Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (49 page)

“Who was in the car?”

She turned to see her little sister limping down the driveway towards her and quickly stuck the envelope in her jacket pocket.

“Just some guy,” she told Cassie. “How’re you doing?”

Cassie’d had a bad asthma attack this morning and was still lying down in the rec room watching videos when Apples had come out to rake leaves.

“I’m okay,” Cassie told her. “And besides, I’ve got my buddy,” she added, holding up her bronchodilator. “Can I help?”

“Sure. But only if you promise to take it easy.”

It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that Apples was able to open the envelope. She took it into the bathroom and slit the seal, pulling out a grimy sheet of paper with handwriting on it that read:

I no yer secret. Meet me tonite at midnite at the cow castle, or they’ll be

trouble. I no you got a little sister.

Don’t call the cops. Don’t tell nobody
.

Okay, Apples thought, getting angry as she reread the note. The loser in the car just went from annoying pervert to a sick freak who needed to be dealt with. Nobody threatened her little sister.

By “cow castle” she assumed he meant the Aberdeen Pavilion at Lansdowne Park, commonly known as the Cattle Castle because the cupola on its roof gave it a castle-like appearance. And though it was obviously a trap of some sort, she’d be there all the same. She couldn’t begin to guess what he wanted from her, what he hoped to accomplish. It didn’t matter. By threatening Cassie, he’d just gone to the head of her “deal with this” list.

3

Okay, here’s the thing. I didn’t ask to get turned, but it’s not like we sat down and talked out how I felt about it. By the time it’s over, I’ve been three days dead, I rise, and here I am, vamp girl, and I don’t mean sexy, though I can play that card if I have to. Anybody can do it. It just needs the right clothes and makeup, with one secret ingredient: attitude.

It’s funny. I didn’t have too many friends before I got turned. I don’t have so many now either, mind you, but now it’s by choice. Getting turned gave me this boost of self-confidence, I guess, and that’s really what people find attractive. Everybody’s intrigued by someone comfortable in their own skin because most of us aren’t.

The parents freaked, of course. Not because I’m a vamp—they still don’t know that—but because so far as they know, I just did the big disappearing act the night I got turned. Went to a concert and came back home four days later. Trust me, that did not go over well. I was canned for a solid month, which made feeding a real pain—having to sneak out through a window between two A.M., when Dad finally goes to bed, and dawn to find what I can at that time of the night. I never much cared for booze or drugs when I was human and that’s carried over to what I am now. I still hate the taste of it in someone’s blood.

Yeah, I drink blood. But it’s not as gross as it sounds. And it’s not as messy as it is in some of the movies.

4

The Aberdeen Pavilion was a wonderfully eccentric building in the middle of Lansdowne Park where the Central Canadian Exhibition, the oldest agricultural fair in Canada, was held every year. The pavilion was the largest of the exhibition buildings that dotted the park, an enormous barn-like structure surrounded by parking lots, with an angled roof curved like a half-moon and topped with a cupola. For a city kid like Apples, going inside during the Ex had always been a wonderful experience. The air was redolent of farm smells—cattle, sheep, horses, hogs—and she’d loved to walk along the stalls to look at the livestock, or sit with Cassie on the wooden seats in the huge arena and watch the animals vying for first place ribbons.

Though she still took Cassie to the midway every August, she hadn’t gone inside the pavilion for a couple of years now.

As she walked across a parking lot towards the Cattle Castle, Apples wondered if this was part of the freak’s plan, if he knew that this was where she’d gotten turned. It had been right here, between the Cattle Castle and the Coliseum when she’d come to see a Bryan Adams concert a few years ago.

She didn’t have to close her eyes to be able to visualize the woman, that first sight of her coming out from between the parked cars. Tall and svelte, with a loose walk that lay somewhere between the grace of a panther and a runway model. Golden blond hair fountained over her shoulders and down her back in a spill of ringlets and she was dressed all in black: short velvet skirt, low-cut T-shirt and high-heeled ankle boots. Apples remembered two conflicting sensations: that this woman was so unbelievably gorgeous, and that no one else seemed to notice her.

“Come with me a moment,” the woman said and without a word to her friends, Apples had left them to follow the stranger into a darker part of the parking lot.

And nothing was the same for Apples, not ever again.

I no your secret.

Maybe he did.

The area around the Cattle Castle appeared to be deserted, though there were a handful of cars in the parking lot. Apples recognized the sedan that had come by her house earlier in the day and walked in its direction. There was no one seated in it, but Apples could smell the driver. She assumed her semiliterate pervert was lying across the seat, waiting until she’d walked by so that he could jump out and take her by surprise.

That was okay. She had a surprise of her own. But first she wanted to know how he’d gotten her name and address. With her luck, somebody had put up a directory of known vamps Web site on the Internet and every would-be Van Helsing and Buffy was looking for her now.

She walked by the car and pretended to be shocked when he opened the door and confronted her, a gun in hand.

I hope you’ve got wooden bullets for that thing, she wanted to tell him, but she kept silent.

“Get in the car,” he told her, waving the gun. “Not there,” he added as she started to walk around to the passenger’s side. “Behind the wheel. You can drive, right?”

To some remote location, Apples supposed. Where he’d have his nasty way with her. Or kill her. Probably, he planned to do both, hopefully in that order. Though technically, any physical relationship with her had to be classified as necrophilia. Ehew.

This whole business was so clichéd that she could only sigh. Still, a remote location would work for her, too.

She came back around to the driver’s side and got in.

“Where to, gun boy?” she asked.

His face reddened and she watched the veins lift on his brow.

“This isn’t some joke,” he told her, waving the barrel of the gun in her face. “You’re in way over your head now, kid.”

Apples looked at him for a long beat.

“You still haven’t said where to.”

He frowned. “Just drive. I’ll tell you where.”

“Okay. You’re the boss.”

She started the car and put it in drive.

“Turn right after the gate,” he told her.

She did as he told her, pulling out of the parking lot and turning right onto the Queen Elizabeth Driveway.

“So what’s your deal?” she asked as they went under the Lansdowne Bridge at Bank Street and continued west.

“Shut up.”

“Why? Are you going to shoot me? I’m driving the car, moron.”

“Just shut up.”

“Where’d you get my name and address?”

“I told you, just—”

“Shut up. Yeah, yeah. Except I’m not going to. So why don’t you stop sounding like a skipping CD and tell me what your problem is.”

“You’re the problem,” he said. “End of story.”

“Maybe. Except where does it begin?”

They’d driven under the bridge at Bronson now and the Rideau Canal on their right became Dows Lake. She noticed that they’d started draining the water in the canal in preparation for winter.

“Take a right at the lights,” he said, “and then a left on Carling.”

“Not unless you start talking, I won’t.”

“I’ve got two words for you: Randall Gage.”

“Those aren’t words, they’re a name. And they don’t mean anything to me.”

“You killed him.”

Apples made the right onto Preston Street and stopped at the red light waiting for them at Carling Avenue. She turned to look at her captor.

“I’m not saying I did,” she told him, “but how would you know anyway?”

She was always careful. There were never any witnesses.

“He told me you would.”

“It’s still not ringing any bells,” she said.

The light went to green and she made the left turn onto Carling. She could smell the first telltale hint of nervousness coming from her captor, could almost read his mind:

Why’s she so calm? Why isn’t she scared?

Because I’m already dead, moron.

“Well?” Apples asked.

“Randall was about five-eight, a hundred-and-sixty pounds. Blond, good looking guy. He used to come into the coffee shop where you work.”

A face rose up in Apples’s mind, sharp and sudden. She remembered Randall Gage now, remembered him all too well, though she hadn’t known his name. After the first time he’d seen her at the Second Cup where she worked, he seemed to come in every time she had a shift. “A. Smith,” he’d always read from her nametag, fishing for the first name, which she never gave him. Then he’d made the mistake of grabbing her after a late shift and forcing her into the back of his van. He’d bragged to her about other girls he’d snatched, how the last one hadn’t survived, so if she wanted to live, she’d better just lie back and enjoy it, but no problem there, sweetcakes, because this he guaranteed, she was

going to enjoy it.

Rather than find out, she’d drained him.

And then not been able to get back to where she’d stashed his body when his three days were up and he rose from the dead. She’d had to track him for most of the night before she finally found him trying to hide from the dawn in somebody’s garden shed, the idiot. Like the sun was going to burn him.

“You still haven’t explained how you got my address,” she said.

“Legwork,” her captor said.

“Or what you plan to do to me.”

“Same as you did to Randall. Take the Queensway on-ramp,” he added as they passed Kirkwood Avenue.

Apples felt like driving the car into the nearest lamppost, but then she reminded herself that whatever remote location he was directing her to would benefit her as well.

“He raped and killed a twelve-year-old girl,” she said, her voice gone hard and cold.

Her captor shook his head. “He was never connected to anything.”

“He
told
me he did, you moron.”

“Don’t matter. You still had no right to kill him.”

“I never said I did.”

“He told me you were coming for him—called me up, told me your name, where you worked, what you looked like.”

Apples supposed that Gage hadn’t bothered to explain that he was already dead by that point.

“So what’s it to you?” she asked.

“He was my brother.”

Now, that, Apples could understand.

5

Who turned me? I never learned her name. She just said she liked the look of me—the inside look of me. She drained me, took me away and watched over me for the three days until I rose as a vamp. Then she cut me loose.

Yeah, of course we talked before I went home to face the music. She filled me in on the rules and regs. I don’t mean there’s vamp police, running around handing out tickets if you do something wrong. There’s just things you can do and things you can’t and she straightened me out on them. Gave me the low-down on all the mythology. Useful stuff. She never did get into why she turned me besides what I’ve already told you, so your guess is as good as mine.

No, I never saw her again.

6

“How did I kill him?”

“What?”

“Your brother. How am I supposed to have killed him?”

They were on the Queensway now, the multiple lane divided highway that bisected the city running east to west. Apples kept to the speed limit—100 kilometers—but they were already passing Bayshore Shopping Centre and about to leave the city. The last few kilometers they’d ridden in silence. The surviving Gage sibling rested his gun on his thigh and stared out the front windshield. He turned to Apples.

“That’s one of the things I need to know.”

“Have you ever killed anybody?” she asked.

He shrugged. “A couple of guys. Once was in the middle of a holdup, the other time in jail. I never got connected to either one.”

“How did it feel?”

“What the hell kind of a question is that?”

Apples shot him a glance. “Did it feel good? Did it feel righteous? Did you feel sad? Did it give you a hard-on?”

“How did it feel for you?”

“Like a waste.”

“So you did kill Randall.”

“I never said that.”

“Anybody looks at you, they see this sweet little kid—what are you, sixteen?”

I was when I died, she thought. And she hadn’t aged a day since. That wasn’t causing problems yet, but it would soon. Still, she only had to wait one more year. That was when Cassie turned sixteen and she planned to turn her. The thing about vamps is, they don’t get sick. And if you’ve got something wrong with you, it’s gone once you’re turned. Goodbye leg brace and asthma. Cassie didn’t know it, but Apples planned for them to be sixteen together. Forever. “I’m nineteen,” she told Gage.

He nodded. “But everybody looks at you and just sees this sweet little kid. Nobody knows the monster hiding under your skin.”

Apples shot him another look. That was about as good a way to put it as any. How much did he know? And how many people, if any, had he told?

“I guess you’d know all about monsters,” she said. “Seeing how your little brother grew up to be one and you’re not exactly an angel yourself.”

Anger flickered in his eyes and the gun rose to point at her.

“You shoot me now,” she reminded him, “and you’re killing yourself as well.”

“Just shut up and drive.”

“I think we’ve already played that song.”

7

So what are my weaknesses? You mean, beyond getting staked or beheaded? Hey, how stupid do I look? Figure it out for yourself.

Just kidding.

Apparently, the way it works is that whatever meant the most to you when you were alive, becomes anathema to you when you’re dead. Not people, but things and ideas. So I guess if you did worship the sun, then it could fry you as a vamp. Same if you loved eating Italian, with all that garlic in the sauces. Or maybe you were way serious about church.

Here’s a funny fact: pretty much any vampire turned in the past few decades can be warded off with chocolate. And if not chocolate, then some kind of junk food, not to mention cigarettes, coffee or beer. Junkies are probably the biggest problem for normal people since you can only ward them off with needles and drugs. There’s not much by way of sacred icons anymore.

8

Apples kept following her captor’s directions. Eventually they exited the Queensway and drove down increasingly small backroads in the rural area west of the city. When they finally reached a bumpy track that was only two ruts on the ground with branches raking the sides of the car, he had her stop.

“Get out,” he said.

She did, stretching her back muscles and looking around her with interest. She didn’t get out of the city much, but ever since she’d been turned, she’d had this real yearning to just run in the woods.

Gage slid across the bench seat and joined her on her side of the car, the gun leveled at her once more.

“So you killed Randall because he told you some B.S. story about boffing some twelve-year-old.”

“Not to mention killing her.”

“So how was that your business?”

“Well, call me crazy, but I take offence to misogynist morons hurting kids.”

“So you’re just some do-gooder.”

“Not to mention his intention to do the same to me.”

Gage gave a slow nod. “But I still don’t get how you killed him. You’re just some—”

“Slip of a girl. I know.”

“With a big mouth.”

He frowned at her. His nervousness was a stronger scent now, some animal part of his brain already registering what the rest of him hadn’t worked out yet.

“I just don’t get it,” he said.

“And that’s where you made your mistake,” she told him. “That’s the question you should have asked yourself before you ever came by my house with your little party invitation and threatening my little sister.”

The gun rose, muzzle pointing at her head.

“You’re way out of your league, kid.”

“I don’t know.” She grinned, showing him a pair of fangs. “See, I’m faster than you.”

Her hand moved in a blur of motion, plucking the gun from his hand and flinging it a half-dozen feet away.

“I’m stronger than you.”

She grabbed his hand and twisted it, bending it up around his back, exerting pressure so that he couldn’t move.

“And I’m hungry.”

She bit his neck and the hollowed fangs sank deep. He began to jerk as she drew the blood up from his veins, but it was no use.

It never was.

* * *

Afterwards, she sat down by his body and began to talk, conversing with the corpse as though it was asking her questions. She took her time in responding. After all, they had three days to wait.