Legally Undead

The worst thing about vampires is that they’re dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood business runs a close second, but for sheer creepiness, it’s the dead bit that gets me every time. They’re up and walking around and talking and sucking blood, but they’re dead. And then there’s the whole terminology problem—how can you kill something that’s already dead? It’s just wrong.

I was twenty-four the first time I… destroyed? dispatched?… a vampire. That’s when I found out that all the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden stake into their hearts, vampires don’t disintegrate into dust. They don’t explode. They don’t spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and collapse into a pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses are supposed to.

Since that first kill (I might as well use the word—there really isn’t a better one), I’ve discovered that only if you’re lucky do vampires look surprised before they groan and fall down. If you’re unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And then they fight.

There are the other usual ways to kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit complicated. Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They have an uncanny ability to sense when there’s any sunlight within miles of them, and they’re awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn’t kill them; it just distracts them for a while, and then they get that angry look again. And it takes a pretty big blade to cut off someone’s head—even an already dead someone—and carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx, is a sure way to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all around.

My own pointy stick is actually more of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade—the metal makes it slide in easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy in just about the only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to order one off the internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find wood-inlay handles, the blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those people know.

But I wasn’t thinking any of this when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I was thinking something more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”

The problem with killing a vampire, of course, is that then you’ve got a corpse on your hands. A corpse with a hole in its heart. Coroners tend to describe it as a “post-mortem wound.” Usually coroners don’t know quite how post-mortem, of course—all they have to go on are things like rigor mortis and the rate of decomposition, and corpses that are up and walking around and talking simply don’t decompose all that quickly. At least, not on the outside. Apparently, the insides can get pretty rotten. Whatever it is about sucking blood that keeps them going, it works on the heart, the blood vessels, and the brain, but not much else. The liver turns to something kind of like pâté, all mushy and spreadable. And you don’t even want to think about the stomach. At least, I don’t.

I didn’t even want to think about the outside of the vampire in the middle of the cement playground right next to Middle School 45 in the Bronx. What I wanted to do was gather up my groceries, currently scattered across the sidewalk on the other side of the chain-link fence behind me, and go home to my brand-new satellite TV. A Law and Order re-run was sure to be on. It was always on some channel. I wanted to open a can of Pringles, curl up on the couch with my cat, and stare blankly at the screen while television cops solved big problems in less than an hour. But my apartment, and thus my television, were right across the street from the school. I really didn’t want to listen to the fuss outside my window when someone found the corpse with the post-mortem wound in the heart. The Bronx is loud enough without adding hysterical screaming.

So instead, I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and scrolled for Nick’s number.

That’s when I realized that my hands were shaking. And covered with blood—they left little streaks across the screen.

I managed to find the right number anyway and waited while the line on the other end rang.

“Nick here.”

“Nick?” My voice was shaking almost as much as my hands. “It’s Elle.”

“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I’ve got a… another problem. I need help again.”

“The usual? Where?”

I hated to think that dead vampires were becoming “the usual” in any sense of the term, but I told him where I was and he said he’d be there in half an hour.

“And Elle?” he said. “See what you can do to hide the body until we get there.”

Hiding a dead body in the middle of a concrete slab of playground is not easy, even in the Bronx, even after dark. The fight had taken place in the darkest corner of the block, at least, so I decided to go for camouflage. I hooked my hands under the body’s armpits and hauled it upright, leaning it against the chain-link fence. I tried to loop one of its arms through the fence to keep it upright, but I couldn’t get more than the forearm through the gaps in the fence chain-links. That looked totally wrong. Finally I used a broken piece of wire hanging off the fence to punch a hole in its shirt collar. Then I twisted the wire through the collar and back through the fence. It wasn’t perfect, but it did keep the top half of the body from slumping over.

Its head kept flopping over in a suspiciously dead way, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that at the moment, so I crossed its legs at the ankles and hoped it looked more passed-out-drunk than propped-up-dead.

By that time I was breathing hard from the exertion of moving around a 200-pound dead guy—it’s called “dead weight” for a reason—but at least my hands had stopped shaking. I gathered up my scattered groceries and pulled an unbroken glass bottle of root beer out of the plastic bag. I wrapped the vampire’s free hand around it, hoping it looked like a regular beer (I’d stopped drinking alcohol after that first kill—these days, it scares me to think of having my judgment hindered in any way). Then I settled down onto the ground next to the big dead vampire corpse to wait for Nick and his squad of vampire killers to come clean up this mess for me.

I met Nick for the first time the same night I met—and killed—my first vampire. It was the night my whole life fell apart.

It started out as a perfectly normal Monday: I went to class, I did a little research in the library, and finally, I sorted through the mail as I walked into our shoebox-sized apartment. I dropped most of the envelopes onto the table in our tiny entryway and pulled one of them out to open. It was one of those mail circulars you get when you sign up at any bridal dress store—a “buy your dress here and get a veil for free” kind of deal. I’d gotten about a million of them, but I was still excited every time. This one was in a white envelope with pink clip-art all over it: pink champagne glasses and hearts and bubbles and doves. Funny the things you remember.

I opened the envelope with Gregory’s letter opener, a pointy teakwood thing his grandmother had sent him as part of a college graduation “desk set” designed to make studying for law school a more organized and aesthetically pleasing task. Greg never used it, but I did—it made me feel somehow more professorial to open my letters with an implement designed for just such a task.

I was looking down at the envelope, talking to Greg, saying something about would he prefer to have people blow bubbles or throw birdseed at us as we left the church, when I heard a gurgle and looked up.

“Gurgle” doesn’t really convey it, though. A gurgle can be the last glug of a soda bottle or a bubble in plumbing pipes settling down for the night. This was neither of those things. I think that as I looked up, I knew it was the kind of gurgle that has blood in it, that comes from a throat, that goes along with “last gasp” and “dying breath.”

* * *

I was finishing my fourth year as a graduate student in history at Fordham University in the Bronx, studying the Early Modern period in England (which covers pretty much everything up through the Renaissance), and planning to get a Ph.D. I had my life mapped out: I wanted to teach college history courses, maybe write a few history books, host swank college faculty parties where I would serve wine and cheese and introduce people to my husband the lawyer. My fiancé Gregory Parham and I had met as undergrads in New Orleans and had chosen to move to New York because he got into Fordham Law School and I got into the Fordham history program. We lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment near Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, where Greg attended classes. Every day I took the Ram Van, Fordham’s shuttle service, to the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. We had considered moving, but decided it made sense to stay in Manhattan; Greg had finished law school and was in his first year as a junior member of a law firm on Park Avenue—Forster, Pearson and Sims. The job wasn’t as posh as it sounded, but after years of living on student loans, scholarships, and grants, his salary seemed astronomical, so we were excitedly planning the small wedding we’d been waiting to have.

All of those plans were destroyed when I looked up to see a tall, thin man dressed in a gray suit who stood in the middle of our living room holding Greg, really dangling Greg, by the back of the neck. Greg’s eyes were open, but not seeing anything. There was blood everywhere—on the front of the man’s suit, smeared across his face, trickling down Greg’s side, dripping onto the carpet below the spot where Greg’s feet barely brushed back and forth as he swung from the man’s grip. The man’s face had been buried in one side of Greg’s neck, and as he looked up his eyes cleared slowly—they were full of a kind of sleepy predatory pleasure, like a cat that’s been drinking from a saucer of cream and has to refocus its attention on the mouse that’s just wandered into its path.

It was like time both sped up and slowed down, all at once. The man dropped Greg, who crumpled into a pile on the coffee table, then slid to the floor. The vampire (I had seen enough crappy horror movies to figure that much out) leapt across the room at me just as I dropped all the mail in my hand and ran screaming wordlessly, not away from him, as a sane person would do, but toward him.

I don’t think of myself as brave. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m not even sure I knew I had a weapon in my hand. But I didn’t drop the teakwood letter opener. Instead, I rammed it into the vampire’s heart. Over and over. Even after he looked surprised, groaned, and fell over dead.

I was still slamming the letter opener into the dead man’s heart moments later, when Nick Calvani and his Band of Merry Men came bursting through the door.

When I looked around at them, I realized that Greg’s body was gone.

* * *

Nick and his guys said things like “nice job” and “good instincts” and “clean kill,” and I think they would have liked to say “welcome aboard,” but I was too busy vomiting into the kitchen sink to listen to them.

At moments like that, you realize that there are things you just don’t want to know. At the top of my list right then were vampires are real and your boyfriend was just eaten by one. Closely followed by when in danger, you go for the heart. With a pointy stick.

But all of those things were pretty quickly shoved down to the bottom of the list by what Nick had to say.

“The fact that he’s gone probably means that he was turned.”

My eyes widened. “Turned as in ‘turned into a vampire’?”

Nick nodded curtly.

Oh, ye gods. My beloved is now a blood-sucking fiend from hell. Go straight to agony, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

“Who are you guys?” My brain was cloudy and my mouth tasted sour, but the fact that four enormous, muscle-bound guys dressed all in black had just come bursting into my home and interrupted me in a killing frenzy wasn’t entirely lost on me. The lead guy, who looked disconcertingly like a bad cross between Stephen King and Sylvester Stallone, all heavy jaw and protruding brow ridge and muscular torso, was popping out orders while he talked to me.

“John, you check the perimeter.” He turned back to me. “Whose name is on the lease for this apartment?”

I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth. “No. You answer me first.”

“The rest of you, clean up in here.” He pointed out several places where blood had splattered across the couch. Suddenly, the Merry Men became the Merry Maids, pulling equipment out of black canvas bags and snapping together a portable vacuum cleaner, for chrissakes. It roared to life and the man wielding it dragged it across the deepest pool of blood, one that had been under the body, as the other two men zipped the dead vampire into a body bag. The vacuum cleaner made a wet sucking sound, and I felt my stomach heave again. Leader-guy turned back to me.

“If only your name is on the lease, we can probably keep lover-boy from coming back in. But if his name is on it, it’s his home and you need to leave.”

The news just got better and better, and my list of Things Not to Know got longer and longer. And anyway— “Lover-boy? No. Never mind. Just please. Tell me who you are. And what the hell just happened.”

It turned out that Nick and his guys did contract “clean-up work” for the same law firm that Greg worked for. They’d gotten a call from their contact at the firm and he’d told them that there was likely to be a vampire attack that night. He’d told them when and where and that the “incident” needed to be stopped, if possible, and covered up otherwise. No, they hadn’t been told to expect me. And no, Nick and his guys were not about to “cover up” my presence.

“Geez, lady. We’re not murderers. We’re not the bad guys here.” He paused. “But listen. I wouldn’t go around telling anybody about this, either. Not that anyone would believe you.”

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it? If you’ve just killed a vampire, there isn’t anyone you can talk to about it. Not even a therapist. You can’t very well say “My former fiancé is a walking, talking member of the undead.” Not if you want to stay out of mental institutions. And I was sure that I did want to stay out of the psych wards, even though I was equally certain that I needed massive doses of therapy.

That’s when I started to cry. Not ladylike sniffles, but great, huge, heaving, gulping, snorting sobs. Nick’s guys looked nervous and wandered off to the far corners of the apartment, studiously examining the floors and walls for any spots of blood they might have missed. Nick himself looked uncomfortable and patted me on the shoulder awkwardly. He tried to distract me.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Elle,” I said. “Elle Dupree.”

When the weeping storm had passed, he handed me a wad of toilet paper one of his minions brought from the bathroom. He also handed me a bottle of Benadryl allergy pills—from my own bathroom—and said, “Here. Take one of these. It’ll help you… um… sleep.” What he meant was “calm down,” but I swallowed the pill anyway. I wanted me to calm down, too.

Of course Greg’s name was on the lease—he was the one with the real job, after all—so Nick told me he would take me someplace safe.

“I have to take my cat,” I said, after Nick outlined his plan to me.

“Okay,” he said, and waited patiently while I gathered up my pet carrier and supplies, then coaxed Millie out from under the top corner of the bed where she was hiding. Then he helped me get her into the carrier and carried it himself.

We drove to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Nick checked me in. He stayed at the hotel just long enough to see me up to my room and tell me he’d be back in the morning. I still don’t know who paid for it, but now that I’ve spent more time around Nick, I suspect that he got Greg’s law firm to cover the costs. If I hadn’t been so miserable, I would have been overawed at the elegant surroundings. Or perhaps humiliated to be whisked up an elevator and out of sight. I’m sure I didn’t do much for the hotel’s image; my jeans and gray t-shirt had suspicious-looking brownish-red stains splattered across them and my face was streaked with tears and snot. I was also yawning hugely as the allergy pill took effect. As it was, I didn’t even register the horrified stares of the other hotel guests until much later, after I’d run a hot bath full of rich-smelling bubbles and climbed in. After a second’s thought, I pulled my clothes in after me and scrubbed at them furiously.

I don’t know how long I sat there with my head on my knees and my clothes floating around me. By the time I crawled out of the water, the bubbles had all but disappeared and the water was almost cold. I didn’t even dry off before I got into the king-size bed and pulled the Egyptian cotton sheets over me. I pulled a black and gold bolster pillow up to me and wrapped my arms around it. Millie, having thoroughly examined the room, jumped onto the bed and curled up on the pillow next to me. Sleepily, I thought, Greg would love this, but then my mind skittered away from that subject. Better never to think of Greg again.

But I dreamed of him that night, of the day he’d asked me to marry him. The dream started off just like the day had in reality. We were walking through Corona Park in Flushing Meadows, out in Queens, on a picnic Greg had planned. It was one of those beautiful warm autumn days we sometimes got in New York, bright and sunny and all too rare. We had eaten our lunch near the pavilion, staring up at the spaceship-like towers.

He had laughed and pulled me around the Unisphere, the giant metal globe in the park; the spray from the fountains surrounding it misted across my face.

“There,” he said, pointing at Europe. “I think that’s where we should go.” He grinned at me.

“What is that?” I asked. “France? Why France?”

Greg shrugged. “Or maybe Italy.”

I laughed and shoved at his shoulder. “Fine. Why Italy.”

“Because,” he fished in his pocket, then dropped to one knee. “I think we should go there on our honeymoon. I know I can’t give you the world right now, but someday I will. Elle Dupree, will you marry me?”

When it really happened, I gasped and reached down to kiss him and we had ended up in a laughing, sprawling heap while he put the ring on my finger.

In my dream, though, I couldn’t reach him. I held out my hand and his figure retreated while the sun faded out, and I was left circling the Unisphere, calling his name.

* * *

I woke up the next morning groping across the other side of the bed, wondering where Greg was. My engagement ring sparkled on my finger. I stared at it for a moment, then took it off and set it on the bedside table.

I managed to haul myself out of bed and stagger to the bathroom. One look in the mirror told me that although I was cleaner, I didn’t look any better than I had the night before. My chin-length blonde hair was plastered to one side of my head and stuck straight up on the other. My face was puffy. And my clothes were a sodden heap at the bottom of the bathtub; I hadn’t bothered to take them out the night before.

Luckily, the hotel provided those fluffy white bathrobes—I’m pretty sure most hotels that far out of my price range do, though of course I don’t know for certain because I hardly ever stay in them—so I wrapped one around me and sank down into the deep chair beside the bed, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

When in doubt, eat.

I picked up the phone, dialed room service, and ordered everything I could think of: coffee, orange juice, pancakes, an omelet, bacon, toast.

I suppose that eating should have been the last thing on my mind. The love of my life had been gnawed on by a monster out of a horror movie, I was stuck in a fancy hotel with no dry clothes, and I had no idea how I was going to deal with the next few hours, much less even begin to ever have a normal life again.

But I was absolutely certain that I was alive. And that no matter what, I wanted to stay that way. For me, that translated to eating. Everything. Every last bit of it.

Nick showed up just as I was finishing the last bite of pancakes dripping with sugar-laden maple syrup poured from a tiny silver pitcher. I was still chewing when I opened the door. Standing in the open doorway, he peered past me at the jumble of dishes on the small table by the chair.

“Hungry?”

“Not anymore.” I gestured for him to come in. He handed me a small plastic grocery store bag. Inside were some of my clothes—a clean pair of jeans and a red t-shirt, a bra, underwear, socks.

“I thought you might like to have these.”

“You’ve been back to my apartment?”

“Yeah. When you’re ready, we can go back over there so you can pick up some stuff.”

I had been trying not to think about my life, the one waiting for me outside this lovely hotel room. I gathered up my clothes and moved into the bathroom to change.

Nick talked to me through the door. “You’re not from New York, are you?” he asked. “Somewhere down south, right?”

I finished zipping up the jeans and opened the bathroom door. “Louisiana,” I said. “Mandeville. Across the lake from New Orleans.”

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yeah. Do you think Greg’s going to come back to the apartment?”

“I think he already has.”

I picked up my ring from the bedside table and tucked it into my pocket before we left.

Greg had indeed been back—or at least, someone or some thing with a ragingly violent temper had been. The apartment was trashed. The couch was slashed, stuffing spilling out of the cushions. Books had been pulled out of the bookcases and lay ripped and scattered across the floor. Pieces of broken pottery from the cabinets crunched underfoot. Computer components lay on their sides, the covers ripped off and their electronic innards exposed. A framed picture of the two of us smiling and waving after Greg’s law school graduation rested beneath the coffee table. The glass had shattered and the picture was torn into two pieces.

“Greg didn’t do this,” I whispered.

Nick took my hand gently in his. “He did, Elle. I’m certain of it.”

“No. That’s not what I mean.” I pulled my hand away and sat down on the ripped-up couch cushion. “I mean that whatever did this isn’t Greg anymore.”

I picked up the photograph and shook the glass off the two halves, fitting them back together and pulling them apart again as I spoke.

“Greg’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Whatever he is now, he’s not the person you knew. That person is gone.”

I took a deep breath. No more crying, I vowed silently. “Okay, then. What’s next?”

Nick nodded—I assumed in approval. “Today you’re going to pack up everything that’s yours. We’ll find you a new place to live and get you moved in. Then you get on with your life.”

I focused on the only part I could deal with at that moment. “What kind of new place?”

“I’ve got Tony on it right now; he’ll find another apartment for you.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Because…” Nick paused and looked around at the debris in the living room. “Because no one should have to try to deal with this alone. And because my job is to clean up. Leaving you here could be… messy.”

Anything else he might have said was interrupted by one of the guys from the previous night—the biggest of the three—coming in through the front door carrying a stack of boxes folded flat.

“Thanks, John,” said Nick, taking the boxes and dropping them on the couch next to me. “Elle, you start sorting through this stuff and figuring out what to take. We’ll clean up as you go.”

So that’s what we did. I didn’t have class that day—I was supposed to spend Tuesdays and Thursdays in the library working on my dissertation proposal. Instead, I spent the day sorting through what remained of my apartment and my life. Nick and John rolled in an enormous plastic garbage can and began tossing in everything that was obviously trash: broken dishes, torn books, lamps with the cords ripped out, cracked music CDs. I started in the bedroom. At least half of my clothes had been shredded, so I tossed them into a pile in the hall. What was left I folded into my one undamaged suitcase. I went through Greg’s closet, too, taking what I liked—I figured that even if Vampire-Greg wanted the clothes, he’d lost his claim to them by ruining mine. Then I decided that under the circumstances I didn’t need to justify taking them, even to myself. I took all my favorite soft t-shirts (the ones that Greg always complained about me wearing), two pairs of sweatpants, and a bathrobe to replace the one he’d wrecked. I took all my undestroyed books and DVDs and CDs and most of his, too. I packed up my jewelry, picking earrings out of the carpet. And at the last minute, I grabbed the ripped picture out of the living room and tossed it into a box, as well.

I’d left my purse behind the night before, too rattled to remember to take it. It was in the living room, undamaged. Just about everything in it, however, from my powder compact to my cell phone, had been smashed or ripped. I salvaged my surprisingly intact driver’s license and took the credit cards—I guess I need to have Greg taken off them, I thought.

I even managed to save the couch by super-gluing the edges of the torn fabric back together and flipping the cushions to the other side.

Millie spent her time jumping in and out of boxes, meowing loudly to announce her displeasure at the disruption in her life. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one,” I told her, taking her out of a box and dropping her onto the floor.

In the middle of all this, Tony showed up and announced that he’d found an apartment near the Rose Hill campus of Fordham, deep in the Bronx. At least I would no longer have to ride the Ram Van every day just to get to school.

The rest of the team was cleaning the new apartment, and it would be ready by two o’clock. When we finished salvaging what we could, Nick and his guys loaded up all my stuff into a white van. Nick drove and I rode in the front seat. Neither of us spoke on the way to my new place, a pre-WWI era building with cracked marble in the entryway and faded red carpeting in the hallway.

It turned out that it was a good thing that most of my furniture had been destroyed. The apartment was one room with a small kitchen off to the side in what had probably once been a large closet. The bathroom was tiny, even by New York standards. And there was only one miniature closet. But I could see the entire place from anywhere in the apartment, and that felt oddly comforting.

By the time Nick’s team had helped me unpack, it was nearly dark. The last thing Nick did before he left was hand me a new cell phone and a large wooden crucifix.

“You might want to keep this by your bed.”

“Which one?”

Nick laughed—a short, barking laugh of surprise. “Both of them, I guess. My number’s already programmed into the phone. Seriously, Elle, I don’t think Greg knows where you are. And I don’t know if he’d even care if he did know. I don’t know what vampires care about besides feeding and killing, and I don’t know if they care who they kill.” He paused for a moment. “But after what I saw last night, I do know that you’re tough, and that you can handle yourself in a fight against one of these things. You’re a survivor. I like that. So you just call me if anything else comes up. Okay?”

I nodded, and Nick and his men filed out of the apartment. I took my engagement ring out of my pocket and stared at it for a long time, turning it from side to side to watch it sparkle.

Then I put it away in a shoebox in the closet.

I flopped onto the mattress on the floor—my bedframe was in pieces, probably on its way to the New York City dump—and stared at the ceiling high above me, contemplating the strange new shape of my life as it stretched out before me.

What I didn’t know then, of course, was exactly how strange that life was going to be.