Malcolm was watching me, and I’d showed my distaste.
“She’s innocent,” he said to Bill, with a smile full of anticipation.
“She’s mine,” Bill said again. This time his voice was more intense. If he’d been a rattlesnake his warning could not have been clearer.
“Now, Bill, you can’t tell me you’ve been getting everything you need from that little thing,” Diane said. “You look pale and droopy. She ain’t been taking good care of you.”
I inched a little closer to Bill.
“Here,” offered Diane, whom I was beginning to hate, “have a taste of Liam’s woman or Malcolm’s pretty boy, Jerry.”
Janella didn’t react to being offered around, maybe because she was too busy unzipping Liam’s jeans, but Malcolm’s beautiful boyfriend, Jerry, slithered willingly over to Bill. I smiled as though my jaws were going to crack as he wrapped his arms around Bill, nuzzled Bill’s neck, rubbed his chest against Bill’s shirt.
The strain in my vampire’s face was terrible to see. His fangs slid out. I saw them fully extended for the first time. The synthetic blood was not answering all Bill’s needs, all right.
Jerry began licking a spot at the base of Bill’s neck. Keeping my guard up was proving to be more than I could handle. Since three present were vampires, whose thoughts I couldn’t hear, and Janella was fully occupied, that left Jerry. I listened and gagged.
Bill, shaking with temptation, was actually bending to sink his fangs into Jerry’s neck when I said, “No! He has the Sino-virus!”
As if released from a spell, Bill looked at me over Jerry’s shoulder. He was breathing heavily, but his fangs retracted. I took advantage of the moment by taking more steps. I was within a yard of Bill, now.
“Sino-AIDS,” I said.
Alcoholic and heavily drugged victims affected vampires temporarily, and some of them were said to enjoy that buzz; but the blood of a human with full-blown AIDS didn’t, nor did sexually transmitted diseases, or any other bugs that plagued humans.
Except Sino-AIDS. Even Sino-AIDS didn’t kill vampires as surely as the AIDS virus killed humans, but it left the undead very weak for nearly a month, during which time it was comparatively easy to catch and stake them. And every now and then, if a vampire fed from an infected human more than once, the vampire actually died—redied?—without being staked. Still rare in the United States, Sino-AIDS was gaining a foothold around ports like New Orleans, with sailors and other travelers from many countries passing through the city in a partying mood.
All the vampires were frozen, staring at Jerry as if he were death in disguise; and for them, perhaps, he was.
The beautiful young man took me completely by surprise. He turned and leapt on me. He was no vampire, but he was strong, evidently only in the earliest stages of the virus, and he knocked me against the wall to my left. He circled my throat with one hand and lifted the other to punch me in the face. My arms were still coming up to defend myself when Jerry’s hand was seized, and his body froze.
“Let go of her throat,” Bill said in such a terrifying voice that I was scared myself. By now, the scares were just piling up so quickly I didn’t think I’d ever feel safe again. But Jerry’s fingers didn’t relax, and I made a little whimpering sound without wanting to at all. I slewed my eyes sideways, and when I looked at Jerry’s gray face, I realized that Bill was holding his hand, Malcolm was gripping his legs, and Jerry was so frightened he couldn’t grasp what was wanted of him.
The room began to get fuzzy, and voices buzzed in and out. Jerry’s mind was beating against mine. I was helpless to hold him out. His mind was clouded with visions of the lover who had passed the virus to Jerry, a lover who had left him for a vampire, a lover Jerry himself had murdered in a fit of jealous rage. Jerry was seeing his death coming from the vampires he had wanted to kill, and he was not satisfied that he had extracted enough vengeance with the vampires he had already infected.
I could see Diane’s face over Jerry’s shoulder, and she was smiling.
Bill broke Jerry’s wrist.
He screamed and collapsed on the floor. The blood began surging into my head again, and I almost fainted. Malcolm picked Jerry up and carried him over to the couch as casually as if Jerry were a rolled-up rug. But Malcolm’s face was not as casual. I knew Jerry would be lucky if he died quickly.
Bill stepped in front of me, taking Jerry’s place. His fingers, the fingers that had just broken Jerry’s wrist, massaged my neck as gently as my grandmother’s would have done. He put a finger across my lips to make sure I knew to keep silent.