I never considered that she might read my mind. Can she squeeze my heart at a distance? Can she send a blood clot streaming through my lungs? I’d always assumed she has to touch me, but I might be wrong. Now that would be a fatal mistake, so to speak.
I step into the darkness of Barnacle Bill’s and inhale the smell of stale smoke and spilled beer. Old men slouch at the bar, hovering over mugs of beer. I’m the only woman in the place, and that draws interest, for about ten seconds. One look at my face, and all the men turn back to the drinks they’re nursing. I’m not there for company.
A puff of smoke spirals from a corner so dark I can’t make out the features of the smoker. That’s where I want to be. I walk to the booth and sit, uninvited.
“I’m Sandra, and it’s my birthday,” I say. “I have a wish.”
“Fascinating.” The accent is impossible to place, a blend of French and Spanish and old South. Beautiful. Seductive. I hadn’t expected to feel that.
“Will you grant me a wish?” I have to clear my throat twice before I get the question out. I’m afraid. Fancy that. After all this time, all the planning, I’m afraid.
“Depends.”
“I know who you are. I know about you. I’ve done my homework. Mobile Bay, 1823, the ship Esmeralda. You were walking along the docks late one night. You felt a tap on your shoulder and then a bite on your neck. You come back to Mobile to commemorate your making, and to hunt.”
He leaned forward, his eyes so black I felt as if I were being pulled into bottomless darkness. “And what else do you think you know, cher?”
“I know you can give me peace. You can take my life and give me immortality.”
His hand, the fingers chill, brushes my cheek. His touch is sensual and also terrifying. This is the hand of Death that I’ve sought for the last half of my life, but death on my terms.
“It doesn’t always work that way, cher. This immortality you request comes in degrees and always with a price.”
When he smiles, I see the points of his fangs. His face is dark-hued, the color of coffee or a nut. His teeth are white and his hair jet-black, long and beautiful. He’s no older than forty-five, or maybe two hundred and forty-five.
“Death has come for me. She says it’s my time. After twenty years of begging to die, I refuse to do it on her schedule. She took my children. She took my life.” The anger hardens my words into rocks that I hurl at him. “She has her little list with my name at the top, but she won’t win this time.”
His laughter is sucked into the beer-sodden wood of the bar. I’ve amused him.
“You think to best Death.”
“I do.” I don’t hesitate. I stretch out my wrists. “I’ve wanted to die for a long time. Now I refuse—because it suits her.”
“So you want the bite of immortality. To what end?”
“You hold the power of life and death. You are her rival. I want you to win.”
His smile looks haunted, and he doesn’t answer immediately.
From the table beside us a pile of napkins whirl into the air. She’s here. She’s standing right beside me, her hand reaching out for mine.
“Help me. Please.” I ignore her and focus all of my powers of persuasion on him. I think that I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute. I should’ve come sooner.
Before I can blink, he’s swept me into his arms. In a blur of speed we’re out the back door and into the alley.
“Happy birthday, Sandra,” he says just before his teeth sink into my neck. This time the blood loss is erotic instead of painful. I feel my body grow limp. Soon I will sleep and awaken to a world where Death has no hold on me.
Fire and Ice and Linguini for Two
Tate Hallaway
Tate Hallaway is the author of other works featuring the main characters in this story: Tall, Dark & Dead, published in May 2006, and Dead Sexy, published in May 2007. She’s intimately familiar with Midwest winters, having grown up in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Tate currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with five monochromatic cats and her adorable four-year-old son, Mason.
Sebastian told me several times that his birthday was cursed. I didn’t really believe him, but when I found myself standing ankle deep in exhaust-smudged snow on the shoulder of County Highway 5 while Sebastian stared glumly at the engine block of our stalled car, I started to reconsider.
We were stuck. A broken broomstick handle propped open the hood of the ’90 Honda Civic. Sebastian usually drove a mint-condition classic car, but since it had no heater, it wasn’t especially suitable for Wisconsin winters. The Honda was a beater from Jensen’s, the garage where Sebastian worked. He had it on loan for as long as the bad weather lasted.
Sebastian held the distributor cap in his hands and was doing something to it with a fingernail file he had borrowed from my purse. The way he was dressed, it could be twenty degrees, instead of twenty below—no hat, no scarf, no gloves. In fact, all he had on as protection against the wind was one of those shapeless parkas, broken-in, loose-fitting jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked much more like a car mechanic than a vampire. Of course, he was a car mechanic—it was his day job. That’s right, you heard me, day job. Sebastian had been made by magic instead of by blood, and he could walk in the sunshine.
Not that there was much of that left.
The sunset threw pink and blue shadows over the frozen cornfields. In the fading light, icicles glittered from the eaves of a nearby abandoned barn. A dog howled in the distance. It would have been beautiful if it wasn’t so damned cold.
Despite the below-zero breeze pulling at his long black hair, Sebastian worked unhurriedly, impervious to the cold. The tips of his ears weren’t even red; I could feel mine burning under the fake fur of my hat. His composure in the bitter cold made him seem especially supernatural. When I took in a deep breath of icy air, my jaw clenched in a way that made my teeth actually chatter.
It must be nice to be dead.
Meanwhile, I was freezing my butt off. I looked great in my estate sale–find Harris Tweed wool coat, fluffy Russian hat, and fake-fur lined boots, but the skimpy little black number I had underneath everything let the cold seep in to the bone. Normally, a forecast of subzero temperatures suppressed my fashionista tendencies, but it was Sebastian’s birthday, and I’d wanted to glam things up. No doubt I looked absolutely fabulous underneath my winter layers, but a fat lot of good that did me right now. I was shivering so hard that my knees literally knocked together.
The deep blue shadows stretched in the fading rose-colored light, and above us, a highway light snapped on. Sebastian glanced up in the sudden illumination, and then glared at me for a short moment before going back to the distributor cap.
Sebastian hadn’t said much since the car sputtered and died twenty minutes ago, and I knew he was brooding. He hadn’t wanted to come out for his birthday. He said he’d never celebrated it in all the thousand-odd years of his life, and he hardly wanted to start now. It had never been a happy occasion for him.
He believed his birthday caused him to become a vampire.
Today was Christmas.
Apparently, the superstition at the time Sebastian was born was that sharing a birthday with Jesus was extremely bad juju—something about your parents engaging in earthly pleasures at the same time of year that the Virgin Mary had been divinely conceiving. Whatever. It made no sense at all to me, not being of a religious persuasion that concerned itself with Jesus’ birthday, but it was important to Sebastian. Plus, he had been reminded of this wickedness every single birthday. He told me once that the curse had become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, since he had pursued the “dark arts” of alchemy and witchcraft partly because people expected him to. If he hadn’t, he would never have discovered the formula that made him a vampire.