Psalm of Vampires, Chapter Two
Rude Awakening
I was thinking of Charly’s slovenly ways as I drifted off to sleep. The night’s previous hunt with Charly had been enjoyable until the end when he again got a little sloppy. On second thought, no. He wasn’t being sloppy. He had clear intent in this case. Let me explain.
There had been a brazen murder in Piedmont Park. A local woman walking her dogs was killed in the middle of the day. So were her three dogs. The police were useless. “We have no clues,” went their lament. Charly visited the taped-off crime scene and sniffed out the killer in seconds.
While the sun was setting, we found the killer in the attic of a three-story apartment building that had six nice units and one dilapidated attic apartment. How do I know they were nice units? We checked out each one. When you’ve lived for as long as I have, there isn’t a dwelling you can’t easily break into.
We checked out the cretin’s attic apartment when he went for a walk. I hoped he wasn’t out looking for another woman to kill. “Serial killers seem to have gaps between kills,” said Charly when I expressed that concern.
After we checked out the attic, we were able to confirm that it was the attic man who had killed the woman. We could smell traces of her blood. Not much, but enough.
We ran like hell chasing the killer’s scent. One woman who saw us barreling down the sidewalk on Highland while pushing her baby carriage stopped and watched us. She’ll probably never try to tell the story.
What would she say? “So, I saw these two guys running really fast. Like faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.” That’s a no-response type of story. We were gone before she could have whipped her phone out to record us.
We found him at an ice cream shop full of kids. They must have all been coming back from a soccer game because they wore blue uniforms with shorts and yellow sports shoes of some kind. He looked like he was trying to talk to one of the girls, maybe even buy her something, but one of the adults pulled her away. The killer gave the adult a dirty look, then turned toward the counter to order. We decided to make a scene.
Two gawky teenage boys were running the counter. I went in through the front door, and Charly went in through the back. Charly found the electrical box and switched off the lights.
One of the things I haven’t mentioned is that vampires can yowl in almost any octave. With enough decibels to rattle the store windows, I screamed in a thick, muffled baritone, “GET OUT!”
The kids scrambled through the door and piled onto the sidewalk outside, screeching for their lives. Charly and I knew that the killer wouldn’t run out with them. We didn’t know why; we just knew he wouldn’t. Charly hid his face with one hand and gently escorted the teenage counter clerks outside through the back with his other hand while I kept my eyes on the killer.
The killer stood staring at me with a half-pint tub of ice cream, holding one of those flat little wooden spoons ice cream shops give you. He was a big guy. Not afraid. He had a long bushy red beard and 137 freckles on his face. I counted them. I don’t know why I counted them. I was curious, I guess. It only took me a second or two as we stood staring at each other. “Hi, freckle face,” I smiled.
“Who the fuck are you?” he snarled.
“Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is who you are.”
The kids outside were staring through the window by now. That wouldn’t do. I pulled down the shop’s sunshades.
“Oh yeah?” said the killer as I pulled the final shade over the door window. “And who the fuck am I, you twat?”
I spun around and smiled. “You’re dinner. Charly!” I yelled. “Dinner is served! Hurry, we have about a minute and a half before uninvited guests with guns let themselves in.”
Charly came rushing in. “So sorry. The counter help was being difficult.” I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that his mouth wasn’t covered with blood.
Charly glared at the killer, who threw his ice cream at Charly as if it was coffee or, God, I don’t know what he was thinking. He probably panicked because Charly suddenly filled a room that had seemed comparatively empty.
He tried to run between Charly and me because it was his only escape route, but I caught him and threw him over the counter. Charly used one arm to leverage his hurdle over the counter in a way no modern human could imagine, and I went around to the other side of the counter to meet him.
I opened the display case. “Do you mind?” I asked Charly.
“Go for it,” he said.
I took a tub of pistachio ice cream, turned it upside down, and pushed it into the top of the killer’s head, giving him a crown of sorts.
“Save some for me,” said Charly. He was talking about blood, not ice cream.
“Always,” I replied. I always went first because, as I said, Charly’s a slob.
I prayed briefly. The man screamed as my jaws fastened to his neck. I delighted to the way his delicious, oxygenated blood pulled from his arteries into my mouth, creating an almost uncontrollable desire within me. But we had so little time. I’d have to tamper my impulses.
I stopped, stood up, and waved my hand palm up toward the sunken body as an invitation to Charly. Charly dug in on the other side, tearing at the man’s neck like a lion finishing off a wildebeest.
Here’s the difference between Charly and me. I left Charly with a nice, pristine neck. If Charly had taken a bite on my side, he would have barely noticed I had been there. I leave two clean puncture marks that a surgeon would die for. My mouth and lips are always clean. I don’t even need a napkin when I’m finished. Charly, on the other hand, well, perhaps he just enjoys tearing up flesh more than I do. When Charly was done, his chin looked like it had been dipped in red paint, his scarlet grin dripping with bloody pleasure. The killer’s head was nearly severed from its neck.
“Time to go,” I said as a cop entered the shop with his gun drawn. I hadn’t heard any sirens. I had no time to think, but I realized later he had probably arrived by bicycle or motorcycle. Luckily, he was alone, so I jumped over the counter and wrapped my arm around his neck from behind before he could react. I pushed him so hard out the door that he rolled sideways for several feet. This gave us time to run out through the back.
That’s what I was thinking about as I drifted off into sleep. I fell asleep to a mixture of the cop standing there looking at me, Charly’s bloody grin, and the sound of my violin from a few hours before.
The sleep didn’t last long. I normally only sleep about an hour per night anyway. Sometimes, I’ll go for a week or more without sleep. I don’t think I was asleep for more than a few minutes when I was startled by a sound in my bedroom.
There was a time when my bedroom would have been filled with artifacts from across the world. These days, there was a large round bed, enough for several people if the occasion warranted it, a large navy down-filled sofa, and an original Picasso painting called ‘Guernica’, which I obtained in the 1950s from the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid with the help of the world’s best art counterfeiter, who happened to be a vampire named Rafael. Rafael and I snuck his counterfeit of ‘Guernica’ into the Museo Reina Sofía, where it sits today. And I, of course, borrowed the real one. I may give it back eventually. A large chair upholstered with alligator leather sat across the bedroom against massive display windows.
That was it. The carpeting was plush, the walls were painted a reddish-brown ochre. I was able to control the ceiling’s recessed lighting with a remote I kept on a nightstand that curved along one part of the bed. There were two bedroom doors, but they shared the same space closing against each other, and a large bathroom to the right of the doors. There was a 120-inch video screen hooked up to streaming TV services, but it was hidden within the wall thanks to some carpentry and electronic wizardry.
My point in bringing up my boring bedroom décor is to emphasize that there weren’t many places for someone to hide. The couch and chairs were both pressed against the wall or windows. The bathroom had an extravagant alarm system because I didn’t want downstairs male influencers taking a piss in my bathroom. The security system of the home itself was world-class, but it didn’t much matter because the influencers living in the home were constantly partying. If someone walked up the stairs to my bedroom, the influencers would just assume it was a welcome guest. That was the Achilles heel, of course, of the home’s security system.
So, I shouldn’t have been startled when I was awoken by a sound, considering how easy it was to enter my room. I reached for the remote to turn on the lights, but it wasn’t on the nightstand. “What the hell?” I said out loud.
“Looking for this?” came a female voice from the doors. I didn’t need lighting to know who it was. Besides, Moreland glows faintly in the dark because she comes from the Obayifo line of vampires from Africa, an offshoot of the same subspecies as Charly.
I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping I was having a terrible nightmare, but as insurance, I said, “Go away.”
She didn’t. She launched into a diatribe like she often does. “What were you thinking?” she yelled in her high-pitched voice. She was wearing her usual translucent white robe and nothing underneath. I never figured out how she walked around in public like that. Or even if she did. She possessed methods for traveling that I didn’t.
Her hair was usually dyed dark black, just the way I like it, but naturally curly, not the silky straight stuff that I loved most. Now, it was a rose-colored red and straighter than usual.
Her almond-shaped blue eyes were glaring at me. Her normally subtle blue phosphorous glow was pulsating, so I knew she was pissed. Sometimes she faked being pissed because she liked to yell at me about things, but she has a tell that she can’t escape from, so I always know if she’s genuinely mad. She was mad.
“First you make a spectacle of yourself with this ridiculous streaming thing you do. Which is bad-stupid enough. But then you get all over the internet with this violin bullshit. And then, then, you do a bloody ass kill in broad daylight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s all over the bloody news is what I’m talking about. The ice cream shop vampire murder is what they’re calling it already. What the hell is wrong with you? An ice cream shop? Full of kids?”
“Nobody believes in vampires. They’re just fun and games to these people. The Cullens and the two Bellas, Bela and Bella, and Lestat de Lioncourt. Besides, what makes you think I did that? Not exactly my M.O.”
She ignored me. “And then… You know, our people spend thousands of years mastering the art of stealth and discretion, and you blow it all up in two days. You’re a shit. Do you have any idea how good forensic technology is these days?”
“Good enough to catch vampires who can shape-shift their fingerprints?” I smiled. “Can you leave now?”
“You’re smarter than this. You know better, too.”
“Again, I ask you, why do you assume it’s me?”
“Oh ok. It’s one of the thousands of other vampires who live around here.”
“Well, we aren’t the only ones here.”
“Yeah, we pretty much are. In this city. There’s that guy you hang around with. Charly? And let’s see, umm, yeah. That’s it. And me when I am stupid enough to check up on you.” She was usually hiding in the woods in upper New York State.
“You’re not my mother. I don’t need nor want you checking up on me. In fact, I’d rather drink battery acid.”
“If I was your mother, I’d have aborted.”
I was still lying in bed. I crossed one leg over the other. “You’re being harsher than usual in your judgments of me, my vampish sex pistol.” She threw the remote at me so hard that it lodged into the wall behind me. I reached behind and pulled it out of the drywall. “Huh. You’d think it would have broken into a million pieces.” I examined it. “Craftsmanship in the twenty-first century? Who’d a thunk it?”
She sunk herself into the chair, which made the sound leather would make if it hadn’t been used for a few years, which it probably hadn’t.
“I guess you’re staying awhile?” I asked. I grabbed my phone from the nightstand.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I may as well see if we can order some food.”
“Good God, you’re such a sociopath.”
“You think?” I asked as I tapped. “Oh look, an Italian beef place serving until 5 am. Can you believe it?” Her angry glow-pulse was becoming a strobe light. “I’ll order two. We have champagne downstairs. Should I have someone fetch us some?”
“If I can find a way to kill you, yes. I only drink champagne to celebrate.”
I ordered the food, knowing her sandwich would not be eaten, but not caring. I put the phone back on the nightstand. “Look, I’ll admit, Charly got a little rambunctious. But the guy we fed on killed that woman in Piedmont Park.”
She shrugged. “So?”
“So that’s not cool.”
“Of course it isn’t, but we don’t interfere with human stupidity or depravity. Thousands of years have taught us to lay low. Again. I ask you. What the hell came over you? You’ve always been bound to this. This works for us, Atticus. This has always fuckin’ worked for us.” If her strobe-like glow wasn’t telling me how mad she was, her calling me by my real name did. She always called me by my “local” name, no matter the era.
I was being a smartass with her because I knew she was right. Charly and I broke a lot of unwritten rules. I wasn’t willing to admit that to her.
“So what are we gonna do?” she asked me.
“We?”
“This affects me, too.”
“Not really. We all just lay low, and it will blow over. We kicked the kids out before we fed. They didn’t see anything. The cops probably by now realize that the dead guy is the killer of the dead woman in Piedmont. The first thing they’ll ask is, who is this guy that got himself slaughtered in an ice cream shop? They’ll search his place, find enough clues he’s their man, and that will be that. His death will be a cold case for a hundred years, but they’ll celebrate finding out that the dead guy is their man, and they won’t give a flying shit. The dude was a fucknuckle anyway.”
“Glad you’ve thought this through,” she said sarcastically.
“Not really, but you know how things work.”
“What if this Charly guy is out of control? Have you thought about that?”
“He’s not,” I said confidently.
“All of us feel the lust for blood every time we feed,” she said. I had felt it in a big way in the ice cream shop. We always feel it to one degree or another, but the evening’s pull had been especially strong.
“It happens,” she said. “It takes over. There was Bjorn Petursson in Iceland in the 1500s. Practically took out the whole country. There was Genipperteinga in Germany around the same time. There was half of fuckin’ Serbia in the 1700s, for God’s sake. There’s the leader of Russia today. The fucking plague for God’s sake. Shall I go on?”
“Those vampires caused us a lot of grief, yeah, but Charly’s been with us for 10,000 years, and he’s been a slob his whole life. That’s his only crime. Let it go.”
Her glow began to ebb. As angry as she was, and as much as Moreland enjoyed ripping me a new one, she basically trusted my instincts. “Okay,” she said calmly. “Shit. What a mess.”
“The reason I hunt with him is that he likes to pick on jerks like I do. That’s it. We’ve gone on hunts for ninety years. I’ve seen him in action. He’s cool.”
Moreland shook her head. “We really need to fuck more, Jade. We get along better when we fuck.”
“You mean, you yell at me less when we fuck. Anyway, no,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t trust you. Not after Singapore.” I have probably brought up Singapore a hundred times.
“We have fucked since Singapore.”
“Not happily,” I said.
Moreland sighed and sat silently before announcing, “I’m gonna go.”
“You do that,” I said, turning over. I cringed inside at the stab of the wound I was delivering to her. It hurt me, too, but my cold reply was out, and I couldn’t take it back.
I loved Moreland. But I hated her just as much.
I had dismissed Moreland’s concerns out of hand but that didn’t change the likelihood that things could get messy.
The internet noise from my violin act was growing almost in direct proportion to the social media trendlines of the ice cream parlor killing, which was now a bigger story than the Piedmont Park murder. This meant that a heavy volume of internet noise centered around me. No wonder Moreland was pissed.
Daphne forwarded about ten thousand Instagram posts the next day from various people praising the violin solo. Moreland forwarded about ten thousand and one posts relaying what the Atlanta Police Department was saying about the two killings.
Things seemed manageable until a third killing popped up early afternoon that same day, this one also in Piedmont Park, and this one also in broad daylight.
I texted Moreland as soon as I saw a news item about the third killing, deciding I’d get in front of it by attaching the text, “Don’t even start” to a news post I forwarded to her.
She replied with a spiteful curse, and we were off to the races again.
The cops stopped hiding their concerns. The Atlanta P.D. Facebook post was blunt:
“We want the community to stay calm, but we also want everyone to be careful. Do not go to any park alone. When we say don’t go to the park alone, we don’t mean bring your dog for protection. We mean be sure you go with another person. Bring pepper spray and be careful.”
Another police department post stated that the first Piedmont death had been caused by a knife wound to the neck. This little detail had been left out of earlier reports, which had only mentioned a knife attack. The second Piedmont death was also a knife wound. Specifically, the carotid artery was severed. The cops were now saying that was also the cause of death of the man in the ice cream shop.
I called Charly. “Have you seen the news?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Our man couldn’t have done this new one. He’s dead.”
“The police are saying our ice cream shop friend died the same way. Basically, a clean slice of the carotid.”
“Really. I didn’t hear that. What do you think?”
“I think I saw a messy scene from the bloodiest ice cream party in history. I have no idea what game the police might be playing. Oh. And by the way? Moreland is pissed.”
“Moreland is always pissed.”
“She stopped by yesterday while I was trying to sleep. Called you ‘that Charly guy.’”
“Ouch.”
I laughed at that. “I dunno. I told her it would all blow over, but this new killing adds a delta I’m not crazy about.”
“It’s too soon for a copycat killer,” said Charly, sounding worried.
“Right. Can’t be a copycat. The cops only released the news that the first murder was a neck wound today. After the second murder.”
“Shit.”
“I know, right?”
At that instant, I got a message from one of the influencers downstairs: “The police are here. Asking for you.”
I was cozy in my bed. I had been surfing and streaming a little from the bed all afternoon. I sure as hell didn’t want to have a chat with Atlanta’s finest. I texted, “Tell them I’ll be right down,” anyway.
“It just got better, Charly,” I said into the phone.
“How so?”
“Cops are here.”
“Why?”
I laughed. “Why do you think? The influencers are making too much noise?”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Sure, let’s make it easy for them,” I said. Charly laughed. “If they give me too much trouble, I’ll just add to their carotid artery severance count.” Charly was silent. “Kidding. I’ll call you later.”
“Be safe,” said Charly.
“Tell that to the cops,” I replied. Charly sighed as I tapped off the call.
I tried to think about how I could be my most flamboyant self. I didn’t want the police for one moment to think they were dealing with someone they would consider normal. I ran to the wardrobe room across the hall and found a long, pink feathered shawl and some slacks with pink and black polka dots. I didn’t need a shirt because I was able to wrap the shawl around my upper body. I grabbed a mandolin from the music room.
As I descended the stairs, I strummed an oldie, “Mandolin Wind.” There were some influencers at the bottom of the stairs sipping juicy-looking booze drinks. “Dude,” one of them said. “The mandolin, too? Whoa! Hey, guys, listen to that.” I smiled as I found the last steps. One of the women approached me and pushed open my shawl enough to expose a pectoral muscle and rub it as I neared the door to greet the police, who were inside glaring with a pair of stern looks.
The police were wearing suits: A young Black man and an older white guy with a bald head and a small tuft of white hair under his chin. He was burly with a heavily pockmarked face, like a middle-aged TV wrestler who had successfully endured fighting his way through his middle years. His dark gray suit jacket was too snug. It barely fit.
The Black guy was thin but looked to be in shape, too, and was almost twice as tall as the white guy. His suit coat was too baggy. I wanted to ask them to switch suit coats for the betterment of humanity.
I set the mandolin on a nearby table and ushered the two cops out of the foyer into the well-appointed living room before they had a chance to introduce themselves. The Black guy was carrying a satchel and nearly swung it into a blue and white Qing dynasty vase as he entered the room.
“What can I do for you on this fine afternoon?” I asked. I made sure they found comfortable seats on a couch across from the home’s Érard grand piano. I sat on a velvet Victorian parlor chair next to them.
“You’ve heard about the knife attacks recently?” asked the white guy.
“Yes, of course.” I looked into the foyer, where people were cavorting. “They have, too. You wouldn’t know it, huh?”
“What is this place?” asked the Black guy accusingly.
I pulled out my phone and pulled up an Instagram home page of Fang HQ and handed it to him. “This,” I said.
He shook his head while he looked at it and turned his palm up in the universal language that says, “What the hell?”
“Anyway,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
The Black guy rolled his eyes as he handed my phone back to me.
“I’m Detective Garrison,” said the guy who looked like a wrestler. “And this is Detective Owens. We’re investigating one of the murders. You were identified as being at the scene of the crime just before it happened.”
I leaned in toward the nearest officer, Garrison, and said, “Do tell.”
“One of the kids at the ice cream shop,” said Owens. “ID’d you. Said you were there moments before the vic got his throat sliced. Possibly assaulted a police officer.”
I wanted to correct him by saying the victim’s throat wasn’t sliced, but then I remembered that it actually was. Sort of.
“It’s Halloween,” I said. “People masquerade as me all the time. Go to a costume party this weekend. You’ll see.”
Sometimes when I sleep, I feel weird for several hours after I wake up. I thought I heard a buzzing in the room behind me. Sort of like what you might expect a mechanical fly to sound like. I thought I was just feeling weird and hearing things.
“So,” said Garrison. “You’re saying you weren’t there?”
“I don’t even like ice cream. Well, I do. But my body doesn’t.” I took off my shawl. “Does this look like an ice cream aficionado’s body?” I looked at Owens when I said this. The buzzing continued.
Owens wasn’t impressed. “If we never busted a guy because he says he doesn’t like a certain kinda food, we’d never bust anybody. Why the hell are you so blue? Do you dye your skin or something?”
Garrison gave him a cross look but didn’t say anything.
I draped my shawl around my chest and looked behind me for the buzzing sound.
“Are you okay?” asked Garrison.
The buzzing stopped. “I’m fine,” I said.
I wanted to sass back at Owens by saying, “You guys never bust anybody anyway,” but I held my tongue and instead started thinking about who I should find as an alibi.
Charly was an obvious no. I thought about Daphne. No, she’d be terrified at just about every aspect of this. Surprisingly, I decided on Moreland. But she’d resist talking to the police because her skin was so damned red. Plus, she glowed when she was angry. It was a conundrum, but I had plenty of friends. I’d figure something out.
“Do you have anyone who can corroborate your statement?” asked Garrison.
Instead of answering, I said, “You know, Garrison is the perfect name for a detective. If I was making a police procedural movie or TV show, my main detective would be named that.”
“Please answer the question, Mr. Mourning,” Owens commanded.
“You can call me Jade,” I said to him, winking.
“A name, please,” said Owens. “Unless you’d like to go to the station and talk things over there.”
This was becoming a problem. Fuck it, I thought. “Moreland. Contact my friend Moreland.”
They asked for her contact details, which I reluctantly provided. Garrison stood up, then Owens. “Thank you for your time,” said Garrison as I stood up. He strode past me. Owens followed him and made a point of bumping his shoulder against me as he walked past. I gave him a good sniff.
After they left, a streamer named Raygun approached me and held his hand out. There was a tiny something in his palm. I couldn’t tell what it was. “Meet Wallace,” he said as if making introductions.
I strained my neck to peer closer into his palm. The thing in his palm looked like a large bee. “Hi Wallace,” I said. Raygun had been in my bed a couple of weeks ago, so I remembered him fondly.
“Wallace recorded everything,” Raygun said. “Livestreamed the interview. Didn’t you, Wallace?” Wallace flew out of Raygun’s hand and buzzed around the foyer, crashed into a wall, recovered, then flew out the open door. I closed the door, grumbling about letting real bugs in. “Hope you’re cool with that,” Raygun said, a little late.
A lot of people might have cared. But this is life as a streamer. If you don’t like someone recording what you’re doing, you’re in the wrong business. I didn’t care, so I clapped Raygun’s shoulder and said, “Sure,” and started to make my way back up the stairs.
“Wallace is modeled after Megachile pluto,” said Raygun with a loud voice over the rest of the influencers milling about and partying.
I was on the second step of the stairs. I turned around to look at Raygun. “And Megachile pluto is?” I asked. The party seemed to be expanding, spilling outdoors and into the room where I had been questioned. The front door opened again, revealing a couple of giggling girls wearing bikinis stumbling in.
Raygun beamed. “Biggest bee in the world. It’s also known as Wallace’s giant bee. I know, I’m sooo clever. Anyway, Wallace, he’s a little smaller. The real deal is about the size of your thumb. I can’t believe those dumb cops didn’t notice him though.”
“Really,” I said. “Where are these bees found?”
“Indonesia. The last one was supposed to have died back in the eighties. But they saved the species when they found a few flying around a few years ago.”
Like us, I thought, thinking of my kind. But people wouldn’t be trying to save us. I laughed at that. “That’s pretty awesome. You should post some info about that and add it to the livestream recording.”
“Dude, great idea.”
I smiled, turned around, and started climbing again.
I only made it about halfway up the stairs when Moreland called. Moreland never calls. She just shows up like she did the previous night. I acted like nothing had changed when I answered. “’Sup?”
“You know all the times I’ve told you that your belief in God is bullshit?”
“Umm, yeah?”
“I was wrong. There is a god, and he put you on this earth to torture me.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“In fact,” she continued. “I believe that is the entire reason for God’s existence, too. And no, I will not be your alibi, and thanks for asking first.” She ended the call. Apparently, she had seen Wallace’s camerawork.
I contemplated this as I reached the top of the stairs. Why, I wondered, did she think I would have asked her first? I would have been much better off if she had been surprised by the police with their questions. She works best during impromptu moments. She’s an extremely capable liar, and she would have wanted to keep our little worldwide family of vampires as far away from police inquiries as possible.
She would have eventually stumbled her way to an alibi for me. Now, I’d have to find a way to convince her that it was in her best interests to do so. Luckily, there are worse things in the world than having sex with Moreland.
By the time I reached my bedroom, another development occurred. A small crowd was gathering at the Atlanta P.D. headquarters, according to links I was receiving, protesting what they called “Streamer Harassment.” The reason I knew about it was that Moreland was the one forwarding the links, accompanied by a middle finger emoji in each case.
The good news for me was that at least I didn’t need to worry about what might happen if things barreled out of control. The ice cream shop feeding had developed a life of its own and was springing babies out of its young womb.
What I wanted at that moment more than anything was a dose of Daphne. She was the spirit world’s answer to chaos and malcontent. For reasons completely beyond my understanding, I was unable to bring myself to call her. I sat on the crunchy leather chair Moreland had sat in the previous night and sighed.
This hadn’t happened to me in a long time. Nervous about contacting a woman? And Daphne, of all people? She was so sweet that the worst thing I could imagine her saying to me was, “Love ‘ya!” after declining to see me. In other words, nothing to be afraid of. But I was frozen anyway.
The only solution I could think of was to call my friend Longtooth in London. He had inherited his clan’s name when his father was killed by vampire hunters shortly after he was born.
He came from a breed of vampires who had exceedingly long incisors, which resembled those of a sabretooth tiger much more than my considerably more modest canines. The paternal head of the clan always passed his name on to his son if he died, which didn’t happen often. Because, you know. Vampires.
The extreme visibility of their long, arching front teeth made it exceedingly difficult for them to interact with humans, which was fine with Longtooth, who was wildly antagonistic toward humanity. He was born in the Middle Ages, so he was still young. He lived with a small coven near Brixton Market in London, where they usually fed on people who lingered too long after the market stalls were shut down for the evening. Despite Longtooth’s disdain for humans, the victims rarely died.
He was the perfect person to talk me out of whatever was going on with Daphne. I needed the voice of the ultimate anti-human.
His solution was simple. Ask Moreland to turn her.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You know Moreland can’t do that.” I reminded him that Moreland had never produced proof of her claims regarding her abilities. “Moreland is full of more shit than the entire London sewer system. Besides, Moreland is rarely inclined to do me favors.”
“Well, then quench that desire of yours,” he said in a Cockney accent. “Feed on the human wench till she goes limp. Hell, you should do it as part of your act. Your viewers will think it’s a beautiful love story, and since nobody believes in vampires in this era, they’ll just create a half billion silly posts about it on their foul internet.”
“Hell, no,” I said.
“She’s going to die very soon, anyway. If her lifespan was on a vampire calendar, you wouldn’t be able to mark it off for want of space. It would be a tiny sliver and…”
“… I get it, and no.” I should have known better.
“Good God, please don’t tell me you’re in love with a feeding tube. Look. What’s the very best possible outcome for such a depraved romance?”
This was about the time I remembered that during the last decade or so, a conversation with Longtooth was nearly impossible without him quoting a movie — made by humans, I would often remind him.
“You will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality,” he said on cue, quoting Elrond’s speech to Arwen regarding her lover Aragorn’s drift into old age while Arwen retained her youth. Longtooth had always insisted that the elves in the Lord of the Ring movies represented vampires, even if that wasn’t the case in the books.
“The right thing for both of you is for her to sacrifice herself to your longings,” Longtooth continued. “Your true longings are not for the trite sexual dalliances you two engage in once in a while. Or that ghastly thing called human love.
“None of that can satisfy you. It is biologically impossible for it to. Your true longing is to feel the force of her life course through your veins as you draw every milliliter of her blood out of her body while she scratches and slams her fists against your back, her body twisting in that delightful mix of terror and thrill. You know this, Atticus. Deep inside, you do. That is why humans are on this earth. Why have so many of us forgotten that simple truth?”
The simple truth that I hadn’t discussed with anyone, especially Longtooth, was that I wanted to procreate. Daphne was not a fit. Vampires could only impregnate humans in silly movies. I needed to find someone of my kind. To say that the number of fish in the sea was tiny would be an understatement. Our race was nearly extinct.
Only a few thousand survivors were left, and we all mostly knew each other, even if we didn’t necessarily like each other. The bond of extinction forced us into an unwritten law that dictated that there should be no violence against one another. But there were no potential mates for me.
I recognized, as I was listening to Longtooth’s sermon, that the impossibility of procreation with a human was the reason I didn’t enjoy having these feelings for Daphne. Longtooth was correct that there was no future for us. He just had the reasons wrong.
I’ll admit that when Longtooth described her potential submission in detail, it thrilled me. I began to curse myself for confiding in him. Longtooth was the kind of vampire who would do it for me if I wasn’t willing to do it myself, so I immediately realized that I had just put Daphne in danger.
After we finished talking, my concern grew because I realized that the buzzing crowd in the background behind Longtooth’s phone voice didn’t have English accents. They sounded American. I wondered where he was.
I called Daphne. “Jade!” she said happily.
“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Getting ready for a rave. I’m wearing a real dope skirt.” She snapped a selfie and sent it to me. It was a ruffled black skirt decorated with little plastic skulls.
“Are you trying to turn me on?” I laughed.
“It’s Halloween almost, gotta do the mood. And ya, maybe also that. Do I need to work to turn you on or does it just happen?”
“I haven’t thought about it. What’s the right answer?”
“You know what the right answer is.”
“Your rave. Where is it?”
“The Gringo Palace.”
“Never heard of it.”
“You’re not supposed to, I think. It’s a warehouse near the airport. You won’t find it on Google Maps,” she giggled.
“Why do they call it The Gringo Palace?”
“It’s owned by a gringo? I dunno, Jade,” she laughed. “I bet you were a most inquisitive boy.”
“It was so long ago I can’t really remember,” I deadpanned. She couldn’t understand how true that was. My photographic memory was a little tattered from events two thousand years old.
“I hope I age half as well as you, old man,” she said sarcastically since she thought I was close to her age. You won’t, I thought sadly.
“So why you calling, old timer?” Another thing about her: Sometimes her voice sounded like a song that had slipped through time purposed only to touch parts of me that had long ago forgotten about such moments.
“I dunno,” I said, thinking that this is how human teenagers must feel. “Do I need a reason?” I came so close to saying that I wanted to just hear her voice that I wanted to slap myself in the face as hard as I could.
“Hell no,” she replied happily. “Betty says hi,” she said, snapping a pic of her friend, who was dressed as Betty Boop.
“That is not a scary costume,” I said.
“Either is mine, even though I have skulls on my skirt. I hope you’re doing something fun tonight.”
I couldn’t tell her the truth about why I was planning to relax in the evening. Daphne paid so little attention to the news that General Sherman could have come to Atlanta through a time portal and burned the place to the ground again and she wouldn’t hear about it.
“Well, I think, believe it or not, I’m just gonna chill. Maybe stream a little.”
“It has to be a scream stream,” she said.
Don’t worry, it already is, I thought. “Hey, thanks for all the violin promos you slammed against the Insta crowd,” I said.
“You’re welcome, boo. I did TikTok, too. Hey, people liked my drumming, too. I was so happy. I was so focused on making you famous that I forgot about me, but people noticed.”
“Of course they did. Your drumming was sick.”
“People want us to do it more. Some are saying, why not do a full show?”
“Yeah, I saw that. We know one song together,” I said through a laugh.
“We’re good together, though, right? I mean, I dunno. If you don’t want to it’s cool.”
“I do. We will. Let’s at least jam together. If we feel like we can get a show out of it, then we will. Cool?”
“Can’t wait. I feel like I should ask you if you want to rave with us but it’s girls’ night out.”
“You’re sweet for just saying that much. Will they let you stream or snap pics while you’re there?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe not. They’re very secretive.” She whispered that last part.
“Ah, don’t worry about it. People should be allowed to have fun without recording every second of it.”
“Yeah, but you know the saying — if there’s no video it didn’t happen.”
“That would be the idea of no pictures on the part of your mysterious warehouse.”
“See? That’s why I hang out with you. You’re just so damn smart.” I knew she was joking around, but it still gave me a chill. I was now trying to figure out when this started. Not our friendship, but the turn I was feeling. And that was it, wasn’t it? I was the one who was getting turned. Such irony. Maybe Longtooth was right. Maybe I needed to put this matter to bed. But the very idea of it made me a little sick.
“Well, gramps, when should we get together again?” She loved sticking to themes once she found one.
“Text me after you recover from your rave?”
“Ya, that works.”
“Oh, and hey, be careful out there.”
“Why?” she laughed, and then she disappeared from my phone, sending me a short video of her waving and blowing me a kiss.
I got off the big leather chair in my bedroom and walked down the hallway, which I called Ando Hall, named after the Japanese architect whose firm designed the house. The bright white hallway, lined with framed anime art, curved slightly away from my bedroom toward three other rooms. The hallway ended at one of those rooms, which was the studio where I did my livestreaming.
The heart of my streaming studio consisted of a massive white desk curving around my chair. Six large monitors that were always on, day or night, relaying other peoples’ streams, or maybe a live concert, were positioned by telescoping round poles attached to the desk’s edges. This was not the kind of desk you moved around the room.
The walls of the room were decorated with movie posters, anime, a charcoal drawing of the face of Jesus laughing, and an authentic Dali painting. I scanned all six monitors to see if there was anything worth paying attention to.
One of the middle monitors was usually tuned to a Twitch account named Ice Game Z, who kept his livestream going twenty-four a day, even if he was asleep. You’d be surprised how many people watched him sleep, maybe because they thought he might wake up and tell a joke. The streaming comments never stopped, whether he was gaming, traveling, or sleeping.
Ice Game Z streamed from hundreds of locations, but his studio was right here, downstairs, at Fang HQ. He could easily afford his own home, but he didn’t want to buy one because he traveled so much that he didn’t see the point of his own pad. “My crib is the world,” he’d say whenever the topic came up.
He was mostly a Fortnite player, but during the last year or so he hardly gamed at all and spent most of his time streaming funky travel videos, sort of like Anthony Bourdain with darker skin, a Nigerian accent, and a weird, extreme hatred for brownies. He was also funnier than all the comedians I’d seen over the years combined.
His stream showed him setting up shop outdoors on the edge of a lake. He usually traveled alone but people frequently congregated to his location, so he rarely remained alone for long.
His shaking camera showed a few sideways angles of scrambled views of grass, then the lake, then the sky, then, finally, as he stabilized the camera onto its tripod, the lake again. He unfolded a portable camping chair, then disappeared from the camera’s view.
The camera turned again as he repositioned the tripod until it faced a small cluster of trees. Sometimes the camera caught only his body as he manipulated the tripod. Then he appeared in the camera’s view with the camping chair and sat down, grinning broadly.
Ice Game Z always wore a Rasta peak visor hat that nearly covered his eyes. The visor and the top half of the hat’s peak were black, the rest yellow. It was his trademark. He wore loose-fitting drawstring brown trousers and a white T-shirt. I turned on the sound of his stream.
“Here I am,” he said in his Nigerian accent. “As you see, I am at Piedmont Park, and I am very alone here.” He looked around, then made a fake scared look on his face as he covered his open mouth with one hand.
“Oh no!” he laughed. “Behind me is the big bad forest.” It was just an isolated copse of trees. “And on the other side, the lake. The lighting is better this way though.” He laughed again. “So I show you the trees.
“We are told by the authorities that it is not safe to be here alone. But you see, I will not transfer ownership of this fine public domain to thugs and murderers. I will not cede our lands to them. I shall remain here until I say it is time for me to leave. I may stay here all night. I may leave in an hour. I shall decide. A man with a knife shall not decide whether I stay or whether I shall go. This is my home and this is your home.
“You may join me if you wish. We shall make a crowd. But then I will not be alone. And you see, I wish to be alone so I may make my point about being alone here.” He laughed boisterously. He was a gregarious man who sometimes laughed after almost every sentence. Especially when he was nervous.
I needed to pee, so I stood up. Even though he couldn’t see me, I used one hand to salute Ice for his bravery, assuming he’d be joined soon by about a hundred of his fans. Then I headed for the bathroom.
When I got out of the bathroom, I got a text from Longtooth. “Hope everything ok,” he wrote. “Appreciate you confiding in an old friend. Hope I wasn’t too harsh. Ttyl.” Longtooth wasn’t an apologist. I wondered if someone had stolen his phone. Then, of course, I realized that not many people can steal a phone from a sabretooth vampire.
I sat down on Ando Hall’s curvy white bench that people frequently bumped into at night because it was the same color as the wall. I sent a text thanking Longtooth. I considered asking if he was well but instead shrugged off his mood as a rare moment of grace.
Since it was getting close to dinner time, I ordered some food. I was missing Daphne. I wanted to call or text her, but instead, I sat on my right hand and closed my eyes in frustration. She was out with her friends, anyway.
The muffled laughter and occasional screams of delight were getting louder downstairs as hip-hop music started to blare from the speakers.
My plans for the night, to chill and be alone, were so out of the norm that I felt discombobulated. At a bare minimum, I usually live-streamed at night or gamed with people. But I had decided earlier in the day to remain free of society and maintain a solitary existence throughout the entire evening. This wasn’t going to be easy. I was unsettled and antsy. I was bored.
Downstairs began to sound like a major party. I was so not in the mood for that. The influencers downstairs started blowing my phone up, probably wanting me to join them.
One after another sent me a message as I sat feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t even know the cause. Daphne? Boredom? I had no idea. I ignored the messages and scrolled through my music library thinking maybe I should just lie down in the bedroom after dinner and listen to some music.
I settled on an old favorite, Beethoven’s Fifth, but I skipped the beginning because I hated it, and started in at the third movement because I loved the crescendo that started about four minutes in. I set the music app to start playing at the third movement and headed back to the studio to check on my crazy Nigerian friend and see if anything else interesting was happening in the streaming world.
When I sat down to look at his stream, his camera was still focused on the tree cluster, but his chair was empty and flipped over. His visor hat was upside down, off to one side. The emojis on the streaming comments looked like a rolling set of alarms.
The scrolling comments on the left side of the screen were short: “OMG” and “Ice!!!” One said, “Get help!” Another said “911.” None of them said anything about what they had witnessed.
I looked at my phone. One of the messages, instead of saying “Get down here,” like an earlier one that I had interpreted as a plea to party, said, “Get down here NOW! Help!”
Instead, I called the sender, a woman named Veronica. She answered, “Were you watching? Did you see?” She was hysterical.
“See what?” I knew she was referring to Ice, but when people are excited, they interrupt you when you’re trying to say something, so I let her take the lead.
“Ice. I mean, somebody took him, or something. I dunno. We don’t know. Nobody knows what’s going on. But…” she started sniffling. I heard her draw a breath. “You didn’t see?”
I reported my previous couple of minutes to her.
“Oh my God. That’s. He was…so he was sitting in his chair, you know? We had him on the video screen down here but the sound was off because we had music going, you know?
“And he was just talking and somebody made a joke that his mouth seemed like it was perfectly in sync with the rapper. Like it was really cute and an accident. And then a bunch of us looked to check it out, and then, and somebody, goddammit I don’t know, it’s like these two gloved hands snatched his head and just dragged him off camera.
“His whole body went flying backward like some giant from a movie pulled him off his chair. We could see his feet disappear after his chair got knocked over. It’s just all so fucked up.”
I was watching his now quiet stream; quiet from a video cam standpoint, but still visually loud from a screaming emoji standpoint. While I was listening to Veronica finish her story and ask what we should do, a white T-shirt was presented by two gloved hands to the camera with a huge smiley face painted in what, I knew, was blood. The blue-gloved hands made the shirt with its bloody smiley face dance silently in front of the camera. Then the video went dark, and the music downstairs came to a sudden stop.
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