Baka was across the narrow alley where the painter rented a north facing attic room. He would never have stood a chance at getting a glimpse of the vampire because, after several centuries of practice, Baka was masterful at melting into shadows and becoming one with the darkness.
After the young painter left, Baka slipped upstairs to the attic room, curious to see what was on the canvases within. He closed the door behind him and went straight for the large painting propped on an easel, illuminated by the soft light of an oil lamp turned down low. It was almost finished; a nude, reclining portrait of a young woman with a loose bouquet of colorful flowers strewn across her torso.
Baka found it captivating, stunning in the starkness of its frank and accurate realism. It was then that he heard a woman's sleepy moan coming from the bed in the corner. He jerked his head toward the corner where a three-quarter bed was shoved against the wall to leave maximum space for the studio. He had been so intent on the art that he hadn't been aware of her presence.
When he heard the seductive sounds of a young, live, female food source, his fangs descended instantly, involuntarily. He had lost so much interest in living he hadn't even realized he hadn't eaten. Knowing that the sound came from the figure in the painting revived his interest. He grew hard as he began to salivate. The blood called to him, her pulse grew louder beating a rhythm that was compelling and annoying at the same time.
When the naked Jonaviev felt the bed move beside her, she turned smiling without opening her eyes, and murmured a welcoming purr.
Baka was amused. The winsome smile that had captivated the hearts of girls when he was a young man had been made hideous by yellowed fangs and an unmistakable glint of cruelty in his eyes.
"Ah, you welcome my kiss, Cherie."
The artist's model came fully awake, but the scream that originated in her mind froze in her throat as the vampire sank his fangs into her neck severing her vocal cords, one of the first tricks he had learned from Lefrik.
The act reminded him of his late partner and made him reminisce. Good old Lefrik. He hadn't thought of him in ages.
"You should be more discriminating, beauty. My kiss is sweet, but it comes with a bite."
His hands tore at the scant, filmy sheath she slept in as his fangs ruthlessly tore at her jugular. There was no satisfaction in the rape, certainly no pleasure. It was a natural drive prompted by the body, cousin to pissing, nothing more. The pleasure he had once gotten from causing, or witnessing, pain - the way he had sometimes found it comical and sometimes stimulating - had faded away to nothingness and left him feeling simply hollow.
However horrible Jonaviev's initial shock and pain must have been, she had left her body long before Baka was finished with it. When she died from blood loss, it simply felt like she drifted to sleep.
Baka was not careful with the wounds. Why should he be? No one had ever heard of a woman surviving a vampire's attentions. He struck at the body repeatedly until he was full.
As he refastened his pants and licked his lips, he glanced dispassionately at the mess he had made of a young woman. His eyes then wandered again to the portrait. In comparison he noticed how different it seemed now that the subject was his victim.
Stopping in front of the canvas he had a strange urge to pick up a brush. It felt familiar in his hand. He knew he had been an artist at one time because he'd seen flashes of those memories. But that was long ago. And may as well have been someone else.
Looking from canvas to corpse and back again he decided the painting might be enhanced by aspects of the body's new "look', the blank stare of her eyes, and, perhaps, by the addition of the subject's blood. He smiled at his own wit as he thought it would be a variation on bleeding for art's sake.
Taking palette in hand, he attempted to dab blood onto the brush, but found that it had coagulated and become thick and useless. He looked around for something to use to get blood flowing again. Surely there was enough left to refine a painting.
Baka looked around the room for a sharp object and found nothing of that description except for a palette knife which, really, should never have been called a knife at all since it was not designed to cut. Still, he suspected he could persuade flesh to part under the pressure of the palette knife whether designed for that purpose or not.
So he cut Jonaviev to create the grisliest sort of medium and applied it liberally to the painting. After a couple of hours he was satisfied with his work. The artist's lover was a gruesome patchwork of cuts. He left her glassy eyes open and staring thinking they were too pretty to close.
When Picasso returned to the flat, it took several minutes for his brain to make sense of what he was seeing. When his mind was able to grasp the scene, he sank to his knees as his mouth worked silently, unable to produce any sound for the longest time. Just when it seemed he would never breathe again, his body jerked as his lungs filled involuntarily.
He sat on the floor the rest of the night staring at the canvas and the body of his lover. When light began to come through the windows, he went to the police and told them what had happened. When the police were convinced that he was not a suspect, he spent a couple of days walking or sitting by the river. On the third day he went to his friend, Max Jacob, who took him in. He never went back to the attic room.
When he began painting again, his art was drastically and permanently changed. People began to say he was sullen and withdrawn, easily irritated by people who would question him about the change in his work and irrationally temperamental.
Baka left Paris shortly thereafter. He realized that changes in scenery were keeping him occupied for shorter and shorter periods. He was afraid that, if the trend continued, he would reach the point where he would be bored with a place before he even arrived.
He decided to give the colonies another try, see what they were up to. Supposedly, they were in the middle of a cultural revolution and it sounded worthy of personal investigation. He wouldn't use the word interesting because he was afraid that he couldn't remember what interesting was.
Ocean sailing had continued to progress. He could scarcely believe how it had changed in just a few hundred years. He booked passage on the Mauretania, one of Cunard's fabulous steam turbine vessels that could accomplish the transatlantic crossing in just five days. He could manage that without a single feeding if he wanted to.
The eighteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution banned alcohol and named the era "Prohibition". Naturally those who could participate in the business of providing illegal booze either experienced greatly increased prosperity or death at the hands of rivals.
Women were behaving outrageously. They were wearing dresses without corsets and bustles. Hemlines revealed ankles and, sometimes, legs all the way to the knee! Some began smoking, wearing makeup, staying out late at night, and dancing in lewd, suggestive ways. It was a vampire's paradise.
New York was hardly the outpost Baka had visited a hundred and fifty years before. Wall Street had become crowded with Model T's. Baka decided it was time to learn to drive. Since money was no object, he bought a magnificent, yellow Stutz Bearcat, a warehouse to keep it in, and a guard to sleep on a cot and watch over it. He hired a woman to teach him how to drive it and thanked her for it by taking her blood and dumping her body into the Hudson River.
The subway system had been in operation for eighteen years. He was fascinated by it, partly because of the marvel of moving people around underground and partly because of the idea of a place with no light to hurt pale vampire eyes and little, if any, chance of being hunted down by Black Swan knights. After five hundred years of running, the prospect of staying in one place for a while was very appealing. He had concluded that boredom was more tolerable than constant running.
The subways didn't run at night so he took the opportunity to take a full lantern and explore. In the process he discovered that there was a maze of tunnels that had been excavated and then abandoned because of a new or different plan for the system. For the first time since he'd become a vampire, Baka became interested in something besides a mindless pursuit of a pleasure that would always elude him.