The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Needles

The vampires rolled into Needles about three hours before dawn on a Tuesday in April, when the nights still chilled between each scorching day. They sat as far apart from each other as they could get, jammed up against the doors of a ’67 Impala hardtop the color of dried blood, which made for acres of bench seat between them. Billy, immune to irony, rested his fingertips on the steering wheel, the other bad boy arm draped out the open window. Mahasti let her right hand trail in the slipstream behind a passenger mirror like a cherub’s stunted wing.

Mahasti had driven until the sun set. After that, she’d let Billy out of the trunk and they had burned highway all night south from Vegas through CalNevAri, over the California border until they passed from the Mojave Desert to the Mohave Valley. Somewhere in there the 95 blurred into cohabitation with Interstate 40 and then they found themselves cruising the Mother Road.

“Get your kicks,” Billy said, “on Route 66.”

Mahasti ignored him.

They had been able to smell the Colorado from miles out, the river and the broad green fields that wrapped the tiny desert town like a hippie skirt blown north by prevailing winds. Most of the agriculture clung along the Arizona side, the point of Nevada following the Colorado down until it ended in a chisel tip like a ninja sword pointed straight at the heart of Needles.

“Bad feng shui,” Billy said, trying again. “Nevada’s gonna stab California right in the balls.”

“More like right in the water supply,” Mahasti said, after a pause long enough to indicate that she’d thought about leaving him hanging but chosen, after due consideration, to take pity. Sometimes it was good to have somebody to kick around a little. She was mad at him, but he was still her partner.

She ran her left hand through her hair, finger-combing, but even at full arm’s stretch, fingertips brushing the windshield, she didn’t reach the end of the locks. “If they thought they could get away with it.”

She curled in the seat to glance over her shoulder, as if something might be following. But the highway behind them was as empty as the desert had been. “We should have killed them.”

“Aww,” Billy said. “You kill every little vampire hunter who comes along, pretty soon no vampire hunters. And then what would we do for fun?”

She smiled in spite of herself. It had been a lot of lonely centuries before she found Billy. And Billy knew he wasn’t in charge.

He feathered the gas; the big engine growled. He guided the Impala towards an off ramp. “Does this remind you of home?”

“Because every fucking desert looks alike? There’s no yucca in Baghdad.” She tucked a thick strand of mahogany-black hair behind one rose-petal ear. “Like I even know what Baghdad looks like anymore.”

The door leaned into her arm as the car turned, pressing lines into the flesh. The dry desert wind stroked dry dead skin. As they rolled up to a traffic signal, she tilted her head back and scented it, curling her lip up delicately, like a dog checking for traces of another dog.

“They show it on TV,” Billy said.

“They show it blown up on TV,” she answered. “Who the fuck wants to look at that? Find me a fucking tattoo parlor.”

“Like that’ll change you.” He reached across the vast emptiness of the bench seat and brushed her arm with the backs of his fingers. “Like anything will change you. You’re dead, darlin’. The world doesn’t touch you.”

When you were one way for a long time, it got comfortable. But every so often, you had to try something new. “You never know until you try.”

“Like it’ll be open.” The Impala ghosted forward with pantherine power, so smooth it seemed that the wheels had never quite stopped turning. “It’s three in the morning. Even the bars are closed. You’ll be lucky to find an all-night truck stop.”

She looked out the window, turning away. The soft wind caught her voice and blew it back into the car with her hair. “You wanna try to make L.A. by sunup? It’s all the same to me, but I know you don’t like the trunk.”

“Hey,” Billy said. “There’s a Denny’s. Maybe one of the waitresses is knocked up. That’d be okay for both of us.”

“They don’t serve vampires.” Mahasti pulled her arm back inside, turned to face front. With rhythmic push-pull motions, she cranked the window up. “Shut up already and drive.”

Colorado River Florist. Spike’s Bar-B-Que. Jack in the Box. Dimond and Sons Needles Mortuary. Spike’s Saguaro Sunrise Breakfast. First Southern Baptist Church (Billy hissed at it on principle) and the Desert Mirage Inn. A Peanuts cartoon crudely copied on the sign over a tavern. Historic Route 66 (“The Mother Load Road,” Billy muttered) didn’t look much as it had when the Impala was young, but the motel signs were making an effort.

Of Needles itself, there wasn’t much there there, which was a good thing for the vampires: they crisscrossed the whole downtown in the hollow dark before Billy pulled over to a curb and pointed, but it took them less than a hour.

Mahasti leaned over to follow the line of his finger. A gray corner-lot house with white trim and a yard overrun by Bermuda grass and mallow huddled in the darkness. It was doing a pretty good impression of a private residence, except for the turned-off neon “open” sign in the window and the painted shingle hanging over the door.

“Spike’s Tattoo,” she said. “Pun unintended?”

As they exited the car, heavy swinging doors glossy in the street-lit darkness, Billy cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. It flared bright between streetlights. “Why is everything in this damned town named after some Spike guy?”

Mahasti tugged her brown babydoll tee smooth from the hem. An octopus clutching a blue teddy bear stretched across her insignificant breasts. Billy liked Frye boots and black dusters. Mahasti kicked at a clod with fuchsia Crocs, the frayed hems of her jeans swaying around skinny ankles. “Because he lives in the desert near here.”

Billy gave her a dour look over the ember of the cigarette. He took a drag. It frosted his face in orange.

“Peanuts?” she tried, but the blank look deepened. “Snoopy’s brother? It’s their claim to fame.”

Billy didn’t read the newspapers. It wasn’t even worth a shrug. He flipped the cigarette into the road.

He was dead anyway. He hadn’t been getting much good out of it.

“Come on.” Gravel crunched on the dirty road as he strode forward. “Let’s go ruin somebody’s morning.”

Mahasti steepled her fingers. “I’ll be right back. I’m just going to walk around the block.”

Spike’s Tattoo bulwarked the boundary between the commercial and the residential neighborhoods. Mahasti turned her back on Billy and walked away, up a quiet side street lined on either side by low block houses with tar-shingled roofs that wouldn’t last a third of a Minnesota winter.

They didn’t have to.

Mahasti moved through the night as if she were following a scent, head tilted to one side or the other, nostrils flaring, the indrawn air hissing through her arched, constricted throat.

Billy came up behind her. “You smell anything?”

She shot him with a look. “Your fucking menthol Camels.”

He smiled. She jerked her chin at the gravel side drive that gave access to the gate into the backyard of Spike’s. “I’m taking that one. You better go roll a wino or something.”

“Bitch,” he said without heat. “I’ll wait at the front door, then.”

He spun on the scarred ball of his cowboy boot. He was lean, not too tall, stalking down the street as if the ghosts of his spurs should be jingling. The black duster flared behind him like a mourning peacock’s tail, but for once he hadn’t shot the collar. A strip of brown skin with all the blood red dropped out showed between his coarse black hair and the plaid band of his cowboy shirt. Even as short as that, the hair was too straight to show any kind of curl.

She sighed and shook her head and turned away.

“Tucson was fucking prettier.” Mahasti could bitch all she wanted. There was no one to hear.

The houses here had block walls around the back, water-fat stretches of grass in the front. The newer neighborhoods might be xeriscaped, but in the nineteen forties a nice lawn was a man’s God-given American right, and no mere inconvenience like the hottest desert in North America was going to stop him from having one. She walked up a cement sidewalk between stubby California fan palms on the street side and fruitless mulberry in the yards, still pausing every few feet to cast left and right and sniff the air.

She finished her stroll around the block and found herself back at Spike’s Tattoo. A sunbeat gray house, paint peeling on the south side, it wore its untrimmed pomegranate hedge like a madman’s fishy beard. The side door sunk, uninviting, between shaggy columns of leaves and branches. A rust-stained motorboat, vinyl canopy tattered, blocked the black steel gate that guarded the passage between the side drive and the backyard.

Mahasti, who’d been sticking to the outside sidewalks on the block she was walking, looked both ways down the street and crossed, fetching up in the streetlight shadow of one of those stubby palms. She eyed the house as she walked into the side yard. It eyed her back—rheumy, snaggled, discontented.

She looked away. Then she stepped out of her squishy plastic shoes (“What will they think of next?” Billy had said, when she’d pulled them from a dead girl’s feet outside of Winnemucca) and lofted from ground to boat-deck to balanced atop the eight-foot gate in a fluid pair of leaps, pausing only for a moment to let her vulture shadow fall into the gravel of the yard.

She spread her arms and stepped down lightly, stony gravel silent under her brown bare foot, the canopy of her hair trailing like a comet tail before swinging forward heavily and cloaking her crouched body to the ankles. It could trap no warmth against her, but it whisked roughly on the denim of her jeans.

Hair, it turned out, actually did keep growing after you were dead.

She tilted her head back, sniffing again, eyes closed to savor. When she smiled, it showed white, even, perfectly human teeth. When she uncoiled and glided forward it was one motion, smooth as any dancer. “Everything we need.”

There was a dog in the yard, stretched out slumbering on a pallet made of heaped carpet squares. The third security window—long, narrow, and a foot over her head—she tried with palms pressed flat against the glass slid open left to right. There were no screens.

Hands on the window ledge, she chinned herself. In a cloak of red-black hair robbed of color by the darkness, she slid inside.

It was a cold space of tile illuminated by a yellow nightlight: the bathroom. Mahasti’s bare dead feet were too dry to stick to the linoleum, her movements too light to echo. The door to the hall stood ajar. She slipped sideways through it without touching and paused just outside. The rasp of human breathing, human heartbeat, was stentorian. Their scent saturated the place.

Three. Infant, woman, and man.

Mahasti slithered around the open bedroom door, past the crib, one more shadow among shadows. The little boy slept on his stomach, knees drawn up under him, butt a round crooked mountain under the cheap acrylic blanket.

When Mahasti picked him up, he woke confused and began to cry. The parents roused an instant after, their heat crystal-edged against the dimness, fumbling in the dark. “Your turn,” the man said, and rolled over, while the woman slapped at her nightstand until her fingers brushed against her eyeglass frames.

“You probably have a gun in the nightstand.” Mahasti hooked the hem of the octopus shirt and rucked it up over her gaunt, cold belly, revealing taut flesh and stretch marks. She slung the baby against her shoulder with her left hand. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

The woman froze; the man catapulted upright, revealing a torso streaked with convoluted lines of ink. His feet made a moist noise on the floor.

“Lady,” the man said, “who the hell are you? No wetback fucking junkie is gonna come in my house…”

“You shouldn’t put a child to sleep on his stomach.”

The baby’s wails came peacock-sharp, peacock-painful. She cupped him close, feeling the hammering of his tiny heart. She freed her breast one-handed and plugged him on to the nipple with the deftness of practice.

He made smacking sounds at first, then settled down contented as her milk let down. Warmth spread through her, or perhaps the chill drained from her dead flesh to his living.

The vampire didn’t take her eyes off the man, and he didn’t move towards the nightstand. The mother—a thick-shouldered woman bare-legged in an oversized shirt—stayed frozen, her hands clawed at her sides, her head cocked like a bird’s. An angry mother falcon, contemplating which eye to go after first.

Mahasti moved. She closed, lifted the woman up one-handed, and tossed her across the room. Trivial, and done in the space of a blink; the mother had more hang-time than it took Mahasti to return to her original place by the door. The man jumped back, involuntarily, as the mother hit the wall beside him. “Shit,” he said, crouching beside her. “Shit, shit, shit.”

The woman pushed herself up the wall, blood smearing from a swollen lip, a cheek split over the bone.

“What’s your son’s name?” Mahasti said, threat implicit in her tone. The babe had not shifted.

The mother settled back on her heels, but the stretched tension in the tendons of her hands did not ease. “Alan.” She gulped air. “Please don’t hurt him. We have a little money. We don’t have any drugs—”

Mahasti stood away from the door. “We’re going out front,” she said to the man. “And then you’re going to open the front door.”

It took thirty seconds and a glare from the woman before the man decided to comply. Once he had, though, he moved quickly around the bed and past Mahasti. He was lean as a vampire himself, faded tattoos winding down the ropy stretched-rubber architecture of his torso to vanish into striped cotton pajamas.

He paused in the doorway and glanced back once at the nightstand. Mahasti coughed.

He stepped into the hall. The woman made a noise low in the back of her throat, as involuntary as an abandoned dog.

“You too.” Mahasti snuggled the baby closer to her breast. “Go with him. Do what I say and you won’t get hurt.”

She made them precede her down the short hall to the front of the house, which had been converted into the two rooms of the tattoo parlor. A counter constructed of two by fours and paneling divided the living room. Cheaply framed flash covered every wall.

Bullet-headed as a polar bear, sparing Mahasti frequent testing glances, the man went to the door. He turned the lock and pulled it open, revealing Billy with his hat pulled low, on the other side of the security door. A muscle jumped in his jaw as the man opened that lock, too, and stepped back, as if he could make himself flip the lever but not—quite—turn the handle.

“Invite him in,” Mahasti said.

She came from another land, where the rules were different. But unfair as it was, Billy was cursed to play the game of the invader.

“Miss—” the woman said, pleading. “Please. I’ll give you anything we have.”

“Invite,” Mahasti said, “him in.”

“Come in,” the man said, in a low voice, but perfectly audible to a vampire’s ears.

Billy’s hat tilted up. In the shadow of the brim, his irises glittered violet with eyeshine.

He opened the security door—it creaked rustily—stepped over the threshold and tossed Mahasti’s Crocs at her feet. “Your shoes.”

“Thanks.”

He shut the security door behind him. The woman jerked in sympathy to the metallic scrape of the lock. An hour still lacked to dawn, but that didn’t concern the rooster that crowed outside, greeting the first translucency of the indigo sky. Dawn would come soon, but for now all that light was good for was silhouetting the shark-tooth range of mountains that gave Needles its name

The man drew back beside the woman, against the counter. “What do you want?”

The baby, cool and soft, had fallen asleep on Mahasti’s warm breast. She gently disconnected him and tugged her shirt down. “I want you to change me. Change me forever. I want a tattoo.”

She told him to freehand whatever he liked. He studied her face while she gave him her left arm. Billy held the kid for insurance, grumbling about the delay. The mother went around hanging blankets over the windows and turning on all the lights.

“What are you?” he asked.

“A ‘wetback fucking junkie,’” she mimicked, cruelly accurate. “Do you think if you talk to me you’ll build a connection, and it will keep you safe?”

He looked down at his tools, at the transfer paper on the book propped on his lap. “You don’t have much accent for a wetback.”

He glanced up at Billy and the baby, lips thin.

Mahasti held out her right hand. “Give me Alan, please. He needs to suckle.”

“Ma’am.” The woman pinned the last corner of a blanket and stepped back from the window. “Please. I’m his mother—”

Billy glared her still and silent, though even the force of his stare could not hush the sobs of her breath. He slid the baby into the crook of Mahasti’s arm, supporting its head until the transfer was complete.

“When I learned what would become your language—” Mahasti spoke to the man as if none of the drama had occurred “—it was across a crusader’s saddle. I was too young, and the child the bastard got on me killed me coming out.” She smiled, liver-dark lips drawn fine. “And when I was dead I rose up and I returned the favor, to both of them.”

He drew back from her needle teeth when she smiled. His hands shook badly enough that he lifted his pencil from the paper and pulled in a steadying breath. Without meeting her eyes, he went back to what he had been drawing once more.

At Mahasti’s other breast, the child suckled. The touch still warmed her.

“Somebody will notice when we don’t open,” the woman said. “Someone will know there’s something wrong.”

“Maybe,” Mahasti said. “In a week or two. You people never want to get involved in a goddamned thing. So shut up and let him fucking draw.”

He drew, and he showed her. A lotus, petals like a crown, petals embracing the form of a newborn child. “White,” he said. “Stained with pink at the heart.”

“White ink.” She held up her brown arm for inspection. “You can do that?”

He nodded.

If a child changed her once, maybe a child could change her again. She said, “You’ve got through the daylight to make me happy. When the sun goes down we’re moving on.”

He didn’t ask “and?” Neither did the mother.

As if they had anyway, Billy said, “And there’s two ways we can leave you when we go.”

“I’ll get clean needles,” said the man.

Billy paced while the man worked on Mahasti’s arm and the baby dozed off against her breast once more. Dimly, Mahasti heard the flutter of a heart. The woman finally sat down on the couch in the waiting area and pulled her knees up to her chest. The man kept wanting to talk. The dog barked forlornly in the yard.

After several conversational false starts, while the ink traced the arched outlines of petals across Mahasti’s skin and the at-first-insistently ringing phone went both unanswered and more frequently quiet, he said, “So if she was a kidnapped Persian princess, what were you?”

Billy skipped a bootheel off the floor and turned, folding his arms. “Maybe I was Billy the kid.”

Mahasti snorted. “Billy the kid wasn’t an Indian.”

“Yeah? You think anybody would have written it down if he was? What if I was an iron-fingered demon? I wouldn’t need you to get me invited in.”

With a cautious, sidelong glance at Mahasti, the man said, “What’s an iron-fingered demon?”

“If I were an iron-fingered demon, I could eat livers, cause consumption, get on with my life. Unlife. But no, you get to be a lamashtu. And I had to catch the white man’s bloodsucker disease.”

Mahasti spoke without lifting her head, or her gaze from the man’s meticulous work. The lotus taking shape on her skin was a thing of beauty. Depth and texture. No blood pricked from her skin to mar the colors, which were dense and rich. “You could be an iron-fingered demon. If you were a Cherokee. Which you aren’t.”

“Details,” he said. “Details. First I’m too Indian, then I’m not the right kind of Indian? Fuck you very much.”

“Billy,” Mahasti said, “shut up and let the man work or we won’t be ready to go when the sun sets.”

She was a desert demon, the sun no concern. It was on Billy’s behalf that they stalled.

The dog’s barking has escalated to something regular and frantic. A twig cracked in the yard.

Mahasti looked at the man, at the cold baby curled sleeping in the corner of her arm. She lifted her chin and stared directly, unsettlingly, at the woman. “Mommy?”

The mother must have been crying silently, curled in her corner of the couch, because she stammered over a sob. “Yes?”

“You’ve been such a good girl, I’m going to give you Alan back. You and Billy can take him in the back. I know you’re not going to try anything silly.”

The woman’s hands came up, clutched at air, and settled again to clench on the sofa beside her bare legs. “No.”

Mahasti looked at the man. “And you won’t do anything dumb either, will you?”

He shook his head. Under the lights, his scrawny shoulders had broken out in a gloss of sweat. “That’s good, Cathy,” he said. The eye contact between him and the woman was full of unspoken communication. “You take Alan and put him to bed.”

“Here,” Mahasti said, offering him up, his heartbeat barely thrumming against her fingertips. She tingled, warm and full of life. “He’s already sleeping.”

Billy sat crosslegged on the unmade bed, his bootheels denting the mattress. The woman pulled all the toys and pillows from the crib and lay the baby on his back atop taut bedding. She moved tightly, elbows pinned to her ribcage, spine stiff. He slouched, relaxed.

Until the front door slammed open.

“Fucking vampire hunters.” He was in the hall before the words finished leaving his mouth, the woman behind him bewildered by the fury of his passage. A spill of sunlight cut the floor ahead, but the corner of the wall kept it from flooding down the corridor.

Billy paused in the shadow of the hall.

Three men burst into the front room—one weedy, one meaty, and one perfectly average in every way except the scars. Mahasti moved from the chair, the disregarded needle blurring a line of white across her wrist, destroying the elegance of the artist’s design. The artist threw himself into a corner behind the counter. By the time he got there and got his back against the wall, the fight was over.

The perfectly average man was fast enough to meet her there, in the sunlight, and twist her un-inked right arm up behind her in a bind. The silver knife in his left hand pricked her throat. An image of a Persian demon, inscribed on the blade, flashed sunlight into Mahasti’s eyes.

“Well, fuck,” she said.

The meaty one grabbed her free hand and slapped a silver cuff around it.

“Silence, lamashtu,” the vampire hunter growled, shaking her by her twisted arm. “Call the other out, so I can burn him too. You’ll terrorize no more innocents.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s not coming out when there’s daylight in the room.”

“Really?” he laughed. “Your protector thinks so little of you?”

“I’m my own protector, asshole,” she said, and kicked back to break the bone of his thigh like a fried chicken-wing.

She threw the meaty one down the hall to Billy, and ripped the throat out of the weedy one while the perfectly average one was still screaming his way to the floor.

She shut the door before she killed him. The noise was going to bring the neighbors around. Then she went to help Billy drag the third body up to the pile, and make sure the woman hadn’t run out the back in the confusion.

She was still crouched by the crib. Mahasti left her there and met Billy in the hall. “See?” he said. “More fun if you don’t use ’em up all at once.”

Mahasti said, “He had a knife with an image of Pazazu etched on it. That could have been the end of all our fun.”

“He got prepared before he followed us here.” Billy grimaced. “They’re getting smarter.”

“Not smart enough to use it before asking questions, though.”

Mahasti jerked her thumb over her shoulder, towards the rear of the house. The white lotus and babe, blurred on her wrist, shone in the dark. She felt different. Maybe. She thought she felt different now.

She said, “What about them? If there are any more hunters they will be able to answer questions.”

“We could take them with us. Hostages. The Impala’s got a six-body trunk. It’s cozy, but it’s doable.”

“Fuck it,” Mahasti said. “They’ll be a load. It’ll be a long fucking drive. Leave them.”

“Fine,” Billy said. “But you got what you needed from the kid. I still have to get a snack first.”

He met her on the concrete stoop two minutes later, licking a split lip. Smoke curled from his fingers as he pulled his hat down hard, shading his face from the last crepuscular light of the sun. “Cutting it close.”

“The car has tinted windows,” she said. “Come on.”

Traffic thinned as the night wore on, and the stark, starlit landscape grew more elaborately beautiful. Mahasti read a book by Steinbeck, the lotus flashing every time she turned a page. Billy drove and chewed his thumb.

When the sky was gray, without turning, she said, “Pity about the kid.”

“What do you care? He was just gonna die anyway.” He paused. “Just like we don’t.”

She sighed into the palm of her hand, feeling her own skin chilling like age-browned bone. There was no pain where the needles had worked her skin—but there was pain in her empty arms, in her breasts taut with milk again already. “Mommy’s going to miss him.”

Billy’s shrug traveled the length of his arms from his shoulders to where his wrists draped the wheel. “Not for as long as I’d miss you.”

They drove a while in silence. Without looking, she reached out to touch him.

A thin line of palest gold shivered along the edge of the world. Billy made a sound of discontent. Mahasti squinted at the incipient sunrise.

“Pull over. It’s time for you to get in the trunk.”

He obeyed wordlessly, and wordlessly got out, leaving the parking brake set and the door standing open. She popped the trunk lid. He lay back and settled himself on the carpet, arms folded behind his head. She closed the lid on him and settled back into the car.

Her unmarred brown left arm trailed out the window in the sun. Tonight, somewhere new, they’d do it all over again.

Once in a while, Billy was right. Nothing changed them. She could touch the world, but the world never touched her.

The Impala purred as she pulled off the shoulder and onto the road. Empty, and for another hour it would remain so.