Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,56

Jude’s hair. When she tried to smooth it down, she zapped herself, jumped.

Diwata laughed. “We’re a pair.”

They were. Diwata, pushing seventy, hunched and small in the olive drab jacket her wife had gotten while fighting in some war or another, and Jude, pushing infinity, gangly and tall, in nothing but a ragged T-shirt and jeans, long black strands of hair sticking to her moon-pale cheeks. Another woman, still wearing a surgical mask due to the last bird flu outbreak, joined them at the stop, only daring to look at them once. When Jude grinned at her, the woman’s eyes dialed wide. She hurried off without waiting for the next bus, boot heels hammering the sidewalk.

“That was mean,” said Diwata.

“All I did was smile.”

“Uh-huh.”

They waited another ten minutes in silence. But no matter how long the bus took, Jude wouldn’t let Diwata wait by herself, and Diwata had stopped objecting the day she’d scooped Jude out the Lion House—an unspoken pact. Most of the time, Jude’s fearlessness alone was enough to ward off would-be muggers. Most of the time.

A third bus lumbered by without stopping. Outside a bodega, a stooped old man held out an empty cup to customers coming and going. “Something to drink, ma’am? Sir?” Even when the people shook their heads no, the man said, “Bless you.”

Diwata said, “What if you could do something about all this?”

“All what?” said Jude. “What do you think I could do?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a lot Diwata didn’t know. She didn’t know that, not too long ago, Jude lay down in the woods, hoping to feed hungry coyotes with her own flesh. She didn’t know Jude had waded into the lake and tried her best to drown. Diwata didn’t know what the lionesses had done to save her.

Finally, the bus rumbled up to the stop. Before she got on, Diwata said, “You want to come with me? Vivian’s making chicken adobo tonight. Not fake—the real thing.”

“Rain check,” Jude said.

At this lie, Diwata nodded, and then she climbed aboard. Jude watched the bus drive away and started the long walk home. Head down, hands jammed into her jean pockets, she dodged commuters and messengers, students and criminals. The occasional dog barked frantically at her—Not food, not food, NOT FOOD—until she murmured that they were safe, that she wouldn’t hurt them or their humans.

“Girl,” said a Latino kid with a faint pubescent mustache, dragging his mutt away from her shoes, “you’re seriously creepy.”

“Right?” she said.

Night fell over the city, and still she walked. This was the only thing that had carried over from before, this night-walking. It used to be she walked so that she didn’t have to go home to the little house in Jefferson Park, the brick bungalow that was so adorable on the outside and so awful within. Her mom needed her dad but her dad needed his oxy; their fights could be heard for miles. Jude started drinking in middle school to dull the punches and drown out the noise. Later, she used boys to pass the time. When the country was gripped with bird flu terror and the boys’ parents kept them home, Jude found herself in basement clubs with other lost souls, daring Mother Nature to take her best shot at them. Hers came in the form of another boy, prettier than Jude ever was, shiny and gold. He told her he loved her. And he had, in his way, though his love had ruined them both.

Also a ruin: Buckingham Fountain. The city didn’t have the water to spare to keep it operational, so the basins sat empty, the sculptural dragons as thirsty as everyone else. The pretty golden boy had had a thing for magical beasts: unicorns, basilisks, griffins, chimera, and other creatures of all kinds.

“You’re the magical beast,” she’d told him.

“Yes,” he said, pushing her back onto a dirty mattress. “Yes, I am.”

Now, the lights from the buildings downtown stared at her like so many yellow eyes: What if you could do something about all this? What if?

Some questions you can’t ask. The familiar queasy thirst clenched her stomach, pulsed at the root of her tongue. If she didn’t keep moving, the thirst would permeate the air like a perfume, call to the people around her. They would come to her whether she wanted them to or not, offer themselves, even if their eyes rolled in confusion and terror as they did.

So she kept moving, the proverbial shark in the water, swimming so as not to