MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW

by Apache

Content:
Het
Nick/Natalie; Vachon
Implied or Graphic Sexual Situations
No Violence

A little meanie vampire fic-- we usually write them as such sweeties. The title is what Lady Caroline Lamb for one of the earliest fictional vamps.

This is the prequel to Echo; Vachon after seeing Tracy for the last time; its sequel is Dance with a Demon.

A few bad words (Ok, one bad word repeated a few times) and a non-steamy reference to sex.

I made it through 491 years without regrets.  Suddenly they're hanging off me like Christmas ornaments.

In all that time I would have said my only regret was that I didn't make sure the Inca was dead that first night, didn't drag his body out of the soil for the sun to find.  Now, in death, there are moments when I find the Inca has become one of these little poisons, my regrets. And there's Tracy, my little goldenhaired mortal, twenty-five years old, child of this age: right now I regret every time my eyes saw that neck and I stopped myself from drinking.  Urs, my golden child, whom I should have left to be dust and ash, damn you, I've even learned to regret your pain.  Tracy, accursed Tracy, my regret teacher....

And I regret sitting snugly in a city, drinking bottled blood.  Oh yes, I regret every night I can't have warm human flesh in my hands, can't find the throat, bare it to my need, and drink-- the ones that flail, the ones that beg, the ones that come to my kiss for the sheer erotic joy of it.  I regret them all.

So Tracy finally blew me off.  No more supernatural chum for Daddy's girl.  Couldn't take the reality.  I was dishing it out a little stiff, but she wanted to know.... Yeah, and I wanted to know.

Well, now I know.

I went down to the Raven, didn't feel like rattling around the dead church with the BVM tonight.  Didn't feel like anything actually.  Is dead like this?  Who knows-- I don't.

I sucked down a glass or two of special.  This mortal came along and sat near me, a woman, somewhere in her thirties, in a nice suit carrying an actual briefcase.  Not the kind who's destined to be a Raven regular, one way or another.

She ordered a beer and a bump, and specified Jameson's, an Irish whiskey.  Mortals can be so proud of their little personal flourishes, but then some of us have our pet tastes also -- I remember a Catalonian who liked Sephardim more than anything.  Over the years, he probably did more damage than the Inquisition.

The woman kept sneaking looks at me, and I finally deliberately caught her eye and glared.  "Lady, take a good long look and then either fuck off or blow me," I said charmingly.

That should have worked, but no, I got a straight answer.  "I'm really sorry," she said, with a genuine smile.  "You look like my college boyfriend."

"I'm not him."  I thought about it and added, "and I'd piss in his drink if he was here."

"No kidding," she said.  Still not annoyed. I began to be curious. "You're not exactly having the best night of your life, are you?" she said.  Her voice was a cross between kind and humorous.

Oh, a savior.  One of those women who ride forth to gather up pitiful men who will hurt them.  She was going to ask about my life, my wife, my girlfriend, the one who doesn't understand...  she was going to wallow in the pleasure of giving me comfort.

Well, some of them have tasted good, too.

But she was standing up to leave, pulling out money.  The bartender came over, and she gave it to him with a nod in my direction. "Here, let me cover him, too."

I have never depended on the kindness of strangers.

"Good luck to you," she said.  Not pushy, not syrupy, just average nice.  Something Tracy might do.

The change came on, and I let it.  Fangs and glaring yellow-white eyes and all, right there in the middle of the Raven.  I could have ripped her throat out on the spot.  The growl came, that wildcat snarl, and I was hurting too much to hold it in.  I hissed at her: "How long do you want to live?"

She went pale.  I was hearing her heart, tripletime.  So was every vampire in the joint -- it was kind of funny, actually: out the corner of my eye I could see them standing rigid, gritting for control.  A bunch of them had their eyes closed.  And I had to give Our Lady of the Bleeding Heart some credit:  she was able to get a grip and move.  She grabbed her briefcase and blew for the door.

Of course, every vampire and most of the mortals in the place heard me.  A fair number of mortals probably saw me, too.  There's indiscreet and there's spectacularly fuckin' stupid, and I was way off the scale.

Old Lacroix came floating up from wherever he lurks in the back. Everyone's uncle... "Javier, my child,"  he said.  "As much as I enjoy your presence in Toronto, I fear that it is ... a pleasure I shall have to forego."

Lacroix an Enforcer?  No, they just attack.  So what is he? I shook my head.  "Not in a travellin' mood."  I gulped a glass of special and smiled up at him broadly.  "In fact, you're the second person tonight to invite me to leave town, and the other one had a -much- better haircut.  *Pero yo quedo* -- I'm stayin'.  So you can enjoy me all you want, Lacroix."  Big grin.  He knew what I was thinking of, and I knew he knew.

His face turned cruel.  OK by me:  stand there and look cruel all you want.  It's your bar.  I signalled for another glass of special.

He lifted an eyebrow, his manner still silky.  "I wonder how I might contrive to... alter your mood."

"Hey -- use the Force, Luke," I said with another grin.  Can I dig my grave any deeper?  Who cares... My God, what an ugly face that old son of a whore has.

Lacroix's eyes were glaring now, but gray, not vampire.  He has all the control in the universe, a point on which he gave me a firsthand education just a couple weeks ago.  Still...

"Nah, you're right, wrong movie," I said, gulping the glass that came. My grin just got wider and wider as I fed.  Maybe it's the wine... "You're more 'Sunset Boulevard,' or maybe the Bette Davis part in 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane'... no?  Joan Crawford in 'Johnny Guitar?' Maybe you're right."

By now his eyes were nearly white.  Probably thousands of Gauls, Geats, Celts, Iberians, Angles, Caledonians or other sorry bastards with the misfortune to be noticed by Rome saw those eyes right before they died -- and that was just when he was mortal.  Well, maybe it's time.  Better a stake from the old dragon than the tender mercies of an Enforcer...  Of course, no reason to die hungry.  I signaled for another glass.

On second thought, fuck it.  Let's go get some high-octane.  It's been too long.

"OK Lacroix, here I go.  Happy?"  I went out the back way.  Out in the alley, I launched myself into the sky without doing a stop-look-listen, and heard a cry of startlement below me.  Ooops, Jav, that's a few more demerits for the Enforcers to chalk up.  Fuck it.

~ ~ ~

I went back to Tracy's place, thinking I'd drain her and fly away. Nick Knight would want to come after me, but what's done is done. I got more than four hundred years of practice hiding from an angry vampire the whole while the Inca was on my trail, and in the long run, I don't think Knight would care that much.  He's got problems of his own.

I landed on the roof of her building and listened... there were nine hearts pumping away in the various apartments, two of them vigorously.  At least somebody's getting some, I thought.  It made me sad, instead of angry.  And listening, I could hear Tracy downstairs crying, crying with the abandon mortal women allow themselves--  crying over me.

How could I kill her...  I couldn't.  If she'd been sitting down there calmly, hating me, despising me, it would have been possible -- not easy even then, but I could have done it and gotten her out of my life, put her into the box of memories -- there are many, many mortal women with big blue eyes and sweet girlish smiles there already-- but this pain of hers-- pain of ours-- I didn't want to look at it.

And my own cowardice made me angry. I snarled and flew away.

~ ~ ~

There's a mall that has special midnight shows of Rocky Horror, Highlander, Tank Girl, Amazon Women on the Moon, slasher flicks, all the good cult stuff.  I've been a few times; I look enough like some of them to pass, though a little old for their crowd.

It's just a question of getting there early enough to stand in line...  Oh, yeah.  Her.  Waiting for her boyfriend, and he's l-a-a-ate.

"Let's teach him a lesson," I smiled.

"What?"  She deigned to notice me.

"That lout who doesn't appreciate you."  Hair the color of honey in shadow, hazel eyes with the delicacy of new leaves, the clean, perfect lines of a young face, lips brimming with the tender blood of adolescence. So many fragrances, the shampoo of her hair, a cheap perfume, the laundry soap of her clothing, much-handled leather of her purse, a small sweat under the coat and the wool heating and releasing a residue of lanolin... and salt and iron, salt and iron, the saturating perfume of her blood... oh, there's the sound of that heart, so calm, so beautiful a heart....

She laughed. "Thanks, but no thanks."  But she was studying my face, my smile...  the heart is quickening a little.  Does it hear my desire, does it know my universe centers on its wonderful music, its strength?

I shrugged.  "He'll just do this again.  No one as pretty as you... sorry."  I turned to go.

"Ummmm..."  Nothing makes a woman want you like leaving her.  A certain kind of woman, anyway, one so anxious to love, so sure that love is the world's greatest gift, that she will do anything to teach you the emotion.  The heart quickened again, and my desire answered it.  Did you think I could leave you, my pretty one, my angel of life...  I do not abandon, my beauty... don't be afraid.

"Are you going to Highlander?"  She was biting her lip.

I nodded, and met her eyes.  There, there she is...  I saw her falling into me, into my desires, the heart saying oh yes oh yes to my hunger, my need...  Our faces were very close now; I saw the eyelashes, small blue flecks in the hazel eyes.  Her mouth opened slightly and I leaned forward... not yet, not yet, my heart.  Not yet, sweet treasure..

Oh the beauty of women, how they give themselves, even the child-woman who has just found me.  We went into the theater and as the colored images of Scottish moors -- the pictures of a daylight I have not seen for myself since the time of Pizarro -- came onto the screen, this lovely child came to my kiss...

Her heart singing oh yes, oh yes as my mouth caressed her cheek, her ear, as I kissed her in the mortal fashion, feeling how her clumsy boyfriend had never cherished, never celebrated the splendor of her eyes, her mouth, had never told this great and tender heart what beauties it possessed...

She moaned when I bit, snuggled into the clasp of my teeth on her life, and then the heart leaped like a deer to run--

--like a deer that leaps in the last second but is found by the arrowhead and falls from mid-air, its life already slackening, already turned to earth...  her heart rushed into me, her sudden terror speeding its race... and--

it ended. I possessed her utterly.  Her little cry so quick, the others around us only looked for a second and were reassured by her stillness... laughing:  oh that.  One of the others even said, "Way to go, Sandy," and brought on a second ripple of laughter.

I licked a little at the bit of dribble from her neck, and held her for a moment, held those failing fragrances of hair, skin, the new tang of her arousal, the new tang of her death.  On the screen, Sean Connery was giving lessons on how to be an immortal, an education I never had--

Shall I break the little neck, leave the coroners an explanation: "some drifter, some guy on a motorcycle, no it was a truck, some guy we never saw..."

Or shall we just have a mystery?  A supernatural death at a supernatural movie... oh yes, the police will just love that.

Two of them will, anyway.

~ ~ ~

I left her there, relaxed in the theater seat, the smell of her death mingling with the fragrances of hot popcorn and teenage groping that were rising in front of the screen.  Almost all of us hate sticking around a kill because of that very thing, that reek of the decay that cannot find its way into our bodies.  The stench of mortal vulnerability and extinction.

It was filling my mind as I took off into the night from behind the theater.  Even vampires who were given no choice, like me, would never go back because of what we learn once we are this.  The mortal body is permeated with the savors of decay early on, the softening of muscles, the bones turning brittle, those clean, beautiful hearts clogging or missing steps in their lovely dance, a litany of failures that I will never know. And yet... it is not a gift I would force upon one I loved.

Not a gift I can force on Tracy Vetter.

Tracy, my goldenhaired little unsupernatural friend.  I want her. I want her bad.  Not just a taste, but the whole.

This gift I have for her, if she can just take it, will keep her golden and strong forever, bring her to my arms forever, teach her pleasures her young body has no idea even exist.  Her reaction to the mere idea is revulsion...

The last I saw of her, she was facing me, her breath a mortal cesspool of alcohol and vomit and toothpaste, and her eyes like one of those deep glacial lakes in sunlight, full of tears, pity, torment and fury.  She wants me to be an angel, not a demon.  She wants her dark fascination to reform.  She wants me to be the gunslinger who puts down the revolver, the corsair who hauls down the skull and crossbones for the sake of his lovely blonde castaway.  She wants me to be Gregory Peck, taking a bullet for the love of a blonde schoolmarm; Mickey Rourke as the IRA terrorist who dies for the love of a blind girl, whispering an agonized request to Christ for forgiveness, please, please...

Oh women.  What they believe they can teach you...

I've been a fiend for four centuries, Tracy; what are your goldenhaired fantasies to that?  To the savors of women I've tasted, women from brothels, girls of good family, sweet innocents at the mall and dancers and broken-souled whores like lovely Urs, the last golden child to touch my heart...

Miserable Urs who hates her strength as well as her life-- so many women whose lives I simply swallowed, whose lives were nothing and whose deaths were nothing to anyone but me, whose deaths became my hot treasures, the slaked thirst and heart-lust of a man who could adore them. And Urs, another such, met a Vachon who inhaled the perfume from her lace and indulged a fantasy, just once...  A hundred and twenty years of power that she barely touches, more sorrow than you'd think could fit inside  one skin.  Sweet endless Urs, my only kindness, sweet Urs whom I fuck like an insensate object whenever I want, Urs who has yet to find the strength even to feel bitter...

I went past the Raven, began to come down, but no.  Tonight I don't want any more of Lacroix's wise, terrible gaze defining my limits, nor Urs' plaintive pity, nor the casual invitations of the young ones who haunt the place, the newmade vampires who are still in the first flush of learning, who go mad for the taste of an elder.  The ones I would never bother to take home, just having them on the roof, or the back room, or some little place they may keep.  The Raven is always full of them, the young ones who wanted to come across, the girls with long silky hair and predatory eyes who dreamed of strength...  the ones I sometimes kill.

It's ironic-- they are lawful prey, unlike mortals, here in this civilized place.  The Enforcers don't care how we tear each other apart, as long as it is circumspect... and what's easier than unloading a vampire body?  There are nights when I despise those young ones who dreamt of being killers; despise their cruelty and their stupidity all at once, for they come to my hands thinking another vampire won't hurt them.  As mortals, they would never have made so silly an assumption about a stranger; as vampires they imagine they have joined some happy club of the wicked and believe that in my company they have King's X.  That another vampire is just another pleasure-loving killer.

And on the nights when a happy killer is exactly what I am, their terror is sweeter than any mortal's, for they are the most death-hating of all, who thought they had escaped its shadow for all time.  We fuck and drink and fly and drink again, and I rip their throats away and drain them, my strength a terrible surprise, their last consciousness a knowledge they have not the strength to awaken and heal before dawn... sweet awful terror of the murderer trapped.  My dirty little secret even in our Community, my little cannibal vice.

Vicious girls with nothing inside... not like Tracy, thrummed my mind, golden Tracy with her bold heart fixed on being a good guy, a protector, Grace Kelly in her schoolmarm skirt with a gun and a badge...

Everything I am repels her; so great a horror of my reality infests her that her very body revolts against the knowledge, purges its food and throws away consciousness in denial, and I find myself waiting yet again for Tracy Vetter to wake up, to show me her desire. But each time she rewakens, the desire is there as soon as she looks at me.  Each time, she takes the new knowledge of me in, and the inching process of adaptation goes forward, the reconciliation of her life and mine, the invention of the meeting ground where she can come to me as she wishes and I can take her completely, as I wish--

But for now there is only rage and restlessness and pain-- no, fuck that too.  Fuck a little mortal girl who lacks vision.   Who told me "this is the last time, Vachon."  Whose wide blue eyes bled out a stream of tears, clear as river water and nearly as sweetly salt as her blood would be.  "Get out."  "Monster."  "Monster."

I flew beyond the Raven and landed in the city. And found a dark girl, all caramel skin and chocolate hair, deep melting brown eyes.  She walks the street and finds her pleasure in a fire in the veins, cocaine, crack, heroin.  We know these savors well in our community, for these are among the last safe mortals for our kind to feed on, mortal lives that have so nearly destroyed themselves that few questions are asked when we swallow the residue.  No more in years than the girl of the mall, this one had mare's eyes, not filly's, eyes that had seen and measured many men. She led me into darkness, into a back alley, without a word between us, just a look, just my own head ever so slightly inclined which she took to mean yes.

And it was a yes, though not what she expected.  Nor was she what I thought to have, for she awakened what was left of the mortal arousal in me, unbuttoned my jeans and caressed the mortal sex organ so sweetly, touched it with her wide mouth so sweetly...  and when I raised her, brought her face to mine, she didn't flinch from the hungry eyes of a vampire.  What can a woman have seen by that age, not to fear a vampire? But I didn't ask her, I took her, pushed the face to an angle and drank hard, hurting the veins, hurting the heart, hurting the mortal life out of her--

And she liked the cruelty of it; even as her life broke and sagged in my hold, I felt the dark pleasure she had in pain... she was trying to whisper, even with my fangs sunk tightly into her throat, trying to say -- I knew what, I've heard it before -- make me what you are.

I withdrew my teeth from her throat, swallowing what I'd sucked, and looked at the last flare of conscious mind that animated the big doe eyes.  "No," I said tenderly.  "You die."  And smiled, and felt her fear at last, struck, and drank to the end.

Then... there was a man who looked like Lacroix.  Who could resist such a tidbit?  But he was a coward and pissed himself; I barely escaped being touched by the disgusting scent of him.  I took him aloft and dropped him in the water a mile out in the lake; I don't care if he sinks or swims, but he needed a bath.  I didn't drink much from him, and that little I took from his wrist; neither hunger nor a lust for his heart moved me by then.  Damaged heart, I could hear the hissing of its constrictions.  Probably should have seen his doctor.

Coming back I saw lights, a bright boat on the water.  Just the kind of party I felt like crashing.  A big ferry, with plenty of empty decks at this hour of the night where a vampire in a dark coat can loft himself aboard unnoticed. I hadn't meant to kill again, just catch a ride home, but there was a girl...  mint white skin, pale gold hair, serious gray eyes, and she wanted to talk about poetry...  oh sweet oh sweet.  I took her in the auto bay. She made me so happy I thought, for the first time in this luxuriously evil night, that I might care to live after all.  Which meant I had to dismantle her, poor exquisite creature, and lob the bits overboard at intervals.

Then I went home to sleep.

~ Go to "Dance With a Demon" ~

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