Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,207

in the room that night. Ash had been kidnapped.

Later, when she had numbed herself with wine and marijuana, Cole remembered Ash’s last business trip. From a hotel room in Buenos Aires he had written her a message on his computer:

The city doesn’t sleep until dawn. The clubs and bars only really begin to pump around 3 a.m. Our hotel is in La Recoleta—near the “City of the Dead.” I roam there with Kevin all night while he tries to buy drinks for the girls on their mopeds.

The women are stunning, but never as stunning as you, chula. One tried to get me to tango with her two nights ago. I passed her on to Kevin but she kept smiling at me.

Buenos Aires. It was the last stumbling block in his smoothly paved life. A girl. A cemetery. It didn’t bode well.

“So you came here,” I said, the café and afternoon far behind us. Cole drank gin straight from a glass and chewed the ice. We sat on the sidewalk that served as my front lawn, resting on warm cement as the multi-colored sidings of La Boca gleamed with deceptive cheer above us. After Maria I had thought to move somewhere festive. Yet the shadows were lengthening now. Mothers called children to supper and the boys with their soccer balls vanished from the streets. I could smell meat and spices, hear the beef sizzling when the traffic lulled. The breeze came in from Canal Sur, stinking of oil. A salsa band began to tune in the distance, the trumpet mewling, lost in amongst the bright and dirty dwellings. Another colored night coming now. Another night.

“I’ve got a jealous nature,” Cole said, blowing smoke from her cigarette. “I won’t let another woman have him. Even if she is a vampire.”

When I winced she quirked the side of her mouth.

“Shall I speak more softly?” she asked.

“Perhaps you should,” I said. “No one speaks that word. Other people would think you were …” Why was it so hard? I had acquired more caution in my old age, instead of less.

“Loco?” Cole asked.

I spread my hands, nodded.

“Vampire,” Cole whispered. “Wampyre. El Vampiro.” She laughed in her low, rough way and blew the names of the demons out in clouds of nicotine. “I’m not afraid, Father,” she said.

I sighed. “Perhaps you should be.”

Cole was the only person I’d ever met who knew about them. My fellow portenos had to have seen things, but even in this city it was hard to acknowledge magic greater than the peace brought you by the Virgin’s effigy, or the hell of too many nights in drink. This was still the modern world. Even Cole and I had only been able to believe after they stole our hearts: Cole’s from a hotel room, mine from a courtyard café.

“Maria,” Cole said. “Your priest friends told me about her. I think they miss you at that little church.”

I laughed. My turn for gin now. We sat sweating in my flat, the bottle nearly empty between us. Passing cars provided the only light. I kept the ceiling fan on but would not touch the lamp. Cole seemed to understand. We sat and smoked, growing drunker. This is what lonely lovers do without their other half. It doesn’t matter if two years have passed or twenty.

“You still wear the collar,” Cole said.

I touched my throat: its white-starch band. She noticed so much, enough even to mark the stir in the air when one of them appeared. Is that how she had traced them, I wondered? To ask in churches until she found rumors and then stories and finally the local legends that brought her to me?

“I was told to retire,” I said. I was drunk enough to sound bitter. “They wouldn’t like it if they knew Father Peña still fancies himself a priest. But I never left them—they left me.”

“You aren’t a priest though, are you? Not anymore?”

“My religion is Maria. Father Adelmo and Father Sanchez—they knew it, even before she vanished. My heart had not been God’s for some time.”

“What happened, Father?” I could hardly see her in the dark. Just the outline of her hair.

“A girl of seventeen won the love of a priest twice her age.” I said it calmly, as if I had told the story before. “On the night they would consummate their love the priest arrived late to a tango and a man in a black suit was standing with the girl. The dance was held outside amongst the