The House at the Top of Briggs Road

"No." His voice was a guillotine. "You bring me my love. Who comes?"

My heart thumping, I struggled against a rising fear. Julia stirred beside me, cheerfully nude beneath the heavy cloak, clearly curious as I drew another breath. "It is I, Richard Turco... and your love is Julia Cooney."

"She is pleasing to me," he said at once. His fingers drummed the wood.

I paused, unable to make myself say the words, my eyes low as I turned to Julia. My Julia. "Ms Cooney," I recited, my arm making a halfhearted sweep toward the weirdo by the chair, "this is Mr Felix." Once again, as it always had, the air gained weight, definition, whirling down onto my head like soil on a grave: I felt that very clearly tonight. But I had one more thing to say, and before I did it I raised my eyes to meet hers.

Julia stood proud and tall, her eyes shining bravely. She smiled at me, her lips glorious and ripe and beautiful, and all at once the heaviness in the air seemed to lift a little, the fire giving off warmth and light instead of simply shadows. I felt my eyes widen, a gasp choking its way past my Jerry Garcia tie, and all of a sudden I could say nothing more at all.

She was so beautiful. Her mouth opened, but my eyes warned her about what I'd told her earlier: say nothing.

"Mr Turco." Felix' voice rolled cold and imperious from behind me now. "Say the words, please. To whom does she belong?"

Julia's smile merely grew, and in her eyes was perfection. Passion. Life. Love. I nodded and turned. "She belongs to me now, my lord."

There was no way I could ever have been prepared for the speed with which Felix leapt upon me. The Smith & Wesson in my pocket never even registered. My shocked senses recorded flashing impressions: the shadow of his body, blotting out the fire. The light in his eyes, fey, deadly. His mouth open in a sneering rictus. His breath, hissing, smelling like the grave. And, at the last, holding the very last fragment of my attention, the firelight playing off the coldly unnatural ivory of his sharp fangs, reaching for my throat, ready to mark me forever...

The cruel points pierced my neck. And I knew nothing more for a long while.

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Postea

* * *

They found my '72 Charger in a ravine near Ray Peak. It was still there over a hundred years later, after Felix unearthed me, when he and Millow at last trusted me to leave the manse at the top of Briggs Road. So I finally made it out there to look at my car under the light of an autumn moon. I had no difficulty seeing its rusted, bramble-covered remnants, even under nothing but starlight, for I had learned that Felix' bite had given me many gifts. Superior vision was one of those.

Ahh, but that bite had also taken. It had taken so much from me...

Life, for one thing. It had been explained to me, after I'd been taken from the grave, that I was well and truly undead. My friends, my sister, my string of whores... all in the ground by now, in their own mortal time. "You'll learn a new world, Turco," Felix had assured me; no more Mr, not anymore, not from him, "but you will learn it by night."

My money, for another. Zondervan told me quite calmly that they'd not bothered to pay my two million to my lawyer; I'd had a momentary, panicked thought, there in those first hours after I'd been unearthed, that the wrongful death judgment was still out there, lurking, awaiting me. "Did they issue a warrant for the full amount once I defaulted?" I asked.

Zondervan had cocked his head. "It's easy to escape arrest and prosecution," he pointed out gently in that strangely accentless voice, "when three vampires are keeping you in a coffin for eighty or ninety years."

And, worst of all, my Julia. She looked at me a bit oddly these days, as if she wasn't sure what to make of me, but then that made sense: she was a queen now, chosen by Felix Gnaeus, mighty among our kind. But she was not cruel to me. Not like Felix and the others, who still called me Halbrecht sometimes. I doubted they did this by accident. And Julia, who had spent my long imprisonment forgetting all about me, did not call me Ricky-baby anymore.

She was a queen, yes. And I was worse than a servant. I would spend centuries, as far as I was aware, waiting upon the succubi who served my three masters. But those succubi were mostly kind to me, even after I'd sold them into this life: Monica, Erin, Mia, and Andrea Gutierrez, all ethereally beautiful now, all immortal as I was. All perfect. I'd thought I'd been killing them, but instead I'd been doing something much worse in some ways. And yet, they were usually kind to me.

Except poor Andrea, The First Andrea, who'd never done anything wrong except be available one Halloween, so long ago. My second-to-last Halloween, though I didn't know that at the time. No, she's still kind of a bitch to me. But I have eternity to try to win her over.

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