The Girls With Games of Blood (21 page)

Patience traced the frame’s beveling, feeling the weight of the cherry wood and its varnish. Their father had commissioned separate paintings instead of the usual one of both sisters together. “You two are so different you might not even be related,” he’d said often, “if I wasn’t so completely sure of your mother’s fidelity.” And for a long time Patience had pretended they weren’t, that she was a changeling born of a Gypsy princess and a disgraced nobleman, sent to America for her own safety.

But truthfully, there
was
a resemblance. Both were smart, capable of great deviousness, and able to see through the lies of most everyone around them. Except, in her case, those of her fiancé and sister. They were bound by blood, now in more ways than one.

She sighed and went upstairs to the master bedroom. She’d placed clothes in the closet, and filled the dresser with lingerie, but otherwise the room was bare. She needed no bed: she rested on the floor, usually naked, her limbs neatly arranged. She required nothing else.

She’d tried sleeping in a coffin once, for a week. It had been both uncomfortable and pointless. She’d researched the folklore and understood the desire to return to the grave, but for her it was simply a waste of time. She knew what she was and understood her limits. She did not fear discovery.

As she lay on the floor, feeling the grain of the wooden slats beneath her, she recalled the night she had been turned. Her final mortal memories were all sensations: the weight of Vincent’s pistol in her hands, the cold metal barrel against her soft bosom, the flash of light, the smell of powder and burnt meat, and the incredibly anticlimactic, muffled bang. Then the agony of the round bullet tearing through her bodice, her flesh, the bone beneath it, and finally her heart. She had fallen atop the hill, where the morning sun would reveal her body for all to see.

But before the sun rose, there was the moon. It was full, and cold, and merciless. It carried magic that she never anticipated, charms sympathetic in the worst way to the impulses that drove a girl to suicide. More than just the bite of another vampire could create its kindred; the universe itself, if the conditions were right, could spawn one just as it had once spawned life from a sea of primeval chemicals. Instead of journeying to heaven, or hell, or the nothingness she truly expected, the moonlight fixed Patience’s soul to her body and left her with an irresistible urge for the only substance that would anchor her to the earthly plane.

And before her lifeless corpse could be found by her family, she awoke beneath the stars with a chill in her heart and a hunger greater than anything she’d ever known. With a
certainty so great it was as if God himself had ordained it, she made straight for the one thing that could appease her new appetite: Vincent.

There was no hesitation, no stealth, no subtlety. She burst through the window of the guest room and pounced on him without a word. Her teeth had grown long and sharp, the better to rend the flesh she’d once coveted. He managed to fire a pistol at her, striking near the wound she’d inflicted on herself. But except for the thump of impact she felt nothing, no burning or pain or weakness. If anything, it made her more furious.

She crushed his hand while it still held the pistol, driving splinters from the wooden hilt into his palm. His screams were high and girlish. Then she slammed him back against the wall, tilted his head to one side, and buried her teeth in his neck. She had not understood the nature of her need, and instead of simply piercing his vein she’d ripped out a fist-sized chunk of flesh. She spat it to the ground, and then the ecstasy of the blood found her. She put her face into the wound, uncaring that it flooded her nose as well as her mouth, grateful only for the sense of completion she now felt.
This
was what she needed.
This
was her reason for living.

Except that she wasn’t living. And when the door flew open, and her father and male cousins stood frozen in horror, she realized she was no longer Patience Bolade. She was a monster.

Her cousins tried to restrain her, but she killed two of them instantly with blows to the head, and a third was left crippled after being hurled out the window. Her father tried to shoot her but could not bring himself to pull the trigger, and stepped aside for her to emerge from the room and ascend the stairs. She bellowed her sister’s name like the cry of some rabid beast.

But when she found Prudence huddled in her closet behind her petticoats, she felt a cold certainty that stayed her
hand. “I will never die, Prudence,” she had warned, her voice wet and gurgly. “For the rest of your days I will haunt you. You will never know when I will strike. No prayer can save you from me.” And with that, she left her family and her life behind. She bore them no ill will, and no anger; with all eternity before her, she saw Prudence’s actions as those of a limited, selfish mortal.

Or at least she tried to. Because the next night, while the moon was still full, Prudence also killed herself on the same hill. And when she arose, she eliminated the rest of the Bolade family and swore eternal vengeance on Patience.

Patience tried to reason with her sister, to convince her that vampires had no need for grudges over things done during their mortal existences. But Prudence was adamant that someday, somehow, she would avenge what Patience had done. So Patience left Tennessee, putting as much of the planet between her and Prudence as possible. Discreet inquiries subsequently told her that Prudence still occupied their ancestral home, a dim shade spoken of in whispers by those who lived nearby. “Mama Prudence” they called her, and came to her for fortune-telling and crude magic spells. Isolated, with no one to feed on regularly, she withered and shrunk so that she resembled a storybook crone. No one truly believed she was the same Prudence Bolade from a century earlier; most assumed she was a slightly dotty relative, content to live among the relics of the past.

As her limbs grew rigid and her consciousness faded, Patience’s last coherent thought was,
Soon, sister. We shall settle this soon. You know I’m close, just as I know you are. Because I’m weary of running and hiding. I’m tired of not being able to come home
.

Clora kissed Leonardo hungrily, and her body squirmed against him almost of its own volition. She couldn’t
wait to get naked with him; it was all she’d thought about since sundown. He never specified which nights he would visit, so every night became a sleepless, humid battle against her raging body. The sleeplessness was beginning to tell on her, too: she’d lost ten pounds, and now had dark circles under her eyes.

On the nights he didn’t come, she thought about Mama Prudence’s warning. There was no question which of the two boys in her life was truly her “lover.” Yet could Leonardo seriously pose that sort of danger? He never asked to meet her out anywhere, and if she couldn’t be safe in her own bedroom, where could she? No colored boy would dare injure a white girl in her own home. Not in McHale County, for certain.

“Touch me,” she said, reaching for his wrists and putting his palms against her breasts. “Please, touch me everywhere . . .”

He smiled, but she was too close to him to see it. “Don’t worry, girl, you’ll get what you want.” He squeezed gently, and she moaned in gratitude.

He could tell there was less life in her than before. The air around her used to be heated by her body’s thriving energy, but now it was cooler and weaker. It wasn’t yet dangerous, but before long it would become so. He would have to decide then what to do about her.

She took his right hand from her breast and began to kiss his fingers. She said breathlessly, “Daddy and I went to town today. I got you a present.”

“Really?” he said, his free hand roaming over her body through her clothes. If she sensed how clinically detached he was from the process, she gave no indication.

“Mm-hm,” she said, and pulled away enough to open the night-table drawer. She retrieved a small, velvet-covered ring box. “Open it,” she said when she handed it to him.

He did, and took out the plastic ring with its wide oval stone. He held it up to the light. “What is it?”

“It’s a mood ring,” she said.

“What does it do?”

“You know what a mood ring does, don’t you?” She had seen commercials for them on Channel 5 out of Memphis, so surely everyone in the city knew all about them.

He shook his head. “Tell me.”

Maybe he was just testing her, to see if she was really with it or not. Bruce would do that, quizzing her on the latest music. “It changes color based on your mood. Well, really, based on your body temperature. For example, when you’re here with me, mine turns blue.” She held up her left hand, where she wore an identical ring. The stone was deep blue. “Now let’s try out yours.”

“I don’t think it’ll work on me,” he said.

“Oh, come on, give it a try.” She took his left hand and slid the ring on his finger. They both watched it for several moments; it remained the same neutral gray color.

“Sorry,” he said, and took it off. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

She sighed, and wanted to cry. It had been such a minor thing, but to have it collapse this way left her feeling as useless and stupid as she did around Bruce. She took the ring and hurled it through the open window into the night. Then she turned back to Leonardo.

The next thing she knew it was dark, and she was alone.

She sat up in bed. She was still dressed in her panties and T-shirt, but she ached inside as if she’d had sex. As always, though, there was no memory of it, just a nagging sense that something had happened. She looked at the window, which stood open to the night; the tops of the trees were visible in the moonlight. She stood, intending to close it, but a wave of dizziness struck and she sprawled back on the bed.
Just a
moment,
she told herself,
until this passes, and then I’ll close the window.

In less than ten seconds she was asleep again.

Outside, on the roof, Leonardo sat on the peak beside one of the chimneys and looked up at the moon. He knew he should get going, in case Clora’s other boyfriend came around. But he needed to think and regroup, because he’d learned something tonight that was totally unexpected.

Another vampire
had fed on Clora.

Whoever it was had been careful to use his fang marks, and had clearly not taken much. But the taste of strange saliva was there, altering the essence of Clora’s blood for those first few draughts. He had shared victims with Fauvette and Mark, as well as Olive and Toddy before they were destroyed. He recognized the change, but not the taste.

That left two candidates: Zginski, and the new girl singer Patience. Or it was a vampire he knew nothing about. That was a long shot, since there simply weren’t that many vampires around, and they tended to congregate in cities, not sparsely populated rural areas where their predations would attract attention.

He wrote off Patience as a possibility, which left Zginski. It also brought up the unanswerable question of
why
.

Zginski pulled back the curtain and again checked his watch by the streetlamp outside. It was three in the morning, and he had to accept the fact that Patience wasn’t coming. Instead of the usual rage at being treated so cavalierly, he felt something unexpected: disappointment.