The Eternal Kiss: Vampire Tales of Blood and Desire

One

BY THE TIME the train pulled into the station, and Lauren wound her way down the stairs and out onto the desolate stretch of York Street, the sun was only a pale yellow sliver of warning slipping fast below the darkening horizon. She didn’t like being out after dark—no one did these days—but she needed the job, and so here she was hurrying past empty storefronts, abandoned cars, and long-gone ironworks factories untouched by Brooklyn’s gentrification boom. It was July in the city, the heat bullying in its humidity. In the distance, the half-lit towers of the Farragut Houses rose like an ugly Lego attempt. She glanced at the tiny ad in her hand: Part-time assistant needed for Angelus House. Good pay and flexible hours. There was an address scribbled on the side, an address she’d been given over the phone when she foolishly booked the appointment for eight-thirty, an address she was now trying desperately to find even as her gut told her it was madness to be walking unprotected at this hour. A torn page from a newspaper scuttled along the sidewalk and got caught on her foot. BLOODLUST SICKO KILLS AGAIN read the headline. Lauren shook it from her shoe and hurried along.

Angelus House occupied a corner on one of Vinegar Hill’s cobblestone streets next to a litter-strewn, weed-choked lot surrounded by a rickety fence. It had been a small Victorian hospital that overlooked the Brooklyn Navy Yards at one point, but now tinted-glass privacy windows, thick iron gates, layers of graffiti, and heavy vines obscured its former limestone glory. Lauren buzzed, and when no one opened the heavy security door, she walked around the side looking for a usable entrance.

“You one of them, huh? You one of those freaks?” A dark-haired guy in a Knicks tank stepped out and dropped into a karate stance, brandishing a spray-paint can.

She screamed loud and high, which sent the guy running. A second later, a door banged open, and there was a guy offering her his hand.

“Are you okay?”

Golden. That was the word that popped into her mind. With the glow of lower Manhattan shining behind him, he appeared like a golden god, his long pale hair falling in thick waves to his shoulders. “Do you need help? What are you on?”

“What? N-nothing!” she said in a shaking voice. “There was a guy. He was spray painting something on the fence over there. He took off when you came out.”

The golden one scanned the empty lot, scowling. “What are you doing out here? It’s not safe after dark, and this is private property.”

“I came about the assistant’s job,” she said, showing him the ad still clutched tightly in her hand. “I have an appointment for eight-thirty. But nobody answered the buzzer at the front door, so I came back here. I’m Lauren.”

“Oh. Jeez. Sorry. Sometimes nobody gets to the buzzer. That’s why we need an assistant. Come on in. I’m Johannes.”

Lauren sat across from Johannes the Golden Boy in a drab chair in a cheerless square of an office with only one dim banker’s lamp for light. He turned a pen end on end while asking her a series of questions: Was she proficient on a Mac? Did she mind answering phones and filing? Would she be willing to run errands during her shift—go for food or supplies that they might need? Did she understand that this was a place for troubled teens and that she might see and hear things that were kind of rough? Was she discreet? Did she spook easily?

She answered yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no.

He stared at her. He had deep brown eyes flecked with gold, which seemed to burn in the lamplight. “So tell me what you know about Angelus House?”

“I know you’re the last hope for the toughest addiction cases. You take in homeless teens, runaways, kids from the projects, the ones everybody else has given up on.”

He stopped playing with the pen. “Why do you want this job?”

Lauren stared at the ceiling and wondered how much she should tell him about herself. About the last three years. Her sister Carla.

“I just graduated from high school. I need a job, and I’d like to give back somehow.”

He glanced at her flimsy resume that mostly consisted of part-time retail jobs. “No college plans? No rushing off to Gimme Gimme You or something?” She thought she saw a hint of a smirk on his face.

“No.”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Somewhere else. It was uncomfortably cold in the room. The air chilled the sweat on her neck and made her want to go outside into the heat again. “I have no idea.”

“You’re really honest.” Golden Boy stared at her, and she couldn’t begin to know what he was thinking. Had she blown it? She must have blown it. “Congratulations, Lauren,” he said, giving her a beautiful smile. “You’ve got yourself a job.”

Johannes insisted on walking her to the subway in the dark. It had begun to rain a little, which only made the humidity worse. “Great. Just what we needed. Our own hater.” Johannes pointed at the wall where the tagger had come back to finish his work. Over the Angelus House insignia of a lone winged knight, the words Los Vampiros had been sprayed in red paint, and the letters dripped like blood.

Two

LAUREN WAS STANDING on the mostly empty subway platform when she saw the tagger in the Knicks shirt coming her way. She scanned the few people around her—a homeless guy, an old couple having a fight in Chinese, some oblivious hipsters across the tracks on the Manhattan side.

“I have 911 on speed dial,” she said, holding out her phone.

“Yeah? You get reception down here? Who’s your carrier—the Matrix? Look, I’m just trying to warn you, a’ight?” He wasn’t so scary up close. About five-eight with short-cropped dark hair, a face from a Renaissance painting, and a large cross medallion hanging around his slender neck.

“Warn me about what?” Lauren forced herself to make eye contact.

“You need to stay away from those Angelus House assholes. They are seriously bad news.”

“Says the guy who vandalizes buildings and stalks teenage girls,” Lauren said, trying to put some snark into her voice. She hoped he couldn’t tell how uneasy she was. That was the first rule of survival in New York: a shrug and a that-all-you-got attitude.

“I’m serious, yo. They go into the projects, and they take people.”

“Yeah. It’s called helping.”

“They’re not helping. They’re recruiting.”

“For what?”

“Something very bad. This guy I know, Isaiah Jones, he told me all about it. He used to roll with them, but he got out. Said they were up to some freaky shit. Now he’s in hiding. Won’t even tell his mom where he’s staying.”

Light filled the tunnel. Lauren could hear the train scuttling closer.

“Don’t take that job, yo. You be sorry.”

“Yeah? Says who?”

“Just a friend.”

The train blasted into the station, sending the trash on the platform swirling around Lauren’s feet. The doors opened and she leapt inside, willing them to close again. The guy stood on the platform, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets.

“I got a name for you to remember: Sabrina Rodriquez. She used to be one of theirs. When the cops found her body, there wasn’t a single drop of blood left in it.”

The doors closed with a loud ding-dong that made Lauren jump, and then the train hurtled into the darkness.

Three

ON MONDAY AT two o’clock, Lauren showed up for her first day at Angelus House. The buzzer let her in, and inside, a girl with a purple-blue Mohawk and heavy eyeliner greeted her. She smelled strongly of patchouli and looked to be about Lauren’s age or a little older. She wore a sleeveless sundress, which showed off her many tattoos, including one on her neck of the Angelus House insignia.

The Mohawk girl beamed. “Hey, you must be Lauren. Awesome! Welcome to Angelus House. I’m Alex. God! Isn’t it miserably hot out? We’ve got the AC cranked.”

Alex wore an ankle bracelet heavy with charms that tinkled like bells with every step. “We’re, like, soooo crazy happy you’re here. Seriously? I cannot keep up with the filing and phones and stuff. Don’t get me wrong—it’s all because Angelus House is a successful program, and that is totally cool. But still. There’s only so much we can do without help. Hey Rakim! Come meet Lauren!”

A tall, skinny guy with an old-school fade and oversized black-frame glasses bounded up, his hand out for a shake. “Nice to meet you, Lauren.” He made up a silly song about her name on the spot, rhyming Lauren with Darwin, Sauron, and Kilimanjaro-n, and Lauren found herself hoping that this was the start of something new and good.

They showed her around, introducing her to more smiling teens working on posters or playing ping-pong in the rec room. The first floor had been turned into “sharing” rooms and common areas. The second and third floors housed a dormitory that could take as many as thirty teens at a time. The staff lived on the top floor. On the surface, Angelus House was like every other drug rehab center she’d visited in the past three years. There were the ratty, secondhand couches and chairs grouped around a wall-mounted TV. Here were the requisite inspirational posters sharing space with cheaply framed photos of rehabbed teens doing inspirational activities—a dance-off, arts & crafts day, basketball, quilt-making. Captions had been supplied: “Brian shows us his moves!” “Grace for two, nothing but net!” “Amber and Gabby love DDR night!” “Sing it, Rakim!”

“You know I make that picture look good,” Rakim said with mock seriousness.

Alex punched him in the arm. “Modest much?”

“Looks fun,” Lauren offered. She was never very good at small talk.

They showed her the kitchen area with its chipped cupboards and an old refrigerator marked by a laminated “Newbies” sign. “You’ll need to keep this stocked with healthy foods for the new teens who come in. Juice is great because a lot of the addicts crave sweets. The rest of us can take care of ourselves, so it’s just this one fridge you have to worry about,” Rakim said, showing off the inside of the fridge with its three juice cartons.

“Sorry. I know it’s kinda disgusting in here,” Alex said, making a face. “But once we take over the Navy Yards to do some new building, we’re gonna have, like, crazy amazing new facilities—almost a mini-city.”

“And then we can kiss this shit goodbye,” Rakim said.

“Is Johannes here?” Lauren asked as they made their way down another long corridor turned faintly green by the bad florescent lighting. She’d looked for the golden one on every stop of the tour but hadn’t seen him.

“Usually he does a lot of field work,” Rakim answered. “Going into the projects and out on the streets. He helped save my ass for real.”

“And he is such the hotness,” Alex said, giggling as if she and Lauren were sharing their first girl secret. “Oops, not that way.” She steered Lauren away from a set of stairs leading down into complete darkness.

“What’s down there?”

“Detox,” Alex said, grimacing. “Not pretty. Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to deal with that.”

“Don’t get freaked out if you hear weird noises and shit coming from there. Just turn up the radio and learn to block it out,” Rakim said. “You get used to it after a while.”

Lauren stared down into the darkness. She heard nothing but the asthmatic hum of the overburdened air-conditioning. “What happened to the last girl who worked here—Sabrina?”

Alex looked confused. “We’ve had a Lisa and now we’ve got a Lauren. No Sabrina. Besides, you’re the first assistant we’ve ever had.”

“And not a minute too soon, ’cause I cannot file another thing,” Rakim said, palms up in surrender. “I just remembered: We’ve got kick-ass brownies in one of the sharing rooms. You like brownies?”

Alex offered her arm and Lauren took hold.

“Who doesn’t?” she said.

Lauren worked at Angelus House Monday through Friday from three o’clock until eight. The job was fairly easy, she discovered. As none of the teens were allowed off the grounds and the staff was needed to look after the place, Lauren was often sent outside to do the grocery shopping or pick up medical supplies. There was plenty of time to read. And everybody made her feel like she was wanted, like she was contributing to something important. No one was really around to miss her at home, anyway. Since her sister Carla had been court-ordered to the Eagle Feather Center for Hope and Healing, her parents made the drive upstate every weekend for visiting hours. Sunday nights, they’d come back looking gray, their words of parental encouragement scooped out of them. The TV was on a lot.

Lauren was glad to have somewhere to be with people who might possibly become friends—or more. And there was Johannes. Whenever he swept through, the air in the room felt different to Lauren, charged with possibility. She watched him—leaning one arm against the door frame, lean and long in a worn-thin Vampire Weekend T-shirt that showed the outline of muscle across his broad back, his deep-set eyes taking everything in, that lazy smile showing up along with a pair of dimples and a low growl of a laugh that did things to her stomach. She’d seen the way he was with the teens who came through the doors, how he calmed them, took in their stories, nodding. It was hard to believe he was only twenty-two. Sometimes he’d drop by her desk or pop into the long, musty filing room where she sat sorting through manila folders with badly-typed patient names on the tabs, putting them in alphabetical order.

“How’s it going in here?”

“Fine,” Lauren would answer, wishing she could think of something clever to say to keep him there.

“Got those supplies for me?”

She would hand over whatever she’d been asked to procure that day—boxes of gauze, economy-sized bottles of hydrogen peroxide, pine floor cleaner, rubber tubing, new sheets and towels. Once, she’d had to make a run to the home improvement center for long, flat pieces of lumber, nails, and ten-pound bags of mulch. “Might want to do some retaining walls and some plantings in the parks. Good project for the newbies,” Johannes had explained when she and the delivery guy had dropped it all in the freight elevator for Johannes and Rakim to take down to the basement.

Sometimes, Johannes would pop his head into the filing room and ask, “Need anything?”

Yes. I would like you to ravage me here on the floor and swear your undying love to me. “No. Thanks. I’m good.”

“Keep up the good work,” he’d say, and Lauren would creep to the door to watch him walk away, his beautiful ass perfectly showcased by his Levi’s, as he took the stairs down to detox.

Four

FRIDAYS WERE RECYCLING day at home, and since no one else bothered to do it anymore, Lauren hauled the newspapers down to the recycling area behind their new rental with its view of traffic on Fourth Avenue. Their old apartment had windows that looked out onto Prospect Park, but that was before Carla’s medical bills poured in, and they were forced to move down Park Slope into a fourth-floor walk-up in a building with a super who liked to chatter whenever he saw Lauren. She dropped the tightly-bundled papers, the blue bags of spent plastic and metal in the bins and wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm. The super nodded to the day’s paper with its two-inch headline: BLOOD GANGS OF NEW YORK.

“Another body,” he said in his heavily French-inflected English. “That make ten so far. They find this one with her throat ripped out.”

Lauren didn’t want to get drawn in or she’d be late for work. “The police think it’s some gang thing.”

“In Haiti, the Tonton Macoute would come in the night like ghosts. If you spoke out, they would come. If you didn’t, sometimes they still come. Everyone lived in fear then. They would come and come until our spirits were silenced and we all felt dead.”

A loud blast came from Fourth Avenue, and two cabbies cursed each other until a full-scale fight broke out.

“Crazy people,” the super said, dropping the lid on the recycling bin.

When she slipped back into the apartment, the TV was on with the sound muted. Lauren saw garish images of kneeling prisoners in orange jumpsuits, black hoods covering their faces. Lauren’s mom sat in her chair by the window unit wearing her reading glasses as she sorted through a stack of mail that Lauren knew were bills. Her dad was at work. He would stay in the safe bubble of his office, with its office jokes, water cooler, kitchen coffee pot, and shared stories about the “putz” boss, until he was forced to come home.

“I’m off to work, Mom,” Lauren said.

A minute later, as she was closing the door, her mother answered. “Okay. Be careful.”

The day passed slowly. By six o’clock, Lauren had accomplished her to-do list and finished the last forty pages of her book, so she loitered in the hallway outside the sharing room where people did their 12-step work. The voices inside were hushed murmurs. A big guy named Brian stepped out. He had a shaved head that had been tattooed with intricate designs and smack in the middle was the Angelus House insignia. He headed to the men’s room without noticing Lauren. A snippet of confession drifted through the cracked door.

“… it was just the most incredible feeling, and I like feeling powerful now, not like before …”

“… I’m gettin’ my mark at the end of the week …”

“… that’s awesome, bro. Stick with the program. You won’t be sorry …”

“… let’s say the Angelus prayer. ‘We are the fallen angels. We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega …’”

Lauren pressed closer, trying to hear more. A hand pushed the door closed.

“Sorry. You’re not supposed to listen in. Privacy and all that.” Brian was back. He towered over her, smiling.

“Oh, I-I’m sorry. I was just … sorry.”

“No problem.” He gave her a dazzling smile before slipping inside and shutting the door tightly behind him.

Lauren wandered the halls staring at the photos of those smiling teens, wondering what made them succeed. “Everybody likes a winner,” she whispered to the wall.

A long, chest-rattling moan of pain drifted up from the detox floor, and Lauren found herself taking the stairs down into the shadows, drawn to the sound. It was cooler as she descended and so dark she had to hold fast to the banister to be sure of her steps. She’d reached some sort of wide door, but it was locked. She put her ear to it, hearing nothing but the AC hum. And then came a piercing scream that prickled the hair on her neck and sent her stumbling back up the stairs toward the light. She sat at her desk with her headphones on, blasting her music until it was time to go.

Five

IT WAS THURSDAY night, just before the end of her shift, when the guy got inside.

Somebody had accidentally left the back door open, and now he was standing in the common area screaming obscenities, with a wild-eyed look and a knife in one hand.

“What did you do to me!” he shouted. His teeth were a mottled brown; angry sores dotted his face.

“Okay, take it easy, bro.” Six-foot-two Brian tried to take him, but the guy smacked him hard, sending him reeling. The drugs made him fearless, and no one could get close.

“What did you do to me?” he screamed until the tendons of his neck bulged. “I can’t sleep. I see things the way they really are. I know. I know!”

“Calm down. It’s all right,” another staffer said, extending her hand.

He jumped back and jabbed at the air with his knife. “You’re out to get me!”

“They’re out to get me, too,” Lauren said suddenly. He noticed her for the first time.

“You know? You know what I’m talking about?”

She nodded and lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “We’ve got to get away. I’ve got a safe room. I’ll take you there.”

“Okay. Okay,” he said.

Heart thumping, she led him to the filing room.

“The thirteenth step,” he muttered. “I didn’t finish it. Now I hurt so bad—worse than ever, and they’re going to kill me.” He showed her his arm where he’d scratched it to ribbons. Under the blood, she could just make out the ink of a tattoo.

“It’s okay.” Lauren opened the door to the filing room. She could hear the wail of sirens in the distance. “In here we’ll be safe.”

She let him go in ahead of her. Quickly, she locked the door behind him, the keys shaking in her hands. He screamed and flung himself against the door. Lauren jumped back.

“I’m not doing the thirteenth step! You hear me!” He bashed his head into the frosted-glass panel of the door once, twice. The sound of sirens grew closer. Lauren slid down the wall and placed her hands over her ears. The third time he bashed against the panel, a crack appeared in the glass like a flower stem dotted by petals of blood. Someone had gone for Johannes, and he was running down the hall toward her, beautiful and fast.

“You okay?” he asked, touching her shoulder.

“Sure,” she said. Then the guy broke through the glass with his head and Lauren blacked out.

Six

AFTER THE PARAMEDICS left and Lauren had given a statement, Johannes insisted on taking her for something to eat. They settled on a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop called Lisa’s Pieces where Lauren ordered a bowl of hot broth with noodles that felt slippery and good going down.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked for about the tenth time.

“Yeah. I’m okay. Who was that guy?”

“I heard he was in the program a long time ago, before I came in. Sometimes people go back out there—it’s rare, but it happens.” He reached over and rubbed her arm. “I heard you were amazing. How’d you think to do that?”

“You really want to know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

She stared at her spoon. “My sister Carla used to get like that when she was tweaked out of her head. If she wasn’t giddy and planning to become a famous movie star, she was paranoid and ready to take your head off.”

“I’m sorry,” he said so sincerely that Lauren blushed a bit. “This job must be hell for you.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s cathartic, you know?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I know. I killed my best friend, driving drunk when I was sixteen. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about that. Not a day that goes by that I don’t pray for forgiveness. But with each person we save, I get a little closer to it.” He looked so sad and helpless then, and Lauren wanted to throw her arms around him, save him with a kiss. “I guess my penance became my calling.”

Lauren felt a sudden twinge of envy that he seemed to know his place in the world. “I guess I haven’t found my calling yet.”

“Maybe your calling will find you.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s here at Angelus. Maybe you’ll even run some missions with us. I know I’d love it if you stayed on.”

He reached past the bowl of untouched fried noodles and took her hand in his. His fingers were long and swallowed hers easily.

“They found another one,” the waiter said, and somebody turned up the TV mounted over the bar.

“The decapitated body of sixteen-year-old Shawna Lenore of the Farragut Houses was found down by the Navy Piers,” the lacquered TV reporter said. “Police had no comment about whether this murder is related to a string of brutal killings that have terrified New York for the past several months, and which some are speculating could be part of an escalating gang war.”

On the flickering TV screen, a crowd of angry residents shouted at police from the sidewalks in front of the Farragut Houses. “How come they don’t do nothing to help us?” a lady holding a baby said to the camera. “They blaming us and we didn’t have nothing to do with it. They just gonna let us die.”

The report switched to one of the fancy restaurants a few blocks away and a couple enjoying a meal at a table outside. “It’s so scary. Makes us wonder whether we should move to the suburbs.”

“Hey,” Johannes whispered, stroking his thumb against Lauren’s palm in a way that made her heart beat faster. “You want to get out of here?”

They walked along the water. Across the river, Manhattan had restructured itself for night as a fractured geometry of light. A homeless couple argued in the street: “You made me do it!” “I didn’t make you do nothing!” “You coulda stopped it.” “It don’t never stop.”

The woman fell on the pavement and started crying like a child.

“Should we do something?” Lauren asked.

“Nothing to be done,” he answered and drew her into the velvet darkness of an alley. He backed her against the brick wall with a mural of two towers under the words “Never Forget,” and then his mouth was on hers, sweet and warm and obliterating.

“Don’t you touch me! Leave me alone—I never did nothing to you!” the homeless woman half-yelled, half-cried, but they were moving away now, out of sight and caring. Johannes leaned into her and pressed his body against hers. He tilted her head with one hand and sucked down the length of her taut neck until it was almost painful, but Lauren refused to cry out. She never wanted him to stop. Nothing else mattered but this. The sounds of the city—the shouts, the taunts, the threats, the distant cries—faded away, and when the police cars screamed past, red lights flashing a warning on their way to some new horror, Lauren didn’t even flinch.

Seven

LAUREN’S FIRST MISSION with Angelus was on a Friday night, second week in August. She, Johannes, Rakim, Alex, and a few others headed down to Admiral’s Row, a length of street marked by dilapidated row houses protected by an iron fence that did nothing to keep them from becoming shooting galleries. The houses were so decayed Lauren could smell the rot. Inside, it reeked of shit and piss and they had to step over the bodies of people half-dressed and barely conscious.

While the others fanned out trying to see if they could get anybody to come with them, Johannes leaned over a petite blonde girl in an NYU shirt. She looked like she’d been there for days. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Dana,” the girl slurred, her eyelids fluttering.

“Listen, Dana. We’re with Angelus House, and we can get you a bed for the night. Would you like that?”

She tried to grab for Johannes’s crotch. “You got any glass? I’ll do whatever you want for it.”

Lauren imagined Carla like this, offering her body to anybody who could get her high for another hour or two. She wanted to kick the girl, not save her.

“Come on, Dana. We’re taking you some place where you can get cleaned up,” Johannes said evenly. “You guys get her in the van. I’m gonna see if I can save anyone else.”

Alex and Rakim draped the girl’s arms across their shoulders and stepped carefully over the shattered bottles and rusted syringes to where they had a van waiting.

“What was that?” Lauren asked, suddenly startled.

“What was what?” Alex asked.

“I heard screaming.”

Alex craned her neck skyward. “Must’ve been the birds.”

Lauren saw the birds outlined against the perpetual hazy glow of the New York night. They were enormous with what looked to be six-foot wing spans. That couldn’t be right, she thought, as she watched them dive down and disappear into the dark behind the shadowed, broken houses.

“Holy shit. Did you see that?”

“Sorry. Kinda occupied with Dana here,” Alex grunted as she and Rakim eased the girl into the back of the van.

“Those birds. They were huge!”

Rakim wiggled his eyebrows. “Must’ve been real New York pigeons then. Okay, we are good to go.”

“Jesus Christ!” someone screamed in alarm, but Lauren couldn’t be sure where it had come from and Rakim was gunning the motor.

“Kilimanjaro-n. It’s time to move. You in or out?”

“In,” she said. She slid the door closed and refused to look back.

“We’ll take it from here,” Rakim told her, once they’d returned to Angelus. He and Alex half-carried Dana down the stairs into the dark of detox and Lauren started a new file, putting it into Johannes’s inbox for him to fill out later. Then she sat in the common area watching a vampire flick with the newbies and fell asleep. She woke two hours later to find herself alone on the couch feeling worried and more than a little annoyed that Johannes hadn’t come for her.

“Forget this,” she said, and took the stairs down to detox, pushing through the heavy door.

The hallway was mostly dark, but up ahead, where it curved left and right, she could see dim florescent lights flickering like strobes. There were no inspirational posters with pictures of smiling teens on these walls. It was grim as a Soviet-era apartment building. From behind the doors, she heard odd sounds—growls and gurgles, like animals eating. And something else—a constant buzzing machine whine that didn’t match the sporadic popping of the overhead lights. It made her skin crawl. And then there was a loud, piercing shriek of agony that died into desperate cries. Lauren heard a rumbling noise coming closer. She stood trembling under the flickering lights too terrified to move. A shadow reached across the back wall, growing larger, then smaller, and then a pigtailed girl appeared, dancing to the music blaring from her headphones while pushing a mop and a big yellow bucket on wheels. The water was oddly dark, and the girl’s gloved hands and apron were spattered with splotches.

“What are you doing here?” the girl asked in a thick New York accent that competed with the music blurting from her headphones. “You can’t be here now. I gotta clean.”

“Sorry,” Lauren said, turning away from the shadows, the sounds, the girl, and the murky water in the bucket, running as fast as she could for the door. She ran smack into Johannes.

“Lauren? What are you doing? You’re not supposed to go into detox.” His face was grim, even a little angry.

“I … I was just looking for you.”

“And I was up there looking for you.” His smile relaxed her.

“I heard weird noises. And somebody screamed.”

“That’s why we tell you not to go there. Sometimes during withdrawal it can get really nasty. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

Lauren remembered going with Carla to the hospital that first time, how her sister fought and cursed, growled like an angry dog, spat and, yes, screamed. “I guess you’re right.”

Johannes kissed the top of her head and held her close. “Just looking out for you, babe. Besides,” he licked her neck. “I require your assistance in other matters.”

It had been a long time since Lauren had felt like someone was looking out for her, and she found herself grateful and hungry for the way Johannes took her hand in his long fingers and led her away from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.

Eight

THE DRIVE TO Eagle Feather was pretty if you were on vacation, which Lauren wasn’t, and so it was just trees and cows and more trees and three hours in the car with her parents saying nothing that mattered.

Carla had put on some weight since the last time they’d seen her, but she’d also taken up smoking, lighting one cigarette after the other during their visit. “Sometimes the patients exchange one addiction for another. We try to get them hooked on something healthier, like exercise or a hobby,” the director, a small man with a wire-thin voice and very little hair told them. “But if there is a stop-gap addiction that is not as immediately detrimental, such as smoking or doughnuts, we allow it.” Her parents ignored the smoking and made overly cheerful conversation about how good Carla looked and how much cooler it was upstate than it was in the city where everyone was just sweltering this summer. Lauren thought about the people at Angelus, about those kids who had nothing, who lived on the street or the projects, who’d overcome the worst possible scenarios to get clean and make something of themselves. And here was Carla—spoiled, entitled Carla, whose selfishness had driven them into a shitty rental and aged her parents by ten years. Carla, who couldn’t get it together despite having everything. Lauren hated her for it.

“Can you bring me some new clothes next time?” Carla said when they were leaving. “All the candy around here is making my jeans tight.”

“Of course,” her mother said. “I’ll get Lauren to help me pick something out.”

“Great. Homeless Chic. Don’t make me look like too much of a dork, okay Squirt?” Carla laughed. Lauren didn’t.

Lauren slammed the car door hard. “Well, that was fun. What a fucking waste of time.”

“Lauren! Watch your language,” her mother said, catching her eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, ’cause it’s my language that’s the problem here.” She knew she should give it up—there was no point in having an argument—but she couldn’t stop herself. “When are you going to get it? She’s ruined everything. She’s a loser, and she gets everything.”

Lauren’s mom blanched. “She’s sick, honey.”

“She’s not sick. She’s useless! This wouldn’t happen at Angelus House.”

“That’s enough, Lauren,” her father snapped.

Yeah, enough, Lauren thought. They didn’t speak for the entire ride back to Brooklyn. The next day, she packed her clothes, her iPod, and some pictures, and moved into Angelus House.

Nine

THERE HAD BEEN a few brownouts due to the heat’s demands on the city’s ancient grid, and the mayor was telling everyone to cut back on their electricity. But inside Angelus House, the AC was working fine, keeping everything freezing cold. Now that Lauren was living there full time, she had to adjust to the chilliness of the place. No one else seemed to mind it, but Lauren found herself wearing a sweatshirt during the day and sleeping in flannels at night. There were other oddities. No one ever used the vending machine in the rec room. In fact, a fine layer of dust lay on the keys, and she realized that in her six weeks on the job, she’d never seen anyone come to refill it. Once, she hit the button for a package of M&Ms, and when she opened it, the candy was so old, the chocolates crumbled in her hand like pastel dirt. Only the fridge marked “Newbies” ever needed restocking. And sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, distant cries, shrieks, and moans cut through the stillness. The desperation of those sounds filled her with a dread she couldn’t name, and so she pulled the pillow over her head, listening to her heartbeat until she managed to sleep and forget. And by noon, with everyone up and laughing, going about their work, offering hugs or back rubs or jokes, Lauren felt safe again. People looked out for each other here. Her family had imploded, but now she’d found a new family to take her in, and that was enough.

On a Friday, one week after Lauren had come to live at Angelus House, she found all the residents huddled together in one of the sharing rooms, speaking in hushed tones.

“… What was he doing out at that hour?”

“… He knew better than that …”

“… burned to a crisp …”

“What’s going on?” Lauren asked.

Alex looked up, her face registering surprise. Her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. “It’s Brian.”

“Those bastards in the projects, they torched Brian,” Rakim said, his nostrils flaring in anger. “He went in to help them, and they paid him back by setting him on fire.”

Just then Johannes walked in. “If we get caught up in anger, we lose. Come on. Let’s remember Brian as he’d want us to.”

They formed a sharing circle, hands clasped. Lauren stood on the outside, watching. “We are the fallen angels,” they intoned. “We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega. Unto us is given this charge. Unto us will be the glory.”

They hugged and comforted one another, especially the newbies who had come to see Brian as their protector.

“We remember and go on,” Johannes said.

“Amen,” the others answered.

Brian’s death was front-page news. FALLEN ANGEL, the headline in the Daily News trumpeted, and there was a picture of Brian smiling out from under that shaved head full of tattoos. Everyone at the Farragut swore they’d had nothing to do with it, that nobody had even seen him around there and that it was all a setup by the cops or the real-estate developers or Angelus House itself. One anonymous source claimed that he’d seen Brian simply walk out into the daylight muttering “For the greater good,” before bursting into flame.

They held a candlelight vigil for Brian that evening, marching from Angelus House through Vinegar Hill to the Navy Yards, where the mayor spoke and promised that those who were guilty would be brought to justice. The cops hit the city hard, taking people in for any and everything they could. After Brian’s death, the tide of public opinion turned in favor of Angelus House taking over the empty warehouses along the waterfront.

“He sacrificed himself for us,” Lauren overheard Rakim saying a few days later. He said it to Dana, who had cleaned up nicely and was attending meetings every day. “That’s the Angelus commitment. That’s the extra step.” He broke off when he saw Lauren. “Hey Lauren Sauron. You mind going for some groceries? I think the newbies need more juice.”

“Sure.”

He smiled, but something in his eyes made her uneasy, and she found herself wanting to escape the too-cold recycled air. “Hey, who’s better than Kiliamanjaran?”

“Nobody,” she said and went outside.

In the grocery cart, Lauren found an envelope with her name on it shoved under the bags she kept there. Inside was the day’s paper with the headline: ANOTHER ONE BITES THE

DUST. Lauren scanned the story. The body, drained of blood, had been discovered in a dumpster behind a Burger King in downtown Brooklyn, the head missing. Another victim in an escalating gang war. The victim’s name was Isaiah Jones of the Farragut Houses.

Isaiah Jones.

A note had been scrawled at the bottom of the page: I need to talk to you. You can find me today on the boardwalk at Coney, in front of Deno’s. Tell nobody. A friend.

That afternoon, Lauren pretended she had a dentist’s appointment and biked down to Coney Island where she found the tagger on the boardwalk painting caricatures of tourists for extra cash. He looked up, shielding his eyes from the relentless sun. “Hey. What do you want—a drawing of you as Princess Leia or Barbarella? Personally, I think you would look hot as Wonder Woman.”

“Sorry about your friend.”

“Yeah,” he said, gazing out at some point on the horizon. “Come on. Let’s get outta this heat.”

The tagger, whose name, she learned, was Antonio, sweet-talked an aquarium volunteer into letting them inside for free. They took refuge in the cool damp, wandering through the maze of watery exhibits full of exotic creatures, stopping in a secluded spot near the moray eel. Antonio leaned against the glass. The blue-gray light turned him ghostly pale.

“Remember I told you about my cousin, Sabrina? Right before she died, she called me up scared out of her mind and said she’d seen some weird shit going down at Angelus. Bad shit.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head. “She wouldn’t tell me over the phone. But she mailed me this postcard right before she disappeared.” He pulled a card out of his back pocket. It was the Angelus House insignia. Across the front in a shaky script were the words los vampiros. “Two days later, she was dead. They killed her.” Lauren started to object, and he held up a finger. “Wait. Just let me tell you about Isaiah now. Isaiah ran with a crew out of the Farragut. He liked to smoke, deal a little weed, nothing major, only he gets caught for a second time—he’s eighteen now—and they give him a choice: Angelus House or time. So he joins up, does the program, but he doesn’t take it serious. He’s just going along till he can get out.”

Lauren felt hate rising. “Nice.”

“One night, he comes rolling back into the houses, smokes a blunt with his boys, and when he’s all loose, he starts telling them how he got tapped for something big, something secret, like the damn Mafia. He told ’em that Angelus wasn’t just a twelve-step program. They got a secret thirteenth step.”

Lauren remembered the tweaker who’d broken in that night. He mentioned a thirteenth step, but he was out of his mind. “What do you mean?”

“Isaiah said once you were tapped, you got the mark to prove your commitment to Angelus House—the tattoo they all wear. Then you had twenty-four hours to prove yourself on a mission, and once you did that, you were untouchable. A bona fide immortal.” He paused. “A vampire.”

The eel bumped against the glass, startling Lauren. “This is, like, crazier than crazy,” she said.

“Yeah? How do you explain what happened to that guy Brian?”

“The cops say somebody at the Farragut killed him.”

“That crazy bastard burned up in the sun.”

“You know this.”

He shrugged. “I heard it.”

“And that makes it automatically true.”

“You want to hear this shit or not?”

She crossed her arms. “Whatever. You asked me down here.”

“And you came,” he offered. “Think about it: If you wanted to work up a crew of vampires without being noticed, where would you do it? You’d get the people no one wants to be bothered with, the lost causes who already got a craving they can’t stop on their own so they’re, like, ripe for whatever you throwing at ’em. And then you’d make up some bullshit turf war and blame it on a whole bunch of other people nobody wants to be bothered with, let them take the fall.”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “Okay. Backing up. You said they had twenty-four hours after they got the mark to do a mission. What happens if they don’t?”

He lowered his voice to a strained whisper. “It’s like the worst withdrawal symptoms ever, and they never stop. You lose your mind.”

And again Lauren thought of the man who’d bashed his head into the glass of the filing room door.

“So either you do what they want you to do, or they kill you one way or another,” Antonio continued. “Isaiah said he saw it happen to this other cat, and that’s why he was out of there the next morning without getting inked. That’s why he went into hiding. But they got to him anyway. Just like Sabrina. And the worst part is, nobody knows. People are so blind they’ll believe whatever they’re told. Gang war.” He spat. “My Puerto Rican ass.”

The eel slithered along the bottom of the dark floor of the tank, back and forth. Lauren watched it searching for prey, and something hard and angry twisted in her guts. This guy and his bullshit theories was taking away the only good thing she’d had in three years.

“So let me get this straight. Some former drug dealer gets high and starts making up stories about vampires and you take it as gospel? You’re such an idiot. He played you. He probably owed money to somebody. Listen, my sister used to tell me all kinds of crazy lies, and I believed her because I didn’t want to know the truth. She’s still pulling shit on my parents all the time. So excuse me if I’m all out of gullibility. Go play your games with somebody else.”

She turned and threaded her way through a sea of yellow-shirted camp kids. Antonio ran after her. “Hold up. Just answer me this, okay? They hired you to run errands, right? Because they needed somebody who could go out during the daylight hours for them. Tell me—you ever go out during the day with your boyfriend?”

Lauren realized they had only gone out after dark. “He doesn’t get off shift until nighttime.”

Antonio nodded, a cruel smirk pulling at his lips. “Yeah. I’m sure that’s it.” He handed her his phone. “Here. Call him up. Tell him to come meet us out here at Coney in the nice warm sun. Hey, if he shows up, I will personally go to Nathan’s and buy the hot dogs. Oh wait—he probably doesn’t eat, either.”

A sense of unease pricked at Lauren. She’d never once seen Johannes eat. Not Alex either. Not Rakim. Only the newbies. But that didn’t mean anything, did it?

She shoved his phone at him. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

Lauren walked the long way to the train letting the sun bake into her skin. She watched the people bobbing in the gentle surf, the bright afternoon turning the sand into little prisms, and thought about what Antonio said. Vampires. That was completely insane. On the way to the train, Lauren texted Johannes. CN U MEET ME FOR PIZZA @ 4:00? She waited for his response. It never came.

Ten

THEY WERE CROSSING Atlantic Avenue on the way to the movie theater when Johannes nudged her with his elbow. “What’s up? You’re pretty quiet.”

“It’s nothing.”

He stopped walking and turned her to face him. “Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

“It’s just … you never texted me back.”

“God. I’m so sorry, Lauren. We had this crazy long meeting with some suits today about the go-head with the building plans for the Navy Yards, and I couldn’t get away. It was so boring I wanted to hang myself.”

“Oh. Sure. Okay.”

“That is not an okay face,” he said, tilting her chin up so that she could look into those dark eyes.

Lauren forced herself to look away. “Okay. Um.” She laughed uneasily. “This is so incredibly crazy that I sort of hate myself. But you remember that first night—the guy tagging the building? Well, he left me a note today.”

Johannes’s eyes widened. “What? Are you okay?”

“Yes. Totally fine, but I met up with him, which I know was stupid, but he’s got this insane idea that you and everybody at Angelus House are … vampires.”

Johannes cocked one eyebrow in an amused fashion.

“Okay. Forget I said anything. Totally stupid.”

“Um, you think? Maybe just a little bit?” He lost his grin. “What’s creeping me out more is that he’s been watching you. Especially with all the murders going on. I wish I knew who this guy was.”

Lauren hesitated for a second, but Johannes’s hand was rubbing her back, and she found she wanted his protection after all. “His name is Antonio Rodriguez. His cousin Sabrina was in your program for a while. He said she died.”

Johannes’s face darkened. “Antonio. I should have known.”

“You know him?”

“Yeah. I do. He’s always blamed us for the loss of Sabrina. She was a tough case, kind of like your sister. Hard to save.”

Lauren flinched at the mention of Carla. “What happened?”

“Antonio happened. Sabrina was ninety days clean—she’d been through almost all her steps—and against our advice, Antonio signed her out. Two days later, they found her at the Farragut Houses. Heroin overdose.”

“He told me she was drained of blood, like those others.”

Johannes shook his head. “Heroin. If he’d let her complete the program, she might have made it.” Johannes looked right into Lauren’s eyes and she felt foolish, like a kid who’d been pranked. “Did you know he’s obsessed with vampires? I mean obsessed. He visits all these sites on the Internet, chat rooms. Sick stuff. Sabrina said he was part of a crew that used to call themselves Los Vampiros, and they would freak people out by pretending to be the undead. It was a gang thing. To prove your loyalty, you had to do something pretty hardcore.”

“How hardcore?”

“Like maybe kill somebody. I don’t like this.” He pulled her close and kissed her head. Lauren’s felt shaky. She’d spent the afternoon talking to the guy without once realizing how dangerous he might be. “Lauren, please be careful. I don’t know what Antonio’s mixed up in these days, or how far his crazy obsession has gone. If you see him again, you should call the police. Or if you don’t want to do that, you can call me. I promise to keep you safe.” He kissed her long and slow. “You really want to go see that movie?” That easy grin was back, making Lauren sweat.

She shook her head.

“Me either,” he said.

He took her back to Angelus House, leading her up to the top floors where the staff lived. She’d been up here very rarely as there wasn’t much to see except dorm rooms, and all the action happened down in the common areas. Johannes stopped before one of the doors and pushed it open. “Come on in.”

“This is your room?” Lauren wasn’t sure why she asked except that it seemed so nondescript. There were no photos, no mementos, nothing except the Angelus House insignia poster, a chest of drawers, and a twin bed beside a small table with a banker’s lamp.

“Do you trust me?” He took her face in his palms and looked into her eyes. “Because I need for you to trust me, and sometimes I feel like you don’t.”

“I do,” Lauren whispered. “It’s just—I’ve learned a lot about not trusting.”

Lauren could feel tears welling up and suddenly, Johannes was kissing her, and she didn’t care about anything else. He lay her down on the too-soft mattress, and she welcomed the weight of him as he nudged her thighs open with his own. She couldn’t escape if she wanted to, and there was a sick little thrill in that kind of surrender.

“Is this okay?” Johannes whispered, planting small kisses down her neck.

“Yes,” she moaned.

She kissed him hard, and he matched her intensity, gripping handfuls of her hair. He moved against her slowly but deliberately, and she arched to meet him.

“God. Lauren,” he moaned. “You feel so good.”

In one quick move, he yanked off his shirt exposing the Angelus tattoo in the center of his beautiful chest. Lauren reached out to touch it, and he sucked her fingers, making her shiver. He lay down beside Lauren and slid his fingers under the waistband of her cargo pants, moving down, touching her in a place that made her gasp.

“Yeah? You like that?” he purred, and Lauren could only gasp again. “I like making you feel good.” His thumb made circles, and his mouth was on her neck, kissing, sucking hard. He nicked her with his teeth and she flinched. “Sorry,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Sorry.”

He buried his face in her hair, his thumb became more insistent, the pleasure building till Lauren’s body shook and shuddered from the force of it.

“I love you,” he whispered, and Lauren had never been happier.

Eleven

LAUREN WOKE TO an empty bed. It was late for her, around two in the afternoon. She showered and dressed and headed down to the common room where the TV weatherman promised a record high of one hundred and two with an absurd amount of humidity. Lauren groaned even though inside the Angelus House, it was dark and cool as the earth.

She plopped down next to Alex on the ratty old couch. “You want to go out for a walk or an ice cream?”

Alex grimaced. “Ugh. Too hot for me.”

They ever go out in the daylight? She heard Antonio’s voice in her head. But he was a thug and what he said was crazy; she would prove it. “Come on. I don’t want to go by myself,” Lauren said, tugging on Alex’s limp arm. “Just five minutes.”

“I can’t leave,” Alex insisted, sliding out of her grip. “I’m on duty.”

“What could happen in five minutes?” Lauren taunted.

Alex’s gaze was steely. “A lot.”

Lauren got that same prickly feeling, but then Alex was smiling and nuzzling against her in that affectionate, hippie girl way. “I’m sorry, Lauren-a-manjaro. I wish I could go with you. Look, here’s ten bucks. I’ll take a cherry ice and get yourself whatever you want.”

“Sure,” Lauren said, staring at the tattoo on the back of Alex’s neck.

On the way out, she found Dana sitting alone on the front steps, her face turned toward the sun. Rivulets of sweat ran down her neck. The heat was beastly.

“God. Aren’t you dying out here?”

The girl shook her head. “I just wanted to soak it up while I can, you know?”

“I guess,” Lauren said. She couldn’t wait for the first cold snap to blow through.

“Tomorrow it will all be different,” Dana said sadly.

“What’s happening tomorrow?”

Dana lifted up her hair, showing off a brand-new tattoo on her left shoulder blade. It was still caked in dried blood. “Got the mark today. I’m fully committed to the program now. I’m ready.”

“Right,” Lauren said, her heartbeat quickening. “So you’re ready for the thirteenth step.”

“Exactly,” she said smiling. “The first one’s the hardest, but after that, it gets easier and easier. Anyway, I guess it’s like they say—you have to be willing to commit.”

“Dana—” Lauren started, but there was a scratching and then a pounding at the tinted window behind them.

“I think they’re looking for me,” the girl said. With a backward glance at the blazing sun, she went in.

Lauren didn’t return with the ices. She spent the night in her old room at home. Her parents had gone to Eagle Feather, but the super let her in with his key, and she went to work right away researching vampire lore on the Internet, locking all the doors and windows, hanging garlic from them, hoping she was wrong. Johannes sent her a text at ten and another well after midnight—WHERE R U? and EVERYTHING OK?

CARLA TROUBLE, she texted back. SEE U MONDAY. She added x’s and o’s and willed herself not to cry.

When the first pink claw marks of dawn faded into a pale blue morning, Lauren headed out. She looked down to see the day’s papers bundled in string. The front page showed a picture of Antonio. JUSTICE SERVED: ANGELUS HOUSE KILLER KILLED BY HIS OWN. Lauren ripped off the string and turned inside to the story. Antonio Rodriguez of the Farragut Houses had been found down by the Navy Yards with his chest torn open, his head ripped off, and every drop of his blood drained. An anonymous source claimed he was a member of the notorious Los Vampiros gang, rumored to be responsible for the city’s spate of murders.

She ran for the subway.

Twelve

AT YORK, SHE got off and walked through the sleepy neighborhood up the cobblestone street to the top of the hill overlooking the Navy Yards. She let herself into Angelus House. It was eerily quiet, cool and dark as always with that slightly earthen smell she’d always attributed to the AC. Carefully and quickly, she made her way to the back, to the small hallway that housed the freight elevator. Rakim had said it was the only way down to the basement. It had a metal gate that had to be closed first. Lauren pushed the round B. It lit up, and then she was moving down into the bowels of the old hospital.

The doors opened onto utter darkness, and for a moment, Lauren thought about going upstairs to her desk and pretending there was no basement, no mysterious detox floor, nothing going on at all. She could file papers, read her book, buy juice for the newbies, and go on loving Johannes. But she had to know. She stepped out, letting the elevator doors close behind her, and then she was tiptoeing through the dark. Her knee banged against something hard, and she stifled a scream with her fist. Carefully, she reached down and felt. It was wood—a table? Too low. A bed frame? She wished she’d brought a flashlight. The damp earth odor was stronger here; it filled her nostrils and made her want to sneeze, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she stood perfectly still, allowing her eyes to adjust. Soon, she could make out long, rectangular shapes in the dark that were oddly familiar. Coffins. Her breathing quickened as she remembered the lumber and mulch she’d hauled back from the home improvement center earlier in the summer. As gently as possible, she nudged aside the top to one of the coffins and squatted low, putting her face even with the opening. Her eyes started at the bottom, where she could make out the glint of Alex’s ankle charm bracelet; her gaze traveled up to a moonlight-pale hand with impossibly long fingers topped by razor-sharp curved nails. She bit off the cry in her throat and half-stumbled back toward the freight elevator, which wouldn’t come though she pressed the button furiously. She turned a corner, looking for a way out and found herself in another room of coffins, their new pine tops shining in the darkness, but at the far end, she could just make out a pair of double doors. Slowly, she inched her way through the room, her shaking breath the only sound among the sleeping undead. She didn’t see the coffin until it was too late, and she flew over it, knocking into two others and sending their covers to the floor with a loud thunk. Gurgling animal noises filled the dark. And then one of the things burst up from the coffin. It was gray-white as the moon, long and barrel-chested with enormous, leathery wings, a mouthful of pointed teeth and yellow eyes that stared down at her in contempt. Then it threw back its head and shrieked in alarm, and Lauren was up and running. She burst through the doors into the flickering light of the detox floor. Behind her she could hear the thing screeching, awakening the others. She tried door after door trying to find one that would open. Down at the far end of the hall, she found a knob that turned, and she threw herself inside, locking the door.

“You’re not supposed to be on this floor.”

Lauren turned around slowly. Dana stood in the corner. Her mouth was a smear of bright red blood. Two long, serrated teeth poked down over her bottom lip. Pale, thin skeletons of wings had sprouted from her back, and her skin was the color of old bones. The bloodshot yellow of her eyes was interrupted by enormous pupils that were utterly without light, and Lauren could not stop staring at her, or at the mess of a body the thing that used to be Dana had left convulsing on the floor behind her, the jugular still spurting in a thinning stream.

“You can’t be here,” Dana said again, her voice more of a snarl now.

The door opened. She heard shouting. Human sounds. Something hit her hard, and then she fell into a merciful blackness.

Thirteen

SHE WOKE TO a high, whining, machine-like buzz and the sensation of pain. She was strapped to a table, and Rakim was bent over her left arm, the tattoo needle doing its work. Blood oozed from the miniscule holes he raised.

“Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to ask you where you’d like it, so I went with the forearm. It’s a classic.” He wiped away her blood with gauze from the boxes she’d brought them every week.

From across the room, Johannes approached, so perfect and golden that it made her ache. He stroked her hair gently as she’d seen him do with the addicts, kissed her softly. “Lauren, it’s okay. Just relax.”

She squirmed anyway. “You killed Antonio.”

“He brought it on himself. He should have left it alone.”

“He wasn’t very tasty, either,” Rakim tutted. “I will be so glad when we run this town, and we don’t have to dine out on its leftovers. Maybe I’ll have me some nice Park Avenue socialite then. Hey, you should hold still if you don’t want your mark to look all busted.”

The pain was back in her arm. “I’ll go with you for your first kill,” Johannes promised sweetly. “It’s not so bad. You’ll see.”

“You get used to it. And you feel totally amazing after.” Alex stood framed in the doorway, smiling. “Before long, you don’t care about what you’re doing.”

Rakim finished his work, wiping away the last of Lauren’s blood with gauze. Her arm was sore and the Angelus insignia was black against the red of her skin. Johannes freed her from the table’s restraints.

“You’re free to go. You have twenty-four hours. If you don’t make a kill, you’ll get very, very sick. If you do choose to be one of us, you have to be back before sunrise. It’s your choice.”

Johannes’s lips were on hers and she couldn’t keep from kissing him back.

The night was hot; the sky was the oily black of old coffee. Lauren wandered the streets of Brooklyn in a haze, the humidity pressing down on her. She rode the F train all the way to Coney Island and back into the city. The bright white inside the train made her eyes burn and her head pound and she got off at Fourth Avenue. Above her, the vampires swarmed the skies shrieking. They were not birds; she knew that now. She was beginning to see and hear everything. Her ears picked up the smallest noises: rats scuttling in alleys, the sighs of discontented lovers, new life coming into the world on a tide of pain and blood, always blood. She passed by her apartment and listened to her parents breathing, could sense their worry. Outside the super’s apartment, she felt his restlessness as he dreamed of his time with the Tonton Macoutes, his machete doing its grisly, silencing work. Everyone had something to hide.

She moved on, fighting the jittery need making itself known in her anxious heartbeat. The skin of her arm was puffy and tight beneath the new tattoo, and every part of her had begun to hurt, as if she could no longer be contained by the limits of her flesh. Bile churned in her gut; her blood, which pumped with a new ferocity, begged for satisfaction. She licked her lips and ran her tongue over the tiny nubs of fangs pushing through her upper gums, making her mouth tender and swollen. How long had it been since the tattoo? Twelve hours? Fifteen?

Here and there she saw the vampires, squatting on the burned-out shells of cars, climbing the fire escapes of the tenements, circling the bridges and the piers, crouched under the overpasses, yellow eyes flashing, tattered wings spread out, lips peeled back to show their bloody maws, bodies breaking in the grip of their unnaturally strong hands. One glanced at her and laughed.

It was an hour later than she had ever remembered knowing before. Sharp pain twisted round her muscles like squeezing vines. In the alley near the water where Johannes had kissed her so perfectly, Lauren fell onto the broken pavement in a cold sweat. She blinked. Her eyelids scratched. The homeless woman staggered up the street without her boyfriend this time. She sang a Stevie Wonder song off-key. As the woman moved closer, Lauren felt her body quickening, tensing, the nubs of her fangs descending. She shut her eyes tight and tried to hold very still.

“Hey.”

Lauren opened her eyes to see the woman very near, so near that the scent of her blood beneath her skin was nearly unbearable. “Hey. You got some change you can spare? I’m hungry.”

“Go away,” Lauren rasped.

“You stupid little bitch.”

“Go. Away,” Lauren growled through gritted teeth.

“You think I like doing this? You think this is my idea of a good time?” The older woman spat on her and cursed until Lauren was forced to take refuge elsewhere. Lauren walked till she was numb, making her way through Red Hook, toward the water, to wait for the sun. At Lorraine Street, the blue of the pool tantalized her. She thought about going in for a last swim, about letting her lungs fill with water and ending it, but when she came around the corner, there was the girl sitting alone on the wall outside the recreation center in her day-camp shirt. It was close to dawn, maybe five-thirty. The sun would be up soon.

“What are you doing out here?” Lauren asked.

“Waiting for my aunt. She went to get me donuts.”

“Donuts are good.”

“I like the ones with the powdered sugar.”

The girl smelled like powdered sugar to Lauren. Like something sweet and perfect. Lauren doubled over and wrapped her arms around herself.

The girl looked at her strangely. “You sick?”

“Yeah, sweetie,” Lauren choked out. “You should stay back. I’m real sick.”

The child was scared now. Lauren could smell the fear mixing in her blood, and Lauren wanted to tell her to get ready because the whole world was sick, as diseased as she felt inside. But this girl with the large eyes didn’t know that yet. It was waiting for her, like a spoiled donut gone to maggots. And then, as Lauren’s body shook with new agony, she realized the girl didn’t have to know.

Lauren would save her.

Fourteen

LAUREN STOOD ON the old cobblestone street taking in the view of the yawning mouth of the city, its steel and stone teeth ready to devour the morning sky. Already, signs of dawn showed. At the top of the hill, Angelus House loomed. Someone had left the front light burning, and Lauren she made her way toward it now with slow, sure steps, adjusting to the tangy iron taste in her throat. She’d only vomited once at the beginning, but the girl was small and too weak to get away, and Lauren had held her with surprising strength. The girl’s blood had tasted sweet and sugary and slightly creamy, as if she might have had a quick cup of milk that morning before leaving the house. It had been fairly quick, all in all. Her only mistake was looking into the girl’s eyes and seeing her face mirrored there. She would not make that mistake next time.

She passed by her old desk. They’d have to find a new assistant, of course. A note had been left on her chair—We’re in the sharing room. She found them standing in a circle, hands joined, waiting for her.

“We are the fallen angels,” they intoned. “We are the shadows in the night.”

Johannes held out his arm to welcome her into the circle, and she took her place, mouthing along with them, her whispers growing stronger, her words gaining power and conviction until her voice could not be distinguished from anyone else’s.