The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Each subsequent evening she placed herself in the same shop, at the same table, buying a cup of tea she never drank, and gazed out for the fruit peddler. Even when the shop closed at eight, she stood on the corner with her irritable friends, and studied each of the dirt-coated vendors and scraggly, mobile merchants. Surely he lived in Buffalo. Fruit peddling was not a job that took one from town to town. She only stopped in her vigil to tend to her need to feed, then returned beneath the moon or the stars or the rain or the fog to catch her love and his cart.

Several weeks later, at quarter past three in the morning, while Marie and Clarice were seated on a trolley bench com-paring loose stitching in their gloves, there was the shouting of drunken men and laughter from up the street, and then a small crowd stumbled past in a makeshift parade. One man was seated in a fruit cart, another pushed, while the rest danced beside them as if they were celebrating the King of Fools. The man in the cart, nearly out with drink, was Alexandre. Danielle motioned to her friends, and they followed the mob to a rickety tenement house near the railroad station. The men dumped the cart, fruit and all, then stumbled off to the street corner and out of sight.

Danielle hurried to the drunk man's side, pushed away the squashed fruit that covered him, and took his hand in hers. "My love," she said. Her heart hammered as if it were still alive. "My love, I've found you! Alexandre, it's me, Danielle!"

Marie said sternly, "Let it be, Danielle. It is not Alexandre."

But Danielle knew they couldn't believe. It didn't matter that they didn't. She did. She helped the man to his feet, and touched his split lip with her cold finger.

And then a screech from a window above: "William Kemmler, is that you? Get your sorry ass up these steps before I come after you with this hatchet, and I'll do it, you know I will!"

"Fishwife!" screamed Danielle. "You do not know who you are talking to!"

A lantern came to the window, and then many lanterns at many windows, and there were faces peering out and down. Someone shouted, "Fishwife? Tillie ain't Kemmler's wife, just pretendin' to be so they's can fuck and still go to church on occasion!" There was a burst of raucous laughter, and then someone spat, a long, hefty hawk the colour of rust that landed with a phatt in a puddle near Danielle's shoe.

Danielle would let it go for now. For tonight. She would come again where there was not so much attention. For to try to reclaim him now would be careless. And carelessness could bring destruction. She had found him. She would return tomorrow, quietly, as her kind was greatly talented, and speak to him.

And bring him to his senses.

And back to her bed, back to her heart. And unlike the other misfortunates who had fallen under her bite, she would raise him from the dead for herself.

The following evening was clear and cold, with a silver moon riding above the lights of Buffalo like a jealous and forgotten toy. Marie and Clarice warned Danielle to let it go, it was insane to believe her love was reincarnated into a fruit vendor, and when she refused to hear them, they refused to go with her. "We wash our hands of this," said Marie. "We cannot endanger ourselves for your folly, as much as we love you."

Danielle said, "Then do not."

She went to the tenement house and watched from the shadows of a dwarfed maple tree as the occupants wandered in and out. Within minutes, two ragged women came out to the stoop in hats and shawls, their teeth broken and brown, and one said, "You get me some of them cigars if you can, Tillie. If you swipe 'em, we can sell 'em and make us a bit of coin, don't you think?"

Tillie, a skinny thing who could have been twenty or forty, said, "I'll swipe 'em and you can pay like the rest of 'em."

"Bitch!"

Tillie strode from the stoop and the other woman spun angrily and went in the other direction.

Danielle counted to twenty. And then she went to the door of the tenement and waited. A man opened the front door, and flinched when he saw her standing there. She kept her lids lowered so the red of her eyes would not be so obvious. "Hey, honey," he said. "What's a fine-looking wench like you doin' standing here?"

"Waiting for you to invite me inside," said Danielle simply. The man did. She broke his neck in the hall, and stuffed him under the steps. No one was outside the flats to see, and she guessed they might not have cared much, anyway.

Tillie had shouted from a third-floor window, on the left. Danielle trod softly and quickly up the flights of stairs to the flat that surely belonged to William — to Alexandre. The door was locked, but with a simple jerk to the handle it swung open freely. She stepped inside the cluttered apartment.