I could see the trailing leaves of the rose tattoo spilling over around his neck, indigo blue against cold white.
His jacket was zipped open, and he was wearing a black t-shirt underneath. A Grateful Dead t-shirt I remembered well, of a skeleton wearing a crown of roses, barely visible through the gap. He was narrowly built, compact, almost frail. I was right about the boots. They looked like they were made of concrete and painted black. Very Goth.
"Hi," I said in the silence. My voice was a little too high, but he probably wouldn't know that. Probably.
"Sorry."
He inclined his head just a bit, not really a nod, more like he was zeroing in on the target. His smile came back, but it was fifty percent more charming. He didn't show teeth. "My name's Israel," he said. "And you are?"
"J — " I choked it off fast, because I remembered what he'd said to Ed. I don't eat anybody I haven't been properly introduced to. "Just passing through."
He laughed. "Your nametag says different."
Crap. My heart contracted to a painful little walnut when he laughed, because the teeth that showed in his mouth didn't look right. Not right at all. Not vampiric, exactly, in the classic Christopher Lee sense, but …
"Joanne," he nodded, and kept smiling as he purred out my name in that hoarse voice. "Pleased to make your acquaintance." And then he laughed again, lunged forward and formed his pale hands into claws.
And halted a few inches from my face and yelled, "BOO!"
I don't know how I managed it, but I didn't flinch, and I didn't scream. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was moving back, clearly disappointed. He shrugged and started to clump away, but then … he turned back, a slight frown on his face.
"Israel," Ed warned him.
"Shhh." Israel took a step toward me. "Something different about you. Right? Ed, don't you feel it?"
I backed up. My shoulders pressed against glass, and the chill seeped through.
"Not like the rest at all," he said, and reached up to slide his sunglasses down his nose, and oh God …
Djinn eyes.
No, my second fast assessment told me; not quite, but close enough. They weren't human eyes, that was for damn sure; they were a dull red, the color of murder in mud. And they flared hot when he looked at me without the intervening Ray Bans.
"Israel!" Ed banged up the counter's service hatch and stepped out. He was holding what looked like a gigantic cattle prod, and as I watched, lightning zipped cold blue at the tip. Ah. It was a cattle prod. For really dangerous cattle. "Leave her alone."
"You don't understand, Ed," the vampire said, and took another step toward me. "She knows. She understands what happened to me. I know she does. And she can fix it!"
He lunged forward, and one gloved hand grabbed my throat. Inhumanly strong. I twisted, got free, and ran backwards away from him, just as Ed stabbed him in the back with his portable lightning rod.
Israel went rigid, grimaced, and went down to the accompaniment of fast snapping sounds. He twisted and twitched for a second, then went limp. I stayed where I was, pressed against a corner display of Charmin Bathroom Tissue, and looked mutely over at Ed.
Ed sighed, and said, "Sorry about that. This is my brother, Israel. Help me get him up, will you?"
###
He had a place to put his brother. Well, it was a refrigerated cooler, actually, the walk-in kind, but it was sturdy and he put a lock on the outside once we'd dragged the limp, cold weight inside and slammed the door shut.
"Won't the cold — " I asked.
"He won't feel it," he interrupted, and scowled as if he hadn't wanted to think about that. "Son of a bitch. I thought he was decently — "
Dead. I could almost hear it, though Ed didn't come anywhere near the actual word. "What happened?"
Ed stalked past me to the doors, looked outside, and flipped the sign to CLOSED, then locked up. He turned off the sign and most of the lights, leaving just the few in the back. "Car accident. Israel flipped his truck out on a farm-to-market road about four months back." For the first time, I sensed a failure of courage in Ed; he looked away from me and folded his arms across his chest, staring fiercely at the rack of Cheetos. "You eat your hot dog already?"
"Never mind the hot dog," I said. "What happened?"
"He was trapped in the wreck. Don't know if you understand what that's like around here — sun heats up metal faster than sticking it in a furnace. He must have cooked inside that tangle …" Ed shook his head, trying to get the image out of his head. Unsuccessfully. "Nobody found him. I started driving around, looking for him. Found the wreck about ten that night."
"He was dead."
Ed blinked and darted me a look. "He look dead to you?"
"Actually … except for the walking-around part, yes."
Ed didn't answer. He looked off into that long distance again, arms still folded. "Yeah, well, I identified him.
Buried him. Next evening, he walks in here filthy and dressed in his suit, the one they put on him at the funeral home. No shoes. No — " He stopped. His mouth shut with such a hard snap I heard enamel click.
I let out a slow, aching breath. "What did you do?"
"Nothing. I didn't know what the hell to do. Law says he's dead, but he's not, he's … walking. He talked some, then he left. Next night, he came back. I haven't seen him for a couple of weeks now. I thought — "
Muscles fluttered under the skin as his jaw tightened. "I figured he'd finally died. Or whatever they do.
People who come back."
Clearly, Ed wasn't a fan of vampire fiction. "I don't think they just … roll over and do that."
He lowered his chin. Didn't answer directly. Or maybe he did, I realized, as I listened. "I asked him what he remembered. I was thinking — hell, you know what I was thinking." Yeah, I knew. Some suave European guy in a cape, fangs, scary music. "He said he was dying, bleeding out in the truck, and he started seeing … fairies."
"Fairies?" I said. "You're kidding me!"
"Wish I was. Fairies. Little Tinkerbelle lights. Blue. He said they swarmed all over him. I figure it was some kind of hallucination. He says — he woke up the next night and came up right out of the ground. Right out of the ground."
Oh, fuck.
Little blue sparklies.
Israel was entirely right after all. I did understand what had happened to him. Not the mechanics, not the how and why, but the basic mechanisms at play. But … the little blue sparklies were gone, right? Banished back to their own Demon dimension when Patrick and Sara, my Djinn benefactors, had sacrificed themselves to seal up the rift that was tearing our universe apart.
Maybe they were gone, but they'd left … wreckage. Israel was something they'd tried to use, probably out of desperation. The Demon Marks invaded Wardens; maybe this was what happened when one invaded a regular human and couldn't find the power needed to twist itself into a full-grown menace. Maybe it sapped life and kept the body moving, hoping to find another shell in which to grow.
I felt a need to sit down.
"You okay?" Ed asked, as I plopped my butt down on the nearest uncomfortable stool and bent over to put my head in my hands.
"I'm fine."
"Yeah, me too," he said. "He seemed to think you could fix what's going on with him. Can you? Do you know?"
"I don't know." I wasn't really sure what Israel was. Maybe he wasn't a vampire. Maybe he didn't kill people.
Maybe he was just scary as hell, and was a walking corpse.
But everything that walked the earth consumed something … and chances were that he wasn't going to live on sunlight and happy Tinkerbelle thoughts.