A Taste of You Read online

  “No thanks,” I say, although I feel the bottle, a lump in my backpack. The last thing this city needs is a well-adjusted vampire who has forgiven herself. I’d be like Jilly on magical steroids. “I have Dr. Springe to support anyway.”

  If I stand here any longer, I’ll start hyperventilating prana like a carp out of swamp-water, and somebody will end up in the DustBuster.

  “It’s nonaddictive,” Beulah calls after me as I reach for Dr. Springe’s office door. “You’ll never want another dose!”

  “Great! Thanks!” I wave and scram for my therapy session.

  o0o

  It’s not an easy session. To start with, Dr. Springe freaks me out. She looks a little different. Her eyes are open wider, or less focused, or something. I decide not to mention it. Instead I remark that I met one of her clients outside her office, someone I know, who is one of Dr. Katterfelto’s ... associates? employees?

  “She is my therapist,” Dr. Springe says calmly.

  I am pardonably boggled. “She seems like a bag lady.”

  Dr. Springe smiles. “Even therapists need therapists of their own. She has a unique point of view. I get most of my ideas for my radio show from talking to her.”

  This makes perfect sense, since Dr. Springe, when talking on the radio about how happy thoughts will keep you from disappearing into the pink during rush hour, sounds at least as batty as Beulah. It puts a bit of a dent in my urge to confide in her, however.

  Then I remember telling my mother to quit drinking. I tell my shrink about that. “I feel so guilty. She actually looked depressed when I told her!”

  “This is good,” Dr. Springe says. “Things will not change if you do not change. You are already changing, I think.”

  A chill passes through me. I’ve made it this far by not changing. What if that was the wrong thing to do? I’d thought of seeing Dr. Springe as one way to make it possible for me to tolerate staying the same.

  I may have been looking at all my problems backwards.

  “I think I’m ready to change,” I say gloomily. “I don’t know how not to. It’s just happening.”

  “It must be very uncomfortable,” Dr. Springe says sympathetically. “What is different?”

  “For one thing, this Federal agent. He’s a pest. He came to the bout the other night and then he turned up at the after party and he kissed me. And then Dr. Katterfelto said one my chakras has turned itself back the right way around again. And I think Nick’s not sleeping with me because I seem so young.”

  Dr. Springe leans forward. “What is this I see on your face?” She touches the outside corner of her own eye.

  I touch my own face, and then I remember. “Crow’s feet,” I say. “I’m sick of being treated like a teenager. My own mother,” I add, thinking of Jilly manipulating me from her sickbed.

  “Your own mother has crow’s feet? You are envious of her, perhaps?”

  Sheesh, the way shrinks think. “Yes, I am envious of her,” I snarl. “She’s seventy years old, she has liver cancer, she’s penniless, and she’s still having fun. I think she’s having an affair with her married surgeon,” I add, hearing the envy in my own voice and kicking myself for it.

  “She should not be screwing a married surgeon?” Dr. Springe says.

  “Well,” I admit a little shamefacedly, “I suppose it’s no worse than me screwing a Fed who will put me away if he figures me out.”

  “You’re screwing the Fed!” Dr. Springe says delightedly. “At last! Congratulations!”

  “I’m not!” I say, and burst into tears. “I wish I was dead!” My insides are twisting in a way that makes me wish even more passionately for a drink.

  Great. Is this Jilly’s secret? She can stay happy if she simply never gets far from the next drink?

  Dr. Springe waits out my tears in silence. Eventually I’m just hiccupping into a tissue. Then she looks me in the eye. “You don’t wish to be dead.”

  I throw my tissue at the wastebasket. “I think I do,” I say.

  “That’s very serious,” Dr. Springe says. She says it very well, as if she isn’t just saying what she’s supposed to say. “You never mentioned it before.”

  “I know.” I let my arms lie on my thighs, staring at the pale, veined skin. “I wasn’t sure what kind of obligation it would put you under if I said.”

  “Even in death, you are considerate.” She sounds amused.

  “No, I’m not. I’m a horrible coward. I’d like to be dead, but I’m afraid to try. What if it doesn’t work? What if it hurts? I’m sick of hurting.”

  “What, precisely, hurts?”

  I think of young Breck listening to Dr. Katterfelto in mad scientist mode explain how his love comes up and sticks in his throat instead of coming out. Just like Breck’s, my tears well up and spill over.

  I say, “I think it’s my heart.”

  Dr. Springe says nothing.

  “If I can’t express my love, I hurt. When I hurt, I drink. When I drink, I get very, very afraid I’m going to kill someone. Every now and then I do — about every seven to ten years.” That’s a lie. It’s oftener. “But it’s not because I’m trying to express love. It’s always some asshole I’ve trolled for.”

  “Trolled?”

  “Bar hopping. Looking for a predator who thinks I’m easy pickings.” I watch my hand close on my knee. My fingers clench until they’re bloodless. I open the hand with a snap, as if I could show Dr. Springe how quickly they die.

  “Nobody deserves to die. Do they?” I’m so pathetic. Asking my shrink for absolution. Hell, I’m paying for absolution. It’s embarrassing how much I am willing to ignore that, how eagerly I would accept purchased absolution from her.

  “Not even you, Hel,” she says, thank goodness.

  I blink at her. “I’m not so sure.”

  She lets that lie. I think she ought to be trying harder to talk me out of suicide. Maybe she can tell what a coward I am.

  “What would decide it for you?” she says now.

  Now I feel alarm, as if she’s pushing me toward suicide. “If I can’t have Nick.”

  “Is he an asshole?” The word sounds funny in her prissy, not-really-American mouth.

  “Do you mean, is he the kind of predator I kill? No,” I say, and then I reconsider. “I thought he must be, when we met. He’s so bossy.” I think of how it feels to be near Nick. How I can’t control my urge to drink as much of his prana as I can hold.

  How it hasn’t hurt him yet.

  “He—I—”

  I feel like a fool. We’ve met how often? And I’ve sipped at him, tentatively at first, then harder and harder, trying to dent his bossiness.

  “I think I can’t kill him.” I rush on, “That’s why I want him. Because he just gets hornier, the more I take from him. That’s not the real problem, though. The real problem is, he’s a Fed. If he found out, if he arrested me — I think I’d be ready to die then.”

  “And if he found you out but did not arrest you?”

  I try to imagine this. It would be like being near Jilly and wanting her to hug me and not daring to let her. Like wanting a steak or a big plate of bacon and eggs and just staring at it, staring and wanting and knowing it’s wrong, until my insides pinch right up.

  I daren’t.

  I want it so much. So very much.

  I put my hands over my face. “I’m such a coward.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nick’s Cherokee is waiting for me when I leave Dr. Springe’s office. So he did follow me.

  I felt weird, walking up to his car. No doubt he’ll yell at me for going into the blue. Or for going to see Katterfelto and not telling him. Or, what if he knows about me following him and watching him undress and do his exercises in his horrible flophouse room? I can only imagine the scolding I’ll get for that.

  Hel, if he knows about you turning into a mist, you won’t get a scolding, you’ll get sent to Hinky Guantanamo and you’ll never go home.

  I don’t look fo
rward to trying to keep my temper during an Agent Nick scolding.

  At the same time my pulse is leaping around like a swimming pool full of ADHD kids. I want to touch him.

  I want to taste him.

  He seems to be in a good humor when I get into the car beside him. I can taste that. I can no more stop myself from tasting him than I can stop breathing. Oh God, he tastes good.

  He smells like he just at a hamburger with ketchup and a slice of pickle and then a vanilla ice cream cone. I picture my big bad secret agent licking the cone. I think about licking him. I think of how it felt to watch him undress and do his pushups.

  Whatever he’s thinking, it makes him breathe heavily. So maybe he knows after all. But he can’t possibly know.

  Anyway, it’s a lovely moment, and I’d like to bottle it and keep it for those long lonely winter evenings ahead.

  “I want to show you something,” he says finally. He puts the Cherokee in gear and we roll. “You asked how I got into the agency. It’ll be easier to show you than tell you.”

  We swing out onto Peterson and head west.

  He meanders around the north side in a crazy, lazy way, for all the world like a squad car cruising for trouble. He’s in such a good mood. Being with him makes me feel great. I can’t stop tasting him. Sip, sip, sip. Heaven!

  And it doesn’t affect him at all.

  Or rather, it does. It seems to make him feel better and better. And he whangs up a boner.

  Nice to know I can make a man feel good, even if we’re not naked.

  Nick tightens, and then he’s gunning the Cherokee and roaring west on Peterson. We charge through West Rogers Park and then barrel north up Pulaski, and soon we are mired in a traffic jam north of Lincoln Avenue and Pulaski.

  Nick pulls into the lot of a Dunkin Donuts and angles the car’s nose so we can see the intersection.

  “When that gas pump blows, it’ll melt the pump canopy,” Nick says. He’s looking at the gas station kattycorner from us. A cloud of pigeons is wheeling over the gas station. Nick shakes his head.

  “What do you mean, when that blows?” I say. “If you know—”

  BOOM! The gas pump jumps on its concrete pad. Flames shoot up and engulf the steel-and-plastic canopy over the pump.

  “I’ve watched this happen too many times,” Nick says, watching.

  I get a freaky feeling. “What are you? Some kind of pyromaniac?”

  “Nope. I just know when stuff — certain things — are about to happen.”

  I stare at him. “You knew when a pigeon was about to steal a cigarette and drop the lighted butt on top of somebody’s gas tank just where the pump was stuck in it and the fumes were concentrated in one spot?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went to watch it anyway?”

  I have a bad feeling. Nick doesn’t look like a crazy person. He doesn’t feel like a crazy person, either. I think of cheerful psychopaths I have met and I hope to goodness Nick is not some new kind. His energy, while it tastes good to me, has darkened. My chest is tightening with his. He’s afraid of what is coming, or at least, he’s not enjoying looking forward to it.

  We sit here, staring through the windshield as the car at the pump catches fire. Flames fill the interior, and black smoke seeps out of the slightly-open window.

  A man comes out of the gas station and gesticulates madly. “That’s my car! That’s my car!”

  He looks up. The cloud of pigeons has come closer, swirling over the stricken gas pump and the burning car beside it.

  The car owner backs away from his toastmobile.

  Five seconds later, an eternity, we hear — and feel — four muffled thumps as the burning car’s tires pop. I flinch and smack my head against my window. “Ow.”

  Sirens sound in the distance. A cop car angles across Pulaski, blocking traffic. Another zooms into position to block Lincoln.

  The canopy above the pump is apparently eighty percent plastic. It’s black and melty and flaming around the edges. The pump looks like a pop can after a cherry bomb has exploded in it.

  Nick points through the windshield. Up.

  I look up.

  Overhead, small flocks of pigeons are racing through the smoke, dodging in and out of it, careening through the flame. They wheel, bank, and change direction with the earnest intensity and perfect formation of Olympic athletes training to do something utterly insane.

  They’re trying to get into the flame.

  “I’ve never seen them do that over a fire before,” I say. “Are you telling me they deliberately drop the lighted butt right there, on the precise spot where the pump nozzle is in the gas tank, where the fumes are the most concentrated? Are you telling me they want to start a fire?”

  The flames last a minute or two and then vanish, although the black smoke remains, fogging the area and making a horrible smell.

  I shake my head. “That’s crazy. They can’t have evolved like that. Pigeons have been around forever. Cars have been around for a hundred years, tops.”

  “Magic changes things fast,” Nick says, putting the Cherokee in gear and turning around so we can get away from the melee. “We think it’s a mating ritual.”

  I think about that. Then I think about it some more. “Whoa.”

  “Seriously,” Nick says.

  “That is scary.” I say. “Because pigeons mate year round. Like, they’re always horny.”

  “Yup.”

  We’re rolling west, and then Nick ducks down Elston Avenue. At the river he starts working his way east again. The river is always close by. Gulls, not pigeons, are more common now, flicking their way over the street and buildings, tracing the river.

  He pulls over again. I see a series of huge metal warehouses backed up against the river.

  “What stinks?” I say. “P.U.” I’ve been smelling it for half a mile, but now it’s unbearable.

  He points. “That’s a garbage sorting facility.”

  “Sorting?” I say incredulously. “We sort garbage in Chicago? What the frink?”

  “You don’t have special contractors to handle recyclables the way the burbs do. So the recyclables in blue bags go into the trucks with regular garbage. And they have to be sorted out here.”

  “That’s insane,” I say.

  “It’s pretty normal, actually,” Nick says. “Pittsburgh did it.”

  Pittsburgh. I get a chill.

  The place is surrounded by high chain link fence, topped with barbed wire.

  “So why are we here?” I say. “Because this really stinks.” He has no idea how much it stinks. My vampire nose is suffering here.

  He points. Two big garbage trucks rumble up to the gate. The gate is weird. Long silvery strings hang down from a high arch, twenty feet high, like some giant hippy-dippy curtain of tinsel. “The portal is electrified,” Nick says.

  I watch the first truck rumble up to the fringe and push very slowly through it.

  “Adaptation.” Nick says. “Chicago is remarkably good at it. Losing battle, of course,” he adds dispassionately.

  Little zaps and sparks appear along the surface of the truck as it passes slowly through the electrified veil.

  “Ah.” Nick points to the side.

  From a hole in a fence surrounding the next lot come dogs, three, four, five, and I stop counting, a pack of small, filthy, used-to-be-white woolly dogs. They race up to the second garbage truck, biting holes in its tires. Really. There’s a series of pops and hisses. The second truck sags, groans on ten flattened tires, and stops, half-way through the electrified veil.

  “Adaptation?” Nick says. “Or magic? They didn’t start out with steel teeth.”

  I hear yells from the men inside the truck. The big pole holding up the electrified veil jerks and lifts away. As soon as the veil is no longer touching the garbage truck, the dogs race into the compound.

  The driver gets out and curses at his ten flat tires.

  Five minutes later, a gang of Teflon-padded workers comes
out of the compound. They’re wearing sticks at their sides like long truncheons, and dragging big sacks.

  Oh. “Poodle canes,” I say. I do this every week when I take my bag out to the dumpster. But I don’t have a warehouse full of garbage.

  Looking at the sacks, I wince. “That’s mean,” I say quietly.

  “In other cities they use guns and traps,” Nick says. “The local PETA won’t let ’em shoot, here.”

  I clarify. “You’re mean. Don’t you know a slaughterhouse you want to show me? If it matters, I’m already vegan.”

  As we drive away, I see the garbage men, now a good fifty feet from the gate, emptying the limp little dogs out of their sacks. Then they walk inside the compound and the tinsel veil is lowered again.

  I twist backward in my seat, watching, angry and hurting for the dirty white bodies.

  But one by one the poodles stand up, shake themselves, and trot back through the hole in the fence next door.

  So,” I say conversationally, hoping to cut this short, “I take it you don’t want me going to the blue zone alone.”

  “We’re not done,” he says. He pulls the Cherokee into a parking spot and gets out. He stands and stares into the middle distance, pivoting, as if listening for some sound my super-hearing can’t pick up.

  I roll my window down. “What?” I say.

  He doesn’t answer. His face changes, and an uh-oh expression darkens it. He gets back in the car. “Here we go,” he says.

  And off we go. We drive all the way to a spot about a block north of Irving Park Road on Harlem Avenue. Nick gets out again and stands like a bird dog, listening and looking and, I could swear, sniffing. He also has the boner of the century.

  I’m taking credit for that, smugly.

  Then I become aware of noise, a crowd, the inevitable blat of squad cars, and cops dressed for crowd control, blaring something out of bullhorns.

  Nick beckons me out of the car. We walk down Harlem on the heels of a gathering crowd. Beside us is a big urban mall, built all under one roof with a parking ramp under it and, I see, more street-level parking stretching out behind.