Eternal Kiss (20 page)

“Kilimanjaro-n. It’s time to move. You in or out?”

“In,” she said. She slid the door closed and refused to look back.

“We’ll take it from here,” Rakim told her, once they’d returned to Angelus. He and Alex half-carried Dana down the stairs into the dark of detox and Lauren started a new file, putting it into Johannes’s inbox for him to fill out later. Then she sat in the common area watching a vampire flick with the newbies
and fell asleep. She woke two hours later to find herself alone on the couch feeling worried and more than a little annoyed that Johannes hadn’t come for her.

“Forget this,” she said, and took the stairs down to detox, pushing through the heavy door.

The hallway was mostly dark, but up ahead, where it curved left and right, she could see dim florescent lights flickering like strobes. There were no inspirational posters with pictures of smiling teens on these walls. It was grim as a Soviet-era apartment building. From behind the doors, she heard odd sounds—growls and gurgles, like animals eating. And something else—a constant buzzing machine whine that didn’t match the sporadic popping of the overhead lights. It made her skin crawl. And then there was a loud, piercing shriek of agony that died into desperate cries. Lauren heard a rumbling noise coming closer. She stood trembling under the flickering lights too terrified to move. A shadow reached across the back wall, growing larger, then smaller, and then a pigtailed girl appeared, dancing to the music blaring from her headphones while pushing a mop and a big yellow bucket on wheels. The water was oddly dark, and the girl’s gloved hands and apron were spattered with splotches.

“What are you doing here?” the girl asked in a thick New York accent that competed with the music blurting from her headphones. “You can’t be here now. I gotta clean.”

“Sorry,” Lauren said, turning away from the shadows, the sounds, the girl, and the murky water in the bucket, running as fast as she could for the door. She ran smack into Johannes.

“Lauren? What are you doing? You’re not supposed to go into detox.” His face was grim, even a little angry.

“I … I was just looking for you.”

“And I was up there looking for you.” His smile relaxed her.

“I heard weird noises. And somebody screamed.”

“That’s why we tell you not to go there. Sometimes during withdrawal it can get really nasty. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

Lauren remembered going with Carla to the hospital that first time, how her sister fought and cursed, growled like an angry dog, spat and, yes, screamed. “I guess you’re right.”

Johannes kissed the top of her head and held her close. “Just looking out for you, babe. Besides,” he licked her neck. “I require your assistance in other matters.”

It had been a long time since Lauren had felt like someone was looking out for her, and she found herself grateful and hungry for the way Johannes took her hand in his long fingers and led her away from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.

Eight

T
HE DRIVE TO
Eagle Feather was pretty if you were on vacation, which Lauren wasn’t, and so it was just trees and cows and more trees and three hours in the car with her parents saying nothing that mattered.

Carla had put on some weight since the last time they’d seen her, but she’d also taken up smoking, lighting one cigarette after
the other during their visit. “Sometimes the patients exchange one addiction for another. We try to get them hooked on something healthier, like exercise or a hobby,” the director, a small man with a wire-thin voice and very little hair told them. “But if there is a stop-gap addiction that is not as immediately detrimental, such as smoking or doughnuts, we allow it.” Her parents ignored the smoking and made overly cheerful conversation about how good Carla looked and how much cooler it was upstate than it was in the city where everyone was just sweltering this summer. Lauren thought about the people at Angelus, about those kids who had nothing, who lived on the street or the projects, who’d overcome the worst possible scenarios to get clean and make something of themselves. And here was Carla—spoiled, entitled Carla, whose selfishness had driven them into a shitty rental and aged her parents by ten years. Carla, who couldn’t get it together despite having everything. Lauren hated her for it.

“Can you bring me some new clothes next time?” Carla said when they were leaving. “All the candy around here is making my jeans tight.”

“Of course,” her mother said. “I’ll get Lauren to help me pick something out.”

“Great. Homeless Chic. Don’t make me look like too much of a dork, okay Squirt?” Carla laughed. Lauren didn’t.

Lauren slammed the car door hard. “Well,
that
was fun. What a fucking waste of time.”

“Lauren! Watch your language,” her mother said, catching
her eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, ’cause it’s my language that’s the problem here.” She knew she should give it up—there was no point in having an argument—but she couldn’t stop herself. “When are you going to get it? She’s ruined everything. She’s a loser, and she gets everything.”

Lauren’s mom blanched. “She’s sick, honey.”

“She’s not sick. She’s useless! This wouldn’t happen at Angelus House.”

“That’s enough, Lauren,” her father snapped.

Yeah, enough, Lauren thought. They didn’t speak for the entire ride back to Brooklyn. The next day, she packed her clothes, her iPod, and some pictures, and moved into Angelus House.

Nine

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a few brownouts due to the heat’s demands on the city’s ancient grid, and the mayor was telling everyone to cut back on their electricity. But inside Angelus House, the AC was working fine, keeping everything freezing cold. Now that Lauren was living there full time, she had to adjust to the chilliness of the place. No one else seemed to mind it, but Lauren found herself wearing a sweatshirt during the day and sleeping in flannels at night. There were other oddities. No one ever used the vending machine in the rec room. In fact, a fine layer of dust lay on the keys, and she realized that in her six weeks on the job,
she’d never seen anyone come to refill it. Once, she hit the button for a package of M&Ms, and when she opened it, the candy was so old, the chocolates crumbled in her hand like pastel dirt. Only the fridge marked “Newbies” ever needed restocking. And sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, distant cries, shrieks, and moans cut through the stillness. The desperation of those sounds filled her with a dread she couldn’t name, and so she pulled the pillow over her head, listening to her heartbeat until she managed to sleep and forget. And by noon, with everyone up and laughing, going about their work, offering hugs or back rubs or jokes, Lauren felt safe again. People looked out for each other here. Her family had imploded, but now she’d found a new family to take her in, and that was enough.

On a Friday, one week after Lauren had come to live at Angelus House, she found all the residents huddled together in one of the sharing rooms, speaking in hushed tones.

“… What was he doing out at that hour?”

“… He knew better than that …”

“… burned to a crisp …”

“What’s going on?” Lauren asked.

Alex looked up, her face registering surprise. Her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. “It’s Brian.”

“Those bastards in the projects, they torched Brian,” Rakim said, his nostrils flaring in anger. “He went in to help them, and they paid him back by setting him on fire.”

Just then Johannes walked in. “If we get caught up in anger, we lose. Come on. Let’s remember Brian as he’d want us to.”

They formed a sharing circle, hands clasped. Lauren stood on the outside, watching. “We are the fallen angels,” they intoned. “We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega. Unto us is given this charge. Unto us will be the glory.”

They hugged and comforted one another, especially the newbies who had come to see Brian as their protector.

“We remember and go on,” Johannes said.

“Amen,” the others answered.

Brian’s death was front-page news. F
ALLEN
A
NGEL
, the headline in the
Daily News
trumpeted, and there was a picture of Brian smiling out from under that shaved head full of tattoos. Everyone at the Farragut swore they’d had nothing to do with it, that nobody had even seen him around there and that it was all a setup by the cops or the real-estate developers or Angelus House itself. One anonymous source claimed that he’d seen Brian simply walk out into the daylight muttering “For the greater good,” before bursting into flame.

They held a candlelight vigil for Brian that evening, marching from Angelus House through Vinegar Hill to the Navy Yards, where the mayor spoke and promised that those who were guilty would be brought to justice. The cops hit the city hard, taking people in for any and everything they could. After Brian’s death, the tide of public opinion turned in favor of Angelus House taking over the empty warehouses along the waterfront.

“He sacrificed himself for us,” Lauren overheard Rakim saying a few days later. He said it to Dana, who had cleaned up nicely and was attending meetings every day. “That’s the
Angelus commitment. That’s the extra step.” He broke off when he saw Lauren. “Hey Lauren Sauron. You mind going for some groceries? I think the newbies need more juice.”

“Sure.”

He smiled, but something in his eyes made her uneasy, and she found herself wanting to escape the too-cold recycled air. “Hey, who’s better than Kiliamanjaran?”

“Nobody,” she said and went outside.

In the grocery cart, Lauren found an envelope with her name on it shoved under the bags she kept there. Inside was the day’s paper with the headline: A
NOTHER
O
NE
B
ITES THE

D
UST
. Lauren scanned the story. The body, drained of blood, had been discovered in a dumpster behind a Burger King in downtown Brooklyn, the head missing. Another victim in an escalating gang war. The victim’s name was Isaiah Jones of the Farragut Houses.

Isaiah Jones.

A note had been scrawled at the bottom of the page:
I need to talk to you. You can find me today on the boardwalk at Coney, in front of Deno’s. Tell nobody. A friend.

That afternoon, Lauren pretended she had a dentist’s appointment and biked down to Coney Island where she found the tagger on the boardwalk painting caricatures of tourists for extra cash. He looked up, shielding his eyes from the relentless sun. “Hey. What do you want—a drawing of you as Princess Leia or Barbarella? Personally, I think you would look hot as Wonder Woman.”

“Sorry about your friend.”

“Yeah,” he said, gazing out at some point on the horizon. “Come on. Let’s get outta this heat.”

The tagger, whose name, she learned, was Antonio, sweet-talked an aquarium volunteer into letting them inside for free. They took refuge in the cool damp, wandering through the maze of watery exhibits full of exotic creatures, stopping in a secluded spot near the moray eel. Antonio leaned against the glass. The blue-gray light turned him ghostly pale.

“Remember I told you about my cousin, Sabrina? Right before she died, she called me up scared out of her mind and said she’d seen some weird shit going down at Angelus. Bad shit.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head. “She wouldn’t tell me over the phone. But she mailed me this postcard right before she disappeared.” He pulled a card out of his back pocket. It was the Angelus House insignia. Across the front in a shaky script were the words
los vampiros
. “Two days later, she was dead. They killed her.” Lauren started to object, and he held up a finger. “Wait. Just let me tell you about Isaiah now. Isaiah ran with a crew out of the Farragut. He liked to smoke, deal a little weed, nothing major, only he gets caught for a second time—he’s eighteen now—and they give him a choice: Angelus House or time. So he joins up, does the program, but he doesn’t take it serious. He’s just going along till he can get out.”

Lauren felt hate rising. “Nice.”

“One night, he comes rolling back into the houses, smokes a blunt with his boys, and when he’s all loose, he starts telling them how he got tapped for something big, something secret, like the damn Mafia. He told ’em that Angelus wasn’t just a twelve-step program. They got a secret thirteenth step.”

Lauren remembered the tweaker who’d broken in that night. He mentioned a thirteenth step, but he was out of his mind. “What do you mean?”

“Isaiah said once you were tapped, you got the mark to prove your commitment to Angelus House—the tattoo they all wear. Then you had twenty-four hours to prove yourself on a mission, and once you did that, you were untouchable. A bona fide immortal.” He paused. “A vampire.”

The eel bumped against the glass, startling Lauren. “This is, like, crazier than crazy,” she said.

“Yeah? How do you explain what happened to that guy Brian?”

“The cops say somebody at the Farragut killed him.”

“That crazy bastard burned up in the sun.”

“You know this.”

He shrugged. “I heard it.”

“And that makes it automatically true.”

“You want to hear this shit or not?”

She crossed her arms. “Whatever. You asked me down here.”

“And you came,” he offered. “Think about it: If you wanted to work up a crew of vampires without being noticed, where would you do it? You’d get the people no one wants to be both
ered with, the lost causes who already got a craving they can’t stop on their own so they’re, like, ripe for whatever you throwing at ’em. And then you’d make up some bullshit turf war and blame it on a whole bunch of other people nobody wants to be bothered with, let them take the fall.”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “Okay. Backing up. You said they had twenty-four hours after they got the mark to do a mission. What happens if they don’t?”

He lowered his voice to a strained whisper. “It’s like the worst withdrawal symptoms ever, and they never stop. You lose your mind.”

And again Lauren thought of the man who’d bashed his head into the glass of the filing room door.