“Want to smoke a doob, man?” Flynn finally asked, falling back on his oldest—and most reliable, hitherto—trick.
“No, Flynn. I don’t.”
“’Cause it’s, uh, good stuff . . . ”
“No.”
Bicentennial firecrackers were going off somewhere in the distance, accompanied by the hoots and hollers of drunken children. Elder shut her eyes a moment, remembering grazing through a clutch of dying redcoats near the far side of some foot-bridge in upper New York State: Choking musketfire chest-wounds, faint Cockney and Lancashire curses. Blood leaking slow from the open side of one boy soldier’s neck, even as she ripped the other wide and let the overflow spill down her greedy chops, soaking her bodice, drying so thick and hard that she’d actually had to throw her clothes away, afterward. She’d drunk her fill, drunk more, then eventually stumbled back to Eudo Lemonastere, three days late for their agreed-upon rendezvous—dazed, replete, naked and stained under a British officer’s discarded frock-coat, with bugs in her unbound hair from sleeping under piles of leaves on the forest floor.
And Eudo had responded by slapping her face, sickened by her lack of restraint. Called her a peasant, uneducable, one brief step up from an animal.
She grinned at the memory, even now: Pretentious Eudo, her long-suffering maker and so-called master, with his clean white hands and his dirty, dirty mind. Still playing the saintly father-figure with her, vampire Pygmalion to her mortal Galatea, even after he’d paid her parents gold for the pleasure of taking her virginity—no different from any other aristocrat—and then hadn’t been able to muster enough self-control to keep from killing her while he did it.
But guilt only went so far, after all. Which was why she most often chose her own spawn as she did, from the ranks of fools and freaks—to avoid, quite frankly, the inconvenience of ever having to feel any.
Flynn, Elder could tell, wouldn’t be capable of considering his options long enough to resent losing his one chance at permanent oblivion. He’d welcome the Change with open fangs: One big par-tay ’till dawn and beyond. All of the fun, with none of the fallout.
She turned on her side, studying him closely. Watched him shift uncomfortably under her eyes’ weight, readjusting himself, knee half-raised to mask his growing erection, with a cute little hip-twist for emphasis—a laughably furtive movement for someone his size, just this side of a squirm.
“’Kay,” he said, apparently still meditating on her bewildering refusal of free weed. “That’s okay. Um. So. Well . . . ”
. . . what do you want to do?
Elder sat up, stretched, languorous. She leaned over Flynn, towards the cooler—”discovered” it empty. Leaned down, close, a little closer, then nose to nose; Flynn’s sunburned surfer’s beak looming dangerously close to her own sleek, cat-snub profile. Close enough for him to smell her, and rouse further—helplessly—at the pungent scent: Woodsmoke and spices, plus a faint slaughterhouse tang of old blood.
Appalling, the unexpected stink of it, under this fresh salt air. And yet . . . intoxicating, somehow.
“Wellll,” she repeated, drawling. “What I’d actually kinda like to do—is—to suck—”
(Flynn gasping, an incongruously tiny squeak)
“—your blood.”
“Whuh . . . ?”
Elder laid her lips on his, lightly, as her palm pressed against his straining crotch. Exhaled, equally light. And felt him shudder in response, groaning—spurting into his own baggy shorts at the barest touch of her clawed hand.
A slow whine: “Oooow, my Gohhhhdddd . . . ”
“You like that, big guy?”
Flynn shuddered again, eyes rolling; she nipped at his bottom lip, just nicking it—a paper-cut thin blood-weal, a mere shaving-accident scratch—and felt him spasm in response, paralyzed. Shaking like a dog left out in the rain, hair wild, sweat suddenly everywhere, gluing his hot skin to hers; her cool, nacreous moon-tan, pale as a pearl by the white beach’s reflected light.
And then Elder slid down between his legs, taking his waistband with her. Pushing his poker-stiff penis aside to find the femoral artery, biting neatly in—hearing him yelp as he came again and again, gushing up over his own incipient pot belly. The beads of sperm choking his auburn pubic thatch until they hung in clusters, like limp stars.
Elder laughed aloud to herself at the sight, coughing blood through her nose. And went back to what she was doing.
Flynn, meanwhile, just kept on coming, right up until the very minute his big, dumb heart finally stopped: An empty thud, a last, wet squeeze.
Then silence.
* * *
Afterward, Elder buried them both in the sand under a pitched-over boat, curling catlike into the slack arm of his corpse. And when the next night fell, she slapped him awake—then hiked up her little boy’s bowling shirt, and gave herself a shake in front of his dazed, red new eyes.
“Hey, man,” she said. “It’s like, a miracle, or somethin’. Take a pull on you the once, and lo
ok what I grew.”