Page 3 of Hot for Slayer
“Oh, don’t worry. I’llalwayssave myself for you.”
And that’s how I got away from Lazlo Enyedi on the night of November 9, 1989. As I walked side by side with the journalists, I did look back at Lazlo, once, mostly to treat him to my smuggest, most insufferable grin. He was where I’d left him, still scowling down at his dagger. When he noticed my eyes on him, he lifted the blade up to his face. And with a smile that did notfeellike a smile, he began to lick it clean of my blood.
It was . . .
Well. It justwas.
A lot of things, among which the last time we were so close. I’ve caught glimpses of Lazlo a few times since—at a year 2000 celebration in LA, in the early aughts in Southeast Asia, after that Lilith Fair revival in 2010—but never had as close a call as it was in Berlin, and I always managed to slip away before he could get near.
Until now.
Today, nearly thirty-six years after that night in Germany, his arms wrap tight around me, his body is a heavy blanket above mine, and his only purpose seems to be shielding me from the sunlight.
Today, Lazlo Enyedi saved my life.
Chapter 2
My mother didn’t raise a quitter.
Well, my mother didn’t raise meat all. She dropped me off at the abbey once my brother came into the world, after promising to Saint Fursey that if my father begat the male heir he so ardently wished for, she would dedicate her eldest daughter’s life to piety and labor. Dear Mommy was very generous with her pledges, especially when they involved sacrificingotherpeople.
It was unfortunate for me, the eldest daughter in question—and, let’s be honest, even more unfortunate for the abbess—that my disposition wasn’t quite monastic material. Not that I was a rebel or a miscreant. That would have required scheming, hard work, or well-organized defiance, and Little Aethelthryth was too much of an absent-minded, stargazing dreamer for that.
Of course, that was an issue in and of itself, because I constantly wished for things that weren’t compatible with my destiny. I wished to travel. I wished to laugh. I wished for ballads and dances and tales. I wished for a life that I couldn’t have, which was, apparently, my greatest flaw. Despite being compelled by the Benedictine Rule to pray eight times a day, the abbess still found time to remind me that if I kept coveting a future that didn’t belong to me, I would end upin freezing water for eternity, and my bones would rot inside my body. Her credibility may have been slightly undercut by the fact that she also believed in putting the livestock on trial for misbehaving, and in plucking off the entirety of her eyebrows. (Regrettably, I cannot recommend growing up in a small nunnery located in eighth-century East Anglia.) Still, she wasn’t wrong about me: I want things that do not belong to meall the time. Chief of which: companionship.
My favorite part of being in the convent, of course, was the taste of sisterhood it gifted me. The women I lived with, they were my people. My family. My community. They taught me the beauty of sharing a life, and I naively assumed that this kind of fellowship would forever be within my reach.
Then my vampire maker yanked it away, and I have been aching for it ever since.
The problem lies with the disposition of my kind. A lot of legends assume that we like to stick together. They speak of clans and nests and hives, where vampires gather to join forces in preparation for our nefarious deeds. They imply that we form a structured society, that we do meal trains, that we date and bang it out and have cute little vampiric children. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most vampires are extremely territorial. They cannot stand close proximity with others, crave competition even when natural resources abound, and are more likely to murder each other than to extend a dinner invitation.
Vampires suck—no pun intended—and are condemned to an eternity of conflict and solitude. So, of course, a vampire is what gregarious, companionable young me was turned into. And because the abbess, the nunnery, and the fortnightly mandatory vows of fasting didn’t raise a quitter—nor did they manage to beat the stubbornness out of me—even thirteencenturies into my vampiric tenure, I have yet to accept my new circumstances.
That, I fear, will be my demise.
My latest bout of misfortune started a few months ago, when a new vampire moved into a house located just a little too close to my place.
Initially, I didn’t think too much of it. New York is huge, and I was by no means the only vampire living in the city. Manhattan, however, has been my personal hunting ground for the last decade or so, chiefly because of the abundance of my favorite kind of meal.
My motto is: If I have to suck someone dry every few weeks, why not make it a Goldman Sachs executive?
But all of a sudden, I was no longer alone in my seven-block radius. Which could only be interpreted as a challenge, and left me with two options: getting the hell out of the place that had been my home for the previous ten years or putting some effort into running the new vampire out of my territory.
Stubbornly, I decided to bring shame upon my species by doing neither.
I liked my cramped little apartment. How early the winter sun set in the city. The way the people walked fast until they blurred, unaware of the fragility of their short little lives, day after week after month. I enjoyed the four seasons, the museums and movie theaters, the scent of the eateries I would never step foot into. More recently, a few small raccoons seemed to have acquired me. They’d climb up the fire escape and stare into my window until I provided them with food, hiss at me while they consumed the fruits ofmylabor, and then unceremoniously scurry away, no doubt to some otheridiot who’dalsopurchased a bodega rotisserie chicken just for the occasion.
The point is, I’d been having a fine time. I didn’t want to spend weeks planning an ambush on some asshole who was trying to pick a fight, but I also didn’t want to move. So I carved out a third option for myself: I would ignore the new guy and hope he’d do the same.
Naturally, he didn’t. Instead, after a few months of uneventful coexisting that lulled me into a false sense of security, he attacked me while I was taking a nighttime stroll in Central Park.
No biggie. I thought it was shitty of him not to give me some warning before resorting to violence—a courtesy horse head in my bed, a scribbled note pinned to my door with a bloody dagger. Still, this was obviously a baby vampire. A male of just a few hundred years. Fighting him off took very little effort.
I left him unconscious under the Obelisk and thought,Fuck this. I’m not dealing with the mood swings of an adolescent. I’m moving.
My first mistake was not restraining him.
My second, stopping by my apartment to collect a couple of things: the bronze comb Mother had bestowed upon me before I joined the convent; the small portrait of Donna Lucia, a human who correctly guessed that I was a vampire and still traveled all over Europe with me, painted by Botticelli in the 1400s; the cassette tape of songs I composed during my shoegaze era. That kind of stuff.
