Blood Oranges Read online

  He pronounced the name “GROO-may.”

  “Mr. Who?” I grunted.

  “Jack Grumet, dear. The departed lycanthrope, lately of Woonsocket.”

  I lay my head down in a cooling puddle of slobber (flashback to the Bride’s basement), and shut my eyes. Even then, it wasn’t dark enough by half, and my head throbbed.

  “How’d you hear?”

  “Small town, dear, and people talk whenever something as curious as your recent misadventure comes to pass. Let’s just say a little bird told me.”

  “I am so screwed.”

  “So it seems.”

  “What am I gonna do?” I asked, and there was a cramp then that probably would have put me on my knees if I hadn’t already been sitting.

  When it passed, Mean Mr. Barlow said, “Well, I’ve been wondering that very same thing myself.”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “Undoubtedly. But it’s impolite to bring that up. Nor does it help with your current predicament. Right about now, you’d best be thinking about not pissing me off. I can always finish my cocktail, pay my tab, and leave you sitting here. And you know I will, Quinn.”

  I belched then. Nothing in my stomach, but I belched anyway and tasted, well, nothing.

  “You’re the sweetest guy I ever did meet,” I whispered in the quiet that followed the belch. “You’re one delightful dude.”

  “That’s better. Now, first things first. I assume you’re starving. Am I right?”

  I nodded without sitting up, so I smacked my forehead against the wood several times and the table shook like it wasn’t bolted to the floor (though I knew it was).

  “Then I imagine you’re going to have to find something to eat. And soon. That part’s not optional. Anyway, even living people tend to think more clearly after a square meal. There you go. Step number one, advice for the asking, free of fucking charge.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone. I’m not going to eat anyone.”

  “Sure you will, Quinn. Not that I don’t respect your reverence for the sanctity of human life and whatever other high-minded morals you may yet harbor. I do, cross my heart. But you are going to kill, and I’d wager you’ll do it before sunrise. Then, once that’s out of the way, we may proceed to step number two.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone.”

  “I’ll put down green folding money to the contrary.”

  “I’ll find a rat,” I said. “Or a cat, or a stray dog.”

  He was silent for a moment, sipping his red drink. Then Mr. Barlow laughed and said, “Kiddo, you know as well as I do that won’t work.”

  He was right, of course. It’s not like Louis de Pointe du Lac or Angelus or one of those guys. Vampires can’t get by on rodents, pigs, poodles, and such. Not even monkeys will do. Vampires need human blood. Accept no substitute. It’s the real McCoy, actual and factual hemoglobin from some unfortunate Homo sapiens, or it might as well be nothing at all. Might as well be a mouthful of air.

  “Fuck me.”

  “If you can stomach it, I suggest one of our local homeless denizens,” Mean Mr. B(arlow) suggested with utmost seriousness. “Or you could try Brown, but college kids go missing, it never fails to attract attention. There are tourists, of course, but the Chamber of Commerce frowns on that sort of shit. Go for the homeless. A transient if possible. Fortune might even smile on you, and you’ll find someone who’s bathed this year.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone, Barlow,” I told him, trying hard as I could to make the name sound like the bad joke it was. Guess it’s safe to assume he’d read ’Salem’s Lot, or at least seen the movie. But maybe not, which makes it even funnier.

  “You keep saying that. I might as well say I’m a lace doily, or pinch of lint. It’s just about that ridiculous, you know.”

  “You could always kill me,” I mumbled, my words muffled by all the slobber and the wood I was speaking into. The ground glass had spread from my joints to my guts and throat.

  “I could,” he said in a thoughtful, contemplative sort of way. “I considered that, because I can be merciful when the mood strikes me. But I’m not going to. Better for my health if I don’t start crossing the Bride. Isn’t she a pip, by the way?”

  “The Bride?” I asked.

  “Well, you don’t truly think she’s Mercy Brown,” he said. “Perfectly fucking ridiculous, the way she goes about calling herself that.”

  “I told her that.”

  “Good for you. Best we stick to calling her the Bride of Quiet. I think she acquired that nom de guerre in the winter of ’42 and ’43, during the Battle of Stalingrad. Must have been a feast. Oh, she’s Russian, as it happens, from some horrid village on the banks of the Volga. Anyway, I’ve always thought it had a nice ring to it—Bride of Quiet. The German soldiers started calling her that, Braut der Stille, and they got in their heads she was some sort of angel or—”

  “I’m not killing anyone,” I said again (for—what?—the half-dozenth time?). I said that, then gagged on hunger pangs and at the cloying smell of the air trapped inside Babe’s. It stank of my sweat, of Budweiser and Jäger shots, of the ghost of cigarettes, from back when smoking was still legal in Rhode Island bars. It stank of piss from the toilets and the cakes of deodorant that are supposed to cover up the stink of piss. Unless you’re a vampire. A vampire who’s also a werewolf.

  “As you wish,” he sighed. “Either way, I’ll be here until last call. Try not to do anything else outrageously stupid.”

  I have no idea how I got to my feet again and made it back to the front door of Babe’s, but I did. And, one teensy-weensy step at a goddamn time, I made it to the other side of I-95 and found a woman sleeping off a quart bottle of Thunderbird. She was my first. When it was over, I dumped the husk of her into the Providence River, and made my way back to Wickenden Street. As they used to say (and maybe some people still do), I felt like a million bucks.

  * * *

  I was back at Babe’s on the Sunnyside half an hour before closing. You live in Providence, you know that’s one a.m., as mandated by state law. Mr. B—Bayard, Baptiste, Barlow, whoever—was still in his booth at the back, finishing off what would be his last Cape Cod of the evening. He saw me coming in, and the motherfucker totally looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. He knew right off what I’d done, though I’d washed in the river. Washed as best I could. I knew there were still bloodstains on my jeans and T-shirt, but I was trying to pretend there weren’t. No one at the bar seemed to notice. Anyway, there he sat, all smug and pleased with himself. Probably, I hated him more then than I ever had or ever would (which is saying quite a lot).

  “Brava,” he said, and slowly clapped his hands. “The gourmand returns victorious from her banquet, cherry popped.”

  I sat down, and ran my fingers through my wet hair. I realized there was still blood caked under my nails and wondered if I was going to have to get used to that sort of thing. Speaking generally, you see two sorts of vampires in novels and the movies. You see clean, fastidious vampires, and you see filthy wretches that can’t be bothered with the likes of hygiene. In the real world, they come in both those varieties, though it’s been my experience most are perfectly content with the “can’t be bothered” category. Truth is, all the primping and perfume in the world only does a half-assed job of covering up the facts. There’s only so many ways you can beautify a corpse.

  “I trust your repast won’t be missed? I trust it certainly won’t be found?”

  I didn’t answer either question. I said, “You trust an awful lot, Mr. B.” Then, well, I just sat there staring at the blood under my nails. I realized there was a Patti Smith song playing on the bar’s stereo. Not just any Patti Smith song, but “Land.” I closed my eyes and listened. See, there’s a story here. That song’s not just any song. There was this game me and Lily used to play, when we were too cold or hungry or strung out to sleep. At some point, she started calling it Songs for My Funeral, and that’s all we ever ca
lled it. She’d say, “At my funeral, I want them to play ‘Black Star’ by Radiohead.” Then it would be my turn, okay, so I’d say something like, “At my funeral, I want them (them, whoever them was gonna be) to play ‘Hate My Way’ by Throwing Muses.” Or, instead, I’d say I wanted the song to be something by Tom Waits, or the Rolling Stones, or Elvis Costello. See, it didn’t matter what the song was, only that there were songs. But the song I named more times than any other was “Land” by Patti Smith, and I sat there with my eyes shut, the lyrics and drums and guitar chords spilling over me, mocking me, reminding me of shit I didn’t want to be reminded of. But also washing me lots cleaner than the river ever could. Back then, fuck, we’d both been so innocent, and here I was never gonna be innocent again.

  Songs for my funeral.

  And I opened my eyes and stared into the steely eyes of Mean Mr. B in his razor-sharp pinstripes, wondering if any vampire had ever gotten a funeral. I wondered that, and Patti Smith sang about rape and horses and dances from the 1950s and la mer.

  “Step number two,” I said.

  “I always appreciate an eager student. Now, what shall step number two be?”

  I thought about it a minute before answering him. “Mercy, she believes I killed her lover. Her daughter. Some bitch named Alice. I’ve been assuming she was talking about another vamp, one she made.”

  “Good call. That would be one Alice Cregan, who was, as it happens, a young lady our Miss Brown dragged out of her mortal coil about four decades back. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that name doesn’t ring a bell?”

  “Alice Cregan?”

  “Yes. That very name.”

  “Doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to me,” I replied, wishing the song would end and another would come along to take its place, one that had never been part of me and Lily’s stupid, fucking, morbid game.

  “Well, it ought to,” said Mean Mr. B, Mr. Barlow, Mr. Whatever He Pleases, Mr. Whim. “Not too long after we met, you and her tangled one night amid the gravestones and mausoleums of—”

  “—Swan Point,” I interrupted, finishing his sentence, knowing how much he hates being interrupted. So, my second vampire, whom I had indeed offed at Swan Point Cemetery, now I knew her name.

  He sipped his drink and nodded coolly, like someone who didn’t mind being interrupted. “That’s her. Seems like the Bride took it personally. Also, seems like she’s the sort holds a grudge. Not that you can necessarily blame her.”

  “Yeah, okay. But . . . that was like six months ago.”

  Mr. B, he leaned back in the booth and grinned. “The undead, they don’t think of time the way you and I think of time. Six months. Six weeks. Not much difference to them. But then, you’ll eventually figure that out for yourself. Hell, might be the old lady didn’t even miss Alice Cregan until a few days ago. But when she finally did miss her . . . daughter . . . she found you and delivered unto our fair maiden her proper comeuppance.” He raised his glass, which was mostly empty, like I had a drink of my own and we were supposed to toast.

  “You must put a lot of effort into being an asshole,” I said.

  “No I do not. I assure you, it just comes naturally.”

  “It’s not that simple. There was more. I mean, she talked about more than me having killed this Alice Cregan.”

  “Ah, so the plot thickens.”

  “She said what she did to me, before she did it, she said she was paying off a debt, something about a bet she lost a long time ago. And she went on about me being something she was forbidden to create. Taboo, she said.”

  “Obviously. A vampire that’s also werewolf, or, conversely, vice versa,” he said and thumped the rim of his cocktail glass. It emitted a painful, high-pitched ring I felt in my teeth.

  “Jesus,” I hissed. “Don’t you fucking do that again.”

  “Je suis désolée,” he smiled, without so much as half a scrap of contrition in his voice. “All apologies.”

  I rubbed at my temples and gritted my sharp teeth.

  “But yes, that’s a no-no from the long ago, bygone days. As for the debt, that’s between her and her creditor. Unless, of course, she was speaking metaphorically.”

  “She called me her pet.”

  “How very fucking sweet of her. She should know you’re not exactly housebroken.”

  I ignored him. Finally, the music wasn’t Patti Smith anymore. It was another song. I don’t remember what. And just now I almost wrote “but at least it was easier to breathe” again. Only it wasn’t, but I hadn’t noticed until “Land” ended that I wasn’t breathing, that I hadn’t been breathing since I woke up in the ditch by the railroad tracks. I put my right hand over my chest. Nope, nothing there, either. No reassuring cardiovascular thump, thump, thump. Not a peep. Naturally, Mr. B was watching me like a hawk.

  “Do you know, Quinn, the meaning of the word apocalypse?”

  “End of the world.”

  “Wrong. It’s from the Greek apokalypsis, and it means a revelation, a disclosure. Hence, the Book of Revelation of Saint John the Divine, or, alternately and more concisely, the Apocalypse of John. The book isn’t named that because it talks about the end times—if you approach it as a futurist and not a symbolist—but because of the revelatory visions experienced by John while on the isle of Patmos.”

  I think it fair to say I glared at him. I think I was wishing becoming a vampire had given me the power to make people’s heads explode just by thinking about their heads exploding, like in that old movie, Scanners.

  “Are we done with the fucking history lesson now?” I asked him, and Mean Mr. B shrugged.

  “If you wish. Still, I believe you’ve just had your own personal apocalypse.”

  I rubbed at my face and ran my hands through my hair again. It was sticky, my hair, so I knew I probably hadn’t gotten all the blood out.

  “That shit at Swan Point, I didn’t even start that. It was that fuckwit Bobby Ng.”

  “But, dear, it was you who finished it, and that’s all that really matters to the Bride.”

  “I should have let the son of a bitch die. I should have let her eat him.”

  “I do believe that’s exactly what I said at the time.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?” he asked and straightened his lapels.

  “Don’t fucking say I fucking told you so.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did.”

  “Not in so many words. Anyway, we’re in agreement, kitten. You should have left that fuckwit Bobby Ng to his fate, the one he’d brought upon himself. Let’s not argue, not when we so obviously agree.”

  By now, I was trying so hard to make Mr. B’s head split open in a steaming burst of brains and bone and gore, my own head was beginning to ache. Maybe I did have skull-rupturing superpowers, but they were about to backfire.

  “I heard he’s down in Cranston these days,” Mr. B said. “Delivers pizzas on the side. Didn’t that used to be your neck of the woods, Cranston?”

  Okay. Stop. Right about here I should probably explain a little bit about Bobby Ng, Demon Hunter. That’s what the asshole called himself. He even had these embossed business cards printed up, and that’s what they said. Bobby Ng was half Chinese, half Portuguese, and generally he used to run around stirring shit up that needed to be left alone. He was aces at not letting sleeping dogs lie. Styled himself all things dark and spooky—an exorcist (he was even ordained by some church or another), parapsychologist, occultist, palm reader, practitioner of witchcraft and voodoo, UFOlogist, a magician with ties to the Illuminati, an escape artist, a Rosicrucian, clairvoyant, and all-around psychic, but was, at best, a sort of cut-rate Van Helsing. Oh, he also claimed to have a fourth-degree black belt in tae kwon do and to be the Worshipful Master of a super-secret Masonic Lodge somewhere in Massachusetts. Fall River, I think he said. Mostly, though, I think he’d just spent too much time watching Scooby-Doo and Peter Cushing films. If there’s a douche bag hall o
f fame, I hope to hell Bobby Ng has a bronze plaque front and center.

  And everyone—the nasties included—had a Bobby Ng story or three. Mr. B, he had about thirty of them. I’m pretty sure the only reason Ng was still alive back then was that he was either too goddamn funny to kill, or not worth the trouble. This isn’t to say he was exactly harmless, mind you, because lots of times an inconvenience can turn into a shitstorm—as was the case with Alice Cregan—but still he lived. Maybe some people are too stupid to die, or maybe it’s just that even the damned need comic relief.

  Once, and this was a year or so after the whole mess with the Bride was over and done with, Mean Mr. B dragged me to a local demon brothel and bookie joint (with which I was already familiar, as you shall see) over on Federal Hill. Neither of us was there to get our freak on with Hell’s outcasts or place a bet on the next Red Sox game. Mr. B, he had some business or another with the proprietor, this utter skank of a succubus who went by the moniker Madam Calamity. Her real name was Drusneth, but I’m not supposed to know that. You know how demons are about their real names. The walls of her parlor were upholstered with a gaudy combination of human skin and orange crushed velvet, and the legs of all the furniture were made of shin bones and barbed wire. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, no . . . I guess you can. Bunches of people get paid to make this kind of shit up. So, strike that.

  Point is, Madam Calamity had this great Bobby Ng story, which she told us right after her and Mr. B had concluded whatever eldritch transaction had brought us to that house of exceptionally ill repute and he’d called me into her office, because he was of the opinion that I just had to meet old Drusneth. Seems holier-than-thou Bobby Ng wasn’t as pure as he let on, and he suffered from a horn fetish. Seriously, to hear this mistress of the night tell it, antelopes gave the guy a hard-on. She said he’d once gone to jail and had to do a month of community service for whacking off in front of the gazelles at the Roger Williams Park Zoo. Anyway, he’d had this crazy-ass plan to storm the brothel and banish the whores back down to Hades or Sheol or wherever (and the bookies too, I guess). Then, he was gonna torch the place, bless the whole block, and sow the scorched ground with salt. Bobby’s plans can get pretty elaborate.