“I’m not looking for a hooker.”
“So what are you looking for?”
“Someone to talk to. I recognized a kindred soul in you.”
The way she said it made Nita sigh. She’d heard this about a hundred times before.
“Everybody thinks we’re dancing just for them,” she said, “but you know, we’re not even thinking about you sitting out there. We’re just trying to get through the night.”
“So you don’t feel a thing?”
“Okay, so maybe I get a little buzz from the attention, but it doesn’t mean I want to fuck you.”
“I told you. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Nita ground her cigarette out under the heel of her boot. “You just want to talk. Well, you picked the wrong person. I’m not having a good night and to tell you the truth, I’m not all that interesting anyway. All the guys figure women with my job are going to be special—you know, real exotic or something—but as soon as we go out on a date with somebody they figure out pretty quick that we’re just as boring and fucked up as anybody else.”
“But when you’re on the stage,” the woman said, “it’s different then, isn’t it? You feed on what they give you.”
Nita gave her an odd look. “What’re you getting at?”
“Why don’t we go for a drink somewhere and talk about it?” the woman said. She looked around the alleyway. “There’s got to be better places than this to have a conversation.”
Nita hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure. Why not? It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do. Where’d you have in mind?”
“Why don’t we simply walk until we happen upon a place that appeals to us?”
Nita lit another cigarette before she fell in step with the woman.
“My name’s not Lilith,” she said.
“I know.” The woman stopped and turned to face her. “That’s my grandmother’s name.”
Like people couldn’t share the same name, Nita thought. Weird.
“She used to call me Imogen,” the woman added.
She offered her hand, so Nita shook it and introduced herself. Imogen’s grip was strong, her skin surprisingly cool and smooth to the touch. Shaking hands with her was like holding onto a hand made of porcelain. Imogen switched her grip on Nita’s hand, shifting from her right to her left, and set off down the alleyway again. Nita started to pull free, but then decided she liked the feel of that smooth cool skin against her own and let it slide.
“What does ‘Nita’ mean?” Imogen asked.
“I don’t know. Who says it’s supposed to mean anything?”
“All names mean something.”
“So what does your name mean?”
“ ‘Granddaughter.’ ”
Nita laughed.
“What do you find so humorous?”
Nita flicked her cigarette against the nearest wall which it struck in a shower of sparks. “Sounds to me like your grandmother just found a fancy way of not giving you a name.”
“Perhaps she had to,” Imogen said. “After all, names have power.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Nita asked.
Imogen didn’t answer. She came to an abrupt halt and then Nita saw what had distracted her. They’d been walking toward the far entrance of the alley and were now only a half-dozen yards from its mouth. Just ahead lay the bright lights of Palm Street. Unfortunately, blocking their way were three men. Two Anglos and a Hispanic. Not yet falling-down drunk, but well on the way. Palm Street was as busy as ever but Nita knew that in this part of the city, at this time of night, she and Imogen might as well have been on the other side of the world for all the help they could expect to get from the steady stream of pedestrians by the mouth of the alley.
“Mmm-mmm. Looking good,” one of the three men said.
“But the thing is,” added one of his companions, “I’ve just got to know. When you’re fucking each other, which one’s pretending to be the guy?”
Drunken laughter erupted from all three of them.
Imogen let go of Nita’s hand. She was probably scared, Nita thought. Nita didn’t blame her. She’d be scared herself if it wasn’t for the fact that she’d come to a point in her life where she just didn’t give a shit anymore. Reaching into one of the front pockets of her jeans, she pulled out a switchblade. When she thumbed the button on the side of the handle, it opened with an evil-sounding snick.
“Oh, conchita,” the Hispanic said, shaking his head in mock sorrow. “We were just going to have some fun with you, but now there’s got to be some pain.”
He stepped forward, the Anglos flanking him, one on either side. Before Nita could decide which of them was going to get the knife, Imogen moved to meet them. What happened next didn’t seem to make any sense at all. It looked to Nita that Imogen picked up the first by his face, thumb on one temple, fingers on the other, and simply pitched him over her shoulder, back behind them, deeper into the alley. The second she took out with a blow to the throat that dropped him on the spot. The third tried to bolt, but she grabbed his arm and wrenched it up behind his back until Nita heard the bone snap. He was still screaming from the pain when Imogen grabbed his head and snapped his neck with a sudden twist.
Imogen held the dead man for a long moment, staring into his face as though she wanted to memorize his features, then she let him fall to the pavement. Nita stared at the body, at the way it lay so still on the ground in front of them. Her gaze went to the other two assailants. They lay just as unmoving. One moment there had been three half-drunk men about to assault them and in the next they were all dead.
“What—” Nita had to clear her throat. “What the fuck did you do to them?”
Imogen didn’t even seem to be breathing hard. “It’s a . . . a kind of judo,” she said.
Nita looked at her companion, but it was hard to make out her features in the poor light. She seemed to be smiling, her teeth flashing as white as did her hair. Nita slowly closed up her knife and stowed it back in her jeans.
“Judo,” Nita repeated slowly.
Imogen nodded. “Come on,” she said, offering Nita her hand again.
Nita hesitated. She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and took a long drag before she eased her way around the dead man at her feet to take Imogen’s hand. The porcelain coolness calmed her, quieting the rapid drum of her pulse.
“Let’s get that drink,” Imogen said.
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I think I could really use a shot right about now.”
3
They ended up in Fajita Joe’s, a Mexican bar on Palm Street with a terrace overlooking Fitzhenry Park. The place catered primarily to yuppies and normally Nita wouldn’t have been caught dead in it, but by the time they were walking by its front door she would have gone in anywhere just to get a drink to steady her jangled nerves. They took a table on the terrace at Imogen’s insistence—”I like to feel the night air,” she explained. Nita gulped her first shot and immediately ordered a second whiskey, double, on the rocks. With another cigarette lit and the whiskey to sip, she finally started to relax.
“So tell me about yourself,” Imogen said.
Nita shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell. I’m just a loser—same as you’ve got to be if the only way you can find someone to have a drink with you is by hanging out around back of a strip club.” Then she thought of the three men in the alley. “ ’Course, the way you took out those freaks . . . those moves weren’t the moves of any loser.”
“Forget about them,” Imogen said. “Tell me why you’re so sad.”
Nita shook her head. “I’m not sad,” she said, lighting up another cigarette. “I’m just fucked up. The only thing I’m good at is running away. When the going gets tough, I’m gone. My whole life, that’s the way I deal with the shit.”
“And the dancing doesn’t help?”
“Give me a break. That’s not dancing—it’s shaking your ass in a meat mark
et. Maybe some of the girls’ve convinced themselves they’re in show business, but I’m not that far out of touch with reality.”
“But you still get something from it, don’t you?”
Nita butted out her cigarette. “I’ll tell you the truth, I always wanted to be up on a stage, but I can’t sing and I can’t play a guitar and the only way I can dance is doing a bump ’n’ grind. When you’ve got no talent, your options get limited real fast.”
“Everyone has a talent.”
“Yeah, well, mine’s for fucking up. I work with women who are dancing to put themselves through college, single mothers who’re feeding their families, a writer who’s supporting herself until she can sell her first book. The only reason I’m dancing is that I couldn’t make that kind of money doing anything else except hooking and I’m not that hard up yet.”
“Perhaps you’ve set your sights too high,” Imogen said. “It’s hard to attain goals when they seem utterly beyond your reach. You might consider concentrating on smaller successes and then work your way up from them.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Imogen shrugged. “Breathing’s a talent.”
“Oh, right. And so’s waking up in the morning.”
“Feel this,” Imogen said.
She caught Nita’s wrist and started to bring it toward her chest.
“Hey!” Nita said, embarrassed. “I told you I’m not like that.”
She was sure everybody on the terrace was staring at them, but when she tried to pull free, she couldn’t move her hand. She might as well have been trying to move the building under them. Imogen brought Nita’s palm through the open front of her jean vest and laid it against the cool smooth skin between her breasts. In the light cast from the terrace lanterns, her eyes gleamed like a cat’s caught in a car’s headbeams.
“What do you feel?” Imogen asked.
“Look, why don’t you . . .”
Just get out of my face, was what Nita was going to say, except as her palm remained on Imogen’s skin, she suddenly realized—
“You . . . you’re not breathing,” she said.
Imogen released Nita’s wrist. Nita rubbed at the welt that the grip of Imogen’s fingers had left on her skin.
“I’m sorry,” Imogen said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“How can you not breathe?”
Imogen smiled. “It’s a talent I don’t have,” she said.
This was seriously strange, Nita thought. She was way, way out of her depth.
“So,” she began. She had to stop to clear her throat. Her mouth felt as though it was coated with dry dust. She took a gulp of whiskey and fumbled another cigarette out of her package. “So what are you?” she finally managed.
Imogen shrugged. “Immortal. Undead.”
That moment in the alley flashed in Nita’s mind. The three men, dispatched so quickly and Imogen not even out of breath. The vise-like strength of her fingers. The weird gleam in her eyes. The cool touch of her skin. The fact that she really didn’t breathe.
Nita tried to light her cigarette, but her hand shook too much. She flinched when Imogen reached out to steady it, but then accepted the help. She drew the smoke in deeply, held it, exhaled. Took another drag.
“Okay,” she said. “So what do you want from me?”
“No more than I told you earlier: company.”
“Company.”
Imogen nodded. “When the sun rises this morning, I’m going to die. I just didn’t want to die alone.”
“You want me to die with you?”
“Not at all. I just want you to be there when I do. I’ve lived this hidden life of mine for too long. Nobody knows me. Nobody cares about me. I thought you’d understand.”
“Understand what?”
“I just want to be remembered.”
“This is too weird,” Nita said. “I mean, you don’t look sick or anything.”
Like I’d know, Nita added to herself.
“I’m not sick. I’m tired.” Imogen gave a small laugh that held no humor. “I’m always amazed at how humans strive so desperately to prolong their lives. If you only knew . . . .”
Nita thought about her own life and imagined it going on forever.
“I think I see where you’re coming from,” she said.
“It’s not so bad at first—when you outlive your first set of friends and lovers. But it’s harder the next time, and harder still each time after that, because you start anticipating the end, their deaths, from the first moment you meet them. So you stop having friends, you stop taking lovers, only to find it’s no easier being alone.”
“But aren’t there . . . others like you around?” Nita asked.
“They’re not exactly the sort of people I care to know. I’m not exactly the sort of person I care to know. We’re monsters, Nita. We’re not the romantic creatures of myth that your fictions perpetuate. We’re parasites, surviving only by killing you.”
She shook her head. “I look around and all I see is meat. All I smell is blood—some diseased, and not fit for consumption, it’s true, but the rest . . .”
“So how do I smell?” Nita wanted to know.
Imogen smiled. “Very good—though not as good as you did when those men attacked us in the alley earlier. Adrenaline adds a spicy flavor to human scent, like a mix of jalapeños and chili.”
The new turn their conversation had taken made Nita feel too much like a potential meal.
“If your life’s so shitty,” she asked, “why’ve you waited until now to put an end to it?”
“My existence is monstrous,” Imogen told her. “But it’s also seductive. We are so powerful. I hate what I am at the same time as I exult in my existence. Nothing can harm us but sunlight.”
Nita shivered. “What about the rest of it?” she asked, thinking of the dozens of late-night movies she’d watched. “You know—the running water, the garlic, and the crosses?”
“Only sunlight.”
“So tomorrow morning you’re just going to sit in the sun?”
Imogen nodded. “And die. With you by my side to wish my spirit safe-journey and to remember me when I’m gone.”
It was so odd. There was no question in Nita’s mind but that Imogen was exactly what she said she was. The strange thing was how readily she accepted it. But accepting it and watching Imogen die were two different things. The endings of all those late-night movies went tumbling through her in all their grotesque glory.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Nita said.
Imogen’s eyebrows rose questioningly.
“I’m not real good with gross shit,” Nita explained. “You know—what’s going to happen to you when the sunlight touches you.”
“Nothing will happen,” Imogen assured her. “It’s not like in the films. I’ll simply stop living, that’s all.”
“Oh.”
“Have you finished your drink?” Imogen asked. “I’d like to go for a last walk in the park.”
4
Fitzhenry Park was probably the last place Nita would go for a walk at this time of night, but remembering how easily Imogen had dealt with their attackers in the alley behind the club, she felt safe enough doing so tonight. Walking hand in hand, they seemed to have the footpaths to themselves. As they got deeper inside the park, all sense of the city surrounding them vanished. They could have been a thousand miles away, a thousand years away from this time and place. The moon was still working its way up to its first quarter—a silvery sickle hanging up among the stars that came and went from view depending on the foliage of the trees lining the path.
Nita kept stealing glances at her companion whenever there was enough light. She looked so normal. But that was how it always was, wasn’t it? The faces people put on when they went out into the world could hide anything. All you ever knew about somebody was what he or she cared to show you. Nita normally didn’t have much interest in anyone, but she found herself wanting to know everything she could about Imogen.
“You told me you live a hidden life,” she said, “but the way you look seems to me would turn more heads than let you keep a low profile.”
“I dress like this to attract my prey. Since I must feed, I prefer to do so on those the world can do better without.”
Makes sense, Nita thought. She wondered if she should introduce Imogen to Eddie back at the club.
“How often do you have to . . . feed?” she asked.
“Too often.” Imogen glanced at her. “The least we can get by on is once a week.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve been fasting,” Imogen went on. “Preparing for tonight. I wanted to be as weak as possible when the moment comes.”
If Imogen was weak at the moment, Nita couldn’t imagine what she’d be like at full strength. She wasn’t sure if she was being more observant, or if her companion had lowered her guard now that they were more familiar with each other’s company, but Imogen radiated a power and charisma unlike anyone Nita had ever met before.
“You don’t seem weak to me,” she said.
Imogen came to a stop and drew Nita over to a nearby bench. When they sat down, she put a hand on Nita’s shoulder and looked her directly in the face.
“It doesn’t matter how weak or hurt we feel,” she said, “we have to be strong in here.” Her free hand rose up to touch her chest. “We have to project that strength or those around us will simply take advantage of us. We can take no pride in being a victim—we belittle not only ourselves, but all women, if we allow that to happen to us without protest. You must stand up for yourself. You must always stand up for yourself and your sisters. I want you to remember that as you go on with your life. Never give in, never give up.”
“But you’re giving up.”
Imogen shook her head. “Don’t equate the two. What I am doing is taking the next step on a journey that I should have completed three hundred years ago. I am not surrendering. I am hoping to kill the monster that I let myself become and finally moving on.”