Stories: All-New Tales

After the first time I was weakened by the lunar allergy, I came upon an old woman confined to a wheelchair who had been left for a while by an unprofessional attendant. The attendant had gone down to the water not far from my crypt and was talking at a phone booth. While she was there I snuck up behind the old woman and bit.

Her dreams were fragmented and her blood thin, but it was all I could do. I hoped that she would not die from my attack. I find that since my transformation I have an instinctual reverence for life in all its myriad forms. Spiders and roaches, rats and human beings all have a right to life in my eyes. I drank half a dram of the old woman’s tasteless blood and hurried away to revive.

Four weeks later I saw the woman walking with a new nurse. She was healthy for a woman her age and chattering happily with the new helper. I realized then that my bite has certain curative properties. I remember smiling at my elderly prey as I walked past. She looked as if she recognized something about me, though that should have been impossible seeing that I’d attacked her from behind.

ANOTHER PART OF MY life has been the coronas, empty circles of light that are seemingly invisible to the human eye. They come in every color and have a variety of natures. Some are predatory, attacking and destroying others of their kind. Some are able to communicate with me. Not many approve of my being. I don’t know if it is that they don’t want to be seen or if they are repulsed by my urges and needs. Regardless—we exist on different planes and cannot touch or affect each other in any physical way.

The only corona I recognize is the yellow being that approached me while Julia was making me into Juvenal Nyx. It appears to me at times, imparting cryptic messages about knowledge and perception.

“You are on the path to knowing what should be secret,” it has said more than once—not in words but the meaning has crossed the void between us and settled on my mind.

I paid little attention to these messages until nine months ago.

I was down on Water Street watching the old woman who had been wheelchair bound before I bit her. By now she no longer had a nurse and was herself looking after what might have been a toddler grandchild.

I felt paternal toward the old woman and ancient in my bones. It was a summer evening and the sun was far enough behind the horizon that I didn’t have to worry about light-headedness.

“Come,” a voice in my head said.

I turned and saw the jagged yellow corona floating in the air behind me.

I stood to follow, but the strange piping voice then said, “Later.”

“Come later?” I asked the empty air.

The corona disappeared and I went back to my subterranean home to wait for it to reappear. I had eaten quite recently and so had no need to hunt.

Late that night the yellow light appeared in my chamber. It did not speak but led the way up and out of my home. It brought me to the pedestrian entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge and faded from sight.

I walked out on the pathway. It was late in the evening and unseasonably cool, so I was one of the few people out strolling. When I had just passed the first pylon of the bridge, I caught sight of a woman who had climbed out on a girder and was now about to jump.

My condition makes me quite agile and strong. I ran straight out across the girder and caught the woman by her wrist just as she was falling over the side. I pulled her up and held her around the waist in case she wanted to try again.

“This is not a good idea,” I said. My voice was dry and cracked, as I rarely spoke out loud.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” she replied.

For some reason this made me smile.

“You were going to kill yourself,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen now,” she said, “obviously.” She looked back over the side a little wistfully. “You want to buy me some coffee?”

HER NAME WAS IRIDIA Lamone. She’d been born and raised in northern California and had come to New York to study painting.

“I married my high school boyfriend, but we don’t really get along anymore,” she told me at the Telltale Bean in Brooklyn Heights.

There was no hint in her demeanor that she’d just tried to kill herself.

My senses were in such a heightened state from the corona and saving a life that it took me a while to identify the potency of her scent. There was a bouquet to her blood that I had never experienced before. It drew me on a primal level. I found myself having to hold back from biting her right there in the coffee shop.

“Is that why you tried to kill yourself?” I asked.

“Tarver is always depressed,” she said. “He mopes around the house when he’s not working and he’s jealous of my painting. Whenever I’m working he finds some way to interfere. Either he needs my attention or finds something wrong with the house. He comes in with plumbing problems and unpaid bills—anything to distract me, anything so he doesn’t have to feel bad about me living my life.”

“That’s not really an answer,” I said.