Elixir

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir Jordan Castillo Price All rights reserved.

Copyright ©2009 Jordan Castillo Price

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir Jordan Castillo Price Wild Bill and Michael might have thought they made it out of the subterranean vampire nest unscathed, but in her anger, Silk left Michael a taste of her wrath that’s impossible to shake. It’s a race against time to cure Michael of a bizarre affliction, and though the hunter and his favorite vamp have few enough friends, Bill can’t ash a cigarette without burning another bridge. Now Wild Bill must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice to save his lover. His friends? His scruples? His pride? His humanity?

Chapter 1 I tracked Michael’s hand as it traveled down the length of me. Shoulder, biceps, chest. Lingering to trace the ink, the tribal thing over my left tit that covered up the name Deborah -- no great loss to Deb, I’m sure -- down the obliques. Wending through the six-pack. A pause to toy with the treasure trail. “What’re you in the mood for?” he asked. Most people would’ve answered, “Surprise me.” But most people didn’t have Trouble with a capital “T” for a boyfriend. “You got such a pretty mouth,” I said instead. “How ’bout you spoil me with it?” He unhitched the fly of my jeans one-handed. “That’s all?” “I’m sure the mechanics’ll sort themselves out as we go along.” “That’s not what I mean.” He bent his head to press a kiss just beneath my navel, and his Clairol-black hair fanned over my belly. He lingered there, tonguing cryptic messages on me that made my nuts shift and the insides of my thighs go all tingly, and when he spoke again, the soft words tickled the patch of skin he’d just dampened. “I want to make sure you don’t get bored.” “Do I look bored?” I nudged him in the shoulder with the stiffie that was trying to escape from my jeans. He turned and mouthed my hard-on through the denim. He knew how to be naughty, Michael did. How to tease his way up to a moment. How to make wicked promises with a sly glance of his silvery bedroom eyes. Bored. Right. I’d have to be dead to be bored with him. A cool breeze drifted in from the open window and raised goose bumps all over me, but I was in love with the idea of having a window open at the crack of springtime without waking up to a snowdrift for my troubles. It wasn’t exactly the world’s freshest

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air, given that Sin City with all its carbon emissions sprawled around us for dozens of miles in any direction, but it was outside air nonetheless -- warmish outside air -- and since I’d been born, bred and undead in the snow belt, I was enjoying me a little southwestern bliss. Michael smoothed away the pebbly prickle of gooseflesh with his deft, warm fingers. “Should I close it?” “Nah. I like it.” He peeled my jeans open and pressed a kiss to the ridge of my hipbone, and a fresh crop of goose bumps sprang up that had nothing to do with the breeze. “I like it when you suck my soul out through my piss slit, too,” I suggested. “Mmm. Romantic.” He coaxed my hard cock out of my pants. It slapped against my belly, rigid and flushed. Michael traced a vein with the hot, wet tip of his tongue. His eyelids fluttered shut like he was reading my pulse. He probably was. I ran the backs of my fingers down his cheek. “C’mon, baby, don’t tease. Suck it.” I caught sight of the corner of his grin around my boner. He fluttered his tongue and bathed my cock with his warm breath, but he didn’t wrap his pretty lips around it. An arch of my back made my shaft nudge him in the jaw, but no dice. He could keep me on the brink for hours, and he knew it. He’d done it, just to see how hard I’d squirm -- and the thought of that made my cock twitch without any help from my hips. “You want me to beg? I’m not proud.” The gentle puff of Michael’s silent laughter tickled my spit-wet shaft. “Uh-huh. And I’ve got a secret stash of Playboys in the van.” “And what, you’re not gonna share?” My pride was old history, but the longer you play your cards close to your chest, the harder it is for anyone to tell whether you’re yanking their chain or not. He might as well think I was a sarcastic a-hole. It was easier that way. “You’d rather look at naked pictures? We can’t have that.” Michael trailed his tongue higher and stroked my slit with the tip of it. Almost too sensitive. Almost. The heat of his breath bathed my cock head, and I rocked my hips again. This time, he let

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me do it, sink myself deep inside his hot, wet mouth, and I reveled in the thought that whatever hell we’d been through together, Mikey and me, that this little slice of heaven was worth it.

*** Our front door looked as sinister as a bum with his hand down the front of his pants skulking in an alley behind a playground. I noticed things about it I’d never noticed before. The slight warp of age. Half a century of scratches built up around the lock. Mismatched screws in the hinges. The number “3C” slightly off kilter. The layer of greasy fingerprints radiating from the doorknob. The way it threatened our imminent death. Michael pressed the length of his sleek young body against me, put his mouth to my ear, and breathed, “There’s no one there.” Yeah. That’s what my nose was telling me. But my mind -- that was another story. My delusional dry-drunk brain was telling me that a big, fatal surprise must be right around the corner, and we would’ve been better off ditching Milwaukee straight off, leaving that little pink piece of circuitry behind. When I tried to sprint the nine feet down the hall, my legs locked in place, and I clutched the wall so hard a lightning bolt crack shot through the old plaster. A few flakes fell and dotted my combat boot. Michael fitted his body more firmly to mine and covered my hand with his. “I’ll go. I’ll be quick -- I know right where I left it.” “We stick together,” I insisted. Just as soon as I disengaged from the wall, I’d be all over it. “C’mon then. Just because no one’s here doesn’t mean no one’s coming.” “Remind me never to ask you to talk me down from the ledge.” Michael planted a kiss just below my ear, then peeled himself away from me. Without him pressed against my side, it felt like something was missing. A phantom limb.

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He held his Colt .45 just inside his jacket with his finger on the trigger, itching to give it a squeeze. Normally, I’d be concerned that a neighbor might get caught in the crossfire. But the bums who lived on that floor didn’t come out unless it was time to cash their welfare checks, they were out of dope, or the Powerball jackpot was over a hundred mil. The sight of Michael traipsing across the worn indoor-outdoor carpet provided me with enough leverage to break free from the wall. I veered around him and pressed my fingertips to the grubby old door. Somewhere in the building a TV played, footfalls reverberated, and then a piece of furniture moved, a chair, maybe. But not here. Not in our apartment. Michael unlocked the door and opened it. Our room was exactly as we’d left it, newly cleaned, with a dresser full of syringes and an empty pint of Jack beside the TV. Michael set his gun next to the ketamine, stuffed the laptop into its carrying case, and crammed the AC adapter and a handful of syringes into his pocket. He picked up his gun and said, “Let’s go.” While he’s not quite as stealth as a vamp, Mikey’s a lot faster than your garden variety human. We were down those stairs lickety-split and across the lobby before you could say “scary assed vamp junkies.” And even though the heart of my heart doesn’t have my keen vamp senses, he’s still got one hell of a sniffer on him. He grabbed me by my spiked epaulets and hauled me back into the lobby before I was halfway through the front door. “Wait. I think I smelled something.” We both sank back against the walls with our hearts pounding. I took deep breaths in an effort to calm myself, but it was no use. Those vampires freaked me out big time. “How did they know?” Michael asked. “We stayed in one place too long. People seen us. They talk.” We should’ve known better than to lay down roots, but what good was shoulda-woulda-coulda to us now?

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I looked around for an exit route. There wasn’t one -- unless we wanted to add “home invasion” to our laundry list of felonies. Too bad there wasn’t any alternative. We headed for the farthest unit from the front door, in hopes that one of the windows would lead to a back alley. The doorknob twisted off in my hand, but the door held. A deadbolt. I gave it a push where I felt the resistance and the doorframe splintered. “God damn it, Marco, I told you to call me if you forgot your keys agai --” A leathery old housefrau who’d smoked way too many Newports over the years shuffled out of the bedroom and froze at the sight of us. She drew in a breath to scream, and her mostly plucked-off eyebrows arched inhumanly high. And I hated to do it, but I felt myself start oozing charm like a used car salesman. “Shh, shh, it’s okay. We’re cool. Everything’s cool. We ain’t gonna take nothing. No one’s gonna hurt you.” She held the breath she’d meant to scream with and started shaking all over. Michael fit the door back into the doorframe and wedged an ash tray underneath it like a makeshift door stop. I’ve always avoided becoming a member of the it’s-for-your-own-good club, but I didn’t have time to mince ethics. I could’ve reached into that old broad’s head and insisted everything was fine and dandy, but I didn’t. I suggested it. A hint. A nudge. And that was enough. She clamped her lips together tight. But then Michael piped up. “Fuck, Bill. Look at the window.” His fear-scent spiked. I took my eyes off the lady of the house to get a load of whatever he’d just seen. Glass block, high up in the wall, too awkward for us to punch out and slither through, not without alerting everyone in the building that something bad was going down. I turned back toward the wide-eyed woman. “You got another window in this place?” She nodded. “Let’s see it.” She led us back through the door she’d come from -- and wasn’t her place palatial, practically twice the size of ours. The bedroom smelled like bodies and mildew,

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and faintly of piss, and a big umber stain shaped like Antarctica covered the ceiling. The single window on the far wall made it my favorite room, ever. It let out at the back of the side alley, and it was big enough for us to fit through it. Michael snapped up the yellowed plastic window shade. Bars. His fear spiked higher. “Don’t worry, babe. I got this.” “It’s painted shut,” the woman told me as I forced up the double-hung pane. The brittle paint hailed against my leather jacket and the warped wood squealed like a chick at a slasher film. I pushed on a bar once, twice, and the screw popped from the masonry. I bent it up, got a second bar out of the way, and we were good to go. I went first, leading with my boots. The old lady stared at me in bafflement as I slipped out the open window. “Sorry… didn’t mean to fuck up your pad. The fresh air’ll do ya good.” I dangled there, ready to drop, then I added, “But maybe, for tonight, you should climb into your bathtub, pull the shower curtain, and stay real, real still.” Her sparse eyebrows inched up higher still. I considered manhandling her psyche, but since she’d been game enough to let us root through her house, I didn’t. I tried to be charming instead. “It’ll be fun. An adventure.” I would’ve loved to have stuck around and made sure she didn’t get creamed by whatever was sniffing around for Mikey and me, but when it came right down to it, I was a hell of a lot more concerned with our survival than making sure some stranger didn’t get mauled. Besides, those vermin were supposedly pacifists. I slipped out the window and Michael followed. The alleyway was narrow, and pitch black. I grabbed Michael by the head and said right into his ear, “Stay put.” And I maybe nudged a little with my mind, too -- as if the impulse to monkey around in the old broad’s brain had been diverted, and it needed to leak out somewhere. The legendary vamp-charisma felt rusty, which was a relief. Once you spill out all the crayons, it’s hard to stuff every last one of ’em back in the box -- and I didn’t want to fall

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into the habit of out-and-out vamping people to get what I wanted. Not this late in the game. With my body angled to stay deep in the shadow, I slipped toward the front of the building. The rough brick rasped some of the paint off my jacket, but I’d moved so fast it was quiet -- a hiss of steam, leaves on concrete, a sigh. I took a deep whiff, and over all the other smells, the Dumpsters and winos and the last gasp of fall, I caught the scent of vamp. Where? If he’d come this far, he had to have our building in his sights. Maybe he was inside, munching on the neck of the lady with the crappy window. No, I reminded myself again. Pacifist. For pacifists, them vamps sure were scary. Or maybe not pacifists, not in the sense of the word that I was. It didn’t sound like any of ’em laid awake during the day eaten up with guilt over anything they might have… eaten up. Not like me, whose conscience couldn’t even handle putting an end to Ambrose Gray. It was more like they didn’t want to get caught. I stayed stock still, and I watched that front door. Nothing moved. And I wondered if maybe we’d been wrong. Maybe a vamp just happened to be passing by as we left the building -- insanely coincidental, but still possible. After all, Milwaukee was crawling with bloodsuckers. Except it was the middle of the night, and other than the occasional passing car, the street was dead. A click. Movement. My head snapped around. There, behind me. We’d parked Big Red three doors down. Its hood gaped open, and a small figure -- a chick -- rifled in the engine, pulled out a coil wire, and tossed it across the street into a scraggly line of bushes. If I squinted and imagined her giving someone an enema, I could picture her in that burned-out basement. Fuck. I might very well be paranoid, but even so, they really were after us. She hadn’t sussed out our apartment yet. Just our wheels. Big Red had been waiting for us in front of a dilapidated hardware store with apartments upstairs where illegals slept five to a bedroom. The vamp chick crept up to the building and sniffed.

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That was all I needed to see, one of them creepy vampettes picking through the side streets like she was wielding a nit-comb, and zeroing right in on us. I darted back to Mikey before he came to see what I was gawking at, grabbed him by the shoulders and pointed him at the other end of the alley. “We gotta make tracks.” He moved as vampire-quiet as me, maybe better, because sometimes my old buttons and safety pins clacked where I brushed up against him. Still, muted by the buildings, it shouldn’t have alerted Nurse Nancy out there. Hopefully. We hurtled toward the back, bounced off an old iron security gate, skirted the rear face of the building, then dead-ended. No way. I flitted back to the gate and tried to bend the bars, but it was a no-go. They’d been built to withstand a siege of Visigoths. They didn’t budge. Fine. We’d climb. I looked up. Everything was vertical and at least two stories high. Michael grabbed me by the jacket, pulled me close, and whispered, “Someone’s really out there?” I nodded, once, with my best calm, cool and collected expression in place. He pointed down, and I looked. The building behind us had an ancient coal chute, hardly wider than my shoulders. We were both scrawny things. We’d make it. The metal was sealed shut with decades of corrosion and God knows what else, but I broke off the padlock and pried it open without any fanfare. The stink of old metal was as heady as huffing airplane cement, so if we were lucky it’d cover our tracks. Michael squeezed through and I followed, feet first, jamming my fingers into a ridge that ran around the door to pull it shut behind us. Rust stabbed under my fingernails like bamboo splinters. But it closed. Thank God, it closed. “I think the chute’s walled off from the basement,” Michael whispered. So much for the great escape. “Come down here,” he told me. “It’s not as tight.”

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It stunk like rodent piss and it wasn’t exactly spacious, but I’d take it. I flicked open my lighter to make sure I wasn’t resting my head on a rat’s nest. Nothing moving but shadows. “Wait.” Michael pulled out his cell and flipped it open. It glowed green. “This is safer.” Our hidey-hole was about the size of the back of the van, but only half as high, so it was easier to crawl on our bellies and keep low than to try to crouch -- and end up with spiders in our hair. It had a sloping floor that the refinishers had framed around at ninety degree angles. And we could defend it. If Florence Nightingale did manage to track us -- I hated to think it -- a single bullet would change her mind. Michael shined the meager light up toward the metal door as if he’d experienced a telepathic interlude -- and he wouldn’t mind a little target practice. “I don’t get it. I thought they were cool with us.” “C’mon, Mikey. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel the whoop-ass rolling off ’em.” “Well, yeah, but I didn’t really think they’d… how’d they find us, anyway?” “Combing the ’hood like a bunch of bloodhounds. They smelled the van.” I wedged my arm under my belly and tried to position myself better, and found myself sliding down toward Michael like a load of coal. Air woofed out of his lungs as he got a hipbone to the groin. He shifted and gravity pulled me closer still. He settled himself, and I felt my thigh drop between his legs. His breathing got very careful. A squelched laugh rolled through me and buffeted my stomach against his. Leave it to our bodies to assume the position even as we hid in a stinking rathole from the gang of psycho-vamps. Michael whispered, “Stop it,” and arched his pretty neck about three inches from my teeth. I hadn’t eaten yet, and my fangs ached at the sight of his Adam’s apple, the dusting of stubble at his jawline, and the shiny hatchwork of his scars, pale green by the light of the cell phone.

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I pressed a palm to the powdery back of the drywall and tried to put a little breathing room between the two of us. The slope of the chute wouldn’t have it, and I only succeeded in frotting him. “Bill --”

“I didn’t do nothing. I swear.”

He sighed and wiggled, and his thigh brushed up against my junk. His throat… I

could write sonnets to his throat. I could say prayers to it. The scent of him, leather jacket, maleness and Michael, welled up all around me and filled my senses. The smells of rust and dry rot and rat piss turned into a bunch of background noise that was easy to ignore. I pressed the bridge of my nose into the spot where his earlobe curved to meet his jaw. “Bill… stop rubbing me.” “Can’t help it.” “This is serious.” “I know.” He huffed, clenched up, and did his best to hold completely and utterly still. I tried my very hardest to stay still too, though part of me insisted on staying hard. I did my best to tune him out, to turn my mind to the alleyway above us that could, at any moment, send a hostile vamp skidding down the chute. I reached, and I reached, but I didn’t hear anything. Nothing but the even thrum of Michael’s pulse. I was hungry. Then again, I was always hungry. I also needed a smoke, and a shot of Jack. That was worse. Michael let his breath out, and his pulse readjusted. “My arm itches.” I smiled and nuzzled him. “Really. It really itches.” “Where? I’ll scratch it.” “You won’t be able to reach it, not through my jacket. It’s the tattoo.”

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“They itch ’til the ink scabs fall off. Ignore it.” Michael rolled his shoulder, hoping to get some sort of relief by rubbing the fresh ink against the inside of his jacket sleeve. The squirmy-hot move set my eyeteeth to aching as he arched his pretty throat right below my mouth. Hunger. I ignored it.

“Can you hear her? Can you tell if she’s waiting out there for us to come out?”

I sighed. “I dunno.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

I didn’t know that either. I pressed my face into Michael’s neck and breathed the

scent of his skin, his hair. The green glow of the cell phone bathed the outsides of my eyelids and seeped through enough to create a sepia vignette in my closed eyes. “Two hours ’til dawn,” Michael said. “We could wait it out.” I breathed, and tried to fill my empty gut with the scent of him, and ignore all the other smells warring for my attention. “Wild Bill? What d’you think would happen -- and this is just an idea -- what would happen if I covered you up and moved you after sunrise?” “You and your ideas.” “Don’t be that way. Look, if we’re worried about those other vampires cornering us, it’d be the safest way to go.” “I dunno.” “Because they’ll all need to take cover at dawn. The fact that sunlight doesn’t affect me is our biggest advantage.” “Gimme a minute to wrap my head around it.” A big, fat vein throbbed against my cheek. I’d just bled Mikey deep the night before. Besides, the scent of me drawing blood would be as obvious as hanging out a big neon sign with flashing letters that read, “We’re hiding right here! Come and get us!” Damn it. Did he have to taste so good? My mouth started to water, and I told myself I was only jonesing for a cigarette. Michael was really sold on this plan of his. He spoke softly, but his words cut deep. “If we wait ’til sunset, it won’t be just one vamp out there. It’ll be all of them.”

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I turned my face away so I couldn’t feel that vein beckoning quite so hard. “Truth is, kiddo, I got no idea what’ll happen. I might go up like a cut-rate Christmas tree with a shorted out string of lights. Or I might just be deadweight. Either way, I don’t know.” The sick thing was, maybe I would rather self-ignite than have him carrying me around like a big sack of shit. But it didn’t seem right to let my own pride keep us there like a couple of targets waiting for skeet shooters. I told Mikey about the coil wire, and did my best to describe how to reinstall it. He assured me that he could look up instructions on the Internet if worse came to worst. Though worse than the status quo was hard to imagine. “If I need to,” he told me, “I think I can vamp us a car.” Which was a prime example of the way I manage to spoil any good thing that brushes up against my life. But I’ll admit, I was pretty damn relieved, too.

Chapter 2 So the plan had been for Michael to call Suzanne after sunrise, have her grab an industrial-strength sleeping bag and bring it to him. He’d load me up, reconnect the coil wire -- and get the hell out of Dodge before Charlie and his posse rolled out of their coffins at dusk. Mikey’s plans usually have a Bermuda Triangle in the middle where by hook or by crook, things are supposed to miraculously go his way. Operation Coal Chute Escape, while hastily conceived, seemed tighter than the usual product of his over­ active imagination. Not that it mattered. Even the most hole-ridden plan wouldn’t have been able to keep me awake once the sun cleared the horizon. I woke up to screaming. A chick screaming my name -- Suzanne. Them vamp junkies were mostly guys, and all of ’em of the straighter-thanstraight variety, the sort that tried to pretend the ass play wasn’t getting them off, it was only the wine. They’d tear through Suzanne like a rabid Doberman through a cheap hunk of rawhide. I shot out of the hidey-hole so quick the metal door ripped off its hinges, bounced off the opposite building, and clattered to a stop in the middle of the alleyway. I hadn’t vamped out, not quite, but my pupils were blown wide. The alley looked like cobalt-tinted daylight, and Suzanne’s bleached blonde hair was blinding. “Bill, oh my God, Bill.” She flung herself at me, totally oblivious to the fact that I was starving, that if I was any younger (or less of a sentimental sap), I’d cave in and make a snack out of her willowy neck. “Where’s Michael?” My heart stopped. Maybe not, but it felt like it. It felt like someone had slammed that eighty-pound rusted metal door over my thick skull, and hard. “Ain’t he with you?”

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“He called and told me to bring a sleeping bag, and he was supposed to meet me here… and then he called again and said something was wrong, he felt really sick, and then he stopped answering his phone…” I sniffed, and couldn’t tell if I actually smelled Michael himself over the corroded metal and rat piss, or if it was just the scent of him that clung to me. I stuck my head down the coal chute and sniffed again. Too much interference. And yet, if I dropped a shoulder and let in a hint of moonlight, maybe I could see. He lay there at the bottom of the walled-off chute with his arms twisted over his head in his leather jacket. His face was pale, his eyes were closed, and there was a hitch between his eyebrows like he was having distinctly unpleasant dreams. “When did the sun set?” I called over my shoulder. “You mean the beginning, or…” “When did it get dark?” I snapped. She started crying. Great. “I don’t know. I can’t tell. I’ve been in this alley all day. I pounded on that fucking door ’til my hands started bleeding, and then…” I tuned her out and forced myself not to sniff the air in hopes of getting a little nip of the scent of her plasma. First thing first -- get Michael out of the hole before the hounds converged. I tossed my jacket to the side and clambered down the chute facefirst on my elbows and knees. Michael was breathing and he had a pulse, but his skin felt hotter than usual. Maybe. Or maybe I was cold as the concrete I’d slept on. Since my best bet was to drag him out of there by his collar, I tugged his jacket down and zipped it up tight. I expected him to moan and shift, and he didn’t. He just laid there like he was drugged -- dead weight. And up close, I could smell the prickly tang of human sweat. It wasn’t just me. He was hot. Way hot. We’d slid down that slippery slope quiet as can be, but I more than made up for it getting my boy back out. I was nothing but elbows and knees and a long line of swears that made no sense, but helped me feel like I had some tiny sliver of control over the whole fucked-up situation. Suzanne was spewing nonsense in counterpoint with

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mine, and as I backed out of the coal chute our cussing mingled, mine raspy, dry and pissed-off, hers shrill and panicked. I slung Michael over my shoulder, raised my voice over hers, and shouted, “Get in the van. Now.” I ran there slow for me but fast for a human, and she damn well near kept up with me. I was fumbling for my keys when she rounded the back of the van tottering on one foot. She had on patent leather platform boots with five-inch heels. Cute. And a bitch to run in. “Find my keys,” I said, because I didn’t want to waste time dumping Michael in the street and picking him back up. She had her hands in my pockets in no time flat, and then the key in the lock. I dumped Michael on the air mattress, then hauled Suzanne over the bumper and into the back, where a pile of newspaper softened her landing. “Lock up. I gotta go grab something.” “I’m scared -- don’t leave us here --” “Shut the fucking door.” I hated to boss the kid around, but if I’d opened my eyes right at sunset and the vamp junkies had gone to roost back in their lair, time might be on our side, and we might actually stand a chance of outrunning them if we hurried. I tiptoed across the street between the traffic and started rummaging through the bushes for the cable. Grab the wire, plug it back in, and if Nursie hadn’t ripped out anything else, we’d be on our way. That was the plan. That’s what I’d do. As soon as I laid my hand on that goddamn wire. I dug, and I dug. It wasn’t there. I remembered right where the thing had dropped, but I searched all around. It wasn’t like the street had been cleaned lately -there was a layer of old trash under there half a foot deep and even a couple of used syringes. No spark plug cable. Nada. Nil. God damn. Fuck me.

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I straightened up and turned, and found myself staring at Charlie, the Swarm King. My eyes were level with his hairline, where a thick head of dark blond hair parted itself off-center and hung rakishly over one bloodshot blue eye. He wore mirrored aviator shades slid down to the tip of his nose so he could peer at me over the top. It was dumb luck that I’d shown up on his radar to begin with, but it’d take me a lot more than that to escape his interest. “I’m thinkin’ you got something I need,” I said. He gave me a blink of acknowledgement. “So what’s it gonna take?” I sized him up. Couldn’t smell him, but his army fatigues -- they would’ve been khaki if he’d blown in from Desert Storm. His tattered jacket was olive drab. Nam, then, or possibly Korea. As old as Michael and me put together. Not freakishly old, but no one to turn my back on. “I thought we were cool.” “Maybe, maybe not. I wanted to take a look for myself and see if you were just telling me what I wanted to hear.” He looked me up and down. I did my best not to grab him, turn him upside down and shake that wire out of him, since for all I knew he had his whole derelict platoon lurking in the shadows just waiting for me to make a false move. “Look, we don’t wanna cause no trouble. We’ll be out of your hair if you just --” “The girl.” “What?” “You think I’m an idiot? You and Boytoy suck her dry, then he leaves her on our doorstep after dawn and calls the cops.” Holy Paranoid, Batman. “Tell me I ain’t having this conversation… She’s not food. She’s with us.” “Right. That’s why you locked her in the van.” He cocked his head. “You think I’m stupid? I smell her crying.” “C’mon, pal, I got no beef with you or your buddies. Suzanne and Michael call each other ‘girlfriend.’ They got matching skull bracelets, for cripes sake. If you let us hit the road, you’ll never see us again. Both our problems, solved.”

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He pulled out a Camel, lit it with a Zippo older than me, and squinted toward the van. “I do remember you. From before.” “Yeah, well, that ain’t hardly any kind of recommendation.” “I had a theory, then, that whatever kind of drunk someone was, that’s the sort of vamp they’d be if you turned ’em. The belligerent drunks, the assholes -- those are the ones who turned into killers.” Great. Forty-some odd years of assholism had picked a fine time to catch up with me. “That was a long time ago --” “You might’ve had the tendency to sit alone in a corner feeling sorry for yourself, at least if you couldn’t manage to get laid, but you were never one of those guys with something to prove. I never saw anyone pick a fight with you. Or maybe I saw them try -- but you never rose to the bait.” And here I’d thought there wasn’t a single living soul to connect me with my past, not anymore… and pow -- right in the kisser. Shadows shifted, and I caught the silhouette of a longish-haired drifter behind a graffiti-covered truck, and some dreadlocks behind a security fence. “Then don’t back me into a corner. I don’t wanna fight you. I just want to get Michael out of here.” Charlie’s eyes narrowed. Hard to say if he knew Mikey was out for the count or not -- or if it obviously spooked me to be going it alone without my other half getting my back. His gaze flickered over to the van. If he didn’t know Michael was in trouble before, he knew now. He gave a soft grunt -- I could take cryptic-lessons from this guy ­ - then dropped his smoke and crushed it with his heel. “I give you safe passage, you leave and don’t look back. No retaliation. Got it?” “It’s a win-win, buddy.” I held out my hand, palm up. “Just say the word and I’m gone.” He glanced at the van again, pushed his mirrored shades up, and dropped an unassuming length of silicone into my palm. A blur, and he was gone. I popped Big Red’s hood and checked for anything else folded, mutilated or spindled. The serpentine belt looked about ready to cry uncle, but other than that, the

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single wire was the only thing missing. I plugged ’er in, painfully aware that the kid who’d normally be keeping watch with his Colt .45 was out of commission, slammed the hood and took another look around. Shifting shadows everywhere. I climbed in, turned the key. The engine started. I’m not usually one to call attention to myself by driving fast. Tonight was an exception. I took a turn on two wheels and headed for the expressway “What happened? What’s wrong with Michael?” Suzanne pushed through the rubber mat that sunproofed the back of the van and worked her way over to the passenger seat. Michael’s seat. “I’ve been shaking him and trying to wake him up, and he just lays there.” “Lemme put a few miles under the tires and we’ll sort it all out.” “Why were you hiding in a basement? What happened to the van?” “Not now, Baby Doll.” “You drive me crazy. I don’t know how he can stand you.” “That makes two of us.” Suzanne made a frustrated noise and threw an empty pop can against the dash. It bounced off and landed in the trash wasteland behind the console. “What’s the matter with him? Is he drugged or something?” I focused harder on the road. Drugs? Doubtful. Michael dished ’em out, but he didn’t take ’em. “We got a hornet’s nest of vamps all waiting for the signal to put the sting on us, so shut up and let me drive.” “Why don’t you just ‘vamp’ me into submission if you don’t wanna know what I think?” “Same reason you don’t take off your top every time you wanna strike a bargain at the corner store. It’s heavy-handed. Crude.” “Oh, right, like you care.” She pulled out the ultimate girl-weapon and started bawling again. Sonofabitch. I sighed, slowed for a red light, saw that no one was coming from either direction, and cruised through it.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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“Michael needs a doctor,” she sobbed. “But let me guess -- we’re not going to the hospital -- because it’s what I think we should do.” “It’s not that cut and dried.” I wasn’t even sure if he was human anymore, and I wasn’t aware of any vamp clinics in the vicinity. Although… we did know a medic. A single light burned in Melba’s loft. I carried Michael up the cement stairs while Suzanne pounded on the door with her blood-crusted knuckles. The door opened so fast Melba might’ve been lurking right behind it, and Suzanne jumped half out of her skin. Melba nodded at Michael. “Whatsa matter with him?” “I was hoping you’d tell me.” She frowned, a hundred-year-old woman’s frown on a thirty-year-old’s face. “Look, I like you kids, I do, but I can’t afford to attract no trouble.” “So that’s it, we’re shit out of luck? C’mon. It ain’t like I can do this myself. I’m so out of my league it ain’t even funny. If you don’t bail us out, who will?”

Chapter 3 The night breeze carried the sound of distant sirens through the open window on the warm Nevada air. One of them ambulances would be coming for me someday if the wicked young thing between my legs didn’t have mercy on me. You’d think that once you had one BJ, you’ve had ’em all. Not so. Some people will suck your dick to try and make you happy -- to prove that they’re into you in hopes that you’ll put a ring on their finger, or at least let ’em use your credit card. But some people give head because they love it. And lucky for me, Mikey’d always been the kind of sweet, sweet Cocksucker who did it for the sheer joy of sucking dick. It probably didn’t hurt his ego any to reduce a guy to a big, throbbing wreck who was begging to get off. I ran my fingers through his hair and tried to act like I wasn’t about a minute away from shooting my load, figuring that if I didn’t let on how close I was, he’d bring me off before he even realized I was spurting. He’d dragged me to the brink and then backed down so many times that night that I ached from my knees to my belly button, but I still held out hope that this time would be the time that he’d finally let me have my sweet release. He swallowed me down and then glided back up, sucked on my cock head, then plunged down again. Fast. Precise. And warm and incredibly wet. A few more strokes, and that’d be all she wrote. But then I felt the fingers of his left hand clamping around the root of my dick as steely as any cockring, and he pulled off and considered the shiny purple prong that was just this side of bursting. “You’re killing me,” I gasped.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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He nuzzled his cheek against my cock. I just about wanted to cry. “You don’t have to say that. You’ve been with so many people…” “And I settled down with you.” As a rule, I didn’t do domesticity, so I was way out of my league in our Vegas love shack. “Kid, I’m serious, if you don’t make me come soon I’m gonna explode.” He left my yearning dick flapping in the breeze, and rooted down low to take a long, slow lick of my nuts. My thighs started trembling. “I love it when you come hard.” “There’s coming hard, and there’s oblivion. C’mon, baby. Give it to me.” I hated how desperate I sounded, but I saw Michael smile to himself, and I thought maybe the holding on by a thread edge to my voice might actually persuade him to have mercy on me.

*** Melba hadn’t even wanted to let us past the threshold. She sighed, ran a hand through her short-cropped bob and planted her fists on her hips, and then sighed again. “Ain’t there anywhere else?” “Where else?” I hated how desperate I sounded. “Where else am I gonna take him?” Melba turned and walked away, muttering to herself. But she’d left the door open. She flipped a switch, and high up by the ceiling, the lights cascaded to life. Once they warmed up, her studio glowed green-tinged fluorescent, walls multicolored with flash, floor antiseptic white. It reeked of disinfectant. “Strip ’im, put ’im in the chair.” She went to her shop sink and turned the tap, and water thundered out that steamed in three seconds flat. She scrubbed like a surgeon. While I held Michael up, Suzanne started to strip him. She got as far as his leather jacket and jumped back, shrieking. Melba glanced over her shoulder. “That’d be the problem.”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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It wasn’t blood, and it wasn’t pus. I would’ve recognized either one of those -- I would’ve smelled it myself. Whatever was coming out of Michael’s arm was a pale, sickly moss-colored slime that ran down his arm, and now freed from his leather jacket, dripped down the back of his hand and trailed off his fingertips in long, goopy strings. “What the fuck?” “You, Blondie,” Melba said to Suzanne, “cut his shirt off.” By the time Suzanne clomped over to the array of antique stainless steel tools spread on an immaculate white cloth and grabbed a pair of scissors, Michael’s shirt hung in ribbons and I had my switchblade back in my pocket. Melba dried her hands and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. When she peered at Michael’s arm, another hundred-year frown crept up on her. “God as my witness, it wasn’t my ink that did this.” She scrutinized Michael’s tattoo. “What in the heck is that? He got another tat on top of it?” My stomach sank so low I expected it to fall out my asshole. “Wasn’t my tat. Look, around the sides there, mine healed clean. It’s that other one.” Like I had any doubt. Silk. “She planted some kinda time bomb in him, the lousy bitch.” “Whatever it was, the Dracula Bug should’ve knocked it right back out.” Melba grabbed a thick pad of gauze and swabbed Michael’s arm. Just a couple of days ago she’d done the very same thing, only back then, everything’d been different. Back then we had no idea how blissfully lucky we actually were. “Only time I ever seen a vampire in this kinda shape was frostbite.” “So what do you do?” Suzanne’s voice trembled. “How do you treat it?” “Third cabinet, all the way in the back. Grab the bone saw.” Suzanne froze. Melba shook her head. “If you ain’t got the stomach for it, then get out of my way.”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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Suzanne grabbed me by the jacket and started hauling on my sleeve. “Don’t you dare let her, Bill. Don’t you dare.” “Hey, medicine’s progressed since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Can’t we clean ’im up and give him some penicillin?” I saw Melba move, barely. She was up in my face, all five foot two of her on tiptoes, with her Gibson Girl chipmunk cheeks and her pearly little fangs. “You’re the one who asked me for help. I take the arm off or he dies. It’s that simple.” I looked down at Michael sprawled in that chair, so pale, so incredibly vulnerable, and I wondered how I’d ever live with myself if I said go ahead, hack off that arm. And I wondered how I’d ever live without him if I didn’t. Suzanne fluttered around Melba and me but her ephemeral humanity didn’t quite register. We were too busy staring at each other, the old broad and me, and it wasn’t quite that she was trying to vamp my head, but she was trying to sway me to her line of thinking. I heard ringing, distantly, and then Michael’s girlfriend said, “Doctor Harmon? You don’t know me, my name is Suzanne. I’m calling for Michael Davies. He’s unconscious -- and this vampire lady wants to cut his arm off.” The sound of Dr. Smug’s name severed whatever eyeball connection I had with Melba. “Oh no, sweet thing, tell me you didn’t. You know he’s not the kind of doctor who writes prescriptions and plays golf, don’tcha?” And Harmon didn’t exactly rank on my list of humanitarians. He was a prick of the highest order who didn’t give two damns about anyone but himself. But maybe… Maybe he’d be a little less likely to leave Michael in pieces. “No. It’s green. Yes, red and swollen. A tattoo. Let me ask.” She held her hand over the receiver and opened her mouth to ask me a question, and I grabbed the phone from her and blurred across the room for a little privacy. “Okay, Doc, you’re probably pissed off at me --” “Can you send a photograph?”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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“Huh?” “Michael’s phone has a camera. Send me some photographs of the wound.” Thank God for the fleeting little human. Having Melba or me figure out how to use a camera phone would be like teaching a fish to juggle. While I held up Michael’s arm so Suzanne could get a few good shots of it, Melba blotted his forehead with a damp cloth, muttering all the while. “Come to my shop, force your way in, and then you stop me from doing what needs to be done. Of course no one likes losing a limb…” “How come it don’t smell infected?” I asked. Because any answer she might have given me was preferable to the road she was currently headed down. “It’s not infection. It’s necrosis.” Scratch that. Things can always get worse. “Without the Dracula Bug, it might’ve taken a couple of weeks for all this tissue to die off. But his chemistry’s haywire, and the rot’s moving fast. I wouldn’t have believed he was fine two days ago if I hadn’t seen it myself.” And worse. “His tricep’s half gone. He probably won’t be able to straighten his arm anymore as it is.” “Look, I don’t know how much longer he’s gonna walk this planet, whether it’s another day or another hundred years. But I’m not gonna make him do it mutilated, not unless there’s no other way.” Suzanne finished snapping shots and started pushing phone buttons twothumbed. Melba took another look at Michael’s wound. “I’m not gonna force you. But he’d be better off with a couple inches of stump than taking it clean off at the shoulder, and in the amount of time you just wasted, the necrosis spread another quarter inch.” I crouched beside the chair and pressed my forehead into Michael’s cheek and breathed in his scent as if it would fortify me to make my choice between bad decisions and worse ones. “God damn, baby, wake up. I don’t know what to do.”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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The first two notes of Michael’s ringtone made me flinch, but I held onto him and listened, as if he was trapped there inside his body, banging on it with his fists while he called out to me and told me what to do. Too bad I was too pathetic to hear him. Suzanne spoke softly to the Doc, then said doubtfully, “Is there any chance he had a… spider bite?” Silk. “Could be,” I said into his neck. Suzanne consulted the phone. “Dr. Harmon says he can help if you bring Michael right away.” We loaded him back into the van, and Melba snagged Suzanne before she could climb into Big Red herself. “You can stay. I got food in the freezer, if you’re hungry.” Melba’s eyes went to a pathetic sprinkling of tattooed stars on Suzanne’s wrist that were in desperate need of touching up since they’d healed blotchy. “I can fix that for you.” Suzanne stared at her own forearm as if she didn’t know how it had gotten there, and she couldn’t fathom what she needed it for. “I am… hungry.” Melba turned and began leading Suzanne back into the loft. “Hey, Suzie-Q,” I called. “What about Michael?” Suzanne planted her platform boots in the doorway to the tattoo studio and looked around, dazed. Vamptastic. I’d just stepped on more cold, dead toes in my efforts to keep me and mine safe. I beckoned for Suzanne to come back to me. “Maybe next time,” I told Melba. “Right now we got people to do and places to be.” Once I’d coaxed Suzanne into the passenger seat, I risked a look at the vamp I’d just cheated out of dinner. Melba wasn’t pissed off, not exactly, but there was a dead flatness in her eyes that left me itching to lay rubber. She let our tug-of-human-war pass without comment, but before I slammed my door, she blurted out, “You understand it wasn’t my ink that did this to him -- right?” “Yeah, I know.”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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“Look, I’m real sorry the way this all turned out. I really do like you kids. But… do me a favor. Don’t come back here no more. Got it?” I started the van and punched the transmission into drive. “Loud and clear.” Maybe a block and a half later, Suzanne shook off Melba’s whammy. “What the fuck just happened?” “Calm down, baby doll. You’ll have every mongrel on the lower west side following us if you don’t pipe down with the screeching.” “Was she… was I… did she hypnotize me? Did she just fucking vamp my head?” I swerved around a homeless broad who had no qualms about losing her shopping cart to the likes of me. “Now d’you see why I keep my meddling to myself?” “Stop the van!” It was so shrill I really was surprised the neighborhood canines didn’t answer her with a big chorus of howls. The second Big Red skidded to a stop on her balding tires, Suzanne was out the door and halfway to a graffiti-covered bus shelter. I leaned over and rolled down her window. “C’mon, Suze. We ain’t got time for this.” “No more,” she said. Her eyes darted this way and that, and in a loud stagewhisper, she said, “No more vampires. Maybe Michael can deal with it, having you people messing around inside his head, but I can’t. I won’t.” She ran her hands through her hair like she expected to find something nasty there. “Not ever again.” And here whatever Melba had done was more like a friendly suggestion, though I decided it wouldn’t make Suzanne feel any better if I told her so. “I told you -- I don’t play that game.” “But you could. If you wanted to. If you were desperate.” “Listen, Chick Pea. Clock’s ticking. Get in the van.” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “I need you.” “No, you don’t. You don’t listen to a single thing I say. All you do is shove me around.”

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Great. She’d been keeping score. “I got to go. Now.”

“Then go.”

What choice did I have? Waste my time chasing her around so I could

manhandle her into the cab while Michael’s arm rotted off in the back? Or how about going for the gold in irony and offering her a vampy invitation she couldn’t refuse? I took a pass on both. Suzanne could take care of herself -- and I had a doctor’s appointment.

Chapter 4 The jaunt between Milwaukee and Madison would’ve taken a regular person doing eighty in a sixty-five zone an hour and a half. I floored it. Since it was the middle of the night, traffic on 94 was non-existent. I cleared Milwaukee fast enough, and then the streetlights petered out. A dark, lonely stretch of four-lane wound its way into the countryside before me, snaking through gently rolling hills of pasture and harvested cornfields covered in the stubble of dry stalks. The sky was overcast and the stars were covered, and the only source of light other than Big Red’s headlights was the glare of oncoming traffic. Night driving is hypnotic. The sound of the tires clunking over segments of blacktop turns into a steady cachunk-cachunk that aligns itself with your brainwaves and lulls you into a kind of trance. I might not nod off anymore while the sun is down, but I don’t think anyone can resist drifting. Except tonight. Because tonight my heart lodged in my throat and my blood hammered in my temples, as if I could make the van go faster by ratcheting up my blood pressure. The speedometer wouldn’t budge past ninety-two, and the whole chassis shook like it was going through a car wash. I considered opening the window, chucking things out to slough off any deadweight, but I suspected that was something you’d only do on a sinking ship. And mine was only metaphorical. There are a couple of towns between the two cities where you’re supposed to slow down to a mere forty. I didn’t -- if I slowed down we might wheeze to a halt, and then I might as well dig out Michael’s pistol and swallow a bullet, because if I didn’t get Michael to Harmon’s in time it’d all be over. The state troopers were looking the other way when I blew by in my shuddering claptrap. Fate, or God, or plain dumb luck must’ve been with me.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 33 -

Forty-five minutes into our frantic crossing, I crested a rise and caught the glow of Mad Town in the distance. “Almost there,” I called back to Michael. Not that he answered me. Not that he’d answered any of the hysterical things I’d been yelling to him since we’d shot out of Milwaukee. Another small town -- thank God, no cops -- and then I was in the home stretch, repeating the directions to Harmon’s place over and over like a mantra. That’s when cachunk-cachunk turned into clunkety-clunk. It sounded like I’d run over something. Maybe a branch that kicked up into the engine and bounced around. I searched the side view for the thing -- and yeah, I could see it with my vamp-eyes, black against black, but it wasn’t no stick. It was a belt. The fucking goddamn serpentine belt. Maybe I could duct tape it. I only needed to go another twenty miles. I was thinking that when the whole world went kablooey. Impact. Baffling, since I was the only one on the road for miles. My head smacked off the windshield, then the headrest. A spin-out, no treads to stop me. Spinning and spinning, like a dinner plate on the end of a magician’s cane. Like a night where I mixed tequila with my Jack and washed it down with a greasy, day-old burger. When the spins finally stopped, the air inside the cab was so thick I could hardly breathe, and I was sitting at an angle that might’ve been perfect -- if I’d been piloting the space shuttle. I got my dubious wits about me and found the van ass-down in the ditch and the airbag all over me like a desperate one-night stand. I hadn’t even known we had an airbag. Apparently it’d been stuffed inside the steering column with a shitload of white powder, grit that now covered me, the ceiling, the windshield, the console, and every millimeter of the interior of my lungs. The driver’s side door took an extra shove to open, and the outside was sticky. One headlight shone cockeyed at the highway, where pieces of a massive buck

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sprawled from one side to the other. The choking smell of airbag powder gave way to the sucker-punch of blood -- animal blood, stag blood, heady with musk. I dry-heaved a few times, took a deep breath, and knuckled grit out of my eye. Then I remembered I wasn’t alone. Michael. The way the van was wedged into that steep ditch, I couldn’t open the back doors more than a foot. I saw him, smelled him, crumpled there on the floor, bleeding. One of the doors tore off like a butterfly wing. Better. “C’mon, baby. It’s okay. You’re okay.” I scooped Michael up and clasped him to my chest. He was still breathing, blood still pumping -- but even in the hazy moonlight his right arm looked black. When I picked him up, he didn’t even groan. My knees folded. If only I’d let Melba do the dire deed. If only we hadn’t gone in that old basement to begin with. If only I’d never been born. I didn’t wallow long, mind you. Just the space between one heartbeat and the next. Some people’s lives flash before their eyes when they face down death. Me? I relive my most bitter regrets. Most of me did. But the gullible little corner of my soul that holds out hope was telling me to buck up, that I hadn’t come this far for nothing. That if I ran, and I paced myself, I might make Madison by dawn. Or Michael and I would go up in flames together, and that would be the end of it. I climbed up the embankment and hefted Michael against my chest to make sure I was holding on good and tight, when a piece of plastic landed on the blacktop with a clatter. His cell phone. Not that I could think of anyone to call. Who would help us? Who could even find us? I slung Michael over my shoulder, grabbed the phone and hit redial. Harmon answered before the first ring was finished. “Where are you?”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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“I’m uh…” my fucking voice was shaking. “There was an accident.” “Call 911.” At first I thought he was being a smartass. Because, come on. What can you count on besides death and taxes, and Harmon being a prick? And since I outlived my own funeral and hadn’t given Uncle Sam a red cent since 1987, it really did fall to Harmon to keep my worldview spinning on its jaded axis. But surprise, surprise. He was serious. “When the sheriff gets there, make him drive you the rest of the way. Understand? Hello? Should I do it for you?” I was busy squinting back towards Milwaukee. Headlights. “Someone’s coming,” I told him, and I jammed the phone in my pocket so I could flag down a ride. When the driver saw the van in the ditch, and me standing there with Michael in my arms, he skidded to a stop just beyond the trail of deer guts that sprawled the length of our skidmarks. It was a truck, a huge honkin’ 4x4 with an NRA bumper sticker on one side, a Bush/Cheney on the other, and a pair of bright silver truck nuts swinging wildly from the trailer hitch. The driver hopped out, leaving the door open and the motor running, and came to help me with Michael. “C’mon, let’s get you to the hospital.” “Where?” “University Hospital -- they got the best E.R.” The pickup had two rows of seating, and the driver, a thirtyish guy who smelled like a mechanic, pushed Michael into the back bench. The dome light showed a dozen cuts and contusions on my battered beau, and his arm leaking something that looked like mint jelly. “That’s by the Capitol, right?” “Not far.” Not far from Harmon’s either. I could vamp the guy’s head and help myself to his truck -- for Chrissake, he had truck nuts, he deserved it -- but then I’d be stuck with this two-ton monstrosity. And my hands were shaking so bad I wasn’t even sure I could handle the transmission. “Yeah, UW. Thanks a lot.”

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We climbed in and he didn’t waste any time making tracks. His truck was faster than Big Red. I imagined the old girl looking down at us from the junkyard in the sky, watching over us so that I could get Mikey to Harmon’s before his arm was a lost cause -- heck, before he was a lost cause. And then I figured I was probably in shock. The driver handed me his phone. “Here. Call 911. Report the van.” I stared at his phone like it was an alien device, though I couldn’t find the spot the anal probe retracted. He glanced at me and said, “Just dial it, can you do that? I’ll do the talking.” “No phone.” “Here, gimme that, you’re all shook up…” I powered down the window and tossed the phone out. “Sorry, pal.” “Sonofa --” he made a grab across me as if he could somehow manage to catch the long-gone hunk of plastic and circuitry. “What the fuck’s your problem? I stop to help you and this is how you fucking repay me?” “Chill. You can get a new one.” My voice shook. Usually I was the calm one, the one who could look danger in the eye and find it mildly amusing, tops. But in the back seat, Michael groaned like he was having a worse dream than the one I was currently living, and my concentration went to pot. The driver grabbed me by the jacket and hauled me halfway across the bench. “My address book’s in there. And pictures of my girlfriend.” I gave him a mental smack and told him to calm down, and wouldn’t you know it? I saved vamping people’s heads for emergency situations, and here I needed to spread a little peace and quiet… and my talent was missing in action. The truck swerved as the driver shook me. “Hundreds of texts.” I tried to project my calming mojo at him again. Either I was too spooked myself to do it, the wellspring had dried up, or the whole shebang had atrophied from disuse. I should’ve packed it into the steering column with a bunch of powder to make sure it would deploy when I needed it. Coulda-woulda-shoulda.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 37 -

“I should toss your ass out on the road right now. Serve you right, freak…” Calm the fuck down. Him or me? Not sure. Either. Both. All them years I did my best not to vamp no one’s head -- well, not more’n a little nudge here and there -- all that self-righteous forbearance down the tubes. “Assholes like you are what’s wrong with the world today. And that one in back probably isn’t any better.” Another shake, and the truck’s tires squealed as the rear end fishtailed. “You listening to me? Huh? You got anything to say for yourself?” “Calm down.” My voice was powdery dry. “Fuck you.” We passed another highway sign -- Madison eight miles away now, with a rest stop in half a mile -- and the truck slowed. I thought something was wrong for a minute, because other than the lack of a clunking sound, that’s how it had felt when Big Red started to fall apart. But the truck was too shiny and new for that. The driver had taken his foot off the gas. He really was gonna dump us. All over a stupid phone. I tried so hard to vamp him I nearly broke into a sweat. “Keep going.” He put his foot on the brake and pulled into the turnoff lane. Vamp powers, don’t fail me now. “Keep… going.” The truck came to a full stop in front of a concrete shack that smelled like camp toilets and disinfectant. “Get the fuck --” No, no, no. It wasn’t gonna end this way. I might be too wound up to vamp his head, but I was still vamp-quick… and vamp-desperate. The tip of my switchblade rested just beneath his septum. Not breaking skin, not yet. But pressing there hard enough for him to feel its sharpness. I’d moved so fast even I didn’t see it. He breathed through his nose, real careful, and his exhalation fogged the shiny blade. “Drive. Now.”

*** “Now what? You gonna stick it to me?”

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Michael knelt between my splayed legs and looked me over like he couldn’t decide what to do next. “Seriously? You like it when I fuck you?” “No, I moan and groan and shoot my load for the benefit of the downstairs neighbors.” He chewed his lip and angled the right side of his body away from me -- new Michael-language that meant I can’t stand for you to see that side of me ’cos I’m so selfconscious and shy. Uh huh. He’s about as shy as a ten-dollar hooker. “You got hips like a snake charmer. What’s not to like?” The beginnings of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. I couldn’t see his eyes through his thick black lashes. I pulled my knee to my chest and said, “I’m asking you real pretty. Do me.” He licked his left index finger and brushed the wetness over my hole. Yearning blazed down my spine. “Baby, seriously. Please. I’m so hot for you right now it hurts.” He toyed with my ass more deliberately, diddled my hole with his spit-wet finger. I thrust my hips up toward him to give him an idea of how fine he’d feel sunk down to the balls inside me. He tilted his head to consider, and his black hair fell across his scarred shoulder like rivulets of ink. I could tell him as much -- that he was still beautiful to me, so much that it hurt to look at him sometimes -- but knowing him, he’d think I meant the opposite. “Lube me.” Yes. Finally. I reached back for the joy juice and gave his pretty-boy dick a good polish. He slipped his good shoulder under my knee and let my other leg lie where it fell, sprawled to the side while I shamelessly waited for my fucking. I suppose I could’ve taken mercy on him and straddled him so I could handle all the logistics myself. But it seemed to me that it’d been long enough now, and that he’d need to get used to pitching with his left hand. It probably didn’t help that he was a righty -- and a lot more confident as a catcher. “C’mon, Michael. I need you.”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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He held his dick awkwardly, but even so, the feel of that spongy, tapered cock head prodding at my hole made my nuts do an anticipatory squirm. Yeah, it would’ve been easier for me to reach down there and make it all happen. But I didn’t. My ass and his dick were old dance partners. They’d fall into their familiar rhythms soon enough. A couple of false starts, and then we both held our breath when the angle fell just so, and his sweet, sweet cock sank in. His breath hissed, and I felt myself clench around him with the joy of getting nailed. “Mm, yeah. Just what I needed. Get busy on me.” Michael pulled out carefully, then took the same aim and sank in again. I encouraged him with my hips. He did it again. Harder now. And again. My dick pointed up at my chin, so stiff I’d nail myself in the eye if I popped my cork. A shimmy of them snake-charmer hips and my cock gave a happy twitch. Michael found his rhythm and set to filling me with cock. I closed my eyes and focused on the sensation of his skin sliding against me, over me, in me. Pure heaven.

Chapter 5 The drive from hell was nearly over. I could’ve tried to be clever and get dropped off a couple blocks away, wait for Truck Nuts to drive off before I made a covert run for my destination with Mikey slung over my shoulder. But fuck it. If the guy ever came snooping around to kick ass and take names, Harmon could snap him in two before he even got past the welcome mat. “That wasn’t no way for me to pay you back for picking us up.” I hoisted Michael out of the cab while the driver glared at me. “I’m sorry.” “Fuck you.” “And I’m sorry about your phone.” He reached across the bench, slammed the passenger door shut and peeled off. Harmon stood framed in the doorway of his bungalow, tall and strangely fey, coltish, but not awkward, the opposite of awkward. He was dressed like a geriatric middle-school teacher, and even so, I had nothing left to make fun of him with. The well was dry. I was drained. Too drained to care that he wasn’t alone. The woman, whoever she was, did all the talking while he hovered way too close, stony-faced and silent. “Here, bring him downstairs. Our equipment’s in the basement.” Drained as I was, I still tried to get a whiff and see whether she was vamp or gentile, but the whole house smelled like old woodwork, wool rugs and Harmon. Age? Maybe mid-to-late thirties, with an aristocratic bone structure that gave her the air of an ex-model who’d decided she was sick of the glitz and glamour, and traded in her highheeled shoes for a Greenpeace membership. Her hair was in a single dark gray-streaked braid. She wore Levi’s with a boxy man’s T-shirt and garden clogs.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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Harmon flitted ahead of me and flipped on the lights. Some rumpus room. The whole place was so white it hurt my eyes, with enough computer equipment to hijack NASA, and a bunch of other contraptions that were as foreign to me as a cell phone that shot photos. A steel lab table, dead center, was the only empty surface. I set Michael down as gently as I could, but letting go was harder than I thought it would be. The lab was as comfortless as a morgue, and the thought of leaving my beloved on a stainless steel slab plucked at heartstrings I’d given up for dead years ago. Harmon and the woman flowed around me like water. Harmon peeled off Michael’s jacket and stashed it on a rolling metal cart, while the woman cut Melba’s loose gauze dressing from the wound in two snips. “Brown recluse would be my guess. You didn’t find a crushed spider in his clothing, or…” “It wasn’t no spider.” My head was spinning. “Er… maybe once upon a time it was.” It could’ve been… if Silk was fucked up enough to trap it and grind it up into her private-stock ink, just in case she’d ever feel the need to exact revenge on someone who’d impugned her creative vision. “It’s a long story.” And one I didn’t think I could repeat in a way that would make any sort of sense. Harmon shone a penlight at Michael’s arm. The skin was split wide, like a medieval woodcut of a pomegranate, with uncomfortable glisteny stuff waiting to spill out where he should’ve had skin, fat, muscle and bone. Harmon stood side by side with his lady -- no, scratch that, he stood right up against her, touching at shoulder and hip -and when their eyes tracked up and down the mess that was Michael’s upper arm, their eyeballs moved in synch. “When was his last tetanus shot?” he asked. “A couple months ago, when he started the job at the animal hospital.” I knew that, at least, but no one pinned a badge on me for it. “So what does that mean? Is he gonna be okay? Can you save his…” I swallowed, and realized I was going to start dryheaving again like I had after I cracked my forehead on the windshield. I staggered to a stainless steel sink, clung to it for dear life, and sucked in great, cleansing breaths. “Bill.”

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The woman was at my side. I hadn’t heard her approach, but then again, I’d been busy trying not to hurl. “I can call you Bill, can’t I?” I nodded. “My name is Felice. I’m a doctor.” Behind her, Harmon was tinkering with a piece of equipment that looked like a battery for an outboard motor. A hell of a lot. “What’s that?” “We need to pass an electrical current through the wound to interrupt the cell wall degradation.” “Shock treatment.” “It’s the same voltage you’d get from leaning on an electrical fence.” “Time is of the essence,” Harmon said in his least charming voice. Felice patted my jacket sleeve. “I’ve treated scorpion stings in the desert and snakebites in the Amazon -- he’s in good hands. Why don’t you go upstairs and have some blood? You look starved.” She glanced down at my shaking hand. Some blackpainted nails were broken and others had slivers of rust jammed beneath them. I was covered in airbag powder. “Take a bath if you like. Or lie down in the guest room.” “Felice…” Harmon called. “There’s nothing you can do here.” She turned toward Michael and fell into synch again with Harmon. I craned my neck around them and caught a glance at Michael’s pretty profile. How close had I been to letting Melba dismember him? My knees went weak. Felice glanced over her shoulder and caught my eye. “Really. You should go.” She might be too nice to order me around, but it preserved what little was left of my dignity to act like I was leaving of my own free will rather than to wait for Harmon to toss me out on my ass. I headed back upstairs. “And, Mr. Schmitt…” he called after me. “Do try not to break anything.” Even if I couldn’t be with Michael, I figured I could hear what was going on, unless there was some sort of special vamp-soundproofing in the house. There didn’t

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seem to be. It was pretty much your typical early 20th century, single-family home. The basement stairs led to a mudroom, and three steps up from that was a kitchen that looked like something out of a seventies sitcom, all dark wood and colonial furniture. I took it in -- and the scent of human blood sideswiped me. I stalked around the table and sniffed. I strained, as if I could feel it, hear it -- the blood -- if I only tried hard enough. The microwave? I opened it and inhaled. Maybe. Traces. But it wasn’t the main source of the smell. I opened the fridge. There they were, just like I’d imagined. Blood bags. Not only those, not alone. They were interspersed among tree-hugging groceries like soy butter, veggie burgers and rice milk. And an open box of baking soda tucked toward the back. When I closed the refrigerator door, the scent stayed with me, nagging. Then my eyes fell on the dishwasher. I yanked it open. Dishes. Pots and pans. Top rack -- tea cups. A thermal plastic car mug, bright red, with a Wisconsin Badgers logo. I pulled it from the rack and caught a whiff. Blood. I tongued my left eyetooth. It felt achy. Hollow. Dr. Smug’s Amazon Princess -- not a vamp, judging by the presence of human food -- had told me to help myself. It wasn’t her blood, though, was it? It was his. Harmon’s. I’d come crawling back to Harmon after everything we’d been through -- after Bat Boy and the ketamine and the trailer in the woods -- and here he was, trying to save Michael’s arm. The one he’d snapped like a twig. Fuck it. I was already ass-deep in irony. I took a cold blood bag out of the fridge and chugged. Vile, half-rotten. Good. The lack of enjoyment calmed my Great Catholic Guilt.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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Even with a belly full of blood, I still felt empty, empty and drained, wrung out and hung up to dry. I slumped in a kitchen chair, turning the collapsed bag in my wrecked hands, and did nothing while the sun crept toward the horizon. “It’s late.” Harmon. He might as well have teleported himself to the spot. I hadn’t sensed him coming -- he walked like his feet didn’t actually contact the floor, and he smelled like his woodwork. “How’s Michael?” “Felice is working on him.” The chair held me down like I’d been glued to the spindles. Harmon said, “I suggest you retire to the guest room. The rest of the house isn’t sun proofed. Too conspicuous.” Then he was gone. I sniffed around for somewhere to ditch my blood bag. My nose told me the garbage was in the pantry -- and when I opened the door, lo and behold, was it ever. There were bins for paper, glass, aluminum, and three kinds of plastic. I opened a sealed bucket. It was full of used teabags and apple cores. My empty blood bag? No idea. I tucked it behind the compost bucket, slunk upstairs, crawled under the bed in the guest room, and succumbed to the insistent waves of blackness. I dreamt, sort of. Or maybe I heard voices -- Michael’s voice, Felice’s voice, from the other end of the house -- and my body was straining to break free from the oblivion of sunlight so I could know what was happening, and if my one and only would survive the day. After an arduous tromp through Dante’s playground, the voices grew louder, and with a sudden snap, I understood one of ’em. “Bill? Are you awake?” A woman’s voice. Whatsername. Felice. “Why are you under the bed? Didn’t Jim tell you the room was sun proof?”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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“Figured you’d want me to make myself at home.” I clawed my way out from under the bed frame. Dust bunnies stuck to me wherever the airbag powder didn’t. What a relief. Harmon and his chick had normal-people things in their house, like dust. “How’s Michael?” “He’s sedated.”

She was gonna make me come out and ask? Fine. “How’s his arm?”

“It’s…” She searched for a way to put it.

“Is it there or not?”

“I’m trying to save it. There’s a lot of damage.”

Sleep might hold me at its mercy during the day, but I snap to pretty quick at

dusk. I was out of that room and down the stairs before she even finished the sentence. Michael was still in the basement -- I knew by the smell of his hair. I smelled other things, too. Antiseptic and rust, infection and necrosis. I would’ve given my left nut to never know what that last thing smelled like. Rot, but sweeter. Living death. I busted through the lab door expecting to need to thumb-wrestle Harmon to get an audience with my beloved, but the only one down there was Mikey. A band across his chest held him to the gurney and his right arm was strapped down tight to keep his gauze in place and his I.V. from popping, but his left arm was free. It rested on his chest. If it weren’t for the smell, and all the gear, and the nightmare we’d been roped into, I’d swear he was just sleeping. The kind thing to do would be to let him sleep, but my well of compassion was as dry as everything else. I needed him. “Mikey? Baby? You in there?” A hitch formed between his eyebrows. He wet his lips. I grabbed his left hand and hugged it to my chest. “Everything’s gonna be fine. We got the experts workin’ on you.” “Wild Bill?” I let go of his arm and grabbed his face two-handed. “I’m here.” He wet his lips again, and struggled for words. “W… why?”

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“The vamp tat went bad. But I got you to Madison, and Doc Harmon’s giving you five-star treatment --” Michael disentangled his hand from mine and pressed his fingertip to my lips. He swallowed a few times, and tried to speak again. “Why didn’t…” He coughed, a weak, raspy thing. “Here.” I jumped. Felice was right beside me, and I hadn’t heard her sneak up. She handed me a hunk of ice with a paper towel wrapped around one end to hold it by. “This will help.” The ice glided over his dry lips and left a glistening trail behind -- and I suppose it makes me sound like a pig to say I thought of him giving me head, but it wasn’t like you might think. I thought that maybe I hadn’t appreciated him enough, all the hundreds of times he’d polished my rod. I’d had something precious, something fleeting that could be snuffed out like a flame. I was thinking I should have cherished him better. And now it was too late. Michael caught a trace of the melted ice on his tongue, swallowed, and tried one more time. I bent my head and put my ear to his mouth so he didn’t have to strain. “What is it?” “Why didn’t you kick that vampire chick’s ass?”

*** “How’s that ass?” I didn’t really need to ask, but I enjoyed the earthy smell of Michael blushing. “Tight enough for ya?” “Best ass I’ve ever felt.” The only ass he’d ever felt. I fucking loved that. “Make it sing, then. Blue balls are a leading cause of high blood pressure and stroke in men over forty-five.” “Next time you make up statistics, stick to a subject you know something about.” Michael gave a slow, dirty grind and my nuts rode up like they were dying to shoot, but he paused, and the fireworks fizzled. “Don’t worry. Think of how amazing it’ll feel when you do come.”

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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He had my dick clamped hard in the circle of his thumb and forefinger and he’d been fucking me methodically, deep and ruthless, for the past half hour. I was so hard the brush of the air in the room was nearly enough to send me crawling up the wall. Pre-come glistened over my slit in a fat, wobbling drop. Michael drove his bad boy home again, and the surface tension gave. Wetness trickled down my shaft. “Now look what you did. You made my dick cry.” “Tears of joy.” “Frustration’s more like it.” Michael released the action-grip and it throbbed so hard from root to crown that my belly heaved. He squeezed again and my cock leaked more than I’d ever seen it, to the point where I was scared he might’ve messed something up inside there with all his teasing. “Fuckin-A. You’re juicin’ me.” “God, that’s hot. I’ll bet I could take your cock with just that.” Take my cock? Damn. The thought of me -- in him -- and nothing but our own jam between us? Maybe that would be worth the wait. If he did it soon. Before he killed me dead. He pulled out like he’d been waiting all night for a chance to lure the horse back into the stable. He doesn’t strip as quick as he used to, but he pushed his jeans the rest of the way off quick enough. Once he was as naked as me, I grabbed him around the waist and flipped him face-down before he could protest that he wanted to be face to face -with hearts and flowers showering down, violins playing, and all that other romantic B.S. He tried, though. “Wild Bill…” The words were muffled by our blankets. “What’sa matter? This was your idea.” I grabbed his ass with both hands and spread him open wide. Sweet fucking hole. I gave it a big, deep kiss and felt Michael shudder. “Two can play this game, you know. Size queen like you… I could eat your ass for hours ’til you plead with me to stick it to you.” He made a sound that was half anticipation, half dread. I was ready to nail him -- hell, I’d been ready to nail him two hours ago -- but there’s time for mercy, and there’s time for merciless. I twisted his left arm behind his

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back and pinned him to the bed like a bug on a wax tray. He tried to get his knees under him and squirm away, but I grabbed him by the thigh with my other hand and smelled his capillaries bursting as I bruised him -- and then the salty smack of him adding his pre-come to the mélange of fluids on the bed. My teeth raked over his taint while I made sure he felt my stubble rasping the tender smoothness of his ass crack. I missed my long-lost tongue stud. But I’d make do. I licked and prodded and sucked, and every time the poor kid got into the groove of something, I switched to the next tactic. He could’ve begged, but he didn’t. He chewed the blankets and grunted and writhed under the expertise of my legendary tongue, but he didn’t beg. Not because he was proud -- though I’m sure he is, in his own way. But because he knows when there’s nothing left to do but close his eyes and think of England.

Chapter 6 “Bill? Come on, come upstairs. He’s asleep. There’s nothing you can do.” Felice tugged at my arm but I hardly noticed. I was too busy staring at Michael -and his pale, still face was like the eye of a storm, and that storm was raging through and collapsing my whole life around me. “This is my fault.” “How is this in any way your fault?” “If we weren’t hiding in that stinking hole like a couple of trapped rats, we would’ve been able to do something in time. If I’da been a man and stood up for us like I should have.” Woulda-coulda-shoulda. There was a reason I’d banned it. Admitting a guilt like that might make some people feel better -- sharing the burden and all that bullshit. But not me. No, the enormity of my remorse hadn’t actually sunk in until I said it out loud, and then it damn near leveled me. I was so numb I was practically catatonic with regret, so Felice was able to pry me away from my beloved and lead me up to her Suzie Homemaker kitchen. She sat me down at the table, filled a bowl with warm water and stuck my hand in it. I didn’t really have the energy to inform her that if she was trying to make me piss myself, she was twenty-five years too late. But then I saw the wreck of my fingertips where shards of rust and metal protruded from beneath my jagged nails, healed right into my fingers. If I shifted my focus to it, it hurt like all get-out. I supposed I deserved all that and more. But I didn’t have anything left to give it, not when wallowing in the agony of guilt was my top priority. Felice spread about a dozen yards of folded paper towel on the table, then laid out gauze, tweezers, alcohol wipes and a scalpel. “Jim says Michael’s like me.”

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“Oh yeah? You got a death wish too?” “In terms of the vampirism.” She pulled my hand out of the bowl and plucked out the biggest shards. A drop of tainted blood fell into the bowl and blossomed like a pale red rose. “Partially mutated.” Well, that explained the tofu in the fridge. Kind of. “Bacteria, fungi, viruses, cancer… they can’t touch us anymore. But venom triggers an autoimmune response that turns the body against itself. Someone did this to him intentionally?” A deep-seated chunk of rust got a wince out of me as she tore it free. I turned the gesture into a nod. “Think of it this way -- better him than you. You’re fully mutated. It probably would’ve killed you within the hour. At least Michael has a fighting chance.” He probably would’ve had an even better chance if we handled the situation like I’m sure he’d wanted to: shoot first, ask questions later. Once Felice plucked all the rust out of me, I was relegated to the TV room so she could try to help Michael cheat fate -- without me hovering. I turned down the volume so I could tune in to what was going on in the basement, but there was nothing to hear. I.V. lines dripping, keyboards clicking, all that stuff was too subtle to carry through the floorboards. Hard to say when I actually took stock of the room around me. I was looking at nothing -- straining to piece together what was going on downstairs -- when it hit me that the room I’d been parked in was a treasure trove. The walls were filled with souvenirs -- ticket stubs and postcards, paperweights and shot glasses on tiny little shelves. Photos. So many photos. Dozens of them. Hundreds. I spotted an old black and white instamatic. Felice with dark red lipstick and an umbrella drink, Harmon with a slight pompadour -- only slight, nothing too flashy -caught in the midst of saying something, probably something smug. No fangs. The photos beckoned like tiny gems among tribal masks and palm leaf fans and whatever other crap indigenous people make to sell to the tourists. The pics ranged

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from the postage stamp edged black & whites to faded 110s, to 4x4s to digital. Statuesque Felice aged, slowly but visibly, and Harmon didn’t. Of course he’d known right away what kind of vamp-hybrid I’d turned Michael into. He had one of his own all along. I picked out a picture of the two of them circa mid-seventies, judging by Felice’s feathered hair. She looked thirty-ish in the snapshot. Harmon was his perpetual nineteen. The locales were all exotic. Tiki huts and jungles appeared behind them, the real thing, not a theme park re-creation, with colorful locals of various races populating the background. Felice smiled. Harmon didn’t. Except for the one where a very young Felice was holding up the little Asian baby with a look of rapture on her face, where even Harmon seemed cautiously optimistic. Judging by the other pictures clustered around it, he’d probably had no reason to be. Felice, leading the kid -- now maybe four, with thick metal braces on his legs -- from a Studebaker Champion coupe. Another black and white where the kid was twelve or so, with the world’s closest crew-cut, black rimmed glasses, and a science fair trophy. Jim was next to him, glowing with an inner light. High school graduation? College? Nope. Twelve was the end of the line. Here I’d thought Harmon was vying against me for the role of Mikey’s sugar daddy. The whole time he’d been trying to replace Michael’s father. As I searched for more evidence of the kid among the haystack of photos, I caught a sound from the basement… a whimper. I’d thought the green jelly leaking out the sleeve of his leather jacket had been bad. That hadn’t even been the tip of the badness iceberg. I gagged on the sweet-rot smell that hit me like a hammer to the teeth the second I cleared the basement door. The cloying chemical smell of disinfectant didn’t cover it

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up -- no, it enhanced it, made it reach deeper into the sinuses and lodge there, smoldering. The stench made me stagger, but I pushed through it, all the way to the stainless steel table where Michael was laid out like he was waiting for a toe-tag. Saturated gauze, streaked umber and viridian, hung dripping from the side of the cart, and within the wreck of the bandages, what was left of Michael’s upper arm hung in tatters. Ivory glinted from the wet mass of marbled colors. “Jesus fucking Christ, is that his bone?” Felice pressed a pair of latex gloves into my shaking hands. “If you’re going to panic, go do it somewhere else. But if you want to save his arm, put these on and help me treat the wound.” It was a long night -- the longest night of my life. Halfway through, Harmon got back from his rounds at the university and pitched in to help us, and our four hands became six, cleaning away the putrefaction with our nimble vampire hands as fast as Michael’s body could produce it. Soon the sun would be up, and Jim and me would fall into our day-stupors, and six hands would become two. Chances were, those two hands would wield the bone saw while I dreamt uneasy dreams under the guest bed. “What about blood?” I said, when my own stomach clenched against its emptiness -- because the rotten bag from the night before was more than I was used to, but twenty-four hours later it was old history. “Would it help if he drank some blood?” Harmon looked ready to dismiss it like he would any other idea from the peanut gallery, but Felice tilted her head to one side and considered it, so he kept his trap shut. “How about vamp blood?” I suggested. “He can have mine. Take it.” Harmon handed me a clean sponge and threw the one I’d been using into an overflowing biohazard bin. “Leave the thinking to us. Feeding him vampire blood would only speed up the process.” Felice caught his hand. “But what about regular blood… not as a meal, as a transfusion. What if that gave him time to heal himself?”

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“It’s your specialty. Not mine.” We hovered over Michael, all three of us, sponges and gauze and suction at the ready, while Felice thought her plan through. “Try it,” Harmon said, finally. “We might as well.” “That ain’t hardly a rousing recommendation.” Harmon glared at me, blurred, and was gone. Felice and I went back to swabbing out the mess of stuff that wouldn’t quit coming out of what was left of Michael’s arm. A minute later, the microwave beeped. Harmon reappeared beside the I.V. hanger. He hooked up one of his midnight snacks -- one of the fresher ones, hopefully -- and swapped it out for the saline drip. Felice said, “This isn’t the time to try something theoretical.” “If we’ve forgotten how to improvise, then we’re overdue for our next Peace Corps rotation.” We all got busy again, cleaning, swabbing, and while at first it seemed like the same uphill battle we’d been fighting all night, at some point I realized the two square inches I’d just cleaned actually stayed that way when I came back to the beginning to start again. I held off on my victory dance ’til I got word from one of the experts. Eventually Felice stopped cleaning and started examining. She shone a light into the big wreck of a wound, then pulled out a set of calipers, measured, and jotted down some notes. Then she gave Harmon a dazzling smile. “We did good, Jimmy.” Even though he turned his face from me, I caught a glimpse of a crooked grin. A nineteen-year-old’s grin. Harmon worked at cleaning up after Silk’s dirty work the longest, with movements so small, so precise, he might’ve been working on a microscopic level. There was nothing left for me to do, but I couldn’t tear myself away. I was entranced by Michael’s closed eyes, the fragile thinness of his lids, the delicate folds in the skin. The urge to thumb back one of those eyelids and see if anyone was home made me squirm.

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Felice was busy at the bank of computers, typing. She turned to Harmon and said, “All right, it’s late. You and Bill should go upstairs. I can handle this from here.” Harmon vamp-glided up to her where she sat and kissed her on the top of the head. Hokey, like everything about him -- but still, it felt too intimate for the likes of me to see. I took a final look at Michael, then saw myself back into the guest room. The airbag powder itched something fierce, so I wiped down my leather with wads of damp toilet paper, shook out my jeans, and took a shower with Harmon’s water, Harmon’s soap. There was a line of gray silt left on the bottom of the tub when I was finished. I did my best to encourage it down the drain. As I stood at the foot of the bed contemplating whether I wanted to spend another night among the dust bunnies or sleep on top of the mattress like a person, there was a tap on the door. “Yeah?” Harmon opened it. He wore a brown velour robe over pajamas and leather slippers. Harmon. In pajamas. My stockpile of smart remarks was as tapped out as every other reserve. I just stared. “Felice tells me this was no accident.” The thought of explaining to Harmon what had happened made me want to crawl under the floorboards. “Seems that way.” “I’d prefer it if you left as soon as Michael is stable. We’re settled here, and we need time to prepare for our next move. We’ve got too much to lose if we draw that kind of attention.” “You’re way outside these scumbags’ territory… but don’t worry. We won’t wear out our welcome.” I wished he’d say good night or cheerio or whatever he meant to say, but he lingered there in the doorway instead. “If you’re interested, I’ve started clinical tests on my cure.” “Your cure.”

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“For the condition. It’s no magic elixir -- the condition’s not entirely reversible. But you could shed enough of the symptoms to make you less like a vampire in the traditional sense of the word, and more like your companion.” “Which symptoms exactly?” “You could eat and drink normally again, after your system has some time to adjust. And you won’t fall into torpor at sunrise. I haven’t enough data to determine whether you’ll begin aging, but I suspect so.” “You’re saying you can un-vamp me.” He rolled his eyes. “In so many words.” “Then how come you ain’t done yourself?” “Whatever gave you the idea I wasn’t content exactly the way I am?” He gave me a cool, level stare while the whole world as I knew it burst into shards and rained down inside me. “Good night, Mr. Schmitt.” Yeah, real good. Great. I got down on my hands and knees with the intention of wedging myself under the box spring, but the effort of lifting the dust ruffle cost more than I had left in my reserve. I pressed my face into the mattress instead. It smelled a little like old people. But it was cleaner than whatever I usually holed up in for the night. If I wasn’t exhausted enough -- mentally, physically, emotionally tapped -- the creep of dawn tickled at the edges of my awareness, wooing me into its soporific embrace. I planted my elbows on the quilt and focused. Now I lay me down to sleep. Except as used-up as I was, I couldn’t shake the thought that I didn’t have to be a vampire. Not anymore. Cheeseburgers and sunsets and as much Jack as I could drink without spewing. Was Harmon serious? He could do that for me? Never mind why. Once upon a time I’d thought I had his number, but now I just didn’t know anymore. Maybe for his ego, maybe for science, maybe to show off for his babe. “Why” didn’t matter. Only that it was possible. Sunrise was coming fast, so I stumbled downstairs on leaden legs, through the kitchen, the mudroom, the cellar that smelled like antiseptic and rot.

Jordan Castillo Price

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 56 -

“Bill?” Felice sounded surprised. Concerned. “What are you doing down here? It’s dawn.” No wonder I was having such a hard time keeping my feet under me. Even so, once I noted that Michael’s right arm was still attached to his body, I took the extra couple steps I needed so if I collapsed, I’d do it on his good side, and I braced myself on the stainless steel table and looked down at him. “So this is all my fault, ’cos when we went back for your computer, I didn’t come out with my guns blazing?” I hadn’t realized that was what I’d come all the way there to say, but believe it or not, I did have some internal censors. And they’d shut down for the day. Michael’s closed eyelids twitched. “You want to know why I didn’t kick that vamp-skank’s ass?” “Wild Bill?” Michael didn’t have much of a voice to him, but I recognized the shape of my name on his mouth. “I don’t pick fights. I don’t shoot people. I don’t hit girls. That ain’t me -- got it? That ain’t me.” Michael opened his quicksilver eyes with as much effort as it took me to keep mine from closing. “I know.” “But that bitch who was stalking us -- you said I shoulda kicked her ass.” “Did I? I don’t remember… it’s all a blur. I didn’t mean it.” He’d meant it, all right, but his filters had been in the off-position, same as mine were at that very moment. I couldn’t fault him for what he thought -- hell, I’d gone my whole life with people expecting things from me that I didn’t seem capable of giving, so why should now be any different? Except it was. It didn’t sting nearly as bad as I thought it would, because it wasn’t weakness, laziness or apathy that had let him down. It was my worn-out, half-assed moral compass. Michael craned his neck, got a load of his arm, and let his head drop back down to the lab table. “Oh shit. That’s not good.” It’s okay, I wanted to tell him. But if he could hold up his end of the conversation, it seemed pretty obvious to me the transfusion was doing its work, and I’d said what I

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

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needed to say, so the world was as right as I could put it. I must have been relieved -enough so that my adrenaline petered out. Maybe Felice caught me when my legs folded. Or maybe I kissed the tiles. I had a hard head. I’d survive.

Chapter 7 Harmon left for work the next day while I helped myself to one of his semirotten blood bags. I had no idea how he could stand it -- not only the lousy blood, but enduring gainful employment, and then needing to ditch his job every ten years or so when people started noticing he’d still get carded if he tried to buy a measly pack of smokes. As I was trying to figure out where to stash my empty, the stairs to the mudroom creaked, and Felice and Michael appeared arm in arm. “Should you be, uh, walking around and stuff?” Michael was shirtless. Mr. and Mrs. Doc had wound his upper arm like a mummy’s, and he had a neat hospital-blue sling. His jeans were snug across the hips like they’d had a few runs through the washing machine. “I’m okay… relatively.” “Did Jim tell you to leave?” Felice asked me. I didn’t want to rat on him, but I wasn’t gonna lie. “It seems harsh, I’m sure, but we have a colleague in Nevada who’s a brilliant physical therapist.” “Colleague…” I clarified. “Like a doctor?” “Like a vampire.” Oh. “There’s been no new necrosis in the past twelve hours. We’ve stopped the transfusions, and the wound is even starting to heal. But you’ll need to visit Dr. Kim right away and start treatment as soon as possible.” Vegas? That was a three-day drive, easy.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 59 -

Felice must’ve read my mind. “Michael should fly out in the morning. You can meet him there.” “How d’you get Harmon to Timbuktu? I’m guessing he didn’t drive.” “He travels with the equipment… and we have help on the inside. But there’s no time to arrange anything like that for you. Just drive. It’s the simplest solution.” Didn’t she know that all our plans required a Bermuda Triangle section? Michael flying to Vegas and me meeting him there seemed awfully pedestrian. No feats of derring-do? No disguises? No catapult? Although driving was hardly simple without a car. I gave Michael the once-over. He looked pained and strained, and I was about to add to his misery. “I totaled our wheels.” He closed his eyes. Disbelief? Maybe. Or maybe a silent goodbye to Big Red. “Jim and I have talked about it. You’ll take my minivan. It’s not new, but the back is sun-proofed, there’s less than sixty thousand miles on it, and I’ve had the tires rotated every spring and the oil changed every three months.” “We couldn’t --” “Bill? It’s the only way. Take the van.” “We’ll pay you back,” Michael said. Felice whipped out a manila file folder. “The blue book value is less than five thousand dollars. It’s not an issue.” I gave Mikey a look that said, We’re totally paying them back. She flipped through some paperwork. “Here we are. The title. Who should I sign it over to?” Michael looked to me for approval -- God knows why, since technically, I’m dead -- then tentatively said, “Me.” Felice put her name to the paper, neater than I’d expect from an M.D., but then again she’d probably learned cursive from nuns with really big rulers. She dotted the “i” and handed the pen to Michael. He had a hard time figuring out how to hold it left-handed.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 60 -

I could’ve just put his John Hancock to the title like I had for Big Red, but it didn’t seem right with him standing there. So I looked discreetly at the harvest gold fridge while he wrapped his arm around the pen and signed. Even though I tried not to look, I got a glance at the product of his labors. I should have done the signing. “If you leave tonight you’ll get a head start.” I nodded. It didn’t seem right to linger and force her to kick me out, especially after all the green slime she’d cleaned up for us. Felice glanced at the clock. It was almost eleven. “Jim’s doing a short shift, so he’ll be back soon. I have a lot to do downstairs. I’ll be in the basement, if you need anything.” In other words, she was giving us time to say our goodbyes. Good thing I never ended up with a chick of my own -- too much interpretation needs to happen between what they say and what they mean. How come she was giving Mikey and me a chance at an extended goodbye? Was there something we should be worrying about? When I got to Vegas he’d be there to meet me, right? “So… the computer’s gone?” I wanted to bristle at the question, but I was having a hard time feeling anything but gratitude -- emotion so vast at seeing Michael upright, thinking, talking and twoarmed -- that I was sick with worry and relief. “You were due for an upgrade anyway.” I dug his cell out of my pocket. “You got this, though. Better call Suzy-Q and let her know you’re all right. I would have, but her and me butted heads in the heat of the moment and now I’m on her shit list. And I got no idea how to find her phone number.” Michael took it and smiled down at it wistfully. “Battery’s drained. The charger?” “In the van.” He tucked the phone into his pocket. “Wild Bill? I’ve been thinking. What I said earlier, about kicking that vampire’s ass -- and seriously, I really don’t remember --” “Aw, shit, we gotta back over this roadkill again?”

Jordan Castillo Price

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 61 -

He eased up to me, ducked his right shoulder and tangoed one of his thighs between mine. The edge of the kitchen table was hard against the backs of my legs. Our bodies locked into place, just like always. “I need to tell you -- I get it. You’ve always said you’re a lover, not a fighter.” He brushed his lips over my jaw. “When you talk, I do listen, y’know.” More than I could say for me. I watched his pretty, pretty mouth and reminisced about how it looked wrapped around my dick. When he stood that close, anyway, and nudged my junk with his hipbone. “Did you know Jim apologized for breaking my arm that night? He was mortified. He’d almost vamped out, and I think it scared him. So I could see why you’d try to avoid losing it. Being out of control is scary, especially when it’s better to think your way through and not just react like a wild animal.” “Ain’t that all we are, when it’s all said and done? Chemical cocktails? Bundles of cells? Animals?” “You think that, seriously?” He brushed his hot mouth over my jaw again, and my skin prickled from my scalp to my ballsack. “I doubt it. You’re too spiritual.” I swallowed down a laugh, barely. “Don’t worry, Bill. I won’t tell anyone. Your secret’s safe with me.” I turned my head so that our lips brushed, and I let my tongue graze his hot, sweet mouth. He gave me one of those sexy little gasps of his in return, and then we were kissing, hard, like there was only one breath left in the world, and we had to share the thing between us. My eyes were closed, but when I sensed him watching me I opened them, and our lips slid apart. No fangs clashed, no blood flowed. Just a sweet, wet kiss. “If I asked you to give up hunting,” I said, before the warmth of his mouth drained away, “would you do it?” He thought for a moment. “I’d wonder why.” “Call up the pictures on your camera phone once you get it charged, and you’d see.”

Jordan Castillo Price

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 62 -

“But we didn’t run into those vampires when we were hunting. We were doing our own thing, minding our own business. It was a fluke.” “Tomato, tomahto. Thing is, I’m betting your life expectancy’s gonna be a lot longer if you hang up the wooden stakes.” Michael scraped some airbag powder from the snap on my epaulet with his thumbnail. “I guess, if you were to ask me, I’d think about it.” The front door opened and the two of us disengaged before Harmon came into the kitchen. Michael looked spooked. I imagine I did, too. “You’re still here?” “Don’t worry. I’m on my way.” I’d meant to thank him for the wheels. And for saving Michael’s arm. And his life. But that was the best I could do. “You’re sure? Maybe you’d like to take me up on my offer. It’s no magical pill -nothing you can swallow down and expect a miracle cure. I’d need to do a bone marrow transplant. Normally that’s a four- to six-week procedure. But for one of us -- a week, maybe two.” Michael threaded the fingers of his good hand through mine and squeezed, hard. I looked at him and found him staring at me, wide-eyed. Whatever he was trying to pass on to me telepathically, I wasn’t picking up on it. I gave him a “what?” scowl. He shook his head once, a subtle flick. No. Seriously? No? I would’ve figured Mikey’s biggest wet dream’d be to watch me step back into my humanity like a favorite pair of old jeans. I hitched my brows more sharply, because I wasn’t sure I’d read him right. He shook his head again. No. No whiskey. No suntan. No early mornings and coffee and cold pizza. Why? Damned if I knew. Whenever I thought I understood what made Michael tick, he pulled a new piece of the schematic out of his sleeve. We’d need to talk, Mikey and me, but not in front of Harmon. “I’ll pass. It ain’t the kind of decision I’d want to make on the spur of the moment.”

Jordan Castillo Price

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 63 -

Harmon’s mouth twisted into a creepy semblance of a smile. “Really? I’ve underestimated you, Mr. Schmitt. I thought you’d jump at the chance to rid yourself of the condition.” Of course, getting approval from the likes of him made me antsy to do the exact opposite. “What’re you saying, this is a one-time offer? I can’t come back and scrape the barnacles off the old hull later on?” “Felice and I are preparing to go abroad. It’s time -- we’ve been here too long as it is. I can’t guarantee I’ll have the resources to treat you the next time I’m back in the States.” I could almost taste the Jack sliding down my throat -- not the single shot I’d learned to settle for, but a long, hard pull of smoky amber that prickled hot and sweet, all the way down. Michael gave my hand another hard squeeze… and maybe his telepathy wasn’t on the fritz after all, if he heard me yearning to be human again.

*** I could only tease his ass for so long -- I’m only human, as the expression goes -­ and the craving he’d built in me, the raw, primal need, layer upon delicate layer, had pushed me to the breaking point. I spat in my hand and gave my throbbing boner another swipe, then I lined it up with Michael’s hot, wet hole. So fucking tight. The thought of pounding it home, regardless of what kind of damage the friction might do, made my pulse hammer in my temples. “It’s gonna hurt.” “You know my limits.” He didn’t have any limits to speak of, that’s what I knew. I prodded my cock head into his tight ass, pressed my hands over the small of his back, and felt his pulse thrum through his body with the anticipation of getting plowed. I’d left enough spit in there to get my sticky pre-come slippery again, but even so, it wasn’t much. And it was mind blowing, feeling him like that, virgin-tight. I grabbed him by the hips and tipped his ass up so I could wedge myself in a little deeper. “You want me to talk nasty -- act like I’m forcing you?”

Jordan Castillo Price

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 64 -

His breath skittered. Yeah. He would’ve liked that. But he also knew some of the mind-games skirted uneasy territory for me. “I’m close. Just make love to me.” I worked myself in, inch by slow, hungry inch, and I fit myself against his back, chest to shoulder blades and my face buried in his hair. I breathed him, my heart of hearts, for a good long moment -- and I cherished him the best that I could, lingering there in the tightness of his sweet, young ass, the shampoo and cigarette smell of his hair, and the stop-and-start breathing that told me he was fixing to pop his cork. I cherished him. And then I set about getting us both off good and hard. “Hold my hands.” Michael groped and caught my left hand, and wove his fingers through mine. “Both of ’em.” I shoved into his ass while I insisted. Not sadistic. Just forceful. “I can’t.” “What good’re all them visits to Dr. Kim if you don’t even try? C’mon, baby, hold my hand.” “Damn it, it’s not a matter of willpower. There’s hardly any muscle there. It takes time.” I reached under Michael’s body where his broken wing was furled against his chest, and I grabbed it by the wrist. I hadn’t hurt him -- yet -- but his ass milked me with the anticipation of pain. “Kim says it won’t fill in unless you keep working it -- so how many reps did you do today?” “Bill…” “Uh-huh, that’s what I thought.” Michael was into one physical activity, and one only -- the one we were currently enjoying. Anything that smacked of “exercise” reminded him too much of gym class. While it bugged me that I was the one who ended up dispensing the tough love, I supposed one of us had to be the grownup. At least now and then. The moan he gave when I straightened his arm was enough to roust the neighbors. And the thought of them card dealers, waitresses and change jockeys all

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 65 -

getting an earful of Mikey having his hole plugged pushed me even closer to the teetering brink. I forced his fingers apart, threaded mine through ’em, and clenched his stiff hand tight. The place where most of his upper arm used to be -- the fucked-up divot that was a mass of scar tissue with a few curls of ink around the edges -- lined up perfect with my biceps, like the two of us had taken body modification to a soaring and sickening extreme so we could hold each other that much closer. I couldn’t tell if the muscle mass had changed, if the fit was any snugger than it had been the last time we’d fucked that way. Maybe. Maybe not. But I liked to think it was -- that in time, his vamp-enhanced biochemistry would fill in the missing parts. There wasn’t enough glide to let me give him a good, hard pounding, so I did my best to finesse his ass instead. I even went up on tiptoes to find a hot down-angle, and I rocked into him with the precision of a piston. The blankets shifted as Michael tore at them with his teeth, and I felt him tense all over -- everywhere but his crippled arm. I squeezed that hand harder, until a broken whimper told me he felt it, all right. And I kept on fucking. “Yes.” He forced the word deep into the mattress, and I knew, I could feel it, that I was bringing him off -- for probably the millionth time, but who was counting? The sensation was still precious like it was brand-spanking new. I caught his long hair between my teeth and tugged at it just like he was yanking the bedspread, and Michael moaned again while the scent of his jizz soaking the covers beneath him welled around us. That tipped me, the smell of him coming, and I plumbed him even deeper, let loose inside his sweet ass with a slow, satisfied sigh. We were still for a minute or two, then Michael said, “You can still drink me. If you want.” I was hungry, no two ways about it. But it seemed more important to stay there with him than it did to go digging around for the switchblade -- which had slipped underneath the bottom of the headboard, last I remembered. “I’m all right. We still got a little something in the fridge.”

Jordan Castillo Price

Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 66 -

“Why didn’t you?” I couldn’t see the litany of scars on his pale neck, but it seemed like if I pressed my cheek against his hair just so, I could feel them calling me, beckoning, urging me on. “Sometimes I like to remind myself that you dig me for something other than just my fangs. Like my big dick, for example.” He huffed out a little sigh, or maybe it was a laugh. “I love you for who you are.” Yeah, I’d figured as much. Back in Harmon’s kitchen, when he’d begged me with his limpid, silvery eyes not to un-vamp myself, I had the sneaking suspicion that Michael had fallen for the whole package. Big dick, fangs, nicotine habit and all. ’Cos if I’d chugged that magic potion and it left me half-and-half like Michael, I’d still have my fangs, and I’d still be able to make him shoot by drinking from him. All I’d be giving up were my liabilities -- the sunlight swoons and the water willies. And I’d be able to get drunk again. Chances were, it’d be a good time at first, but eventually Michael would get sick of all the attention I’d lavish on Jack -- and no doubt his jealousy would be justified. Jack and me went back a long, long time. Michael probably hadn’t followed the thread of reasoning so far down the skein. He’d just known he liked me exactly the way I was. A vampire. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” I breathed the words into his scalp. He gave my hand a squeeze in return. We lay like that a few minutes longer, even though it was sloppy now, and his arm probably hurt like a bitch, and I was hungry, and dying for a smoke. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t ready to let go. Neither was Michael -- he squeezed my hands again. Both of them. I might have taken what happened on the right side as a tic if the motion hadn’t been mirrored as it was meant to be in my left hand, but it was still there. Something. “Did you feel that, baby?” Michael mm’ed an affirmation into the bedspread.

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Sweet Oblivion 5: Elixir

- 67 -

I pressed my face into his hair and told myself not to get all sappy -- that I’d known his body would put itself right eventually, given time -- and that since he was half-vamped, he had all the time in the world. I told myself it was no big deal. But I hadn’t known, not for sure. And it was a whoppin’ huge deal. I thanked God -- though I didn’t go so far as to make any promises to Him I wasn’t about to keep -- and I pressed kisses into Michael’s scalp, and I held him tight. And I cherished him.

Jordan Castillo Price Jordan Castillo Price grew up in the steel mill warrens of Buffalo, NY, spent some formative drinking years in Chicago, and migrated north to small-town rural Wisconsin once she realized she was going to kill the next person who bumped into her with a shopping cart. She did a six-year stint in art school and played bass in a punk band that crashed and burned just before their first CD was pressed. At least she got a cool boyfriend out of the deal, since she ran off with the drummer. Jordan has a weekly show on erotica writing tips and techniques at www.packingheat.net. She suspects some of her listeners aren’t much interested in writing, and just tune in to hear her say naughty words. Readers interested in freebies, snippets, and peeks into the writing process should check out JCP News, a monthly newsletter where Jordan posts links to free eBooks and serialized M/M stories. Visit www.jordancastilloprice.com to sign up.