Three hundred and seventy-two years, and I was still here, exiled.
I shed no more tears, though unlike my half-brothers, I was now able to do so.
I’d been waiting; I’d been watching.
For that specific alignment of man to furry beast to imprinted vampire, of planets and supernatural worlds.
The Lunar Eclipse on axis with the Summer Solstice.
The first go round, in 1638, I’d been reviled by my brother Aro because of my children… the immortal ones.
The twenty-first of June, two thousand and ten, I would be reunited with my kin.
My long banishment ended.
~~ll~~
“Come. My darling pet… I can smell thy musky pelt.” I lifted one hand to beckon the sleek black animal to me, “Do not wait out in the cold night of the plains.”
Largely wet huffs and deep smoldering snorts, and the elegance of her pads sifting across the dim marbled floor, her approach caused a vibration through the rest of the vârcolac. “Settle now, my loves. It is only your sister, returned from the Americas.”
Light yips were muffled under paws as they continued their dreamless sleep in heaping piles around the large room whose walls were carved from the heraldic insides of a long-dead Gryphon’s cave. Formerly Assyria, where Babylon and Mesopotamia had spread around and stretched beyond me, I was locked up inside the depths of this mountain; the spoils of the fearsomely clawed, brightly-winged creature at my behest.
Treasures to surround me, in my travesty. The structure had been demolished and embellished as befitted a Queen of the very Damned. Luxurious fabrics, the richest adornments, columns and silver and gemstones and gold beyond count. But no windows. And no escape from this craggy garrison. Protected from daylight and sequestered from civilization through unapproachable terrain and the harshest weather of both extremes.
“Mmmm,” I worked my fingers through her luscious, jet fur. Long, silken waves brushed my hand and shadowed the royal jewels whose heavy weight spilled in prismatic shatters when the tall, soot-black tapers’ light flickered over me. Upon her haunches at my feet, my own pricolici princess soiled the midnight opulence of my lace-bedecked gown with her panting, but I cared not.
She had saved my life.
The moon was in them; it worked upon their long, muscled bodies as it had ever done from times before even I had known the earth. My beloved werewolves walked upright in human form for most of their lives, yet I adored them most as they were now. Wonderful, gargantuan Goliaths who would battle for me.
That glossy celestial orb that called the tides of the ocean, the currents of their bodies, was also in me. But being born as I was—a vampyre—it altered my essence in such a way that I myself could no longer see the day’s light, for to do so would mean my death.
Not an instant succumbing to its mercurial burn; instead my demise would slowly infect me from inside… a scorching virus whose destructive path would wander languorously from the very least cardinal of my appendages, thence to my minor organs, lastly to my brain… after three or more days of agonizing affliction.
Relying upon my hell-borne hounds, I had eventually discovered the cipher to end my nightmarish existence in exile from the empire that belonged to me, from the ramparts I used to stroll about in unconcerned proprietorship.
I swept her gruff aside to look at her bared canines. The whites of her eyes were bleak and twisted over by diamond irises that knotted backwards into carnelian when I asked, “How fare your far-off brethren?”
Redolent of fire and ash, the sodden path of her incandescently wet breath steamed from wide, damp blackened nostrils and lolling tongue.
Her coat shook, and the timber wolf worked her way across the tiles, clacking her elongated sabers to the white stone.
Hackles risen, she returned and snuffed at my hand, her grim snout raised heavenward, cursing the Moon’s blight.
The meaty contortions of Tamara’s feral face were telling.
Her Paul had been spelled upon, as was portended.
I grabbed under her stout neck, purchased my fingers to her scruff, pressed our faces together, monster to mongrel, “And dear Katrina?”
The snorts of her exhalations were stallion-like. Displeasure had her back arched and her enlarged paws kneading the woven rug under my feet.
“I love how much you detest the succubus.” Cumbersomely, I kneeled beside my heeled pet.”It makes me thirsty for more and more blood, my beautiful bitch.“
Snarls ripped from within her, harvesting the night.
“Hush, yes, I know, I know,” I patted her flank, uncurled her quadruped claws. “Paul is to be yours… yes.
“But they must imprint for our bedlam to come into being.”
Her howl mirrored all the spines of lances shoved into the enemy’s throat at battle! Her neck craned upwards, and her sinews were trapped amidst the long, unending, gluttonous growl exiting the narrowed aperture of her throat.
Enraptured, hungry, I haughtily stroked the quiver-shakes that threatened to rip her apart.
Paul and Katrina had mated.
I, too, trembled with ferocity to be set free from the musty cell, from the chains of non-light, from the assassination that had been done me—almost—by my favored brother.
“Have they?” I attempted docility and softness and charm, yet my fangs bit out beyond my lips and my pronunciations ended with cobra-hisses. All my insouciance was shed like snakeskin. To be this close. I trebled with ferocity to be freed. I trembled.
“Have they become one unto the other? Paul and Katarina? Lupen to valkyrie?”
Unleashed, like my glorious vagr. To commit chaos and killing and death and destruction and…my REIGN!
Yes, I was unutterably excited.
~~ll~~
The most atrocious act my brother, the Chosen One, had perpetuated against me was the unjust carnage of my children.
A Halfling in every sense, Seraphiel my dam, Zeboul my sire, I alone had been granted regeneration, through my womb.
Sent off to the deserts of Babylonia, I was to procreate with many, to ensure our line remained intact.
Even mated to Marcus, I had pined for my groveling lovers, each chosen from indelible heir-istocracy.
Hypocrisy.
My garments ever undone, my arms gathering the males, my lips kissing, my love trounced and denounced as year after year I procreated in the name of my true liege. Zeboul.
His lineage was continued through me.
But they were mine alone.
Only Aro knew the reason for my sequestering.
He confessed to Marcus.
Caius, that useless hindrance with the face of a donkey’s ass, knew nothing.
Marcus brought himself to my gruesome birth chamber.
His strong grasp helped me through the pains of life-giving.
Each time I laid, waiting, Marcus stayed beside me.
He held me blameless while he railed against his own biological uselessness—the studs whose bodies serviced mine were bred solely for that purpose; unparalleled power, cunning and pulchritude were the precepts by which they were created, for me.
“I would give you this!” Marcus’s bellow blew fast and cold as a glacial gale.
“I know, my love.”
I named and coddled and dandled and delighted in each babe; the effortlessness of maternal love replacing the pains of grueling labor that left me retching and robbed of my… strength.
Sanity shattered each time, anew, when anonymous nursemaids carried the young away to a far-off settlement where they were to be raised by the hands of others as warriors for the future of our race.
One child per season.
The Immortal Children grew.
In the 1500s, Aro ordered my presence during his inaugural voyage to the New World.
In one of the southern states on a balmy night that was familiar with screams and splatters and screeching flesh and bone, hoofs flew and our nightmarish cadre coalesced into one haunting parade.
Our flags raised; the red an emblem of blood spilled, and more to be had.
My throat dried.
My cries extinguished into unheard screams; I had not prepared for this!
In front of me, my hundreds of children were tied to one another, and every child in each stage of life was bound to my neverending soul.
Spiritually, they begged me to save them from the surrounding blaze that jumped closer and closer until their skin turned into a reeking ooze. My young, my children, my beauties!
Aro gave no quarter.
I listened to their keening screams for all my centuries: Mother! Mother! It burns! My skin, my face… My EYES! I cannot see you, Mother. Please, help us!
I bridled my mare and implored. I grabbed my hair, the ground, and the ashes that fell around me smote me and took my race’s fertility with them, into the mud of the earth.
My throat too tight to speak, my legs incapable of holding me upright, I’d crawled towards Aro over the patchy scorched ground, “Were we such a threat?”
He ignored me, but to sneer, “This is how it should be, sister mine… you, on your knees before me.“
Ignobly, he scattered the ashen plumes that had been my offspring, even laughing a little.
The massacre of my young was only the beginning.
~~ll~~
Another march.
March.
Time had all but forgotten me.
My children had been disintegrated by The Son.
I was interred by my bereavement.
Invisibly, I went about the castle; that which had happened was never mentioned, so my mourning was seen as mere insanity by all except Marcus, who vowed to avenge my loss.
Secrets passed liked silk veils among the servants, and I became nothing more than gossip for entertainment.
Two things my brother and that tool of his, Caius, should have learned.
Perhaps three, or four, more.
Caius believed he had wreaked havoc upon the wolves.
He had not.
Caius thought me happily dim.
Every time he turned his back to take up a new plaything, I mocked him.
I was never that canonized female they took me for.
Aro overestimated the laws of the firstborn.
Fool. It was about to bite him in the arse.
By sororicide, they thought I was dead.
It had happened as such not much more than a century after the razing of my young ones.
Unto a European village whose citizens were thick as timbers; our brigands rounded up the peasants, making them circuit to the drumbeat of our steeds’ bass bruises o’er soil.
Ignorant humans.
I followed a Siberian bear of a man… his only trespass was that he recognized our forces.
Craving the jump of his vein between my teeth, I’d lost all but my huntress’ instincts until it was too late.
“Because you harbored your children, because you created from your womb… because you still prefer the love of Marcus in lieu of allegiance to me… you will die now, Sister.”
Against my throat, Aro had gurgled, tackling me and taking me utterly by surprise.
His hands tilted my neck to an awkward angle so that he might shear my throat from my torso.
My venom was rain.
It ran.
It sizzled his face and acidly cratered the sod ‘neath me.
And as Aro’s teeth took apart my neck, and jets of my life squirted up to the night, my head departed, leaving my body to collapse into a sinkhole that covered me over.
Betrayed.
What found me next, my head severed free, aflame from without, my mind yet alive, were heavy treads unlike my own kind.
Snorts and shuffles and thick, rasping licks across my dismembered flesh, claws shredding my deathly shroud.
There were not shouts but earth-shattering growls puncturing the grabbing of darkness.
Saliva—great swathes of slimy sputum—took what was torn apart and mended it back together. Then a great throat came ‘neath my teeth and renewed immortality took me over. The hanks of hair were parted by my tongue, the sinews of wolfish flesh sundered by my bite, the river of red ran in giant gulps from a thoroughly powerful anodyne vein pumping occult antidote into me.
Tamara.
The radial burst of beasts surrounding us gathered closer. Each lycan offering his or her place, tendering their race’s own majestic blood to me.
Binding us.
Changing me.
The intervening nights that surpassed my intravenous cure made me know my novel hex: Fangs to teeth. Night to light. Feast to famishment. And centuries more waiting.
A simple feint of the Furies, my mother had watched o’er me. Her heiress, I was kept alive by her watchful eye that brought werewolf to vampire in a most unlikely fellowship.
Escaping Aro’s death knell with my lycanthropes’ blood inside me, I too watched from afar.
I sneered, they were so civilized now.
Battles were warned about in advance.
Subterfuge and palace intrigue had given way to a sprightly court o’er which Aro still opined.
The abhorrent swine.
They would never see me coming.
I’d made good and nice and played the part of princess, and what had that gained me? ME! The woman who should be Queen?
Death, by my own brother’s hand.
Now, every test of dishonor would fall far short of my undertakings.
Sister, lover, the giver of undead life.
Made anew.
Beware the mother whose children had been murdered before her very eyes.
~~ll~~
Imagine my derision, the very opposite of pleasure, upon learning an American upstart by the plebeian name of Bella Swan was being groomed to take my imperial place.
Usurper!
Handpicked by the messengers, sought out by the bestial, refashioned in half… I would neither be wasted nor waylaid.
Her fate was sealed as soon as the Volterra coup was put into action.
I did see their mistake clearly, but that was no excuse: the riddle had been told and told and told again until it was mangled so far beyond its origination anyone could make of it what they would.
Cullen~Swan~Volturi
No.
On vellum, in an ancient leather bound tome, the calligraphy had leached from the pages like faded watercolors.
Valkyrie~halfbreed~Volturi
Yes, I could understand how they’d misinterpreted the message from devils and deities alike, but I would not stand for this deliverance.
They assumed, wrongly, that she was the successor.
That she was presaged to supplant me.
That I was dead.
As a vampire, a mixed breed, one of the firstborn amongst the Volturi… that was my fucking Castle!
I swept my skirts aside, the hooping nightingale fabric a curtain over my legs and down my arms. My bosom all but bared beneath the stricture of whalebone and ribbons cinching me in.
Could I have breathed, I would have splintered my carapace apart.
Could I have walked during the day, I would have rolled across the land like a tornado; leaving nothing more than dust and desert and cremations behind.
From this continent to hers.
But I was content, for a minute.
Tamara’s strapping chest trapped my feet and ceased my pacing.
“Sleep, my dear one.”
But for the voodoo, I would have gone more than maddened by now.
My sister of the southernmost realms had been sent to a jagged end; her body bombed from Earth to Hell like an arrow.
With a mystical connection, I’d seen her descent, the terror saddling her cheeks up to her eyes and lifting her skin and hair from her bones, the soucouyant gave me the answer to my long imprisonment, “She will be bound to you as you are to her, and when the Lamberts’ eighth son lies with her, our revenge will come.”
Her reprisal was mine; the time and place and… people preordained. Paul, Katrina. The loogaroo. Me. Tamara.
Paul’s past, our present, and my wrathful rising.
Now there was no mistaking my gravitational pull to this… Bella.
I spat upon her name.
Yes, my lips curled back in a tight curve, my full mouth bared over the fangs I’d been presented with… unlike the others of my kind. A true daemon with the gift of creation… at the thought of the slight American girl who was to take my throne.
The ignominy!
I waited.
I would not let her desecrate my path to Glory.
For I was daughter of Serpahiel and Zeboul.
Sister to Aro.
Mother of many, whom I would still exhume.
Keeper of wolves.
Mate of Marcus.
~~ll~~
Smelling my male before he appeared, I saw the cave’s entrance black out o’er his broad shoulders.
His curling jet locks sat upon his shoulders, calling my hands to braid, and pet and stroke.
Rightfully a braggart in our own hellish home, he swaggered to me; the arch of his cock thoroughly visible inside his deep, black leathers.
His muscular jaw opened over erotic snarls to be with me once more.
Stopping once, he ran his hands down Tamara’s furry back, his eyes glowing at me.
All the other whelps whimpered and made a path of pelts for him to stalk between.
He had always played his part pristinely: lovelorn, lost, comatose.
That feigned moroseness was left at the entrance.
For three days, each month, three hundred years and more.
“Come to me, Marcus.”
But instead of instead of obeying my order, he commanded a large human forward.
My dinner.
Aroused, Marcus watched while I supped.
Readied himself.
Pounced on me before even the flowing blood had a chance to run dry.
He threw me down, parted my gown from breast to thigh and had his face betwixt my legs so quickly I straddled his shoulders; his craving for my taste causing my breasts to jar and my legs to shake with the swarthy brush of his tongue inside my sex.
Insidious.
Lust.
Heavy, panting, breathing, groaning, Marcus’s gorgeous lips found my stomach, my nipples, my neck, and lastly my mouth.
I lashed him to me; his pelvis, his ass, his back and cock…
I flipped him down to the floor and wantonly fucked his face, sat on his chin, rode his thighs and then knew the masterpiece of his erection deep inside of me.
My orgasm was a forceful thing that rode throughout my body until I was stunned and held frozen, mid-scream!
Undaunted, Marcus toppled me over to my back, pushed my knees to breasts, and my feet arched, my toes curled.
My nipples between his fingers were hard and pink and so very ready for his steady sucking.
Cum drizzled between us like hot drops of slick wax that never cooled.
My fangs furrowed against his neck.
I screamed in climax again; my hips to his hilt, my breasts pressed down under his hands and my legs held up and apart with his cock lashing into my cunt!
Keening, crowing, drowning, dying…
Drops of cum made warm entrails between my legs.
The slatternly splits in my gown had Marcus’s hands all over my ripeness.
He righted himself to his elbows, gained his velvety satchel in his palm.
The rich red musk from our bodies put shame to all the cavern’s incense; I went back to my meal: the mortal whose veins were still running like a stream, awaiting me.
Marcus’s smile became a leer as I lapped up and down the thick flume leaking across my tongue with the man’s throat casually tossed aside to fit my hungering fangs.
My lover lifted his groin and captured his cock in both fists.
Panting for Marcus, I licked a fresh path up the other side of the neck… then I bit him hard.
Viscous, volcanic streams screamed from his artery.
Marcus came again, in his own hands.
My thighs were wet and slick.
My mouth an eel’s suction.
My sex swollen.
Dropping the human, I needn’t turn nor ask; Marcus was immediately at me, his forearms holding me up against the clammy cave wall.
I wallowed in his scent, his pounding rhythm.
I reveled in his long erection, steadily lunging into me, in the stern sensuality of his features, in the aching fucking that filled the chamber with moans and whispers and wet smacking noises.
Eventually, outside, that nemesis, dawn, dazzled.
Her dainty fingers pleading to be bitten off, knuckle by knuckle.
But Marcus was still with me.
His thighs twined with mine.
The black of our tresses plaited together, our heads side-by-side.
The pillow of his bicep curled and released, just like his cock.
His lustrous mouth plucked at mine, “You are certain? You have decided?”
“Yes, my love.”
“You will not let sleeping dogs lie?”
I trounced on top of him, dropped my sex over his cock, “No, I think not.”
Behind every spineless, sister-killing son-of-a-bitch…
I swept her gruff aside to look at her bared canines. The whites of her eyes were bleak and twisted over by diamond irises that knotted backwards into carnelian when I asked, “How fares your brethren?”
Redolent of fire and ash, the sodden path of her incandescently wet breath steamed from wide, damp blackened nostrils and lolling tongue.
Her coat shook, and the timber wolf worked her way across the tiles, clacking her elongated sabers to the white stone.
Hackles risen, she returned and snuffed at my hand, her grim snout raised heavenward, cursing the Moon’s blight.
The meaty contortions of Tamara’s feral face were telling.
Her Paul had been spelled upon, as was portended.
I grabbed under her stout neck, purchased my fingers to her scruff, pressed our faces together, monster to mongrel, “And dear Katrina?”
The snorts of her exhalations were stallion-like. Displeasure had her back arched and her enlarged paws kneading the woven rug under my feet.
“I love how much you detest the succubus.” Cumbersomely, I kneeled beside my pet. “It makes me thirsty for more and more blood, my beautiful hound.“
_______________________________
Thanks darlin’ Amanda J. who is takin’ over the artwork for the RWaC blog. Nice one .
These words meant nothing to Paul Lambert until he stopped across a West Ashley parking lot and saw the foulest creature he’d ever looked upon. A big one, stinking of beer, decay, and a perfume so sweet and sickly a ten-dollar whore would have turned it away. Dumb, too, that one. He could tell by the way it loped out of the store, lifting a battered baseball cap to the occupants as it shifted a brown sack of paperback books against its hip.
Paul smelled it, at least sixty feet away from where he stood at the doorway of the Indian Head Lounge, the hum and bustle of Highway 17 rumbling behind him, and Jake going on about some cousin who got one in Bayou Aux Carpes back in the day.
Jake told him his Daddy came up from Grand Bayou with the rest of the Plaquemines wolves to hunt. Who the fuck needs cell phones when you’ve got pack telepathy, yo? They roasted that leech, just like their Mi’kmag tribe ancestors did over four hundred years before them: the head on one pike, the body on another.
As Paul saw Emmett Cullen, got a good whiff of his vamp stench, the lies and half-truths of the past days lost meaning, even lost their place in his memory. He understood at that moment he was a weapon, that the events of the past three days had only brought together plans that were hatched over a thousand years ago, and that he was merely a means to an end.
He never felt part of anything. Even his own odd mix of features that spoke of deltas, Mekong and Mississippi, his own skin was a stranger to him.
Since it happened, since she was there and then gone, his own mind, too, became foreign to him. Novenas and incense, sounds and smells once the closest he’d been to comfort, peace, and God… they buzzed and crackled in his ears and nose.
Too heavy, too many words, too much smell. Too many voices called to him but brought no face to mind as they tumbled through Paul’s head.
His second cousin, a man he did not remember existed, had arrived at the tiny shotgun house in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana that he occupied with his mother, Thien, and sister, Ameline, just two days past. Maman knew him, even expected him.
Daddy – Thầy Paul as Maman called him– had told her his family’s stories at night through the iron-barred gates surrounding the embassy in Saigon; he was locked in, she was locked out. When he had left Saigon, he was among the last Marines to go. A burly man had lifted Maman from her Grand-Mere’s arms, delivered her to Daddy’s waiting ones, and they’d flown away.
When Paul came to Charleston, he discovered the truth. Daddy wasn’t human; only something close to it.
Louisiana, 1997
From the time he was a knee baby, when Maman had told her little boy Paul the story, he’d imagined his father with his ruddy skin and hawk’s beak nose putting little Maman on the back of a great silver bird he’d snatched from nghĩ rằng những đám mây bay xa hơn –the place beyond the clouds – and taking them far away from the bad man named Charlie. They lived in a castle on stilts that rose proud from the marsh and looked out over a great placid ocean, a full company of alle-gawtors as their sentries.
When his child’s imagination gave way to an adult’s knowledge, Paul understood the silver bird was really a helicopter called a Huey, the bad man Charlie was Viet Cong, and an agent called Orange took Daddy away. It gave him the cancer that ate his liver and turned his lungs into the spongy black-spotted gunk he spat out as he shook and coughed. He had refused to go up to the Veteran’s Hospital in New Orleans, said he wanted to die like a human in Grand Bayou, not hooked up to some machine far away from the marsh that was his home.
Maman,A’hn Qui Thien, she’d been a girl of sixteen, a kitchen maid, brought from Hué to Saigon with her grandmother, Uhen Trang, by men fleeing the once-Imperial city on the Perfume River. The NVA was not kind to the conquered as they poured into the cities abandoned by the South Vietnamese army. The lucky ones were shot on the spot or after trial as a spy. The unlucky went to reduction camps. Pol Pot in neighboring Cambodia was not the only conqueror determined to re-educate his people.
The unmarried brothers who employed Maman and her Grand-Mere had been professors at the esteemed Imperial University; from a family that knew such wealth that Uhen Trang and her little granddaughter A’hn Qui Thien couldn’t even comprehend enough so they might dream of it. The two men could have escaped easily, made a new life in another country far from war-ravaged Vietnam, instead they pushed the elderly woman and her granddaughter on a transport, giving up their only means of escape.
Uhen Trang had been told later the two brothers were hung from the banyan tree that towered over their home’s garden. They’d swung from nooses made of their intestines. The brother’s names were lost to the days of terror and flight from the only home Maman had known. She still said prayers for them, could still remember their faces. She and her grandmother had survived seven years in Saigon until that city fell, too, taking the country of Vietnam with it.
Unlike his cousins, Paul had not been threatened to good behavior by parents chuckling ironic warnings of the Laroup-Garou. You go on now, cher, and clean dat room like Mama tell, or I’ll send d’Lar-oop Garou to get you. He’d been told he would swing from his own guts if he talked to those dirty swamp children who called themselves his cousins. Maman had whispered it in his ear in Việt ngữ, her language. Daddy couldn’t wrap his Creole tongue around Maman’s words, it was her own to use with–and against–Paul and his older sister, Ameline.
“Now, mo garson, don’nya be too mad with Maman,” Daddy had told him as they glided around the narrow spots of silty soil that emptied from the Mississippi River into the land around them. Paul had been thrilled to go with Daddy as he checked the muskrat traps instead of sitting up in the house listening to the mother and sister argue in the sharp twangs of a country that would never be the same again.
“She don’t let me go off with th’ other boys,” Paul had told his father as they searched a mud flat for one of their snares. “She say the Blaquieres an’ Ulrys donno count, Daddy.”
No answer had come to the seven-year-old’s complaint, only the silence that tells a child his parent’s attention is diverted elsewhere. After watching his father’s broad, olive-drab-encased back for a time, Paul had picked his way through the sticky black mud to the elder Lambert’s side.
“Daddy?” he’d said, his voice sounding small even over the gentle lapping of the tide coming in and distant shore birds.
“Go on back to do boat, cher.” Daddy had answered quietly. All the men they knew had big proud voices to match their giant bodies. Quiet Daddy was not usual, not good. The boy had reached his father’s side just in time to have heard him muttering words in the French-Creole he was not meant to understand. At his father’s large feet had lain a dead alligator, not stiff and bloated from baking in the Louisiana sun but shriveled, the mottled hide compressed on the skeleton underneath.
“What happen to de alle-gawtor, Daddy?” Paul had whispered with the morbid fascination of a small child. He’d looked around his feet for a stick as his nostrils curled at a fancy-sweet scent on the air. “He look like someone took a straw and sucked da juice outa him.”
“Go on back to do boat, Paul, like I done say.” This time the words had been accompanied by a firm shove towards the shallow aluminum boat his father rowed among the marshes. “Go on, now. Listen to Daddy.”
Paul trudged back to the place his father had run the small craft aground. As he’d clambered over the edge, he’d been surprised to see his father closing the distance between them in big strides, his face a mask of angry rumination that he’d never seen before, not even when Maman talked about the bad man called Charlie.
That night Paul and Ameline slept in his parents’ big bed with Maman, the three holding their rosaries, saying prayers over and over, as Daddy and his cousins had talked out in the front room. Eventually, Daddy called Maman out to them.
“Billy will stay with y’all, cher. We’ll take care of it.”
Maman had returned to bed, muttering in Vietnamese to her ivory beads. Sounds from behind the door told Paul they were not alone in their stilt-raised castle on the marsh. He’d fallen into his sleep reluctantly, dreaming of flashes of golden light, a black dog guarding their parents’ bedroom door, and bonfires on the marshes.
When Daddy had passed soon after, the big men he called his pack came up to the front door, not dressed in suits and nice ties, but in old, musty-smelling clothes. Sad, bedraggled feathers had poked from their falls of inky hair and the cruel-looking spears they carried weren’t shiny and bright like the painted, plastic sword Daddy brought Paul from one of his trips up to New Orleans to see one of his doctors. The swords Harry Clurierre, Old Sam Ulry, and the others carried were as tall as they were, with heavy metal points that had looked like the inside of a dragon’s mouth. The wood was singed, worn with age–and use.
Billy Blaquiere had spoken to Maman on the doorstep; she wouldn’t let them in the house.
“Thien, I know you n’don care for us, but we the Wildman’s fonmie. We take care our own, and we teach th’ boy right.”
Around his mother’s tiny frame, Paul had been able to see the man, just as big and gentle-looking as Daddy, offer an envelope thick with bills.
“We go tomorrow. You don’t find us. Leave us alone.” Maman had spat as she looked up what must have been close to two feet separating them. “I take care of my chil-ran, Billy Blaquiere.”
“Leaving?” Ameline pushed past him, her black skirt whipping at Paul’s face. “No! Not leaving, Maman!”
“Leaving, yes. I say goes, you have no say. Go sit and not dishonor Father, Am-ah-enne.”
Maman had pushed the envelope and Billy Blaquiere away with such force the sweat dampened paper shredded under her fingers, sending wrinkled bills cascading to the sun-bleached porch boards and the shell-littered scrub below.
“You go away,” she’d repeated over Ameline’s sobs.
That night Ameline disappeared into the Bayou.
Louisiana 2005
A woman named Katrina came into Paul’s life twice, each time with life-altering consequences. She had blown in first as a storm, nature’s fury the man on Maman’s TV called it, and twisted the shoddy, mold-spotted, white clapboards from their little house as Maman sat at Ameline’s feet clutching her ivory rosary and muttering in her mother tongue. Paul was still enough of a boy to wonder if Maman might blow away with the howling wind and enough of an angry young man to wish she would. Ameline, poor haunted Ameline, would have needed more than a gale to lift her from the Earth now. The boy had sat on the floor beside his sister’s bed as the murky water seeped around his legs, struggling to keep his tears at bay. Three times already Paul had sent the parish officials away, telling them Maman wouldn’t leave; they would ride the storm in their little house.
Maman had evacuated twice before in her lifetime. She’d never been able to return, to repatriate herself. How could she have believed anything would be different the third time?
Maman and Ameline would be arrested for child endangerment.
“Please, mister,” Paul had mumbled over the rain, causing the deputy to lean down to the fifteen-year-old and tip a torrent of rain water from his cap and on to the boy’s feet. Paul gulped at his shyness and spoke again. “I say please, Mister, do no make us leave here. My sis’ah, sir, she can no move too good.”
“Where’s your mama, boy?” the deputy growled, pushing his way past the slight boy.
“Back dahy…” he’d coughed, took in another breath of rain-heavy air, and tried to speak to the retreating form, only to hear his own words falter, then concede the struggle to be heard over the tropical deluge. He’d followed the deputy’s footsteps, hands shoved deep into his pants pockets and shoulders drawn tight around his neck.
“Hoooo -ly…” At least this man had been kind enough to cut himself off with a low whistle through his teeth rather than express what was most likely morbid fascination combined with a valiant effort to face the room and the smell like a man.
“Mister, sir, please… Maman no want no trouble, but Ameline, she can no get aroun’ now like I say.”
Paul had turned mournful eyes, brown as rich, silted earth, toward his sister who attempted to shift her ruined body from view. As if it were possible.
The night of her father’s funeral, Ameline Lambert had been distraught over her mother’s insistence that they were leaving Grand Bayou for Jefferson Parish the next day. Thien Lambert had refused to give further detail to her sixteen-year-old daughter, who’d sobbed as she tugged at the tiny Vietnamese woman’s arm, nor to the giant man who had stood on the front porch of the Lambert home, speaking with such care and apparent sorrow at the loss of Big Paulie, as they called him.
When night closed over the deep bowl of bayou sky, the usually timid Lambert daughter had found her courage and went off in to the dark to find the boy she loved from afar. Ameline had watched Rémy Ulry for years from her required station at her mother Thien’s side. The Lambert children had been kept close to their Maman, never permitted prolonged interaction with the tussle of young children who yipped and tumbled at play while their broad-shouldered fathers’ laughter tolled across church halls and back yards. Ameline once was a mild-tempered, quiet girl, reared in the tradition of her mother’s country and grown into an exotic beauty with the combination of her parents’ globe-spanning ethnicities. Shy glances and dart-eyed smiles had been the only interaction between the cloistered girl and the imposing boy-man who glanced in her direction when Thein’s attention was turned to her seven year-old-son.
To the present day Paul still found it difficult to remember his sister’s smile, much less a time when Ameline might move about with freedom on limbs that could bear her. He did remember that evening with exact detail, although someone had whispered in his little boy ear that this was an important moment in the terrifying wash of the day his father was buried in the Lambert crypt.
Paul watched from his bedroom window as Ameline bounded down the shell-lined front walk, graceful as a gazelle with the moon shining on her shoulders and sheet of long black hair almost blue in the silvery light. Even though he was but a child of seven, Paul saw transformation on Sè Ameline’s face; Daddy was gone and Maman was taking them from their home, but his sister finally shone with possibility.
Maman discovered her absence during her pre-dawn inventory of the house’s occupants and possessions, waking Paul with a smart slap to his cheek, her shrill demands in her own language barely comprehensible to the sleepy child.
The men of Daddy’s pack arrived before eight, looking grim. Billy Blaquiere held a quilt-encased form in his massive arms. As Paul peeked around his mother’s waist at the bundle his father’s cousin bore, he noticed dark stains shimmering with moisture on the weathered cotton.
Blood.
“You go on back porch,” Maman directed quietly, in a soft voice Paul had not heard from his mother since his father’s illness upended their lives. “Quick, quick, cậu bé.”
When he closed the door that separated the Lambert’s kitchen and the Gulf-side screened porch, Paul discovered Jacob Blaquiere sitting on the shiny red two-wheeler that was his father’s final gift from New Orleans.
“Hey ya, Ti-garson Paulie.”
“Hey ya,” Paul replied, flinching slightly at the odd sensation of using the standard form of address of his father’s people; he was incapable of forming those salutations himself, forbidden by Maman by being familiar with the Lamberts’ cousins.
The bigger boy rocked on his heels for a moment, came to a decision and faced Paul again.
“Why do your Mama no let you run aroun’ with us?”
Paul glanced over his shoulder to the kitchen door, wary of his mother but desperate to interact with his cousin. He looked once more for surety, then stepped toward Jacob Blaquiere, every question in his seven-year old boy’s heart tumbling out in one breath. This would be his only chance to understand.
“Maman say you all bad, that you all was borned damned to the devil with demon blood. Maman say bad things happen in the wood, and our Daddies do it because the demon make them. Maman say if I say my prayer and stay with her the demon won’t get me, too.”
Jacob looked past his cousin to confirm their privacy, and stepped closer to Paul.
“No, no, cousin. The pack, they fight the demon and keep us safe.” He had leaned toward Paul’s ear, his eyes glinting with excitement over his secret knowledge and the opportunity to share it with his younger cousin. “If my Daddy not been there last night, the sookie-yant, he would have got your Sè Ameline, too. It got Remy Ulry before he could turn.”
Before Paul could question Jacob further, a deep male voice came from behind them.
“Let’s go on home, now, Jake.”
The two boys looked at each other reluctantly, Jacob enjoying the sensation of holding an audience rapt; Paul almost buzzing at the prospect of understanding so many family secrets.
“Jacob, now. Say Adyeu to cousin Ti-garson Paulie.”
Jacob scampered to his father’s side and, as they moved toward Billy’s ancient red pickup, nodded a good-bye.
“Wait, Mister, please,” Paul whispered to the man who was sworn by his own father to look after the Lambert family. Billy Blaquiere turned to his pack-brother’s son, a tight smile on his lips but going no further. He looked toward the house and then crouched in front of the child.
“What is it, mo tchen chanchon?”
“What happen to Remy Ulry, sir? Was it they sooki-yant?”
The man’s face constricted, his jaw tensing.
“You don’t need to worry about the soucouyant, yet. You run on to you Maman. Sister all better now.”
In the weeks after Katrina in late summer of 2005, Maman’s devotion to her rosary had become even more intense. She’d attended every mass, installed graphic Sacred Heart illustrations on bare walls and tabletops, had assisted the brothers at chapel tirelessly.
She had also made a decision.
Maman’s own flavor of religious belief was a unique one, not unlike the closely guarded gumbo recipes passed down and refined by generations of Louisiana families: a little of this, a little of that, simmer until the parts are barely discernible. Hardline pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Buddhist mysticism, and ancient superstition made for a strange mise en place, but Maman was a devoted practitioner. She drew together the half-comprehended whispers her late husband put in her ear through the gate at the US Embassy in Saigon twenty years earlier, her own lifetime of war and terror, her grandmother’s peasant beliefs, and stories of saints like St. Catherine of Siena. Because of her husband’s family, all demon-possessed, her Paul had been led into the bayous and conducted acts of nighttime depravity which turned to the rot that blackened his body. Ameline had followed one of those demons from the delta, been returned to them but bore a face full of angry scars and an appetite no amount of food would fill. Thien herself had been cursed to live in a strange country, unable to care for her ancestors’ tombs, without her man to look after her.
Maman had decided Paul would save them all.
“No issue,” she had told her bewildered son after a twelve hour day of scrubbing oily muck and mold from the walls in a parishioner’s flood damaged home. “You will be priest. No more cursed blood.”
After Maman’s edict intending him to the priesthood was handed down, Paul followed his mother diligently on her errands, served as altar boy at every mass. When the young parish priest, calling himself ‘Brother Tim’, had encouraged Maman to let Paul arrive at his own decision regarding a vocation once he would have completed college, the Lambert mother and son had begun to travel from Barataria to Morrero, then Gretna, Bridge City and finally into New Orleans in search of a traditionalist congregation that would support Maman’s plans. Ameline stayed in her bed almost constantly, cocooned in layer upon layer of pulpy fat, slick with perspiration and unable to support her own scarred body on her bones. When not attending to her ravenous appetite, she dozed, frequently screaming for Remy Ulry and mumbling about a black haired woman with no eyes.
Louisiana, 2009
“Good afternoon, Paul,” Father Tim said, mustering his warmest smile to cover his unease at Paul’s daily arrival. The boy was unsettling and often the young priest wished for a streak of late-teenage rebellion to open up in him so that he might be rid of task of finding work for him.
“Father.”
“I’ve just been sorting out some donations from the Anchorage, Alaska Diocese, of all places. Does your mother let you drive?”
“Yes, Father. For the market and Sister’s medicine.”
“Ah, well…” Tim handed Paul a set of keys for the church van. Surely this would occupy him for a few hours; maybe the boy would wander aimlessly a bit and enjoy a day of freedom. The cost of gas would be worth the relief of him. “I’d like you to load the church van with those boxes of donated clothing and canned food and take them to St. Ignatius down in Grand Bayou.”
Paul hesitated, considering Maman’s reaction if he went back to the little town at the end of Plaquemines Parish. She would be furious, but even more so, he reasoned, if he disobeyed the priest. Nodding wordlessly, he took the keys and began to load the ancient white van.
He arrived late that afternoon at the small church, set up in a temporary building at the edge of a sandy strip of land. Paul found the doors of the corrugated steel building locked, and there was no response to his knock there or at the tiny mobile home that served as the church rectory. He unloaded the boxes of donations, left a note on the rectory door, and returned to the van, his task complete by the time evening shadows were stretching out over the church parking lot. As Paul started for the van, he paused, looking over his shoulder at his former home.
Father Tim’s wish was granted. Paul pocketed the slim keyring and walked off down the narrow shoulder that separated road and marsh.
“Hello.”
The shock of another voice behind him should have been startling, but the tone of it was so familiar Paul found himself relieved to hear it. He turned to the sound, more haunting melody than human voice, feeling the unusual sensation of a smile spreading across his face
“Katrina?”The name spilled across his lips as though he’d said it every day, thousands of times, in whispers and laughter. His logical mind warred with something more ephemeral, but just as real to him.
Her.
Paul stared, fascinated, at the shimmering woman before him. He knew her. The slanted angles of her face, the moody amber and rose scent floating from her white-blond hair, the particular pitch of her clarion voice, The air around her even resonated within him, drawing him into a cyclone of recognition and astonished but futile attempts to clutch at a reality that had never before felt comfortable.
This woman, however, made perfect sense.
Essential. Katrina.
He stepped toward the woman, into the glittering, golden aura around her, and drew her against him. The heavy salt air from the gulf lifted her pale blond hair around them, swirling around their heads as his head bent toward hers, finding her lips waiting as though they had always been just beyond him, waiting for him to take the first step toward her.
“You came back,” she whispered and kissed him again.
In his short, isolated and sad life, through Maman’s roller-coaster moods and Ameline’s slow drown in her own scarred flesh, Paul Lambert could remember few times of joy after his father’s death. He had few happy memories after he, Maman and Ameline stopped one final time at the crypt holding Paulie Lambert, the Wildman of Grand Bayou and seven times removed grandson of a Mi’kmaq warrior called Etlintoq- Tápu, paid their stoic respects, and drove north toward higher ground and away from the marshes the Lambert family had called home for centuries. However, the moment Katrina’s luminescent hand touched his arm and her mouth fell against his, Paul was besieged with memories of other men who knew this same otherworldly woman, even sights and sounds his own father had never spoken of but Paul knew to be his. He knew he was bound to the woman whose skin glimmered and danced with refracted lilac and gold from the setting sun, and knew, without a doubt, there would be no other now that she had made herself known.
“I came home,” he said, the sound clear and full, not the mumbled or stuttered boy’s voice no one was meant to hear. Paul Lambert spoke in that moment as a man.
Her hands on his face and neck were gentle and so blessedly cool in the heavy, heated air, the voice that tickled the fine hair on his earlobe was more ethereal than the choir at the St. Louis cathedral in New Orleans. The Lambert men carried their own secret within the secret of their tribe: Katrina, whose origins they understood but refused to acknowledge, was as much a part of their history as the real soucouyant who terrorized the Dominican village where the Lamberts, Blaquieres, and Ulrys settled after their flight from Acadia. The flesh-eating witch was torn into pieces, her head separated from her body and burned, just as this pale woman, who now faced Paul Lambert, had instructed his eight times removed grandfather, Paul-Georges Lambert.
And, just as Paul-Georges promised his two friends Sebastien Ulry and Jean-Claude Blaquiere, the long-limbed white woman with hair the color of pearls did appear the night the soucouyant returned to their village to take another skin so she could hide her own revolting form. The witch cursed the three men while the fire ate her withered, pustule-scarred skin and turned her ill-shaped neck bones to lilac dust, it consumed the final words of her curse upon those three men with a gust of spark and ash flaming through her throat.
The men and their progeny would have fully turned into je-rouges-and indeed they were cursed to live as shapeshifting wolves, turning without warning and dependent on the proximity of vampire species like the soucouyant, but the hag’s final spoken curse was silenced by the embers of her own burning bones ensuring the men would never drink from humans as the vampire did.
Right before the soucouyant’s eyes bubbled into a spitting, hissing yolk, they found the face of Paul-Georges and glared at him, accusatory and full of fury.
“She will be bound to you as you are to her,” the blazing, dismembered head screeched over the crackle and sizzle of its own flesh “When your eighth son lies with her, Paul-Georges Lambert, my revenge will come.”
Paul heard this ancestral story, this race memory, without a word from Katrina, knew it within a second of her lips touching his. He saw, through Paul-Georges’ eyes, the clawing, snarling soucouyant flailing as a pair of giant teeth impaled her and heard the unearthly screeches and howls as her limbs were rent from her trunk. Her torso fell with a sickening thud to the sandy ground as the head and spine ripped from it. As if he had seen it himself, Paul witnessed through Katrina’s kiss the incorporeal backbone dancing in the orange firelight as it searched for the flesh that had contained it and the nerves at its command. The memories were so repulsive to Paul’s sheltered mind, he sunk to his knees, whimpering like a frightened child even though he was now breaching manhood. He felt cool arms circling him, and the sensation of rising, then propulsion so sudden and impossibly quick his breath was forced from his lungs. As suddenly as they moved, they were still again, seated high over what felt and smelled to Paul like water.
He opened his eyes slowly, blinking himself back to the here and now, and glanced tentatively around them. Beyond Katrina’s milky-white arms, still cradling him gently against her, were the sun-bleached skeletons of hundreds of cypress trees, glowing faintly in the silver light of the full moon.
“Where…” he mumbled, shifting his body slightly so he could sit beside, not on, her.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Katrina sighed as she clutched his hand. Below them an inky artery of black water lapped at the spindly roots of upturned trees as the marsh grass waved to and fro in the rising wind. Paul turned to her, awed.
“I can hear it all–the dolphin out past the jetty, that alligator what went in the marsh up to Venice,” he said, incredulous. The small marsh town of Venice was over ten miles up the inter-coastal waterway. Paul looked back to Katrina, mesmerized at the sight of moonlight reflecting on her clear golden eyes. “What’s happening to me?”
She crossed her long leg over him, threading her fingers through his silken ebony hair as she settled against his chest. Paul’s body went rigid at the new sensations of breasts and female skin and a place he never allowed himself to think of so close to him.
“You’ll be no offering to those holy men and their Church now.” Katrina pushed herself closer to him, winding her legs around his waist as her tongue found the hollow under his jaw. “You’re my eighth song, my miláčik Pavla. Come be a man with me.”
Paul pushed at the gauzy fabric covering her thighs, determined not to think of Maman and the curse she imagined her own son was dedicated to end. This stranger, with her mind as familiar as his own—her strong, cool, luscious body as close to foreign as possible-was all that mattered to him, was the first glint of joy and possibility in his eighteen years. He remembered Ameline as she darted down the path from their Grand Bayou house, determined to find her Remy and her escape.
“Show me,” he told Katrina as he stilled his hands against the curve of her hips. Everything about her was perfect, filling him with answers to questions he never knew how to ask. She topped his hands with her own, a soft and inviting smile lifting her angelic features as she guided his fingers over the mounded fabric at the dip of her waist. Paul’s hands went rigid as his fingers pushed aside the material covering the heavy curve of lush breasts and taut pebbled nipples, denying his sensitive fingertips contact with the cold, silky skin under them. Her head tilted slightly, causing her shimmering hair to spill over her shoulder and slide across his forearm, waking another part of his own body to her. The silvery strands dancing in the unsettled air called to him as much as the gleaming flesh under both his palms; was just as fascinating as the fringe of dark lashes over her crystalline eyes. He caught a skein, held it from him and let the pale blond hair, almost as silver as her skin under the moon, slide through his fingers. Katrina’s eyes fluttered closed as her back arched and she began to hum an ancient tune from her mortal time, over a thousand years before.
In short, Paul Lambert was enchanted. What else could he do but fall under the spell of the succubus while she was just as entranced by him? They were bound together by her nature, the curse of a long-dead soucouyant, and the smell of his blood; thrice fixed to each other and intended for the other even beyond the material. Had he been part of the everyday world that moved past him, unaware of his presence, noticing only a quiet, awkward boy if he was noticed at all, Paul might have been fearful when Katrina looked down to his expectant face again and opened her eyes. The clear, reflective gold irises and almost iridescent white surrounding them were gone, replaced by nothing but black.
Paul’s entire life had seemed something of a dream, as though he hadn’t been entirely present in his own skin. The touch of the creature straddling him was the most absolute sensation he had experienced, the waves of something real and meant just for him too much a balm for the down-deep aches he never was permitted to acknowledge. He couldn’t care less if he were damned, if he sent Maman and even poor, tortured Ameline into an eternity in purgatory with him.
He wanted to feel. He needed to feel Katrina.
“Inside,” she whispered, more music than speech and circled her hips against him, and his own cock, utterly foreign to him when erect, sent a zinging pulse of energy down his thighs. Without any effort, she pushed herself from his lap, crouching above him, and they made quick work of the passed-down jeans his father once wore. The surface of Katrina’s body sparked faintly when she settled against him, inching him into the chilled wet between her thighs. The restrained electrical current that rode over her frame danced in tiny, violet-blue pin-pricks of light as Paul shuddered and pressed his hips up toward hers. She splayed one hand behind them, across a weathered branch for balance, her other hand resting on the muscled curve of Paul’s ass, guiding and lifting him into her.
Paul could barely gather a strand of logical thought to tether himself to the crash of very base and otherworldly sensations assaulting his mind. In particles of seconds he careened from physical feelings so intensely sublime they dangled him over the precipice of insanity to a serene surety that he was finally rooted to the existence he was created for. His own voice joined Katrina’s, rising from deep within his chest and spilling out over the howling wind, urging her deeper while his hands clutched uselessly at the hardened flesh under his fingers. They rocked against each other with a familiarity etched into their mortal and immortal bones, sending the dead cypress under them swaying and cracking with their movement. Her hair coiled around them, lit in fragments by the storm blowing in from the Gulf behind her. Katrina’s hand glided from his hip, following swells of muscle Paul had never noted on his own body, and came to rest on his shoulder. Her head dipped to his neck, and she dragged her nose over the skin there again and again.
“Not… yet… no,” she moaned and threw her head back with an agonized whine. A bolt of lightning shot from the sky just offshore, illuminating a waterspout dancing across the churning gulf. Paul reached for her, drew her face back to his as he willed himself to look into the black pools where her eyes once were.
“Yes. Make me like you.”
She stilled against him, a struggle apparent even in the predatory haze that transformed her eyes. Paul drew his fingers over her lower lip, followed with his tongue, and caught the deceptively soft-looking pillow of skin in his teeth.
“Katrina, make me yours.”
She pulled him against her chilled skin, settling his head into her arm as she brushed her lips across his cheek and forehead.
“I’m sorry, my sweet Paul. It won’t hurt forever.”
She kissed him once again and moved toward his neck as she rocked his body against hers. Tiny drops of icy moisture dripped on his scalding skin, numbing it immediately where it fell. Another flash of lightning illuminated her shoulders and the curve of her cheek as it rose toward her temple and revealed a row of perfectly formed, glimmering white teeth. Paul could feel cold radiating over his own feverish skin as Katrina’s mouth neared its intended mark, and he tensed his body, forgetting that she still held his cock inside her.
Instead of pressing, piercing against him, she was suddenly flying away with speed and force that made him dizzy to watch. He squinted into the wind, looking first toward the Gulf, then at the black marsh below him, trying to make sense of the instantaneous loss of her. He lifted his head to look over the marsh toward the open water once again and was met with the sight of another woman, completely obscured in shadow, seemingly hovering in front of him. He screamed, horrified, and lost his balance, tumbling several feet from the massive pieces of cypress driftwood and landed on a clump of marsh grass with a heavy thud.
Paul scrambled to right his jeans as he looked wildly to both sides and behind him for the creature. Once again she appeared without warning in front of him, this time lit by a break in the advancing storm clouds that revealed the full moon once again.
The woman in front of him was swathed in black: her clothing rising and flickering about in the gale, the long curtain of stick-straight hair a thousand times more satiny than his own and almost blue it was so inky. Her eyes lifted at the corners, much like his own, arching open to reveal icy, silvery irises punctuated with thin rods of cobalt blue that appeared to shift erratically.
“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back for you,” she sing-songed to him as she drew a stinging line down the side of his face and immediately replaced her dagger-like nail with her tongue.
“Leave him alone, Tamara. He’s mine,” Katrina’s voice called out over the swaying reeds and grass.
“Oh no, Katrina, dear. You’re both mine.”
The creature sprang easily into the air, her body flipping several times before she came to rest over seventy feet from where she had just stood.
“Come out, Katrina. We’ve been waiting a long time for this, you and I.”
A gust of wind and almost imperceptible wave of contact caught Paul’s attention, insisting that he turn away from Tamara, who crouched as if she were an athlete ready to blast toward an invisible end zone or finish line, and eyed the expanse of salt marsh around her.
“Paul,” Katrina was behind him, whispering very softly into his ear and at a speed that made her speech almost unintelligible. “When I jump over you, turn and run. Your chief is coming for you. Don’t stop until you are home.” She leaned toward him, readying for a kiss and stopped abruptly. “She touched you?”
Paul nodded, intuitively aware he should refrain from speaking as it might reveal their location.
“Our hearing is slightly better, one of the few advantages we have over them. Tell the Chief she touched you. I don’t smell blood, doesn’t seem that she’s broken your skin.”
Suddenly Katrina vaulted over Paul, positioning herself between the bewildered man and the other woman who landed at the same time.
“Go!” Katrina snarled as she pushed forward toward Tamara. “I’ll find you, Paul,” she called out over her shoulder.
A shrill laugh rang out over the intensifying storm and the velvety voice that made dread curl around Paul’s stomach sang out once again.
“Oh, Katrina, my old friend, not if I find him first.”
“He’s human, Tamara. Out of play. Your battle is with us, not them.”
“But, Kate, when I hurt him, I hurt you and that makes our game so much more thrilling.” The lithe figure spun against the swamp’s musk, stirring up its forbidding odor. “Besides, I would like to know, how goes it with your sister, Irina?”
Paul listened to the two women, mesmerized at the disembodied voices’ taunts and the notion prickling at his spine that both beings were posturing, taking the others’ measure in advance of a battle.
The wind shifted again and a slip of pale skin and hair streaked in front of him.
“Paul, I said run!” Katrina screamed as Tamara’s form whistled toward him. Katrina extended her hand toward the path of her adversary’s attack. When the dark-haired woman came nauseatingly close to Katrina, a sharp metallic crack punctuated the intense wind now barreling in from the open sea, followed by the heavy scent of ozone.
Paul took in a hurried look at his mate, and turned, wincing at the pain of physical separation from her. Behind him, another inhuman crack rang out over the marsh, followed by a wail.
At the Lambert home over forty miles away in Barataria, Ameline sat up from her sweat-soaked bed and began to scream. Paul heard it as if he were in the next room.
Because the voice was already in his head.
And the thing that had attacked his sister, that had interrupted her innocent courtship with Remy so long ago, hadn’t been the blood sucker of the bayou. No. It had been…Tamara.
Katrina was the answer to every question Paul had never realized. As he ran from her, his body aching at the loss of her presence, voices other than his own infiltrated his mind.
“Run along, little pup. I’ll find you once I’ve disposed of your bloody whore.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s on it, Jake, can you just shut your fucking mouth!”
“Billy, what the hell?”
“You boys just stay where you are.”
“Did he fuck a leech?”
“Fucked a leech and lived?”
The voices came with torrents of emotion that weren’t his: somewhere far beyond the morass of dark soupy water and twining roots he staggered through, there was pacing, snorting, frustration at energy contained instead of unleashed. Then a harsh snarl in a higher pitch–a woman? That woman with the ice-gray eyes?–superseded the tumult of voices.
Then silence. But wary, waiting, dreadful with quiet inertia.
With his mind stilled, Paul sensed his own altered perception of the world he sped through. Scents were stronger, bearing multiple layers of decaying vegetation, the excrement of small animals and rotting larger ones. He slipped further into the sound of his feet splashing through boggy earth, felt trees fall away as his shoulders connected with them. His breath cascaded across his chest, hot and moist, as his limbs pushed harder into the ground beneath him. His body felt powerful, expansive; it moved with speed and efficiency and grace like he’d never known. The sensation of his muscles contracting, propelling him forward, elongating, and drawing toward his center over and over was almost addictive. His lonely, constricted childhood fueled his exertion, the hurt condensing into anger and spilling over into a rage that boosted him into a harder, faster pace. There was no pause in disbelief at the kind of exertion he was suddenly capable of: it made perfect sense. He made sense. The world that barely existed for him could offer up no questions in this new state of existence.
He was hot breath and snarling, baying hugeness, pounding the earth, sending showers of rock and dirt in his wake, cracking asphalt as he crossed Barataria Boulevard. Crossing the vast Jean Laffite Preserve was little more than walking down to St. Joaquin’s every afternoon to see Father Tim for his daily penance, clearing high privacy fences and block walls was accomplished with little more than minor exertion and a long glide through the air as his body pressed forward.
When he arrived at the little shotgun house he occupied with his mother and sister, the porch light was on, illuminating an ancient red truck that Paul noticed only as it bounced and swayed when he passed it. He snorted, frustrated, at the impediment and continued toward the door.
He was met by a very short man, clothed entirely in black, who bore a strong resemblance to the memory his father.
“Whoa, there, boy.” The man said as his hands reached up to Paul. “What do you say we walk this off, yeah?”
Paul followed the man in silence, still unable to shake the feeling that he was surrounded by other intensely interested voices listening closely. He twisted his head over his shoulders, looking for the others, then let out a frustrated yip.
Yip?
“Alright, now, boy… take it slow, yeah?”
“Dude, wonder if he’ll freak? Embry broke both of Billy’s arms when we caught him.”
“Jake, would you shut your stupid fucking snout before I rip it off your drooling face.”
“Hey Alpha bitch, suck my –”
“JACOB!”
“Uh… sorry, Dad. And uh… you, too, Leah.”
“Cocksucker.”
“Paul… son… do you remember me?”
Paul looked down at the man he’d just heard speak and realized his face had remained completely still. He looked further, expecting to see his own feet and saw nothing but hard packed ground.
And paws.
“Here’s the wind up… and the pitch… OW! Fuck, Leah!”
He looked forward again, searching for the small man he’d followed to the ill-kept playground and found nothing but a furry black dog staring at him.
Paws. Dog. Forty miles, minutes.
Realization and rebuttal tumbled over him, calling up a mournful whine from deep in his chest. The animal before him padded to him, panting easily.
“I’m sorry, son. When you Daddy pass, you was too young to know.”
Did that dog just talk to me?
“Try wolf, noob.”
The next fourteen hours passed in a long blur of voices, heightened sensory input, and overwhelming, almost incessant hunger. When he wasn’t eating or draining bottle after bottle of Gatorade, Paul was pressed against the passenger door of Billy Blaquiere’s-Billy Black he was now-truck, too stunned, heartbroken, and angry in turns to speak. He watched his father’s cousin talking, taking in as much as possible until his mind dragged him away again, back to the tear-stained, scarred face of Ameline, his Maman’s lifeless stare as she turned her back to him, refusing to say good-bye and most of all, his Katrina, smiling up at him as she turned the air around her into glinting lavender and gold.
His Katrina; a vampire. A succubus, designed to seduce and kill.
Not his, never his Katrina.
South Carolina, 2009
Billy swung the truck into a deserted parking lot off of Highway 17, slotting the Chevy between a modified Honda and a gleaming black ’68 Camaro.
“Well, then,” he said aloud, grinning as he nodded encouragingly. “Welcome to Charleston, yeah?”
“Welcome to the den, little pup. I’m watching…”
“Did you hear something? Someone else?” Billy asked as he closed the driver’s side door. Paul shoved his hands deep in his pockets, rocking back on his heels.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Just now,” the older man repeated. “Did you hear another wolf?”
“Oh, no. No sir.”
They were parked behind a one story block building capped with faded orange, faux shingles and, based on the warped and graying particle board over the windows, abandoned for some time.
The wooden-covered door swung open and several young men and a woman, all dressed in cut-off jeans and black t-shirts, emerged. Paul froze, immobile, at the sight of them laughing, shoving each other, their lips stretched into wide smiles as he was mentally included in the non-verbal horseplay. The loudest, and biggest, of the group was also one of the youngest. He stepped to Billy first, giving him a one-armed hug, then to Paul.
“Hey ya, Ti-garson Paulie.”
Jacob Black.
This time Paul understood how to respond.
“Hey ya, Ti-garson Billy.”
The interchange was followed with a quieter round of ‘Hey ya, cousin’.
“Come on, in, yeah?” Jacob said to him, standing aside.
Inside the Indian Head Bar and Lounge was a complete contrast to the dilapidated outside. Dim lights highlighted a pool table, bar stools, and several arcade-style video games. The distinct thudding bass of a hip hop song droned over the labored hum of six window-mounted air conditioners. Atop the gleaming bar sat at least twenty pizzas, flanked with line after line of two liter bottles of soft drinks.
Jacob punched him heartily, a wide grin stretching across his face.
“Hope you like pizza, G. Grab a pie and come meet the family.”
Mighty cooty fiyo – hey la hey, hey la hey
Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey
Paul was seated beside Billy Black, watching warily as the people he now called family moved around him. The hip hop music from earlier had been replaced with tambourines and a small shell-covered drum.
This was what the family referred to as ‘practice’. Based on the odd assortment of items arranged on the table before him, Paul suspected ‘practice’ actually meant ‘ritual’. Given his position at the right side of the pack’s ‘Big Chief’, Paul also suspected ‘practice’ included some manner of initiation.
I’ve got a Big Chief, Big Chief, Big Chief of the Nation
Wild, wild creation…
The voices of the pack became louder, the percussive beats and rattles more erratic. Billy moved in front of him, clutching a black bag in his hand and also singing.
Mighty cooty fiyo – hey la hey, hey la hey
Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey
Billy thrust his hand into the bag, withdrawing a writhing black cottonmouth snake. Before Paul could move, Billy had plunged the animal against Paul’s skin. As the snake’s venom spread through his body, the singing and music increased in intensity, becoming frenetic and chant-like.
Here come da Wildman, da Wildman.
Paul fell from the chair, screaming in agony at the fire spreading across his shoulder and into his hand. Pain more intense than any he had known drew his knees under him, made him press his head against the cold linoleum as his screams echoed back to him in the tiny space between floor and mouth. Hands grasped his arms, sending another pulse of scalding venom through his muscle and tendon, and he was seated again, this time with the weight of others’ hands securing him to his chair.
He won’t bow down, down on the ground
No on no dirty ground
Oh how I love to hear him call Indian Red
As the torturous escalation of pain reached its apex, Paul felt something stirring deep within him, at every part of his body that seemed to gather and move toward his injured shoulder. Waves of heat radiated through him, making his teeth clatter wildly as perspiration poured in thick rivulets from his scalp.
“Dey go, cousin! Dey go!” Jacob Black shouted from somewhere behind him. “Here come da Wildman, yeah!”
The room erupted in cheers. A smaller hand cupped his cheek; Paul opened his eyes to find the woman he’d heard called Leah crouching in front of him.
“Push it back,” she directed silently. Paul focused on her eyes that blazed intensely as she blinked at cascades of her own perspiration rolling down the bridge of her nose and dripping from her eyebrows. “We got you, brother.”
Mighty cooty fiyo – hey la hey, hey la hey
Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey
The chant seemed to be pulling him along, he could feel the rhythm in his bones urging him to repel the filthy venom infiltrating his body. Paul snarled, his lip curling as he ground his teeth and snorted along with Leah.
“Go on now, Paul.” Even her voice in his head was low, sensuous.
They shared a vision of oily black sludge moving toward the twin wounds where the cottonmouth’s fangs punctured Paul’s skin. Both pairs of eyes traveled to his arm just as the very fluid they imagined gurgled from Paul’s body and tumbled in a clotted ooze across his tawny skin. Jacob jumped from behind them into the center of the circle, holding the limp snake over his head. He called out, head thrown back, white teeth flashing in the fluorescent light.
“Mighty cooty fiiiiiii yoooo! The Wildman in da house!”
Paul gasped for breath, smiling with a mixture of relief and exhaustion. He stood, threw back his own head, and answered the pack with his own call.
“Mighty cooty fiyo – hey la hey, hey la hey! Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey,” Paul sang, his arm thrust toward the ceiling, pumping his fist in time with the chant. A chorus of howls met him and the pack drew in close, jumping in time and chanting.
Yeah, we get dem leech, we roast him dead.
We love it when you call us Indian Red!
Mighty cooty fiyo – hey la hey, hey la hey
Mighty cooty fiii-yo hey la hey, hey la hey
Paul felt hands on him once again, pushing him into the center of the bouncing men. It was Leah, flanked by Billy. She carried a ragged bag, little more than a beggar’s purse, embroidered with odd symbols that looked like hieroglyphics. As the throng of men continued to jump and howl, she thrust her fingers in the bag and withdrew a pinch of grayish lilac dust, raised her fingers to her mouth, and blew the powder in Paul’s face.
The stench was nauseating; sweet like dimestore lilac air freshener covering putrid, long-term decay. Paul choked on his own bile, even as fury boiled over inside him. He knew he would never be able to dislodge that smell from his memory; it occupied the same part of his brain as another, more cherished scent.
And she was one of them. His Katrina. And they were bound… cursed?
Imprinted, brother.
Leah nodded to him, drawing him away from the celebration still raging around them.
“We never know when… or why. We’ll think on it with Billy, cher. Everything that has a beginning has an end.”
“Let’s go up to Cuckold Point for a run, bros!” Jake shouted over the din. The pack made for the front door, their chant giving way to laughter and slapping hands.
“And sister, Fido.” Leah called to the hulking boy.
Paul laughed a little at the two, already enjoying what seemed to be an unending verbal war between them.
“That’s my good pup, I’m watching you, Paul. I’ve waited for you too long not to use you well and take my revenge on them all.”
As he stepped from the Indian Head Bar and Lounge, shivering at the other voice that occupied his head, he realized he was no more brother to these men than to the large man stepping from Miss Mamie’s Literary Treasures across the empty expanse of asphalt. He froze, sniffing the air and before he was aware it was happening, a full-throated howl escaped from him.
A fucking leech.
“Whoa, dude!” Jake relayed instantaneously. Paul could feel him closing in behind, taking up a rear position. The huge vampire snorted at the same time, nostrils flaring slightly. The brown bag of books tumbled from his grasp, sending a shower of yellowed paper into the air like a flock of geese. Even from seventy-some feet away, Paul could see the bloodsucker’s eyes shade over, going from clear amber yellow to black. As he began to crouch, another leech, sinewy but radiating with menace, swung from the driver’s seat of a large truck resting on a lift kit, and slung himself easily over the hood, dropping beside his beastly companion.
“C’mon, boy,” the larger of the two snarled as he twisted the bill of his threadbare baseball cap around his head.
“Watch who you call boy, son,” Paul retorted in a voice he’d never used before.
“Hey, shit-for-brains, what the Christly fuck do you think you’re doing?” said the lean, wild haired death-dealer as his hand connected with the back of the brute’s head with a bone-jarring thwack. “Do you want to get your ass turned into a fucking chew toy, Bubba? Much as I’d enjoy a little dog fightin’ m’self, am I right, Jake?” the vamp-in-charge stopped to holler over to Jacob, who grinned and agreed, “but we ain’t brawlin’ on the N’awlins for real, Bubba.”
Jake stepped around Paul, blocking his view of the still-threatening vampire called… Bubba?
“Heeey, where you at, Ed?” Jake threw up a hand, saluting slightly.
“That’s Eddie to you, Shit-zu.” The two shared a laugh and the red-capped immortal turned toward his companion. “Get in the fuckin’ truck, Emma.”
Bubba stood slowly and spat a fair amount of venom at his feet, eyes turning again to gold and never leaving Paul’s.
“I’ll let you have him when the time comes,” Tamara’s voice echoed in Paul’s head again.
Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and followed his cousin. For the time, he would live with the pack of shapeshifters, even learn their ways.
But even he couldn’t guess where his future would land him; he’d only just unearthed his past.
And who would find him first?
Tamara, the wolf who wanted him as warrior, or Katrina.
Katrina.
His heart felt squeezed when he remembered their sex… their bond.
Katrina, his mate, threaded through his bones; an immortal enemy.
Without the woman who would use him, without the vampire who would be his, away from his mother and his sister, Paul was displaced…again.
Made by the saucy, the sexy, the scintillating ROBZSINGER.
Welcome to Rebelward Without a Cause, ladies, where you can read about all them other Dead Confederate characters…oh, and I imagine there’s enough of me to keep you all completely occupied (at least your hands, mouths, and imaginations).
Y’all are just in time…new outtake this week. So make sure you have a nice little look around…and subscribe, of fuckin’ course.
Clusters of cobwebs swayed with a ripple of movement as the ghost rushed past. Excited to show Alice what she found, she wavered between being completely invisible to forming an illusory trick of light and shadow; her main concern was not concentrating on keeping her form.
“Come Alice… it’s so pretty, just perfect for your collection of treasures,” her disembodied voice laughed.
Skipping barefoot along the cold-bitten cement floor of the long-ago abandoned basement ward, Alice followed after the wisp of ghostly energy down the dimly-lit hall. The vapor lamps sputtered, dying out momentarily as the spirit approached them, flaring anew once she passed by. Alice didn’t really need the light; she loved the blackness of night, and feared nothing as she crept about; a dancing, darkling shadow, gliding from one dank, deserted room to the next. Every night after lights out, so as not to make the rusty coils of her bed creak, Alice would very carefully slip out of bed, then fly down the stairs to seek out supernatural spirits to play with.
She felt like their Queen of the Underworld, the spirits obeying and catering to her every whim. They loved her dearly, often trying to please her by performing impressions of long-dead historical figures or showing her various personal items and trinkets that had been lost or forgotten by the staff members or patients of the hospital. This simple nightly game of hunt and seek got Alice through the hollow haze of her day. She hid her pirated booty easily within her dismally thin, lumpy mattress; all her brightly colored buttons, a broken necklace, some scraps of black tulle and a shiny solitary pearl were among her favorites.
She learned very quickly that if she wanted less drugs and the dreaded “electro-shock” therapy, she needed to be quiet and compliant, so she spent most days in bed, feigning sickness so as not to be bothered with. The day nurses would be simply shocked if they saw how different Alice was in the dense embrace of the gloaming.
As her phantasmal friend rounded the corner, a shiver splintered through her, quickening her pulse, making the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention. Her body was warning her there was something other than harmless, otherworldly apparitions skulking about. She inhaled deeply, catching the unmistakable sweetness in the air, overpowering the habitual smells of dampness and mold. She froze mid-step and closed her eyes. Waiting. She had caught this scent many times before… but never this strongly.
He was close.
Closer than he’d ever been before.
Perhaps tonight he would finally make the decision to take her.
In her mind’s eye she could see bone-white, outstretched fingers reaching for her, shaking, desperate to touch even just the ends of her short, disheveled hair. Those fingers frantic to rein in their thready control… for this being was a hairsbreadth from snatching her up and snapping her like a twig.
She knew the breathless body standing behind her was a vampire. What the vampire didn’t know was she had been waiting for him.
Her first warning of his presence came from the instinctual fight or flight feeling she experienced off and on, indicating she was being watched by something very dangerous. Her second warning came from the ghosts she had befriended. They told her outright the skulker was a vampire, even foretold her death by his hand, should he continue to stalk her.
Alice had no fear of demise. In fact, she welcomed it. She knew her stalker’s venomous kiss would be the only way she could be like Jasper, her one true love who waited for her leagues along the line of time in the future, for he was a vampire, too.
Besides the bright, shiny baubles found for her by her phantom friends, her visions of Jasper were the only things that brought light and color to her dreary grey life. He was her constant, hardwired into her very soul. Remembering nothing of the family that brought her here, Alice had no doubt her obsession with Jasper helped land her in the institution; she cared for nothing except figuring out a way to bring him her love. Being changed into a vampire so she could weather the passage of time while searching for him, was a key point in her plan to do just that.
Anxious and tired of waiting, she was more than ready to turn the tables on this twisted game of cat-and-mouse. Without a thought for her own safety, the tiny, fearless, fey-like woman whip-turned to face her huntsman.
Shocked, the vampire only had enough time to pull back the hand gravitating boldly for her ebony hair. Alice placed her hands on her hips and looked up the 6-foot length of his body and saucily quipped, “What do you want with me?”
“You don’t want to know.” An eerie grin slid lazily across his features. He knew she was brave, but he had no idea she was this brazen. Arrogant even. Most definitely insane. He liked it. Very much.
“Well, then, sir,” Alice sneered and turned to walk away, calling his bluff, “you know nothing about me.”
He reappeared in front of her. She tried to suppress her smile as the satisfaction of having him right where she wanted him washed over her.
He leaned down to look into her steely-grey eyes. The red, otherworldly sheen of his irises gave her goose-flesh, and the visceral reaction to run coursed through her veins, making him smile all the more as he watched the blue veins under her thin, pale skin engorge. He could hear the valves dilate to accommodate the rush of his hunter-heart’s desire. His mouth filled with venom, which he swallowed in an unseemly gulp before he spoke., “I know your name is Alice, and you don’t belong,” the intruder curled his upper lip in disgust and gestured around them, “here. You are special.”
“Special, you say? To whom? You?” Alice goaded. “Just where do I belong then?” Her heart beat like a jackrabbit’s.
His grin widened, as he thought of her hot blood running over his tongue.
The cheekiness amused him. Apparently she had neither the wit nor the wherewithal to properly fear him. James knew there was a reason why he wanted this little one for himself.
The Volturi were the worst demons on the planet you would ever want to run from, but he finally understood what he had been wrestling with for months as he watched her: she was worth it. His decision was made.
“With me.”
He held out his hand. She took his measure, noting how his hair was a white-blond, not honeyed like Jasper’s. He was taller and more muscular but… he would do.
For now.
New Orleans, Louisiana, February, 1991
Alice could hear the revelry of Bourbon Street a few blocks down. The loose lines of freestyle jazz competing with the squeezebox whine of Zydeco music drifted above the shouts and screams of the crowds walking drunkenly from bar to bar. Mardi Gras was about to start, and the tourist traffic was thickening. It was a humid February evening, the clouds hanging low with the promise of rain, when her preternatural gift of prescience whispered and waggled its disembodied fingers at her to stay open for business despite the impending bad weather. The electricity of change was in the air; she could feel it in her immortal, iron bones.
She looked around her beloved shop; candles of all shapes and sizes were the only light in the room, casting their otherworldly orange glow over all of the occultish bric-a-brac placed about with careful precision. How she loved setting this stage. The doors were covered with curtains of black and red beads. Skulls and a few taxidermied ravens perched on the windowsills, with brightly colored scarves used as window coverings. The room held a heady potpourri of patchouli, pot, and burning candles. The altar took up the back wall of the room, as no self-respecting Voodoo Priestess would be without an altar.
The centerpiece of the altar was a three-foot tall statue of Papa Legba, otherwise known in Christian circles as Saint Peter the Gatekeeper. Candle wax covered his feet; half smoked cigars, tumblers of rum, wilted flowers and bits of cake had been placed in dishes of offering before him. Alice had done some extensive reading on the Santeria religion of the area to get it just right. Positioned in the middle of the room was a small, round table, covered in a black, silk tablecloth which complimented the highly polished gleam of a large, quartz crystal ball.
Of course, Alice needed none of these items to help with her visions… but the humans seemed to like them. She found the irony endearing; so, she would wrap the truth of her gift within the garish dressing of the fortune-telling trade. Perhaps it was overkill using so many props most considered sacred, but she had no fear of being called out by the real thing. Any voodoo practitioner would know immediately Alice was a vampire, and to leave well enough alone if they valued their life. They weren’t the only ones that could talk to spirits. Alice didn’t have to sacrifice poultry to do it either.
By the dawn of the 1990s, New Orleans had long been embracing the sinister and sacred as part of its culture thanks to Anne Rice and her pseudo-macabre, pussy vamps.
Alice was in heaven.
She fashioned her own look for her work wardrobe, a gypsy-goth spin only she could truly pull off and not look garish. Though her background was a smorgasbord of local and secular occult magicks, the look was all about Alice’s flair for the unconventional. Black, flowing skirts moved with her body like a liquid veil; all lace and tulle and netting. Steel-boned, waist cinching demi- corsets over blousy peasant tunics; the billowing sleeve caps floated over her arms like wings. Some nights her overzealous flair for the farcical would pull her towards wearing swathy headdresses, as well as bangles and ornaments dripping from every exposed finger, wrist, ankle, and bare toe to enhance her ensemble. Her apparel was matched by her hair and makeup. Outrageous wigs, smoky kohl lined eyes, decadent apple cheeks, a Monroe-mole on her upper lip, and rouged lips would complete her crazy costume.
James turned up his nose at her scene setting, spending most of his time skulking around in the back room when he wasn’t out preying. She knew he would push her to move on soon. He got snaky if they stayed in one place for too long. His paranoia was something she would often use to her advantage.
Recently they had made the switch to taking only the blood of animals. James had told her stories of “vegetarian” vampires with golden eyes he had come across in his travels. Realizing this was why her Jasper’s eyes had turned from red to caramel, Alice immediately set about convincing James that if they changed their diet it would be harder for the Volturi to track them, as there would be no bodies left behind in their wake. She had a hell of a time trying to convince him to come to New Orleans so she could set up her own shop to purge the tourists of their vacation money for their futures.
“What the hell, woman? You want to set up a fortune telling booth in the middle of vampire central? The Volturi will be on to us quicker than flies on fresh shit!”
Curling her lip up at his crassness she growled, “Fucking Volturi, that’s all I ever hear while you drag me all over hell’s half acre.” Alice chuffed out. “Can’t do this, can’t work that job, the Volturi might find us,” she parroted, the sarcasm thick and dripping off her razor tongue. “It’s been over 60 years, James, since you screwed them and took me for yourself… I think we can stop looking over our shoulders. At least for a while. You know I would tell you if we were in danger.”
Coyly, cunningly, she added, “Isn’t that why you took me in the first place?”
The lies rolled easily off her tongue. Must be all the practice I’ve gotten over the years, she thought darkly to herself. She would like nothing better than to be rid of James, but she needed him. Someway, somehow, she would figure out how to use his talents for finding Jasper, as her visions were not very helpful with the ‘where’, they were more about the ‘when’.
She sidled up to him, and ran her fingers up and down his arm, batting her eyelashes at him.
He sighed the sigh of a man who was used to giving in to the whims of his woman; a schlepped man played like a finely tuned Stradivarius.
The next week a very smug and content Alice was looking at storefront property. Her inner sidhe pointed her in the right direction, and when she found the right haven, an orgasmic shudder laddered up her spine, hit every nerve ending, and shattered out her fingers and toes.
The rain began to patter against the windowpanes, bringing her back to the present. Sheets of water then drummed against the glass, seeking asylum inside with Alice. Loud shouts could be heard as the straggling celebrants downtown took cover. Outside, a drenched dame peered in the windows of the shop, an anticipatory smile crept across Alice’s face as she dreamily read ahead, smoking on a cheroot, considering her luck. This was the one she was waiting for. She could feel it prickle across her mind as her ability woke for the task at hand. Not many souls would brave this magnitude of rain flailing at them. Mother Nature made sure she drove all the humans away except this one. The young woman flounced in through the hanging beaded curtain, shaking the offending water from her long, brown hair.
“Don’t you just love the rain?” The girl asked jokingly, completely oblivious to the momentous occasion, looking around with wide eyes at Alice’s strange and exotic showroom.
Barely able to speak from her choking need to see how this woman’s thread was woven amongst her own steel strands, she evaluated the human in front of her. This woman-girl was most definitely essential on her road to Jasper. Yes, she was the one who would bring about the catalyst to change everything for the better. Alice had had enough of this limbo existence with a vampire she despised.
“Yes, I do.” Alice agreed in her charming accent, “Welcome to my parlor,” says the spider to the fly. “I am Madame Alyssandra.”
“Um, hi, I’m Renee Higginbotham.” She held her hand out for Alice to shake. Alice, however, was unwilling to take the proffered greeting for fear of her coldness. Instead she merely gestured towards the table and looked Renee right in the eyes, causing the human to reel her hand back in embarrassment and root herself to the floor. Rapt.
“I have answers to your questions, or I can offer you a towel while you wait for the rain to stop?” She concentrated on inhaling and exhaling her cheroot as she held back her need to let her eyes roll back in her head and let the visions come.
Renee scuttled to the chair offered by the Madame, trying to quell her nerves now that she was here. She’d wanted to come inside all week, but the broody blond creep skulking in the back room scared the bejebus out of her. He always carried his face at a downward angle so he was looking up at you like he was sizing you up for a coffin, or dinner.
Settling down, she fingered the wet Benjamin in her pocket. Renee knew this would be costly since everything in New Orleans this time of year was ridiculously expensive. But, she had to know how her future would turn out. Especially now…
Removing the sorry looking crumpled currency, she wiped it on her blouse, a futile gesture since the fabric was just as drenched. Her cheeks flaming, she straightened out the bill as best she could, and placed it on the table. The portentous Madame swiftly placed an elegantly manicured hand over the bill, her black nails a flash of jet against the calla lily glow of her skin. In a twinkle of a candle flame, the Ben Franklin disappeared within the folds of her Gautier Goth ensemble.
Alice took her place on the richly adorned red and black leather chair. Placing her hands over the crystal ball, she kicked the UV light beneath so it shined through the crystal, and it came alive with luminescence as if by her own skimming touch. It made her hands sparkle and wink, mesmerizing her captive audience. An audible gasp escaped Renee’s lips.
A convulsive rush of visions pushed through her with hot promise. She placed all of her concentration on taming the flow and editing what came out for the unassuming human in front of her:
A filmy flickering panorama of a wedding, both bride and groom wore white. Renee was beaming with happiness in a mermaid-style wedding dress, the tulle flared out like meringue on a pie just below her knees.
Alice tried not to show her distaste of the crinkled, over-processed perm Renee scrunched and teased out to look like petrified plumage fanning around her face.
The groom was facing her, holding her small hands in his large, sweaty, shaking ones. He was red as a beet against all that white. This groom didn’t know a thing about grooming either. He had black hockey hair, a pseudo-mullet for jocks, all offset by a considerable mustache. His cowboy boots were white to match his suit with a bright royal blue cummerbund displayed loudly. He rivaled the church decor plastered with cheap crepe ribbon and bows hanging symmetrically all over the pews and doorways.
“Tacky, tacky.” Alice tsked to herself.
Tears threatened the groom’s masculine code to remain stoic as he said his vows. “I, Charles Swan, take for my wife, Renee Higginbotham…”
“You will marry Charlie Swan.”
Renee’s face came alive, and she gasped. She knew this gypsy woman was the real thing!
Alice saw how deeply in love this woman was, and watched as Renee ghosted her hand over her still-flat belly. The single endearing action caused a second scene to roll Alice’s murky grey matter into a ferocious undertow; her hands moved away from the crystal ball and clawed the edge of the table:
A toddler with chestnut brown pigtails pacifying herself with a ratty pink blanket was caught in the middle of her parents fighting. Renee had a suitcase in one hand and her daughter’s in the other. Accusations flew, Charlie was as red as he was on his wedding day but for a completely different reason. She was taking his child away from him. He pleaded on his very knees as Renee slammed the door in his face; he stood up in a rage and ripped their wedding photo from the wall, whipping it at the door, splinters and glass exploding as the scene dissolved.
“The marriage will not weather the storms that plague it. You take his daughter from him.”
Renee’s hand flew to her mouth. “I would never…” she stopped mid-sentence as Alice went rigid in her seat, her fingers massaging her temples in a dramatic gesture alluding she was in pain. She wasn’t, she just wanted Renee to shut up so she could concentrate.
The inside of an old Dodge with a bench seat in the back. The cherub face of the toddler from her previous vision aged to pubescence, curled underneath a pile of blankets in the backseat. Clothing hung on hangers within the vehicle, creating an insular cocoon, but try as she might, the heartbreaking sobbing coming from her mother outside still managed to reach her ears. She threw the blankets off, peeling one out from the layers to take with her and opened the car door, Renee was sitting on the hood of the car, butting out her smoke in her empty coffee cup, wiping her tears awkwardly as her daughter approached.
“Bella! I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s alright, Mama. I wasn’t tired anyway. See any constellations tonight?” The young girl hopped up to take a seat next to her mother, and wrapped her blanket around them both. Renee sighed and placed her head upon her daughter’s shoulder, pointing up to the sky.
The scene dissipated, but left its mark on Alice, who told Renee nothing of this vision, figuring the shock of the marriage she dreamed of ending so quickly was enough for now. Besides, Alice knew the dangers; the simple sweep of a butterfly’s wings could cause storms. Veiled advice was given instead as she prepared for the next onslaught of Sight… its potential singing in her head loud enough to shatter glass.
“What is meant to be will be, Renee. There is nothing you can do to change it or you run the risk of Bella being something else entirely. Hard times make us stronger.”
Renee’s eyes brightened, “Bella? We name her Bella? What is she like?”
Closing her eyes, Alice placed her hands over the crystal ball once more as she waited for the next vignette to coalesce for divination:
About a hundred students in black caps and graduation gowns sat on little white folding chairs outside on a beautiful spring afternoon. Bella, now a full grown woman and a stunning beauty, walked across the podium to receive her diploma, all grins and pride for her accomplishment.
“She is breathtaking. Long brown hair, brown eyes like her Daddy, a figure like yours only curvier… I can see her graduating high school right now. She’s so proud.”
Tears formed in Renee’s eyes. She pawed through her purse for Kleenex. After blowing her nose loudly, she asked, “What about her father… does he still… even though…,” her lip quivered miserably.
Alice was getting impatient; this session, which held so much promise before it began, was sputtering to an end with no answer to how Renee and her daughter were tied to her and Jasper.
In answer, the 8-mm movie of Bella’s graduation replayed for Alice, starting up as if queued from a cut in the roll.
Charlie, older, still sporting the Selleck ‘stache, but the grey was peppered along his sideburns. He wore a shirt and tie, the suit coat thrown over his arm, walking purposefully towards his daughter, who peeled herself away from a beautiful bronze haired…
Vampire!
Alice froze, a gothic gargoyle perched upon her leather throne. The power of speech, gone. She reached for her sketch pad and began drawing Bella’s face on the parchment. Renee trembled as she saw the face of her daughter come to life, pleased her fortune teller was so gifted she could be given this glimpse.
“Her father is at her graduation. She’s greeting him with a beautiful man on her arm. He must be her boyfriend.”
Daddy dearest seemed oblivious to the fact that his daughter, looking like a deviant debutante in her flirty, buttercream dress, was dating a vampire. The deadly erotic vampire man-boy was salivating over her, eyes roving over her frame, but looking away at the precise moment Charlie could have caught him eye fucking his Bella. Uncanny. Beyond instinct.
Like he knew in advance.
An immature squeal erupted from Renee when she saw the drop-dead beauty of the boyfriend beside Bella smolder back at her in black shade and sculpted angles as Alice continued to sketch frantically.
“What about friends? Does she have friends? My mama always says the more friends a girl has, the more goodness in her heart.”
Nearly scoffing at the inane question, considering her daughter was meat on a tray for this vamp… Alice paused with a feeling of vertigo when she realized the vampire had golden eyes. Just like… of course! The connection snapped into place as another scene formed:
Bella was in the same graduation day dress, but the scene was set at a County Festival of some sort. There were people dancing all around her as her voice addressed out-of-sight individuals.
“So, what’s y’all’s stories?”
Experiencing a feeling of being sucked backwards and rotated to see Bella’s view, Alice inhaled sharply as she realized she was looking at herself.
And Jasper.
Nineteen more years. Nineteen more years and she would be with him!
Stunned, Alice watched herself answer Bella freely with the truth of what she was.
“Alice Brandon, Mississippi State Insane Hospital, 1927, sired by James, formerly of the Volturi and now destroyed. By my hands.”
Alice tried to control her grim glee in the confirmation she would get the satisfaction of killing James herself. A smile pulled at the corners of her mouth as she fantasized darkly about the deed.
Renee was enthralled, not caring Alice had fallen silent in her absorption of what she was seeing, her hands gliding quickly over the parchment, the charcoal pencil making scratching sounds as the images came to life. Alice added a man with long, light colored hair. His eyes held a kind of patience she only saw in the very old and wise. He too, was very handsome.
“Jasper Whitlock, Confederate Army Major, ma’am. Turned in 1863, the year of the Gettysburg Address, in Texas. About ten miles from my momma’s doorstep, actually.” Alice heard sadness in his voice, “Mad-bitch Maria made me what I am, made me the commanding officer of her army of newborns. I done some bad shit, Bella.”
Alice’s eyes shimmered with the tears she was denied. The sound of her lover’s voice heard for the first time in its true form was a sonorous tonality shattering her stone heart into sand, drifting and funneling to the other side of the hourglass. So much time spent searching, and she never felt so close and so far away from him at the same time.
The image of him began to evaporate, the loss of him ripping through Alice with stunning force. She was more resolved now than ever to get to him, especially since the ‘when’ walked through her door tonight. Bella Swan was her benchmark in time.
A sharp flare of pain ripped across Alice’s skull.
No. Bella was more. Oh Jesus! Much much more. The charcoal, worn to a nub on the end of her forefinger, had just enough left to write across the vellum in perfect calligraphic script:
Swan…Cullen…Volturi.
The i was dotted, their destinies crossed-she looked upon her sketch and cursed silently to herself.
Fucking Volturi. There was no escaping them.
Carnelian eyes snatched upon Renee’s blue, the pupils dilated, Alice’s words tight and deliberate.
“Who are the Cullens?”
“I… I don’t know. I’ve never heard that name before.”
Alice attempted to scan ahead. All she spied was a vision of James walking through the back entry of the shop about one minute from now.
Crumpling the sketch in one hand, she leaned across the table towards Renee and hissed ominously, “You must go. The one who kept you away from here all week is coming back, and he must not see you here.”
“What? Why…”
“You are not for him. Leave. Now.” Alice shoved the damp C-note at Renee making no apologies for her rudeness. There was no time.
The chair scraped across the floor as Renee stood abruptly, clawed at her money, and shoved it in her purse while she walked backwards, white as a sheet. At the door, she turned and ran blindly out into the pouring rain. Out into the arms of her doomed marriage.
Alice breathed a sigh of relief. The woman was gone as she heard James’ wet boots squeak across the tile floor in the back room. Her head was spinning in a million different directions. She wished she had more time with Renee, just to catch hints of her destiny. But if James saw anything relating to the Volturi like she had drawn from that divination, well… shit, news like that would not buy her nineteen years to coerce him into finding Jasper, now would it?
She needed him.
He was the first and final piece of the endgame.
James silently weaseled into the room, sniffing the lingering curls of Renee’s sodden scent in his disgusting predatory way. “Well, well, well. Who the fuck was that tasty dish?”
Hiding her peevishness, “Just another pigeon.”
Chicago, Illinois, December 2009.
The mechanical whine of a forklift moving cargo echoed and reverberated off the walls in his cold storage warehouse. Jenks shut his office door, reducing the distracting noise to a muffled hum. His warehouse in the meatpacking district of Chicago was a front for his criminal career. Jenks had his hand in various pies throughout the city. He was good at what he did, which was work below the radar and not piss off any of the larger crime-syndicate families. What also helped was he used supernatural beings for some of his more high-end work.
Jenks was sweating profusely while sitting across his desk from the vampire. He had never been afraid of James; Alice, yes, James, no. He also knew this bloodsucker was the best Bounty Hunter he had ever met, and was thankful whenever the blond tracker would do jobs for him. James had only two conditions; no one could ever know who or what he was, and, he wouldn’t do work which had anything to do with the Volturi.
Jenks was about to infringe upon the second and most important condition.
“I have the perfect mark for you, and before you say no, hear me out.”
James gripped the arms of his chair as Jenks waddled his large frame over to the wall safe. Quickly rotating the dial with the combination, he pulled the brick-red leather dossier out from the void filled with bundles of cash and bonds. The Volturi insignia atop the flap made James go rigid in his seat. Jenks held up his hands in a submissive, friendly gesture while James eyed him coolly. He pled for his old friend to hear him out before he bolted.
“This came across my desk about an hour ago. You’re the first person I called about it, and the only person I know of who can find this coven since the Volturi can’t.”
James growled low and threateningly. Jenks then boldly stepped forward, lowering himself to look into his friend’s disturbing coppery eyes, a few shades redder than Alice’s. If Jenks didn’t know any better, he’d think the vampire was off the animal bandwagon. Sipping the supper, as it were.
Steeling himself, he reached for the one thing he knew James wanted most.
“Finding this coven could gain you clemency from them.”
James sighed. Considering it.
“They seldom farm out a bounty as big as this, James. I know you’ve been on the lam from them for years, but just take a look before you decide.”
With sweaty hands, Jenks passed the folder to James, who picked it open carefully, as if the very leather that bound the file was poisonous. His eyebrows rose up to his forehead when he took note of the Bounty offered, and he thumbed through the pictures in the file.
Alice sat up in shock. As the scene in her vision still rolled on she saw James look over the photos of a verging-on-manhood vampire called Edward, then her Jasper. Her body shook with excitement, as she waited for James’ answer. This was the job offer that would decide if she could get to him on time.
It was the end of December, 2009, and Bella was a senior in high school, somewhere. She was getting ready to graduate in late Spring, and for the past nineteen years, Alice had jockeyed and maneuvered James into position for this particular job. Being such a resourceful vampire, Alice realized the Volturi were looking for the Cullens also, and sooner or later, they would put out an APB to all their contacts, no matter how minor. She begged and pleaded with James for them to move to Chicago and do odd jobs for Jenks. Knowing the fat old coot wouldn’t be able to resist the money to be made from the Volturian Bounty on the Cullens, he would try to pull James in on the job.
James passed back the file and smiled indulgently at a crestfallen Jenks. The Bounty would have given Jenks a considerable percentage. He could finally retire and live out his life in poshness.
Could have.
Now his retirement-plan shrugged his shoulders and said, “I have two well-known conditions, Jenks. No shittin’ way.” James vanished, the door closing slowly behind him.
Anger streaked a black stain across Alice’s dead heart as she realized he would cost her everything if he turned down this job.
It was time for Alice to roll the dice and risk it all. She prayed James loved her enough to do what was necessary. She had just enough time to call him before he took his meeting with Jenks.
After leaving Jenks high and dry, James rushed home knowing he was in for quite a scene when he got there. He recalled his conversation with Alice on the cell before going in to his meeting with Jenks;
“James, you absolutely, positively MUST take the job Jenks offers you. Baby, it could set us up for life… we would finally be free of the Volturi.”
“Now hold on there… what the hell are you talking about? Jenks knows better than to offer me a job involving the Volturi, he knows the rules and why I have them.”
“But I saw him tell you if you took the job and succeeded, the Volturi brothers would grant you pardon for your… transgressions.”
“It doesn’t matter what Jenks thinks, Alice. I know how badly the V-Three want you, and they aren’t about to broker me any deals. If he offers it, we are out of here.”
Hysteria brooked in Alice’s voice. James knew she could really pour it on when she wanted, and he listened to her with practiced but thinning patience;“I am not going on the run again, James. I’m sick of this shit. I swear to fucking God, if you don’t take that job, I will light myself on fire. Do you hear me? Burn myself to ashes and make sure the Volts find out. Then, you will have nothing, and you will still be running from those pricks.”
Her histrionics were quite convincing, but James stoically reasoned that rules were rules, and they were what kept him alive all these years. Refusing the Cullen job, he prepared himself to tell his manic mate that they had to get the hell out of Chi-town. Anger simmered all along his nerves. He was tired of this shit too, but Alice had no idea how dangerous the threat really was. He didn’t understand why she couldn’t just give him this one reprieve.
Anything she wanted, he gave to her. They started working for Jenks, against his better judgment, so she could have her Rodarte fashions and fixed address in a Penthouse suite. ‘When would it ever be enough, Lisa?’ his Oliver asked.
Putting the key in the lock of her Penthouse Suite, his body went into alarm mode when his nose caught whiff of a sickening sweet, burnt smell. White smoke choked him in the doorway as his eyes zeroed in on a blackened mottle of brittle glass shapes resembling body parts and melted plastic from the tulle skirt she was wearing that morning. This was all that was left of her in the smoldering heap of ruin on the carpet.
James ran over to the sooty stain, sinking to his knees in grief.
“Sweet Jesus, Alice.”
Shoving his hands into the smoldering ashes, he wiped it across his face moaning her name. Never in a million years did he consider taking her threat of self-immolation seriously. He knew her theatrics could be outrageous, but this…
It was when he stood sometime later, he found the letter. Trembling, charcoal stained hands left ash smudges on the white paper.
Three crazy cryptic sentences stared back at him.
You ruined everything. Now you will have nothing. Including me. ~A
Shock forced him to read it a second time. Then a third. James turned it over, looking for more clues as to what Alice meant. He even looked through the stack of books on top of which the letter had been lying. Spying one of Alice’s pads that held her sketches from her automatic drawing sessions, James noted it was one he’d never seen before. It was bursting with more paper folded and stuffed between various pages. He opened it up, and the world dropped away from him, placing him in the dark cold corner of clarity where nothing was ever as it seemed.
His whole relationship with her had been a lie.
He thumbed numbly through pages upon pages of sketches depicting Alice in some very compromising positions with a familiar face. A face he had only looked upon for the first time this afternoon in a photograph. Jasper Lee Whitlock. Wanted by the Volturi for association with the Cullen Coven; the bounty he had turned down… the bounty Alice wanted him to take so desperately.
The illustrated book read like a manual of manipulation constructed and carried out with creepy precision by Alice. He had been grifted by his own girlfriend… his own issue. For over 80 years she had led him across miles of water, earth and sky to find this Jasper. The deception burned him to the core, righteous anger taking root across his body. Rage itched along his palms, the need to destroy paramount. He would start with the sketchbook… large strong fingers gripped menacingly to rip it to millions of confetti-sized shreds.
But he stopped himself.
He could use this book.
He would find Jasper alright. To kill him. He would not be denied the closure only Jasper’s end could bring for such a grievous wound to his soul. Then he would hand over the rest of the Cullens and ask for no purse. He simply wanted to be pardoned for his crime of desertion and thievery. Ruing the day he ever took that conniving harpy into his dead heart, he walked out of their Penthouse leaving everything behind. After he retrieved the Volturi file from a very surprised and excited Jenks, he began his search for Jasper as retribution for his broken heart.
Old City Jail, Charleston SC, January, 2010
James couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched, but then again, he was standing in the middle of the most haunted building in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. For over 150 years the Charleston jail was a prison and asylum, wherein many souls lost their lives under incomprehensibly unfortunate and cruel circumstances. Starvation and malnutrition being the smallest of the offences; torture and execution being the most violent. Alice would have loved this place. He came here feeling nostalgic, and stupidly sentimental, wanting to be in an environment that made him feel close to her, where the veil between the living and the dead was thin. Just as it had been in Mississippi, when he’d finally found her.
The lurking dread was a trick of his mind, he imagined. Akin to that sneaking feeling he knew his Alice had felt as he’d watched her, wanted her, and waited for her brave—and dire—capitulation so many years before.
Hopefully, it was thin enough so the bitch could hear him make the call to the Volturi about him finding the Cullens. Once he sent the proof via pictures they were living in Cainhoy, mainstreaming themselves as local yokels, he was going to kill Jasper Whitlock.
Keeping her wretched sketchbook had its drawbacks. The collection was an illustration of just how contrived their whole relationship had been. A blueprint of her lies that only drove the knife deeper in his back. Alice had mind-fucked him at every opportune moment to get to that bastard Jasper.
But, having the drawings to refer to as clues to find the son of a bitch proved quite useful. A good tracker knows the answers can always be found in the details; James studied her drawings; the background scenery, the clothing, the words sometimes scrabbled across a page here and there. Piecing together a cohesive timeline was not easy with so many alternate endings, but the Volturi file helped fill in the holes. This was a strange puzzle. The crucible was seeping himself in their doomed love story. He came to understand her drive. Jasper had been tithed to Alice long before him and was to remain long after. He burned the sketchbook once he memorized it. It would be disaster if it fell into the hands of the Volturi. There were things in there he doubted even his eyes should have seen, and he certainly didn’t want to bother trying to understand it.
Debating for the final time whether or not he could call the Volturi and clear his name, he paused as he felt a cold rush of air hit him. A crinkled field of energy materialized. Short in stature, the figure was small, the hair short and dark. The face that still haunted his dreams was now stealing through the shroud into his reality.
Alice.
She looked so sad; James actually hesitated to listen to the apparition.
“Please. Please don’t kill him. He’s already lost me. He’s as good as dead. Don’t lose your soul over this, James. It’s not worth it.”
The voice was thin and reedy. James’ eyes narrowed.
“Liar! Go back to the rock in hell you live under, you treacherous, batty bitch! The lover you never knew will soon join you.”
The spirit of Alice disappeared just as James felt the tingle of breath on the back of his neck.
Words cold as ice upon his skin, “No, James, darling. You first!.”
A very solid Alice standing behind James grabbed his head in a powerful vise-grip, and twisted viciously, ripping it off, disassembling his body before he could even register his death was upon him.
It was simply over.
Hypnotically, with precise purpose, Alice burned her sire’s body, each piece hissing and spitting at her while it succumbed to the flames. Tucking James’ cellphone into her pocket, she glanced to her right as Lavinia Fisher-the first woman serial killer ever caught and executed-manifested beside her. Lavinia’s filmy dream-form flickered and re-assembled to look exactly like Alice.
Feeding another piece of James into the fire, she smiled at her partner in crime. “You did a phantasmagorically good job, Lavinia, thank you for your help. You like that trick?”
“Oh yes,” Lavinia grinned conspiratorially, “but how did you know I could do that?”
“The spirits in the asylum would put on shows for me when I was a child there. I was so frightened and alone, they took pity on me and made me laugh with impressions of dead historical figures. They were the ones who taught me spirits can mimic the form of anyone who has passed over into death, assuming it for short periods of time.”
“You are dead?”
“Yes, Lavinia, I’m a vampire. Of course I’m dead.”
“Is he dead?” The ghost gestured towards the burning remnants of James.
“Oh yes. He is very dead.”
“Alice?” Lavinia asked, her voice small and secretive.
Alice merely raised her eyebrows in response.
Lavinia faded in and out, her form coalescing into Elizabeth Bathory, then Lizzy Borden. “Can you tell me about Jasper?”
“Some other time, but right now, I need to go to him.” Standing up, free at last, Alice dusted herself off and smiled at her new friend. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. James was right. I really do like this place.”
“This was… enjoyable.”
“Yes, Lavinia, it certainly was.”
~~ll~~
Jasper Lee Whitlock
Jasper felt her careening in his direction, felt it in the dead marrow currently breast-stroking through his wrought-iron skeleton. Heard her disjointed call screaming his mother-given name from an unknown distance and space. Eons ago.
And now.
His glassy, peri-black painted ’48 Ford F-1 couldn’t move fast enough. That souped-up engine whined like a little cunt as he mashed on the chrome footprint pedal. The fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror were defying gravity, just like a picture he’d seen once in a magazine of a crucifix hanging from a rearview mirror with the Son of God holding on for dear life and nearly flying off it. The last time he’d seen the offensive Photo Shopped Jesus, he’d been speed-gluing the pages together with his own personal wank paste.
She was here in South Carolina; he could sense it. And, at his familial homestead, no less.
His own off-kilter life skeined home to rest. The red laser-pointer of anticipation acidized just to the left of his harsh chest plate; right where his dead, confederate heart lay unmoving. For just a moment, he felt the dried out, old vasculate gallop with the same velocity his Army charger would on the Texas Badlands. Then the feeling was gone, going silent as the whale-bone graveyard it was housed in.
Pulling up to Maw and Carl’s, she was there. Waiting for him on the steps with Eddie. For a second, he knew jealousy. She was his, and the fact his family got to meet his mate before him rode rough on his nerves. For a moment, Jasper knew doubt.
It didn’t last.
Her face spoke volumes. Her unleashed emotions promenaded a do-si-do right into him.
He already knew her name; Alice. His Alice. His incredible, edible Alice. Her eggshell skin bloomed with a million dark promises. Bright as an eclipse, her rat-a-tat funeral garb seemed fitting. Why wouldn’t she be dressed to celebrate the death of their wanting and waiting for one another? She carried a tainted regality; all smoke, weeds, ash and shadow, her hair a dark, undercast crown of angel spikes and devil’s wings.
She stole his reason to exist and rucked it into her heart’s pocket.
Out of the truck quick as silver, he saw Eddie’s stricken face. Felt his wretched determination, his finality, his dejection. Eddie looked away. Jasper did not.
Like an eighteen-wheeler hitching a semi, his draw-bar slid into her receiver. Now as a single unit, they stood toe-to-toe, straight as pewter soldiers until the very end when they threw off the last vestiges of their single, transient lives.
For they had been truly homeless until now.
Alice jumped first. Jasper caught her a split-time second after he forcefully threw his whittled toothpick down onto the ground.
A tornado to a volcano. A flash in a pan. Lips beat against each other, igniting into a maelstrom of churning lavatic ribbons as they fell to the earth. A fine flume of dust sailed into the air and settled upon them in a powdered terra confection.
Silent words were conveyed and questioned as Jasper picked his precious package up and settled her into the custom, creaky leather of his bench seat; although he was sure the freshly verathaned California Bull Pine boards of the truck bed might do just fine once they were away from the prying, scrying ways of his family.
“You hurry up, Jasper. Those pine boards are not for us just this minute. I’ve waited long enough.”
“Yes’m. Just a minor thought.” He grinned his awry half-smile at her.
Jasper fired up the rebuilt ’76 Ford engine, and listened to the sound of the rocker valves seat and unseat the pistons. They caused the internal combustion needed to propel them to their destination. The din muffled by the aluminum valve covers mirrored the rush and ebb of venom through his veins. The polished ’48 tore off with a roostertail’s flurry of gravel and grit. Maw would not approve.
Alice moved to sit on his lap, straddling him with her short skirt hiking up around her svelte hips. Her shredded tights would have but a spider’s web chance of surviving this trip home. She sucked on his neck, kissing every mark and scar. And, when she rolled her tongue into his ear, he very nearly lost the war. Nearly skittered off the blacktop into a ditch. Not that either one would have cared at this moment.
From the corner of his eye, he spied a church sign that read,
“I love you.”
My name is God, and I approve this message.
Luxury Hollows never felt so far away. Nor nearer.
~~ll~~
Alice took in Jasper’s not-anymore-bachelor pad, and decided this single-wide was the fucking Taj Mahal. A Mughal garden of architectural bliss. A Persian paradise.
Tattered rugs scattered atop the worn seventies-era plush, pile-style carpet, and ratty pillows were haphazardly thrown about with no real furniture to speak of. She skimmed her fingers along his dusty memories knick-knacked along sagging, faux-wooden-paneled walls. All lonely salt-and-pepper shakers of his travels.
Alone no more.
Jasper watched her touching his useless memorabilia and marveled at her marbeline features before tucking into her lips again. His cock bowed out, mashing between their seeking bodies and his fly. Alice wasted no time in molding her hand to his considerable out-dent, palming and squeezing.
He stilled her while trying to regain his shaky leash on the spillway. Jasper was no stranger to a quick skinny dip into warm wells, but this was different. He hadn’t been with another vampire since Mad Maria made and maimed him.
“It’s okay, Jasper. You don’t have to hold back, lover. Come and get it.” And with that, Alice disappeared into the bedroom.
Slow as a turtle, he smiled and made his way to his pecker room, all the while stripping himself to just his jeans. With his hands on his belt buckle, he entered the doorway and stopped short. Alice lounged on the bed, spread eagle, knees up with nothing but her Coming to God Suit on. The sight of her kissable pink slash so perfectly displayed, nearly undid him again.
She openly ogled his swollen junk while he popped the two-pound buckle free of the leather, then let the rest of the metal rivets fly loose so the panels flapped and furled at his rangy hips. Her wheat-grass eyes rounded then shuttered while she drank in the sight of his girthsome pole standing at full mast. Jasper looked down at his mighty prick saluting him, and smirked. He was about to be balls deep in this witchy woman.
Nubile fingers hooked and beckoned. Jasper licked his lips and answered her call by letting his time-worn jeans drop, the heavy buckle making a mute thunking sound on the outdoor-grade carpet. Cradling right up to her crook and cranny, he grabbed her fairy chin between his thumb and pointer finger and kissed her hard enough to chase away any of her shadows. This kiss was meant to erase nightmares, meant to stake and brand her as his.
Alice was not one to be dominated. She’d had plenty of that in her life, and she gave back as good as she got. One kleptotic hand found its way into his dredged-flour and honey hair, while the other mischievous hand snuck to his saddle-honed ass to knead and squeeze.
Heavy passion radiated from Alice and slammed deep into Jasper. She knew exactly what she was doing; fucking him from the inside out. Her tongue mated deeply with his, showing him exactly where she wanted him.
She was an unearthly maven all right, and everything Alice felt or tasted crowded out of her only to steep back into Jasper. His sympath ways fed from her, bled from her. On groveling hands and knees, his scarred sheen of skin flayed for her, leaving him exposed, wonderfully fashed open. He was lost.
He slid down the bed, enjoying the rasp of the coverlet on his cock and pushed her feathery thighs wide. Placing a hand on each delicate piece of flesh, Jasper grinned a toothy grin, then swooped in and bit down superficially on each side before sucking tenderly on her tight skin. He pushed her open even farther with the palms of his hands so he could gaze at her from stem to stern, pucker to pubis pearl. Tongue lolling out, Jasper licked her starting from the bottom straight to the top. Once at the top, curls parted, her fleshly button perked and jerked into his drawn lips. Applying hard suction, the nub distended and issued a staccato pulse.
Loud and verbal, Alice let Jasper know exactly how he made her feel. Soon, he absorbed it all and went sexually nuclear enough to make any living being within a ten-mile radius feel inexplicably horny. The feral trailer park pussies went at it, caterwauling and spitting just like the minx underneath his lips. Shit, even the fucking nocturnal crickets starting chirping in mid-daylight.
“That’s right, baby. Right there,” Alice dictated as she sat up and grabbed his hair, hard. “Suck it.”
“Darlin’, that’s my line.” Jasper stated from around her clit.
“Huh. Not anymore.” She smiled evilly and pushed into his mouth greedily.
Jasper let go of her clit and pulled back to watch as he sunk two fingers into her gleaming slit. Scissoring them, he stiffened his tongue and laved in between the long digits, then pushed down on her back disc with his thumb.
Alice nearly stood straight up on the bed as she came in a gale force rush. Jasper held onto her like an eight-second bull rider to subdue her until she subsided.
Crazed and energized, she flipped him onto his back. Alice was no Debbie Does Dallas, but she gave it her all, relishing him, worshipping him. She pounced on his rod with the fervor of a woodpecker on an oak tree, his short hairs tickling her nose with each pass. When she added her hand to the motion, Jasper groaned, his head lolling back momentarily on the pillow. She traced the thick ridge and valleys from the head all the way down to the heavy spheres lying tight inside the pouch. One ball hugged higher than the other, the ruched seam dividing them fascinated her. Entranced, she bit down on the thick sac testing the pliable feeling under her incisors, then let go and licked at the skin while she continued to stroke him.
Her mouth and tongue were gifts from the southern god, Billy Bob. And God, how she could bob. Jasper so very badly wanted to come down her throat and watch her swallow, and swallow, and swallow him whole. He felt the sting and boil threaten low in his belly. Then something deep in his chest shifted and by the look on Alice’s face, she felt it too. They both felt the insane need to complete this marriage of souls.
Alice straddled and reared up to impale herself; quickly, desperately, giving him full view of her taut, pear-shaped breasts. They were petite and white just like the rest of her frame. Perfection. Jasper grabbed her lithe hips and ground her down on his cock, then lifted her to watch himself shuttle back in and out of her hungry pussy. The thick mushroom head popped free, slick with her nectar, then disappeared inch by nine inches into her crushing sheath.
Jasper wrapped his honed arms around Alice’s back and began to feast on the luscious fruit offered to him. Her quarter-sized aureoles drew into diamond points inside his mouth. He latched on and sucked hard, using his teeth to scrape and rake at the reinforced weights.
She continued to screw down tightly on his dick, the bed groaning under their onslaught. Luckily the box spring was buttressed with cinder blocks. A vampire of his sexual caliber needed all the fortification for fornication he could get. All king size, the queens in here were long gone. He had a monarch-winged fey perched on his branch now
Both began to growl deeply, the double whammy of what was coming loomed just within reach. And, then it happened.
All nutting hell broke loose.
Alice threw her head back and screamed. Jasper let go of her tit and clamped his teeth down on her collarbone, slicing through the agate skin to the mercurial osseous beneath. He felt his balls draw up tighter than a boxer’s fist and felt the crush of fluid punching its way out. Her box squeezed and squeezed him, her clit rigid and thrumming against his other bone. They came together, making bedlam of their souls. Souls that sparked and arced higher and higher into nirvana, then crashed down, locked together in one cell. For life.
~~ll~~
All-seeing Alice was a force to be reckoned. Slip of the fingers, and nimble of feet, she walked toes-only on this earth. Those spells of hers prodded into his psyche, slashed straight through to his cortex. She intuitively shared everything she spied in that crazy minds-eye of hers. Every time she had an episode, he’d watch her elfin face dance into a vampire grin almost as if she enjoyed those previews playing out.
Heteronormative: a kooky conundrum of a word! She left him full, yet aching. Always eerily grieving for her while she stood right next to him; inside him. Being the Equal Opportunity Fucker, Alice parted Jasper from his need for a symbiotic Tom, Dick, and Harry-foolery type of satisfaction. Nope, he was on the straight and narrow for this train ride… reformed.
No longer searching for oblivion.
And, how this goth-clad raven ever chose to align with him, Jasper would never comprehend. Alice made him a General from a Major, a leader in this army of two. It was never his to question, only revel and swim in deeply still waters. Yes’m, their jagged little murky pond.
Meeting up with his brothers and sisters-in-arms, Alice, the ever-knowing egret, wowed Jasper by bringing home a sleek crotch rocket she could ride and negotiate like his johnson. He pulled the lamb-hide cover off his own pride and joy, his Orange County Choppers, Prisoners of War, custom cycle from out of storage. He turned the key in the ignition and twisted the throttle, enjoying the deep warble the Rev-Tec engine provided. The pipes sang the sad tune of all those lost in war.
They had a job to do. Volturi vulture scouts were here and needed to be taken care of. Jasper would do anything to save his family; Alice would do anything to save Jasper.
When the preventive maintenance deed was done, and each party fired off into the night, Jasper and Alice went back to their trailer trove of love. Jasper parked his bike, but Alice stayed on hers. After watching her man, a killing thing, raze that froggy, rope-haired vampire with her help, she wanted him with a vengeance. They’d committed pre-meditated, first degree murder together all Natural Born Killers-like. Nothing said ‘I love you‘ as much as manslaughter.
“You wanna ride mine?” Alice hinged the throttle for effect.
A slow smile crossed his features. “Hell yeah.”
She slid to the back seat, riding bitch so Jasper could be the White Knight to her Black Betty.
Jasper laid low over the tank and knew no need to tell Alice to lean with him. When he zigged, so did she. Instead of a testosterone laden peel-out, he lazily started forward, carefully crunching over the uneven dirt and gravel lane out of Luxury Hollows.
Once clear of the metal trash bin houses, Alice slipped her arms around Jasper’s waist and cupped him through his leathers to find him already hard as the fiberglass tank it was trestled up to.
“You after something, darlin’?”
“Just go faster.”
“Hold onto that wheelie bar, sweet tea, we’re goin’ ridin’.”
In the dead of night, with no prying eyes except maybe a few cranked-out truck drivers, they sped up Clements Ferry Road to I-526, then I-26 where there were unending miles enough to go from Pond to Pacific.
Alice undid the zipper and parted the leather to have better access to Jasper’s cock. It stood straight, just touching the edge of the fuel cap, as if it were the compass navigating their journey. She pressed it with her palm flat against the vibrating tank and felt him squirm. He gripped the sides of the Kawasaki firmly between his thighs and sped up even more.
Wanting to be free, Alice ripped her helmet off and set it a’sail into a tributary along the roadside; enjoyed the air ripping at her hair. On a split second decision, she ducked to the left side of Jasper while they rode in the fast lane. She balanced precariously on one foot peg and snaked her torso around his, bringing her head into the vee of his legs. Jasper let go of the handlebar and wrapped his arm around her for more support.
Surprised, there was something new under the sun, so to speak, the biker did a high-speed wobble for a moment when Alice’s pert lips enveloped him, sucking him in to the deepest recesses of her mouth.
Road head just got a whole new meaning in Jasper’s big black book of sexual proliferations. Shit, she gave rode head. He looked down to watch the back of her head piston over his pulsating prick. He began to count road signs, even shouted out the names on billboards to keep from knocking the bottom out of the back of her throat.
‘Martin Luther King was a Republican’ flew by, so did ‘You never sausage a place – You’re always a wiener at Pedro’s', and ‘There’s plenty of room for all God’s creatures. Right next to the mashed potatoes’.
Amen.
Alice’s laughter only served to stir his ardor up even more. He felt his balls swell near to bursting as she polished his knob to a brilliant shine. The unbelievable softness of her mouth in sharp relief to her buckram tongue and blade teeth felt incredible. Her venomous saliva wet him more and more. He couldn’t hold on any longer. A slick oil spill; an Exxon Valdez gusher burst onto her tongue, into her cavern until she had drunk him dry. She popped him free of her puffed lips, tucked him back in, and zipped him up with a zing.
The relief he felt along with the gratitude for his fortune told Alice all she needed to know, and she settled back in behind her man, happy for once, scanning the future, and forging their destiny.
“Hold me tight!” he half warned, half hoped.
They sped on in the blue glimmer of the headlight in front of them, and the dull red gleam of the single tail light behind them.
“Always.” Alice promised.
________________________
Written by the exquisite duo Gasaway Alley and RowanMoon
I might’a married that girl if her daddy hadn’t tried to shoot me.
Now, I know I’m not the suave, foreign one, the one with the fancy Oak Park history or some damn warrior, but one thing a McCarty would never do is walk right in on Sunday lunch with a .12-gauge callin’ for a wedding or a hangin’, and if we did, we sure as hell wouldn’t take along two half-dense brothers who had fourteen teeth between ‘em as back-up. Some things just were not done. My granny would worn our asses out if we tried such fool-headedness.
Thanks to the quick thinking and crack aim of my brother Elbert, Herman Sanders’ shot went all to hell as soon as that biscuit hit him smack in the left eye.
Lucky for me, that was his good eye.
Lucky for me, too, Abel Greer was driving the Slow and Easy, also known as the Knoxville, Sevierville and Eastern Railroad, towards Knoxville. I’d hopped on that old train more than on ol’ round-heeled Becky Sanders, anyway. Hell, me and Elbert would ride those rails up to Knoxville every Saturday evenin’. Becky had rode me twice; I do believe that was once on a Tuesday afternoon and then that very same Sunday morning when we shoulda been in church.
Preacher was probably talkin’ on eternal damnation in the lake of everlastin’ fire, just like he always did on the third Sunday of the month. I’d heard that sermon once every few weeks since I was old enough to go to Sunday meeting. On the other hand, I’d only had Becky the one time. I figured I knew the sermon backwards and forwards; I’d seen Becky forwards and was mighty interested in tryin’ her out backwards for a change of scenery.
Lucky for me that was the last time. That girl would have sucked the stripes off a barber’s pole if you’d give her half a chance. If I’d let her near me one more time I bet I would’ve gone around cock-eyed and with a limp for the rest of my days.
So, in the interest of carryin’ on the McCarty name with the right girl and keepin’ my pecker in one piece, I took off. I figured I’d lie low up in Knoxville for a week or so, just long enough for some other sorry jackass to let ol’ Becky have a ride. Then I’d run on home.
Problem was, I’d lit out of Granny’s kitchen hotter than a goat’s ass in a pepper patch and din’t have one thin dime to my name. I could do without when it came to woman-folk but damned if I’d run around hungry for a week.
If there’s one hobby I’ve carried with me all of my ninety-five years walkin’ this Earth, no matter if it’s livin or existin’, it’s the fairer sex. I just… well, I can’t help myself for appreciatin’ on the female form. The way ladies look and feel and sound and damn, that smell of ‘em… it don’t matter to me if they’re a handful or an armful. Each one of ‘em has their own mysteries and special little particulars. How could a man not want to get a little sample of ever’one he can?
Lucky for me, all McCartys had the gift of gab and a talent with games. My talents with the women-folk was just gravy.
By Sunday evenin’ I was down in Mechanicsville, asleep in the warm arms of a red-head whose husband had gone North for work, had a dollar in my pocket I’d won at dice down behind the Bijou theatre on Gay Street, and an invitation to Cass Walker’s backroom poker game on Monday night.
I liked to keep busy. McCartys didn’t set much by those who couldn’t find some industry to occupy themselves. Idle hands an’ all.
I hated I never made that poker game up at Walker’s store. Sorta had to scoot out of Knoxville right quick. That red-head’s husband came staggerin’ in, drunk and out of work again, from what I heard tell… or yelled. I waited out some of that fussin’, but you would’ve thought they was trying to skin cats there was so much dang screechin’ and things breakin’. I took my chance, and her man’s jacket since it was looking like I’d be sleeping rough that night, and headed on out the bedroom window. Well, wouldn’t you know that old boy come on out front to wish me well with a couple of bad shots whizzin’ right by my ears. I took off for the train yard a few streets over and managed to lose him and the law when I hopped another quick ride out of town. Lucky for me that red-head’s husband’s coat had fifty dollars in the pocket and a pint of real Canada whisky, ’cause when I woke up in another boxcar and realized I was hungover in Chicago, it was damn cold.
I’d never been further North than Knoxville, and there I was up in the Windy City, eatin’ fancy Italian macaroni and makin’ time with the little black-headed girl who brung out the food. She had my drawers around my boots slicker than cat shit on a hot skillet in that back room. She did such things to this country boy, I never heard them Tommy guns goin’ off! Them boys was the first Eye-talians I ever came across, but certainly not the last, and they was about the worst shots I’d ever seen. That macaroni house looked like it’d been sprayed down in tomato gravy, and there was still folks sittin’ at their little tables, lookin’ like they’d just seen the ghost of Cootie Brown.
Fortunately, I spotted a nice wool cap on the floor. I asked around, but no one said it was their’n. I sure did need that cap once I woke up in Minneapolis. Them railcars was gettin’ more and more chilly, not to mention cows ain’t the cleanest of bedfellows. It was Thursday, and I figured I needed to be makin’ my way home soon. But I sure as shit weren’t headin back on home stinkin’ like the inside of a cow-filled boxcar.
Bein’ wise in the ways of the city-Minneapolis was just a bigger Knoxville, after all-I knew to head toward the nearest pawn shop. Where there’s a pawnshop, there’s a boardin’ house, affordable for a man with light pockets and ridin’ a heavy run of good fortune . If’n I had to, I’d pawn my overcoat until I could work a table of cards. Blue eyes and dimples went a long way toward gettin’ me a bath and a shave. I paid my ‘water bill’ right well and, lucky for me, someone run off with that ol’ jacket I’d had since Knoxville and left a big heavy woolen coat with an honest-to-God second-class train ticket to Anchorage, Alaska, in the pocket.
Wouldn’t you know that yeller-headed lady at the train station who changed my ticket to 3rd class had some spare room in her little office for a cot. When she closed up of the evenin’, we had us some place to get friendly, and I had an extra ten dollars from turnin’ second-class to third.
When I got to Anchorage, Alaska, I figured I was about the luckiest shit-kickin’ country boy in the whole entire history of Sevier County. I did need some money to get back home, but I sure was glad I got to see the last frontier. A pretty little Inuit lady taught me all about her Northwest Passage and then directed me on the right way out of town, even though we did have some difficulties conversin’. I got the jist of what she meant and started to make my way to a logging camp to ask for work. I sure was lucky I stuck to the snow and grass on the side of the road ’cause them trucks with the logging company name writ on their sides was haulin’ ass down that muddy road.
I never did make it up to that lumber company in Talkeenta. I did, however, run across the biggest damn grizzly bear I do believe man has ever encountered. That fucker was taller than me when on its hind legs and was hell-bent on battin’ me around like it was a cat with a ball of yarn. I’d seen my share of black bears in the Smokies, but this was a huge 1500-pound, predatory, fuckin’ machine.
I damn near broke the leg the Grizzly hadn’t mauled tryin’ to crawl after that lucky cap I’d picked up in Chicago.
Lucky for me Carlisle was out huntin’ and heard the bear’s roar, ’cause it weren’t me screamin like a banshee Indian, that’s for damn sure. He swooped down, lookin’ like St. Peter himself and said something to me about eternal life without death. I told him I didn’t much care what he said or did as long as he’d find me a couple of aspirin tablets and a warm place to sleep.
It sure had been a hell of a week and a half.
‘Course I had no idea I was about to be fried up like a side of bacon in my own blood and sinew, changed from man to inhuman. Bitch of it was, I was the first McCarty to cross the Mason–Dixon line and, with no job to speak of, I hadn’t even had a cent to send my mama a telegram about it all. That might have been a spot of luck, though. Mama could carry a grudge when it came to actin’ up at Sunday lunch.
Carlisle introduced me to his family: Esme and Edward. He said they could be my family, too.
I just about couldn’t believe the run of good fortune I was havin’!
There I was, suddenly reborn and then seein’ the whole entire world with a family of untirin’ travellin’ folk. I sure did wish I could tell my Mama about it all, ’cause I was happier than a newborn tick on a fat hound. We went on a Grand Tour of Europe, the four of us. Met some more of our kind, most unsettlin’ bunch imaginable, worse’n revenoors. Settled down in England, and the Cullens-the name we all shared now-did real well there, until ol’ Eddie had a serious bad streak with a woman called Chelsea.
I’d settled real good into the lifestyle when we finally made it to England. It was just the four of us still, ’cause Jazz was dippin’ his pole and havin’ his fill on his own time. That’s where I took up my appreciation of fine literature. Barbara Cartland: now that lady sure can tell a story. All them books about little perky-tittied orphan country lasses and their manly London guardians just captured my imagination. Those tiny backwater gals always did just peachy-keen amongst those fine London people, and there weren’t a reason I couldn’t do the same. Besides, somethin’ about love and togetherness and the bonds of friend and family winnin’ out in the end just lumped up my throat ever’ time. No matter what, I’ve always got my people and a big ol’ grin. When it seems like I might be forgettin’ that and fixin’ to get all down in the mouth about what’s to come, I just take me another novel out and get to readin’.
As interestin’ as it was traveling and seeing everything and ever’one across the big pond, I can’t say I see much to recommend about some parts of Europe.
I don’t care to talk on that much but… well, let’s just say sometimes seein’ hard things can turn a man hard. The more time you spend lookin over your shoulder, waitin’ for some damn real-live carnival freak-show to turn up and end one of your own, a man kindly starts to feelin’ less than fuckin’ gracious.
I spent my time in England watching and waiting. At first, I wouldn’t leave Eddie alone for worry one of them black-robed folks might come for him anyway. Then he reared up at me, mad as wet hen, and told me if I didn’t take my head out of his ass, he was gonna’ introduce me to my own personal Jesus. And my cock would be nothin’ more than an icon like them hippie-dippy wanderers in Glastonbury worshipped while they spliffed up before continuin’ their pilgrimages to Stonehenge.
Eventually, we made our way to the Low Country and set up real fine down to Luxury Hollows. Hell, I even got to meet a real-live Confederate officer when Jazz joined up with us. I made sure not to mention most of the folks in East Tennessee went Union. Esme wouldn’t have ugliness come up between her boys.
I had to run on up to Sevier County and look in on the McCartys once we got to Cainwhore. Tennessee was barely a two-hour sprint, and it was just too tempting to see what had become of the old homefolks.
For some reason I couldn’t make myself look around for Mama, though.
I did see that poor old Becky Sanders got so fat it took two dogs to bark at her an’ lost most of them pretty teeth her Daddy was so proud of while she was at it.
~~ll~~
When it boilt down to it, I decided to let Eddie-or Edward depending on our locale-pull that tortured, navel-gazing, Byronic Hero shit. Hell, long-faced boy was just the wing-man my jovial ass needed. Everywhere we roamed I was meetin’ folk just like us, and dangamighty if undead women didn’t turn out to be damn pretty and pretty damn willing.
I met all sorts of ladies on our travels. Mary and Mekenna, Zafrina and Senna. I had me a wee little Irish lassie I’d call on, Maggie, and her big sister Siobhan with all them dangerous curves. I never complain when I’ve got more cushion for my pushin’!
I have to say my favorite place to visit was Denali, the site of that lucky day when Carlisle found me. Eddie and I would make it up there every year or so, enjoy some local fare, and I’d hit the Klondike Trifecta: Irina, when she was home, Miss Katie, and Hell-cat Tanya. Sometimes I’d even hit it all at once. Them were some fine days.
~~ll~~
Lucky for me I’ve paid attention all these years. Women are simple creatures when it came right down to it… with beautiful, complicated bodies I’d spent more than my fair share of time studyin’.
These pearls of wisdom, these gentle drops of rain should fuckin’ be published or posted in the men’s bathroom of every Applebee’s nationwide or some shit. I’d win a Nobel Prize for Literature for these jewels, maybe even some damned humanitarian award for the aidin’ and assistin’ of all the damn introspective wankers-like my suddenly ever-spankin’ little brother-just fuckin’ gettin’ some. It damn near broke my stony-dead heart watchin’ Eddie go off the pony. My own baby braw, the hardest of the stony and stoned undead, ceptin’ me–of course–was hell-bent on rubbin’ freakin’ callouses on his one-eyed wonder worm as soon as Bella took one look at him and turned him to stone.
Some poor fuckers have no luck at all.
We could have hung twenty layers of wallpaper with the amount of spooge that fucker jerked over the snack-sized brunette human from over t’ Mama’s. He was a bad-assed muthafucker, reduced to nothin’ more than a chronic warrior against the purple-headed jizz spitter. Sad cow-eyed Eddie, unluckiest bastard I’ve ever met.
He wouldn’t listen to me, and there the fool lay, rubbin his nub instead of neck deep in the nasty.
Any sumbitch with, or without, a pulse could pull a fair share of either variety poontang if he’d just follow my simple advice:
Bubba Cullen’s Five Rules For Pullin’ Good Cooter.
1. When you come upon one you like the look of, act all shy and shit but make sure she cottons on you’ve got an interest in her. If she’s too stupid to get the point of a coupla looks over your beer, shoulder, or the pool table, she’s most likely inbred, insecure, or lazy. All of them things mean a lay about as excitin’ as dry humpin’ Maw’s Goose-Down Pillers, and you should move on. I’ll add as one of them… er… cravats that insecure chicks can be a gold mine of pent-up dirty librarian fuck-me harder, fuck-me faster, and smack-my-ass types, but those ho‘s (or hoes?) tend to cling like Georgia red clay and should only be handled by the skillful professional like me.
2. Once you’ve got her attention, work that line a little. Ignore her. Even better, pay attention to her friend.If her friend’s nasty-ass, it’ll piss her off, and she’ll start workin’ for your attention. If her friend’s fine as frog hair, too, you could get in there for a little triple-decker action, and that shit ain’t never a bad thing.
3. Sometimes, the feisty ones get stubborn. These are the ones you gotta amuse to calm ‘em down a bit. Lay your wantin’ out there, get the hooker’s attention and make her laugh. It don’t hurt a bit at this stage to make an ass of y’self. Ain’tnothing to let your pride take a slobber-knocker when the ultimate prize is between them thighs. I like to say laughter is the best lube around.
4. At this stage of affairs, it ain’t improper to get a little physical. It lets her know you’re reckonin’ about her body and gives you a chance for a final perusal of the merchandise. I’m partial to a little slap on that ass m’ own self. Those little squeals and giggles y’get from a well-placed pop on the posterior are like a concerto to my highly sensitive ears. Plus, it portends her tendencies for vocalizin’. I do love me a screamer.
5. A word about cockblockers. They are out there, like damn potholes in the road to your intended pussy. If it’s a chick, go back to step 2 and repeat. It it’s a dude, it’s absolutely imperative to figure out which side of his bread is buttered. Women who tote around them Sex an’ the City type, gay boyfriends are a recent development, and here’s how I’ve learnt to handle the Fairy Fuck-busters. Let him know y’ain’t got a care in the world about where he sticks his wick, an’ if you got a buddy that’ll take a mouth fuck from anywhere, no matter who’s attached to the mouth, you’re solid. Just make absolutely, posi-fuckin’-tively sure he understands your Hershey highway is exit-only. Unless you’re into that shit, and if you are, ain’t nothing but a thing, and refer yourself back to step 2.
Only a virtuoso of the tuna taco should come up agin’ the boyfriend. Tell y’self this – if she’s all satisfied with who’s currently knockin’ her boots, why the hell have you made it to step 5? That’s right. There’s a chink in the armor somewhere. There may be a little cock struttin’, and if that’s all it takes to send his ass to the showers, he were a pussy that didn’t deserve her anyway. If it gets physical, and you’re capable, like me, of wipin’ the floor with someone’s ass, no problem. Chicks totally dig that ‘fair maiden-two knights battling for her hand’ bullshit. Plus, you might get banged up a little if you’re human, and she’ll go all Florence Nightengale on your shit, which is your ticket into pussydise. You cain’t show me a lady who don’t love fawnin’ and pettin’ over a man who’s been injured in a battle for her hand. Or snatch. Whatever.
If the boyfriend manages to shift her attention away from you for a nano-second, walk the hell away and take your shit to greener pastures. Fuck the broad, she weren’t nothin’ but a piece of ass anyway.
Just never, ever let it rattle your fuckin’ cage. They’s just girls. Wait five minutes and they’ll be another one that’ll come along right behind the first one. I don’t care how fine they look, how good they smell, or even how good they is at gobblin’ your gopher. Ain’t no need to get all down in the mouth about ‘em.
We Cullen boys ishard motherfuckers, dawg.
It’s how we roll.
~~ll~~
Of course them rules don’t amount to a hill of beans when you see her.
I can’t rightly say who saw who first. The way Rose tells it, she scented us comin’ over the bridge from Cainwhore, and I can’t say I’d be surprised. My woman does tend to run a bit… edgy. Who would blame her?
Lucky for me that Garrett fucker was a stupid shit who would rather go off on some damn sentimental journey, visitin’ battlefields for some lame ass reason. Holy shitcracker, Rose was a fine slice of undead woman, and that pontificatin’ nomad couldn’t stay in one place too long without gettin’ sloppy on his feed and ignoring his woman. My Rosie ran his ass on out of here, and I guaran-damn-tee he won’t get no closer to Cainwhore again than the Visitor’s Center up at Cowpens Battlefield Park.
Rose told him she was no longer a stop on his Continental Army Magical Memory Tour.
Hellfuckinyeah! I was in there.
Opportunity had turned it’s shinin’ face on me once again, and I had my chance with her. Now just to convince her to be forever-mine. After seventy year of cattin’ around the world, I was lookin’ for somethin’ a bit more permanent, and I just couldn’t imagine any other damned-to-hell walkin’-dead woman but Rose Hale by my side.
I had it bad. I was fucked.
I even got me a new pair of Carharrts and asked Eddie to borry the F-250 he kept for his Sunday outtin’s.
He coulda’ been a just a gnat’s ass more supportive.
“Why don’t you just ride her around the back forty on your Kubota?” he’d snarled at me when I asked for the keys.
“This ain’t just a piece of pussy-pie, Ed.”
Sumbitch damn near took my ear off flingin’ them keys at me!
“Don’t get the seats dirty. An’ don’t rag out the engine again. An’ don’t clean your ears with the keys, Emma-lou.”
I tore off from the double-wide ‘fore that ever’whinging grope show had a chance to change his spunk-addled mind.
I was neat and clean, hangin’ free, and my pecker was ripe fer pickin’.
But still lucky?
~~ll~~
Dang.
I kicked up another cloud of gravel and dirty sand.
She’d said, real clear, I could get her at Mama’s at 8:00. Maw Esme would be lookin’ for us at 8:30, and she don’t stand for tardiness. There it was 8:20, and I was still standin’ there, leanin’ against the truck like some dipshit holdin’ some flowers, and just where the fuck was Rose? I said it at 8:05 and again at 8:15. If she wasn’t there in five minutes, I was bookin’ ass.
Fuck her, I told myself.
Yeah…oh fuck her and those mile long legs and that pretty mouth…
I dug the heel of my new Carhartts into the sandy earth, making an absent minded arc and grinnin’ to myself like a doped-up monkey.
When I noticed I’d just drooled on my fresh shirt, I was worried my good karma had finally ran out.
Just then, the door swung open, her scent wafted towards me and Gaaawddammm, there she was, like some country-fried angel all in the tiniest little white dress. Even from across the parking lot, I could make out the pinpoint white flowers embroidered into the material, all innocence and light. Her rippling, honeyed blonde hair just barely floated away from her face with each step she took toward me. Them golden eyes of hers were locked laser tight on mine, and I swear to Christ all time halted and all of my already heightened senses overflowed with her.
Rose.
She stopped just in front of me and looked up with that cocky-assed little grin of hers.
“Well, hello there, Bubba,” her sun-dried grass and mint breath washed over me with that buttered-whiskey voice. She looked down at the flowers, raised an eyebrow.
“Flowers?”
I thrust the bouquet of sunflowers I’d picked up at The Pig right at her.
“Why thank you.”
“They… uh… seemed more like you than some prissy-assed roses or somethin’ like that.” I sputtered like a damn human kid over at Wando High. My luck was goin’ fast.
Suddenly, I was as nervy as a dog shittin’ peach pits.
“Why?”
“They just look more… real… and, they’re bold and sturdy -”
“Sturdy?” she stopped me, pissed or amused–sometimes with Rose it was hard to tell the difference.
“Well, yeah… I mean… you’re strong… sturdy. Not something that’s goin’ to fall over at the first gust of a wind or wilt in a little bit of heat.”
“Oh,” she smiled, looking down at them.
I offered her my arm to walk her to the passenger side of the truck. Without realizing it, my earlier angsty, Eddie-like heel dragging had created a ten inch furrow in the ground, and I stepped right into it, ending up splayed out like a dead lizard under the wheel of a semi right in front of her.
Dangamightyfuckitalltohell.
Without a word, she caught me by the collar, jerked me clean up off the ground and dropped me back to the gravel softly. She passed her hand over my shirt briskly, wiping parking lot dust off of me, her head bent down so I couldn’t see her face and then did the same with the legs of my jeans. Those damn witchy golden-flecked amber eyes traveled up the length of my body to meet mine.
My luck had gone flat as a cow’s cunt.
“Shall we try that again?” she whispered. She took my arm again, and I walked her around, opening the door and letting down the chrome step. She climbed up into the cab like she was fixin’ to mount a horse sidesaddle, and those legs just kept on stretching out further and further until they were one long, pale stretch of the road to heaven.
~~ll~~
After the freak show between Eddie and Jasper’s little fairy in Maw an’ Carl’s parlor, I was certain she was ready to be rid of me. I opened the door of the truck again and watched her climb up, my throat full of regret. When I got in, she was looking down at M’Esme’s gift with a confused and sad expression.
“Well…” I sighed. My seventy-year lucky streak had taken the first train south, my game went along for company.
“So what are we doing for an encore, Bubba?”
“Really?” I gasped. It came out soundin’ like a 12-year-old girl.
Fuck my… life?
“Yes, really.” She laughed, nudged at the cooler on the floorboard with her knee. “I assume you’re planning on sharing some of this beer? Where are we going?”
“Well… there’s someplace I’d like to show you,” like a jackass, I got all shy over it. “I wanted to go look at the moon with you.”
“Where?” If there was a way to look flirtatious and suspicious at the same time, Rose could do it. “I can see the moon from right here.”
“My place that I… uh… like to go. Crack us open a bottle. It’s a ways up 17.”
We drove with the windows down, and I let her play DJ. She surprised me with Billie Holliday. After Georgetown, 17 was pretty much a straight shot, and I started getting a little lazy, just watching her taking slow sips of her beer and singing along with the music and not payin’ much attention to the road.
She had her heels planted on the dash of the truck, and her hair blew wild in the wind, filling the cab of the truck with her scent. Damn if I wasn’t feelin’ drunk as a boilt owl, all full-up with that Rose-smell and the sight of them long thighs underneath that sweet white material. She didn’t look at me for a while but damn sure knew I was looking at her. It was like she put on a little show for me: wrapping her red lips around the bottle, drinking, pulling her lips away from the amber glass and barely tracing her upper lip with the tip of her pink tongue.
Just my luck, I was all googly-eyed and completely under the spell of Billie and her voice with Rose’s laid over it. That scent of honey and sun-baked cut grass was just pourin off the most beautiful vampire woman I’d ever come across, and there I was havin’ to drive. Damn. Shit like that never happened in them Silhouette Desire books.
‘Course I’m not a romantic hero or nothin’.
“Hey Bubba…?” she turned her eyes to me, amused.
“Yeah?”
She looked away and back again. Aw… playing shy after that little show with the bottle. That’s cute.
“Emmett…” she nodded towards the road.
“What?”
“Are you going to stop or something?”
“Huh?”
I looked forward. There in the headlights I saw we were barreling at 112 mph towards a deer standing stupidly hypnotized in the middle of the north bound lanes of Highway 17. Vampire reflexes are one thing, American engineering with a lift kit is another, and I’d be damned if I was gonna test the last gant’s ass of luck I had left, hit the brakes and roll Eddie’struck. I pulled the wheel to the right as much as I could and managed to keep it upright but still clipped the deer.
Damnshitfuck!Just the time for my cocksuckin’ luck to run out.
I slowed it down to 50 so I could start to flip a bitch, and as soon as I did, Rose was out the door and gone.
There in one second, my destiny shifted again for good.
I could see her in the moonlight leaping towards the thrashing deer, and I swung the truck around in the median, spraying grass and sand and flaming pink crepe myrtle flowers everywhere. She faced the deer, but when the 250′s headlights hither, she turned and smiled at me. Again! Twice–in one night! How fuckin’ lucky can I get? The headlights made that little dress she had on look more like mosquito net than fabric, and I saw a perfect outline of her body.
She knew it, too.
She parted those damn long legs, totally spread eagled, bent over from her waist to the deer. I caught me a lucky glance of them unders of her’s, too: white lace g-string, all sugar and spice with a little ruffle and bow nestled right above her ass. In one swift, elegant motion Rose broke that unfortunate deer’s neck, and it stopped strugglin’. With one glossy red nail, she barely opened the jugular vein on the deer and caught a drop of blood on her finger. Legs still splayed open, she turnt at the waist and looked back at me invitingly.
“Hey, Big Pappa… supper’s ready.” she said softly, tipping her head back, her finger right over her mouth.
I saw the blood shimmer, like a thick liquid ruby, and it dropped in a perfect hot, salty orb onto her tongue.
Yeah.
I’m Bubba Cullen. And I AM the luckiest dead sumbitch in South Cackalakee.
.
