Fawns blood, p.17
Fawn's Blood, page 17
I covered myself with a blanket and read the rest of the bad vampire novel I had gotten at the thrift store. It was about a vampire who killed himself.
I texted Silver just before falling asleep: I’m in Seattle. I want to see you. Talk to me. I’ve been getting my blood drunk. I’m ready for who you are now. For what you are.
But when I woke up, there were no new messages from Silver. Instead, there was the noise of a shower, and, echoing on the fiberglass through two thin walls, the voice of a woman crying. Sobbing, the keening, guttural noises sloshing under the noise of the water. I couldn’t tell if it was Raina or Roxy. It was disturbing. It sounded like a sick creature screaming. I put my head around the door when I heard the water stop and peered into the empty kitchen. I was nervous about eating from the pantry when she might come in and tell me something wasn’t allowed, so I ate three packets of instant oatmeal very fast and then waited for her to appear, listening to her sobs grow softer and then silence. The lock of the door clicked, and Raina appeared, freshly dressed in leggings and a long sweater, hair and eyes wet.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
It took her a second to respond. She squinted at me, as though I shouldn’t be there.
“Slayers found the clinic on the hill,” Raina said, rubbing her puffy, red left eye and walking past me into her room. “And the shelter.” Her voice was flat and haggard.
“The shelter where I was?” My heart sped up. I followed her and stood in the door of her room, waiting for more. Raina looked over her shoulder at me, seeming unable to keep her eyes open. She walked into the kitchen and started making coffee.
“Millie’s okay, and ten kids got out, but the tunnels got firebombed first thing this morning. Probably some dead. The clinic was set on fire after it closed. There’s fifteen or so missing still. The news hasn’t covered it yet except as a fire on a residential block. Bet they say it’s an accident, don’t even mention casualties. Ned’s shop is going to get shut down, and he has to figure out what to do. He wasn’t there last night, he was out. But fifteen—we don’t know where they are. Millie took some kids into the tunnels, they’re still hiding out somewhere, she doesn’t want to tell me where in case the slayers have the line. They could have anyone’s line.”
I felt like dropping to the ground, crying, Silver, Silver! but that also felt overdramatic. He probably wasn’t there. He was with Cain. “Is this—how often do they do this?” I asked. “Slayers attacked the van I was in. On the way to the city.”
“They do it as much as they can. I think they have police funding. Police don’t raid these places themselves, mostly. But our side’s gotten better, with security.” She looked at me with some suspicion. “Or were supposed to. That shelter is supposed to be secret. Not many people are allowed to know about it.”
“I haven’t told anyone about it,” I said, feeling myself assess how far my shoes, the door were.
“I don’t—no, why would you.” She blew her nose. “Just . . . those poor kids. These slayers are evil, inhuman people. The cops won’t find them, won’t charge them. I bet a couple are cops.”
“What can we do to help?” I asked.
“You can’t do shit. You’re new. A child,” Raina said. “There’s going to be a lot of hungry people coming to us, though, probably. I don’t know what to do. I can’t really cut my rate much. I mean, I guess that’s terrible to say, but I can’t. I can’t feed everyone.”
I sat with that. I didn’t feel like I couldn’t do shit. I had learned so much, so fast.
“I can try to help,” I said. “Tell me what I can do.”
“Sorry to be curt, but I really need time to myself right now. Can you leave the house for a bit? Leave me alone? I just—for my peace of mind, I need space.” She shut her bedroom door, and I was left staring at its grooves. The coffee machine bubbled.
I had lost all track of time, but I thought I should walk down the hill, down Pike, looking for the grocery store and the bar beneath it. Whatever had happened, I could learn more there.
It was warmer than I had expected and sweat built up on my back when I started walking. I turned myself in a new direction—downhill—and set off, passing an old man and a dog sleeping on the doorstep of Raina’s house. I didn’t feel like I lived there for real enough to tell him to move, and I didn’t want to anyway, though I wondered if Raina would be mad at me for not evicting him. The further down I went, the more the hill was covered with large, boxy buildings with fancy apartments that had no window blinds inside, and a few boxy buildings that were SROs, and the kind of businesses that didn’t make any sense to me, called things like Ruddr and Knoll and Beanbag. They had white lights inside and strangely shaped geometric furniture, with people sitting around on laptops. They were intermixed with empty storefronts whose naked interiors yawned. A few places were recognizable as coffee shops and restaurants, and then there was an axe-throwing place, and a bar, but when I went into a cafe that was still open, a muffin cost 8 dollars and there wasn’t a bathroom, so I left again. Cop cars seemed to be parked somewhere on nearly every block. At the break in the street where it became a bridge over a steep shrub-covered cliff and the highway, I saw a pile of tents, descending down the trash-strewn rocky hill towards the rushing cars, one wasted tree leaning over them like a protective claw. A man shot past me on the sidewalk on an electric scooter. The tallest skyscrapers of the downtown weren’t finished yet: yellow and orange cranes sprouted over the shells, touching the sky over their bony outlines. Behind them, the water glimmered in the light of late afternoon.
I looked up Damalbi’s on my phone. It closed at ten. The bar probably wouldn’t be open until after that.
I went to Gefen’s on Cherry, which meant turning around and walking back uphill. It was an old silver-walled diner. The outside of it looked like a quilt, with beaten metal instead of cloth. Inside, the dimming sun hit the faces of a few customers. Almost all were older than me, but human. They looked professional in a work-from-home kind of way. The sun was still up. Inside, there was a long, narrow Formica counter, and a wide workspace behind. A glass case had six kinds of cream cheese and piles of cold fish and deviled eggs and something that looked like cornbread, cut in half with a crumbly white cheese in its middle. I went to the counter and showed my bracelet.
“Richeza gave this to me and told me to come here for a free bagel and coffee,” I said as confidently as I could, to the short Latino guy working. He was fat-bellied, middle-aged, with a tattoo of a bird’s wing spreading over the back of his neck and heavy wrinkles over his eyes. He was human.
“She acts like Pola’s still here running the shop instead of me,” he snorted, but he turned to grab a paper cup. “Sugar?”
“No thanks. I appreciate it.” There was a social script and I was inside of it. Richeza was real. I hadn’t dreamed her.
“How is she,” he said. “Still look like an albino bat? So glad she never got registered. She’d be dead.”
I no longer knew the script. “Good,” I said. “I just met her, really. She’s nice. Do you know what she does for work?”
“She has some ancient gold buried somewhere still. Sells a piece of it at a time. She’s a weird one, but she’s got some old, old friendship with Pola.”
“They knew each other in Bukovina,” I offered.
“It has to do with helping her buy the building, years back. Think they knew each other in Ukraine, though Richeza’s Albanian or something. Pola’s given orders we feed anyone who’s Richeza’s friend. She’s not in the shop much anymore. She says the Board of Health would notice she hasn’t aged.” He set a paper cup of coffee on the counter, face serious but voice gregarious. “What kind of bagel? Some lox?”
“Uh, everything. And everything I can get.” I wasn’t used to bagels. He turned and took a bagel out of the steel cage that held them.
“Yo, so. You heard about the clinic last night,” he said, as he fed the bagel into a conveyer-belt toaster. “There’s another, down in South Seattle, but it’s going to get crazy now.”
“I heard,” I said, thinking about Raina crying. “The shelter too.”
“Kids dead,” he said, in a low voice. “Nothing in the news. You on the Discord server?”
“No,” I said.
We both went quiet as another customer came in. They picked up a remote order in a plastic bag from the counter next to me. Other people eating were sitting farther down the counter. Maybe they knew Pola was a vampire too, or maybe they didn’t listen.
He pulled the bagel from the conveyor belt, dipped a knife in white cream cheese, took more pink fish than I had expected and spread it across the surface of the bagel before folding it quickly in tinfoil and sliding it toward me.
“Richeza and Pola both talk shit on the U District kids a lot, but they’ll be devastated. It’s like a world nobody else knows about, happening right alongside the real world, on fire all the time, people dying. Every time they’re both in here, they just list people they know who are dead. I can’t get the two realities to gel, ever since working here.”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked at the counter and took the bagel. I turned to put milk in my coffee, and then chanced a glance back at him. He had been staring at me.
“What’s your name?”
“Uh,” I said, and hesitated. “Fawn.”
“It’s interesting. Usually Richeza doesn’t go for boys,” he said. “Drank from me once, then told me she liked women better so I couldn’t have a bracelet.” He laughed. “She’s broadening her scope.”
I felt my tongue knot in my throat. My mouth clenched.
He was making an expression as if he had expected more insight from me, or a joke, a wink-wink. But when I didn’t say anything more, he shrugged, turned, and then—while I sat down at the counter, and for the hour after—paid me no more attention than he did anyone else. He cleared trays strewn with trash off nearby tables, and the sun went down.
My phone vibrated.
I had a text from an unknown number. Hi, this is Rachel who met you at your house. I’m kind of new at this, but are you free tonight? I don’t know where to get blood now the clinic and the shelter are gone. Do you know how to get into the Pearl? I’d pay you to be my guide.
I shouldn’t be free tonight, because I’d already had Richeza drink too much blood yesterday and I hadn’t eaten much. I should be careful, if what Wanda had told me was true. And I didn’t really know how to get to the Pearl. But I felt a buzz in my body, and I wanted more of that buzz. I also was harboring some questions about what Richeza had said—about neck-blood, about wings.
Face pic so I know you aren’t cops, I sent.
The picture I received in return surprised me—mouth tight, tiny, pouty. She still looked like a girl who would have bullied me at school.
I can meet after 8, she sent. Do you know a place?
According to Richeza, in order to turn, she’d had to want to turn. True? Who knew.
Richeza’s power came from her weird intensity, but this girl was so awkward and also had a power over me. I had a different response to her than to Wanda; with both, I buckled under instantly on seeing them, wanted to give them something, wanted their approval. I hadn’t felt like that about the girls at my school who looked like Rachel. I’d been too scared of them. But she had looked at me that time as if she wanted me, beyond just needing my blood. Even if she also ran away and didn’t text me back.
I replied with a picture of my face and neck, with Richeza’s teeth-indents purple in my skin. I looked like I had looked: goth, androgynous, round-faced, with eyebrows too heavy, but I found myself liking my own scowl.
Had a client yesterday, I said, trying to sound mature, busy. But if you can buy me dinner, I can probably see you too. The Pearl is under a grocery store near Pike Place.
A couple minutes passed, then:
Meet me at Pike Place Market 8:15?
Sure.
I sent Silver the bite-mark photo too.
Would he be hungry?
Then I left the bar, walked down, down the hill that dropped down to the narrow gray sound, and sat in the cold on the stoop in front of a store that sold umbrellas until they told me to move. Night didn’t come fast. I moved down to the tourist farmers’ market and wandered there, up and down, and ate cheese samples, as the rest of the crowd dwindled and eight p.m. grew nearer. I was wondering the whole time how many of them had their blood drunk on the regular. More than zero, right? There were many levels to the market, because it sat on what was essentially a hill at a forty-five degree angle, and on a lower floor, an orange-walled food court that was flanked by candle stores and Mexican Folk Art stores and a store selling incense and one selling comics, there was an automated fortune teller in a glass case. You could pay a quarter to get a fortune from it. I had a quarter in the bottom of my backpack. The apricot-colored dummy, which was wearing a wig in a gray perm and a cloak held shut with a brooch, clanked back and forth with one finger over dusty Tarot cards while I looked at my reflection in the glass. There was nobody behind me in the food court except for one shop owner dragging the gate of her store shut.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, even though I didn’t see anyone behind me in the reflection on the glass, and at the same moment, the slot at the base of the puppet’s torso spat out a piece of paper.
“Don’t trust those machines, they steal your money,” the voice at my shoulder said.
I turned around and found the pouty, evil-looking, pretty blond girl, shorter than I had remembered from when she came to Roxanne’s house. She was wearing a hoodie and jeans, which only managed to accentuate how much she looked like an airbrushed, fourth-gen Disney princess, an Elsa slightly smooshed and plumped to be even more perfect adorning a keychain.
I looked down at the card. I squinted at it—there was far more writing on it than I’d expected. Beware a beautiful woman, and look forward to meeting an old friend, it began. Lucky numbers 80, 34 and 23.
“Seems applicable to me,” I said. “I’m even hoping to see a guy I know in this bar.”
She was appraising me with a mix, I thought, of mean-girl scrutiny and that same look of want and nervousness. A part of me worried about what she saw, in my hands and jaw and shoulders.
“You sound Southern, kind of,” she said. “Didn’t catch it before. You’re not from here.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“I thought I’d take you to the Chinese bakery place upstairs?” Her sentence ended with a question, as if waiting for my approval, but I knew from her voice she was also used to getting what she wanted. The contented certainty.
We walked up two flights of wooden, shellacked stairs, and took tables with wooden booths next to the misty, dirty window in the Chinese bakery. The boat-lights on the water shone. Many of the shops in the indoor part of the market were shut, but the fragrant steam from the pans and hot case still rocketed around in this place.
She said what I had been worried about her saying, but it didn’t hurt as bad because she needed something from me. “You’re trans, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, a . . . transfeminine person.”
Oh, god.
“A girl.” This had been my worst day so far, in terms of how people spoke to me. The counter guy—it ultimately hurt worse, after I realized he was gay. It wasn’t better at all. She’d bitten me, her teeth in my arm. A golden-colored girl saying person in that voice made me furious enough to throw something, and my shoulders knitted tight. I felt like asking her to go, to leave, but I didn’t. How did she think about me?
Rachel nodded and glanced to the side. “Okay. I’m not transphobic, I just wanted to know. I totally support trans rights. So, have you been to uh, the vampire bar before?”
My bluff was called. “No. Just heard about it. I wanted to go tonight anyway, to find out what happened with the clinic. I feel like people will talk about it. My friend might be there.”
A series of expressions—panic, maybe, fear, disappointment—crossed her face, so I turned, got up, and ordered two steamed chicken buns and a tea from the woman at the counter before Rachel could leave.
“You were hoping I’d show you the ropes,” I laughed, turning back to sit.
“Yeah,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Are you living with your parents?” I asked. She could be in college, maybe. She could be a very young eighteen. She acted Mormon or something. What was up with her?
“What have you heard about the clinic?” she asked, not answering. “I was there last night—”
“Oh my god,” I exclaimed. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe someone had tried to kill her since I’d last seen her.
“—before they got it, and it was normal. I only found out—” she paused. “Sorry, no. I didn’t see anything. That’s why I’m asking. I found out this afternoon when I woke up.”
“Me too. My roommate was really upset. She’s a seller, too.”
“Roxy, right?”
I nodded—suddenly wondering, with a flash of paranoia, if I should trust this girl. There was something off. But maybe that was just me smelling the definite slight cringe she’d had when I confirmed I was trans. And maybe she was just literally so born yesterday that she’d never thought about it before she saw an actual trans person, and now she’d be so normal.
“I can’t figure it out,” Rachel said. “Sellers, I mean. What I think about it.”
Oh, no. “What?”
“I mean Erica took me to see you, so that’s easy, I didn’t have to think. I was using the government blood bank, a bag a day. Then they told me the government doesn’t give me enough to live, so I went to the clinic. Now the clinic’s gone. There’s people at the clinic who hate sellers, and then people who think other stuff—that’s like, it’s bad to drink from people. And now there’s synthetic blood, so I don’t have to and shouldn’t. But when I drank from you, it felt so good. It just felt right. I just want it. But it’s so dangerous.”
