"Yeah. All I ever want to do is command them the hell away from me."
Doug nodded, and looked out of the corner of his eyes at her breasts. Deep in his mind there was a space like a basement where he kept ideas he’d used once or twice but had mostly forgotten. Self-improving ideas, like exercise equipment, gathering dust. One of these was the realization that sexy people were not always, themselves, hypersexual, that just because Doug could only think of sex — sexy, hot nude intercourse sex — when he looked at Absinthe didn’t mean that it was on her mind at all. There was probably no clever conversational password that could get her making out with him at this moment. Probably.
"I can make fog," he said.
"Hey, look, so can I," said Absinthe. She took a drag and blew a plume through her plum lips. It smelled like Christmas.
Doug laughed. "That’s not what I meant. I—"
"Do you like your tutor guy? Mr. David whatever?"
"Not really."
"I can’t stand this anymore," said Absinthe. "I hate her! It’s like, I get to hang out with this totally hot two hundred-year-old vamp and she’s just like my mom. Worse, even — at least my mom will die someday."
Doug managed to say, "What’s wrong with—" before she started up again.
"I mean, what’s the point of being a vampire if everything is ‘don’t do this’ and ‘I forbid you to do that’? She’s even got the nerve to insult my clothes, like her Masterpiece Theatre wardrobe hasn’t been out of fashion for, like, ever. I’m all, like, ‘You should talk. Nice empire waist. I bet you were the belle of the Industrial Revolution, bitch.’"
Absinthe sighed.
"I totally should have said that."
"I like your clothes," said Doug.
"Jesus. Of course you do. You’re just another horndog boy. But Madam Polidori says I look like a hooker, and I say, no, I look like a vampire, so she says I look like a vampire hooker. Then she shows me a photo of this vampire hooker she knows in New Orleans and we’re wearing the same top."
Vampire hooker, thought Doug.
"And all the time she — she wants me to…" Absinthe quailed, but recovered quickly. "Did you know that Asa really isn’t a vampire? He’s a…thrall. It’s so fucked up."
"She introduced him to me that way. As her thrall."
"Yeah, but do you know what it means? It means she almost made him a vampire, but she didn’t give him enough blood. She just gives him a tiny bit at a time, so he’s addicted. It means he’s her slave. He can never leave — he has to do whatever she says. What kind of person does that to someone?" Her face pruned. "Shit! I’m in such shit," she said, and she folded up against her knees.
Doug put his arm around her as he’d seen people do on television, but she only seemed to stiffen and lean away. Like the way an unhappy baby could almost pitch herself backward out of your awkward clutches. He let her go as she got to her feet. She turned and hugged her arms, though Doug knew she could not possibly be cold.
"I told my boyfriend. Almost right away I told him. He was cool with it. Well, not so cool with the whole getting-ravished-by-a-vampire thing, but…I made it sound like I hadn’t been into it. Like it was more of a…rape or whatever."
"Uh-huh," said Doug. Where was this going?
"I guess he…I guess he really never was okay with it. He started making all these little comments, not much at first, but then all the time, and…I finally got tired of it and dumped him."
She dropped her cigarette butt and ground it out with her toe.
"But then people started asking me these questions, everyone’s looking at me different, and I know he’s been talking about me…" She raised her face and pinched her eyes shut. "God, Travis! Don’t you know I have to kill you? Don’t you know you’re making me?"
"Elizabeth?" said a voice behind Doug, and he turned to see Cassiopeia Polidori stepping onto the porch.
"Oh, perfect," Absinthe said, her eyes shining. "Perfect timing."
"Hello, Douglas," said the signora. "You are welcome inside. Elizabeth, why don’t you come back in—"
"Don’t look at me," said Absinthe, and then her whole body exhaled and was only mist, a lewd column that shed its clothes and lost its shape and rose into the sky.
Doug looked at the pile of clothes, next to the other pile of clothes.
"You can’t keep transmogrifying away from your problems, young lady," Cassiopeia called to the vapor as it drifted over the trees. She watched, for several beats after it had vanished from sight, then turned as if suddenly remembering that Doug was also there. "Douglas. This is a surprise. Leave the clothes. Asa will see to them." Doug followed her inside.
They walked through the parched, candlelit hall. "You’re looking well," said Cassiopeia. "I can’t confess to agree with your recent flair for vigilantism, but I daresay it agrees with you."
"You shouldn’t believe everything you’ve been hearing about me," said Doug.
"Hm. So I suppose you don’t have an invisible motorcycle? What a disappointment — I was rather looking forward to not seeing it."
They settled in the drawing room near the harpsichord, Doug on an uncomfortable chair and Signora Polidori on what Doug assumed was an uncomfortable sofa. He thought they should be drinking tea and remarking on the latest society gossip and news from London and whenever would Mr. Fucklesby settle down and marry? A moment later Asa arrived with the tea.
He glanced briefly at Doug with eyes that, while not exactly approving, no longer carried the hint that Doug was something to be scraped from his heel. So that was something. Doug thought about what Absinthe had said. If true, it was Doug who was the superior being — Asa probably wished he were him.
"Mr. David tells me that you did not attend your last appointment with him," said Cassiopeia after Asa withdrew. "And that he’s heard naught from you since. Milk?"
"Uh, no," said Doug, looking down at the tea.
"Sugar?"
"No. Thanks. So…I didn’t feel I was learning with him. And I didn’t like his attitude, to be honest."
"Mr. David, despite his many fine qualities, could have a more winning disposition," Cassiopeia admitted.
"Right. Well, I heard from Victor that there was supposed to be some big meeting a few weeks ago. Stephin forgot about it, or just blew it off. I dunno."
"And I have not pursued the matter because I believe the issue at heart has been…settled? The television show?"
Doug allowed a beat to pass before speaking. "Let’s just say I took care of it," he said. It was something else that happened on TV a lot, these kinds of enigmatic statements. They were probably a kind of story shorthand, thought Doug. It was all that needed to be said, because the viewer already knew the details, or wasn’t meant to yet. It wasn’t going to work in real life, he reasoned. Nobody just let you say a thing like that without explaining yourself. But here, now, was Cassiopeia’s curt nod, and then silence. Don’t you want to know what I did? thought Doug. Don’t you want to know how I did it? He had a sense that he was moments from being dismissed. That the signora would stand, and Doug would have to stand, and then Asa would come from wherever Asa came from to guide Doug through such uncharted territory as the stair hall and the foyer.
He didn’t want to leave. He was kin to women like this. Why had he ever thought vampires smelled bad to one another? Here he was in a vampire’s chambers, and he couldn’t smell a thing. The world outside smelled like a farm.
"Have you found out anything about the mystery vampire?" asked Doug quickly. "The one that made…all us guys."
Cassiopeia shifted in her seat. "We are investigating. It’s no fox hunt. It can be a long and delicate process, finding a fellow cousin."
"Oh, right," said Doug. "Obviously. I didn’t expect you would have found her yet, it’s just Stephin thought I ought to try to learn more—"
"I don’t suppose you have any further details about your benefactor you may have neglected to mention…?"
"No. Like I said before, it was dark. I didn’t get that good a look at her."