Chapter 3

I was sitting up at the counter next to Alice. It had been a busy day today and I was grateful for the chance to put my feet up. We were quiet – she watched the door, I looked out the window. This was one of the things I really liked about Alice – she had a stillness about her. A body could just sit, without having to be conversational.

It was half an hour to closing time. Frank was already shutting down the grill and Felipe had started to put up some of the chairs. The bell over the door tinkled and a man walked in. I sighed, but slid off the stool and went to greet him, bringing a menu with me.

"We were just getting ready to close, so there's not a lot we can get for you that's hot," I said as I led him to a booth.

He had short brown hair and coffee–brown eyes. He didn't look directly at me, but something about him made goose bumps raise up on my arms. I ignored it. I'd been waitressing a long time, and some folk just rubbed me wrong like that. Didn't mean anything.

He ordered a meatloaf sandwich. When I came back to give it to him, he was staring at Alice. I wasn't surprised – a lot of guys had that reaction to her.

"Who is she?" the man at the table hissed.

"Just a customer," I said. I put his check on the table. "You let me know if I can get you anything else."

He grabbed my wrist in a painful hold. "I asked you a question, woman. Who is she?"

"Let go of me," I said sternly. I glared at him and tried to tug my arm free. "Listen, mister, you let go of me now or I holler for help. Frank keeps a 12 gauge in the back and I'm sure he'd love to introduce you to it."

"Miss Mariah?" Felipe was looking over at us from where he'd been filling salt shakers. The man let go of my arm and picked up his sandwich, but his gaze lingered on Alice. "You OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine Felipe." I rubbed my wrist. "Thanks."

I had gotten all the way to the Woolworths three blocks away from home when I realized I'd left my purse at the diner. I paused on the corner, staring blindly at the store display while I deliberated. I wasn't scheduled on tomorrow. I could always get up early and go get my purse. But then I'd have to go in and if June or Sally didn't come in I knew I'd be suckered in to working. With a sigh I headed back to the diner.

I was halfway through the back door of the diner when something heavy pushed me from behind. I fell, landing hard on my hands and knees. The door slammed heavily behind me. Before I could get up, fire ripped through my side. I looked down to see one of our kitchen knives sticking out of my abdomen. I couldn't get my head around what it was doing there, or reconcile it with the burning pain.

My attacker grabbed my shoulder and twisted me around so I was lying on my back. I looked up to see the man who'd ordered the meatloaf sandwich. His eyes were wild and his lips were twisted. I couldn't tell if it was a smile or a grimace.

He knelt next to me and leaned across me to take hold of the knife. He jerked it out of me and I screamed. He pressed the knife against my throat. I wanted to scream again, but I couldn't move, even to breathe.

Blood spurted from my side and I could feel it drip down my ribcage in warm rivulets. The man moved his gaze from my face to the hole he'd carved in me. He stared, fascinated and reached out a hand to touch my wound. I squirmed away from him, but he lunged forward and snagged me by the hair, pulling me back. I could see the knife out of the corner of my eye, clutched in his fist. Then he leaned down and fastened his mouth over the hole in my side, lapping at the blood, one hand still tangled in my hair. It felt so bizarre, even through the burning pain.

It took me a minute to gather my wits, but once I did I tried to fight him off. I pulled his hair and tried to kick him. He balled up his fist and punched me. Stars exploded in front of my eyes. I screamed, calling for help. Maybe someone passing by the diner would hear me. The man laughed.

"Do it again!" he cried, as if I had done a magic trick for him.

"Let her go, hijoeputa!"

Out of nowhere, Felipe came up behind the man. He had a broom in his hands and he brought it down on the man's head with a hard crack, splintering the handle. The man turned from me with a roar. He lunged at Felipe and they went down in a tangle of arms and legs. I couldn't see what was happening; my side hurt so much, I couldn't sit up to see.

It sounded like they were still fighting. Felipe was snarling in Puerto Rican. The man who'd attacked me was hollering in pain. Then there was a loud crash. Dishes clattered to the floor near my head. A soup ladle landed next to me. I stretched my fingers out, trying to ignore the pain, and wrapped my fingers around the handle. Not much of a weapon, but more than I'd had before.

By the time I'm managed to grab hold of the ladle, panting from the effort, the sounds of fighting had stopped. Things were nearly silent except for my heavy breathing, reverberating in my ears.

"Felipe?" I called.

I tried to sit up, propping myself up on one elbow. My vision dimmed from the pain and I bit my lip, trying to hold back a moan. I kept hold of the ladle, squeezing the aluminum handle like a talisman.

"He's not here anymore."

The man's voice was gleeful. He leaned over me. He smiled and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

"I killed him. You see, I'm getting stronger. Maybe you were the key to my immortality all along!"

Using the last of my strength I brought the ladle up and smashed it across the man's face. He made a strange, keening cry.

"You hit me!" he whined, clutching his hand over the spot the ladle had hit. He had a small cut on his temple. At least I'd hurt him a little. "Why did you hit me? I'll make you pay for it, you old goat!"

He wrenched the ladle out of my hand and slammed it into the knife wound on my side. He raised his arm back for another blow when a pale blur barreled into him. He landed hard on the ground.

"Mariah! Mariah, can you hear me?"

The high pitched voice was frantic. The man no longer loomed over me. He had been replaced by a small figure with cold, cold hands that she placed on my face. I felt I should know this person, but my brain didn't seem to want to bring the name to mind.

"I didn't see it, not soon enough. Mariah, are you alright?"

The voice was distressed. Her name drifted into my head. I whispered it, "Alice."

She sat me up, leaning me against the oven door. I slumped there as she went over to Felipe's prone form. Despair gripped me, thinking that Felipe was dead. That boy had saved my life. She picked him up and it took me a moment to realize why that looked so wrong. Felipe was not overly large for his age, but he wasn't small, either. Alice was tiny for an adult, and she was lifting him up as if he didn't weigh more than a feather.

To add to the sense of wrongness, her eyes were not the golden brown I had gotten used to. They were dark brown, closer to black than brown. She set him down next to me. Felipe stirred, mumbling something. I was so relieved when he opened his eyes that I nearly wept. Thank God he was alive.

Alice backed up a few steps. She watched us, her dark eyes wide and intense. She crouched low to the ground. Her teeth glistened in the low light. She looked ready to pounce on us at any second. A shiver wracked me as I realized why she'd never seemed quite right. She wasn't human.

I stared at Alice. Terror paralyzed me. I knew she had saved my life, but I was even more frightened of her than I was the man she had saved me from. As if my thought had resurrected him, the man stood up behind Alice. His arm hung at an odd angle and his face was turning purple, probably from where I'd hit him with the ladle.

Alice swiveled around, still crouched low, and growled – actually growled, like some sort of dog. Her hands were curled into claws and I knew she was preparing to defend us.

"You're one of them," he breathed. He made some sort of gesture, almost like he was about to cross himself. "I've been doing what they told me, to be one of you. I've been working real hard."

Alice stared at him, her head cocked to the side in puzzlement. The man looked proud, as if he were a lapdog waiting to be praised for doing a trick.

"What do you mean?" she asked slowly.

"They told me – the cold, beautiful ones. They said if I drank human blood, like you do, that I'd be just like you. All I had to do was drink enough of it. It made me sick at first, I couldn't drink all of it. But I'm getting better. I can drink more now." He pushed a lock of hair out of his face, smoothing it back into place, and smiled at her. "Soon I'll drink enough and I'll be like you."

"Like me? A vam –" she broke off, glancing back at me and Felipe. Her gaze turned back to the man and I shivered as her voice became cold and hard. "That's not how it works, you know. One of us has to bite you. Whoever told you that claptrap was playing with you."

"No." He shook his head wildly. "You're lying. No!"

She simply stared at him. I watched his expression slide from skepticism to horror.

"Then do it. Make me immortal like you!" he shouted. "Bite me!"

"I don't bite humans," she shrugged. "And even if I did, you're a monster and I would never turn you."

The man let out a wordless shriek and rushed toward Alice. I don't know whether he thought he'd provoke her or if he was trying to hurt her, but he didn't get more than a foot closer before she was there, intercepting him. She grabbed him by the throat and tossed him across the kitchen.

He wheeled his arms, trying to stay vertical. His head slammed against the stove and caught the corner. The sharp metal sliced into his head and blood spurted. Alice's eyes widened and she took a trembling step forward, then another.

"Oh, God. The blood," she whispered.

An instant later she was at his side. She leaned her head over his and buried her face in his neck. For a moment I couldn't understand, didn't want to understand. Then I heard a wet sucking sound and I realized that she was drinking from him. He screamed, but it wasn't a sound of pain, at least not at first. At first he held her to him. Then, when she didn't stop, didn't let go, he started to claw at her head. He pulled her hair and began to thrash, but she didn't so much as sway. His screams faded to little mewls of terror, then stopped altogether.

My stomach heaved. I leaned over, away from Felipe, and wretched. My side screamed in pain with each contraction of my stomach muscles, but I couldn't stop it. When I was done Felipe helped me sit up. I looked across the kitchen.

Alice was crouched over my attacker's body. Her eyes were a terrifying scarlet red and smears of blood covered her mouth and clothing. Felipe pulled me behind him and, I'm ashamed to say, I let him. I had never been so terrified in my life. Were we going to be next? Drained of blood, just to satisfy this monster?

Her gaze narrowed and focused on my side. Blood was dripping down it at a steady rate, made worse by the muscle spasms of my vomiting. Alice took a step towards me, a dreadful hunger in her crimson eyes. I whimpered.

"Alice, caro, it's OK." Felipe lurched to his feet to stand between me and Alice. He held his hands up, palms out. He kept his voice even. "Calm down. It's Miss Mariah and Felipe. You know us, from the diner. We're your friends."

She shook her head, not in negation, but as if she was trying to clear it.

"I'm sorry. I – I can't. I have to go." Her words came out tight and strangled, as if each one was an effort.

Then she turned and ran, faster than I've ever seen anything move in my life. She was gone and Felipe and I were left with the body of the man who'd tried to kill me.

I looked at the man's body and felt ashamed. Alice had saved our lives. Whatever she was, whatever kind of monster, she hadn't hurt us. I tried to get up but Felipe pushed me back down. He grabbed a couple of clean towels and made a compress to hold to the wound in my side.

We tried to figure out what to do with the body. Felipe thought we should call the police. I argued that we wouldn't be able to explain how my attacker had gotten bite marks in his throat and been drained of blood, not without being sent to the loony bin or getting arrested as murderers. Eventually I won out. Felipe took the body – I told him to dump it in the Delaware River, but he never did say what exactly he did with it.

While he was gone, I crawled to the phone on the table and called the police. They came quickly. I told them that Felipe had walked me back to get my purse when we interrupted a robbery. Felipe had "chased off" the robbers, but not before they stabbed me.

The police had called Frank and he came in. I was glad he was there to speak for Felipe, because the police seemed to think I was covering for him. They didn't believe that I would trust a Puerto Rican boy to walk me home, and there was a lot of blood on the floor that hadn't come from me. I was grateful when the ambulance got there. The ambulance driver shooed the policemen away and put me on a gurney. He went off to radio back to the hospital.

I lay on the gurney, waiting for them to load me into the ambulance. I clutched Felipe's hand like it was a lifeline.

"You saved my life tonight. How did you know? What were you doing there, Felipe?" I asked. He looked embarrassed, but I kept my eyes on his, waiting for his answer.

"I sleep in the stockroom some nights." He looked away from me. "Just when I can't stay at a friend's place or something."

"You don't have a place to stay?" I was appalled. "But where do you live?"

I wanted to ask more, to demand that he tell me who was taking care of him, but the driver came back then and put me into the ambulance. I watched Felipe through the ambulance windows as we sped away. His shoulders were hunched over and his face sad. He raised his hand and waved.

The next day was sunny as I walked slowly to the diner. June and Frank had both told me I was crazy for coming in, but I couldn't sit at home. The doctor had said that the knife hadn't done any serious damage and had given me some pills for the pain. The pills I threw away. The pain wasn't so bad, as long as I moved slow. Besides, I needed to see if she was there. All day I waited, but she didn't show up.

I looked out the plate glass window at the clear blue sky with frustration. I wasn't sure if I was grateful or worried that Alice didn't come. Now that I knew what she was, I understood why it was only the overcast days we saw her. At least, it made sense if the stories were true about her kind and sunlight. But I wanted to see her again, in the light of day, to see if she really was the creature I remembered from the night before.

Felipe came in at three for his shift. I let out a gusty sigh of relief when he walked into the back room. He didn't look at me at first, just punched in and slipped his apron over his head. After that, he came over and looked down at me, dark eyes wary.

"Is she here Miss Mariah?" he finally asked. He met my eyes with an odd air of defiance.

"No, Felipe." Guilt washed through me as his face crumpled. I couldn't help offering, "It's sunny, though."

He paused a moment, then nodded. His face brightened. He crouched down by the table as he headed into the kitchen.

"Are you ok, Miss Mariah?" he asked kindly. His hair flopped into his eyes and I had to stop from brushing it back.

"Yes, I'm alright. Thank you, Felipe." I hoped he understood I meant it for more than just asking. "I'm sure she'll be back when it rains."

"Then I'll pray to Madre de Dios that it rains soon." He patted my hand and went into the dining room to begin his shift.