Chapter 5: First Hunt
The bass came through the brick like a second pulse, and Renee gripped the alley wall to keep from drowning in it.
A hundred hearts beat on the other side of that door. She could hear all of them at once, each one a separate fist opening and closing. Her palms were wet. Her teeth ached in their sockets, a dull pressure she kept testing with her tongue.
Danielle stood in front of her, barefoot still, jeans rolled at the ankle, grinning. "You hear all of that?"
"All of it." Renee wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "There's a woman at the end of the bar. She's got a murmur. It stutters."
Danielle laughed, low and pleased, and looked over her shoulder at Amy, who leaned against the dumpster with her arms crossed. Amy didn't laugh. She just watched Renee the way an instructor watches a first attempt at something difficult.
"You'll want to pick a quiet one," Amy said. "Don't hunt the loudest thing in the room. That's amateur work."
"I'm not hunting anything. I'm standing in a puddle."
"You're hunting. You just haven't admitted it yet."
Amy pushed off the dumpster and walked to the back door of the bar live music leaked through in a red seam. She pulled it open and the noise hit Renee like a hand across the face, and the smell, sweat and perfume and beer and underneath all of that the black-rich smell of blood moving through living bodies.
Renee's vision narrowed to a tunnel. Her jaw fell open.
"Breathe," Danielle said at her ear. "Through your mouth. It helps."
Renee breathed. The tunnel widened.
The bar was a long coffin of neon, blue on one wall, pink on the other, sticky floor, a jukebox playing something with too much treble. Renee walked the length of it with Danielle's hand on her lower back. Every pulse she passed pulled at her like a hook in the ribs. A man in a trucker cap, a woman doing shots with her bridesmaids, a bored bartender with a barbed-wire tattoo.
At the end, in the corner booth, a woman sat alone with a glass of something amber and a phone she kept turning face-down.
She was mid-thirties, dark-haired, the kind of tired that lives behind the eyes. Her pulse was slow and steady. No murmur that Renee could hear. Just a deep, even drum.
"That's her," Renee said.
Amy came up beside her and looked, and nodded once. "Good choice."
Danielle squeezed Renee's arm. "Go on."
Renee didn't move. Paul didn't come. Her feet had turned to concrete.
Amy leaned in close enough that her breath moved the hair by Renee's ear. "You don't have to take her by force. You never have to. That's the thing nobody tells you."
Renee crossed the room. She slid onto the bench across the booth and the woman looked up, wary, then not wary, because Renee was young and pretty and alone and the night was late and nothing about her felt like a threat.
Renee understood, suddenly, why Amy had picked her. She was the sort of woman other women relaxed around.
"I'm sorry," Renee said. "Do you mind if I sit? My friends are being loud."
"Go ahead." The woman turned her phone over. "I'm Marisol."
"Renee."
They talked for a while. Marisol worked nights at a warehouse. She'd moved here two years ago and hadn't made friends. She was drinking because it was Friday and the alternative was her apartment. Renee listened and nodded and heard every word and also heard Marisol's heart fill and empty, fill and empty, and smelled the iron in her blood and the soap she'd used on her neck.
"I'm gonna have a cigarette," Renee said, standing. "Out back. Come with me."
Marisol looked at her for a beat. Then she grabbed her jacket.
The alley was colder now. Rain hadn't come yet but the air had turned heavy and metallic and the neon made the wet brick look like open skin. Marisol lit up with a plastic lighter and leaned against the wall, and Renee stood close enough that their shoulders touched.
"You're freezing," Marisol said. "You alright?"
"I'm alright."
"You've got the prettiest eyes I've ever seen, you know that? Like, that's not a thing people have."
Renee smiled, and she let the smile go a little too wide, and Marisol didn't notice. That was the other thing Amy never had to explain. They never notice.
Renee caught her by the jaw and turned her face into the light, and she could see the jugular sitting under the skin like a rope under silk, and she put her mouth on it and bit down.
Marisol made a sound like surprise and then like nothing at all. The blood came hot across Renee's tongue and it was nothing like food and nothing like wine and nothing like the wrist she'd drunk from in her kitchen. It was alive. It was moving. It was Marisol, everything she was, draining into Renee's mouth in thick pulses that matched the beat Renee had been hearing all night.
Renee's knees unlocked. She pressed Marisol against the brick with her whole body to hold her up and drank harder.
"That's it," Danielle said, right behind her. Danielle's hands gathered Renee's short hair and pulled it back off her face, gently, the way you'd hold a girl's hair over a sink. "That's it, baby. Slow. Don't waste it."
Renee couldn't slow. She wanted to crawl inside the woman. Her free hand found Marisol's waist and pulled her close and Marisol's fingers were digging weakly into Renee's back, not fighting, just holding on.
"You're doing so good," Danielle whispered. "Keep her warm. Don't let her go cold."
Renee felt the last of it come, the heart stuttering under her mouth, and something in her chest howled with delight. She drank until the pulses went thin and sour and then she drank past that too, until there was nothing in her mouth but thick cooling syrup and a silence where the drum had been.
She pulled back. Marisol slid down the brick and sat in the puddle, one arm across her throat, eyes open, mouth open, going nowhere.
Blood ran off Renee's chin and down her neck and pooled in her collarbone. She was shaking. She was so full she could barely stand, and she had never in her life felt so calm.
A slow clap came from the dark end of the alley. Amy walked into the pink light with her hands in the pockets of that green silk robe she'd never taken off, and she looked at Renee the way a sculptor looks at a finished face.
"There she is," Amy said.
Danielle pressed a kiss to the side of Renee's head and let her hair go.
Renee looked down at Marisol. Then she looked at Amy, and the question she'd been carrying since the pantry came out flat and calm.
"Do I have to kill her?"
Amy crouched beside the body and brushed two fingers over Marisol's throat, checking, unhurried. "She's got maybe a minute left. So the question isn't whether you kill her. It's whether you wait, or you finish it clean."
Renee wiped her chin on her wrist and looked at the rain still holding off above them.
The rain finally broke. It came down in a slow, heavy curtain that turned the neon into smears of blue and pink on the brick, and it ran into Marisol's open mouth and did not wake her.
Renee dropped to her knees beside her. The puddle was going pink around Marisol's hip and the water was carrying it away in thin, ragged threads.
"She's dying," Renee said.
"She's mostly dead already." Amy didn't stand up from her crouch. Rain beaded on the shoulders of her green robe and slid off the silk. "You drank her down to the dregs, baby. There's not a lot left in the tank."
"So I killed her."
"You ended her. That's a different word and you'll learn the difference later." Amy put two fingers flat against Marisol's throat again and held them there. "Here."
Renee leaned in. Under the noise of the rain and the bass behind the wall, she heard it. A heartbeat, thin as a fly against a window, with long spaces between the beats.
"That's the last of it working," Amy said. "When that stops, she's meat. While it's going, she's a door and it's still open a crack. You want her walking out of this alley?"
Renee looked at Marisol's face. Rain in her lashes, mascara running down to her jaw. A woman who'd said the alternative was her apartment.
"Yes," Renee said.
"Then you have to do it fast and you have to do it right. There's no second door. You only get one." Amy took Renee's wrist and turned it over, palm up, and traced a thumb down the pale inside of her forearm. "Feel that? Everything you've got running in there now, that's what makes a vampire. A human can drink a bucket of your blood and it's just blood. But a dying human, one who's already got your teeth in her, one who's already got you inside her veins?"
"That's how Danielle got made."
"That's how you got made." Amy let go of her wrist. "The bite opens them and the blood closes them. What comes out the other side is one of us. What comes out the other side is yours."
"Yours or mine?"
"Both." Amy's slitted eyes caught the pink neon and held it. "She'll feel me, because my blood's in you and yours is going in her. But she'll hear your voice first for the rest of her life. That's not nothing. That's the closest thing to a child any of us get. So ask yourself if you want it."
Renee didn't need long. "Where do I open it?"
"Your wrist. Not your thumb, not your palm. Two fingers down from the heel of your hand, right where you can feel the cord." Amy pressed her thumbnail into the spot and it left a white dent. "Bite there and don't yank. If you tear it open it'll clot ugly and you'll have to do it again and she won't have time for that."
Danielle crouched on Marisol's other side and lifted the woman's head off the brick, cradling it in both hands. Marisol's jaw lolled open. Rainwater ran into her ear and out of it.
"Ready when you are," Danielle said.
Renee lifted her wrist to her own mouth. It felt ridiculous for half a second, like biting your own arm to make an audience laugh. Then her fangs came down out of their sockets the way they had in the kitchen, and the ridiculous part went away.
She bit through skin and her own blood came up over her tongue.
It tasted nothing like Marisol. It tasted like cold metal and burnt sugar and it stung going in, and Renee's whole body went tight with a pleasure that had no business being there. She pulled her wrist back off her teeth and the wound opened like a small red mouth.
"Here." Amy guided her hand down and turned it, palm folded toward the sky. "Wrist up. Let it run. You want the cut sitting right over her tongue."
Renee laid her forearm across Marisol's open mouth.
For three heartbeats nothing happened. The rain kept coming, the bass kept thudding, and Marisol just lay there with her head in Danielle's hands and blood pooling in the bowl of her tongue.
Then she swallowed.
"She did it," Danielle breathed. "Oh, she did it."
Marisol's throat worked again. Slower this time, but it worked. Her lips closed around the cut and pulled, and Renee felt the draw all the way up her arm, a hook in her elbow, a soft sucking tug that went straight into her chest and made her gasp.
"Easy." Amy's hand closed on the back of Renee's neck. "Don't let her take you dry. Watch your own head."
"She's pulling hard."
"She's dying. Dying things grab." Amy's thumb moved in a slow circle at the base of Renee's skull. "Give her a count of ten more and then take it back. Not one more."
Renee counted. Marisol drank with her eyes shut and her hands limp in the water, and somewhere around eight her heartbeat came up out of nothing, one clear strong beat, then another, and it was no longer thin. It was a drum again. A different drum. Faster than any human pulse in that bar.
"Now."
Renee pulled her arm away. The cut in her wrist had already half closed, and it left a dark comma of blood in the corner of Marisol's mouth.
Marisol's back arched off the brick.
She made a sound that wasn't a scream. It came up from her chest and cracked in the middle, and her heels scraped two lines through the wet grit, and her hands curled into fists and then into claws. Danielle held her through it with both arms around her shoulders, murmuring into her hair, and Amy stayed crouched and watched every second of it like she was reading a page.
The veins stood up under Marisol's skin. They went dark, then darker, black branches crawling up her throat and across her cheeks, then sinking away again.
"What's happening to her face," Renee said.
"The change. It's got to move through the whole body or it doesn't take." Amy reached over and turned Marisol's chin with one finger, examining her jaw, her gums, her eyes. "Her teeth are already coming. Good. That means it's working fast."
Marisol's eyes opened.
They were crimson, and the pupils behind them had gone narrow as a cat's, and they found Renee first, before Amy, before Danielle, before the sky.
"Renee," she said. Her voice came out ragged and low. "You said you were gonna have a cigarette."
Danielle laughed, wet and delighted, and pressed a kiss to Marisol's temple.
"Do you remember the alley?" Renee asked.
"I remember being cold and then not being cold." Marisol sat up on her own, slowly, and put a hand to her throat, where the wound was already knitting shut under her fingers. Her skin had gone a soft, flat gray under the rain. Her ears were pointed now, just slightly, the way Renee's were. "You bit me. You bit me and then you gave me something and then I died, I think. Did I die?"
"Close enough."
"Okay." Marisol looked at her own hands. Then she looked at the bar, where the door was swinging open and a man was stumbling out to have a piss. "Okay. Why don't I care? I feel like I should be screaming right now and I'm not."
"Because you're not the thing that was scared," Amy said, standing up and shaking the water out of her sleeves. "The thing that was scared is the one you left in the alley. Come on, all of you. We're standing in a crime scene and it's starting to rain harder."
Renee got to her feet and offered Marisol her hand. Marisol took it and stood, and she was steadier than a woman who'd just bled out on wet brick had any right to be.
"Where are we going?" Marisol asked.
"Home," Renee said, and was surprised to hear herself say it. "My place. It's a few blocks."
Amy was already walking toward the mouth of the alley, and she stopped at the corner and looked back over her shoulder at the two of them standing in the pink light.
"Your first student and your first lesson, both on the same night," she said. "You'll want to be careful what you teach her, Renee. She's going to believe every word."
They made it two blocks before Marisol stopped walking.
She stood in the middle of the sidewalk with rain coming off the ends of her hair and looked up at the street sign, then down the cross street toward a row of brown brick walk-ups with buzzers by the doors.
"I know this street," she said.
"You've lived here two years," Renee said. "You should know every street."
"No. I mean I used to live on it." Marisol turned her face toward the third building, where a porch light was on behind a grimy shade. "Third floor. With somebody."
Amy had stopped a few feet ahead. She didn't turn around. She just tilted her head, the way a dog does at a sound too far off to place.
"With somebody," Amy said.
"My ex." Marisol wiped the rain off her jaw. "That's why I drink at that bar. It's the closest one to him that isn't him."
Renee looked at Amy. Amy looked back, and there was nothing on her face at all, which was its own kind of answer.
"It's your first night," Renee said. "You don't have to spend it on this."
"I know." Marisol was already walking toward the building. "That's why I'm doing it."
The vestibule door had a broken latch and Marisol knew that too. They went up three flights with the stairwell light strobing on a bad ballast, and Renee listened to Marisol's new heart jackhammering the whole way. Danielle stayed a step behind, quiet, watching Marisol's shoulders the way she used to watch Amy.
On the third floor Marisol stopped at 3B and stood there breathing.
"You can smell him through the door," she said.
"Of course you can." Amy leaned against the opposite wall and crossed her arms. "What does he smell like?"
"Old spice and cigarettes. He never quit." Marisol put her palm flat on the door. "He's got the TV on. ESPN. He always leaves it on when he's about to fall asleep on the couch."
She knocked.
The TV went quiet. Locks turned, and the door opened six inches on a chain, and a man's face appeared in the gap, unshaved, mid-forties, a bottle of beer held up near his chest like a shield.
"Marisol." He didn't open the door further. "It's almost one."
"I know it is."
"You're soaked. What the hell happened to you?"
"Let me in."
"Are you drunk?"
"Let me in," Marisol said again, and this time there was something under the words, a low note Renee could feel in her own sternum.
The chain slid off the track.
He stepped back from the door without meaning to and stood in the middle of his own living room with his beer hand hanging down, and Marisol walked in and shut the door behind her.
Renee followed. Amy came last and closed it soft.
The apartment smelled like grease and cigarettes and the man himself, sour sweat and the bite of his blood under it. Marisol stood in front of him, much shorter than he was, and he kept saying her name in a confused loop.
"Marisol. Marisol, you look, what did you do to your eyes?"
"I got better."
"That's, hey. That's not funny."
Danielle drifted past them into the kitchen and turned off the stove light so the room went dim and orange, and sat up on the counter with her bare heels knocking the cabinet. Amy took the armchair. Both of them were watching Marisol the way you watch someone try on a coat.
He reached out and touched Marisol's cheek. He was drunk enough that his thumb went to her mouth by accident, and Marisol caught his wrist and held it, and he froze.
"You're cold."
"You want to sit down," Marisol said.
"I want to sit down."
She walked him backward to the couch. He sat. She climbed into his lap facing him, knees on either side of his hips, and he let her, because his hands had decided they belonged there.
Renee stood by the door with her arms folded tight and listened to his heart pick up. It was a strong old drum, forty-six years of it, and Marisol had her nose against the side of his neck like a cat against a bowl.
"I hate you," Marisol said into his skin. "I hate you so much I stayed in this town."
Then she bit him.
He made a noise that was mostly confusion and it turned into something else when she started to drink. His hands came up off the cushions and grabbed two handfuls of her shirt and his knuckles went white.
Marisol took one long pull and pulled her mouth off him and laughed, blood over her teeth.
"That's what it's supposed to taste like," she said, and went back down on him.
The blood ran down his collarbone and soaked into his t-shirt collar. Marisol drank in long greedy mouthfuls that Renee could hear swallowing, wet and rhythmic, and her hips had started moving against his lap, grinding down, and he was hard under her, and he was too far gone to be embarrassed about it.
"Look at her," Danielle said quietly from the counter.
Amy hadn't moved. "She's doing it right."
"He's drinking this out of a bottle." Marisol pulled back and licked the wound, then sucked at it. "Two years I called this man and he never picked up. Two years."
She got his belt open with one hand and her fingers were clumsy on the buckle, wet with his own blood. She pulled him out and spit in her palm and started working him, slow and mean, and his head fell back on the couch cushion and his mouth hung open and he said her name like a question.
"You don't get to say my name," Marisol said, and put her mouth back on his throat.
His hips bucked. She stroked him faster, her wrist moving in short quick twists, and he came across his own stomach with a grunt while she drank, and the whole time she didn't stop swallowing.
The sound died first. His hands slid off her back and dropped to the cushions, one open, one curled. Marisol stayed on top of him with her teeth still in his neck and her hand still wrapped around him, gone soft now, and she kept drinking long past the point where there was anything coming.
"Marisol." Renee's voice came out thin. "Marisol, that's enough."
She didn't stop.
"Marisol."
Marisol lifted her head. Her mouth was a mess. Her eyes had gone bright and flat, and for a second she looked at Renee like she'd never seen her before, like Renee was furniture in a room she was passing through.
Then she blinked and it was gone and she was just a soaked woman on top of her dead ex-boyfriend.
"What?" she said, wiping her chin with the back of her wrist.
Renee looked at the man's face. Eyes open. Beer still on the floor where his hand had let go of it.
"You emptied him," Renee said. "You drank him dry before you even started stroking. That's not the same thing I did."
"So?"
"So there's nothing to make him."
Marisol looked down at the body under her like she was noticing it for the first time. Then she climbed off, and her knees went, and Danielle was there to catch her elbow.
"Hey, hey, you're fine," Danielle said. "You're fine. First one's always ugly."
Renee turned around. Amy was still in the armchair with her chin on her fist, and she was smiling, and it wasn't the proud smile she'd given Renee in the alley. It was the one she'd worn at her own kitchen table with her hand on Danielle's knee.
"Now you know what you made," Amy said. "She's not a copy of you. She's whatever she already was, with the leash off."