NOT FOR SALE Read online

  Charlie vaulted from the floor so fast Patrice could hardly see him, ripping at his first victim so savagely that blood spattered wastefully on the falls. He hunched over the body, more monster than man, and there was nothing of Charlie in him. Nothing at all.

  Don't be stupid, she told herself. He just rose. There's nothing like that first hunger. But next to her she could sense Ivan becoming wary.

  When Charlie had sucked all the blood he could from the corpse, he threw it against the wall so hard that bones crunched. He turned back to them, his face a mask of anger. "More."

  "Good hunting awaits you," Ivan said, calm and pleasant. Patrice felt a surge of gratitude. "We can go into the forest now, look for foxes and deer. And tonight, we can revisit your German captors, if you would like. They would not like, I assure you."

  "Now," Charlie growled.

  "Get a hold of yourself." The sharpness in her voice shocked her. "You're still you, Charlie. Just a vampire now."

  The word vampire seemed to snap some sense back into him. Charlie rose from his crouch, his bloodied prison clothes hanging from him in rags. "I remember ... I remember you bit me."

  "That's right. I bit you. I changed you, so you wouldn't die."

  "You're a vampire, too," he said. Charlie didn't sound shocked or horrified. More . . . angry. "You always were?"

  "For almost one hundred years." Patrice glanced briefly at Ivan. "The two of us, Ivan and I—we were changed by the same vampire. That means we can always find each other. Just like you'll always be able to find me, because I'm your sire."

  Charlie frowned. "Sire?"

  "There's a lot to understand. We'll explain everything, and we'll get you all the blood you need. It's easy in wartime."

  "You lied to me," Charlie said.

  Patrice winced, but she was not one to back down easily. "Soon you'll be lying, too, and you'll understand why it's necessary."

  He was starting to smile—a smile she didn't like. Ivan took a step closer to her. But now Charlie was laughing. "It's all been a lie. Everything they ever taught us in school or in church. Nothing but lies."

  "Stay calm. You need to remember who you were, to decide what you want to be," Patrice said, but he didn't seem to care.

  "Monsters are real!" Charlie shouted with glee. "You can rise from the dead without any help from Jesus. You can live by killing other people, and nothing's ever going to punish you. What's hell? We never have to worry about it, do we?"

  "You can make a hell of earth easily enough," Ivan said. "I don't advise it."

  "All my life, I studied and worked. Never took a drink. Never took a girl to bed until I thought it might be my last chance before I died, and even then I meant to marry her." Her, Charlie said, as though Patrice weren't there in the room. "And it was for nothing! Life begins after death—the preachers didn't lie about that. But heaven can't be as sweet as drinking that Nazi's blood."

  "Charlie!" Patrice cried. But he was lost in a wild, thrilled delight that didn't include her. Not yet, anyway—when he calmed down he'd probably be more interested in company. But already she knew that Ivan had been right. She'd loved an illusion, and the memory of Amos; she'd never really known Charlie at all. Nor had he known her. They had just been two more enchanted lovers at the canteen, mesmerized by war and the romance of the forbidden.

  "I'm going hunting," Charlie said. He didn't ask for a teacher, and why should he? She knew his instincts would guide him. "Don't try to stop me. Nothing is ever going to stop me again."

  He ran for the door. For one last instant he was silhouetted against the pale dawn sky—then Charlie was gone. All of him: body, soul, life, love, illusion. There was nothing left for her.

  "If he doesn't recklessly get himself slain in the next few days, someday Charlie will come looking for you," Ivan said. "He'll be able to find you. I cannot yet tell whether he'll come out of love or hate. Or perhaps merely desire. You do have this effect on men."

  "I'll deal with it when it happens." Patrice couldn't look Ivan in the face. "So. You were right. Don't pretend you're not happy about it."

  "As with many things, the possibility was more enjoyable than the reality. Do you think I enjoy seeing you hurt?"

  And that—the knowledge that he could see her pain, that her beauty and her coolness had been inadequate to hide that wound—was what brought Patrice to tears. She could bear anything—even death, even loss—but she could not endure being exposed before anyone.

  Patrice crumpled against the wall, hands covering her face so Ivan couldn't see any more. But the sobs wouldn't stop coming. At least he knew her well enough not to try to hold her.

  "Patrice. Don't do this to yourself," he murmured as she wept. "You're too strong to mourn the loss of a mere dream."

  Did Ivan never have any dreams of his own? What had Julien taken from him, when he changed Ivan into a vampire? Patrice didn't know. Didn't want to know. She'd wanted to be out dancing again, with her hair done just so and a pretty dress on, ready to dance and flirt and play the part of the silly young girl she'd never been. The haze of the cigarette smoke in the USO canteen had helped to hide her true nature—even from herself—for a time.

  Ivan said, "If I could understand one thing, I would want to understand why you only love the ones you can't keep."

  "Stop it," she sobbed. "Just stop it. If you can't give me something better to think about, then don't say anything. Or go. Maybe you should go."

  Ivan didn't go. He stood there, a slender shadow in a long gray coat, pale against the faded ivy leaves that covered the wall.

  Maybe it was Amos she had been chasing, the shade of the man she'd lost too soon, too long ago. Or maybe it was her own humanity she'd sought. Either way, what a fool she'd been.

  Although it took her many more minutes to collect herself and stop crying, Ivan said nothing else until Patrice had dried her eyes. As she straightened up, still disheveled but at least something like herself again, Ivan finally took a step toward her.

  "You were in Paris," he said. "Since the liberation."

  She'd told him this while they'd waited for her knee to heal. "Yes."

  "I haven't been there since the 1920s. Is it still beautiful?"

  "The war has left its mark," Patrice replied. "But of course it's still beautiful. It's Paris."

  "Then I think I should like to see Paris again. And I think the journey there, while hazardous, could be quite delightful in the right company." How clever Ivan was. How wise. He knew the best thing to do was to pretend her breakdown had never happened. "Will you accompany me, Patrice? When we get to Paris, we'll drink champagne and stay up all night and create no end of scandals. And we'll kill every Nazi we see on the way there."

  Patrice straightened herself, smoothed her hair, and took Ivan's arm. Somehow she managed to smile. "You always did know how to show a girl a good time."

  Say Yes

  Lili St. Crow

  That Friday the party was up in the hills, some ratfaced kid's parents were gone and a whole fake adobe mansion thrown open, throbbing with rave music. As soon as we got there I snagged us a couple of beers from a passing boy with a cooler full of ice and brown glass bottles, and Chelsea and I cased the place.

  The hardcores were doing coke in one of the designer bedrooms upstairs. The banister had already been slid down. The punch bowl had probably already been spiked, and when we found the quietest back bedroom there was already a couple sprawled out across the water bed. The guy was a lacrosse star at St. Ignatius, and the girl was from one of the public schools. Nobody we knew. She looked glaze- eyed, her tangled brown hair spread out in a mat, eyeliner dripping down her cheeks. The lacrosse star's naked ass had pimples.

  We left them alone and went back downstairs. The huge circular living room had a fireplace and a mass of kids hopping around to the half-assed DJ's attempt at trip-hop coolness. Girls in worn-thin designer jeans and cropped shirts that showed their bellies, jewelry winking. Boys in prep or jock costumes, some in loos
ened St. Ignatius uniforms. There was a sprinkling of Marys—girls from St. Mary of the Sacred Heart, Ignatius' sister school, instantly recognizable in the blue and green plaid skirts Chel and I also wore, the almost-knee-high socks, the Mary Janes and whatever shirts we threw on at the end of the school day. Some of them still had the Peter Pan collared white button-ups on, but they'd unbuttoned them down and camis peeked out through the top. You could always tell a Mary by the long hair, the healthy scrubbed skin, the clear nail polish, and the neutral lip gloss.

  We don't all look alike, but it's close.

  Chelsea took a long swig off her beer and rolled her blue eyes. I shrugged. It was as close as she would get to admitting I was right and this was a complete waste of time. We should have gone to the Rose. Yeah, it's an all-ages club and it sucks, but it was better than this.

  The music was a loss, so we headed into the kitchen. Big beefy frat-boy types were doing shots off the counter. One of them staggered and put his head down like a bull, the blue fug of cigarette smoke wreathing his head. He looked just about to vomit, so we got an armful of cold beer bottles and retreated.

  The patio was almost a complete loss, too. Someone had already been tossed into the pool and was shrieking, and there were two kids throwing up in the manicured bushes. Someone passed Chel a joint, she took a drag. There was a forgotten corner to the patio, two deck chairs sitting lonely under madrone trees. The stars were out, clear and cold though the night was warm, and the first breath of the Santa Anas was flirting with the sides of the canyons and the valley. It smelled like hot dust and chlorine from the pool. The music was too loud to be a comforting heartbeat, but it was close.

  "Don't say it." She handed me another beer.

  I shrugged again. My keychain had a dainty silver bottle opener, so I cracked both mine and hers.

  "We can always leave." Her throat moved as she took a long hit off the bottle and passed me the joint. Even when she was drinking you could see the ballet classes every Mary has to take, classified under "deportment" and graded. It's so fifties, but it's what our parents pay for. "Go to the Rose."

  The smoke stung my lungs. I held it for a long time. "It'll be the same there without the beer," I finally said. We clicked bottlenecks and sat back on the deck chairs, legs stretched out, ankles crossed and skirts safely tucked. I watched over the polished tips of my Mary Janes as one of the kids throwing up in the bushes staggered toward the kitchen door. "Jesus."

  "I hope this kid knows a good cleaning service." She laughed, and the music started a screeching feedback loop. "Goddamn. Annoying."

  I took a long draft. It slid cold down my throat. I hate the taste of beer, it's yeast in a bottle. But it was chilly and would give me a buzz. "Did Jenny get her results yet?"

  "Not yet. And no period." Chel sucked in her cheeks. "Poor kid."

  "Well, everyone knows how Marty is." I shifted uncomfortably on the deck chair. Thank God Chel had told me about him in time. When I'd moved here, I'd thought he really liked me.

  That's the way he is with everything female, though. At least, everything female he thinks he can get his meat into. But he's a popular Iggie. His dad's in plastics or something. Bought his Junior a red convertible. It was like every cliché about midlife crisis come to life and projected onto a hapless kid.

  "And she was voted Most Likely To Graduate Knocked-Up, If At All. In our highly unscientific personal poll." Chel giggled and so did I. It was nasty, but satisfying. Like nachos. We finished off the joint in companionable gossip, and the familiar soothing blanket of warmth spread all through me.

  That was when she saw him. "Oh, wow. Hold everything."

  I looked up, across the frothing mass of the pool. More kids had jumped in, clothes and all. And someone, of course, had poured dish soap or something in it, so great opalescent banks of bubbles crawled toward the molded-concrete rim.

  It was just like every other party this year.

  Except for him.

  He stood by the French doors to the dining room, flung wide open to let in the night. He wasn't tall or even very cute. Here you've got to be blonde, snub-nosed, long-legged cheerleader material. Like Chel.

  He had dark curly hair like me, more actual curls than my just-waves. Dark eyes and perfect olive skin. Normal face, nice and regular, nothing out of the ordinary.

  But there was something about him. He stood there like he had all the time in the world, his sneakers placed carefully and his shoulders relaxed, hands in his pockets. A simple white button-down and jeans, his hair mussed and a thin gold necklace with a small white pendant nestled just below the hollow of his throat.

  He was looking right at us.

  Chel drew in a short, sharp little breath. I knew that sound. The cat had just found her next mouse.

  I looked away quickly, studying the soap foam. Where was it all coming from? The kids weren't thrashing around enough for all of it.

  Jets, I decided. Or whatever they'd put in the pool to make the bubbles.

  "He's looking right over here." Chel had a good sotto voce, her lips barely moved even when she had to be heard over the thumping music.

  We had lots of practice in class. St. Mary's is strict. But there are ways of getting around it, especially if the teachers think you're a brain. It's hard treading that line between smart and popular. You have to choose one or the other. Chel had the pop covered, I settled for doing all our homework and tagging along.

  The sheen on the wall of bubbles looked sick. Like a slug-trail. I took another long draft of beer. My stomach was sour. So was the rest of me. The feedback was beginning to give me a headache. Thank God it cut off just then, replaced by another pounding beat. Even the windows were flexing. It was a question for the ages: could the Eternal Dude make a sound system so loud even His eternal windows would shatter?

  Betcha they wouldn't cover that in Theology class.

  "Oh God, do I look okay?" Chel wanted to know.

  "You look fine." Just like usual. She looked like a California dreamboat. And it poured off her in waves, hot interest. I could tell we were going to be replaying this all night. We'd probably go for late-late fries and milkshakes at Druby's and then to her house, where I was technically supposed to be staying the night. We'd get in about 3 or 4 a.m., get ready for bed, and then lay in her room giggling and talking about this very moment until she fell asleep. Because if I fell asleep she would poke me. "You look hot."

  "I should've changed."

  We hadn't changed because she'd been all in a hurry to hang at the mall and then zoom to the party. As a result we were part of the unbuttoned-dress-shirt-and-camisole crowd. "Schoolgirl is hot this year," I muttered.

  "Schoolgirl's always hot." She shifted a little bit. I could tell she was raising her chin, because her mother was always on her about it. It takes years off your age in photographs, sweetheart. Stand up straight.

  He must've been getting closer. The bubbles climbed up. In two years I'd be graduated, I'd go to whatever college would have me, and Spring Break would happen in Cancun or something. There would be shit like this all the time.

  I hunched my shoulders. Took the last long six-swallow burst of beer, and was faced with the decision to belch like a linebacker now or in five seconds when the guy got to us. I chose now and stifled it with a ladylike hand. Chelsea about had a fit, trying to laugh with her chin up and her posture okay while lounging in a deck chair with kiped beers.

  "Hi." He didn't quite have to shout to make himself heard over the music. Nice voice.

  "Hi!" Chelsea chirped. "Want a beer?"

  "Sure." He wasn't averse to the notion. Of course, who would be at a party like this?

  There was an awkward silence. Both of them were looking at me. I gave Chelsea a sideways glance and cracked one of the beers, handed it up to him. I had to stretch and sit up to do it, and I kept my fingers on the bottom of the bottle so I didn't touch him. I went back to studying the pool.

  He noticed I wasn't looking. "Did I interrupt
something?"

  "No, no, it's cool. She's just tragic. I'm Chelsea."

  Tragic. That was a good word for it. I squeezed my knees together and leaned back in the chair. Maybe another beer was the answer.

  "Jack. You go to St. Mary's."

  Well, he got no points for stating the obvious. There was a beat or two of silence. If I was interested at all, now would be the time for me to be polite and introduce myself.

  I didn't. It would only be grief. I knew the rule—if she was interested, I didn't even get to look. I was the accessory girl here, the brain to her looks. It was my job to be snarky and supportive.

  Small price to pay for basking in her borrowed glow. Or at least, it seemed that way when we became "best friends."

  I've been on the unpopular end of the stick. I don't want to revisit it.