Odette Delauney’s beady stare was making him feel strange. His feet kept inching his chair backward, but his head wanted to lean closer to her.
She swiveled suddenly on her high heels and pointed at a toy display: “If the donkey works, I’ll take him.” Then she was walking away, carrying a wind-up tin donkey that sat back on its haunches with a pair of little cymbals between its front hooves.
The ambient sound of the wide dealer space roared in as if Josh had suddenly yanked out a pair of earbuds: conversation, Julie Andrews climbing every mountain, shuffling footsteps.
Odette Delauney? Was she somebody? Had he just blown a big chance?
Too late; she was gone.
Josh stayed late to sweep up and turn out the lights. It was after midnight. His gray Civic was the only car left in the lot.
By the glow of the floodlight outside, he saw that a plump, dark-skinned girl was sitting on the sagging slat bench by the front door. She had a mass of dreadlocks, shiny piercings in an ear plugged with a white bud, and a cigarette in her hand. Wearing jeans, a tank top, and pink plastic sandals with little daisies on the toe straps, she looked about fourteen.
“Hey,” she said as he locked the front door behind him, “think I could get a job here? I’ve got expenses, and my aunt is so stingy.”
“But she lets you stay out late and smoke weed,” he said.
She snorted derisively and took a puff. Ivan would disapprove of her on so many levels. The dealers and buyers at the mall — mostly old, white, and from the boondocks — didn’t run, as Ivan said, in progressive circles (har har, progressive circles, get it?).
“Is working here as boring as it looks?” she asked.
“Worse.” He gestured at her iPod. “So, who are you listening to?”
“Amy Winehouse.” She narrowed her eyes. “What’d you expect? The Jonas Brothers?”
Josh thought fast. “M.I.A.”
“‘Jai Ho,’” she drawled, but her expression relaxed. “You’re Josh? My auntie Odette met you inside.”
“She bought a musical toy, right? Funny, she sure didn’t strike me as the type for that kind of thing.”
“She’ll have a buyer for it somewhere. Those old animal-band sets are hot right now.”
Then auntie was just another antiques dealer, not a record producer’s best pal, surprise surprise.
“So — are you adopted?” he said.
Studying him with narrowed eyes, the girl blew another slow plume of smoke. “My Main Line mom ran off with a bass player from Chicago. The wheels came off and they both split and left me with a neighbor. I call her auntie to keep things simple. I guess ‘adopted’ works. You a musician?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and that was enough about that. He didn’t want to come off as some dumb-ass poser. “You collect stuff, too, like your aunt?”
“Sure,” she said, shifting aside on the bench. “Sit down — I’ll show you what I found tonight.”
He had barely touched butt to bench when she grabbed him with steely arms, jammed her face down the neckline of his T-shirt, and bit him. His yell pinched down to nothing in seconds. Muffled panic surged through him as he slumped, unable to move or shout for help, staring over her head at the neon bar sign across the avenue.
Am I dying?
“That’s enough, Crystal.”
The sucking sounds from under his chin stopped. Someone else took the girl’s place. He knew that perfume. The woman’s lips felt tight and cool, like the skin of a ripe nectarine pressed to his throat.
He came to sitting behind the wheel of the Civic with a stinging sensation in his chest and a headache. “Ow, shit, what happened?”
Crystal said, right beside his ear, “Odette wants to talk to you.”
It all came rushing back, paralyzing him again with sweaty horror.
“Josh,” said Odette Delauney from the backseat. “I’m only in your town for a little while, buying antiques. I need an insider here to help me find the kinds of items I want and then to make sure I get them. Tonight I’ll just take a quick look at the storage area. If I pick something out, you show it to your employer tomorrow — ”
“Cousin,” Josh croaked. “My cousin Ivan owns the place.”
“Show it to your cousin Ivan and tell him you have a buyer for it. I’ll come in the evening and make the purchase.”
Something weird as hell had just gone down between him and these two, but what, exactly? Odette’s calm tone made it impossible to ask directly without sounding like a lunatic.
Please go away, he prayed.
“You could just take stuff,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t say anything.”
“Of course not,” Odette sniffed. “But I don’t steal. And I’m not asking you to steal for me, either.”
Gee, thanks. His trembling fingers found a swelling, hot and pulpy wet, low on his throat. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “What’ll I tell my parents about this?”
“Nothing,” Odette said. “One of us will lick the wounds closed. Our saliva heals where we bite.”
Agh, vampire spit! His teeth began to chatter. “Are you gonna turn me into a — like you?”
“With one little bite?” Crystal hooted scornfully. “You wish.”
“Certainly not,” Odette said, ignoring her. “Do as I say and you have nothing to worry about. Our arrangement will be brief and very much to your advantage. I’ll pay you a commission on every purchase that I make.”
A giggle burst out of him, ending in a sob. “I’m supposed to work for you? Everybody knows how that comes out — Renfield eats bugs, and then Dracula kills him!”
“We put the Eye on you,” Crystal said in a smug singsong. “Now you can’t tell anybody about us, so we don’t have to kill you.”
“Unless,” Odette added, “you say no.”
Which was how Josh went into business with Odette Delauney and her “niece,” Crystal Dark (a joke; Crystal, it turned out, was an avid fan of fantasy movies).
It was true: he couldn’t tell anybody. When he tried to talk about the vampires, his brain fuzzed over and didn’t clear again for hours. It was just as well, really. All he needed was for word to get around that Josh Burnham claimed he’d been attacked — and then hired — by two female vampires from out of town.
Pretending he had found a new band to hang with after work, he told his parents he’d be coming home late some nights. Luckily he was too old to be grounded. His mom put up a fight, but she left hot food in the oven for him on his late nights anyway (which was particularly important now that he was suddenly this major blood donor).
His father, absorbed in updating a textbook he was coauthor of, said, “No drugs, that’s all I ask.”
Twice a week after hours, Josh let the vampires in through the loading doors, which were hidden from the street by the bulk of the building. In the windowless back room, they cleared space on the worktable Ivan used for fixing old furniture, and they went through whatever new stock had come in.
There was always new stuff. Business was booming. Ivan called it the “Antiques Roadshow effect”; that, and the stock market. People were desperate to put their money into solid objects, things that they thought would get more valuable no matter what.
That first week Odette bought: a tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder (fifteen dollars), bronze horse-head bookends (twenty-eight dollars), three colored-glass perfume atomizers (thirty dollars), a rooster-silhouette weather vane (twenty-five dollars), and a four-inch-high witch hugging a carved pumpkin, both in molded orange plastic (seven fifty).