DANCE WITH A DEMON

by Apache

Content:
Het
Vachon/Evangaline
Implied or Graphic Sexual Situations
No Violence

Sequel to "Mad, Bad, etc."--

Remember the young vampire Nick met (and groped) in "Sons of Belial," the one CK dubbed "Miss Snarl-Hiss-Thud?"  I've called her Evangeline.

I found Urs in my bed when I got home.  A vampire's accursed blessing on her, Urs took me in without a whisper about my mood, not a whisper of surprise when she read the four kills in my blood.  I buried myself in her, spilled myself in her, drank her essence into myself over and over that long night and day until finally I was just exhausted and slept, still tangled with her, we two immortal slaughterers coupling in one of God's churches under the mild eyes of the Virgin who was supposed to intercede with Christ for all of us nice Spanish boys.  //You got me this, Maria?  *Muy bien, gozetelo* -- fine, watch and enjoy.//

I woke up next to Urs feeling pure vampire, pure rage, full of blood... and started thinking of Tracy.

Poisons... oh, she's a much crueler sting than a little curare. //Monster.  Yeah, I think I'll go be a monster...// I'd been pure vampire for twenty hours, what a luxury, no lying, no fake mortal anything for a whole night and day.

//Yeah, babe, I'm in the mood to do the Monster Nosh -- right on your succulent neck, sweet fruit, sweet girl.//

Tracy was not in her apartment.  That meant she'd run back home to Daddy-- an easy trip to the burbs.  And I heard her, asleep in an upstairs room, a heart whose patter I know all too well, healthy young heart.  Fast asleep.  The whole house was fast asleep.  I went in through an unlocked window-- Daddy Vetter doesn't think he needs alarms.

The wolf in my heart was happy, hungry. Go on, monster--have the kill.  Leave her twisted in her bed for her parents to find, how delicious, and go home to Urs for another twenty hours or so of deliriously rabid sex and blood.

I couldn't do it.  I stood there looking at her, how her hair caught what little light came in from the night, at how simple and human her bed seemed... and there was the shape of her long body stretched out under the blanket, a body I want to explore and be explored by.

Did I breathe too loud?  Was the sheer force of my wanting too much?  She started to waken--

I ran for the Raven.  Coward, coward.

Coward-- that's what she called me to make me come back, last week -- one week-- seems like years.  Golden, gallant Tracy, who never hesitates to speak her mind to a vampire.  //'I don't think I like you anymore.' 'Monster.'//

Oh, she wants me... but that's not what saved her neck again tonight.  It's some awful -- "love, such a bitter emotion," was that what Lacroix said?  Is this love, this torment?  This horror-show of pain and desire is what poets sing and coo about, love?  This hideous lust-riddled hunger is Bogie in the rain with a note in his hand that says Ilsa isn't coming, get on the train, *sauve qui peut,* get out those who can -- this is what's behind the "man standing there with a comical expression on his face" -- five hundred years and it pours into -this-?

I wanted to pull the sheet away and kiss her face, stroke her cheek, her hands, the long slender forearms, that smooth slender neck.  To taste Tracy's mouth and find the flavors of toothpaste or chewing gum or diet cola lingering there on top of the savor of her saliva, with its hints of the taste of her blood.  To kiss her shoulders, her belly, her thighs. Insanity.  Helpless insanity.  To feel with my face, my mouth, the flower at the center of her -- and to drive my teeth through that soft flesh, spill her fruity blood into the petals and lap it away, smell the arousal, hear her heart quicken with desire, and have her have her have her--

Back to drinking, but no Urs in sight.  The blood was good, how could it not be, but my teeth ached with the desire to sink into a throat. Last night was great -- I haven't had a night that good since... oh, turn of the century, easy.  But I like Toronto, and my ass is about to be grass -- I just might squeak by on three of them -- a four-holer, two bites to the neck, could be a dog; a drowning, and I barely took a drink from him; and one that shouldn't turn up at all, she's in so many pieces; but that one in the movie house....  I probably just issued a gilt edged invitation to the Enforcers.  Still -- if only one gets caught -- well, let's see what Lacroix has to say.

And never mind the voice in my head -- remembering, especially, the one in the movie house and the one on the ferry who knew so many poems by heart -- the way her memory slid into mine and the poems lasted there for the first hour or so I spent in Urs' arms -- Ezra Pound's Cantos were her specialty, and his last poem-- "let those I love try to forgive what I have made--"  I felt bad.  I hate feeling bad.  //Tracy Tracy Tracy//

Bottle after bottle went down my throat... but nothing drowns this out, nothing.  It barely even dulls the ache.

However... my fairy goduncle seems to be on the job again tonight.  Here comes Lacroix, with a pretty girl in tow.  And then my senses said...// No, not a girl.//

One of us.  I licked my lips involuntarily, and saw Lacroix's amusement.

"Javier, my child... since you have some time to kill, I wonder if you might take the beautiful Evangeline off my hands?"

This was a command, of course, but hey-- please don't throw me in that briar patch.  Evangeline is tall, dark and fabulous and oh how her eyes say she is available.  My senses went nuts.  OK, maybe Tracy Vetter has a viselock on my heart tonight, but the rest of me just discovered it can still be distracted.

Evangeline is fly, folks, and she is also good to go.  Her eyes were burning..."Wanna dance?"

I nodded very slowly.  Our eyes had a long conversation, and then we both blinked.  I was thinking, hmmm.... may be some salvation in this night after all.

Why after nearly five centuries am I still so fucking stupid?

We danced.  It was all I could do to keep from drinking her right there in the front room. I had to keep my eyes closed to slits, couldn't get them back to human even for a second.  She liked that, laughed low in her throat at my lack of control; the young ones always love to get a taste of an old one, and here she had one in her hands who was about to drive his fangs into her in front of a roomful of mortals.  She danced me to the back, to some room, her hands wrapped in my hair then sliding down my back to grab my ass.  Anything she did, I did, and more.  Our kiss so hot and bloody I almost couldn't see for the red delirium in my mind... but my hands roved her body, went inside, came out, lifted her to me, and she wrapped herself around me like a basket of snakes....

"Perhaps you would take the beautiful Evangeline off my hands."  Yes, children, no good deed goes unpunished.  Ever.  Not in Mr. Lacroix's neighborhood.

It was in her blood.  This stupid fledgling had something on Nick Knight and was trying to blackmail Lacroix....  suicide.  The picture of Knight in her mind was weird, red-eyed, out of control, and very fresh... the Jiminy Cricket of the vampire world, and he'd almost ripped her head off.  In front of Lacroix, no less.

And Lacroix... "since you have some time to kill."  Damn her.  Damn him.  He knew I was hot to fuck and hot to kill and he gave me both.... damn his cruel eyes.  Evangeline... Lacroix wanted a kill, and he knew I was just the boy who'd do it.

How did he know?

And do I think the timing of this little incarnation of Uncle as entremetteuse is even remotely coincidental?  Nooooo... how -does- he contrive to know *everything?*   Think I'll ask him-- he'll enjoy not telling me.

We went up on the roof and continued our little dance..  She was very young, maybe three or four, incredibly happy to be a vampire, like she'd somehow joined the upper class.  She'd been a call girl, figured out that one of her clients was more than usually bent, and asked for it. Her master cut her loose almost right away, and she drifted here. Somewhere along the line she told me to call her Vangie.  So I called her Vangie, and suggested that Lacroix was maybe not the best friend she'd ever had.

"Oh, we get along fine," she said brightly.  "We understand each other."

We were stretched out on the asphalt shingle roof.  It would have been too cold for mortals, but we lay there under the stars and city lights like kids in summer, a little icy finger of wind drying us.

She snuggled onto my chest, and lapped pleasurably at the small residue of blood sweat on my skin.  A happy little sigh came out of me. It sure would be a shame to deprive the world of her... uh, enthusiasm.

"Vangie... Toronto is not a healthy place for you to live," I said.

I figured I could tell Lacroix the little cuckoo just flew away, and sell it.  Unless, of course, he decided to have a sip of -me,- but I was gambling he wouldn't care that much.

"But I'm dead," she said elegantly.  Very cute.

"Vangie," I had a hand tangled in her long brown hair -- the one part of us that feels exactly the same as a mortal's, I thought idly -- "Vangie, a word to the unwise:  go."  I leaned up and looked at her.  "Really.  Right off this roof, second star from the left, and straight on till morning."  I gave her a grin, nuzzled at her hair, softening it.  "Or almost morning, anyway."

She gave me a fey look.  The young ones, they can't read us as easily as we read them.  She found Tracy, Knight, Lacroix, in my blood, but not what I understood about her.

"You don't want me to tell your little mortal playmate about you?" she teased.  She curled a finger into my chest hair and pulled at it, enough to make the nerves twinge.

"No, pretty girl, I don't," I said patiently.  "But that's not why I'm saying you should go."  //She really is thick as a plank,// I was thinking.  //By now, she ought to know she's getting a free warning... if I gave Screed one-tenth of the clue she's gotten, he'd have been in Buenos Aires by now.//

"Maybe I'll just make your distraction go away," she continued, in a less teasing tone.  "Then you can concentrate on -me.-"  There was bloodthirst in her archness, now -- she was starting to think of Tracy as snack food.

"Vangie," I said.  "Really.  Time to go.  You know, see America first.  And don't come back."

"Detective Tracy Vetter," she said teasingly.  "Metro Police.  Night shift.  Lives alone.  Can't imagine why you haven't done it yourself."  Her eyes flushed to gold, the endless thirst of a fledgling. "Let's share her, Javier-- but let me have the heartblood, OK?"  She sounded like she was requesting a favorite song from a DJ.  "It's soooo good right out of the heart..."

I sat up, arms wrapped around her tight, cocked her head back with the hand that was snarled in her hair.  It lengthened the beautiful curve of her throat where the fang marks had already healed, the long auburn hair tumbling away from her forehead, off her nape, spilling softly over my arms.  "Ohhh, and the lungs, too," she continued obliviously. "Unless she smokes?"  My eyes had gone feral again; I leaned my face close to hers and breathed, "you really are going to make this easy, aren't you?" and struck.

I got close to a drain on the sheer violence of killing, broke her back somewhere along the line to stop her struggling-- but she wasn't dead when I pulled my mouth away from her throat.  It takes a lot to kill a vampire, even a new one.  Even with only a few drops of blood left in her, I had to stake her, which I hate-- but it was that or leave her for the sun, which would be even crueler.  She went to powder almost instantly, young as she was.

"I'm sorry," I told the ash, but in truth I just felt tired.  The same cold wisp of wind that had dried the sex-sweated blood off our bodies carried her ashes away from the roof of the Raven.

I went downstairs and found Lacroix leaning negligently on the bar.  I raised my eyebrows and said "Uncle."  I think I meant its old meaning, 'I surrender.' His eyebrows quirked for an instant, and he gave me one his cobra smiles.

"Quid pro quo, Javier," he said mildly. "You -did- say you wished to continue your residence in our fair city?  Though one might draw another conclusion entirely from the way you so indiscriminately reduced its population last night."  So he can even fix the Enforcers, at least this once -- why am I not surprised?

He smiled at me.  "Really, Javier, as wholly I sympathize with your dislike of the modern need to restrain our natures, I do think you must -curtail- your exuberance in the future."

I nodded.  That's why he's helping: he likes vampires who like being vampires.  Poor old dragon, with that hairshirt Knight for a child. Of course, so much as hint at that thought and Lacroix would stake me himself -- *no one* should dare to sympathize with him.

A glass of something -- someone -- that smelled good appeared at my elbow as if by magic.

I allowed myself one tiny bit of insolence, and left the glass untouched.  Went home, found Urs, and threw her out.  I want to be alone for a while.

Like maybe a century or two.

~ Go to "Echo" ~

~ Return to "Forever Knight" ~

~ Return to Apache's Archive ~