The Blood: A Denouement

“I was wondering when you’d call,” Jason said.

“I can’t believe you’re awake.”

“Well,” Marabeth heard a shrug in Jason’s voice, could almost see him taking a hand through his reddish hair, “You know. Detective hours.”

“I think things have been so weird,” Marabeth told him while she sat in bed. “I don’t know what I would say that would make you not run away.”

“Things have been weird since we’ve met. And there are still things we haven’t figured out. Like, you know…?”

“You still want to go there, to that place? Try to contact, no scratch that, absolutely contact Hagano?”

“I absolutely do.”

“Jason, so much shit has happened since we’ve gotten here. So much has happened tonight.”

“You learned more?”

“A lot more, and still not enough.”

“Do you want my help in this? For real? Because I feel like I’m already in, but then I feel like maybe you don’t quite want me all the way in.”

Marabeth looked out the window, but not because there was really much to see. It was the middle of the night. And yet, even as she said this, her eyes adjusted. She could see sphagnum moss hanging from trees, moths darting, the birds of the night. Her wold eyes were opening.

“I don’t know. I was married before, but back then there wasn’t much to tell, My family wasn’t nearly so… interesting. Or at least I didn’t know how interesting they were.”

“I got a few days off,” Jason said. “What if…. What if I was to come down there? Would that… Be alright? You could show me everything. Everything you wanted.”

This would be the time where a cautious woman said something like, let me think about it.”

But Marabeth Strauss had never been that cautious.

“How soon can you be here?”

A mood overtakes Myron even as the plane touches down in Heathrow. He tries to say it’s nothing, and when Dan says, “Look at this. This is London,” Myron just smiles, looking a little sick and says, “I’ve actually been to London before. With Uncle Grange and Peter, years ago.”

It is later that evening that it flies out of Myron’s mouth.

“This is my fault.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t watching out for you. That first time I wasn’t watching out for you. With that girl. I was being horny and drunk and feeling bad about myself. And… when this happened to you, I wasn’t watching out for you either. Things would not be the way they were if … If I had been a good friend.”

Dan looks shocked.

“That is bullshit.”

“And I didn’t even know anything had happened. I didn’t even know, but I did the math, and I know when it happened, I know the night. And… I wasn’t taking care of you.”

“You had a wife. You had a kid,” Dan said, “and it was never your job to take care of me.”

Dan Rawlinson is past jealousy. He’s a little confounded because the band never took off. They tried for years, and it seems like he might want to settle into his father’s plumbing business, and put this music to the side. Myron never agrees when Dan suggests that, but then Myron is working with his family still. The only thing he ever says is, “Dan, you could come in on the business.”

That seems like ultimately failure, to take charity from Myron’s family. Myron went to school and graduate school to do what he does, to really do… he isn’t exactly sure what Myron does. But it’s something smart people do and something he was always going to do.

And then Myron’s got to get home to the wife and kid, and Jinny’s great and the kid is adorable, and sometimes it sort of hurts that his best friend is so successful, and it sort of hurts to be hurt by it. That isn’t right. It’s not gracious.

When he has a beautiful girl on his shoulder, or better yet, when they are together, really together and it seems like a life is going to start, like it did with Eileen, and then it ends, well then he feels what a shit at success he is.

It was like this that night, when Two and the Band had finished their set. Rick and Jack were long gone, and now they had Craig and Angelo. Eileen had been a singer in the band, Eileen, who had his engagement ring, Eileen whom he had looked at houses with, Eileen who he had found in bed with Craig.

So Craig was just business, He was fulfilling his part of the contract and getting the fuck out of the club without looking at Dan, and he knew he had to stay till they found another member. This was a business. They weren’t the most important band in the world, but they made money. People expected them to be a full band that rose above its personal bullshit.

:”That was a great set you guys played,” the redhead said to them.

“Oh, thank you,” Dan said.

“Especially you.”

She smiled at him. He needed a smile.

“You look like the saddest man in the world,” the woman said. “Let me get you a drink.”

Dan shrugged and said, “Okay, but I have to get the next one.”

“We’ll see what happens.”

They drank for a while, and Myron was with them, but in the end he squeezed Dan’s shoulder and said, “I’m about to go.”

“Oh, goodnight, Myron.”

The red haired woman’s voice was lush. Dan couldn’t place her accent, tell exactly where in America it was coming from. For a moment he thought it was almost as if she was making a generic accent up.

Before Myron departed, Dan whispered to him at the door, “I think…. She wants me to go home with her.”

Myron smiled warmly at his friend.

“I think you should, Dan. You deserve a little happiness.”

“I’d be happy if I still had my fiancé.”

“Fuck her,” Myron said with more heat than he’d intended.

“If you can’t have happiness the way you want, at least have some attention you deserve.”

He made a little phone gesture with his hand.

“Call me in the morning.”

The woman is glorious. She smells like… Dan isn’t quite sure what she smells like, but honey is there, and he knows he’s going to bed with her. She has the most lustrous, thick red hair and green eyes, and she tells him, “I’m staying at the Midland Hotel. I’m visiting family.”

Dan has only passed the Midland Hotel on Bancroft, tall and elegant, one of the oldest hotels in the city, and here he is in a lobby where the second floor surrounds it as a balcony and there are marble arches under a vaulted ceiling, and he’s trying not to grin like a rube and she’s laughing and kissing him on the cheek. They’re going up in an elevator and he cannot believe his good fortune. Maybe things are getting better after all.

They have another drink and she makes a bath, and they make love in the bath, and while Dan remembers what it’s like to be with a woman who isn’t Eileen, she drains the tub and they move to the shower and from the shower to the bed.

She is running her hands over his body. He is gently sucking her lips, kissing her nipples, taking his tongue up and down her soft skin while she laughs in exultation. When she touches him it’s like the first time he’s really felt his own penis, the first time he’s felt it be this swollen thing, sensitive to the touch, curving, growing, hard, wet with the trickle of semen, wet with whatever she’s got on her hand while she’s massaging him, stroking him, pulling him, someone else’s hand on him for the first time in a long time.

“Come on,” she says, her hands caressing his ass, pulling him inside of her.

“Oh, God,” she murmurs, or is he murmuring? It feels so good. He’s needed this. Her hands are so tender up and down him and it feels so good. He shudders. It feels so good to push and push into her, and he wants to keep doing it, but he’s slow about it, wanting to be gentle, and then her hands are up and down his back and she’s saying, “Don’t be gentle. Just do it.”

And so he starts to do it and he can feel her thighs around him, pulling him deeper inside of her, and he can hear himself growling between his teeth and she is rejoicing and calling ,”Fuck me! Do it harder.”

They’re both breathing hard together and his heart his pounding, his whole body is pounding, and then Dan is surprised and cries out while he comes. Somewhere along the line, sex with Eileen became tame Maybe that’s why she left. He keeps slamming into his new lover, exhausting himself, surprised at his shuddering body and at how long his body rocks on this orgasm, how much he spills, when her fingernails, sharp in his back, draw blood, become as insistent as claws. He answers with a harder thrust as she pulls him down and suddenly the gently nipping teeth prick, clamp down into his throat, and in an agonizing, strangling moment everything changes as, at the last of his coming, his body reeling from orgasm, he is turned around and feels the insistence of the fangs, his body convulsing with death and not pleasure, and a burning filling his arteries as life and strength drain away and he knows….

Tanitha and Kruinh… they were vampires.

This woman is a vampire…

I… am dying.