Chapter Four
I woke up at midnight, sitting upright in bed, wondering what my subconscious mind had heard.
The vampire's pale face hung over me like a diseased moon, so close that I was forced to fall back. He wasn't anything pretty from an old vampire movie, not a wistful Brad Pitt or even a ferociously life-hungry Tom Cruise. His dead white skin hosted a raging case of psoriasis and his oily dishwater-brown hair was long enough for its rat-tailed ends to twitch at my face and throat like barbs.
Suddenly I was up against a wall, pinned there by him. Vamps can do that, move faster than human perception. And he wasn't alone. He played lead bloodsucker with a backup trio, all as nauseating as their leader.
They were teen vamps who'd been bitten young. Someone had left them buried and forgotten a bit too long. That had made them ugly and mean.
Lead boy ran his fingernail down my cheek. It was ragged, with black oil and dirt obscuring any moon at the jagged tip. It was like being caressed by a jigsaw blade.
"Cool and white," he said. Then he said my name. "Delilah."
"Looks good in red, I bet," a backup boy cackled.
Suddenly I knew where I was, and it wasn't my bedroom on Moody Avenue.
I was back in the social services group home, and the boys were daylight vampires who were older, bigger, and way stronger than I. They knew just when to waylay me, when no one was around to stop them-except me, and I weighed all of ninety pounds at age twelve.
It was so clear. So real. It would be gang rape and then a group blood tasting. I'd be tainted two unrecoverable ways, even worse than I was now as an unwanted orphan.
I reached into my jeans pocket. Jeans? I'd been accosted in bed. Since when was I wearing jeans?
I was wearing jeans, and the pocket held a cheap plastic handle with a pointed steel blade dusted with diamonds. I'd been ready for this moment all my life and knew what to do.
I lifted my left hand, and then wound it tight in those repellent greasy strands of the lead vamp's hair.
The trio wolf-whistled. "Oh, she likes you, Hacker. Come on, Snow White; time to donate a little blood and a lot of booty."
My right hand snaked up to press the long-missing nail file I'd stolen from Miss Whitcomb, the supervisor, hard into the outer socket of Hacker's left eye.
Bleeding doesn't bother vamps. It can even be a turn-on. But the threat of having their eyes popped out "like a pair of pearls from an oyster shell," as I put it in my best Captain Jack Sparrow voice, did turn their dead-white complexions greener than creme de menthe.
They wouldn't have known what creme de menthe was, since they all had the reading level of a gerbil.
The quartet melted away as I sat up. In bed. I was sweating from my hair to my feet, and my right hand was coiled into such a tight fist that I turned on the bedside lamp to inspect the damage: half-moon fingernail indentations weeping blood.
I took a deep breath. In my own bed.
Alone.
Someone whimpered.
Achilles, looking worried, paced the floor beside my bed. Shorted-legged Lhasas aren't great jumpers. When I lifted him up beside me, he set about licking my face with a hot, loving tongue. He brought the warmth back into me and banished the dream. The nightmare. The trouble was, it was true to life.
My life. I'd been there, done that.
So much for the everyday adventures of an underage ward of the guardian state of Kansas after the Millennium Revelation.
I'd always considered myself the orphan's orphan.
After all, no one had ever adopted me, or tried to. No one had fostered me. I just stayed at the Sedgwick County Home as kids younger and older came and went.
Maybe it was my funky name. Delilah Street. I'd supposedly been found there as an abandoned three-day-old infant, wrapped in one of those storm shelter Army-green blankets.
No dainty pastels for baby me.
But, see, there wasn't a Delilah Street in Wichita. Or Kansas. Or surrounding states. I'd looked. At least I hadn't been found on Lavender Lane. I'd have really developed a chip on my shoulder with that sappy name.
When Y2K and the Millennium Revelation came along, it was exciting that all the bogeymen were coming out of the closet and out from under the bed of night-time stories. Vampires and weres and ghouls, storybook stuff. I still wanted to read about The Little Princess, and Cinderella with those cool glass slippers, and Little Orphan Annie, who'd had a good dog and a sugar daddy, born before the age that recognized child molestation. Then, suddenly, the vamp boys came out of the woodwork and circled, flooding the social service agencies, as unclaimed as rabid dogs. Half-breeds, some of them. All predators. That's when they zeroed in on me.
Luckily, a couple years after the Millennium Revelation, some anonymous benefactor, likely a faceless charity, had sponsored my going to a girls' high school, and, later, to college. When I say sponsored, I mean paid the tuition. Period. Oh, sure, room and board at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School was covered, but nothing beyond that. College was coed and public. I earned some extra scholarship money and worked my way through it in the usual "fries with that?" student mode. No time for foolishness, including much dating.
I brooded about all this the rest of that long nonworking weekend. I'd trashed the roses and gardenias, but their sickly sweet odor lingered like the subtle breath of a funeral home.
Sometimes I had nightmares I didn't remember much of, almost alien abduction dreams. Compared to the remembered shards of my nightmares, a needle in the navel would have been child's play. I glimpsed something like a silver turkey baster and it was pushing between my legs. Made it hard to think of a penis as anything other than a blunt instrument after that. So maybe Undead Ted was right. I was frigid. Cold. In one sense, silver scared the hell out of me, yet called to me in all its more elegant forms.
Sometimes I thought I was a ghoul, gathering dead people's clothes and fragments of their lives from resale shops and estate sales. Compelled to buy weird Victorian sterling serving pieces at fire-sale prices; they were so tiny, so mysterious, so precious. A set of fairy-size forks for some forgotten kind of seafood appetizer. An opium pipe set into a lady's finger ring. Taxco Mexican jewelry with welts of bright blue glass dewing it.
I was born to be odd. Whenever I tried not to be, it went wrong. Like with Ted.
I moped through the weekend, sharing a sip of Bailey's Irish Cream with Achilles. He seemed downcast himself that idle Saturday. We sat together all afternoon watching old movies on cable TV, I stroking his long, soft hair. Saturday night, he collapsed in front of his water dish, panting. I gathered him up, looking into licorice-black eyes that had dulled to the point of not recognizing me. After frantically riffling the Yellow Pages, I raced in my vintage Caddie for the nearest twenty-four-hour vet's offices. On the passenger side, Achilles lay inert. I stroked him the whole way, only one hand on the wheel, but he wasn't even responding to his name now.
The vet took him in with vague guesses and promises of intravenous fluids and constant care and a phone call if anything changed.
Sunday night I stood in a fluorescent light-glared room and they told me he was terminal.
"Never seen anything like it," the weary-faced vet said. "So fast. Blood poisoning."
I pictured small defensive teeth sunk into a bony undead ankle, and sobbed. Achilles lay dead to the world on a steel table, a beautiful dust mop of pale hair just barely breathing. My own breath came raggedly. Getting Achilles had been the first thing I'd done after leaving college and getting a job. He was the first and only creature to ever give me joy and affection. We'd been together for three years. I felt like I was strangling on poisoned cotton candy.
What did I want to do? they asked. Leave the body with them, like a CSI corpse? Or send it to Smokerise Farm for incineration? Rotting in a common grave, or reduced to ashes on my mantel?
What I wanted to do was leave with my dog.
Not... possible. I asked for a lock of his albino-white hair and opted for Smokerise Farm, where, I was assured, the ashes I received were guaranteed to be really his. I could select a suitable... vessel from a book of photographs. I chose one of an Asian shape, with a five-toed Imperial dragon on it. Achilles had been royalty.
Imagine, some people might pass off any old ashes on a bereaved companion.
Achilles was of a breed that had guarded Tibetan holy men for centuries. What if some of their masters' reincarnation mysticism had rubbed off on the dogs? Maybe I was just trying to dull the ache, but I somehow felt that Achilles and I would meet again some day. We might be in different forms, but we'd know each other.
Meanwhile, tomorrow was Monday, not Maybe. I had to go to work again. I felt like the walking dead. In fact, it would be a miracle if I didn't stake Undead Ted on the six o'clock news.
Chapter Five
I hadn't expected life at work to be pleasant after kicking out anchorman Ted, but it seemed he'd been busy over the weekend while I'd been losing my dog.
For one thing, when I entered the studio Undead Ted the Splitting Toad was canoodling with Sheena Coleman by the blue screen. For another, the news director, Fred Fogelmann, called me into his tiny windowless office for a little two-person conference.
"Sit down, Delilah. What's the matter?" He must have just noticed my maroon eye-circles (a problem with tissue-thin pale skin), so this conference was about something else. "You look like hell."
I tried to dredge up a patina of perky. Looking bad was a mortal sin in the TV biz.
He rolled right on before I could defend myself and my raccoon eyes. "Never mind, it doesn't matter."
That was even worse news, but I still couldn't gather any words or gestures to fight my way into a good mood.
"Er, there're some changes in the hopper." Fred was formerly a newspaper City Editor and he still talked like someone with a dwindling pint of rotgut whiskey in his bottom desk drawer.
"Ted's eager to get out on the streets." I bet. "To use his reporter skills again." Again? Really? As if he'd ever had them. "You've done a great job with the ritual crimes beat, but he'll be taking that over. And Sheena wants some street cred too. She'll be doing that 'pornanormal' spot you thought up. Fresh face, you know."
"You mean 'blond and anorexic'," I said, finally peeved enough to growl a little.
"Ann or Rex who?" He shrugged. What a with-it guy on women's issues!
I saw the strategy. Ted had grabbed the juicy beats I'd made mine. What's better to cover than sex and violence? Especially exotic sex and violence. Who did Ted think he was, his journalistic idol, sob-soul brother Geraldo Rivera? Really! Vampires and Geraldo are so over! And what did I get in exchange?