A man and woman sat wedged together in a secondhand armchair, looking like a Mack truck was about to run them down. The zombie woman shuffled toward them. Now that I was out of the way, she reached toward them, arms rigid and trembling. She moaned—she might have been trying to speak, but she couldn’t shape her mouth right. She was like an infant who desperately wanted something but didn’t have the words to say it. She was an infant in the body of an adult.
And what she wanted was the man in the chair.
A few steps away, her moaning turned into a wail. The woman in the chair screamed and fell over the arm to get away. The man wasn’t that nimble, or he was frozen in place.
The zombie wobbled on her next step, then fell to her knees, but that didn’t stop her reaching. She was close enough to grab his feet. Those clawlike hands clenched on his ankles, and she tried to pull herself forward, dragging herself on the carpet, still moaning.
The man shrieked and kicked at her, yanking his legs away and trying to curl up in the chair.
“Stop it!” I screamed at him, rushing forward to put myself between them.
She was sprawled on the floor now, crying gut-wrenching sobs. I held her shoulders and pulled her back from the chair, laying her on her back. Her arms still reached, but the rest of her body had become limp, out of her control.
“Matt, get a pillow and a blanket.” He ran to the bedroom to get them. That was all I could think—try to make her comfortable. When were those paramedics going to get here?
I looked at the guy in the chair. Like the rest of the people at the party, he was twenty-something. Thin and generically cute, he had shaggy dark hair, a preppy button-up shirt, and gray trousers. I wouldn’t have picked him out of the crowd.
“Who are you?” I said.
“C-Carson.”
He even had a preppy name to go with the ensemble. I glanced at the woman who was with him. Huddled behind the armchair, she was starting to peer out. She had dyed black hair, a tiny nose stud, and a tight dress. More like the kind of crowd Matt hung out with. I wouldn’t have put her and Carson together. Maybe they both thought they were slumming.
“Do you know her?” I asked him, nodding at the zombie woman on the floor.
He shook his head quickly, pressing himself even farther back in the chair. He was sweating. Carson was about to lose it.
Matt returned and helped me fit the pillow under her head and spread the blanket over her. He, too, was beginning to see her as someone who was sick—not a monster.
“You’re lying,” I said. “She obviously knows you. Who is she?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“Matt, who is this guy?”
Matt glanced at him. “Just met him tonight. He’s Trish’s new boyfriend.”
“Trish?” I said to the woman behind the armchair.
“I—I don’t know. At least, I’m not sure. I never met her, but I think … I think she’s his ex-girlfriend. Beth, I think. But Carson, you told me she moved away—”
Carson, staring at the woman on the floor, looked like he was about to have a screaming fit. He was still shaking his head.
I was ready to throttle him. I wanted an explanation. Maybe he really didn’t know. But if he was lying … “Carson!”
He flinched at my shout.
Sirens sounded down the street, coming closer. The paramedics. I hoped they could help her, but the sick feeling in my stomach hadn’t gone away.
“I’ll meet them on the street,” Matt said, running out.
“Beth,” I said to the woman. I caught her hands, managed to pull them down so they were resting on her chest. I murmured at her, and she quieted. Her skin color hadn’t gotten any better. She didn’t feel cold as death, but she felt cool. The salt hadn’t sent her back to any grave, and it hadn’t revived her. I wasn’t sure she could be revived.
A moment later, a couple of uniformed paramedics carrying equipment entered, followed by Matt. The living room should have felt crowded, but apparently as soon as the door cleared, most of the guests had fled. God, what a way to kill a party.
The paramedics came straight toward Beth. I got out of the way. They immediately knelt by her, checked her pulse, shined a light in her eyes. I breathed a little easier. Finally, someone was doing something useful.
“What happened?” one of them asked.
How did I explain this? She’s a zombie. That wasn’t going to work, because I didn’t think she was one anymore. She was a zombie didn’t sound any better.
“She was going to leave,” Carson said, suddenly, softly. Responding to the authority of the uniform, maybe. He stared at her, unable to look away. He spoke as if in a trance. “I didn’t want her to go. She asked me to come with her, to Seattle—but I didn’t want to do that, either. I wanted her to stay with me. So I … this stuff, this powder. It would make her do anything I wanted. I used it. But it … changed her. She wasn’t the same. She—was like that. Dead almost. I left her, but she followed. She kept following me—”
“Call it poisoning,” said one paramedic to the other.
“Where did you get this powder?” I said.
“Some guy on the Internet.”
I wanted to kill him. Wanted to put my hands around his throat and kill him.
“Kitty,” Matt said. I took a breath. Calmed down.
“Any idea what was in this powder?” one of the paramedics said, sounding like he was repressing as much anger as I was.
Carson shook his head.
“Try tetrodotoxin,” I said. “Induces a death-like coma. Also causes brain damage. Irreparable brain damage.”
Grimacing, the paramedic said, “We won’t be able to check that until we get her to the hospital. I don’t see any ID on her. I’m going to call in the cops, see if they’ve had a missing persons report on her. And to see what they want to do with him.”
Carson flinched at his glare.
Trish backed away. “If I tried to break up with you—would you have done that to me, too?” Her mouth twisted with unspoken accusations. Then, she fled.
Carson thought he’d make his own zombie slave girlfriend, then somehow wasn’t satisfied at the results. She probably wasn’t real good in bed. He’d probably done it, too—had sex with Beth’s brain-damaged, comatose body. The cops couldn’t get here fast enough, in my opinion.
“There’s two parts to it,” I said. “The powder creates the zombie. But then there’s the spell to bind her to you, to bind the slave to the master. Some kind of object with meaning, a receptacle for the soul. You have it. That’s why she followed you. That’s why she wouldn’t stay away.” The salt hadn’t broken that bond. She’d regained her will—but the damage was too great for her to do anything with it. She knew enough to recognize him and what he’d done to her, but could only cry out helplessly.
He reached into his pocket, pulled something out. He opened his fist to reveal what.
A diamond engagement ring lay in his palm.
Beth reacted, arcing her back, flailing, moaning. The paramedics freaked, pinned her arms, jabbed her with a hypodermic. She settled again, whimpering softly.
I took the ring from Carson. He glared at me, the first time he’d really looked at me. I didn’t see remorse in his eyes. Only fear. Like Victor Frankenstein, he’d created a monster and all he could do when confronted with it was cringe in terror.
“Matt, you have a string or a shoelace or something?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He came back with a bootlace fresh out of the package. I put the ring on it, knotted it, and slipped it over Beth’s head. “Can you make sure this stays with her?” I asked the paramedics. They nodded.
This was half science, half magic. If the ring really did hold Beth’s soul, maybe it would help. If it didn’t help—well, at least Carson wouldn’t have it anymore.
The cops came and took statements from all of us, including the paramedics, then took Carson away. The paramedics took Beth away; the ambulance siren
howled down the street, away.
Finally, when Matt and I were alone among the remains of his disaster of a party, I started crying. “How could he do that? How could he even think it? She was probably this wonderful, beautiful, independent woman, and he destroyed—”
Matt had poured two glasses of champagne. He handed me one.
“Happy New Year, Kitty.” He pointed at the clock on the microwave. 12:03 A.M.
Crap. I missed it. I started crying harder.
Matt, my friend, hugged me. So once again, I didn’t get a New Year’s kiss. This year, I didn’t mind.
LIFE IS THE TEACHER
Emma slid under the surface of the water and stayed there. She lay in the tub, on her back, and stared up at a world made soft, blurred with faint ripples. An unreal world viewed through a distorted filter. For minutes—four, six, ten—she stayed under water, and didn’t drown, because she didn’t breathe. Would never breathe again.
The world looked different through these undead eyes. Thicker, somehow. And also, strangely, clearer.
Survival seemed like such a curious thing once you’d already been killed.
This was her life now. She didn’t have to stay here. She could end it any time she wanted just by opening the curtains at dawn. But she didn’t.
Sitting up, she pushed back her soaking hair and rained water all around her with the noise of a rushing stream. Outside the blood-warm bath, her skin chilled in the air. She felt every little thing, every little current—from the vent, from a draft from the window, coolness eddying along the floor, striking the walls. She shivered. Put the fingers of one hand on the wrist of the other and felt no pulse.
After spreading a towel on the floor, she stepped from the bath.
She looked at herself: She didn’t look any different. Same slim body, smooth skin, young breasts the right size to cup in her hands, nipples the color of a bruised peach. Her skin was paler than she remembered. So pale it was almost translucent. Bloodless.
Not for long.
* * *
She dried her brown hair so it hung straight to her shoulders and dressed with more care than she ever had before. Not that the clothes she put on were by any means fancy, or new, or anything other than what she’d already had in her closet: a tailored silk shirt over a black lace camisole, jeans, black leather pumps, and a few choice pieces of jewelry, a couple of thin silver chains and dangling silver earrings. Every piece, every seam, every fold of fabric, produced an effect, and she wanted to be sure she produced the right effect: young, confident, alluring. Without, of course, looking like she was trying to produce such an effect. It must seem casual, thrown together, effortless. She switched the earrings from one ear to the other because they didn’t seem to lay right the other way.
This must be what a prostitute felt like.
Dissatisfied, she went upstairs to see Alette.
The older woman was in the parlor, waiting in a wingback chair. The room was decorated in tasteful antiques, Persian rugs, and velvet-upholstered furniture, with thick rich curtains hanging over the windows. Books crammed into shelves and a silver tea service ornamented the mantel. For all its opulent decoration, the room had a comfortable, natural feel to it. Its owner had come by the decor honestly. The Victorian atmosphere was genuine.
Alette spoke with a refined British accent. “You don’t have to do this.”
Alette was the most regal, elegant woman Emma knew. An apparent thirty years old, she was poised, dressed in a silk skirt and jacket, her brunette hair tied in a bun, her face like porcelain. She was over four hundred years old.
Emma was part of her clan, her Family, by many ties, from many directions. By blood, Alette was Emma’s ancestor, a many-greats grandmother. Closer, Alette had made the one who in turn had made Emma.
That had been unplanned. Emma hadn’t wanted it. The man in question had been punished. He was gone now, and Alette had taken care of her: mother, mentor, mistress.
“You can’t bottle-feed me forever,” Emma replied. In this existence, that meant needles, IV tubes, and a willing donor. It was so clinical.
“I can try,” Alette said, her smile wry.
If Emma let her, Alette would take care of her forever. Literally forever. But that felt wrong, somehow. If Emma was going to live like this, then she ought to live. Not cower like a child.
“Thank you for looking after me. I’m not trying to sound ungrateful, but—”
“But you want to be able to look after yourself.”
Emma nodded, and again the wry smile touched Alette’s lips. “Our family has always had the most awful streak of independence.”
Emma’s laugh startled her. She didn’t know she still could.
“Remember what I’ve taught you,” Alette said, rising from her chair and moving to stand with Emma. “How to choose. How to lure him. How to leave him. Remember how I’ve taught you to see, and to feel. Remember to only take a little. If you take it all, you’ll kill him. Or risk condemning him to this life.”
“I remember.” The lessons had been difficult. She’d had to learn to see the world with new eyes.
Alette smoothed Emma’s hair back from her face and arranged it over her shoulders—an uncharacteristic bit of fidgeting. “I know you do. And I know you’ll be fine. But if you need anything, please—”
“I’ll call,” Emma finished. “You won’t send anyone to follow me, will you?”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“Thank you.”
Alette kissed her cheek and sent her to hunt alone for the first time.
* * *
Alette had given her advice: Go somewhere new, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, where she wasn’t likely to meet someone from her old life, therefore making her less likely to encounter complications of emotion or circumstance.
Emma didn’t take this advice.
She’d been a student at George Washington University. Officially, she’d taken a leave of absence, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to continue her studies and finish her degree. There were always night classes, sure … but it was almost a joke, and like most anything worth doing, easier said than done.
There was a place, a bar where she and her friends used to go sometimes when classes got out. They’d arrive just in time for happy hour, when they could buy two-dollar hamburgers and cheap pitchers of beer. They’d eat supper, play a few rounds of pool, bitch about classes and papers they hadn’t written yet. On weekends they’d come late and play pool until last call. A completely normal life.
That was what Emma found herself missing, a few months into this new life. Laughing with her friends. Maybe she should have gone someplace else for this, found new territory. But she wanted to see the familiar.
She came in through the front and paused, blinked a couple of times, took a deep breath through her nose to taste the air. And the world slowed down. Noise fell to a low hum, the lights seemed to brighten, and just by turning her head a little she could see it all. Thirty-four people packed into the first floor of this converted townhouse. Twelve sat at the bar, two worked behind the bar, splashing their way through the fumes of a dozen different kinds of alcohol. Their sweat mixed with those fumes, two kinds of heat blending with the third ashy odor of cigarette smoke. This place was hot with bodies. Five beating hearts played pool around two tables in the back, three more watched—these were female. Girlfriends. The smell of competing testosterone was ripe. All the rest crammed around tables or stood in empty spaces, putting alcohol into their bodies, their blood—Emma could smell it through their pores. She caught all this in a glance, in a second.
She could feel the clear paths by the way the air moved. Incredibly, she could feel the whole room, all of it pressing gently against her skin. As if she looked down on it from above. As if she commanded it. There—that couple at the table in the corner was fighting. The woman stared into her tumbler of gin and tonic while her foot tapped a nervous beat on the floor. Her boyfriend stared at her, frownin
g hard, his arms crossed, his scotch forgotten.
Emma could have him if she wanted. His blood was singing with need. He would be easy to persuade, to lure away from his difficulty. A chance meeting by the bathrooms, an unseen exit out the back—
No. Not like that.
A quartet of boisterous, drunken men burst into laughter in front of her. Raucous business-school types, celebrating some exam or finished project. She knew how to get to them, too. Stumble perhaps. Lean an accidental arm on a shoulder, gasp an apology—and the one who met her gaze first would be the one to follow her.
Instead, she went to the bar, and despite the crowd, the press of bodies jostling for space, her path there was clear, and a space opened for her just as she arrived because she knew it would be there.
* * *
She wanted to miss the taste of alcohol. She could remember the taste of wine, the tang on the tongue, the warmth passing down her throat. She remembered great dinners, her favorite Mexican food, overstuffed burritos with sour cream and chile verde, with a big, salty margarita. She wanted to miss it with a deep and painful longing. But the memories turned her stomach. The thought of consuming anything made her feel sick. Anything except blood.
The glass of wine before her remained untouched. It was only for show.
She never would have done this in the old days. Sitting alone at the bar like this, staring into her drink—she looked like she was trying to get picked up.
Well, wasn’t she?
When the door opened and a laughing crowd of friends entered, Emma turned and smiled in greeting. Even before the door had opened, she’d known somehow. She’d sensed the sound of a voice, the tone of a footstep, the scent of skin, a ripple in the air. She couldn’t have remembered such fine details from her old life. But somehow, she’d known. She knew them.
“Emma!”
“Hey, Chris.” Finally, her smile felt like her old smile. Her old friends gathered around, leaned in for hugs, and she obliged them. But the one who spoke to her, the one she focused on, was Chris.
He was six feet tall, with wavy blond hair and a clean-shaven, handsome face, still boyish but filling out nicely. He had a shy smile and laughing eyes.