The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge (33 page)

—the painted plywood lid of the altar leaning against the far wall of the room—

—Matt standing beside the coffin and looking down into it, a gentle smile on his face—

—a hand pushing out of the dirt—

—two men in Changes shirts turning toward him—

Many things happened at once: Chan ran to Matt. Matt noticed him. The first of the onlookers burst in. The staffer from outside parted the curtains. The other two stepped toward Chan.

Chan grabbed Matt’s shoulder and pulled the Do Not Turn order from his inside jacket pocket at the same time.

Matt opened his mouth to speak and raised his hand to hit Chan.

Chan leaned close enough to Matt’s ear that he could whisper into it. “Don’t,” he said. “It’s over. I have his instructions. They’re legal. Let me do what I have to do, and nothing happens to your business.”

“I could kill you,” Matt whispered back.

Chan crooked his head at the people watching them from the corner. “In front of them?”

Matt lowered his hand and shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re taking away from him,” he said.

“Yes,” Chan said. His words caught for a second in his throat. “Yes, I do.”

Three more people poked their heads around the opposite corner of the drapes. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Matt glared at him for a second. “I hope you remember this for a very long time.”

“I will,” Chan said. “You know I will.”

Matt nodded. “Sorry for all the drama here, folks,” he said. “It’s just part of the show.”

A second hand pushed its way out of the dirt.

Chan released his grip and turned to face the crowd. “As it turns out,” he said, “we’re not quite ready here. Sorry.”

“Whatever,” the tall woman said. “You promised us drinks.”

“They’re on the house,” Matt said. “Gentlemen,” he motioned toward the two staffers who had crept closer to Chan, “please take these fine folks upstairs and make sure we comp them for the rest of the night.”

“Are you coming with us?” the tall woman said, staring at Chan.

“No,” he said, “but my friend here will join you.” He clapped Matt on the back. “I need to finish up here.”

Matt stared at Chan for a moment before he said to the man by the drapes, “Give him all the time he needs in here, and make sure no one disturbs him.” He motioned to the other two staffers and walked toward the onlookers. “Shall we all go get those drinks?”

He held aside the corner drapes as all the people filed out. As he turned to follow the last one, he paused and looked back at Chan. “I was trying to help him.”

“Not your choice,” Chan said.

Matt shook his head. “You’ll understand one day, and then you’ll realize what you’ve done to him.” He paused. “Don’t come back here, Diego. Not ever.”

Chan nodded. “I hope I won’t need to.”

Matt left.

The arms now extended from the dirt past the elbows. Chan stared at them for a moment and took a slow, deep breath.

No point in delaying this.

He undid the clasp holding one of the stakes in his sleeve, pulled it out, and put the piece of purpleheart through his belt. He grabbed the two elbows and pulled upward until Sam was sitting in front of him, his entire torso visible above the dirt. Sam was fully clothed. A red dish towel covered his friend’s face.

Chan removed it.

Sam opened his eyes and immediately squeezed them shut. After a few seconds, he eased them open again, letting in the dim light slowly. He swiveled his head back and forth, his eyes wild, his jaw working but no words coming out.

Chan noticed a small cup of water on the left end of the edge of the altar and put it in Sam’s hands.

Sam chugged the water.

Three seconds later, he grabbed his stomach, bent forward, and threw up the water onto the dirt in front of him. “Oh, God,” Sam said. “That’s not right. Why did that hurt so much?”

Chan shook his head and waited.

Sam scanned the room again, this time more slowly, and then focused on Chan. “So this it?” he said. “Matt turned me, and it worked? You see it, but until it happens to you . . .” His body trembled at the memory.

“Yeah.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone,” Chan said. “It’s just us.”

“I feel sick,” Sam said. “Weak. Really weak. I thought they were strong.”

“They are. You would be. You need to drink first, though.”

Sam nodded. His eyes went to Chan’s neck, as if he could see the pulsing of the blood right through the jacket’s collar and Chan’s long hair. When his eyes again met Chan’s, his fangs had extended. “Would you let me?”

“No,” Chan said. He held up the Do Not Turn statement that Matt had filed with the San Francisco authority four years earlier. “I’m here to respect your wishes.”

Sam glanced at Chan’s waist and saw the stake. “You mean, you’re here to kill me.”

Chan wouldn’t let himself look away. “Yes. Matt turned you against your wishes, and I’m here to fix that. You always said you never wanted to live as one of them.”

“I’m not so sure of that now.”

“You went over and over this with me. You signed the statement. You made me take a copy. You made me promise I’d come if anyone ever turned you against your will.” Chan put away the paper. “I’m here.”

“I was dying,” Sam said. “Now I’m not. That changes a lot.”

“You knew you were dying for two months,” Chan said. “You could have retracted the statement. You could have given Matt legal permission to change you. You didn’t.”

Sam shook his head. “I don’t care about all of that. That’s over. Now, I don’t want to die.” He grabbed Chan’s left arm, his grip stronger than Chan had expected. “Now, I need to eat. You’re my friend. Help me. I won’t take much.”

“Do you remember why you signed this statement?” Chan said. “Why you didn’t want to live this way? Why you asked me to help? Why you told Barbara to contact me?”

“I don’t care!” Sam said. “I don’t care about you or about her or about any of that crap! I just need to eat! Help me, or get Matt. He’s a real friend, not some drift-in, drift-out ghost from my past. He’ll let me feed.”

Chan nodded. He pushed off Sam’s hand and stood. He extended his left arm. “Lean back,” he said.

Sam extended his fangs fully. “I was wrong,” he said. “I’m sorry. You are a true friend.” Sam grabbed Chan’s arm with his right hand to pull it closer.

“Yes,” Chan said. “Yes, I am.” He pulled on his jacket sleeve to expose the veins in his wrist.

Sam opened his mouth, Chan’s left wrist only a few inches away.

With his right hand, moving as fast as he could, faster than even Sam knew he could, faster than Sam would have been able to move even if he had already fed and completed the change, Chan pulled the purpleheart stake from his belt and slammed it into Sam’s chest.

The impact pushed Sam back onto the dirt. He screamed as he released Chan.

Chan used the heel of his left hand to slam the stake further into Sam.

He felt Sam’s death shudder through the wood.

Sam turned to dust.

Chan stood in the dark room. The drapes rustled as the staffer on the other side of the curtain glanced in and then looked away. The music playing outside thrummed a steady beat he finally noticed again. He put the stake back up his sleeve. He bowed his head and closed his eyes, not sure what to say, what could matter now.

Sam was right on one point. He had been the friend who’d drifted in and out, visiting every few years, and then only when work brought him nearby. Through it all, though, Chan had always considered Sam his closest friend, one of the two people who’d known him as long as he’d known himself, since the day they’d met in the orphanage and Chan’s memories had begun. Matt had been there, too, but Sam and Chan had agreed that when Matt had made the change, he’d given up their friendship in the process.

Chan walked out of the room, up the stairs, through the bar, and onto the street. He passed Matt, but they didn’t make eye contact.

The club’s lights flooded the street with enough illumination that Chan could see every face clearly in the orange-and-yellow-tinted glare, but he ignored them all. He stopped long enough to text a message to Barbara:

“Sam’s gone.”

He wanted to throw away the phone then, rip off his jacket, discard everything on him, and run, run just to be anywhere else. Instead, he forced himself to stay still. He thought of the man his friend had been, and then he added two more lines:

“He told me to thank you for sending me.

“His last words were that I should tell you he loved you.”

Chan tucked his phone into his jacket and walked away from the club, away from his past, and into what remained of the night.

MARK L. VAN NAME
has published four novels (
One Jump Ahead
,
Slanted Jack
,
Overthrowing Heaven
, and
Children No More
) as well as an omnibus collection of his first two books (
Jump Gate Twist
); edited or co-edited two previous anthologies (
Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology
and
Transhuman
), and written many short stories. He is the CEO of a fact-based marketing and technology assessment firm, Principled Technologies, Inc., and has worked with computer technology for his entire professional career. He has published over a thousand articles in the computer trade press, as well as a broad assortment of essays and reviews. He has also created and performed three spoken-word shows:
Science Magic Sex
;
Wake Up Horny, Wake Up Angry
; and
Mr. Poor Choices
. For more information, visit his web site, www.marklvanname.com, or follow his blog, markvanname.blogspot.com.

His afterword:

Diego Chan and his world have been knocking around in my head for quite some time now. This story is their debut.

Like so many other urban fantasy settings, his world is one in which vampires and other creatures exist, but in it, as in ours, government regulations and political groups and all the other complicating factors of everyday life play important roles.

Diego is also a character who fascinates me, a man who makes his living in an unusual way and who lives a very different life from most of us.

The heart of this story, though, is none of that. In this tale, Diego has to deal in a very brutal way with the loss of a very close friend, a friend who ended up on a path Diego could not support. Many, probably most of us have had that experience, watching someone who mattered greatly to us turn down a road we would not follow. Saying a final goodbye, really writing off such a person, is incredibly hard—even when the act is not the extreme one that Diego has to take.

As time permits, I plan to write a series of books in which Diego discovers just what he is and, ultimately, why he is what he is.

BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN

CAITLIN KITTREDGE

Outside Lawrence, Kansas

1947

I am reborn in fire.

I am a fallen star, burning up, steam rising from my skin.

Naked under a night sky that unfurls endlessly, untainted by mountains or cities, I stay very still. Even then, I don’t know what’s really happened.

It takes me some time. After I sit up, draw my knees to my breasts, feel the frozen dirt under my flanks. See the twenty-foot circle my arrival has burned into the winter-dead cornfield. Watch stray snowflakes melt before they even get within a foot of my skin.

My bare skin. My flawless, new bare skin.

I manage to get up after a while. I’m sick and empty. My nerves burn and my bones ash and my skin gives off radiant heat that leaves a trail of black footprints branded into the mean, ice-crusted snow.

I look up. Up at the stars, Orion and Scorpio and Ursa Major spinning over the flat, featureless land all around. The stars are older than me. But not by much.

There’s a road. A state route, paved and slick with black ice. I stay on the edge. I don’t know the fragility of this new form, cooling like an ingot just from the furnace. I’ve lost everything. I am completely new. I could, for all I know, be completely human.

Fuck, I hope not.

I walk. There is no sound, nothing but the wind and the clouds and the crackling cold.

I’m cold.

I’ve never been cold before.

After a time, a truck comes. A rattlebone Ford, pitted with rust, driven by a man in a feed cap. He stares at me. I stare at him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks, finally.

I look down the road. It’s a ribbon of ink across the dirty page of this place. I suppose it’s as good a road as any. “Wherever you are,” I said. His open mouth joins his stare.

“I’m headed for Topeka,” he manages.

I walk around the truck. The engine shudders and rattles. The fan belt shrieks. I get in the passenger side. “Topeka sounds all right with me,” I say.

He grinds the gears hard enough to bring out a little smoke. There’s a variety program on the radio. A man is singing about a woman who did him wrong. I sympathize, even though I’m the woman.

The road rolls on. My savior watches the road. I watch him.

I see the sin on his soul, the burden and the stain. I see the young girls in diners and truck stops. I see their twisted faces and his nubby hands on their necks. I see the red knot at his center, the murderous impulse.

Maybe I’m not human yet. Not entirely.

I wrap the man’s jacket around myself as we drive. He asks me questions. I don’t answer.

I see his last girl, rolled in a tarp in the bed of this rusty truck, and left behind in a cornfield just like mine. I feel the hunting knife in the pocket of this jacket.

I watch him drive then, switching gears until I’m sure I’ve got it.

A sign whips by. A hundred fifty-two miles to Topeka.

I touch the edge of the knife.

I might be all right here on earth after all.

Eden, Kansas

Five years later

1.

Across the room, I watched my reflection in the mirror. I’d started the night with my hair rolled up and the nicer of my two decent dresses washed and pressed. My dress was on the floor by the wardrobe. My hair fell into my face, cutting dark lines across my vision.