Isabel One Offs
The First Kill
March 2021
I lost count of the seconds that night. I want that written down first, because it is the only time it has happened, and because I have never forgiven it.
---
His name was Colin Maraj. I knew it for nine days before I met him.
Sara gave me the file in the kitchen of the house near the Everglades, in a plain brown folder, the kind real estate agents use. She put it on the table between us and did not sit down. She never sat when she gave me things. I think now that it was so I would understand the folder was the thing that mattered, and she was only the hand that carried it.
Inside there were photographs, printouts, a copy of a Florida driver's license, and three pages in her handwriting, which is small and slanted and has no mistakes in it anywhere.
Colin Maraj. Forty-four. Born in Trinidad, raised in Fort Lauderdale. Two years in the Army, discharged for reasons the paper did not give. Six years working security for a man in Coconut Grove who did not exist during the day.
The man in Coconut Grove I will not name. Sara did not name him either, not in the file. She called him the host. The pages about the host were the ones I read four times and then did not read again. He kept guests. That is the word he used for them, apparently, and the rooms in his house were decorated for each of them, according to his idea of who they were. Some of the guests had been there for years. None of them had chosen to be. I will not say more than that, not because I don't remember, but because it doesn't belong in this.
Colin brought the guests in. That was his job. He found them and he brought them, and when a guest stopped being interesting, he took them out again, and they were not seen anywhere afterward.
There were eleven confirmed. Sara believed it was more.
"The host is mine," she said. "Colin is yours."
I looked at the photograph of him. He was smiling in it. It was a picture from someone's barbecue; there was a paper plate in his hand and a child's arm at the edge of the frame. He had a kind face. Round. Laugh lines.
"He's a ghoul," I said.
"Yes."
"He's bound."
"Yes."
"Then he didn't choose."
Sara looked at me for a long time. She has a way of looking at you that makes you understand you have said something and she is deciding whether it was worth saying.
"Read page three again," she said. "The dates."
I read page three again. The first two guests Colin brought to the host were brought in 2013. The file said he was not fed until 2014.
He had done the first two for money.
"The bond made him loyal," Sara said. "It did not make him willing. He was willing before." She picked up the folder and tucked it under her arm. "You will do this on the twenty-second. I will be with the host. You will be alone with him."
"How?"
"However you decide." She was already at the door. "But you will decide it before you go in. Not in the room. Never in the room."
---
I decided it on the twentieth.
I decided it the way I decide most things: by walking through it until there was only one version left. He worked nights, as the host did. He drove the host's car, a black Escalade, and on nights when the host did not need him, he sat in a guard shack at the back of the property with a small television and a thermos of coffee he did not need anymore, because ghouls don't sleep much, and ate sunflower seeds out of a bag and spat the shells into a cup.
The shack had one door, one window, and a fan. There was a gap in the hedge behind it, where the landscapers came through. I had been in that gap twice already. I knew that the fan rattled on the third rotation and that the television was always on a channel showing old boxing matches and that he talked to the fighters under his breath, come on, come on, get your hands up.
I would go through the hedge. I would open the door. I would shoot him twice in the chest and once in the head, and I would clean the shack, and I would put him in the trunk of the car Sara had arranged, and that would be all.
I had the pistol. Sara had given it to me in January and I had put four thousand rounds through it by then, on a private range that someone she knew owned in Homestead. Four thousand rounds into paper men with no faces. I could put three in a playing card at fifteen meters in under two seconds.
I knew exactly how it would go. I had walked through it thirty times. There was only one version.
---
On the twenty-second, at 01:14, I went through the hedge.
The fan was rattling. The television was on. I could hear the crowd noise, the ringing bell, a commentator's voice going up and up. I could hear him, too. Come on, get your hands up. Get your hands up.
I could smell him, as well, and that was the first thing that was not in the version I had walked through.
Ghouls smell like the one who feeds them. It is faint, under the sweat and the coffee and the sunflower seeds, but it is there: something old and sweet and wrong, like flowers left too long in a vase. And under that, in him, in his blood, there was vitae. Not his. The host's. I could smell it through the wall of the shack, through the door, through the humid Coconut Grove night. It was the first time I had ever smelled Kindred blood in a mortal body.
The Hunger stood up.
I stopped at the door with my hand on the knob and I could not remember, for a moment, why I had come. There was only the smell. There was only the thin metal door and what was behind it and how easy it would be. The Hunger was at two that night. It felt like five.
I counted. I made myself count. One. Two. Three. By seven it had lain back down, not all the way, but enough. I opened the door.
---
He was in a plastic chair with his feet up on an overturned bucket, a bag of sunflower seeds in his lap, the television a foot from his face. He turned his head when the door opened, and he did not look surprised. I think that is what I remember most. He looked at me with the pistol already up, gray-haired woman in a black jacket in the doorway of his shack, and his face did something that was not surprise. It was closer to recognition. Not of me. Of the thing I was.
"Oh," he said. "Okay."
That was not in the version either.
I shot him.
I want to be exact about this. I shot him twice in the chest, the way I had shot four thousand paper men, and my hands did it without me. That is what training is for. The pistol was suppressed; it made two sounds like a heavy book dropped flat on a table, and the plastic chair went over backward and the sunflower seeds went everywhere, across the floor, under the television stand, into the corners.
He was on the floor. He was not dead.
Ghouls don't die easily. I knew that. It was in the file. I had simply not understood what it would look like. He was on his back on the concrete with two holes in him and he was breathing, and the blood coming out of him was darker than it should have been and smelled of the host, and the Hunger was on its feet again, and he was looking at me.
"Hey," he said. He had a kind voice. It matched the laugh lines. "Hey. It's okay."
This is where I lost count.
I had walked through this thirty times and there had been three shots in it, together, one version, two in the chest and one in the head. The third shot was supposed to come with the first two. It was supposed to be the same motion. Instead there was a gap, and in the gap there was a man on the floor telling me it was okay.
The pistol was pointed at his face. My arm was not shaking. I remember being surprised that it was not shaking.
"He'll know," Colin said. He was looking at the ceiling now, not at me. "He'll feel it. When I go. He'll know it was one of you."
"He's already dealt with," I said.
It was true. Sara had told me she would be with him. I believed her.
Colin laughed. It came out wet.
"Okay," he said again. "Okay. Good." He closed his eyes. "I stopped counting, you know. How many. I used to count. Then I couldn't anymore."
I could have asked him how many. I think he would have told me. I think he wanted someone to ask.
I didn't ask. I didn't want a number I would have to keep.
"I'm sorry," Colin said, "for all of it," and I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I still do not know if he meant it, or if the host's blood in him was only saying what it thought would buy him another minute, or if there was no difference anymore between those two things.
It doesn't matter. That is what I decided later. It doesn't matter.
At the time, I did not decide anything. At the time, I stood there with my finger on the trigger and understood, very clearly, for the first time in my life, that the first two shots had been something my hands did, and that the third would be something I did. That there was no training for this one. That paper men do not tell you it's okay.
That if I lowered the pistol, he would live. The host's blood in him would close the holes, slowly. He would be in pain for days and then he would be fine. He would find another master. He would bring them guests.
There was only one version left.
I pulled the trigger.
---
It made the same sound as the others. A heavy book dropped flat on a table.
That was all.
That was the thing I did not expect, and could not get past, for many nights afterward. That it was the same sound. That the television went on showing a man in red trunks throwing a right hand in 1987. That the fan rattled on its third rotation. That the sunflower seeds were still everywhere. That the world did not make any kind of mark to show that something had changed.
I stood in the doorway for a long time. I do not know how long. That is what I mean when I say I lost count. I looked at my watch afterward and it said 01:22, and I had come through the hedge at 01:14, and I can account for maybe three of those minutes. The rest are gone. There is a white place in my memory where they should be. Sometimes I think I can see the edges of it.
When I came back, I was kneeling beside him, and I was holding his wrist.
Not to feed. I want that understood. The Hunger was loud, and his blood was on the floor and on my hands, and it smelled of the host, old and sweet and wrong, and some part of me wanted it very badly. But I was not holding his wrist to feed. I was holding it to check. For a pulse. As if I did not know. As if I had not put the third one exactly where it was supposed to go.
There was no pulse. I knew there would not be.
I held his wrist anyway for a while.
Then I put it down on his chest, and I picked up his other hand and put it on top, one over the other, the way you are taught to arrange them. I don't know why I did that. It was not in the version. It was not useful. Nobody would ever see it.
Then I stood up, and went back to the car for the kit, and cleaned.
---
I was good at the cleaning. I had done it for two years before the Embrace, for Sara, and a year after. I knew how much bleach and how much of the other thing and how to lift a stain out of concrete and where the blood goes when it runs to the lowest point in a floor. I picked up every sunflower seed. All of them. Three hundred and forty-one. I counted those.
I put him in the trunk the way Sara had shown me. I turned off the television. I did not turn off the fan.
It was the first time I had cleaned up after something I had done myself. I noticed that the whole time. I noticed that it was exactly the same work.
---
Sara was waiting at the house near the Everglades when I came back at 04:30. She was sitting on the couch, which she almost never did, and she had a handkerchief in her hand that smelled of jasmine, and there was something dark on it.
She looked at me when I came in.
"Well?"
"It's done."
She looked at me for a long time. At my hands, which I had washed four times. At my jacket, which was clean. At my face.
"How many?" she asked.
I knew what she meant. Shots.
"Three," I said.
"Together?"
I could not lie to her. I have never been able to lie to anyone.
"No," I said.
Sara nodded slowly, as though I had confirmed something she had expected and was not displeased by.
"Good," she said. "The first one is always two things. The body does one. You do the other." She folded the handkerchief in half, and then in half again, and put it in her pocket. "The ones who do both at once, the first time, are the ones I worry about."
I stood there in the doorway of her living room.
"He said he was sorry," I said.
I don't know why I told her. I was not asked.
Sara was quiet for a moment.
"They often do," she said, not unkindly. "Sometimes they even mean it." She stood up. "It doesn't change what they did, Isabel. It only changes what you have to carry." She walked past me toward the stairs. "Go to bed. The sun is in ninety minutes."
I went to bed. I lay in the dark with the blackout blinds drawn and I held my own wrist, lightly, two fingers where a pulse should be.
There was nothing there either.
That was the first time I understood we were the same, Colin Maraj and I. Both of us fed by someone older. Both of us doing what we were asked. Both of us with hands that could do things before we decided to.
The difference was the third shot. The difference was that I had stood there, and chosen.
I have decided that that is enough of a difference.
I decided it that night, in the dark, holding a wrist with nothing in it, and I have not let myself reopen the question since.
Superhero with Fangs
Sunday, 02:47
You are halfway through filling the tank when the lights inside the store go strange.
Not out. The fluorescent tubes over the pumps still hum, the price sign still glows red, the air still smells of gasoline and hot asphalt and the dumpster behind the car wash. But inside, behind the glass, the little red recording light over the register has gone dark. So has the one above the beer cooler. So has the one pointed at pump four, which is the pump you are standing at.
You notice this the way you notice most things: without deciding to.
The nozzle clicks and keeps running. You don't look up. You listen.
Heightened hearing is not like hearing louder. It is like the world gets more room in it. You hear the ice machine cycling. You hear a mosquito somewhere near the air pump. You hear, very clearly, an engine idling at the dark edge of the lot by the car wash, a big, loose V8 with a hole in the exhaust, and a man inside it tapping his thumb against the steering wheel out of rhythm with the radio.
And inside the store you hear three sets of feet that were not there a minute ago.
"Down! Down, get on the fucking floor!"
The clerk is a kid. You saw him when you came in to prepay: nineteen, maybe, headphones around his neck, a biology textbook open under the counter. You paid him exact change. He said have a good night and meant it.
Now you hear him hit the floor behind the counter hard enough to knock the textbook off.
The nozzle clicks off. Tank full.
You hang it up. You put the fuel cap back on and turn it until it catches, three clicks. Then you take your gloves off, finger by finger, and fold them together and put them in the jacket pocket, because you will need your bare hands for this, and because the gloves are good and you would rather not get anything on them.
Hunger two.
You walk toward the door.
---
There are three of them inside. You see it through the glass before you reach the door, and the glass is a gift, because none of them are looking out through it.
The first one is at the register, a big man in a black hoodie and a Halloween mask, the rubber kind, an old man's face with a bald head and liver spots. He has a sawed-off shotgun and he is leaning over the counter pointing it down at the kid, shouting. The second is by the cigarette rack, thinner, jittery, a pistol held sideways the way people hold them in music videos. The third is in the back by the coolers with a duffel bag, sweeping cans and candy into it with his forearm like a man clearing a table after a party. He's the only one who isn't armed where you can see.
The one with the pistol is the one to watch. People who hold guns like that shoot people by accident.
You open the door.
The little bell over it rings. It's a cheerful sound. Two notes, like a doorbell in an old house.
All three of them turn.
---
What they see is a woman in a black dress with a white collar under a riding jacket. Gray hair pulled back. Hands empty, at her sides. Pleasant face. She has stopped just inside the door and she is looking at them with polite attention, the way a hostess looks at guests who have arrived a little early.
"Oh, what the fuck," says the one by the cigarettes.
"Get down," says the one with the shotgun. He swings it off the kid and toward you. "Get down, lady, get on the floor, now—"
You don't get on the floor.
The next part happens the way things happen for you now, since the Blood. The world doesn't slow down. You speed up. The shotgun is coming around toward you in a flat arc and it is moving, and you are simply moving more. You see the barrel pass the lottery display, pass the hot dog roller, and you are already not where it is going to be.
The pistol comes out from under your jacket in the same motion as your step to the left. You have practiced this draw so many times it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to your hands.
The first shot is for the man with the pistol, because he's the one who will kill someone by mistake. You put it through his right hand. The gun leaves it like a startled bird and skids under the chip rack. He looks down at his hand in total, childlike astonishment.
The second shot is for the shotgun. Not the man. The shotgun. You hit it just ahead of the trigger guard, and the impact wrenches it half out of his grip and sends the muzzle down into the linoleum, and he pulls the trigger by reflex and blows a hole the size of a dinner plate in the floor in front of the counter. The noise inside the little store is enormous. Glass rattles in the cooler doors. Somewhere the kid behind the counter screams, high and short.
It's all right. The kid is fine. You can hear his heart going like a hummingbird's, and nothing else wrong with it.
The man with the duffel bag drops it and runs for the back.
You let him go. There's no back door. You checked when you came in to pay.
---
The man with the mask has not let go of the shotgun. He is trying to bring it back up. He has one shell left in it, the second barrel, and he knows it, and he is angry now instead of afraid, which is always worse.
You could shoot him. It would be easy. The knee, or the thigh, or the shoulder. You have four thousand paper men in your hands and they all want to do it.
Instead you put the pistol back under your jacket.
You cross the store.
It is eleven steps from the door to the counter. The man with the mask sees you take the first one and the last one. He never sees the nine in the middle. By the time he understands you are in front of him, your right hand is closed around the barrels of the sawed-off and turning them up toward the ceiling, and your left forearm is across his throat, and your hip is against his, and your heel is behind his heel.
Rahim would be pleased. Rahim would never say so.
The man goes down onto the linoleum, onto his back, the rubber mask knocked askew so that he's looking at you out of one eyehole. The shotgun is in your hand now. You break it open and shake the shell out onto the floor, where it rolls and stops against the hot dog roller.
He is very strong. He is trying to get up. You put your knee on his chest and he stops trying.
You pull the mask off his face.
He's younger than he sounded. Thirties. A scar through one eyebrow. A tattoo of a woman's name on his neck, fresh enough that it is still a little raised. He is breathing hard and his face is red and every vein in his throat is standing out, and he is angry, angry at you, at the kid, at the gas station, at the guy who told him this would be easy, at everything that has ever happened to him, and you can smell it on him. You can smell it in him.
Choleric. Hot and bright and pounding. The kind of blood that makes the Blood itself want to run.
Hunger two.
It says three now. It is a liar, and you know it is a liar, but you listen anyway.
"The fuck are you," he breathes.
You don't answer him. That's not one you are able to answer.
---
What you do instead takes about forty seconds.
You lean down. He tries to twist away, and then your mouth is at his throat, just beside the fresh tattoo, and he goes still in the way they always go still. The Kiss takes him the way warm water takes a man who has been cold for a very long time. His hands, which were shoving at your shoulders, stop shoving. After a moment one of them rests on your back, lightly, almost tender.
He tastes exactly like he smelled. Heat and adrenaline and a lifetime of being furious at the wrong people. It goes into you like a shot of something strong on an empty stomach, straight down and then out, into your arms and legs, into your fingertips, and for a moment the whole store is very bright and very sharp and very slow.
One. Two. Three swallows.
The Beast says: more.
Four.
The Beast says: all of it. He came in here with a gun pointed at a boy doing his homework. All of it.
Five.
You count to five and you stop.
It is not easy. It is never easy, and tonight it is harder than usual because he is so hot and so angry and it is so good, and because some part of you, under the numbers, agrees with the Beast. You pull back anyway. You lick the two small wounds and watch them close, the skin knitting over pink and then smooth and then nothing at all, just a man's neck with a new tattoo on it.
He's smiling at the ceiling, dazed. His face has gone from red to a healthy pink. He'll be dizzy tomorrow. He'll think it was the adrenaline.
Hunger one.
The store is quiet. The ice machine cycles. Somewhere in the back, by the coolers, you can hear the man with the duffel bag breathing very hard behind a stack of cases of bottled water, trying very hard not to exist.
The man with the shot hand is sitting on the floor by the cigarette rack, holding his wrist, staring at you with his mouth open. He saw some of it. Not all. He saw you lean down over his friend. He didn't see anything else. He was looking at his hand.
You look at him. He stops staring.
---
You stand up.
The kid behind the counter has pulled himself up enough to see over it. He is holding the biology textbook against his chest like a shield. His headphones are still around his neck. His eyes are enormous.
"Are you hurt?" you ask him.
He shakes his head. Then he nods. Then he shakes it again.
"You're not hurt," you tell him, because it is true, and because he needs someone to tell him something true right now. "You did well. You stayed down. Call 911. Tell them there are three men, one in the back by the water, one with a hand wound, one on the floor who will be dizzy. Tell them there's a car at the car wash with a man in it. Black Chevy, loud exhaust. He's leaving now."
He is. You can hear it. The V8 with the hole in the exhaust has just dropped into gear and is pulling away, fast, tires spitting gravel, the driver having decided, correctly, that tonight is not his night.
"Tell them," you say, "a woman came in and stopped it and left. Tell them you didn't see her well. That's true. You didn't."
The kid nods.
He did see you, of course. He's looking right at you. But he didn't see you well. Nobody ever does.
You take the shotgun off the counter where you put it and lay it down on the floor behind the register, out of anyone's reach, barrels pointed at the wall. You pick the pistol up from under the chip rack, a cheap chrome thing with a sticker on the slide, and drop the magazine and clear the chamber and set both beside the shotgun. Neatly. Side by side.
Then you look at the hole in the floor in front of the counter, the size of a dinner plate, and for a moment you want very badly to fix it.
You don't.
---
You walk back out through the door. The bell rings. Two notes.
The lot is exactly as you left it. Your bike is at pump four with the tank full. The price sign glows red. The mosquito by the air pump has found someone else.
You put your gloves back on, finger by finger.
You can already hear the sirens, far off, down on the highway, coming the long way. Four minutes, maybe five.
You swing a leg over the bike. You put on your helmet, and the mirrored visor comes down, and in it you can see the store behind you: the kid standing up now, phone at his ear, pointing at things; the man by the cigarettes still holding his wrist; the man on the floor, still smiling at the ceiling, one hand resting on his own neck where the tattoo is.
You start the bike.
You do not rev it. You pull out of the lot at exactly the speed limit, and at the corner you signal, and you turn, and you are gone before the first cruiser comes off the ramp.
Hunger one. The night is very bright.
You are almost smiling.