I returned to my apartment. I needed a drink. I made a manhattan and sipped from it as I wandered through my place.
Everything around me felt small. I didn’t feel bigger, I think it was that I was aware how my world had shrunk around me. I was boxed in.
I examined the hawthorn stake. The phallic design was someone’s idea of a black joke. Final words to a vampire: Screw you.
This stake was the one souvenir I never wanted but was the only item I had to remind me of Phaedra. I put the stake on the table next to my coffin.
I darkened my apartment and prepared to go to sleep. Usually, I like a snack-half a bag of blood-before I lie down.
I didn’t feel like eating; I only wanted to close my eyes and let time soften the sharp edges of what happened today.
I thought about all the occasions, as a human and as a vampire, that I tried my best and came up short. If it was only me who bore the consequences, then I could make peace with myself. But I had caused others to suffer and I would always be to blame.
I rested against the satin lining of my coffin. I needed to relax, but my mind wandered back to the meeting with Phyllis and Nathacha. It felt like a cue ball cracking hard during a break. My thoughts ricocheted and scattered across my mind.
I’ve given my best to the Araneum and yet they were willing to sacrifice me.
What did it mean to be loyal?
The question burned heavy and hot where my heart used to be.
My kundalini noir tensed, like it expected another blow.
My mind grasped at the one remaining lifeline, a blind faith that all would work out.
Give it time. You have an eternity.
I lay in the dark stillness, a serene quiet like the calm surf after a storm.
I heard my name and the familiar echo.
Phaedra was alive.
I sat up.
The echo became siren loud.
My kundalini noir twisted upon itself, the siren shriek stabbing with needlelike pain.
The shrieking filled my head. I put my hands over my ears though I knew the noise came from inside my brain.
My psychic column trembled like a jet of water pulsing through a narrow hose. The straight lines and right angles in the room twisted and bent. I tried climbing out of the coffin, lost my balance, and collapsed to the floor.
Up, down, left, right, the directions tumbled in dizzying randomness while the shrieking bounced against the inside of my skull.
Nausea crawled up my throat.
I backed against the table where my coffin laid.
I put my hands flat on the floor and tried to regain my bearings. A table leg pressed against my back and I faced the front door of my apartment.
The cascade of noise fed the nausea and I convulsed with dry heaves.
The door shook and it flung open, splintered wood flying where the dead bolt broke through the jamb.
Phaedra stood in the threshold, backlit by the streetlamps.
Her aura blazed like the exhaust fire from a rocket engine. A burr of malevolent thorns quivered across her penumbra.
Her eyes shone bright as electric arcs. Long fangs glistened from a mouth bent into a cruel smile.
She wore a long black dress covered in black lace. A black sash wound across her thin waist. A necklace of small black shapes swung over her bodice. Each velvety shape had a shiny spot-an eye-and a black point. A beak.
It was a necklace of crow heads.
In her left hand she carried a leather bag weighed down with an object the size of a bowling ball.
Phaedra kept her fierce gaze locked on me. She swaggered in. Flip-flops slapped her feet. She grabbed my wrist with her free hand and dragged me from the table.
I lay powerless, limp with nausea.
Phaedra kicked off her flip-flops and put a bare foot on my throat. She raked her talons across my scalp to grasp a handful of hair. Blood trickled from my skin.
She shook my head. The motion made me want to retch. I closed my eyes to keep from vomiting.
“Look at me.” She yanked my hair.
I opened my eyes. Phaedra appeared huge and menacing, grotesque, like a giant’s reflection in a funhouse mirror.
Bile filled my throat. I pleaded, “Make it stop.”
Slowly the shriek faded to a hum, then silence. The nausea passed and the bile receded down my throat.
She let go of my hair and cupped my chin with her knife-like talons. Her eyes probed mine and I could feel her thoughts slither into my brain and slither back out.
Phaedra’s eyes glistened with an amused twinkle. “So the Araneum knows about me? Good.” Her face regained its youthful appearance.
The lines in my room became straight and my sense of balance returned.
Phaedra released my chin and pulled her hand away with a slap. “I’ve come to thank you, Felix.”
“Much obliged.” Blood oozed from the stinging wound on my cheek. “You didn’t have to trouble yourself. A phone call would’ve been sufficient.”
“Always with the jokes.”
“I’m not laughing,” I said.
“Then laugh at this. I chose you because of your weakness. Your guilt. That weakness would let me pry into your head and bring you to me. You were the vampire hero and I beat you.”
I felt raw and exposed, more than I would if naked. I felt used. Violated.
Shame washed over me.
I couldn’t live with the disgrace. But I could live with vengeance.
Phaedra would die.
My mind clearer, I thought about what weapons I had close by. My aura could signal my intentions, and if I sprang at Phaedra, by the time my feet were off the ground, she’d cripple me with another psychic mind blast. When I attacked, it would have to be sudden and thorough.
My pistol was in the next room. But it wasn’t loaded with silver bullets.
What happened to the hawthorn stake? Was it still on the table? Or had it fallen? I moved my arm and felt the stake slide across the T-shirt under my right shoulder. Now to wait for the chance to strike.
“I brought you a present.” Phaedra undid the knot cinching the leather bag in her hand. She upended the bag.
A head with spiky black hair thumped against the floor. Phaedra toed the head until it faced me.
Nguyen’s vacant eyes gazed from the puckered recesses of the sockets.
The dread, the horror, made my neck and shoulders lock up.
Nguyen’s lips were black as ink against his purple skin. He’d probably been dead for days, though with some vampires it’s difficult to tell.
“He never liked me,” Phaedra said, “so I killed him.”
I stared at the head. “Why?”
“Because he said no. I offered him the chance to join me.”
“In what?”
I moved and rolled the stake close to my right hip.
“My destiny. I’ve known it since the time I first became aware of myself. The world pitied me. ‘Poor Phaedra, what a raw deal from life.’ But I knew if I could escape that sentence, if I could cheat God out of what he’d given me, then the world would be mine.”
“How?”
“Because vampires, humans, everyone would belong to me.”
My expression must have said, you’re insane.
Phaedra responded, “Why? Because I’m young? Alexander the Great was only sixteen when he set out to conquer the world.”
“The Araneum will stop you.”
Phaedra clasped the necklace of crow heads. “This is what I think of the Araneum. I will destroy the Araneum.” She kicked Nguyen’s head. “Just like I did him.”
I saw my chance. When she went out through the door, I could leap after her and tackle her. If I hit her hard enough, the advantage would be mine. I’d run her through with the stake.
She narrowed her eyes. A smile wormed across on her lips and her eyes opened wide in theatrical sarcasm. “Oh no, the stake.” She jammed a foot under my ribs. She jerked her foot and the stake clattered across the floor.
“You shouldn’t worry about the stake when I have this.” Phaedra pulled the skinning knife from her waist sash. “It cuts well. Ask Nguyen.”
She sheathed the knife and tossed the leather bag onto my chest. “Go show the Araneum what I’ve done.” She slipped on her flip-flops and stepped back to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To learn. There’s so much I don’t know and yet look at what I’ve done to you.”
Phaedra stopped at the threshold. “When you report to the Araneum, tell them I will have more of this.”
Her aura flashed like the blast from a cannon. Her eyes burned with megawatt intensity.
The noise started in my head, rising to a pounding like I was at the bottom of a waterfall. My psychic column shook like it wanted to tear free of my body. Spots erupted before my eyes, jittering as the walls and floor pitched.
The nausea overwhelmed me. My vision narrowed to a tiny point. My knees buckled and I crumbled to the floor.
The shrieking stopped. The nausea vanished. I became aware of gravity and felt the refreshing coolness of the wooden floor against my cheek.
The echo shrank to nothing. The silence left a void in my head and my thoughts trickled in like sand.
I sat up and stared about the room. Things seemed so normal I could imagine that I had hallucinated everything. But Nguyen’s severed head and the splintered wood from my broken door put me front and center before reality.
I balled the leather bag in my hand and got to my feet. I wiped a trace of sour spit from my lips.
I knelt and scooped Nguyen’s head with the bag. I juggled the bag until his head rested on the bottom.
I found the hawthorn plunged upright through the lining in my coffin.
I felt nothing. No anger. No shame.
I made myself another manhattan and let the ice melt to mellow the bourbon.
The emotion that first came back was the desire to see things as they were.
Phaedra was gone.
I was still here.
I sipped the manhattan. It tasted good.