Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (6 page)

Through the exuberant, unbridled fun of it all, a worry finally surfaced, and the creature voiced it for me.

You can return, Samantha, as easily as you arrived.

Oh, thank God.

You are a gutsy woman to come here without a thought of how to get back.

Oh, I was going to get back.
I thought.
One way or another.

And I did get back, too. But not before I flew some more, sweeping high and low, taking in firsthand the mountain chains and plateaus and valleys that had rarely, if ever, been seen by man.

I grinned like a fool and dove down into a deep gulley, wings outstretched, just missing the sheer rock walls, then angled up, and up and up… and exploded out of the cleft and into the black void of space.

I hovered there briefly, surveying the surface… deciding where to explore next.

I saw it. Another crater. Deeper than the one before. It was wrapped in deep velvet blackness.

I dove down, ecstatic. Yes, I was flying over the surface of the Moon.
The dark side.

Requiem: a song, chant or poem for someone who died.

“If death is the great equalizer, then some of us are just more equal than others.”
—Diary of the Undead

he was the last person I ever thought I would be friends with.

Then again, when you’ve been through the shit we’ve been through together, well, maybe it’s not so surprising, after all.

But still…

We sat on the back steps of my house, facing my expansive backyard and the Pep Boys sign that hung like a god over the far wall.

Friends
, of course, might be too strong a word. And
acquaintances
just didn’t feel right, either.

A comrade,
I thought.
A comrade-in-arms.

Yeah, I liked the sound of that.

“Sounds, I dunno, a little Russian.” Nancy piped up, picking up on my thoughts a little too quickly for my liking.

“Well, we’re going with it,” I said.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, nonplussed. “And, for the love of God, will you blink?”

Admittedly, I didn’t blink much when I was around her, since I knew it freaked her out. There was still some sass in me. Anyway, I could go for days without blinking. Generally, I had to remind myself to do it, anyway.

I now made a big show of the action, and she laughed and shook her head.

We were sipping wine and smoking cigarettes. One of us was buzzed and possibly laying the groundwork for lung cancer. The other would never get drunk or die of lung cancer, or die of anything other than silver to the heart. That someone, of course, just happened to be me. After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“You were…” I did the math “…twenty-two when you met him?”

“Something like that.”

“Old enough to know better,” I said.

She shrugged, some of her old defensiveness coming through. That she was a functioning human after what she had been through was amazing. That she could acknowledge someone else’s feelings was a surprise. After all, my dead husband’s mistress had had a helluva childhood. I almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.

She exhaled a long, billowing plume of blue-gray smoke and turned to me. “How old were you when you married Danny?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Back when you were human?”

“I’m still human!” I might have snapped at her a little. “I’m just, you know, weird.”

She laughed. “You are far more than weird.”

I shrugged and smoked and wondered again how, of all people, she and I had become friends. Through Danny, of course, a man we had both slept with, shared life experiences with, and might have even loved. Well,
I
had loved him. I couldn’t vouch for her, although I
could
have if I scanned her thoughts. I didn’t. Truth was, I never wanted to scan her thoughts again. They were dark and twisted—full of memories no one should ever have. Also, the last thing I wanted to see was an image of Danny in there, with her—and them going at it like feral rabbits.

“We never went at it like rabbits, Sam. Feral or otherwise.”

“How much did Danny tell you about me?” And were there others out there who knew my secret?

Other strippers and prostitutes, no doubt.

“I’m sure there are, Sam.” She exhaled and looked away. Nancy never hid from what she did then—or now. Although I didn’t ask, I got the very strong feeling, and these days I always trusted my feelings, that she made her living as a very high-priced call girl.

“Something like that, Sam. I could tell you about it if you really wanted to know.”

“I don’t. Not now, not ever.”

She looked away and smoked, and if my judgmental tone had affected her, she didn’t show it. These days, I tried to keep that down, anyway. I tried to welcome her as a friend.

“I do what I have to do, Sam. I’m glad you don’t judge me… too much. Anyway, he told me your whole story. How you were attacked. How you were turned. How you guys kept blood in the garage fridge. How you threatened him, scared him.”

Danny had blabbed my secret.

Months ago, when Nancy and I had first met, I could have denied it. I could have even changed her opinion of me. Controlling others was something that used to not sit well with me, but was now, admittedly, a feasible option. Of course, the demon bitch within me loved it. Loved it more than anything, if I had to guess. So, I rarely gave in. And, yeah, that pissed her off to no end. Now,
that
I enjoyed.

“Are you taking his side?” I asked.

“Well, you did threaten him, Sam. He told me all about you throwing him down on the bed and choking—”

“He tried to have me killed! By other vampires. And he nearly got my sister killed, too.”

She shrugged. She usually shrugged. It was her defense mechanism. Her shrugs seemed to indicate:
I’ve seen worse.

I shielded my thoughts. I had to. They had turned dark. Far darker than I was willing to share.

“So, you
are
taking that rat bastard’s side. And if you shrug again, I’m going to remove your shoulder and feed it to my neighbor’s dog.”

She shrugged again, and this one was defiant, snotty. It also came out with a surprising lack of concern for her own safety. She should have been very, very concerned for her own safety.

Very.

Maybe we weren’t comrades, after all. Maybe it was impossible to put our past behind us and to forget the hurt, the jealousy. The complete disruption of our lives.

And this, a defiant shrug, from the woman who’d slept with my husband, back when he and I were still trying to work things out, back when I still loved him, back when I needed him most.

I snapped.

Literally. I knew the bitch within me helped me snap. Gave me just the right amount of hate to fuel what I did next… and what I did next would horrify me later.

But it didn’t horrify me now. Oh no, what I did felt just right.

So very, very right.

When I was done feeding from her neck, I was tempted to kill her. Tempted, of course, by the demon within me.

Instead, through superhuman effort—well, supernatural effort, to be exact—I pulled away from her torn throat, wiping my mouth like the ghoul I am. Then I licked the back of my hand.

Yeah, definitely a monster.

Kill her,
chanted a voice in my head, a voice way, way,
way
down deep. A voice I never, ever trusted. Until now, I had done such a damn good job of ignoring it, too. So good that I almost,
almost
,
thought I was normal. Especially with the two rings I now wore: one that helped me eat normal food, and one that helped me live in the light of day, both forged in an alchemical process that few on Earth would ever know.

I had made a valiant attempt to not feed from humans over these past few months—or even from anything living. My sole source of sustenance had been my bloody packets of filth delivered from a slaughterhouse.

Now, as I sat back, I watched Nancy slowly come back to her senses. I had seen this before. Victims slipped into a catatonic state of shock. Allison never had, though, when I’d fed from her each week. Perhaps a friendly bite to eat was much different than a full-fledged vampire attack.

And I did attack Nancy. Criminal charges could be pressed against me.
Hell, I should be in jail for what I just did to her.

Except that no jail could hold me.

She blinked, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Jesus, had I put her under a sort of spell, the way a dolphin stuns its prey with a sonic blast? She rolled her head in my direction. More tears streamed out. The wound in her neck had already coagulated, although it still seeped some blood.

I tried to feel really bad about what I had done.

The old me would have been mortified. The old me would have hated herself for attacking this woman. The old me would have feared that such an attack would prompt more of the same, and would, in fact, signal the end of my humanity.

The old me was a wuss.

Besides, humanity was overrated.

Yes, I knew that was
her
talking, the demon within. But sometimes, she made sense. And sometimes, people just deserved what they got. And sometimes, I just needed to feed.

All good points
.Which meant, I was slipping. The demon within me was gaining a stronger foothold, gaining more and more access to my thoughts. To my actions. There was a war raging inside, and I was losing ground. But see if I cared.