The freak smiled. “Sophie and I met last night,” he said. “I ran into her at a gallery south of Market.”
“A gallery?” asked Dena. “I thought you were…”
“Going to participate in the vampire games? I did, but I was a little early, so I crashed an opening. It wasn’t worth the effort. The stuff being exhibited was the kind of shit people buy to match their thousand-dollar couch. No message at all.”
Okay, we needed to back up a bit. “The vampire games?”
“Right, let me explain that one.” Dena slipped between Jason and me in an attempt to ease some of the mounting tension. “Once a month a group of people—”
“Vampires,” Jason corrected.
“Right, okay, let’s call them vampire people.” Dena folded her hands under her chin. “Anyhow, a whole bunch of vampire people get together and act out some kind of vampire story. It’s often based on a novel or a movie.”
“Have you read much about vampires?” Jason asked. He stepped to the side so we could have a full view of one another again.
“I’ve read Dracula and The Vampire Chronicles.”
“Then you know a lot about the creatures of the night. I often get to play the part of Dracula.”
“Really.”
“Yes, I am Dracula.”
You are insane is what you are. I examined Jason’s current ensemble. The velvet was gone and in its place were a pair of black suede jeans, a white dress shirt with the breast pocket not so carefully cut off, and the motorcycle jacket from the night before. Dena was right, Jason had a different approach to things.
“Last night, how did you know my name?”
“Well, when I was at Dena’s place I was looking through her bookcase and noticed that she had several titles from you, which sort of threw me off ’cause Dena’s not the type to buy into that whole bestseller thing. She’s more an Anaïs Nin type than a Jane Austen chick. So I got curious and flipped one open and saw your autograph. You wrote a pretty detailed message, so it stuck in my head. I recognized you from the picture in back.”
Dena shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”
“You were in the shower,” he explained without bothering to move his eyes in her direction. “I know I came on a bit strong. When I’m in vampire mode I can be a little dramatic.”
“Understandable.” Not.
“I got one of your books this morning. I just started it.”
“Oh? Which one?”
“Your first one. Criminally Insane.”
“Always good to start at the beginning. I hope it’s not too ‘Jane Austen’ for you.”
“No, I’m sure I’ll like it.” He brought his hand up to stroke Dena’s back. “She and I have similar tastes. Although, as a general rule, I’m not all that into fiction.”
“But you do like books about vampires.”
“Yeah, but I’m not so sure they’re all fiction.”
“Well.” I tried to choose my words carefully. “Parts of many novels aren’t. The writers tend to use a lot of accurate historical references.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Come on, you read the books. You had to have stopped sometimes and said to yourself, ‘Man, these characters are so real—too real.’ It must have crossed your mind that some of those guys are really out there—that the immortals exist.”
“I’ll concede that some of the writers who wrote on the topic are talented enough to bring their characters to life on the page, but I’m pretty sure it stops there.”
“And why are you so sure of that? Because our current western Judeo-Christian ethic says so? You need to broaden your thinking, Sophie. Open your mind to the bizarre.”
I looked over at Dena. She had become very busy rearranging her glow-in-the-dark condom display. “Okay, Jason, for the sake of argument, let’s say there really are vampires. Does the fact that you are so involved with this—this vampire subculture mean that you want to become one of them?”
“I would be open to it. Vampires aren’t inherently bad. They drink blood because they have to in order to survive. We, on the other hand, slaughter chickens and cows because they taste good. So ask yourself, which one of us should be wearing the black cowboy hat?”
I had to admit I was moving from irritated to amused fairly quickly. I decided to dispense with the standard etiquette I would normally observe upon meeting a new acquaintance. I leaned against a display table and stuck a thumb through my belt loop. “You really are weird, you know that?”
“Yeah, but I got your attention, didn’t I? Crazy beats the shit out of boring.”
I laughed. I was beginning to like him. So he was schizophrenic, he still had a certain je ne sais quoi. “So what are your feelings on Santa Claus?”
“Sophie, I know you just stopped in briefly to say hello, and I wouldn’t want to keep you….” Dena took her attention away from the condoms long enough to stop an impending conversation about the existence of Rudolph.
Jason didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. It probably wasn’t a stretch that he had met up with other people who had difficulty accepting his creature-of-the-night theory. “Okay, I’ll get going. Dena, I’ll see you later, and Jason…it’s been interesting. Have a good lunch—or are you on a strictly liquid diet?”
“For now I’ll settle for sucking the juice out of a red grapefruit.”
He could laugh at himself. That was good. Dena rewarded him with a light kiss and then turned her triumphant smile on me. “I’ll see you later, Sophie. Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do inventory Sunday. Can we move movie night to Monday? I’ve already cleared it with Mary Ann.”
“No problemo, I’ll see you Monday.” I turned to leave.
“Hey, Sophie,” Jason called after me.
“Yeah?”
“You’d make an awesome vampire. Exotic features with supernaturally white skin…that would be cool.”
“Thanks, but I’m kind of digging the whole mortal thing right now. I’ll see you two later.”
I left the store and looked both ways down the sidewalk as I tried to remember where, exactly, I had parked. There was a man sporting a scarred face and a rather obtrusive gold chain peeking into the store window, clearly hesitant to enter.
“You should go in, it’s a good store,” I assured him.
Glazed eyes stared silently back at me. He used his finger to pick some food out of his teeth. Lovely. That was the problem with owning a sex shop. Most of Dena’s customers were fairly respectable, but at least once a day she had to deal with some heroin-loving scumbag looking for a public place to whack off. I considered going back in and warning Dena, but the man turned around and wandered off before I had a chance. Gross, but harmless. I left to find my car. If he did go back, Dena could handle it. After all, she was now being backed up by the power of the living dead.
By the next morning I was physically in much better shape than I had been twenty-four hours previous, but I was also intensely anxious and confused. I approached the mirror and turned from side to side, then turned my back to it and tried to do some kind of contortionist move with my neck so I could review every angle. In a half hour Anatoly would come to pick me up and I had just changed clothes for the eighth time. I was now wearing black boots, jeans, a black V-neck shirt and a leather jacket. “I don’t know, maybe this neckline is a little too low,” I mumbled to myself.