tastes, and smells, I kept expecting the pressure of it all to crush me flat. I put my hands on the table in front of me, folded them, and tried to stop shaking, which, of course, was worse than pointless.

  “So, would you be more consoled were I to simply say you look like shit?” he asked and stirred at his drink with a swizzle stick.

  “I’m in trouble, Bayard,” I said through gritted teeth, then realized I was drooling on the table. He saw, too, and passed me a cocktail napkin.

  “So I’ve noticed. And it isn’t Bayard. Not tonight. Tonight, it’s Barlow.”

  Well, at least that was better than the last time we’d talked, when he’d insisted I call him Baptiste. But Jesus H. Christ. Barlow? He might as well have called himself Barnabas Collins.

  “Shit,” I hissed. And, by the way, when I use words like growl and hiss here, I mean them in their purest animal meaning. Or close enough. I hissed that word, and it came out sounding a lot more like an angry snake than it did like me. “I don’t care what you call yourself.” More saliva dripped from my lips, and I wiped at my chin with the napkin, which was already too soggy to do much good.

  “Does this mean I get to call you Siobhan tonight?”

  I didn’t answer the question.

  “Fuck you,” I said again.

  “Not my type, but thanks for the offer all the same. So, Quinn, I heard about your tête-à-tête with the Bride, and also that run-in with Monsieur Jack Grumet.”