“Black in Back” (Part IV)

Grace was still in her jammies when she answered the door. Tess scolded her. “You should have asked who it was before you opened up.”

“I used the peephole,” Grace replied. Her eyes were brilliant, blazing blue in twin cartouches of smoky kohl. “What in God’s name have you done to your hair?”

“You don’t like the colour?”

“Since when has dishwater been a colour?”

“It looks better in natural light.”

Grace stepped aside. “Come in and prove it.”

The apartment’s layout was typical 1970s and the view faced east, filling the living room with bright morning sun. Tess obligingly moved into the spotlight so Grace could see the full effect of her three dollar dye job. As she turned to face her sister, she scanned the suite for signs of company. Grace had gone some crazy after her divorce and it wasn’t unusual—or hadn’t been—to find her entertaining a guest for breakfast.

“Do you want to look the bedroom?”

Tess flushed but kept her cool. “Just making sure we’re alone.”

“We’re alone. I wouldn’t have answered the phone otherwise.”

“Lucky me.”

“If you say so. What’s going on, kid? You sounded stressed on the phone.”

Now that she was here, she had no idea what to say or where to begin. Grace stood patiently in plaid flannel pants and a purple tank top, tattooed and body-pierced in defiance of the suburban soccer mom standard she had failed at so spectacularly. She looked like someone who would believe in vampires, though Tess knew she didn’t. Hell, she hadn’t believed in them, not really, not until a few weeks ago, and even then it had taken the Four Seasons to make them a fixture in her reality. Maybe she could get away without mentioning them, just keep it simple so fewer questions would be asked.

“I’m leaving town for a while.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going home.”

“I have no home without Trav.”

“The parental units would love to hear that,” Grace remarked, dryly.

Tess knew. Different as the girls were in temperament, they were united in disappointing their staunchly Christian, white bread, conservative parents. Grace had betrayed their ideal of wifely motherhood and Tess had fallen in love with a suicidal musician. “You should have fallen in love with him,” she said, half-joking.

“I did, but he was already in love with you.” Grace smiled sadly. “Did you ever find out what really happened to him? Last I heard, you thought you were on to something.”

“I was wrong. There’s nothing more than the cops already figured out.”

“Aw, sweetie—” Grace swooped in to deliver a sympathetic hug “—I can’t imagine what you must feel like, but he wasn’t unhappy with you. He was unhappy with himself.”

Tess let herself be embraced, halfway grateful for the gesture. The family wasn’t overly affectionate, so Grace’s offer meant more than it would coming from someone who dispensed hugs like candy at Hallowe’en. She pressed her forehead to her big sister’s shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut against imminent tears. Grace’s skin smelled of dance sweat, good grass, and fine Scotch, an odd mix suggesting that the clubs she favoured were higher-end than the majority of their fellows. It was a strangely comforting scent after days spent with Black in that crappy hotel.

Grace pulled away first, not surprisingly. “So now I have to ask, what were you talking about on the phone? Travis was into some funky shit before he died; has it come back to haunt you?”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“Are his friends hassling you?”

The niggly knot in her gut suddenly unravelled. “His friends don’t have your phone number.”

Grace started to frown, but Tess remembered how good a liar her sister had been when they were kids. She remembered Grace standing in her living room after Trav’s funeral, offering to pack up his stuff. She had been in the bedroom beforehand, alone because Tess had been unable to face the shower where he had died, and his cell phone … he had kept his cell phone in the nightstand and Tess had never seen it again.

Shit.

She backed up a step.

Grace matched her, reaching out with one hand. “Tessie …”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Tess, listen—”

Her sister’s fingernails were painted black. She felt their tips scrape her sleeve as she turned to run. Grace called her name, called for her to stop, wait, and she opened the door on a thug in a suit standing at the threshold. Not a vampire, not in daylight; maybe he was nobody but Tess couldn’t go on faith when the klaxon in her head was screaming red alert. She spun back to Grace. “What the fuck?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand? You have no idea what you’re messing with, Grace, no idea at all!”

“Yeah, I do,” Grace said as her sister screamed into the damp cloth jammed over her mouth, “I have a better idea than you know, sis.”

The thug had her in a grip that threatened to crack her ribs. Tess kicked out and felt her shoe strike the galley kitchen counter. Gasping for the breath expended in that muffled scream, she sucked back a lungful of antiseptic stench. She tried to struggle, tried to reach her sister, but Grace just watched from vacant eyes as Tess’s muscle turned to rubber, then to lead.

Then, darkness.

………

“About Sean—”

“Shut up.”

“I did what you asked!”

“I didn’t ask; Raymond did, and Raymond doesn’t ‘ask’ for anything. Now shut up.”

Tess tried to move and couldn’t. The dark was moving, though. Quietly, and smelling vaguely of turpentine. A bottle of it had leaked from her paint box last year and the reek was as stubborn as Black. They were in her Nissan, otherwise she guessed she’d have been stuffed in the trunk.

Grace and the goon were up front. He drove; she rode in the passenger seat. Tess tried to move again and managed a wiggle of her fingers. She was bound at wrist and ankle, but not together. Stretching was possible if she wanted them to know she was awake.

She didn’t. She wasn’t sure how long awake would last, she felt so groggy. Had she imagined her nephew’s name? She hoped so. Not imagining it meant something scarier than being tied up and thrown in the back of her own vehicle … but Grace would never have betrayed her unless someone had threatened her son, and that raised too many uncomfortable questions. Questions like, how did Raymond know about Grace? Did Grace know Raymond? And if she did … Tess wouldn’t entertain that one to save her life.

Unfortunate, because her life seemed in dire need of saving.

“Just tell me that he’s okay.”

“Who?”

“Sean, you idiot.”

“Be nice, Gracie, and I won’t tell you that his nickname is ‘Squab’.”

“Motherfucker,” Grace grumbled. “I can’t believe I fell for your manly charms.”

The goon chuckled fondly. He must have reached for something personal, because there was a sharp smack and a muttered obscenity, and Tess could almost feel her sister’s effort against relenting.

Tess felt no such compunction. She dropped with relief back into darkness.

………

She came to in a tastefully designed room from the 1930s. Clean lines, neutral shades, a white coved ceiling. Brass table lamps. A slick marble fireplace, with a cheery fire crackling in the grate. A glossy wood bedroom suite—walnut or oak or who knew what and who cared anyway? Tess struggled from the embrace of down quilts and puffy pillows when she spied her sister sitting in a low-slung armchair near the wardrobe. Gone were the purple plaid jammies, replaced by a beige silk dressing gown. Her hair was wet and combed away from her face. Her eyes were still brilliantly blue, but without the kohl liner, they lacked ferocity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “They have Sean.”

“How do they even know about him?” Tess demanded. She spoke recklessly and didn’t care. “Mike has sole custody; you lost Sean when his father divorced you for screwing, hell, Grace, everybody.”

“Thanks for reminding me, sis.” Grace produced a pack of smokes and pulled one free of its mates. She lit it with a cumbersome crystal knickknack that required she use both hands.

“Now, now, Gracie, you know that’s not allowed.”

Tess immediately wanted to vomit. That voice; that deep, dusky, crunchy-gravelly unforgettable voice, belonged to the one individual she had quit her life to avoid, and here she was, in his house, in her big sister’s presence, about to square off with him.

Without Black.

Grace doused the lighter and stubbed out the cigarette against the wardrobe. “I want to see Sean.”

“I want world peace,” Raymond retorted glibly, “but I don’t see that happening, either. You’re in no position to make demands, sweetie, and until you are, the boy is off limits.” He smiled at Tess, a cold sickle smile that mercifully showed no teeth. “Nice to see you again, bijou.”

“You don’t sound pleased.”

“Oh, I am mightily out of sorts, but what can you do? Life would be so much easier if people would just do as they’re told. Are you hungry? I’ve hired a chef to cater specifically to your needs.”

“That’s kind of you,” Tess said, warily. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. You’re my guest. What do you fancy? Pierre is French, but he can cook anything.”

“Like squab?” she asked.

Raymond’s sabre-edged smile tilted higher on one side. He was not at all attractive unless a girl favoured beady eyes, thin lips and a hawkish nose, but there was a reluctant allure in his whip-slim frame and that oddly compelling voice. “I took you for a vegetarian.”

“Then you mistook me.”

“That’s more helpful than I am certain you mean it to be.” His obsidian gaze flicked to Grace, who had stiffened slightly at the mention of Sean’s nickname. “Your sister has some questions for you, Gracie. I’ll leave you to get reacquainted.” He turned without having crossed the threshold, then added over his shoulder, “Ring if you need anything; there’s a bellpull by the bed.”

Tess looked before she could stop herself. When she looked back, the door was closed and Grace was defiantly relighting her cigarette. “He’s a fucking vampire,” she muttered around the butt end, “he’s not going to die from secondhand smoke.”

“He said it’s not allowed.”

“What are you, Tess, the hall monitor? That asshole has my son!”

“How does he even know about your son?” Tess repeated fiercely, “and while we’re at it, how does he know you? What did you do, Grace? What did you do?”

Her sister’s tone was flat. “You know what I did, Tessie. You figured it out at my place, maybe before then, maybe as far back as Trav’s funeral, I don’t know. He was mixed up with this crowd, too. Raymond—he’s a prick, but he throws a mean party and Travis was a relapse waiting to happen. I guess I took advantage of that, but I never meant for him to die. I had no idea that bitch would kill him. If I had, I’d never have brought him here.”

It was all Tess could do to keep her jaw hinged. “You introduced him to Raymond?”

“No,” Grace said slowly, “he introduced me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Grace shrugged. “You don’t have to believe it for something to be true.”

“You’re a liar, Grace, you’ve always been a liar!”

“And you’ve always been prefect!” Grace shot back, half-rising from her chair with a disfiguring snarl on her face. “Perfect fluffy candy floss girl, so pretty and smart with all the boys on a string. You could have had anyone, but you took the one I wanted just because you could. He wasn’t your type, Tess. He was a drug-addled hopeless case. He was my type, for Christ’s sake!”

Tess shouted at her to shut up, but Grace only cranked up the venom. For the first time in her life, Tess heard how her sister really felt about her, how jealous she was, how spiteful and vindictive, and how she blamed Tess for all that had gone wrong with her marriage—the marriage she had walked into hoping for redemption until Mike had muffed a comment and suddenly Grace had known that he really wanted her sister and wasn’t that always the way? They all wanted Tess—Mom, Dad, teachers and friends and boys in good standing with the Cub Scouts. Grace had had to trawl the dregs and even then, the one remotely promising scrap had preferred her little sister. At the end of her tirade, she changed her tune on one note:

“I’m glad he’s dead because now you don’t have him, either!”

Tess lost her mind. She went screaming at Grace with bared teeth and unsheathed claws. Grace launched herself in kind and the sisters clashed at the foot of the bed, tumbling onto it in a wrestling, writhing tangle of limbs. They fought like teenagers, scratching and shrieking, yanking on hair, tearing at each other’s clothes. Grace was naked under her robe; discovering so gave Tess a second’s horrified pause when she saw the tracks on her older sister’s skin. Tiny bruises and twinned scabs dotted and there—inside her elbows, behind her knees; anywhere a needle could go so, apparently, could a pair of incisors. Holy shit, Grace was a fang banger and the disgust showed on Tess’s face because Grace took exception and tried to smother her with a pillow.

Reinforcements arrived. Six thugs might have been overkill except that four were required to restrain Grace. She fought them as wildly, wrought beyond coherence until the fifth one slugged her and she sagged, whimpering, in an eight-handed grip.

Tess protested. “Hey!”

“You want we should let her kill you?” the sixth one asked. He wagged a reproving finger in Grace’s swelling face. “Raymond don’t want that, Gracie. He wants this one alive.”

Grace spat. “Of course he does! Even the king prick of vampires prefers her over me!”

“That’s not true!” Tess yelled, flinging the pillow at the thug who could talk. He was so surprised that he let it bounce off his barrel chest and stared when it landed at his feet. Idiot. He gave Tess a wounded look, as if she should have been more grateful when in fact she half-wished Grace had succeeded in suffocating her. Better to die by her sister’s rage than whatever means Raymond had in mind, because she seriously doubted she was getting out of this alive no matter what Bachelor Number Six had said. “Let her go,” she told the quartet holding Grace captive in octopus hands.

They exchanged dubious glances.

“Let her go.”

“Tessie, shut up.”

“No, you shut up!” Tess snapped, shaken beyond fear and slam-dunked straight into bravado. “I am not going to fight with you, Grace. If you try to hurt me again, these guys will stop you and you’ve already been hit once. Do you want to save Sean or don’t you?”

Grace sobbed wordlessly, but she nodded.

“Then work with me. Now, let her go, you morons!”

They looked at each other again, penguins waiting for someone else to be the first off the iceberg. Finally, Number Five gave a grunt and Grace was free. She staggered without the support; Tess scrambled off the bed to steady her when the penguins would have let her fall. “Get out!” she hissed at them. It took no effort at all to load her tone with loathing.

Number Five grunted again and the troop left in single file.

Grace began to cry. Tess hesitated to offer comfort—after all, she was the victim here—but when all was said and done, Grace believed she had a case and that made her pretty darned pathetic. So Tess walked her to the bed, sat her down, and embraced her.

………

“We can’t talk here.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s watching us.”

That figured.

“I’m sorry, Tess.”

“Shut up, Grace.”

To be continued …

“February 14”

I turn my head, and there he is.

Laughing. Happy. Talking with his hands. Expounding on the infinity of space and the magic in moonbeams.

Oblivious.

He walks with a buddy along a busy pavement, past two lanes of traffic, one parked, and the other standing still. He might see me if he looks. Will he recognize my car, stuck in the jam? And if he does, will I see it in his face?

The truck ahead of me crawls forward. I turn my head once more, and there he is.

Moving on.

Sketches of Pain

The Brits recently made a wonderful docudrama about Vincent Van Gogh, creating a script from the letters he exchanged with his brother, Theo, and casting Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. Ter and I watched it on PBS a fortnight ago, and were mesmerized, it was so well done. Well written, expertly played. Brilliant.

Despite each having a favourite of his works, neither of us is a great Van Gogh fan. Of course we know who he was, but this little film expressed who he was, and again, I wonder at the misfortune of people born ahead of their time. Unique and misunderstood, he suffered mightily for it, yet he created some of the most vibrant, aggressive, almost brutally colourful art of the age. None of this shimmering, iridescent romanticism of the Impressionists for him; once he “discovered” it, Van Gogh used colour like a weapon.

And a tortured soul? Gah. What might he have done (or not done) without his internal angst? He demonstrated great compassion and sympathy for the plight of the working class, as many of his early drawings showed. The son of a Lutheran minister, he tool a stab at preaching and only lasted six months; he experienced such volatile mood swings that he had trouble keeping any sort of “real” job and so ended up painting the French countryside, starry nights, and sidewalk cafés.

He was not famous in his lifetime. He made no money from his art. He painted to keep his soul alive. Like any true creative spirit, he practiced his art to improve upon it, seeking inspiration in nature, digging deep to source emotion, alternately accepting his genius, then questioning his ability. Highs and lows. Ups and downs. Beauty and pain.

Contrast.

Is a madman who knows he is mad truly mad? Of course Van Gogh was not born ahead of his time. Nobody is. We each come when we are meant to, armed with certain gifts, a rough idea of what to do with them, and a greater role than we imagine we’re to play in the lives of others. We come to sing songs in the darkness, to experience the pull of gravity and learn to rise above it. We are here to touch and be touched by a plethora of emotions linked by contrast: love and sorrow, pleasure and pain, loss and discovery. Anyone who writes or designs or builds or gardens or cooks or sings or plays will understand why Vincent Van Gogh was driven to paint.

Whatever else he may have suffered in life, when he painted, he knew pure, primary-coloured joy.

Kombucha Boogie

ginger, cinnamon vanilla, and in progress

Everyone needs a hobby. My latest is brewing kombucha. When I started, I imagined maybe one batch per month. Now I’m “chain-brewing” so my SCOBY is working 24/7 with no compensation.

Right now, I’m drinking the last bottle from two batches ago, have another four bottles infusing, and a fresh batch of starter tea underway. That’s where SCOBY-Doo is presently housed, feeding merrily on the sugars and creating the bubbles that make kombucha so … weird.

Face it, Ru. It’s weird. Really. Who was brave enough (or fool enough) to peel back the gelatinous layer of goo and sample the smelly liquid beneath it? I guess something similar happened in 18^th century France, when Dom Perignon’s batch of white wine went wrong and champagne was born. Kombucha begins with tea, after all, so clearly something else was intended when the discovery was made. Isn’t that usually the way?

SCOBY (“symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast”) is like a sourdough starter and who knows how old mine is? His direct ancestor belongs to my older sister, who got hers from her daughter, whose beastie can probably trace its lineage back to northeastern China where it supposedly all began. And my own SCOBY is a parent as well – I gave our first baby to a buddy whose initial batch is almost ready for bottling.

Green, black, herbal. Spicy, fruity, tangy—the flavours are proving endless and the “happy bugs” are a bonus as I’m dairy-free and no longer eat yogurt. I’m not 100 per cent sure, either, but my power surges seem to have ceased since I stepped up my kombucha consumption …

Go West, Young Girl!

it's always springtime somewhere

Got an email from Nicole this morning. Poor kid, seems like every time she digs herself out from under the snow, another dump happens, and with three more storms in the forecast for this week, she’s feeling pretty beleaguered by Old Man Winter.

Much as I sympathize with her, I am also grateful. No matter what it’s like in the rest of the country—or the province, for that matter—spring has arrived in Victoria. In fact, passing the park en route to work last Thursday, I blurted to Ter: “Cherry blossoms!”

Nic’s note inspired me to take the Canon on a photographic flânerie this radiant Sunday morning. Big clouds over the water, the sun glowing overhead, and lingering raindrops sparkle like jewels on every bush and blade of grass. The songbirds are doing their collective nut in the flowering trees, and I was lucky to spy the pictured nest amid the aforementioned cherry blossoms. I was even luckier to need no more than my hoodie and a t-shirt on my stroll; I can always tell the imports by the parkas and raingear they bring from the suburbs, not knowing what conditions await them at the ocean.

It’s brisk but mild, a perfect spring day. With 10-15 mms of rain expected to blow in overnight, this gorgeous morning was an unexpected gift. Strained as her tone was, Nic’s note was also a gift, because it made me aware of how truly blessed I am to be here, where the winters last for weeks rather than months and the last snow “storm” we had was in January 2012.

In no way is this post intended as a gloat—there are natural perils out west, as well. Joggers plague every pavement year-round. Purse dogs perennially skitter hither and yon on the same pavements.  A sweater in the morning is too heavy for the afternoon. When it pours, it literally pours with rain. And best of all, we are sitting in a subduction zone that, when the earthquake hits, will likely send Victoria the way of Atlantis.

But not today.

sailboats off the point

“Black in Back” (Part III)

She must have slept because the next thing she knew, she was shaken awake by a hand on her shoulder. Black growled above her.

“Come on, sugar, plans have changed. It’s time to go.”

Her eyes opened sluggishly, she thought, until she realized they were in fact swollen from crying. They felt grainy and icky, and her heart plummeted on discovering this was not a bad dream but what her life had become.

And it was about to get worse.

Black didn’t wait for her to get upright before he rattled a paper in her face. Tess batted it away, but he was persistent as a gnat. The paper cracked inches from her nose. In a flare of temper, she grabbed it from his hand. It crunched in her grip as she finished sitting up and scowled at him.

“It’s still dark. We can’t leave until the sun comes up.”

“We’re leaving. Now.” He roamed the room as he talked, stuffing everything including the Jockeys back into the shopping bags.

“Why?”

“Look at the paper, then you tell me.”

She looked at the paper, blinked twice, then looked back at Black. “Where did you find this?”

“It was taped to a lamppost.”

“Aurora’s?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Tess. Who else is looking for you?”

Her gaze dropped once more to the paper in her hand. It might as well have been a mirror. She met her own eyes in the printed image placed beneath a header asking: “Have You Seen This Woman?” Her physical description was listed below the picture, followed by a phone number. Tess stared at the numerical sequence, numb and sick and aghast.

“Cough it up, sweetheart.”

She barely managed a horrified whisper. “It’s my sister.”

“Your sister? You told me there was no dossier!”

“There wasn’t! Isn’t! That doesn’t mean no one will notice I’m missing!”

Black cursed with preternatural vigour. Then he threw her purse at her. “We’re going.”

“We can’t; not until I talk to Grace.”

“You’re not talking to anyone. Get your ass off the bed and out the door, or I’ll help it along with my boot.”

“Black, I can’t. She’s my sister. I have to call her before Raymond’s goons see this and go after her.”

“Sugar, if I’ve seen it, they’ve seen it.”

“Then I really have to call her. Don’t worry, I’ll use the house phone.”

He grabbed her arm as she tried to pass him. He wasn’t that tall, but he was taller than she was and he used the difference to his advantage. She froze in his shadow, disliking the proximity that allowed her to feel his breath on her face. He didn’t smell like a man. He didn’t smell at all, though his clothes smelled of booze and secondhand smoke … and his breath, it did smell, vaguely but definitely, of raw red meat. Tess turned her head away as he snarled. “Why didn’t you tell me you have a sister?”

“You didn’t ask.”

She winced as he shook her. “I’m asking now.”

Actually, he was being a jerk, but she supposed he was entitled. Surprises had no place in their current scenario and discovering her face plastered to a lamppost ranked pretty high on the list of nasty ones. At least he was willing to listen before he hustled her out of town.

“I don’t see her that often,” she said. “We’re not that close.”

“Then why has she put out an APB on you now?”

Tess wrenched free to put some distance between herself and the blood on his breath. “She’s a few years older than me, and when Travis died, she got all big sisterly and concerned about my state of mind.”

If sarcasm had a posture, Black nailed it by folding his arms. “Any particular reason? Like you talking about a vampire murder, for instance?”

“I told her I was fine.”

“That’s all?”

“Pretty much.”

“What else, Tess? What else did you tell her to make her go all big sisterly on you?”

She tried not to be affected by him using her name. “I might have mentioned that I was investigating on my own.”

Black muttered something intensely rude. “I’m guessing that was the last time you spoke to her.”

“We texted back and forth, but you dropped my cell phone into the sewer so I haven’t been replying lately.”

His stare tripled its weight. Tess stared back. It was stupid to lock horns when they needed each other to get out of this mess. Maybe she had screwed up, but he wasn’t perfect either and she wanted him to know it.

But the longer they stood glaring at each other, the more time her mind had to ponder the niggling knot that had formed in her gut. Among the many things Grace was, panicky was not one of them. An unanswered text message might rouse mild curiosity, but she wouldn’t go public before she conducted her own search, and Tess had only been without her cell phone for a couple of days.

“You can call her when we get where we’re going. Let’s move.”

“Black, wait. There’s something weird about this poster showing up now.”

“ ‘Now’?” he echoed, warily.

“So soon after the Four Seasons. You said that Raymond knew more about me than you did. If that’s true, then he could also know about Grace. I have to be sure that she’s okay. Let me call her.”

“What if she’s not okay?” Black demanded. “I can’t save the world, sweetheart. Your mechanic is in trouble too, once he sees this, and he knows you’ve dyed your hair.”

Tess heard the mounting stress in his tone. He was scared, all right. Maybe more than she was. She tried a dose of reverse psychology to steady him and he didn’t fall for it.

“If you can’t wait, then don’t. Go without me.”

His jaw tensed in the now-familiar sign of internal struggle. Tess allowed herself a moment to notice his handsome features, the broad planes of his brow and cheekbone, his sharp straight nose, and lips that were full when he relaxed but were more often thinned with temper, displeasure, or generally bad attitude. She watched his face soften beneath her gaze and thought she had won—

—then he spun on his heel and strode out the door.

………

She waited, but he didn’t come back. She jumped at every creak and squeak, hope and fear running neck and neck in the adrenaline rush, but he didn’t come back. Only when the tattered window shade gradually changed from opaque to translucent did she admit defeat.

For an empowering instant, she told herself she was safer without him. Since they had yet to be legally integrated into society, vampires policed themselves and, because of that, Black had more to fear than Tess did. He, not she, had pulled the trigger on Raymond’s protégé. No one would question if he disappeared. No one would put up posters of his face or file a missing persons report. He probably wouldn’t be treated as a homicide, either, assuming that he left a corpse. Tess knew that vampires died when they were shot with a flare gun, but she hadn’t stuck around to see what had happened to the one after the fire went out. Had the body turned to ash on the hotel room carpet? Had it steamed into thin air? All she recalled was the keening, curdling scream, and the form of a beautiful woman writhing in agony as her skin burned from the inside out.

She didn’t want Black to die like that. She didn’t want him to die at all.

The thought bugged her enough to get her moving. Black’s paranoia had made an impression; she used the front desk phone rather than risk being seen outdoors for no good reason.

Grace’s phone almost went to voice mail. Tess was about to disconnect when a click preceded a murky, “Hello?” and she knew she’d disrupted her sister’s sleep.

“Hey, sis, it’s me.”

“Tess?” The fog vanished from Grace’s voice. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I’m fine. I just wanted to let you know so you can quit posting my face all over town.”

“Say what?”

A trickling chill pooled in Tess’s stomach. “Are you okay?” she asked, trying to keep her tone casual.

“I’m kinda confused, but that might be sleep deprivation. What are you talking about? Who’s posting your face all over town?”

I thought you were. Aloud, she lost some of her nonchalance. “Are you at home?”

“Yeah …”

“Stay there. I’ll be right over.”

“Tess, are you in trouble?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there. Stay put and don’t be home to anyone but me. See you in a bit.” She hung up before Grace could ask anything more and was suddenly grateful that Black had dumped her cell phone. The darned devices were privacy time bombs, waiting for some lunatic to press the button and release personal information all over cyberspace. A sewer worker was less likely to hack a pink-skinned iPhone than a vampire maven was to milk the chrome-clad one stolen from his lover’s plaything—as Tess threw her thrift store bags in the back of a dirty cab, she remembered that Travis had housed all sorts of goodies on his phone, including photos and phone numbers. And she hadn’t missed it when he died. She hadn’t thought of it at all, mostly because she hadn’t packed up his belongings. She’d been unable to face erasing his presence to make it seem like he’d never been there. Grace had offered to help and been rebuffed. After that, things had changed between the sisters.

Tess kept an eye out the back window as the cab headed toward the upscale mall where she’d left her vehicle. The morning commute had yet to begin and traffic was light both on the street and on the sidewalk. She spotted Aurora hanging with a couple of trashier-dressed peers; had Black gone to her after leaving the hotel? Was her come-hither sass at passing cars meant to throw his own off his trail? Tess was tempted to roll down the window and ask, but Aurora had made her allegiance plain. She would hide Black from Tess as well as from the vampires. Despite the snub, Tess hoped the hooker wouldn’t suffer for her part in Black’s escape—assuming that he did escape. He had nowhere to go and no means to get there. Somehow Tess doubted that Raymond would quit searching for him. The lord of the locals hadn’t struck her as the forgiving type and forever was only a long time to hold a grudge if you didn’t have it. Raymond could afford to keep the hunt alive indefinitely.

But Black was no longer her problem. He had walked out; she hadn’t tossed him. She sat back in the cab and left the south side behind, grateful to be getting out of the stews even if it put her out in the open. Video surveillance was everywhere in the downtown core. If she was caught on film, so was anyone who accosted her, and she did have people who cared. Human people, mortals like her, the species in charge. If she disappeared for real, complete strangers would muster the resources to find her. Tess was no snob, but her place in the social order had never been so reassuring.

Some rube, she thought, darkly. Black had probably meant it ironically, but it still stung.

To be continued …

Boo Hiss

You know those rivalries that go so far back no one can recall when they started? Well, the Philadelphia Flyer/New York Islander rivalry isn’t one of them. I’ve loathed the Isles since the late 70s, when they were consistently pitted against my boys and robbed them of the Stanley Cup in 1980. (Bob Nystrom scored in OT. I’d had surgery the day before game 7 and hauled my drugged-out self from bed in anticipation of a Flyer win and, yes, I’m still bitter.)

Okay, maybe they had more scoring talent. They had Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier, Denis Potvin, two Sutters, a Goring, a Tonelli, a Tambellini and – my father’s favourite (not) – Clark Gillies, but they also had a rat bastard goalie in Billy Smith, who didn’t need three inches above his knob with that much skill up front.

I’m talking about his goalie stick, people.

Anyway, old grudges die hard, and though both teams have become mere shadows of their brutal past, it yet pains me above all when the Flyers lose to the Islanders.

As they lost, last night. They got a point from the game and are now 22^nd in the league standings, but a playoff appearance seems unlikely unless they start to play like they deserve it.

As for the Islanders … they’re in 7^th place and pretty well assured a post-season run.

Kill me now.