Blood Oranges Read online

  The pair of them couldn’t have been more than ten yards from me. Bobby was standing in a knee-deep snowdrift clutching something that looked like an antique blunderbuss in one hand (I shit you not) and a crucifix in the other. The vamp was perched atop an especially tall headstone, right in front of him. Fuck me, but she hardly even looked real. I’d only seen that one vampire in the alley outside the Starbucks on Thayer, but this nasty, she was a whole different ball game. The air around her swirled, the snow whipped up into a silvery whirlwind, and her skin was dark as pitch. And yeah, she did, in fact, have wings, like a goddamn prehistoric reptile and at least fifteen or twenty feet across. I couldn’t see her face, thank fuck. I didn’t want to see her face. But I could tell by Bobby’s expression that he saw it, plain as day.

  What happened next, it happened so fast there wasn’t time to wonder if I was doing the right thing. There wasn’t time to consider that, just maybe, ol’ Mr. B was full of shit about that crossbow, which, by the way, I’d only ever had occasion to fire at soda cans lined up on a brick wall. And I’d missed every single one of them. What happened next, well . . . you hear people talk about shit going all slo-mo in the split second before a car crash, right? It wasn’t like that at all. If anything, time seemed to rev its engine and speed the hell up.

  The vampire leapt from the headstone, and it moved the way a lion with wings would move. If lions had wings. If griffons were real (and for all I know, they are). Part pounce, part glide. Its hands were talons. It was stark naked and almost thin enough for me to make out every rib and vertebra, every bone in its skeleton. In the moonlight, its skin looked like velveteen, and that snowy whirlwind trailed out behind it. Bobby, he screamed like a girl in a slasher flick, which is to say, like me, tried to back away, and fell on his butt. The blunderbuss, pointing skyward now, went off and blew a couple of branches off a poplar tree. They landed on him.

  I aimed the crossbow like I’d been born with it in my hand, like it was maybe a natural extension of my arm. I leveled it at the nasty, and I squeezed the trigger. I squeezed the trigger twice. And the vamp crumpled in an ebony heap mere inches from Bobby Ng. Me, I just stood there, shivering, suddenly freezing, my heart pounding hard enough it made me dizzy. My arm drifted a foot or so to the left, and I squeezed the trigger again. A third bolt whizzed from the crossbow and hit Bobby Ng just above his right knee. He screamed even louder than he’d screamed when the vamp rushed him. He called me a bitch and a few other things I won’t waste time repeating. He rolled around in the snow, caught beneath the branches, clutching his leg and bleeding all over the place.

  My pulse was normal again, and the dizziness passed as quickly as it had come.

  “You really are a fucking moron,” I said, the February night making a puff of fog from each and every word. “I ought to put another of these right between your legs.”

  I noticed he was trying to pull the bolt out, and I told him it would only bleed worse if he did, and he called me a bitch again. I lowered the bow, and stared at the dead vampire. It’s not like in stories (she said, again). They don’t turn into a steaming pile of goo, or quickly decompose as decades or centuries of decay catch up with them all at once. They sure as hell don’t go up in a nice clean puff of dust. They just lie there, like any corpse. In this case, a corpse that only looked vaguely human, and that I knew Mr. B didn’t want one of the Swan Point rent-a-cops stumbling across, a monstrosity he wouldn’t be at all happy to see splashed across the front page of the Providence Journal. Me, I didn’t give a shit. But, back then, I wasn’t working for me.

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “Guess I shouldn’t have shot you after all, Bobby. Now I have to clean this mess up all on my own.”

  “She was mine,” he whined. “They promised. She was supposed to be mine. You fucking cheated, Quinn. They swore Cregan was mine.”

  At the time, I had no idea what he meant by that. Later, though, it would all be crystal clear.

  “Yeah, well,” I told him, “now she’s no one’s. Now, she’s just meat. Shut up, before someone hears you.”

  I went back for my bag, dug out the huge hunting knife stashed there (another gift from B, cause he’s such a generous soul and all), then walked back to the remains of Alice Cregan. While Bobby rolled around in the snow, managing to push away the branches that had fallen on him, whimpering and begging me to call an ambulance, I cut open the vampire’s chest and sliced out its heart. It was the shade of red that comes just before black. I don’t know a word for that color and don’t feel like reaching for the thesaurus, but that’s the color it was, and it was still beating. Weakly. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been holding the thing.

  “I’ve half a mind to make you eat this,” I told Bobby, and he stopped rolling in the snow just long enough to give me the middle finger.

  “Raw,” I added.

  There’s not much left to tell. It went pretty much like the Bride said the night she turned me. I decapitated her, burned the heart to ashes (which is a lot harder, and takes a lot longer, than you might think, by the way), gutted the vamp’s velvety black cadaver, stuffed it with stones (not bricks, as the Bride had claimed; where was I gonna get bricks?), then dragged it through the snowy cemetery, following one of the lanes leading down to the Seekonk River. Fortunately, it wasn’t frozen solid. I pushed the body into the water, dark as slate. I was relieved that she had the decency to sink.

  I wanted to wash my hands, but I’d probably have gotten frostbite. Instead, I followed my footprints (and the gory furrow the dead vampire had made) in the snow back to the mausoleum. By then, of course, the smack in the needle was ice. Oh, and Bobby was gone. There was a bloody trail where he’d limped off to lick his wounds. Maybe he’d wandered away to look for the conspicuously absent security guys. I slung the bag over my shoulder and hiked back to the place where I’d climbed over the wall. It had started snowing again, hard. In another couple of hours the sun would be up, and all I wanted was to get back home, fix, and sleep about twenty hours. I headed south down Blackstone Boulevard, hoping I didn’t encounter any unduly curious policemen along the way.

  And that’s the night I killed Alice Cregan. At least, that’s pretty much all I knew about it six months later, sitting there in the weeds beneath the interstate.

  * * *

  About two p.m., maybe two thirty, I was pretty damn sure I’d puzzled out the answer to Aloysius’ riddle. Also, I needed a cigarette so bad it hurt. Maybe Mercy had cured me of the need for junk, but my body still craved nicotine. Just something else that doesn’t make much sense, right? Anyway, I called the number I’d given the troll, and after six rings, Mr. B answered. I told him I needed fifty bucks. He said no problem, and I was instructed to meet one of his mollies at the corner of Gano and Pitman. Which worked for me. Boy arrived in a candy-apple red C6 Corvette coupe. The top was down, and when he gave me the fifty, I almost asked for a ride. But I knew he knew what I’d become. I could tell by the way he flinched when he handed me the bill that he was scared shitless of me. I let him off the hook. I just didn’t feel like bothering with the spooked kid.

  I had the presence of mind to head back to my place, shower, and change out of the bloodstained clothes. I found a tank top and a pair of jeans that were merely dirty, then headed off in the direction of a shopping plaza just north of the rusty old drawbridge I mentioned earlier. Just north of where I’d awakened the day before. I ducked inside a grocery store and bought a pack of Camel Wides and twenty-four king-sized 3 Musketeers bars (and did my best to ignore the smell of blood wafting from the meat department). There’s a liquor store next door, so I picked up a bottle of the ginger brandy Aloysius loved so much. I probably could have gotten a cheap prepaid cell phone at the Rite Aid across the parking lot, but I most likely didn’t have enough money. I doubt he wanted the damn phone, anyway, and if it turned out he did, I could get it later. Instead, I headed down Gano again, stopping at a convenience store where I grabbed the latest copies of Hustler and
Juggs (and that killed the fifty). The clerk made a joke about dykes. Then I lugged this veritable cornucopia of earthly delights back to the overpass.

  The domino guys were out, and they shouted at me as I passed.

  “Where you headed in such a hurry, chica?”

  “Gotta see a man about a horse,” I shouted back, and they hooted and returned to their game.

  I was beginning to feel hungry, a faint gnawing in the pit of my belly, even though vamps usually only need to feed every couple of nights. Maybe it was the loup bite throwing the schedule off, I thought, and tried not to dwell on my nagging stomach. The day was hot as fuck, the sun a white-hot bastard in the sky, and I’d started to feel that peculiar tingle on the back of my neck. I found myself grateful for the cover of the overpass. There was no one around, so I set the three plastic bags on the ground and shouted for Aloysius. The special shadows appeared, and, just like always, he trundled forth, those long ears dragging along, his elephantine feet raising dust as he came.

  “Already?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow and frowning. “Already has my answer, Quinn lass?”

  “I thought I wasn’t me anymore.”

  “Easier than making up some other name,” he said and shrugged his wide bony shoulders.

  “Yeah, already. I figured it out, and I come bearing presents. So, don’t look so glum.”

  Aloysius peered in each of the three bags, then looked up at me. “Where’s the phone?” he asked. “That was the deal, yes? What good’s the number I got without the phone?”

  I groaned and stared up at the steel and concrete overhead, towards all those unseen cars racing to and fro. “I was in a hurry. I’ll get you the phone later.” I wasn’t about to give him mine.

  “But that was the deal, it was.”

  “Jesus, dude. Look at all this shit,” and I motioned towards the candy, the booze, and the porn. “With all this shit, you can eat and drink and jerk off until you’re half comatose.”

  “But that wasn’t the deal,” he protested, still frowning, picking at a huge mole on the end of his nose.

  “It’s gonna have to do for now. I think I know the answer, and I need to be sure I got it right.”

  “You think? You call when you only think, not know for sure and unequivocal? I was fair busy, I was.”

  Aloysius had never not been glad to see me. But I got it. I wasn’t me anymore. I was a facsimile, a cheap imitation. I was this thing the Bride had made of me.

  “I’ll have the phone to you by tomorrow evening,” I said. He stopped picking at the mole and licked his lips thoughtfully, indecisively.

  “Just tell me if I’m right, okay?”

  “Fine. Can’t expect someone dead and wolfish to play by the rules. Quinn girl always played by the rules, didn’t she? Quinn lass, she never tried to cheat me.”

  “I’m not trying to—”

  “No more wasting of my time,” he grumbled, waving a hand at me. “You so smart, lass. What’s my answer?” He pulled a candy bar from the bag, not bothering to remove the wrapper before he popped it into his mouth.

  “The child of woman newly forged, that’s an infant. And the pump that drives the roses—”

  “Rosies,” he mumbled around the 3 Musketeers.

  “Fucking rosies, that’s a heart. The whole round about, round about business, that one was hard, but you were talking about the moon.”

  He chewed and watched me.

  “Bloody Breast, that was almost too easy. That was a gimme. It’s a robin.”

  “Soldiers come in single file?” he asked, reaching for the brandy.

  “March. Specifically, the month of March.”

  Aloysius nodded, then broke the paper and plastic seals on the bottle. He tossed the cap aside.

  “The last line, that was the kicker. ‘Aphrodite’s child tills loam.’ Took me two hours, that one line, cause she had like a hundred children. But the one you meant was Hermaphroditus. And the line, that refers to earthworms.”

  The troll belched. “Fine and true, one by one. But now you gotta add it all up, yes? Add it one to one to one and one, and tell me the sum.”

  I crossed my arms, so fucking sure of myself I wanted to smirk. But I didn’t. “A full moon, and specifically, the Full Worm Moon, the full moon in March. I can break the spell if I sacrifice an infant who was born on the night of the Full Worm Moon, and remove its heart.”

  Now, knowing the answer to the riddle, like I thought I did, don’t get it in your head that means I was too keen on the idea of murdering a baby. But I figured I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

  Aloysius took another swig from the bottle, then shook his shaggy head, all that lichen-colored hair whipping back and forth. “Nope. Wrong. Don’t bother me again until you got the solution not for maybe, but for certain.” And the special shadows reappeared and began to slither towards him like a living oil spill.

  “Bullshit! That’s the answer.”

  “Can’t lie to you. Not on a riddle. You said yourself. You have intimate knowledge of Lady Underhill’s rules. Gotta go now.” And he snatched up the bag of candy and the bag with the two magazines.

  “Don’t you fucking dare!” I shouted and seized his arm. He shook me off as easy as I’d flick a mosquito away, and I was left sprawling in the dirt.

  “When you know. Not before,” he growled, his eyes burning like embers in his skull. The shadows swallowed him, and there I was, alone again.

  And what do you say?

  What do you do?

  Me, I went back to my stinking, roach-infested apartment. I realized I was sleepy, maybe sleepier than I’d ever been in my whole life. Sure, I’d been up since twilight the day before. But I knew it wasn’t just that. Maybe I’d gotten the riddle wrong, but I understood the sudden grogginess perfectly well. I went home, crawled onto the bare mattress lying in a corner of one room, and—like any good vampire—I slept the sleep of the dead.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LIMBO AND CLEMENCY

  Just read back over the first three chapters of this thing, and seeing everything that’s been left out and told the wrong way round (never mind the bald-faced lies), I feel it’s necessary to call attention to the fact that I’m not a writer. In fact, I am most emphatically not a writer. An actual writer, he or she probably wouldn’t be making all these stupid mistakes right and left, the omissions and continuity errors and whatnot. For example, I didn’t mention how B slipped me a pair of sunglasses when I showed up at Babe’s on the Sunnyside (before the first kill, not after). They were a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers with fancy tortoiseshell frames, and I’m thinking maybe he’d had them since the 1980s. Don’t know why I got that impression. They just had this 1980s vibe about them.

  “Don’t want anyone getting a good look at those peepers, kitten,” he’d said. “You’re going to need to be as inconspicuous as possible, and those new eyes of yours just scream bad news.”

  So, yeah. If you want a point A to point Z narrative, you’re sure as hell not gonna get it here.

  As for the lies, I’m guessing writers lie at least as much as junkies, and maybe more, so I’m gonna cut myself some slack in that department. Oh, and if you’re thinking, “But wait, Quinn, she ain’t a junky anymore. She’s a vampire.” To which I would reply, only difference between the me of now and the me of those days before the Bride is that now it’s blood, not heroin. As William Burroughs (yeah, I quote him a lot) wrote, “Once a junky always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.” So, there you go, constant reader. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Anyway, just remember this is a book being written by someone who dropped out of school when she was twelve, and after that whatever she learned about grammar and composition was cribbed from library books.

  Jesus, why do I even feel the need to explain such a thing. It ought to be obvious, right? And who do I think will ever read this?

  Okay, so now it’s the day after all that business with Aloysius. And I tried to cal
l Mr. B, but all I got was this message telling me the number I’d called was no longer in service. Sitting on my filthy mattress in my filthy apartment, I must have tried the number twenty or thirty times in two hours. The sun was getting low, and I was starving half to fucking death, and I still had a boatload of questions no one had bothered to answer. I started to wonder if maybe Aloysius had gotten his paws on a phone after all. Maybe he found a pay phone somewhere (though I doubt any of those still exist), or maybe he’d eaten someone and, later on, found their mobile while picking his teeth. Maybe he’d been ringing Mr. B the whole time I was sleeping, and finally B had the number disconnected. Bought a new phone. Whatever.

  I haven’t really taken the time to say a whole lot about just how messed up Miss Mercy Brown had left me. I suppose I take it for granted people know this shit, when obviously they don’t. They know the shit they read in books and see in movies, and that’s about it. And, as I have been pointing out all along, most of that pop-culture lore is nonsense. Of course, you gotta take my word for that, and—don’t forget—junkies are, by definition, liars. So you believe whichever parts you wanna believe and chuck the rest. Won’t be no skin off my nose.

  In between trying to get B on the phone, I’d go to the cruddy bathroom and stare at my face in the cruddy bathroom mirror. I kept hoping that I wouldn’t be so shocked the next time I looked, but every time I went back to that mirror, same . . . ah, what would a shrink say? Maybe that I was experiencing intense dissociative disruptions triggered by a traumatic situation. Me, I’d say I was freaked out as freaked out gets, but I guess that’s a case of six of one, half dozen of the other. All semantics. Anyway, my skin was already sickly pale, and those eyes Mean Mr. B was worried about, yeah, full-on vamp. Some of the identifying characteristics of bloodsuckers take years, or even centuries, to manifest. But not the eyes. The Quinn staring back at me from the medicine cabinet looking glass had eyes robbed of even the least trace of their former humanity. Only, there was a twist. These were not the shiny black eyes of just any vampire, devoid of pupil, iris, and sclera—shark eyes, like I said earlier on. No, these were almost those eyes, but shot through with amber threads. So, I guessed that was the loup part of me showing through. The sight of them made me dizzy, and did nothing good for the mounting nausea from the hunger. From the need to eat, or fix, or whatever you wanna call it.