Samhain Publishing Ltd, Ebooks and Books in Print

Chapter One

The blood is the life.

So Hollywood’s been telling us, and maybe it’s true, but water is where the real money’s being made. Water should be free—it falls from the sky, after all—but there it was on the shelf in slick, designer-looking bottles, selling for four, five bucks apiece. Water. It had become the fastest-growing, highest-grossing product on the market.

I felt vaguely guilty as I steered my shopping cart full of Lean Cuisines down the water aisle, but only vaguely. Jonathan had never forbidden me to shop in the water aisle—only the vampire aisle. Though you could argue that they were practically one and the same, especially since water now came in such flavors as Dew Kissed Pear Orchard and…Meatball Hoagie.

I did a double take. Yes indeed, I’d read the label correctly. Meatball Hoagie De-Lite. I rotated a bottle so I could read the label. The first ingredient was water. That was encouraging. A bunch of scientific-sounding words followed. Additives? Preservatives? Hard to say. All I knew was, that bottle of flavored water had more chemicals in it than my Aunt Trixie at the last ill-fated Hansen family Thanksgiving gathering.

The shelf had a bright orange tag dangling from the edge. Meatball Hoagie De-Lite was on sale, three for $11—which was irritating, since eleven isn’t readily divisible by three, and which, I suspected, was the very reason it had been priced that way. It couldn’t hurt to try it, since it was on sale and all, but I wasn’t about to put it on Jonathan’s credit card with the rest of our food. Maybe he looked at the receipts, or maybe he shoved them all into a shoebox for his accountant to handle, but either way, I didn’t want to be stuck explaining my sudden perverse desire to taste sandwich-flavored water.

Maybe I had some cash.

I slipped off my store glove to avoid contaminating my pocket and felt around for my money clip. Empty. But wait, there was a papery sort of rustling behind the foil-wrapped antiviral wipe. I plucked the paper out triumphantly, fully expecting it to be a five…and found a McDonald’s receipt instead. For the record, I never eat at McDonald’s. Not unless I’m fainting from low blood sugar, or I’m stuck at the apex of a particularly long and circuitous route.

I gazed fondly at the receipt. The Big Mac had been divine. And the fries were golden perfection. I hadn’t been imagining money where it didn’t exist—there really had been a five. However, that particular bit of currency now resided in the antimicrobial cash register beneath the Golden Arches.

Vampire water never tasted as good as I imagined it would, anyway. There was no heft to it. No calories. No fat. And the flavors either faded so fast that I couldn’t be sure I’d even tasted them, or they lingered on as strange and intrusive aftertastes. It was just as well that I had no cash to waste on an outrageously priced bottle of water, especially since I still hadn’t managed to calculate its exact cost.

I’d turned away from the display and was fully prepared to wheel my shopping cart away, and as I tried to stuff my hand back into my store glove, a thought occurred to me. Did the water taste like bread? It would have to, wouldn’t it? Otherwise it would be bouillon. Clear, chemically replicated bouillon without any actual meat stock, but bouillon, nonetheless. What made this particular flavor of water taste like a hoagie?

It was while I was in this vulnerable state of confusion that the goth girl accosted me.

“Hiya!” She was up close and personal—and her hand slid into my poor, vulnerable bare hand before I even knew what hit me.

I jerked my hand back, and my elbow knocked several bottles of water off the shelf. Moist palm, fishy grip—I’d been expecting the worst as soon I realized I was actually getting an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned handshake. The flesh-on-flesh contact had been mercifully brief, but she’d left a souvenir behind—a piece of paper.

I unfolded the sheet. It was a quarter-page flyer, hysterically pink, with a local phone number on it. Below that, it read:

V-Luvv
Support Group
For V-Negative Spouses and Partners
Of V-Positives
First and Third Mondays at 8:30 a.m.

“What is this?”

“Call that number whenever,” she said. “I leave the machine on.”

“And I would want to call you…why?”

She looked up through her mascara-clumped lashes and gave me a knowing smile. “It’s tough, living side by side with the virus, worrying about catching it, day in, day out. It wears you down. We know.”

“Which is why they invented gloves.” And antiviral sprays, soaks and wipes. I pulled my right glove back on with a snap, even though I’d touched that damn piece of paper, so now the gloves would need to go in the autoclave.

Her smile went wispy. “Well, mainly we talk about safe sex. Like I said, call me whenever.”

She turned and traipsed away. Her boot heels were as shoddy as her overcoat. She looked as if she might break into a joyous Julie Andrews skip at any moment.

I thought goths were supposed to act morose. Maybe she was emo.

“I’m not…sleeping with him,” I said. Because, oh no, girlfriend. You don’t even want to go there.

I stepped over the water bottles rolling around on the floor and propelled the cart away, all curiosity about the water’s hoagieness gone, replaced by the need to finish my shopping and get out of the store before anyone else saw me and pegged me for a…a what? A guy whose paycheck was signed by a vampire, who happened to do his grocery shopping? Because that’s all I was. Nothing less, nothing more.

I tossed a couple quarts of peanut oil into the basket and headed for the checkout line. Little Miss Handshake was reading the label on a bottle of synthesized blood when I marched past her with my cart, head held high, on my way to the checkout. She glanced at the peanut oil.

“I’m deep frying a turkey,” I informed her.

She raised a triple-pierced eyebrow, smiled, and went back to her comparison shopping.

* * *

Color me paranoid, but I was especially careful driving back to Varga Studio. I could have taken numerous routes—and I’m not talking about normal-person routes, such as, “Should I stay on Halsted, or would it be faster if I turned down Clark?” No, I mean Jonathan-routes, dozens of maze-like paths designed to thwart a would-be pursuer. Not that I ever actually believed someone was following me. It was more that I suspected Jonathan might be checking the odometer to make sure I had followed his instructions to the letter.

I chose route double-double-ess, as I called it in my head, since it had the most right turns, and therefore was the least likely formation to leave me flapping in the wind in the left turn lane.

I attempted a right on red, then stopped as a pedestrian wandered into the street, oblivious, talking on her cell phone. I could have tapped my horn, but what was the point? It wasn’t like I was in a hurry to get back to the studio. Not in the mood I was in.

Safe sex. As if. No sex with a vampire was safe sex. You couldn’t even dry-kiss without someday finding yourself on the long road to a permanent liquid diet…if you even survived all three hideous stages of the disease, which a majority of the people who contracted it didn’t.

Still, those two words nagged at me all the way back to the studio. Safe sex. Back before the hemovore virus, when all we had to worry about was HIV, my best friend Larry used to say, “Keep your fluids to yourself, and everything will be just fine.”

Just fine.

Except nowadays, a condom wasn’t enough. There were respiratory masks, and antiviral products for every surface known to man, and gloves. Dozens and dozens of gloves.

I disinfected my hands with gel, swapped out my car gloves with house gloves and let myself in with my key. The studio was more of a converted high-rise apartment than an actual place of business. Jonathan painted there, and slept there, and I took his calls and ran his errands, his ridiculous routes, and we did our best to avoid one another and acted like everything was just fi—

“What are you doing?” I said.

There he stood, in the center of the kitchen. My kitchen.

Well, okay, technically his kitchen, since it was his studio. He hovered there, midway between the autoclave and the trash compactor. He’d looked to be about twenty-five when I met him and he hadn’t visibly aged a day since. I’ve grown to think of him as a non-age, a vampire age. Which looked pretty much like twenty-five.

Even when he was doing nothing more telling than standing, he was light on the balls of his feet. It was nearly a pose—contrapposto, lean hip outthrust, arms loose. One side of his shoulder-length black hair was tucked carelessly behind his ear, and the other side dangled to his chin in uncombed waves. Black paint streaked one cheek, dotted his jaw, the bridge of his nose.

Did he look silly? No, of course not. He looked breathtaking. As usual.

His head turned and he looked at me. For just a moment, the overhead light in the hallway behind me refracted off his retinas, and his eyes glowed. But only for a moment. When he trained that gaze right on me, and I stood between him and the light source, all hulking six and a half feet of me, his eyes went practically black. Gypsy eyes.

“Mark.” He rolled the “r” when he said my name. Just like Count Dracula, or more accurately, Bela Lugosi—who’d been born in Hungary, like he had. “It is bad.”

I wondered if this was the point at which he’d tell me the goth chick in the supermarket was actually a secret shopper he’d hired to make sure I wasn’t cruising the vampire aisles. “Could you be somewhat more specific?”

He huffed and gestured toward the refrigerator.

“Great,” I said. “You touched it with your bare hands again. Do you realize how long it’ll take me to wipe it down?” I clucked my tongue and set the bags on the countertop. “I keep my lunch in there, y’know. I told you we should order a second fridge—”

“I was wearing the gloves.” He pronounced it, “I vas varink da glahvs,” by which I could tell he was exceptionally agitated. Because usually his accent wasn’t any more pronounced than the heavily rolled “r”, a few flat vowels and an overall lyrical lilt.

Chastised, but only slightly, I said, “Well, then what?”

He gestured at the fridge again. “It is bad.”

“Did the power go out?” I went around him and pulled open the door. Cool air wafted from the opening. I checked the readout on the separate thermometer we kept in addition to the built-in unit. Thirty-seven degrees. “The temperature’s fine. What do you mean, it’s bad?”

“It is…clotted.”

Oh. The refrigerator wasn’t the problem. It. He couldn’t even say the word “blood” in front of me, as if it were something shameful. “Are you sure?”

“Mark.”

Stupid question, right. But we’d used the same blood dealer for years, and never had a platelet problem before. “How many doses are left? Three? All of them are…?”

He gave me a look of exaggerated patience, crossed his arms and assumed a pose that was even more heartwrenchingly beautiful. Which I didn’t notice at all, given that he was my boss. And V-positive.

“Okay.” I pointedly ignored the way his clingy, long-sleeved T-shirt molded itself to his shoulders and pecs, and let the problem-solving portion of my mind click into gear. “I can’t get you more cat until Wednesday, so I’ll track down some synthetics to tide you over—”

“Please call Mrs. Jeffers and explain. I cannot take the synthetics.”

I needed to wrangle with the cat blood dealer like I needed to spray my gloves with Teflon. “She’s not going to bleed her cats twice in the same week. She can’t. And if I piss her off by asking—hell, she’ll probably fly into a tizzy if I even let her know she didn’t anticoagulate this batch right—she’s probably going to tell you to go find yourself another source. Do you have a backup? Because I don’t.”

“I have…a phone number.” He spun and walked out of the room, so graceful it looked like the move had been choreographed. I sighed, opened up the autoclave and rearranged the beakers and vials inside so that I could stuff in one more pair of gloves.

“Here.”

I hadn’t heard Jonathan return, but that was nothing new. I didn’t jump. I’d had plenty of practice quelling my startle reflex.

He held out the slip of paper. He had his gloves on, but I hesitated anyway.

“Take it. I copied down the number again.”

Okay, but was the notepad sterile? The ball point of the pen? I had my own gloves on, but still. Passing a tiny slip of paper seemed an awful lot like touching.

I took the phone number and told myself to stop being ridiculous.

I went into my office, gave my desk, chair and phone a once-over with a pop-up wipe, all the while rehearsing what I’d say. Be brief and to the point, I told myself. Businesslike. You could hardly take two steps after dark these days without tripping over a vampire, but even so, the whole blood trade was still the stuff of hush-hush, back-alley melodrama.

Immediately after I punched in the number, three discordant tones blasted through the receiver. “We’re sorry. The number you have called has been disconnected…”

I glanced up from the slip of paper. Jonathan stood in the hallway, arms crossed, watching me with his black gypsy-eyes.

According to the digital readout on my phone, I’d dialed correctly, but I tried again anyway. The same three tones pummeled my eardrum. I hung up.

“Call Mrs. Jeffers,” Jonathan said. “Please.”

I forced myself to shape my face into the expression I assumed passed for bland neutrality. Please. He’s scrupulously polite when he orders me around. But that single word—please—can so easily be turned into the soundtrack of a fantasy I had no business dreaming up.

“That was your backup?” I said, nastier than I had to. “One phone number.”

“Mrs. Jeffers had very good references. In four years, there has never been a problem.”

I flipped through my kitschy Rolodex and poked through the J section, and wondered what it would take to keep Jonathan from listening in, though I had the sneaking suspicion that his range outstripped the cordless phone’s.

I dialed. Mrs. Jeffers’ phone rang. And rang. And rang. “She’s not there. No machine either—”

“Hello?”

Dang. “Mark Hansen calling.”

No response. But I could hear her breathing.

“About this week’s supply. We’ve had some coagulation—”

“That’s impossible. I follow procedures.”

I closed my eyes and pretended Jonathan wasn’t hovering there in the hallway with his eyes trained on me. And that one of Mrs. Jeffers’ ridiculous cats was taking a dump inside her favorite pair of shoes. Even that didn’t make me feel better. I modulated my voice. Cool. Calm. Professional. “Of course. The quality, up to this point, has been pristine. I’m sure it’s some sort of fluke—but whatever the reason, it’s caused us to be three days’ short—”

“No refunds. You don’t like it? You find someone else to get you cat.”

When, exactly, I’d opened my eyes again, I wasn’t sure. I saw Jonathan fidget in my peripheral vision and wished I’d kept them shut. “I’m happy to pay you for the additional three days.” Jonathan motioned for me to go higher. “And another hundred dollars for your trouble.”

What I really wanted to do was threaten to report her to the Humane Society. But seeing Jonathan squirm like that forced me to quell the urge to give in to my petty impulse.

More breathing—nose-breathing. With a whistle. “I just bled ’em four days ago.”

Jonathan motioned for me to go higher still.

“Two hundred.”

She breathed. Ten seconds. Twenty. Finally, when I decided she’d probably slipped into a diabetic coma, she said, “Two hundred, and two cats. Big ones, socialized, no FIV or ear mites.”

Where was I supposed to…? Jonathan was nodding vigorously.

“Three hundred?” I suggested.

“Two hundred and two cats. That’s the best I can do. I just bled ’em.”

“I heard you the first time.”