The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

LATE BLOOMER Suzy McKee Charnas

The vampires showed up the summer that Josh worked at Ivan’s Antiques Mall.

The job wasn’t Josh’s idea. He hadn’t asked to be there.

Ivan’s side of the family were all fixated on material stuff, and what is an antiques mall about if not stuff? Josh’s side were the talented ones. His mother, Maya Cherny Burnham, was a well-known landscape painter. His father taught higher math at the technical college. Upward strivers both, they had never been shy about letting him know that they expected great things from him.

That was okay; everybody pushed their kids. Josh wasn’t the only one taking extra science, math, and creative writing electives. In fact, he was doing pretty well. He even liked the writing work. The teacher was giving him A minuses and B pluses, and he was really getting into it.

Then he broke his leg. And then Steve Bowlin’s crazy dog bit him, two surgeries’ worth. Then he got mono (better than getting rabies, ha ha). A whole parade of pain. No wonder he messed up on his SATs.

His father said, “Josh, you should hear this from me first: If you had major sciences talent, we’d have seen it by now.”

His mom said, “Okay, you’re not the next Richard Feynman or Tom Wolfe—so what? You’ve got more creativity in your little finger than that whole high school put together!”

So, on to after-school classes at the Community Arts Center: oils, clay, watercolor, printmaking, even a “fiber arts” class that (despite strong encouragement from the instructor) he bailed on early. The retards at school were already spreading a rumor that he was gay. He eased out of team sports around that time, too. You do not want to be the weediest guy on the field with a bunch of Transformers who think (or pretend to think, just for the fun of it) that a guy who does any kind of art must be queer.

The worst, though, was when the portfolio of his best drawings didn’t get him into the Art Institute Advanced Placement program. Probably he shouldn’t have included those comic book pages he’d been so proud of. So he wasn’t good enough; but that was what art school was for, wasn’t it? To help you do it better.

His parents said, “Some creative people are late bloomers.” They smiled encouragingly, but disappointment hung over them like those little black rain clouds that float above sad cartoon characters. Josh got depressed, too. He quit drawing, writing, even hanging out in the local museum (a small collection, but they had two awesome Basquiats and a set of spectacular watercolors by a local guy—he could see these things in his mind anyway, they were that good).

He shut himself off as much as he could, using his iPod to enclose himself in a shield of sound: Coldplay, a couple of rappers, some older groups like the Clash. And the Decemberists, at the top of his list since he had heard them in a live concert and had been blown away.

Then at the farmer’s market one Saturday he heard a band performing and stopped to listen.

They were heading for a music festival in Colorado, according to the cardboard sign propped up in an open guitar case: a sturdy guy on a camp stool with one drum and a light, easy beat; a skinny, capering guitarist who wore a T-shirt on his head like a jester’s cap and bells; a low-slung blonde who padded around with her eyes half closed, fiddling the sweetest riffs Josh had ever heard; and a square-shouldered girl with a voice like a trumpet, belting out off beat love songs and political ballads without ever needing to pause for breath.

They were too cool to talk to—in their twenties, playing barefoot on the grass for gas money—but he stayed until they started to repeat themselves. Their songs were good—quirky, catchy, wry, sad, the works. Okay, they were not Danger Mouse or the Decemberists. But they were surely what those groups had been when they started out: talented friends who went out to play whatever they could to whoever would listen, learning how to make great songs.

That was what he needed to do. That was the life he wanted.

So when the class play, an original musical, needed more songs, he volunteered to help. His reward was to be assigned to write two songs with Annie Frye. Writing verses (what was he thinking? Now he was really going to be killed in the boys’ bathroom)—with Freaky Frye!

But Annie was fun to work with, and lyrics for her tunes came surprisingly easily. Didn’t that mean something?

Annie introduced him to some seniors she knew who played gigs around town for beer money. They called themselves the Mister Wrongs, and they needed a writer (obviously). He began spending time with them, rehearsing in Brandon White’s garage. Annie had a fight with the drummer and walked out. Josh stayed, not just writing songs but singing them. His voice was getting better. They said if he could grow some decent stubble, he might make himself into an acceptable front man.

He had two big problems. One, his mother thought pop music was stupid and destroyed your hearing, so for the first time she was carping about what he was doing instead of cheering him on.

Two, he was so far behind! He couldn’t seem to get the hang of reading music. The only instrument he could play was a Casio keyboard (secondhand from Ivan’s). He existed, musically speaking, in a whole other galaxy from the Decemberists and their peers.

But Brandon’s group liked his lyrics, and sometimes his words and their music did awesome things together. Brandon’s girl Betts knew some people in Portland. They talked about heading up there to do a demo tape. Things were looking good.

Then Betts’s parents moved across the river, and Brandon’s house was repossessed after his whole family snuck away overnight. The others drifted away, and it was all over.

Josh holed up in his room, working on songs about wishing he was dead. He told his parents that he wasn’t going back for senior year.

After the inevitable meltdown, his mom got him the summer job at Ivan’s mall, no ifs, ands, or buts. Obviously his parents hoped that a microscopic paycheck for grunt work in “the real world” plus some “time to think things over” would change his decision.

As if! All he wanted was to get the hell out of Dodge and go someplace he could find new musicians to work with, someplace with a real music scene that went beyond country whining, salsa, and bad rock. He needed a fresh start, in Portland or Seattle—someplace. Once he got there, his nowhere origins wouldn’t be a problem. Colin Meloy was from Montana.

Basically, though, what he really wanted was for the world to stop for a while so he could make a really good musician of himself. He needed to make up all the time he’d wasted on science and arts.

The vampires’ arrival, of course, changed everything.

The first-look sale of old Mrs. Ledley’s estate ran till eleven p.m. on a Friday night. Josh was posted in a back booth, with orders to keep his eyes open. The crowd was mostly dealers, but you couldn’t be too careful in a huge warehouse space broken up into forty-five different dealers’ booths and four aisles.

Tired from schlepping furniture and boxes all day for Ivan’s renters (who all had bad backs from years of schlepping furniture and boxes), he sat at an old oak desk in booth forty-one (Victoriana, especially toys and kids’ furniture), doodling on a sketch pad. He’d have worked on song lyrics (“The day flies past my dreaming eyes…”), but not with Sinatra blatting “My Way” from a booth up front that sold scratchy old long plays.

Hearing a little tick, tick sound close by, he glanced up.

A woman in a green linen suit stood across the aisle, tapping a pencil against her front teeth and studying the display in a glass-fronted cabinet. Josh sketched fast. She might work as a goth-flavored Madonna, being pointy faced and olive skinned with thick, dark hair.

Next time he looked, he met a laserlike stare. Her eyes, crow footed at the outer corners, were shadowed in the same shade of parakeet blue as the polish on her nails (good-bye, Madonna).

He closed his pad and asked if she wanted to see anything from the locked cases.

“Have you got any furs?” she said. Her English had a foreign tinge. “Whole fox skins, to wear around the neck in winter?”

He shook his head. “Some came in with the estate, but they’ve already gone to a vintage clothing store.”

She sniffed. “Then show me what you’re drawing.”

He meant to refuse but found himself handing over his pad anyway.

She flipped pages. “Jesus and sheep? Are you Catholic?”

“You can always sell a religious picture in here sooner or later,” he said, folding his arms defensively. “Minimum wage sucks.”

“This isn’t bad,” she said, tapping the top sketch, “but I would stay in school if I were you.” What was she expecting, Michaelangelo?

“I’m dropping out.” Not that it was any of her business.

“Then this is a good place for you,” she said, handing back the pad. “One can always make a living in antiques.”

“It’s just a summer job,” he mumbled. “I’m a musician, actually.”

“Oh? What’s your instrument?”

“Keyboards. But I’m more of a songwriter.” She had moved closer. Her perfume was making his eyes water.

“Can you sing something you’ve written? My name is Odette Delauney; I know a lot of people. Maybe I can put you in touch, ah… ?”

“Josh,” he muttered, “and I’m a songwriter.” He was not about to sing anything at a building-sized party of old farts zoned out on—Stevie Wonder, now. He avoided mentioning two blurry video clips, made with Brandon and Betts, on YouTube. He had to remember to take the stupid things down.

Odette Delauney’s beady stare was making him feel strange. His feet kept inching his chair backward, but his head wanted to lean closer to her.

She swiveled suddenly on her high heels and pointed at a toy display: “If the donkey works, I’ll take him.” Then she was walking away, carrying a wind-up tin donkey that sat back on its haunches with a pair of little cymbals between its front hooves.

The ambient sound of the wide dealer space roared in as if Josh had suddenly yanked out a pair of earbuds: conversation, Julie Andrews climbing every mountain, shuffling footsteps.

Odette Delauney? Was she somebody? Had he just blown a big chance?

Too late; she was gone.

Josh stayed late to sweep up and turn out the lights. It was after midnight. His gray Civic was the only car left in the lot.

By the glow of the floodlight outside, he saw that a plump, dark-skinned girl was sitting on the sagging slat bench by the front door. She had a mass of dreadlocks, shiny piercings in an ear plugged with a white bud, and a cigarette in her hand. Wearing jeans, a tank top, and pink plastic sandals with little daisies on the toe straps, she looked about fourteen.

“Hey,” she said as he locked the front door behind him, “think I could get a job here? I’ve got expenses, and my aunt is so stingy.”

“But she lets you stay out late and smoke weed,” he said.

She snorted derisively and took a puff. Ivan would disapprove of her on so many levels. The dealers and buyers at the mall—mostly old, white, and from the boondocks—didn’t run, as Ivan said, in progressive circles (har har, progressive circles, get it?).

“Is working here as boring as it looks?” she asked.

“Worse.” He gestured at her iPod. “So, who are you listening to?”

“Amy Winehouse.” She narrowed her eyes. “What’d you expect? The Jonas Brothers?”

Josh thought fast. “M.I.A.”

“ ‘Jai Ho,’” she drawled, but her expression relaxed. “You’re Josh? My auntie Odette met you inside.”

“She bought a musical toy, right? Funny, she sure didn’t strike me as the type for that kind of thing.”

“She’ll have a buyer for it somewhere. Those old animal-band sets are hot right now.”

Then auntie was just another antiques dealer, not a record producer’s best pal, surprise surprise.

“So—are you adopted?” he said.

Studying him with narrowed eyes, the girl blew another slow plume of smoke. “My Main Line mom ran off with a bass player from Chicago. The wheels came off and they both split and left me with a neighbor. I call her auntie to keep things simple. I guess ‘adopted’ works. You a musician?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and that was enough about that. He didn’t want to come off as some dumb-ass poser. “You collect stuff, too, like your aunt?”

“Sure,” she said, shifting aside on the bench. “Sit down—I’ll show you what I found tonight.”

He had barely touched butt to bench when she grabbed him with steely arms, jammed her face down the neckline of his T-shirt, and bit him. His yell pinched down to nothing in seconds. Muffled panic surged through him as he slumped, unable to move or shout for help, staring over her head at the neon bar sign across the avenue.

Am I dying?

“That’s enough, Crystal.”

The sucking sounds from under his chin stopped. Someone else took the girl’s place. He knew that perfume. The woman’s lips felt tight and cool, like the skin of a ripe nectarine pressed to his throat….

He came to sitting behind the wheel of the Civic with a stinging sensation in his chest and a headache. “Ow, shit, what happened?”

Crystal said, right beside his ear, “Odette wants to talk to you.”

It all came rushing back, paralyzing him again with sweaty horror.

“Josh,” said Odette Delauney from the backseat. “I’m only in your town for a little while, buying antiques. I need an insider here to help me find the kinds of items I want and then to make sure I get them. Tonight I’ll just take a quick look at the storage area. If I pick something out, you show it to your employer tomorrow—”

“Cousin,” Josh croaked. “My cousin Ivan owns the place.”

“Show it to your cousin Ivan and tell him you have a buyer for it. I’ll come in the evening and make the purchase.”

Something weird as hell had just gone down between him and these two, but what, exactly? Odette’s calm tone made it impossible to ask directly without sounding like a lunatic.

Please go away, he prayed.

“You could just take stuff,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t say anything.”

“Of course not,” Odette sniffed. “But I don’t steal. And I’m not asking you to steal for me, either.”

Gee, thanks. His trembling fingers found a swelling, hot and pulpy wet, low on his throat. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “What’ll I tell my parents about this?”

“Nothing,” Odette said. “One of us will lick the wounds closed. Our saliva heals where we bite.”

Agh, vampire spit! His teeth began to chatter. “Are you gonna turn me into a—like you?”

“With one little bite?” Crystal hooted scornfully. “You wish.”

“Certainly not,” Odette said, ignoring her. “Do as I say and you have nothing to worry about. Our arrangement will be brief and very much to your advantage. I’ll pay you a commission on every purchase that I make.”

A giggle burst out of him, ending in a sob. “I’m supposed to work for you? Everybody knows how that comes out—Renfield eats bugs, and then Dracula kills him!”

“We put the Eye on you,” Crystal said in a smug singsong. “Now you can’t tell anybody about us, so we don’t have to kill you.”

“Unless,” Odette added, “you say no.”

Which was how Josh went into business with Odette Delauney and her “niece,” Crystal Dark (a joke; Crystal, it turned out, was an avid fan of fantasy movies).

It was true: he couldn’t tell anybody. When he tried to talk about the vampires, his brain fuzzed over and didn’t clear again for hours. It was just as well, really. All he needed was for word to get around that Josh Burnham claimed he’d been attacked—and then hired—by two female vampires from out of town.

Pretending he had found a new band to hang with after work, he told his parents he’d be coming home late some nights. Luckily he was too old to be grounded. His mom put up a fight, but she left hot food in the oven for him on his late nights anyway (which was particularly important now that he was suddenly this major blood donor).

His father, absorbed in updating a textbook he was coauthor of, said, “No drugs, that’s all I ask.”

Twice a week after hours, Josh let the vampires in through the loading doors, which were hidden from the street by the bulk of the building. In the windowless back room, they cleared space on the worktable Ivan used for fixing old furniture, and they went through whatever new stock had come in.

There was always new stuff. Business was booming. Ivan called it the “Antiques Roadshow effect”; that, and the stock market. People were desperate to put their money into solid objects, things that they thought would get more valuable no matter what.

That first week Odette bought: a tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder (fifteen dollars), bronze horse-head bookends (twenty-eight dollars), three colored-glass perfume atomizers (thirty dollars), a rooster-silhouette weather vane (twenty-five dollars), and a four-inch-high witch hugging a carved pumpkin, both in molded orange plastic (seven fifty).

“Your aunt,” Josh said, “has weird taste.”

Crystal shrugged (this was her favorite gesture). “Everything’s cheap here in flyover country. In real cities, the Quality will pay top dollar for the same stuff, sometimes just to keep some other collector from getting it.”

By “the Quality,” she meant vampires.

Josh worked up the nerve to ask Odette, “Who’s the pumpkin-toting witch for?”

“Some old fool I know in Seattle. We’re not all rich aesthetes, Josh, whatever you may have seen in the movies.”

“Aesthetes.” That’s how she talked. That was the kind of conversation they had, those nights that the vampires spent pawing through stacks of cartons and crates, flicking roaches aside (there were always roaches, even though Ivan had the whole place sprayed regularly) and deciding what Odette would buy the next day.

And they would each drink some of Josh’s blood.

This remained skin-crawlingly horrible, but once they laid the Eye on you, you just accepted whatever they did. Instead of wigging out over it, Josh turned to working obsessively on songs about mysterious night visitors and dangerous girlfriends, with Rasputina, Theatre of Tragedy, and Voltaire playing on his iPod.

Not that Crystal herself was girlfriend material. She was just a kid, like somebody’s little sister you’d ignore completely (if not for the blood-drinking thing). Anyway, she said she was celibate right now, trying to put an edge back on her appetite for when she took up sex again. True or not (who could tell, with a vampire?), this was way more than Josh wanted to know—which was, of course, exactly why she’d told him.

Generally, though, he felt strangely upbeat. Grim lyrics poured out of him, which made a kind of sense under the circumstances. Inspiration seemed a fair exchange for a little blood. He wasn’t satisfied with his work, but there were moments. Once in a while he took off on a thrill wave as his words fell together just right and he glimpsed the possibility that he could really do this—he could write songs for people to fly on.

“Wither my soul with your cold, dry lips

So I’ll have no tears to cry—”

The only thing was, he was so isolated. How could his songs get better without real musicians to work with? He was writing his own lines to other people’s tunes, a practice technique that could take him only so far.

He needed to get a move on, to make it to the next level. He was seventeen already! He had so much catching up to do. Nobody breaks out as an old singer-songwriter.

Odette’s profession was perfect: She was a masseuse. She used the Eye to draw customers to her place (a rental on Cardenas) so she never had to go out in the sunlight. Her clients came away feeling totally relaxed (as Josh knew from personal experience). Since that was the whole point of a massage, they recommended her to their friends. Odette apparently needed hardly any sleep; she kept evening hours for working people, rates on a sliding scale (why not? She could always take the difference in blood).

Crystal slept all day or else hung out at the Top of Your Game, an arcade where kids played out fantasy adventures (Odette called the Top “a casino for children”). At night, in Ivan’s office, Crystal browsed antiques sites on the computer for Odette.

He asked once if she missed gossiping and giggling with other girls in school.

“Eww! Do I look crazy? Who wants to be cooped up with a bunch of smelly, spotty, horny adolescents and the teachers who hate them, in a place built like a prison?”

“Is that what you’re thinking when you’re drinking my blood—about how spotty and smelly I am?” (Horny just didn’t come into that experience for Josh.)

“Oh,” she said, “let’s not go there.”

He decided to celebrate his new songwriting energy by getting rid of the pathetic jumble of projects from his arts center classes (the mobile made of hangers and beer tabs, a woodcut of crows fighting), which he had tucked out of sight in a tote bag on the floor of his closet. He might even make a few bucks by farming all this junk out for sale in the mall with whichever dealers were willing to display it. (As they said, “There’s a buyer for everything.”)

When he walked in, two cops were asking for Ivan at the register. Josh made a business of tucking the tote, with a sweatshirt stuffed in on top to keep everything from falling out, into one of the lockers by the front door, so he could listen.

They asked about a well-known local meth head who had come in the day before trying to sell some old coins.

“Stolen, right?” Ivan said.

They nodded, looking meaningfully around the nearby booths.

Ivan braced his thick hands on the glass countertop. “That’s why I never buy off the street—it’s always stolen goods. You won’t find any valuable jewelry for sale by any of my dealers, either; too easy to steal. That kind of thing just attracts thieves.

“So,” he said, relaxing now that he had declared himself totally honest, “did something happen after I kicked that kid out of here?”

“Read the papers,” one of the cops said.

The Journal reported that the kid had been found early that morning out by the old airport, with his throat slashed and the coins gone.

Josh, shivering, ducked into the corner reserved for books and DVDs. “Throat slashed” sounded suspiciously like “disguised vampire bite” to him. He calmed himself down with half an hour of looking at psychedelic sleeve art for old long-playing records.

Crystal showed up at midnight with a puffy, teary look and a bandage wrapped around one hand. He asked if she was okay, but she disappeared into the shadows of the nighttime mall without answering.

In the office, Odette explained in a pissed-off tone.

“A boy accosted us in your parking lot last night, trying to sell us some coins, or mug us, or both. I turned him away. Crystal was in one of her moods; she followed him. I’ve told her a thousand times, we do not drink people dry and then toss them aside like juiced oranges. It’s stupid.”

“She drained that kid?”

“She has a teenager’s appetite,” Odette said. “And poor impulse control.”

“She told me she’s seventy-five years old!”

Impatiently Odette swung the swivel chair around (with Crystal temporarily incapacitated, Odette had to find sites on the computer for herself, which made her cranky). “Years don’t come into it. Crystal isn’t alive the way you are, Josh. She doesn’t mature with time. The parts of her brain that hadn’t developed when she was turned never will. She’s between thirteen and fourteen forever, in her mind as well as her body.”

Imagine never being able to shed your baby fat, your zits, or your adolescent mood swings.

“Wow,” he said.

“Wow indeed.”

“So… did the guy have a knife or something? Her hand—”

Odette said, “You need to understand that I provide the only structure she has in her life, and the only security. Sometimes I must be a little harsh with her, but it’s for her own sake. She doesn’t survive by being a clever adult in a permanently childlike body. She’s a child who survives because I protect her.”

“Protect her?” Crystal, who was clearly injured—but who had also just killed someone. “From who?”

“Her own rash nature,” Odette said tartly, “but also older vampires. The Quality don’t like the young ones, for reasons that should be obvious. Recklessness puts us all at risk. Correction helps in the short term, but there is no curing persistently childish behavior in someone who is, essentially, a permanent child.”

Crystal’s prickliness began to make more sense. “Why do you keep her around, then?”

Odette jabbed irritably at the keyboard with one long, iridescent fingernail. “Youngsters are adaptable and good at modernity. She can be very helpful.”

Useful, she meant.

“Well, well!” Odette’s attention was caught by something on the screen. “Axel Hochauer has sold off his Grande Armée figures for a tidy sum, I see.” She smiled. “Goretsky must be livid.”

Josh knew he was dismissed.

He found Crystal crying in the bathroom. Clearing his throat nervously, he asked, “Crystal? Did she do something to you?”

“Made me hold my hand in sunlight,” she blubbed, glaring up at him through her tears. “Look!”

The skin on the back of her hand was scabby and blotched with raw pink skin. She wrapped it up again quickly. “It was worse before; we heal fast. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. I hate that mean old bitch!”

She had killed the meth head, but her own situation was pretty dire. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Not enough to hug her or anything like that, but sorry.

“Hey,” he said, propping his hip against the sink. “Want to hear a new song? It’s not exactly finished yet—I mean, I’m not through working on it—but I think it’s a pretty good start. I’m calling it ‘Love Birds.’”

He sang, mezza voce:

“Raven hates her own harsh tone.

She hacks and hawks to spit it out.

Swallow down her razor kiss

Salty, icy, light as bone,

To sweeten Raven’s song.

She’ll be your love, your turtledove,

If you sweeten Raven’s song.”

“ ‘Turtledove?’” Crystal mimicked scornfully. “What century do you come from? Makes no sense, either. Well, that’s cool. You can’t eat music, and I’m starving.”

She was always hungry, and she always had to be reminded to stop.

Next time things seemed back to normal. Crystal, Grand Theft Auto champion with a stuffed arcade bear to prove it, was on the monitor again, checking for comparables to Odette’s latest find: a rare Chinese pipe, all delicately curved brass tubing and carved wood. Josh, already tapped by both vampires, dozed in a beat-up armchair on the other side of Ivan’s desk.

“Oh, shit!” Crystal leaned back and yelled, “Odette! MacCardle’s in Dallas!”

Odette swept into the office and tilted the monitor around to see the news photo. It featured a scrawny, self-satisfied-looking guy with suspenders holding up his pants, shaking some fancy suit’s hand in an auction showroom.

Odette snarled silently, showing a gleam of fang (Josh looked away; he hated thinking about where those teeth had been). But all she said was “Fine. He’s there, we’re here.”

She went back to inspecting the Chinese pipe.

Crystal whispered fiercely, “Fine my foot! If MacCardle comes sniffing around here, we are so gone.”

Josh was jolted by a stab of realization: He didn’t want them gone—not without him. (God, could he really be thinking like this?)

“He looks harmless,” he observed cautiously. “Not exactly a Van Helsing type.”

“He’s Quality, dummy. He comes sneaking around after Odette trying to snag the good stuff first, which makes her so mad! You won’t like her when she’s mad,” she intoned, wiggling the fingers of her now-unblemished hand.

“What, she turns green and smashes the place up?”

“No joke,” Crystal said.

“Okay, this is for real, right? People who live forever by drinking human blood spend their time fighting over high-priced junk?”

Crystal snorted. “Are you kidding? They love to feud over scraps—ugly old vases, souvenir ashtrays from Atlantic City, dried-up baby shoes. Some of them are addicted to anything from their own time. Mostly, though, it’s about personal pride and protecting their investments.”

“They hunt down enameled kitchenware, just like some retired bus driver desperate for something to do, and that’s about pride and investment?”

“Hey, look around you,” she said. “Even mass-produced trinkets get valuable if they survive long enough. A vampire can wait a century for his tin plates to become rare and then sell them for a bundle. Then there’s the thrill of spotting a trend first and getting in there before anybody else. Odette’s amazing at that. Timing the market is a real competition for them; they bet on each other. Gambling’s always been the favorite pastime of the upper crust. Well, crust doesn’t get any upper than the Quality.”

An idea sparked, then glowed. “Crystal? What does Odette collect for herself?”

“What you want to know for?” She stared at him suspiciously. “Anyway, you’re asking the wrong person.”

“It can’t all be just merchandise to her,” he insisted. “What does she find in a place like this that she won’t resell?”

Crystal absently twisted the ears of the trophy bear as she thought this over. “Odd stuff. One-of-a-kind things: snapshots, carvings, pictures.”

“Art,” he said.

“Art, and artists. If she thinks you have what she calls ‘real creative talent,’ you get a vampire godmother for life—whether you want it or not.”

Odette hadn’t asked to see his drawings again, but… “What about my songs?”

“The last music Odette liked was a minuet,” Crystal said, rolling her eyes. “And plus she has the tinnest ear ever and hates poetry.”

He pressed on. “Well, what else? What does she love?” If he could find something special, something to show that he was on Odette’s wavelength—that he was too useful to leave behind—

“Well, there’s this quilt,” Crystal said. “Grubby old thing; pretty hand stitching though—little strips of silk from men’s ties, kimonos, and like that. She paid a lot for it. She still has it.”

“But why? Why that?”

“How should I know?” Crystal scowled, then softened slightly. “I did hear once that her brother was a famous goldsmith, couple centuries back. He had a stroke, so she got to design jewelry, under her brother’s name, for the rich people. It could be a true story, but who knows? She’s not the kind who runs her mouth about her first life, like some of the Quality. Specially the really old ones, trying to hang on to their memories. Anyway, maybe she was talented herself, back in the day.”

Josh nodded, thinking furiously. He was not going to be left behind in flyover country if he could help it.

Two more of the Quality showed up at Ivan’s at the next open evening. One looked the part—tall, pale, and high shouldered like a vulture (an effect undercut by his cowboy boots, ironed jeans, and Western shirt with pearl-snap buttons). There was no mystery about what he was after: Several pounds of Indian fetish necklaces decorated his sunken chest.

The other, a chunky Asian-looking woman with a flat-top haircut, wore chains and bunches of keys jingling from her belt, her boots, her leather vest.

“What’s she looking for, whips and handcuffs?” Josh whispered.

Crystal smirked at him. “Dummy. That’s Alicia Chung. Odette says she has the best collection of nineteenth-century opera ephemera in America.”

“She’s looking for old opera posters around here?”

Crystal shrugged. “You never know. That’s part of the challenge.”

In the workroom after closing, the first thing Odette said was “If Chung is here, it won’t be long before MacCardle arrives. We pack up tonight, Crystal.”

Josh broke an icy sweat. He had no time for finesse.

“Odette?” His voice cracked. “Take me, too.”

“No,” she said. She didn’t even look at him.

“Crystal travels with you!”

“Crystal is Quality, and she has no living family. Shall we kill your mother and father so they won’t come searching for you?”

With Crystal’s voice in his ears (“Ooh, that’s cold, Odette!”), Josh ran into the bathroom and threw up. He drove home without remembering to turn on his headlights and fell asleep in his clothes, dreaming about Annie Frye biting his neck. Later he sat in the dark banging out the blackest chords he could get from his keyboard.

His band was gone, nobody from school wanted to hang with him, and now even the vampires were taking off.

His mom knocked on the bedroom door at seven a.m. and asked if he wanted to “talk about” anything. “Your music sounds so sad, hon.” Like he was writing his songs for her!

“It’s just music.” He hunched over the Casio, waiting for her to leave. How could he stand to live in this house one more day?

She stepped inside. “Josh, I’m picking up signals here. Are you thinking of leaving town with your new friends?”

He panicked, then realized she only meant his imaginary musician pals. “No.”

“All the same, I think it’s time I met them,” she said firmly.

“Why can’t you leave me alone? You’re just making everything worse!”

“You’re doing that brilliantly for yourself,” she retorted. They yelled back and forth, each trying to inflict maximum damage without actually drawing blood, until she clattered off downstairs to finish crating pictures for a gallery show in San Jose. The hammering was fierce.

She was going out there for her show’s opening, naturally.

Everybody could leave flyover country for the real, creative world of accomplishment and success, except Josh.

He slipped into her studio after she’d left. As a kid, he had spent so much time here while his mom worked. The bright array of colors, the bristly and sable-soft brushes, and the rainbow-smeared paint rags had kept him fascinated for hours. There on the windowsill, just as he’d remembered during their argument, sat something that just might convince Odette to take him with her.

Ivan had belonged to a biker gang for a few years. Later on, he’d made a memento of that time in his life and then asked Josh’s mother to keep it for him (his own wife wanted no reminders of those days in her house).

What Ivan had done was to twist silver wire into the form of a gleaming, three-inch-high motorbike, with turquoise-disk beads for wheels. The thing was beautiful as only a lovingly made miniature can be. It looked like a jeweled dragonfly. Visitors had offered Josh’s mother money for it.

Value, uniqueness, handcrafted beauty—it was perfect.

Josh quickly packed it, wrapped in tissues, into a little cardboard box that used to hold a Christmas ornament. At work, he stashed it in a drawer of the oak desk in the Victoriana booth, where he sometimes went for naps when the vampires’ snacking wore him out. Odette would come tonight, after her final antiquing run through town, before she took off for good. This would be his one and only chance to persuade her.

After closing time, he dashed out for pizza. When he got back to the darkened mall, he was startled to find Crystal sitting at the oak desk with the little brass lamp turned on.

“How’d you get in?” he asked.

She gave a sullen shrug. The package sat open on the desk in front of her.

“Where’s Odette?” The silent mall floor had never looked so dark.

“She’s late,” Crystal said. “I was tired of waiting, so I hitched a ride over from the Top. This is something of yours, right? What is it, anyway?”

“A going-away present for Odette. I got something for you, too,” he added, trying frantically to think of what he could give to Crystal.

“Yeah?” Her red leather purse, heavy with quarters for the game machines, swung on its thin strap in jerky movements like the tail of an angry cat. “You were gonna give me something? You liar, Josh.”

He wondered, with a shiver, if some of the coins making the little red purse bulge were from the meth head’s haul.

Suddenly she screamed, “You think you can buy Odette with this little shiny piece of trash? You pretend to be my friend, but you just want to take my place!”

She lashed at him with the purse. He dodged, tripped, and toppled helplessly. The back of his head smacked the floor with stunning force.

Crystal threw herself on top of him, guzzling at his throat as he passed out.

He woke up lying on a thirties settee outside Ivan’s office, deep in the heart of the mall. In the office, the computer monitor glowed with light that seemed unnaturally bright, illuminating the little room and the hallway outside it.

His shirt stuck to his chest and his neck was stiff. He felt his throat. There was a damp, painless tear in the flesh on one side.

“Crystal is a messy eater, but don’t worry, that will heal quickly.” Odette, perched on a chair by the end of the settee, held the miniature bike in her hands. “I think you brought this for me? Thank you, Josh. It’s very beautiful.”

He sat up. His mouth tasted sharply metallic, but nothing hurt.

“Where’s Crystal?”

“She ran off,” Odette said. “She knows she’s in serious trouble with me for killing you. Remember what I said about adolescent impulsiveness? Now you see what I meant. She won’t last long on her own, not with others of the Quality starting to show up here and my protection withdrawn. It’s too bad, but frankly it’s for the best. I’m tired of her tantrums.”

He felt a slow, chilly ripple of fear. “Killing me?”

“Effectively, yes, but I arrived in time to divert the process. The taste in your mouth is my blood. It’s a necessary exchange that also provides a soothing first meal for you, in your revivified state. You don’t want to begin your undead life crazed and stupid with hunger.”

He licked his front teeth, which had a strange feel, like too much. His stomach churned briefly. “I thought you didn’t want to… turn…”

She sniffed. “Of course not. Who needs another teenaged vampire? But dead young bodies raise questions, and Crystal already left one lying around out by the airport. Besides, with her gone I have a job opening. Your selection of this”—she carefully set the little bike on the table at her elbow—“shows an educable eye, at least. With coaching, I suppose you can be made into a passable member of the Quality.”

Coaching? He might as well have gone back to school!

She stood, smoothing down her skirt, and picked up his canvas tote from the floor at her feet. “I found this in your locker. The sweatshirt is yours, isn’t it? Take off that T-shirt and put this on. It’s none too clean, but you can’t walk around looking like a gory movie zombie. Then you must leave a note for your family. Say you’ve gone to seek your fortune.”

Thoughts lit up like silent sheet lightning in his mind while he worked the blood-crusted T-shirt off over his head.

His life, his friends, his home—all that was over, and she’d just been trying to get rid of him when she’d said, before, about killing his parents. But there was no going back. The upside was, he would be getting out of here at last, traveling with Odette out into the real world.

Was that why he felt high, instead of all bleak and tortured about waking up undead?

Then it hit him: undead? He was finally going to get to live.

He punched the air and whooped. “Look out, Colin Meloy! Josh Burnham’s songs are coming down!”

Pawing around inquisitively in the tote bag, Odette glanced up. “Forget about your songs, Josh. You died. The undead do not create: not babies, not art, not music, not even recipes or dress designs. I’m sorry, but that’s our reality.”

“You don’t get it!” he crowed. “Listen, I’m still a beginner, but I’m good—I know I am. Now I have years—centuries even—to turn myself into the best damn singer-songwriter ever! So what if I never mature past where I am now, like you said about Crystal? Staying young is success in the music business! I can use the Eye to get top players to work with me, to teach me—”

“You can learn skills,” she said with forced patience. “You can imitate. But you can’t create, not even if you used to have the genius of a budding Sondheim, which you did not. According to Crystal, your lyrical gift was… let’s say, minor. I hope you’re not going to be tiresome about this, Josh.”

“Crystal’s just jealous!” Buoyed by the exhilaration of getting some payback at last for his weeks of helpless servitude, he shouted, “You’re jealous! She told me about you, how you made jewelry for rich people—”

Odette snapped, “That’s someone else. I designed tapestries. As a new made, you’re entitled to a little rudeness, but at least take the trouble to get the facts right.”

“But the thing is, you were already old—your talent was all used up by the time you got turned, wasn’t it? So now you can’t stand to admit that anybody else still has it!”

“My talent,” she said icily, “which was not just considerable but still unfolding, was extinguished completely and forever—just like yours—when I became what you are now.” She fixed him with a dragon glare and hissed, “Stupid boy, why do you think I collect?”

He almost laughed: What was this, some weird horror-movie version of fighting with his mother? Fine, he was stoked. “It’s different for me! I’m just getting started, and now I can go on getting better and better forever!”

With a shrug, she turned back to the contents of the tote bag. “You can try; who knows, you might even have some commercial success—”

She stopped, holding up a fantasy-style chalice he’d made in ceramics class at the arts center. It was a sagging blob that couldn’t even stand solidly on its crooked foot.

“What’s this?”

“You should know,” he muttered, embarrassed. “You’re the expert on valuable things. It’s arts and crafts, that’s all, from back when I was still trying to find my way, my art. I brought all that stuff in here to try to sell it, only I forgot—I’ve been kind of distracted, you know?”

“You made this.” She ran the ball of her thumb along the thickly glazed surface, which he had decorated with sloppy swirls of lemon and indigo.

“So what?” he said. “Here, just toss that whole bag of crap.” There was a trash can outside the office door. He shoved it toward her with his foot.

Odette gently put the cup aside. She reached back into the tote bag and drew from the bottom a wad of crumpled fabric.

Oh, no, not that damned needlepoint!

In his fiber arts class, he had been crazy enough to try to reproduce an Aztec cape, brilliant with the layered feathers of tropical birds, like one he’d seen in the museum. He’d just learned the basic diagonal stitch, so the rectangular canvas had warped into a diamond-like shape. Worse, frustrated that the woolen yarns weren’t glossy enough, he’d added splinters of metal, glazed pottery, and glass, shiny bits and pieces knotted and sewn onto the unevenly stitched surface.

That wiseass Mickey Craig had caught him working on it once and had teased him for “sewing, like a girl.” That was when Josh had quit the class and hidden the unfinished canvas in his closet where nobody would ever see it.

Yeah; his luck.

Maybe he could convince Odette that his mother had made it.

“God in heaven,” Odette said flatly. “God. In. Heaven. If I ever catch up with that girl, I will tear off her head.”

Her eyes glared from a face tense with fury; but he saw a shine of moisture on her cheek.

Odette was crying.

And there it was, the kernel of the first great song of his undead life, a soul-ripping blast about losing everything and winning everything, to mark the end of his last summer as a miserable, live human kid: “Tears of a Vampire.” All he had to do was come up with a couple of starter lines, and then find a tune to work with.

All he had to do was… why couldn’t he think?

All he had to do… his thoughts hung cool and still as settled fog. He found himself staring at the crude, lumpy canvas, vivid and glowing, stretched between Odette’s bony fists.

He began to see it, this cockeyed thing that his own fumbling, amateurish hands had made. Its grimy, raveling edges framed a rich fall of parrot-bright colors, all studded with glittering fragments.

He hadn’t even finished it, but it was beautiful.

Oh, he thought. Oh…

This was it—this was what he should have been doing all along—not drawing comics or struggling with song lyrics, but crafting this kind of mind-blowing interplay of colors, shapes, and textures. This was his true art, his breakout talent.

So why couldn’t he picture it as a finished piece? He stretched his eyes wide open, squinted them almost shut, but he could only see it right there in front of him exactly as it was, abandoned and incomplete. His mind, flat and gray and quiet, offered nothing, except for a faint but rising tremor of dread.

Because although he couldn’t describe the stark look on Odette’s face in clever lyrics anymore, he understood it perfectly now—from the inside. It was the expression of someone staring into an endless future of absolute sterility, unable to produce one single creation of originality, beauty, or inspiration ever again.

If Josh wanted all that back—originality, inspiration, and beauty, only everything he had ever really wanted—he would have to get it the same way that Odette, or any of the Quality, got it.

He would have to begin collecting.