Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,96

adds to her, almost polite.

She feels the side of her neck. “No, he’s right. It is the only way I’ll know for sure.”

I’m shaking my head as I raise the shirt slowly. “You guys didn’t think to sprinkle any holy water on her or nothing?”

“I wouldn’t take the chance,” she says, “it might have—”

But that’s as far as she gets, because she’s looking at my chest now and her face—oh, man, I start thinking I’m in love, because that’s the look, that’s the look you oughta have when you see The Power and The Passion. I know, because it’s the look on my own face when I stand before the mirror and stare, and stare, and stare. It’s so fucking there.

Villanueva and Steener are looking off in the opposite direction. I give it a full two-minute count before I lower my shirt. The look on her face goes away and she’s just another character for a flash-movie again. Easy come, easy go. But now I know why she was so scared when she was here before. Guess they didn’t think to tell her about pure natural fibers.

“You’re perfect,” she says and turns to Steener and Villanueva. “He’s perfect, isn’t he? They can’t tempt him into joining them, because he can’t. He couldn’t if he wanted to.”

“Fuckin A,” I tell her.

Villanueva says, “Shut up,” to me and looks at her like he’s kinda sick. “You don’t know what you’re talking to. You don’t know what’s standing in this room with us. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, and I was a cop for sixteen years—”

“You told me what would have to be done with my husband and son,” she says, looking him straight in the eye and I start thinking maybe I’m in love after all. “You spelled that out easily enough. The agony of the Crucifixion, the burning and the cutting open of the bodies with silver knives, the stakes through the hearts, the beheadings, the burning. That didn’t bother you, telling me what was going to happen to my family—”

“That’s because they’re the white hats,” I say to her, and I can’t help smiling, smiling, smiling. “If they had to do it, they’d do it because they’re on the side of Good and Right.”

Suddenly Steener and Villanueva are falling all over each other to hustle her out and she don’t resist, but she don’t cooperate either. The last thing I see before the door closes is her face looking at me, and what I see in that face is not understanding, because she couldn’t go that far, but acceptance. Which is one fucking hell of a lot more than I’ll ever get from Steener or Villanueva or anybody-the-fuck-else.

And Steener and Villanueva, they don’t even get it, I know it just went right by them, what I told her. They’d do it because they’re on the side of Good and Right.

I do it because I like to.

And I don’t pretend like I ain’t no monster, not for Good and Right, and not for Bad and Wrong. I know what I am, and the madwoman who put The Power and The Passion on my chest, she knew, too, and I think now she did it so the vamps would never get me, because God help you all if they had.

Just a coincidence, I guess, that it’s my kind of picture.

THE UNICORN TAPESTRY

Suzy McKee Charnas

Suzy McKee Charnas has won the Hugo, Nebula, Mythopoeic, and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. Her Holdfast series, a tetralogy written over the course of almost thirty years (the first novel, Walk to the End of the World was published in 1974; the last, The Conqueror’s Child in 1999) is considered to be a germinal work of feminist science fiction. Perhaps even better known is The Vampire Tapestry, a book that grew out of the following novella, “The Unicorn Tapestry.” [The Vampire Tapestry has also been adapted (by Charnas herself) into the play Vampire Dreams.] Considered a classic ever since its publication, the Oxford Times called The Vampire Tapestry: “Probably the best vampire novel ever written.” As “Rebecca Brand” Charnas wrote the considerably more traditional vampire romance The Ruby Tear. Many of her stories are collected in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms (2006). She lives in New Mexico.

Now, please meet Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire unlike any other you are likely to encounter…

“Hold on,” Floria said. “I know what you’re going to say: I agreed not to take any new clients for a while. But wait till I