Show and Tell

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006 (cont.)

“I can’t… I don’t know… it’s complicated," I lamely sputtered.

“Well, I can see that. But I think you know me well enough. I can take complicated.”

“There are things I try not to talk about to just anyone.”

“I’m just anyone?”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.” No getting out of this bind. “But at this point, yeah. You are.”

“And you want me to stay just anyone?”

“No, of course not.”

“So tell me. Something. Anything. Even a little bit.”

“Jeanine, are you serious? Is that an ultimatum? Tell you something you really shouldn’t know ‘or else?”

“Something I really shouldn’t know?” She scoffed contemptuously. “OK, it wasn’t an ultimatum a second ago, but now you’re digging yourself deeper, Miss Marya, and I really don’t care what it is. You’ve got your own secrets? Fine. But don’t pretend to try to protect me.”

“Don’t protect you.”

“No.”

I paused to look at her. An idea was formulating. She’s a grown woman, and she would be able to decide for herself what to get involved in, but I did not entirely want to be responsible for dragging her into it. If it were only about the School of the Grey Orchid, I could have been straightforward with her long before (however reluctantly), but matters have grown so much more complicated in the past few months. “You don’t know what you’re insisting.”

Another scoff. “Again with the condescension.”

“I’m not gonna tell you.” We’d circled back to the dining room-living room part of the flat. I wasn’t looking at her, but I knew she was rolling her eyes, so I said, “But I’ll show you.”

I had my bag in my hand, and I was rummaging in one of the kitchen drawers. Shoving aside the spare batteries, takeout menus, scissors, I pulled out two wooden stakes. I dropped one into my drawstring purse, the same one I’d brought to the club, and handed the other to Jeanine as I led her back into the big room.

“A vampire?” she asked, almost sarcastically. “Is that what this is about? You know you can be honest about that. We had that whole big—”

“I want you to stake me.” I stood in front of her, squared with her. I put my bag on the floor, held my arms at my sides.

And finally she was silent, dumbstruck.

“I need you to try. Aim for my heart.” I unbuttoned my shirt halfway. With a clean entrance and extraction, there’d be little to no bleeding, but I didn’t want it torn, a second shirt in one—or rather, two nights—destroyed. If, that is, she actually followed through.

“But you’re not… or, but, I just saw you in the mirror. And I can’t….”

“I promise you can’t kill me this way. You’ll see. But if you don’t want me to protect you, then you have to be able to protect yourself. I want to make sure you can.” I hadn’t meant to go into teacher mode with her. Hadn’t wanted to. Sometimes I just slip into the role. In some respects I never leave it. “We need to get this overwith quickly, though. We might be running on a deadline here.”

“I can’t do that.” Her voice was as far away as the knocking on the door had been before. The stake dangled from her fingertips, a fraction of a muscle movement away from dropping to the floor. “Do you know what you’re asking me?”

I made sure she was looking me in the eye as I said, “If you can’t do it to someone who won’t die, how can you do it to someone who will? If you can’t do this, I can’t let you into this part of my life.”

The events of this day to be continued...

To Be Ventured, To Be Gained

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006 (cont.)

It seemed too soon to be able to stand, so I made a show of twisting onto my knees, pausing to let a pretended spell of dizziness pass. While I was doing so, she brought in the full-length mirror from my bedroom. She stood it up between us, and I was startled to see the disconcerting quantity of dried blood that caked my face and neck and had turned half of my shirt a rusty reddish-brown. I looked back at the floor where I’d lain prone and saw still more blood where it had pooled and then dried under my neck and shoulder. Altogether, there must have been at least a pint of the stuff. I guessed the mess was a consequence of the repetitive biting, since a common vampire attack typically left a clean crime scene; if he kept drinking after I passed out and could no longer will my wounds to stay open, he’d have returned to the munching strategy.

Next I turned around to view the flat. Drawers were open, books and boxes were pulled from bookshelves and scattered all over. I checked my left wrist, where I’d been wearing the rose quartz as a bangle. Predictably, it was gone. He’d probably been hunting for the other one as well, and I needed to get to Patrick as soon as I discreetly could.

“See what I mean?” Jeanine said, the words pointed but the tone soft and concerned. I nodded. “I can’t believe all this blood. Where’d it come from?”

She set the mirror aside and came back down to my level. “Where does it hurt? The bleeding must have stopped on its own, but….” I let her tilt my head back and forth as she examined me for abrasions while I played weak and convalescent. We took off my ruined shirt, but there were no signs of injury underneath, either. “Is this even your blood?” I simply looked at her. Said nothing. “Do you even know what happened?”

“What time is it?” I asked her.

“Um, eleven or so. How long ago did you… I mean, if you know.”

“Uh, had to be around ten. Wait. I was only out for an hour?” That made no sense. The blood would not have dried so completely. And if he’d drunk enough not to mind leaving a pint of it behind, it would take much longer than that for my body to…. “Oh, shit. You’re here for our date.”

“Yyyyeah. Why else…?”

“Our Friday night date.”

“Oh. This didn’t happen tonight?”

“Last night.”

We paused. Looked at each other. She was trying to figure me out. “Please. Mar. Tell me what’s going on. You know exactly what happened, and I’m just completely confused right now.”

No more point to the slow recovery act. I got to my feet in a rush and headed to the bathroom to clean myself up. My skin washed easily, and I put on a fresh shirt, but the coagulated blood clumping in my hair would be more of a chore, so I just tied a bandanna around my head and went back to the dining room to grab my bag and phone. Throughout, Jeanine spoke to me as she followed me from room to room like a puppy anticipating a treat. “I’m not making heads or tails of this. You were attacked, out cold, almost dead, you have blood on you but no open wounds, and your place has been trashed. Your first thought was to make something up—which just plain isn’t cool—and now you can’t even come up with a good fib to cover up whatever it is that happened. And now… now you’re running around like nothing did happen. Marya, hon, you were completely unconscious, barely a minute ago. Not fainted, unconscious. Please, give me something.”

The events of this day to be continued...

Awakenings I

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006 (cont.)

The knocking sounded distant but felt very near. My body hugged the faintly shuddering floorboards as if they generated the warmth of the presence they heralded. I might have been lying that way for seconds or hours, but it was probably about a minute before the visitor tried the doorknob and, finding it open, let herself in. My name was being called in a familiar voice, also far away though I could feel the air vibrating by my ear. I was being rolled onto my back. A warm hand held my wrist, while another pressed against my cheek, my forehead, the back of my neck. I was comfortable; I wanted to feel more of the hand, and when the one on my neck went away, I reluctantly opened my eyes just a slit to search for it.

“Oh, thank god,” the vibrations said. I found the hand on the floor next to my head, and unable to lift mine to reach it—I felt heavy all over, as if my veins were filled with something much thicker than blood—I scanned my way up the arm to the neck and face. Jeanine’s visage appeared to be in the process of transition from fear to relief. “Can you move? Are you OK?”

I squeezed my eyes shut again and concentrated, taking stock. All systems should be functioning fine, I diagnosed; they’d just taken a break to recuperate. The entire right side of my neck still ached. It wouldn’t appear as if it had been chewed raw, but it certainly felt like it, and the skin would be new-looking and tender. I focused on the heart, noticed the beat was very faint, and brought it immediately into a more normal range. Working my way up onto my elbows, shifting attention back to my exterior, I realized Jeanine was still holding my wrist. “That was quick,” she said with a sliver of surprise in her voice.

“What?” I croaked out. Now that I was conscious, I was recovering very rapidly, but I was trying not to seem to do so faster than an ordinary person might. My self-assessment reminded me of what had taken place before I heard the knocking, and I wanted to get myself back together as soon as possible, but without arousing Jeanine’s suspicion. The situation might be urgent.

“Your pulse. A second ago, it wasn’t even there, I thought you might be… and now iiiiiiiiiit’s…” she looked at her watch for what I guessed was a ten second interval, “fine. Sixty, sixty-five beats a minute, I think.”

“Oh, well, I guess I just passed out. Glad you came in.”

Her expression suggested this was a prematurely invented explanation. “Just passed out?”

“Um, yeah?” I’d pulled myself all the way into a sitting position and found the other warm hand. My own fingers were trailing up her forearm to her biceps and under her t-shirt sleeve. I was about to lean toward her to kiss her a very welcome hello, a hello that would assure her that nothing was wrong now, but she stopped me.

“Look at yourself in the mirror and try to use that word, just. Then look around the apartment and try to tell me passed out again.”

The events of this day to be continued...

Like New

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006

He kept on laughing, now comfortable that he was playing along and oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t. “Oh, yeah, Charlotte. That was a bonny lass if I ever knew one.”

I could hide nothing anymore. My demeanor grave, I looked him straight in the eyes and asked, “Who are you?”

“Marya, it’s me.”

“Who the hell is me?”

“Me. Rick. Rick from Rochester. What’s wrong with you?”

“You need to leave.”

“Whoa, now. What’s going on? I’m sorry I haven’t been up-front with a lot of stuff. I just don’t have such lofty, keep-the-universe-running goals like you do, and I thought you’d think I was an asshole. Or a selfish asshole. Let’s start over.”

“Let’s not. I need to think right now. Maybe I’ll call you in a day or two. Maybe. Thanks for telling me what you’ve told me. It’s been very enlightening, and I won’t forget to thank you if Kay and I and… whoever… decide to help each other out.”

I got up and walked around the table to pull him to his feet, ready to lead him to the door. But I was unprepared for his next move. As soon as he rose, I felt him spin me around and pin my arms to my torso, his in a bear hug around my body. Instinctively, I attempted to ground my feet, preparing to rob him of his balance and propel him into the nearest sharp and stationary object. But before I could, I felt his ankle wrap around one of mine, lifting it from the floor. Together, we came crashing down to the hardwood, and I found myself pinned beneath his weight.

What I really wanted to wonder in the next moment was what the hell he was trying to do, since he’d know—even the emptiest of shells of Richard would know—that there was little he could do to harm me without a weapon, but then I felt him force my head to the side with his own, his nose sliding along my jawline from behind. The absence of breath on my neck was striking, and when the teeth pierced my flesh, I froze, more from surprise than from fear or pain.

He had trouble keeping the wounds open at first: my skin, as well as the vessels housed beneath, mended instinctively each time he extruded his fangs to lap up whatever blood he could from what remained on his teeth or dribbled down the outside of my throat, leaving him unable to suck from open wounds as he normally would. And so instead of taking a single long draught, he fed from me by sinking his sharp teeth into me again and again, establishing a throbbing rhythm, chewing on me as if it were my meat he was trying to consume and not my blood, until I, resigned to my circumstances and unable to roll his bulk off of my back, focused my energy on keeping the punctures open. He didn’t realize right away that the holes were no longer healing, and he gnawed two or three more times, creating a pair of gaping lesions that allowed him to finish the job in a very short time.

As every third Crypt kid can probably tell you, only the incisions hurt. You barely feel the fluid drain away, so long as it isn’t more than your body can spare. What my body could spare was not a concern of Richard’s, however, and as a tingling and then a loss of sensation spread from my extremities toward my heart, it became harder to stay awake. With his arms around me and his chest against my back, his lips and tongue seeming to take as much pleasure in the moment as his appetite, my last conscious thought was, It definitely wasn’t him at the club, along with a sense that this truth was, for some reason, a good thing.

The events of this day to be continued...

Prerogative

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006

I followed his point of view, and I agreed with it in principle. It would be critical to work with people you trusted. What I wasn’t so sure about was whether he could be one of those for me, more for his odd change of attitude that evening than for that phase he referred to as the lapse of judgment. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I had to return to the point before being too far removed from it. “What would you want to use it for? And Kay? I mean, I want to know everything about how you found her, or she found you, and—for like the fifth time tonight—who the hell is she. But I think the rest is moot if we’re not on the same page with this.”

To my surprise, he looked at me blankly, albeit for only a moment. “What would I…? Uh, to…” and he regained himself almost as quickly, “to reorganize negative and blocking energies and facilitate the flow of knowledge.” He finished with a slight, slight grin out of the corner of his mouth.

“Are you just saying that because you know that’s what I’d want to do with it?”

“Not just.”

“Well, since, if you’re telling me the truth about all of this, it would do you no good to agree to one use for it if you’re not gonna work with it, then you might as well tell me now what you have in mind.”

“I didn’t say I had a problem with your priorities.”

“I didn’t say you had. But what are yours? Cause I probably know you as well as you know me. At least as well. And I can tell there’s more. I know there is, and I don’t want to think it’s an ulterior motive.” I waited for him to realize how uncomfortable he looked before going on. “You know I can’t do anything that might risk losing my Gift.”

He chuckled then. “Yeah, you’re kind of predictable like that. But you know, you can act in the service of the Grey Orchid and help out the rest of us. Especially if negotiating, compromise, are what let you do it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was figuring was going on here. So what would you want to do with it? I have to know what I’m compromising before I agree to it.”

“You know me so well, you tell me.”

“Oh, you’re just being snotty now. And I’m not exactly being a mind-reader. Don’t you remember we talked about exactly this at one point in the early nineteenth?”

“Early nineteenth?” And speaking of tables turning, the physical one between us could have literally levitated on its own and begun rotating, and it would not have been so dramatic as what actually happened. While his momentary stumble from before had been mainly due to being caught briefly off-guard, he now appeared entirely befuddled.

“Century?” To his confused stare, I replied, “We talked about what we’d do if we could control other people’s energies? Perfectly hypothetically at the time, of course. When we were philosophizing on the meaning of the thing. I was talking about what I could and couldn’t do, and you thought it would be cool—well, your word was ‘divine’—to do, well, more.”

“Oh, uh, no. I don’t remember that one. What’d I say at the time?”

“Rick, it wasn’t a one-time conversation. It was ongoing. You know: ‘I sure would like to do blah blah blah right now.’ And yours were always about three things. Sex, money, and politics.”

This brought him temporarily back into his comfort zone. He laughed. “Yeah, well, some things never change.” To myself, I thought, I used to think so. But then he slipped. Big time. “Me and the ladies, heh heh. Two centuries and still the lothario.”

I tried to laugh along with him but could only manage a smile that I hoped didn’t betray my misgivings. I nodded. I said, “Charlotte.”

The events of this day to be continued...

Third

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006

His smile spread out. He said, “The amulet, when the charms are put together, allows its users to shift energy. The kind that you always go on about. Soul energy, legacy, selfhood. Whatever you want to call it. On a large scale. Pretty powerful stuff.”

Later, I’d realize just how much enjoyment he was getting from watching my reaction. But in the moment, I was in the reaction as well. What he was describing was tantamount to playing god. The fragments of energy that compose every individual and, according to the teachings of my School, must remain largely fluid to hold the universe’s beings together, are subject only to the conscious control of a lucky few, including myself—and then for very personalized and individual ends. The idea that someone could influence the energy of legacy beyond the confines of her immediate vicinity was at once stunning, horrifying, and—when I thought about how near to this power I was—exhilarating on many different levels. Yes, this certainly went beyond the solitary charms’ ability to put a naïve vampire in a trance. I could barely prevent the thrill of self-importance from infecting my voice. “How did you find this out?”

“From your best friend. And mine, too. I should make it clear right now… we may be seeing a lot of each other from now on.”

Under any other circumstances, I might have been OK with that. I might have quipped about there being plenty worse people to plan to see a lot of. But I was already unnerved by the scenario even though my mind was zipping through many of the possibilities that could be open to me, provided I could obtain the third piece before Richard or this Kay person could find my two. That’s when Richard disclosed the catch.

“The amulet only works when all three in the triumvirate work together. No flying solo here.”

This was the second time he’d used the word; the first time, I thought he was simply using it descriptively, but this time it sounded like it might warrant a capital T: Triumvirate. If Richard were telling the truth this time—and for once, his words seemed to explain much more than they contradicted—then I was eager to learn about the ingenious device’s origins. A primitive yet powerful object with a built-in system of checks and balances. Where had Bella gotten her piece? What had been its original purpose?

“So this Triumvirate. And by the way, what a pretentious name. You’re thinking of you, me, and this Kay?”

“Well. Kay is thinking of you, me, and Kay. But I wanted to get to you before she did so we could… discuss. You know, I’ve known for a while that this”—and at this point, he dug out his replica of the coral charm and placed it on the table—“is not what it’s supposed to be.” He paused and made it clear he was watching me. “Where’s the real one?”

I didn’t know what to say and so remained silent. I moved not so much as a facial muscle.

“What’s wrong? Got so used to lying you don’t know how to take it back? You have two of them. Somewhere. Thanks to my moron of an intern. And Kay has one. But you and I have had a long history, and despite this recent lapse of good judgment on both of our parts, I think it’s in our best interest to get a hold of hers. Find a third of our own choosing.”

The events of this day to be continued...

Reflected

Originally written Saturday, January 14, 2006

The five days I had to wait between speaking to Richard on Saturday and seeing him on Thursday were both calming from their lack of activity and tension-building from the same. I worked the boys through the curriculum over the weekend, and while I’d love to be able to enthuse about Patrick’s progress and Dennis’s excitement over the connections he’s learning to make between Grey Orchid and his major of physics (which he, in turn, has begun to explain to me), we’ll just leave those events as parenthetical occurrences in relation to more recent ones.

Richard is gone, and has been for over a week. He was gone when we spoke a week ago and when he came to my door late Thursday evening. The casual smoothness that I’d thought was merely a consequence of the telephone’s ability to obscure was fully present in his person. The seemingly perpetual yet subtle anxiety had been replaced by a quiet, mocking confidence. His eyes peered intensely into mine not in an effort to read my thoughts but to inform me of them, and if they were vocal, they might have included such phrases as the tables are turned and look who’s in the dark now.

As we sat across the dining room table from one another and I waited for him to begin, I felt as though I were looking into my own reflection: all the manipulation I’d been too distrustful to avoid with him was staring back at me in a stoic façade only blemished by the hint of a smirk. In a rare moment of capitulation, I broke down and spoke first, thereby affirming his awareness that I now needed him and his information more he needed me and mine. “Who’s Kay? What’ve you learned about the charms?”

“What, you don’t want to know how I’ve been? Living out of my office? C’mon, a little empathy here. I’ve had a rough week.”

“But you’re OK, right?”

“Do I look OK?” It was the sort of question that seemed to invite a negative and sympathetic response, but the truth was—

“Actually, you look better than you’ve been in a long time.”

—and interestingly, he took it not as a refusal to acknowledge his woes but as a compliment he’d been fishing for. “Thanks,” he said while arching a Hefnerish eyebrow. “Just wanted to hear you say it.”

“OK, fine. Now, is your ego sufficiently stroked for us to move on to the meat?”

“Sure. So here’s the beef. You’ve been lying to me.”

“A little. But you’ve been lying to me, too.”

“Can’t deny it. So this is kind of the point. Let’s get it all out in the open so we can work together and wrap this whole thing up already.”

“I can work with that. So let’s start with Kay. And the purpose of these things. What’ve you found out?”

This time both eyebrows curved into half-moons, forehead lines crinkling. “Hm. You seem so interested in Kay. And yet as far as I know, you’ve never learned about her except from me, last weekend. Could this be one of those areas of indiscretion we’ve just mentioned?”

“Perhaps.”

He smiled with his lips. “And what’s doubly interesting is that she seemed to mostly be interested in you, too. Heh. It’s like I don’t even exist in this little, uh, triumvirate.”

“What does she know about me?”

“Not a whole lot, as it turns out. And quite a bit.”

“All right, riddler. Will you just spill about something already? I get the point. Secrets. Lies. Aren’t we supposed to be moving on?”

The events of this day to be continued...