“From the Inside (conclusion)”

 

 

She was getting into her car when his voice boomed like thunder, rolling into the corners of the cavernous parkade: “Janine!”

She turned. It suddenly hit him that she had lied about her name as well. She froze, one foot on the running board and one hand on the car door, waiting while he approached at a stilted jog.

He put out a hand to steady himself against the Jaguar’s rear quarter. His heart beat so fast that his breath came shallow and ragged.

“What is it, Peter?”

“We’re not finished yet.”

“I have no further need of you,” she said, coldly. “You can explain the million pounds. Blame it on poor investments. You’ll not be punished. You can go on with your tedious little life as if I had never come into it.”

“You think it’s that simple! What about me?”

“What about you?” she retorted smartly. “Are you in love with me?”

“No!”

“Then we shall trouble each other no more.” She turned her back and sank into the driver’s seat. He grabbed her arm and hauled her onto the pavement. She stumbled and recovered as quickly, wrenching from his grasp.

“Give it to me!” he demanded, blocking her escape into the car. “Give me the blood, Janine. After everything I’ve done, you owe me that much.”

Her stare was brittle. “Do you think that I care?”

“I don’t think about you at all,” he snapped. “It’s what I want that matters.”

She laughed at him, truly amused by his audacity. “I don’t think so.” She gripped his shoulder in one hand. “Get out of my way.”

The force of her strength nearly cost him his balance, but he kept his feet by clutching her sleeve. She spun to dislodge him. He lunged, driving her back against the car, taking a perverse pleasure in the wince she failed to restrain. He shoved her once more, just to watch her face contort. Her fangs flashed, lethally sharp in the brutal light—the only proof that he was not assaulting a woman as mortal as himself. “That hurt you, didn’t it?” he sneered, so pumped on adrenalin that fear was not an option. “Maybe you’re not as indestructible as you’d like me to believe.”

“And how do you intend to find out?” she growled. Her eyes fixed like a lynx’s on his own. She hated him. Loathed him. Despised him—but not because he was weak. She had not expected him to fight and was now scrambling to regain control of him. Without even realizing it, he had turned the tables on her. The revelation was as thrilling as the doubt which suddenly rattled him. Having gained the upper hand, how was he going to use it?

“Is there a problem here?”

Peter maintained his hold on her, refusing to break his lock on her gaze in favour of acknowledging the owner of the voice. She appeared equally intent, though her eyes had narrowed slightly at the intrusion. Neither of them was concerned with the scene they presented—the interruption was not a welcome one.

“Just having a discussion with my girlfriend,” Peter said, tightly.

“ ‘Girlfriend’?” There was a hilarity in the stranger’s voice that warranted a look. The voice belonged to a man about his own age, slender and handsome, who seemed more entertained than appalled by the violence he had just witnessed. His dark eyes were aimed, sparkling, at Janine. “ ‘Girlfriend’? I like that.”

“He’s exaggerating,” Janine said, acidly.

“I should certainly hope so.”

Peter could not ignore the evidence that they knew each other—and quite intimately, from the sound of it. A grave sense of foreboding began its rise to the surface. He fought it down with what he hoped was a venomous glare in the newcomer’s direction. “I’ll thank you to mind your own business, chum,” he declared with more vehemence than he had intended.

“Oh, this is my business,” was the mild reply.

Peter scoffed to cover his nerves. “And who might you be?”

The newcomer grinned, displaying a pair of incisors as jagged as Janine’s. “I’m the boyfriend.”

The adrenalin rush abandoned him, leaving an oily nausea in its wake. He saw now what he should have seen right away: the white skin, the thick mane frothing with a life of its own, the elastic grace that mortal dancers strove and failed to achieve. The vampire stood completely at ease, arms casually folded across his chest; absolutely, inhumanly still. Even the fringe on his leather jacket hung motionless in defiance of the parkade’s air circulation system. Peter’s knees abruptly weakened. “What in God’s name is this?” he whispered, fearing that he already knew.

Janine irritably shrugged his hands from her shoulders, but it was the male who answered. He stepped forward, gently taking Peter’s elbow and leading him a few paces from the car. “She tends to get in over her head,” he said in a conspiratorial hush. “She thought you might be trouble, so she invited me along for the finale.”

“Jolly sporting of her,” Peter remarked, tersely. There was an amiable warmth about the male; under different circumstances, he might have liked the fellow. “What do you mean, ‘the finale’?”

They had reached his BMW. The vampire cast a glance over the vehicle, assessing its value and deciding it was probably overpriced. “What’s the top speed you’ve been ticketed for?”

Perplexed and suspicious, Peter answered the question. “One-ten.”

The vampire smirked. “I’ve done one-forty in the Jag.”

“In the Sovereign?” Peter asked, momentarily astonished.

The vampire shook his head. “That belongs to Jan. I have an E-type that would blow this into the weeds. Still, if you like German engineering, I can’t argue with your choice.”

“It got good reviews in all the motoring magazines.”

“Indeed.” The vampire rested his hip against the car and folded his arms again. “I don’t want to kill you,” he said frankly, “but I will if I have to. The decision is yours.”

“You’re giving me options?” Peter asked, only half-aware of the absurd turn his life had suddenly taken.

“You have two,” the vampire said. “You have a girlfriend of your own?”

He thought briefly, regretfully, about Sandy, and nodded.

“Go back to her.”

“What’s my second option?”

“I’ll have to kill you.”

It was not much of a choice, considering the matter of the embezzled funds. He glanced back at Janine. She stood by the black Jag, watching him bargain with the devil for a life he was unsure he could reclaim. He had tossed everything on the hollow promise that she would give him eternity. It was easy to hate her.

The vampire had followed his gaze and now nodded as if reading his thoughts. “Imagine what my life has been like,” he commented, dryly.

Peter was not the least bit amused. “She promised me immortality.”

“She lied.”

“Then why doesn’t she kill me?”

“She grows too attached when she plays these games. Take my advice, Peter. Go back to your life and forget about her.”

Peter uttered a lame attempt at laughter. “That’ll be a bit tricky when Scotland Yard comes to call.”

“They won’t come.”

“What do you mean?”

The vampire pulled a wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open to extract a business card, which he handed over. “I’ll replace the funds you moved for her. By the time you ring this number in the morning, the arrangements will have been made.”

The ground wobbled beneath Peter’s feet. Gratitude was not the first emotion that surfaced. He boldly met the vampire’s brown eyes. “You sorry bastard,” he said. “Do you always wind up righting her wrongs?”

The vampire smiled. “Not always. But I’m not the sorry bastard in this instance, am I?” He gave Peter an amicable clap on the shoulder and sauntered back across the parkade, the fringe on his jacket whispering as he moved.

Peter watched Janine get behind the wheel when the male circled the car to the passenger side. They sat in conference for a few moments, then she started the motor and backed the Sovereign from its space. Neither of them bothered to grace him with a parting glance.

Death did not come for Peter Aldroyd that night. It waited a full fortnight. His secretary found him in his office, slumped over his desk with the back of his head blown out and a pistol clutched in his hand. There was no note, but the investigation revealed that a million pounds had disappeared from a number of client accounts over three months preceding his suicide. His fiancée took the news well, all things considered; she told the police that he had not been himself for months. He had recently suffered from impotence and depression—the latter, she had imagined, brought on by the former though they had never discussed the subject. Further investigation failed to turn up the whereabouts of the missing funds, and the subsequent attempt by authorities to classify the case as a homicide failed due to lack of evidence.

In a jazz club across town, the owner finished reading the article and laid the newspaper on top of the bar. His grey-eyed lover was flirting with the patrons as usual, casting her spell over those who had no ward against her magic. She caught his eye and came toward him. When she reached the bar, he silently turned the paper around so that she could see the headline. She gave it a cursory glance before uttering a disdainful snort. “You should have killed him,” she said.

“And finish the job you started?”

“He was corroding when I met him,” she declared. “Rotting from the inside out, bored to death by his job and his woman. I gave him his fantasy in the flesh. It’s not my fault he couldn’t handle it.” She pushed the paper back across the bar. “Let it go, lover. You did all you could.” She flashed him a dazzling smile and flounced back into the crowd, resplendent in violet velvet.

The vampire read the article once more, slowly. “You sorry bastard,” he murmured. Then he folded the newspaper and tucked it into the garbage can beneath the bar.

 

THE END 

written May 9, 1999

revised October 6, 2013