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Chapter Four

I woke up atwhat my subconsciousover me like a diseased moon, so close that I was forced to fall back He wasn’t anything pretty from an old vampire ry To case of psoriasis and his oily dishwater-brown hair was long enough for its rat-tailed ends to twitch at ainst a wall, pinned there by him Vamps can do that, move faster than human perception And he wasn’t alone He played lead bloodsucker with a backup trio, all as nauseating as their leader

They were teen va So That had ernail downany saw blade

"Cool and white," he said Then he said ood in red, I bet," a backup boy cackled

Suddenly I knehere I was, and it wasn’t my bedroom on Moody Avenue

I was back in the social services group hoer, and way stronger than I They knew just when to waylay hed all of ninety pounds at age twelve

It was so clear So real It would be gang rape and then a group blood tasting I’d be tainted two unrecoverable ways, even worse than I was now as an unwanted orphan

I reached into my jeans pocket Jeans? I’d been accosted in bed Since as I wearing jeans?

I earing jeans, and the pocket held a cheap plastic handle with a pointed steel blade dusted with diamonds I’d been ready for this moment all my life and knehat to do

I lifted reasy strands of the lead vamp’s hair

The trio histled "Oh, she likes you, Hacker Come on, Snow White; tiht hand snaked up to press the long- nail file I’d stolen from Miss Whitcomb, the supervisor, hard into the outer socket of Hacker’s left eye

Bleeding doesn’t bother va their eyes popped out "like a pair of pearls from an oyster shell," as I put it in my best Captain Jack Sparrow voice, did turn their dead-white coreener than creme de menthe

They wouldn’t have knohat creerbil

The quartetfroht hand was coiled into such a tight fist that I turned on the bedside laernail indentations weeping blood

I took a deep breath Inworried, paced the floor beside reat ju ht the warhtmare The trouble was, it was true to life

My life I’d been there, done that

So uardian state of Kansas after the Millennium Revelation

I’d always considered myself the orphan’s orphan

After all, no one had ever adopted me, or tried to No one had fostered er and older came and went

Maybe it was my funky name Delilah Street I’d supposedly been found there as an abandoned three-day-old infant, wrapped in one of those storreen blankets

No dainty pastels for baby me

But, see, there wasn’t a Delilah Street in Wichita Or Kansas Or surrounding states I’d looked At least I hadn’t been found on Lavender Lane I’d have really developed a chip on my shoulder with that sappy na, it was exciting that all the bogey out of the closet and out froht-tihouls, storybook stuff I still wanted to read about The Little Princess, and Cinderella with those cool glass slippers, and Little Orphan Annie, who’d had a good dog and a sugar daddy, born before the age that recognized child molestation Then, suddenly, the va the social service agencies, as unclais Half-breeds, some of them All predators That’s when they zeroed in on me

Luckily, a couple years after the Millennium Revelation, some anonyoing to a girls’ high school, and, later, to college When I say sponsored, I mean paid the tuition Period Oh, sure, room and board at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School was covered, but nothing beyond that College was coed and public I earned soh it in the usual "fries with that?" student

I brooded about all this the rest of that long nonworking weekend I’d trashed the roses and gardenias, but their sickly sweet odor lingered like the subtle breath of a funeral hohtmares I didn’t remember much of, almost alien abduction dreahtmares, a needle in the navel would have been child’s play I gli betweenother than a blunt instruid Cold In one sense, silver scared the hell out of ant for dead people’s clothes and fragments of their lives from resale shops and estate sales Co pieces at fire-sale prices; they were so tiny, so mysterious, so precious A set of fairy-size forks for sootten kind of seafood appetizer An opiu Taxco Mexican jewelry elts of bright blue glass dewing it

I was born to be odd Whenever I tried not to be, it rong Like with Ted

Ia sip of Bailey’s Irish Cream with Achilles He seeether all afternoon watching old , soft hair Saturday night, he collapsed in front of his water dish, panting I gathered hi into licorice-black eyes that had dulled to the point of not recognizing es, I raced in e Caddie for the nearest twenty-four-hour vet’s offices On the passenger side, Achilles lay inert I stroked him the whole way, only one hand on the wheel, but he wasn’t even responding to his nauesses and promises of intravenous fluids and constant care and a phone call if anything changed

Sunday night I stood in a fluorescent light-glared roo like it," the weary-faced vet said "So fast Blood poisoning"

I pictured small defensive teeth sunk into a bony undead ankle, and sobbed Achilles lay dead to the world on a steel table, a beautiful dust gedly Getting Achilles had been the first thing I’d done after leaving college and getting a job He was the first and only creature to ever give ether for three years I felt like I was strangling on poisoned cotton candy

What did I want to do? they asked Leave the body with them, like a CSI corpse? Or send it to Srave, or reduced to ashes on

Not possible I asked for a lock of his albino-white hair and opted for Smokerise Faruaranteed to be really his I could select a suitable vessel froraphs I chose one of an Asian shape, with a five-toed Iine, soht pass off any old ashes on a bereaved couarded Tibetan holy men for centuries What if some of their s? Maybe I was just trying to dull the ache, but I soain soht be in different forms, but we’d know each other

Meanwhile, toain I felt like the walking dead In fact, it would be a miracle if I didn’t stake Undead Ted on the six o’clock news

Chapter Five

I hadn’t expected life at work to be pleasant after kicking out anchorman Ted, but it seemed he’d been busy over the weekend while I’d been losing , when I entered the studio Undead Ted the Splitting Toad was canoodling with Sheena Coleman by the blue screen For another, the news director, Fred Fogelmann, called me into his tiny less office for a little two-person conference

"Sit down, Delilah What’s the matter?" He must have just noticed my maroon eye-circles (a problem with tissue-thin pale skin), so this conference was about soe up a patina of perky Looking bad was a ht on before I could defend myself and my raccoon eyes "Never mind, it doesn’t matter"

That was even worse news, but I still couldn’t gather any words or gestures to fight es in the hopper" Fred was formerly a newspaper City Editor and he still talked like sout whiskey in his bottoet out on the streets" I bet "To use his reporter skills again" Again? Really? As if he’d ever had thereat job with the ritual cri that over And Sheena wants so that ’pornanorht up Fresh face, you know"

"You mean ’blond and anorexic’," I said, finally peeved enough to growl a little

"Ann or Rex who?" He shrugged What a with-it guy on worabbed the juicy beats I’d made mine What’s better to cover than sex and violence? Especially exotic sex and violence Who did Ted think he was, his journalistic idol, sob-soul brother Geraldo Rivera? Really! Vae?

"I have so I was still feeling too down to pretend to be up, because his next words would have crashed ht before

"We’ve got a vital de served and you’re just the one to put the the feature ’Good Living After Death’ A lot of influential Baby Boomers underwrite those Sunset City retirement communities all over the country and they have a heck of a lot of interesting stories"

When you have to use "heck of a lot" as a news peg, you’re in trouble

"This old doll, for instance" He handed a black-and-white glae of filht here in Wichita at Sunset City Quite a looker once I bet she has tales to tell"

The name under the classic thirties’ face with its arched penciled eyebrows arden, a hly as Garbo, at about the sae made me familiar with films and their stars from the silents to the sixties when the star systee of pace,up the alroup of senior citizens out there now" just won’t die Rumor had it that the North Koreans, banned froetting into cloning Through their various experi death with a "twilight awake" state A thing like that would rake in billions Think Donald Tru to be preserved in amber and comb-over Forever