Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Blood Price
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
I carry in the pocket of my coat a pack of bills. Vampire currency: one hundred thousand-pint notes.
For the last month, I’ve eaten garlic by the clove, raw or baked; garlic fritters; garlic pies; garlic slices on salads of garlic leaves. I’ve washed it all down with a garlic distillation so astringent my lips have permanently puckered back from my teeth.
Which is fine; now everyone can see by the smallness of my incisors what I am and what I am not.
A watcher meets me at the gate. His cloak is billowing as there’s wind, even though the humid air is absolutely still.
“What’s a smiler like you want in here?” he says.
“Tribute to pay.” He flinches at my breath. “In the House of Eight Hands.”
“Lucky them,” says the vampire. “Be quick about it, and be gone.”
I follow the streets I’ve memorized from maps. They only let each of us visit once. The crowd parts, and I reach the palace of the Eight Hands clan in under five minutes.
As I walk through the door, the wood-detector beeps half-heartedly. A guard slouches over and waves a wand up and down. She turns her face away, either because of the amulets all over my clothes or the cloud of garlic scent, and glances up only when the wand shrills at the level of my heart.
I pull out the wad of bills.
“Paper,” I say. “Made of wood. I can leave them outside, if you’d rather…”
“Funny,” she says. “Go.”
I do, down corridors of scarlet and black marble to the throne room.
I don’t rush through the formal statement of thanks for another year of oppressive safekeeping, for not draining too many of us too much too often. I savor the time while I still have a purpose, before I’m another retired pariah shunned by living and undead.
The Night Queen takes the cash, smells it, counts it.
I back away.
I bow low and drop the splinter I’d carried with the money. It joins a hundred years’ of past couriers’ splinters in the hollow between two loose flagstones. In another hundred, a smiler will sneak into the palace with a tube of glue. The next year, a stake will be waiting under the flagstones, and the queen and all her clan will turn to dust.
Something else to think about now I’m retired.
Refining Fire
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
The city burned with slow fire. The burn line moved about a block an hour, tongues of flame dancing with underwater grace. As soon they heard about it on their police band receivers, members of the Phoenix League began getting the word out by phone tree, blog, and Twitter. In half an hour, everyone who wanted to know was on their way to a railroad yard a couple hundred yards from the line.
I didn’t want to know. Even if the fire worked the way the Phoenixers said it did — and all the studies said it didn’t — I was happy the way I was.
Nobody else felt the same way, though. My teachers always said I was unfocused; my friends said I was too cautious; my dad said I was shy; my mom said I was too proud to ask for help; my girlfriend said I was too sensitive to what other people thought.
The lot of them must have planned it months ago. There was no way to know when the fire would start, or where, or which direction it would spread. So they must have had everything ready: the chloroform, the duct tape, the handcuffs. (It may have just been the wooziness, but I didn’t know Aunt Harriet could drive like that.)
They handcuffed me to a chain link fence in the railway yard, gave me a speech about how this might seem cruel but I’d thank them later, and hugged me. All of them. Even my cousin Burt who’s in the Marines. Then they left me.
The Phoenix-folks walked around, set up folding chairs, chatted — from the stories they swapped, it was clear most of them had done this a few times.
“It doesn’t hurt, exactly,” said a heavyset fellow in a suit. “Third time’s the charm,” he said. “I know I can be even better.”
He and all the others were disappointed when the wind changed and the fire went somewhere else.
An hour went by. Two. I wished my family had left me my iPod.
The Phoenix-leaguers were starting to pack, some in tears, when the van drove up, Aunt Harriet still at the wheel.
They had me out of there in seconds.
“I don’t know what we were thinking,” said dad.
“I love you just the way you are,” said Fiona, and everyone else’s eyes said the same.
I could still feel the fire-heat in their hands.