“Don’t scream. Don’t let your new boyfriend out there know I’m still here.” Greg’s whispered instructions seemed more than a little redundant, as he still had his hand clamped firmly down over my mouth. He held me so tightly that I could barely move, but I managed a slight nod. He eased his hand away from my mouth and loosened his grip enough for me to take a step away from him.
I glanced around for something to serve as a weapon, but there wasn’t anything nearby. My letter opener was in the cleaning bucket in the other office. I had a chopstick under my shirt, but it would take some effort to fish it out. I didn’t think I had time. I needed to find better places to hide my weapons.
“Where have you been hiding, Elle? I missed you.” Greg’s voice was cool, slightly mocking.
“Don’t call me Elle. Don’t say my name at all. In fact, don’t talk to me.” I was babbling, my fear was bubbling up and spilling out into words.
“My, my,” Greg laughed softly, “aren’t we defensive? I just asked where you’ve been. I came home and you were just…”—he raised both hands, palms upwards, and gently shrugged—“gone. Poof. Disappeared. And the next time I came home, all of your things had gone with you. Along with several of mine.” He took a step closer, and I backed toward the desk.
“Then I try to talk to you at school and you run from me. What’s wrong, sweetheart?” He backed me up against the desk and I leaned as far away from him as possible.
This was definitely not the Greg I knew. The Greg I knew wouldn’t have tried to intimidate me. Maybe other people—he’d always had that streak in him, something slightly aggressive that made him want to win; it was why he’d become a lawyer. But he would never have tried to frighten me. Vampire-Greg, however, wanted me scared.
I didn’t want to be scared. I was tired of being scared. But I couldn’t seem to help it. I mean, he was a vampire. And vampires are inherently creepy. And he’d talked about smelling me, which had a pretty big ick factor all by itself.
I aimed for bravado, anyway.
“You were dead, Greg. I saw you. I didn’t want to stay in the apartment where my fiancé had just died.”
“I’m not dead, Elle. I’m right here, right in front of you.” His voice had gotten even softer than before. It sent chills up my spine. “You could come home to me, Elle. I miss you.”
Oh, no. Please tell me that my vampiric ex-fiancé was not trying to get back together with me.
Oh, but he was. “Nothing has to change, Elle.”
“You’re a vampire, Greg. You drink blood to stay alive.” Sometimes it’s best to state the obvious, just in case someone has missed its significance.
“So? Diabetics inject human insulin to stay alive.”
“That’s not the same thing!”
“Isn’t it? It’s all about the blood, Elle.”
“So you’re claiming what? That vampirism is a disease?” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. This was far too much like a fight we could have had when we lived together—minus the “you’re a vampire” bit, of course.
“You could put it that way. We were good together, Elle. We could be again.” He stared into my eyes. His were brown, just as I remembered them, brown and soft. And warm and inviting. I felt myself leaning toward him. Maybe he was right. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to just go home together. Forget that all of this had ever happened. Just go home and sit on our couch, staring into his eyes. His eyes. Something about his eyes.
Suddenly his nostrils flared and he jerked his head toward the door, breaking our eye contact. Just as suddenly, I felt my head clear from the dangerous haze that had enveloped it without my even noticing. I took a step back, farther away from Greg.
He moved back toward the side of the door so that he would be behind it when it opened.
And then he…. Look. I know that “melted into the shadows” is a cliché. But that’s what he did. He stepped backwards, and then the light sort of swirled around him. Like the way sugar crystals disappear in iced tea, he just dissolved.
So. Things I Know For Sure About Vampires: One, they can be killed with a wooden stick. Two, once they’re dead they just lie there. Three, they really can hypnotize you with their eyes. And four, they can dissolve into shadows.
The door opened and Malcolm stuck his head through. “Find anything in here?” he asked.
“Um. No. Not yet.”
“Well, let’s hurry up and finish so we can get the hell out of here.”
“Can’t we just leave now?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“We really ought to finish cleaning. We don’t want to give them any reason to suspect that we were here for anything other than we claimed. I’m going to the next office.”
“I’ll come with you.” My voice fairly squeaked by the end of the sentence and Malcolm gave me a strange look, but I wasn’t about to stay in the room with Greg hiding in the shadows.
I don’t know how I knew that he would leave me alone while I was with Malcolm. I suppose it was a pretty good guess, given the fact that he’d waited until I was alone to try to talk to me. And I could argue that since I knew Greg was a vampire and Malcolm didn’t, I had a better shot at defending us if Greg decided to attack. But I have to admit that I wasn’t thinking about it even that clearly. I just wanted to get away from Greg and I didn’t want to be alone. So I followed Malcolm into the third office.
We cleaned up in there pretty quickly. I realized when I emptied the trash into my big plastic garbage bag that my hands were shaking. Badly. But I managed to do a fairly good job of dusting and even managed to block the camera with my body while Malcolm rummaged through the desk.
That made me think about my exchange with Greg—was it all recorded on the video camera in Pearson’s office? That thought made me break out into a sweat, but since there really wasn’t anything I could do about it, I finally decided to leave it alone.
In retrospect, I sometimes wonder why I didn’t tell Malcolm that Greg was back in the office. It might have saved us a whole lot of trouble later on. But he’d want to know how Greg had gotten in without attracting our attention, and trying to explain that might have led to some sort of explanation of the whole vampire thing, and I really didn’t want to go there. Not yet.
I should have. I realize that now. But I didn’t.
So when we walked back into Pearson’s office together to finish the cleaning job I hadn’t really started earlier, I was the only one frantically scanning the shadows for any swirly vampirey shapes.
I didn’t see any. What I did see was a piece of paper folded in half sitting on Pearson’s desk. I was certain it hadn’t been there before.
While Malcolm vacuumed, I dusted the room. I waited until his back was to me, then picked up the paper and glanced down at it. I quickly crumpled it into a ball and shoved it into my pocket. My hands were shaking again.
The note was in Greg’s handwriting. It read, “We’re not done talking. I’ll find you. G.”
* * *
“You know, there’s something a little strange about your ex,” Malcolm said.
Tell me about it.
“So,” Malcolm said when I didn’t answer him, “he was the one who was chasing you the other night, right?”
Damn. I was hoping he hadn’t noticed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So why didn’t you tell me that before we went in?”
“I didn’t think he’d be there.” It sounded lame, even to me, but Malcolm just stared at me thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.
We hadn’t spoken much on the way from the law offices to the train station. I had been too busy watching out for vampires.
I didn’t know the reason for Malcolm’s silence, and frankly, I didn’t care.
I changed clothes in the bathroom at Grand Central Station. I’d always been amused at the laminated signs up in those bathrooms—they list all the things that one cannot do while in the Grand Central restrooms. The list included things like “bathing.”
Now I wasn’t quite as amused. After hours of scrubbing out law offices and confronting my undead ex, I would have been happy to sluice myself off in the Grand Central sinks. But I had to satisfy myself with unstuffing my cleaning-lady clothes and peeling off the pantyhose, then shimmying into a clean pair of jeans and t-shirt. I shoved the dirty clothes deep into a trash can as I walked out of the bathroom. I wouldn’t be using a disguise again—it clearly didn’t work against Creepy Vampire Senses—and I really didn’t want to wear anything that Greg had touched. My skin still crawled when I thought about the way I had almost fallen into his eyes.
Note to self: Eye contact with vampires, bad.
The files I had printed from Greg’s computer were in a backpack. The note he had left on the desk was in the pocket of my jeans. I had almost thrown it away with the disguise, but at the last minute had decided to fish it out and keep it. I didn’t want it floating around Grand Central.
I’d been intensely watchful on the train, nervously fingering the chopstick I held in my hand all the way home. More and more, enclosed spaces made me uncomfortable.
And now we were back in my apartment. The big black garbage bag full of lawyerly trash sat on my apartment floor in front of us.
But we weren’t sorting through that stuff yet. We were sitting on my couch staring at the wrinkled, sweat-stained printouts from Greg’s computer that lay on my coffee table. I smoothed my hand across them for the fourth or fifth time, trying to flatten out the creases they’d developed when I’d folded them and shoved them down the front of my pants. I think maybe I was hoping they would suddenly say something else. “A little strange” didn’t begin to cover it.
Across the top of the first page in big, bold, black letters read the word “VAMPIRARCHY.” Under that was a name: Salvaggi.
The rest of the page was divided into five columns. Each of the columns had one of New York’s five boroughs as a heading: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Staten Island. In each column was a list of names, the top name on the list in bold typeface.
“Vampirarchy? What does that mean?” asked Malcolm.
I leaned over to the bookshelf against the wall and pulled out a dictionary.
“Vampire hierarchy,” I said.
“That’s really a word?”
“Apparently so.” I slid the dictionary back into its space on the shelf.
“I thought you said your ex was mixed up with the mob.”
“I thought he was. Maybe it’s some kind of gang stuff?” I was reaching, but I didn’t think Malcolm was ready for the truth. And more than that, I was getting used to having somebody on my side. I didn’t want him to decide I was crazy and bail on me.
“Hmm. Maybe. You think there’s some gang out there called The Vampires?”
“Geez, Malcolm. I don’t know. I’m not the one who wrote the files. I just printed them out.”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean anything by it. Let’s just go on the assumption that this is gang-related. What does this paper tell us?”
“Well, it tells us that there’s some sort of… overlord? Something like that. Named Salvaggi.” The name was familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it before.
No. Not seen it, not written down. Maybe heard it?
“Okay. So if Salvaggi is the Big Boss, what does that tell us?”
“That these guys are regional bosses who report to him, maybe.” I looked back at the names more carefully. “So. Augustus runs Manhattan, Deirdre runs Queens, Moshe runs Brooklyn, Santiago runs the Bronx, and Donatello runs Staten Island?”
“Augustus, Deirdre, Moshe, Santiago, and Donatello? That does not sound like a list of gang names to me. Maybe this is about drugs?”
“Maybe.” I knew I sounded distracted, but I had suddenly remembered where I’d heard the name Salvaggi before. Nick had said it to me. That was the name of the vampire guy who had killed Pearson’s father. So if this really was a vampirarchy, then they were more organized than I would have guessed. I mean, inasmuch as I’d ever considered vampires—which was pretty much never until the last few weeks—I always assumed that they were solitary creatures, more prone to skulking around alone than to setting up corporate-style structures. Then again, the fact that the word “vampirarchy” even existed meant that someone knew about this.
Trust Greg to find the biggest word possible to describe something.
Anyway, back to the point: If Salvaggi was the big guy, then these other people were regional bosses, and the names under them must be—what? My mind was racing, filling in the corporate metaphor. These other guys must be the vampire equivalent of mid-level managers. There were at least ten guys on each list. Fifty managers. With who knows how many “employee” vampires.
Oh, God.
I must have whispered that last part out loud, because Malcolm looked over at me. “What? You okay?”
“Yeah. I think I just realized for the first time exactly how big and bad this thing Greg’s into must be.”
“He tried to kill you and you’re just now realizing how bad it is?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I knew it, but it’s different having it all on paper right there in front of you.”
I flipped to the next page. In the same five-column layout with the same five-borough headings was a list of addresses. There were at least six addresses in each column—eight in the Bronx, seven in Manhattan.
I was guessing that these were vampire hideouts. And at least two of them were disconcertingly close to Fordham and therefore close to my own home address.
Great. I was living in Bronxylvania.
We called it a night after I realized that there were vampire dens all over the city. I needed to think about that fact, and I needed Malcolm to be gone while I thought. Of course, we didn’t stop until we’d looked at all the pages I’d printed out, but the rest of the pages were covered with codes and numbers that made no sense to me. Malcolm offered to take them away to try to make some sense out of them. I agreed—he was the mathematician, after all. Unless they’re dates, numbers just confuse me. These clearly weren’t dates.
I half wanted Malcolm to stay at my place that night. He hadn’t worn a disguise to the law offices and Greg had seen him. And it’s hard to tell if you’ve been followed home when the guy who might be following you can swirl away into any convenient shadows. So for all I knew, Greg knew exactly where we had gone and would be outside waiting for one of us to leave. The thought gave me chills.
But when I suggested to Malcolm that he might want to stay over on my couch, he gave me a strange, indecipherable look.
“Your couch? No thanks, not the couch. I’d rather go home.”
“I’m worried that someone might figure out what we’ve done and come after us, Malcolm. I don’t want you walking home alone. It scares me.”
“Nobody followed us, Elle. I was watching.”
Yeah. So was I. But I couldn’t tell him why that wasn’t any guarantee that Greg hadn’t followed us home.
We finally compromised. He called a cab and I watched him from behind the locked glass door of my apartment building while the car pulled away.
I don’t know if the whole “invite them into your home” thing about vampires extends to entire apartment buildings. The fact that Nick had hustled me off into a new place indicated that vampires did indeed have to have an invitation to come into individual apartments, but the building itself might be another matter. I mean, my building had locks on both the inner and outer doors and only tenants and their guests were supposed to be able to get in, but I didn’t understand vampire entry rules—so for all I knew, a vampire could be hiding in the elevator waiting for me.
That thought sent me bounding up the four flights to my place. I was breathing heavily by the time I slammed the door behind me and shot the bolt into its slot to lock it.
Millie wound herself around my ankles and mewed at me inquisitively. I picked her up and stroked her. “I know, Mill. I haven’t paid enough attention to you lately. Let’s go snuggle up in bed.”
It was almost 3:00 in the morning by then. I checked out all the darker corners of my apartment (yes, I know, vampires can’t get in without an invitation. But I was scared. I did it more to reassure myself than because I thought there would really be anyone there). And then I crawled into bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
At 8:00 the next morning, a thought came to me as I drifted through my morning sleep haze. I sat bolt upright in bed.
What had Malcolm meant, exactly, when he’d said he didn’t want to stay on my couch?