Henry withdrew from her suddenly, and slamming the car into reverse, gunned the engine, swinging backwards in a sliding turn, savagely steering against the drift of the back wheels on the wet pavement.
Yeah like getting a ticket or ending up in the ditch is going to help, she thought, though she wisely, for once, kept the comment to herself.
By the time he had reached the entrance of the park, Henry had regained some of his composure. Anger was dangerous to him now, when the hunger for blood pressed against his control and pounded in his temples. Anger was a distraction he could not afford. He knew he was being childish, but her words rankled. I am not ashamed of what I am, he thought, as he brought the car to a halt at a stoplight.
Her words troubled him, and he ran his hands up and down reflexively on the steering wheel as he worried at the suspicion she had raised in his mind.
She says she cannot love me because she does not know me, but if she knows, truly knows what I am then she will reject my nature, as do they all, whomever I reveal myself to. I want her to trust me, to love me, to accept me. I want her to share her brief life with me, yet she demands that I do not shelter her from my reality. Is she right? Is she right that I don't trust her?
The thoughts spun in his head even as the hunger clawed at him. Her presence so close after he had been so long denied filled him with a thrumming tension.
The light changed and he put the Jag in gear and started up Georgia Street. The rain was falling again steadily and the streets deserted except for the occasional car or cab. He had to decide.
Vicki wanted to glance at Henry, but she knew that any movement on her part would draw his attention to her, and she wanted to give him time to consider what she was asking. So she stared straight ahead out the windshield at the rain, which was falling more heavily now. She could sense from where she sat the tension in his body. While he considered, he kept up a low growling in his throat that he did not appear to be aware of, but it set Vicki on edge.
She cannot love me because she does not know me, and she cannot love the masquerade, not Vicki, not my Vicki. It was foolish to think that that shallow persona would satisfy her. I have hidden myself from all but a handful in 500 years; it is an instinct for self-preservation. I am not sure I can overcome that instinct and let her that close to me. If I show her what I truly am she will reject me, and if I refuse, she will reject me…there is no choice, if I wish to have her with me.
"You will promise me, to do exactly as I say; you will make no sound and interfere in no way. You will not resist me, or any request I make of you," he said suddenly, his voice a snarl at the corner he felt himself backed into. "Can you promise this?" he demanded.
He turned off to drive along Water Street through Gastown, glancing at her for affirmation.
"This flies in the face of every instinct I have Vicki, to take any but a Childe of my own with me on the hunt. You ask a great deal of me," he rasped. "Do you promise?"
Vicki nodded, suddenly struck by the enormity of what she was undertaking.
"Say it Vicki, in conscience, I need your oath." He persisted.
"I will do exactly as you say. I will keep quiet and will not interfere. I will not resist you in anyway. I promise you," she said seriously. If he is willing to make this concession for me, I can't balk at his terms.
***
Henry had parked the car against the curb three blocks down across the street from the Gospel Mission.
"Remember your promise," he said as he turned to her. "Stay with me but stay back, and DON'T interfere." There was a feral heat in his blue gaze that Vicki had never seen before, but that her every instinct recognized. She nodded, her throat suddenly dry.
He opened his door and went immediately to a very large transvestite hooker who lounged against a chain link fence in a short sequined dress and heels so high that Vicki could see the calf muscles corded with strain on the smooth shaved legs. The tiny, pink poodle design umbrella the hooker held over her head was hardly adequate to keep the rain off the broad shoulders.
As Vicki opened her door she heard the sultry tone as the whore purred in a voice too low to have ever passed female lips, "Henry, I haven't seen you round here for a while, are you looking for a little..."
Henry took the large carefully manicured hand in his own pale fingers and lifted it so that his lips brushed the back of the knuckles. "Cassandra," he purred in a voice so full of seduction that she pulled away from the fence and tottered closer to him, towering over the smaller man. The teased blond wig framed a face heavy with makeup, the eyes dark and rapt behind curled false lashes. Her red lips parted and she breathed, "we could have a...gooood time...Henry."
Vicky slammed the car door and turned, shoving her hands in her jacket pockets, leaning her hips against the car. She wanted to clear her throat to remind Henry of her presence, but mindful of her recent promise she quashed that urge, settling instead for removing her glasses and vigorously cleaning them on the edge of her shirt. Henry ignored her.
"As tempting as the offer is Cassandra," Henry said regretfully, "I have something else in mind tonight." He pulled his money clip from his pocket and peeled out a red tinged fifty-dollar bill. He deftly folded it between his fingers and tucked it between the silicon cleavage. "Keep an eye on my car, Cassie, please? I won't be long."
Cassandra's face lit with a brilliant smile, the effect only slightly spoiled by the lipstick on her teeth. "That's all I gotta do, just watch the car?" Henry nodded as he turned away. He started off down the sidewalk along Cordova at a brisk pace; he neither spoke to Vicki nor turned to see if she was following.
Frowning, Vicki pushed herself off the car and hurried after his retreating outline, nodding brusquely to "Cassandra" as she passed. So he wants to play it like that does he? she thought.
The street was lined with businesses that were dark and secured with metal gates and grills. Every parking lot was fenced with chain link and locked gates, the forbidding coils of razor wire crowning the top of these barriers. Henry paused at the corner of Hawks Street, his face a pale oval haloed by damp curls, and he turned the collar of his woolen jacket up against the damp. As Vicki came up alongside him she saw him narrow his eyes as he looked back up the street.
Two blocks back the light had changed green and even at almost two in the morning the white headlights of the one-way traffic streamed towards them along the wet surface of the road.
Henry stepped back instinctively, putting out his arm to push Vicki back as well. Then she saw him turn his head away to protect his eyes from the glare. She did the same in an effort to maintain whatever night vision remained to her.
For a moment her ears were full of the sounds of engines and the hissing rumble of tires on the wet road spinning water up into the air. There was the sound of rumbling bass from cranked speakers that hung in the air even as the other sounds faded. Her nose registered the smell of the wet interwoven with the familiar oily tang of car exhaust. She could feel Henry's fingers curled around her forearm. As the last of the red taillights disappeared around the downhill curve of the road, Henry released her arm and without a word stepped out across the now empty road.
The emaciated redhead on the corner under the streetlight, straightened hopefully when Henry passed. He shook his head and she lapsed back into a slack hipped stance, her face already blank again under her bedraggled hair as Vicki passed by close on Henry's heels. Half a block along Henry paused at the opening of the laneway behind the Astoria Hotel. A decrepit eight story brick building that housed a bar on the lower floor and then floors of flop house rooms that rented by the hour, day, week, and month or however long was required. The Astoria was a suppurating wound on the body of Vancouver; whatever one wanted, one could purchase it at the Astoria.
From the mouth of the alley Vicki could see the cool flickering blue of the small neon BAR sign over the metal fire door.
The alley was narrow and dark, its margins lined with the litter of everyday life, and the living litter of humanity. The brick walls with their security grilled windows and their defiant aerosol-sprayed tattoos, leaned as a meager shelter over those who had journeyed here. The filthy asphalt floor was wet and puddled in the rainy night, a night only held barely at bay by the oily light cast by the lampposts at either end, where the laneway opened out to side streets as noisome as the alley itself.
Overhead the net of electrical wires hummed with a mindless energy dissipating into the moist air, and high above, overlooking all, a transformer hung bolted to a leaning pole, hissing and crackling softly in the rain. For blocks along the alleys that ran between West Hastings and East Cordova streets this scene repeated itself again and again with a dreadful and pitiful regularity.
This was the other nightlife of Vancouver, beautiful Vancouver, the city by the sea. This was the playground of those for whom the day was but a dim memory: the junkies, drunks, drug dealers, the homeless, the abandoned, the deviants and whores. The drugged detritus of Vancouver, worn away from the main mass of society by circumstance, or ill luck, or weakness, to lie as rubble, ground down and forgotten in the alleyways of Strathcona.
The day was the time of drug induced oblivion, the evening a time of writhing and battling to gain the solace of whatever it was that allowed you to endure one more night spent alone in covert combat among your peers. Life held on a knife's edge in the world of the streets. This was the other nightlife of Vancouver, the wreckage of humanity. It was here that the vampire came to hunt.
Henry pulled at the lapels of his coat, settling it on his shoulders, and as he passed under the street lamp Vicki could see that his hair was netted with droplets of water that caught and refracted the light like faceted jewels.
Vicki's attention was drawn to a derelict, passed out drunk, lying boneless, propped against the overflowing dumpster in the weed choked margin of the parking lot. At least, she thought he was drunk, and she moved closer to check, he was so still, maybe he was...with a sudden snort, he opened slitted and bloodshot eyes, blinking, then mumbled something unintelligible under his breath, and tipped further sideways, to lie prone on the ground, the rain falling to pool in the sockets of his closed eyes. She looked up when she heard the sensuous music of Henry's voice.
He stood close to the bar door in front of three shivering hookers, who were clad in the briefest of garments and huddled sheltering under a crooked metal awning. Water ran in a steady and sparkling stream from one corner of the awning to spatter noisily on the pavement at their feet.
The one who stepped forward to run a hand down his arm in invitation was wearing a short plaid skirt and a tight white man-style shirt unbuttoned to her waist, the inside contours of her breasts and half her nipples visible where the shirt gaped open. She was wearing white knee-socks and Mary Janes and her hair was pulled up in two long tails on either side of her head.
Though she was perhaps twenty-four, the image she presented was disturbingly like a schoolgirl. The attempt at the wholesome image was ruined by the clusters of scabbed sores that covered the wall of her chest and the backs of her hand. Her eyes were dilated hugely though her lids were half closed in a sleepy lethargic expression.
"Hey honey," she purred. "Are you lookin' for a date? Only twenty to do you handsome, course if it's the two of you...well that would cost more," she said, sparing a glance in Vicki's direction.
"I'm looking for Jared," Henry said. Vicki could see he was tense under the whore's touch, but his voice remained neutral and he did not pull away.
"Hell...you ain't gonna find that sorry-assed pimp standin' out here in the wet," an older woman chuckled from where she sheltered under the metal. Her leopard print jumpsuit hugged a slim frame topped by huge breasts. Her face was hollow-cheeked and bore testament to a life of excesses. There was a large blue bruise that circled one of her eyes and crept, yellowing, down her jaw line.
"Jay, he's upstairs, in room 605, dry as a fuckin' bone! Poor boy's been sick, doctor says he's a-neem-ic or some such shit." She began to cough in a throaty whooping wheeze; after a moment she caught her breath, and wiping a hand across her mouth continued, "He's dealin' some good stuff though, honey. If you goes and gets some, then come on back down...you and me can have a real good time, sweet cheeks."
Henry nodded once and then turned and pulled open the door, passing through a short hallway. Vicki followed close behind. Though Henry looked neither to the left or right Vicki turned as they passed an open archway that led out to the bar. Smoke hung in a heavy layer in the room and the stained tables and cracked vinyl chair seats were still occupied by the inebriated or those who prey upon them.
Outside of her blurry field of vision she heard slurred voices rise in a sudden argument and the sound of a chair overturned. Then she was past, and at the end of the hall where Henry had started up the stairs.
He glanced back at her once, his face impassive, his eyes turbulent with what she recognized as anger and hunger. But he said nothing and so neither did Vicki.
He moved so quickly up the flights of stairs, never stopping on any of the landings, that her heart had begun to pound by the time they entered the stale, rancid length of the sixth floor hallway.
The air was full of the sounds of voices and somewhere at close range, a radio playing loudly. The walls were stained and covered with tags and graffiti; the smell of stale urine and greasy food and moldy damp was pervasive.
Henry eased along the hallway to a door that had the number 605 spray painted over the chipped and cracking surface. The music of the radio was coming from inside that room. Henry curled his fingers around the door handle and pushed. It did not seem to be a strenuous exercise on his part, but the door burst open, the lock and dead bolt falling to the floor.
The tall and thin man in khakis and a white undershirt, who had been seated at the table weighing out baggies of coke, shot upright, "What the fuck?" then relaxed visibly as he saw Henry slip through the door. "Oh, it's you," he said, in a strange flat voice. He seemed unaware of Vicki's presence, all his attention fixed on Henry.
Henry replied in a provocative tone, "Yes, Jared, it's time for our...meeting."