Blood Oranges (9781101594858) (8 page)

“You keep secrets from them?” I asked.

“Only the secrets that might get them hurt,” he replied. “The sorts of secrets with which your query is concerned.”

“Then maybe I'm better off not knowing, either.”

“Possibly. Probably. Then again, not knowing, sooner or later, that might also mean your arse, yeah? Damned if you do, damned if you don't, getting yourself hemmed in between mademoiselles Scylla and Charybdis, eh?”

By this time, I'll admit, I'm sweating, and the bastard's starting to scare the hell out of me. I'm thinking, what in the devil's pajamas have I gotten myself into? Going back to the streets and whoring for dope was starting to seem like a good idea.

“What do you mean?” I asked. My mouth had gone bone dry, and I'm sure he could tell.

“Man like me, man in the sort of trade I'm in, he needs himself a spot of insurance now and again. And you surely don't think I'm going to that cocksucker Bobby Ng? Certainly not.”

(I'd already been regaled with a few of Ng's misadventures and exploits.)

I managed to nod my head.

“See, that lot you call the nasties, time to time they need a job done that's best handled by us quotidian and mortal sorts. So as not to draw an undue degree of cognizance from the mundanes. Makes good business sense, yeah? Sure it does.”

I nodded my head again and stared at my bottle of PBR.

“Right, so, returning to the matter of insurance, which is where you come in. I hear about this girl killing off a ghoul and a vamp. Bang, bang. Just like that. Nobody has any idea who she is or where she's come from, but everyone's talking about her. Suddenly, she's the
it
girl, if you know what I mean. Me, I know it's only a matter of time until the monsters take this girl out. They can't have that shit. Makes them look bad. But I'm thinking, knowing them like I do, they're at least a tad bit afraid of this chickadee. And, with a little PR, the right management, they could be a whole lot more scared of her. But, first, I gotta keep her alive and well.”

“Insurance,” I whispered.

“That's just what I said, isn't it? Insurance. Now and then, a deal goes south. I find myself in a tight squeeze, and I turn this over and over in my head, cogitate on it a while, and it seems worth a try. Small investment, potential for substantial returns.”

“But you know they were both accidents.”

“Didn't know that when I picked you up that day, and, what matters, Miss Quinn, no one else out
there
knows it. We play it smart and keep things that way, sure. And we build you up a bit more, arrange for another
accident
or two, and people won't be so quick to do me mischief if a transaction goes bad.”

“I ain't no bodyguard,” I told him. My heart was racing by then, pounding, and all I'm wondering is how I get out of this mess without getting myself killed. Or worse.

“Never said you were. But they don't know that.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“You're always free to return to your previous lifestyle, dear.” And right then he takes a Baggie from a pocket of his blazer and lays it on the table between us.

“Is this blackmail?”

“Why don't you tell me?”

I started to reach for the heroin, then pulled my hand back.

“Whether it is or whether it isn't,” he said, smiling that Cheshire Cat smile of his, “you best work through all the angles and consequences. For example, the nasties, they might not be too keen on the idea of me having backup, but they also know that if they clip you, I might not be so eager to run their little errands. You try going it on your own again, I fear for the duration of your life expectancy.”

“Asshole,” I said, and that was the first time I ever said a word against the bastard. It was the beginning of our long and tumultuous love-hate relationship.

He leaned back and held both his hands palms out. “You're a free agent, precious. Free to get up and walk out that door, return to the everlasting glamour of your previous existence, and never will we meet again. Just you remember, odds are good you had a price on your pretty head
before
I found you, and maybe the only thing keeping the wolves at bay—so to speak—is your affiliation with me. I'd bet my bottom dollar you'd be dead by now if I hadn't come along. Best the devil you know, isn't that the expression?”

Of course, Mr. B ain't no devil. He's just a two-bit lowlife ballsy enough to have cornered a niche market no other lowlife would go near. But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I knew he was right. I knew I'd been played, and there was no going back. Some vamp comes looking for me, was I really gonna say, “Oh, so sorry. Please excuse me. It was a terrible, terrible accident, really it was.” Yeah, that would've saved my narrow white keister. A few seconds later, Mr. B's boy came back, all lipstick and purple patent-leather pumps, and I picked up the dope and slipped it into my jeans pocket. And the rest, as all the cold-blooded motherfuckers of the world are forever reminding us, is history.

But here's the kicker. No sooner had I pocketed the heroin, Patti Smith was singing “Land” through the speakers mounted on the walls. And all I could see was that beast crouching over Lily, and her blood spreading across a dusty warehouse floor. Songs for my funeral? You bet your life.

CHAPTER THREE

BOBBY NG, ALICE CREGAN, AND THE TROLL WHO LIVES UNDER THE BRIDGE

O
kay, so somewhere back there I know I mentioned the apartment Mean Mr. B rented for me, down at the sketchy post-apocalyptic end of Gano Street. Just a block or two over from my place, you segue back to those spiffy Victorians with their tidy front yards and lawn gnomes. But my building, it's seen better days. Maybe back in the 1940s. The tendrils of gentrification haven't reached the corner of Gano and East Transit, and the way the economy's headed, it probably never will. I don't even know what he pays every month. Maybe he doesn't pay anything. Maybe he owns the place, and twenty bodies are buried in the basement.

That night—my first as a full-fledged lupine bloodsucking abomination in the eyes of all vampkind—I walked from Babe's on the Sunnyside back to the apartment. There were the usual guys on the sidewalk outside my place playing dominoes on a folding card table. Sometimes, they played all night long, dusk till dawn. Which was fine by me, just so long as they kept the Mexpop blaring from the stereos of their parked cars down low enough I couldn't feel the bass pulsing behind my eyes like a migraine. And as long as nobody got shot. Not that I much cared what people did with their firearms, but I hardly needed the police hanging about. Because, remember, this was after Bobby Ng and Swan Point, so, technically, I was already a bona-fide killer. Not sure whether or not it would have mattered to the cops that my victims had been dead a spell
before
I killed them, but I didn't want to go there.

That night, it was after my first
human
kill, so all the more reason to be cautious.

As I was unlocking the door, one of the domino players noticed the dried blood on my T-shirt and jeans. Maybe he saw it in my hair, too. I suppose there was enough illumination from the streetlights, it was probably hard to miss.

“Hey, chica. You been in a fight?” he shouted. I think that one's name was Hector. Or Hugo. Or . . . okay, so I don't remember. I do remember he had something Catholic tattooed on his left bicep, Mother Mary and a heart wrapped in thorns. Something generic, something cliché.

“You could say that,” I replied.

“Hope you gave good as you got.”

“Better,” I replied, turning the key, hearing the tumblers roll loud as thunder. Since I'd awakened by the tracks, the whole damn world was loud—sound, sight, smell, touch—all of it LOUD.

“Your blood or theirs,” he asked, and the others laughed. I almost told him to mind his own business.

“
Mostly
theirs,” I lied, seeing how it was
all
theirs. Hugo (or Hector, whatever) nodded and gave me the thumbs up.

“Muy peleonera,”
he grinned. I had to ask him what that meant, which made the guys playing dominoes chuckle again. They laughed a lot, the guys who played dominoes on the sidewalk outside my apartment.

“Don't you worry,” he said. “Means you did good.”

Insert ironic laughter here.

Cut to me stepping into the apartment. It was stifling, the air stale and warm as any other summer night because Mr. B didn't spring for a window unit. Only, it had never seemed quite
as
stale and stifling as it did that night. Thank you, werevamp super-senses. And there was the smell. Sure, my housekeeping skills were nonexistent. Still are. But the mess in the kitchen sink, and the mold running rampant in the bathroom, and the fast-food bags strewn around the place had never stunk even half as bad as they did that night. I may have actually gagged. Look at me, all creature of the night and shit, ready to spew at the smell of a filthy apartment. But like I said, the stink was LOUD. I mean, you'd think some kind soul had left a dead elephant to rot in that dump. I took a few steps across the mustard-yellow shag and could hear the bodies of roaches—some dead, some not—crunching LOUD in the home they'd made between the carpet and the floorboards. I could still hear every word the guys on the sidewalk were saying, and the Mexpop was starting to make my head ring. I went straight to the bathroom—and I'll spare you further details of that
parfum
, except to say the gagging got worse before it got better. Last thing I wanted to do was vomit the belly full of blood, because, for all I knew, that meant I'd have to hit the streets again before sunup. Anyway, I found enough cotton (scavenged from an aspirin bottle and Q-tips) to stuff into my nose and ears, and that helped just a little. Okay, hardly at all, but give the girl an
E
for
Effort
, right?

I stalked around the place with a Hefty garbage bag (I found a box of them beneath the kitchen sink, though I have no memory of ever having bought such things), tossing everything into it that I could stand to touch and cursing my slovenly ways. Fuck you, Siobhan. Fuck you, too, Mr. Month-Old Mystery Thing from Taco Bell. Fuck you, Miss Ashtray I'd Not Emptied All Summer. Let my vengeance rain down upon thee. By the time the sky was growing light, I'd made a few craters in the clutter, but I'd also come to appreciate the futility of my efforts. Might as well have been trying to tidy up a landfill.

I couldn't take the reek any longer, so I went outside and sat on the steps and smoked as the streetlights winked out. The domino boys were gone and had taken the card table with them. I sat and stared at the used car lot across the street. A sign promised me the best deals in town. I wondered what had happened to my own car after the encounter with the werewolf and the china doll who wasn't Mercy Brown. Maybe it was still parked out by the reservoir. Maybe she'd pushed it into the water. You know, to cover her tracks, hide the evidence, whatever. Any bitch strong enough to take out a bull loup that size, she'd have no trouble rolling my beat-to-hell-and-back '99 Honda Accord into the Scituate Reservoir. Sure, my Honda wasn't as spiffy as the great deals to be had just across the street, lined-up safe behind chain link and razor wire, but it usually ran and was all I had. It tended to get me where I needed to go. Most times.

Must have been about six or seven ayem when I smoked my last cigarette, got bored, and decided to take a stroll down the street, to the shade below the cavernous I-195 overpass. It's not at all like most highway overpasses. It's more like, I don't know—like someone
had
to build an overpass when they actually
wanted
to design a Gothic cathedral. It's like that. Sort of. Oh, by the by, that crap you hear about vampires bursting into flame if they're caught out in the daylight? Utter nonsense. Just a lot of twaddle concocted sometime around 1922 by a German director named F. W. Murnau when he made
Nosferatu
, a loose adaptation of
Dracula
(which promptly got him sued by Bram Stoker's widow for copyright infringement; she won). You may recall, Stoker's count doesn't have too much trouble with the sun. And, take it from me, vampires sure as hell don't sparkle . . . or glitter . . . or twinkle, no matter what that silly Mormon twit may have written, no matter how many books she's sold, and no matter how many celibate high school girls have signed themselves up for Team Edward. Worst it ever gets, I might feel a prickle on the back of my neck round about noon. Oh, and naturally it's best to feed after dark, but mostly that's so you're less likely to be spotted. Common fucking sense. But that's it. No fiery conflagrations, and no fucking glitter.

It's not far, the walk from my apartment to the overpass, but far enough that along the way I had time to think about how I could have at least changed my clothes and maybe washed my hair. I suppose I'd been too distracted, what with all the retching and cleaning and retching and all. The stains had made the fabric stiff and had gone sort of the color of raisins. My dinners would get a little less messy later on, but that morning in August I was still too entirely stupefied by the curveball the universe had thrown my way to worry overly about hygiene. I just hoped no one noticed, like Hector (or Hugo or et al.), and walked faster. But not too fast, because I was feeling paranoid and thought maybe walking too fast might attract as much attention as the bloodstains. And the two together, doubt anything short of dragging a dead body behind me would be more conspicuous and likely to get me noticed, right?

It's actually pretty nice there under the interstate on hot summer days. You can sit on a plastic milk crate, say, or a cardboard box someone's mashed flat and spread out across a patch of gravel. The traffic roars and rattles by fifty feet or so overhead, but the roadway and those immense support arches of concrete and steel absorb and muffle the worst of the racket. Even after I got smacked with the double whammy of the loup and Mercy, after my senses went all cacophonous on me, it was peaceful enough. And sometimes there were other people to talk to, maybe a homeless woman or a couple of boys with their skateboards headed for the park at India Point. And, of course, Aloysius. He's a troll. Yes, I mean the sort that lives under bridges (and in culverts and beneath railroad trestles), just like you might have read about as a kid in the “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

Of course, Aloysius isn't his
real
name. Trolls are fairies, after all, and fairies ain't so free with their true names. Same as demons, they let that intel get out and they're screwed. You know a troll's name, he's your servant for life. Though, it's a risky business, binding a troll, and it rarely ends well for the one doing the binding. It occurred to me that morning, standing below the interstate and calling out for Aloysius, that an awful lot of folks (or what have you) were dumping pseudonyms on me. Even Bobby fucking Ng, I knew that wasn't his real name. Sure, with Aloysius, he had his reasons, but not so with “Mercy,” Mr. B, and Bobby Ng. I considered chalking it all up to the sheer and perverse joy some assholes take in fucking with your head. Or maybe they were all too crazy to know better. From what I'd seen, Mercy Brown was certainly minus a fair share of her marbles. So maybe she and (this week) “Barlow” both had a bee buzzing in their bonnets, and maybe both had gotten the notion their true names were as dangerous . . . shit, wait, where was I?

Oh yeah, Aloysius.

I shouted for him, just like always, and, just like always, the brute came shambling out of the shadows. The special shadows that hadn't been there a few seconds before, and that went away again as soon as he'd appeared (oh, another myth: trolls don't turn to stone in the sun, but I don't know who made that one up). Aloysius, he spoke with this rolling brogue might have been Scots or Irish, possibly Welsh. Never bothered asking him, but figured maybe he'd immigrated to the States back in the 1800s when so many Irish came over. He was a good nine feet tall, with these long ears like those lop rabbits have. They sort of dragged along on the ground, his ears, and each one had so many piercings I never bothered trying to count them. Some held loops of bronze and copper, others elaborately carved wooden rings, and still others were threaded through with bones. Didn't take a professor of anatomy or anthropology to recognize most of those bones were human. Aloysius was a troll, and trolls eat people (and pigeons and rats and stray cats, pretty much anything else too slow to get away), simple as that. But, to his credit, he never tried to eat me. Oh, also, none of his piercings were steel, because that's another tale apparently gets it right. Fairies can't bear the touch of iron. Not even a little bitty bit. No idea why, but there you go.

Back then, Aloysius, he possibly was about as close as I came to having an actual friend-type friend. Someone I could talk to and whatnot. I brought him porn mags, 3 Musketeers bars, and pint bottles of Jacquin's ginger-flavored brandy (all of it shoplifted). And sometimes he paid me in peculiar gold coins that always turned into stones or bottle caps by the time I got home. But hey, nothing lost, nothing gained. It's not like I'd paid for the stuff.

That morning, he got a good look at me and cocked one warty eyebrow. I'd never seen him look so surprised. In fact, I'd never seen him look surprised at all, and it took me a moment to realize that was the expression on his face. Surprise. Aloysius wrinkled his nose, obviously disgusted, like he could smell my apartment from two blocks away, and he took a step backwards. The special shadows reappeared behind him.

“What?” I asked, like I didn't already know.

He narrowed his orange eyes and glared at me.

“You're not you no more, Quinn girl,
that's
what,” he snarled. “
They
been at you, ain't they?” And he pointed a four-jointed index finger at me, scratching at the air with a thick brown nail.

“Yeah, but . . . I'm still
me
.”

“No, you're
not
,” he declared. “You're what they made you. You're
dead
. You
smell
like death, the sort what don't know to lay down and
be dead
, 'cause they been at you.”

Ever had a best friend stare at you like you'd just become a steaming heap of horse shit?

“It wasn't my fault,” I said, even though that wasn't precisely true. But near as I knew, trolls didn't have magical lie-detecting abilities. Aloysius flared his wide, hairy nostrils again, snuffled, and looked about as revolted as I imagine a troll can look. Which is kind of ironic when you think about it, given trolls themselves are hardly easy on the eyes.

“You ain't only dead,” he said despairingly. “You're gone dead
and
wolfish. You're twofold balled, you are, Quinn girl. Me, I can't even conjecture how that's practicable and likely.”

“It's complicated,” I replied, hardly speaking above a whisper. “Well, not so much complicated as . . .” and then I stammered something incoherent and trailed off.

Aloysius gritted his massive eyeteeth, sat down with a thud that raised a cloud of dust and grit, and buried his face in one huge hand. Those special shadows behind him evaporated again.