Suck It Up and Die (17 page)

She waved a finger and declared, “You’ve changed.”

Varkos smiled sweetly. “Girls have told me that, but it usually takes a few weeks or months.”

“But you
have
changed,” she slurred as she reached up to touch his hair.

In a flash, he held her wrist. “You’ve changed too. You’re a bit drunk. Let me walk you back to your hotel.”

“All right.” She shrugged as she eyed his untouched Sang Tang. “How ’bout we get that in a to-go cup.”

“I don’t need a to-go cup,” he said, offering his arm to help her off the stool. “I have you.”

Her eyes wavered into focus and locked on him. “You’re gorgeous, you’re funny, and you’re smooth. But I have one rule. Anyone who walks me home has to have a name.”

He smiled. “DeThanatos. Ikor DeThanatos.”

Morning and Portia had walked back to her house in silence. They stood on the stoop. He leaned forward to kiss her.

She lowered her head and put a hand on his chest. “If I ask you a question, will you promise to answer?”

“You know I’d promise you anything.”

“After you rescued me from the fire, when you kissed me, did you have a feeling you’d had one time before?”

His mind raced, looking for some answer that would both satisfy “one time before” and skirt the truth.

“Morning, did you want to bite me?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But I felt something, in your gums. I didn’t want to think about what it might be, but now, with DeThanatos back, I feel like we’re getting dragged there again, to a dangerous place.”

“Okay, there was a moment,” he admitted, “but there was a reason for it.”

“ ‘A reason’?” She shook her head with a rueful chuckle. “What could possibly be reasonable about popping fangs and wanting to bury them in your girlfriend’s neck?”

He let out a sigh. He’d so wanted to avoid this, but—typical Portia—she was too smart and too honest to ignore what had to be said. “I wanted to protect you,” he said, even though it felt like he was pushing a stake into his own heart. “To turn you. To protect you with immortality.”

She held his eyes for a moment, then touched his cheek. “That’s really sweet. But do I look like Zoë? No, I’m me, Portia.”

“I know. I know what you want and what you don’t.”

“Do you?”

He nodded.

She tilted her head in thought. “How can you be so sure, when I’m not sure anymore?”

“What are you unsure of?”

“A lot of things,” she said with a muted smile. “I gotta go.”

She let him kiss her, but there was no invitation in it. It was the worst kind of kiss. A mercy kiss.

Morning walked uptown to get his bike from in front of L’Arte del Gelato. The only thing that could stop him from
being swept away by his torrent of anxious thoughts was to call Birnam. He pulled out his cell, got through to Birnam, and told him about Varkos being DeThanatos, reconstituted from a drop of Portia’s blood.

When he finished, Birnam said, “If it weren’t so terrible, it might be funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about it,” Morning shot back.

“Oh, but there is. Everyone used to think vampires rise from the grave, out of the coffin, and all that. Now, after being buried in the Mother Forest, finally, one has indeed risen from a grave of wood.”

“What are you gonna do about it?” Morning demanded.

“Wait.”

“For what?”

“For him to make his next move.”

“Isn’t trying to kill Portia enough?” Morning blurted. “Please, Mr. Birnam, you gotta come out from wherever you’ve buried yourself.” He waited for a response … until he realized he was talking to a dead connection.

The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is a sprawling glass and steel box overlooking the Hudson River and New Jersey. It looks like it was originally an airline terminal for a city upriver, until a flood washed it downstream and it came to rest on Manhattan’s West Side. On this particular morning its big electronic sign announced
THE ONLINE DATING TRADE SHOW
. Conventioneers poured into the building even though it wasn’t yet eight a.m.

In a corner of the largest convention hall, a booth had been hobbled together at the end of a row of far slicker booths. The booth was no more than a table, piled with xeroxed materials, and a banner hanging above it. The banner announced
VAMPOWER.COM
in large red letters, with another line underneath:
BLOODLUST YOU CAN TRUST
. The flashiest thing about the booth was the man running it. DeThanatos wore a beautifully tailored suit and had his hair slicked back. He looked as sleek and shiny as a new car.

DeThanatos spent the first hour passing out materials on Vampower.com and answering questions. When the aisles were teaming with conventiongoers, he jumped up on the table and launched into a pitch. “Ladies and gentlemen, mortals of all blood types! Vampower.com may be the newest and smallest online dating service to dive into the pool, but I promise you, we’re gonna make the biggest splash!”

His looks and rich voice turned heads. “Some of you have swung by and gotten a taste of Vampower.com, but let me enlighten those of you still in the dark. Vampower.com is the first website to tap into a matchmaking market hiding in plain sight. I’m talking about the secret desire of Lifers and Leaguers to hook up. That’s right, I’m talking consensual bloodlust.”

The crowd sucked in a collective breath. Some people turned and walked away, but most stayed, wanting to hear this alluring and shocking pitchman.

“There, I’ve said it!” he proclaimed. “We know the yearning is out there, underground, waiting to surface. Yes, millions of Lifers want to donate blood to a cause, and I’m not talking the Red Cross. These Lifers want to donate blood to the cause of their curiosity, personal exploration, and pleasure. And yes, there are Leaguers who have an urge to tap into the deepest veins of their cultural heritage and nibble on a mortal. Why shouldn’t the yearning of some Lifers and Leaguers be answered? That’s what Vampower.com offers. A safe and confidential social network for those who want to be sipped and those who want to dip.”

A cameraman pushed through the crowd followed by Drake Sanders. He was in the convention hall trolling for a story about some titillating online dating site. From what he’d heard so far, Vampower.com fit the bill. Drake fired
a question. “Is Vampower.com only a dating service for bloodlusters, or will it match Lifers who wanna bleed for other reasons than the bang of being fanged?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” DeThanatos answered earnestly. “The potential for bleed dating is not limited to Lifers and Leaguers looking for thrills and swills. For instance, on the TV show
The Shadow
, you saw a patient who successfully hooked up with a vampire. Besides Lifers recovering from reattachment surgeries, there are people who suffer from too much iron in the blood, a disease called hemochromatosis, and who need blood drained on a regular basis to remain healthy.”

“Wow, sounds like you’ve done your market research,” Drake cajoled before popping his next question. “Are there any blood matches Vampower.com will refuse to do?”

“Absolutely,” DeThanatos declared. “While Leaguer-to-Lifer blood sharing has many applications, there are two blood matches we’ll never touch. Vampire-assisted suicides and euthanasia.”

“Could you elaborate?”

“The suicidal Lifer who registers with Vampower.com because they want to be matched with a Leaguer for a total vein drain will be referred to a suicide hotline. And any fatally ill patient who wants to be euthanized by a vampire will be referred to their local hospice. We don’t do death, except in one case.”

“What’s that?”

“If the government wants to save taxpayer dollars by using a Leaguer to carry out a death sentence by lethal
extraction
rather than lethal
injection
, we will make the match, pro bono. But only if the prisoner and Leaguer agree to a blood match. We don’t force death on anyone.
It’s all in our motto,” he said, pointing to the banner above him. “ ‘Bloodlust you can trust.’ ”

“Okay, here’s the biggie,” Drake asked. “What if a Lifer wanted to be turned, to be changed. Would Vampower.com handle the hookup?”

DeThanatos answered with a stern look. “That, my friend, is against the law. Vampower.com does not break laws. We help those who want to be sipped and those who want to dip, but we don’t do flips.”

Uptown, in an editing room at LaGuardia Arts, Portia and Zoë gaped at the TV showing Drake’s coverage. Portia’s mouth hung open enough for all doubt to escape: the vampire who had once resembled her was now running on his own DNA and fully Ikor DeThanatos. Seeing him back from the dead bored a black hole of fear in her guts.

Zoë’s insides roiled with something else: high-octane excitement. She punched her laptop on and waved frantically as it booted up. “C’mon, c’mon!”

“What are you doing?” Portia asked.

“Going to Vampower.com before they get bombarded.”

“Why?”

Zoë worked her keyboard. “To join, of course.”

“But ZZ, he just said they won’t turn people.”

“Morning got turned because of accidental backwash. Maybe I’ll catch the same lightning!”

In a midtown hotel room, an exhausted woman with messy hair and glazed eyes worked a computer in a blur of fingers. It was Trudi, the morning after. Sure, she had a hangover,
but she also had something that lasted longer: a fangover. DeThanatos had made Trudi his minion, a sycophant who lived and breathed for his every need. As well as doing a brain suck on her online dating expertise, DeThanatos and his girl Renfield had spent the night designing and launching Vampower.com. She was now handling the thousands of applications flooding in.

“ ‘Zoë Zotz,’ ” Trudi monotoned, reading the latest application. “ ‘Cute Lifer looking for a dashing vampire with swallow reflex issues or a history of bulimia.’ ”

After seeing the Vampower.com coverage, Becky-Dell Wallace put her MOP staff on the case. They quickly gathered several facts. They learned the pitchman’s name, that he was a Leaguer residing in New York City, and that he was an employee of Vampower.com, which was owned and operated by one Gertrude Blankenship. The only oddity was that the site had existed for less than twelve hours. Confirming that DeThanatos was a registered Leaguer with the Bureau of Vampire Affairs took a little more time because the BVA’s computer system had been hacked into the night before and was still down. When it got back online, they found Ikor DeThanatos’s Leaguer registration. This was another chore Trudi had helped her master accomplish the night before.

But the seeming legitimacy of Vampower.com, and its pitchman, was not going to stop Becky-Dell from responding to a Lifer-Leaguer dating service. That afternoon she spoke to the media in the halls of Congress. She began by shaking a scolding finger at the American people. “This is what happens when you let a vampire turn into a leech and
suck on your head. Give a bloodsucking fiend a drop and they’ll want the whole five quarts.”

“Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?” a reporter asked. “The spokesman for Vampower.com only proposed a total vein drain in the case of an execution.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, Leaguers keep getting thirstier. And in response to them baring their fangs, I’ve got two points of my own. First, if Leaguers had any restraint, Luther Birnam would do more than fire off web posts. He’d step up and put an end to this escalation of bloodlust. But it seems that Leaguers like Ms. Capilarus, and this matchmaker of bloodlust, Mr. DeThanatos, are out of Birnam’s league. Second, if Birnam won’t stop them, the American people will. As a congresswoman I’m declaring war on the Leaguer movement and their rising tide of bloodlust. I’m gonna put the ‘slay’ in ‘legislation.’ I’m gonna give the BVA the powers and weapons it needs to fight our newest homegrown terrorists: Leaguers!”

When Morning called Portia and asked her to go for a sunset walk along the river, she surprised him by saying, “Great idea.” It wasn’t the upbeat answer he expected the day after a bad date that ended with a mercy kiss. Nonetheless, he had a plan to find out what was going on, or not, with his eternal beloved, if that’s what she still was.