The Laughing Corpse

“You know I can never tell with you.”

“A compliment to my powers, I’m sure.”

“I did not bring you down here to hunt,” I said. My voice sounded firm, a tad loud. My heart was loud inside my head.

“Would you forbid me to hunt tonight?” he asked.

I thought about that one for a minute or two. We were going to have to turn around and make another pass to find a parking space. Would I forbid him to hunt tonight? Yes. He knew the answer. This was a trick question. Trouble was I couldn’t see the trick.

“I would ask that you not hunt here tonight,” I said.

“Give me a reason, Anita.”

He had called me Anita without me prompting him. He was definitely after something. “Because I brought you down here. You wouldn’t have hunted here, if it hadn’t been for me.”

“You feel guilt for whomever I might feed on tonight?”

“It is illegal to take unwilling human victims,” I said.

“So it is.”

“The penalty for doing so is death,” I said.

“By your hand.”

“If you do it in this state, yes.”

“They are just whores, pimps, cheating men. What do they matter to you, Anita?”

I don’t think he had ever called me Anita twice in a row. It was a bad sign. A car pulled away not a block from The Grey Cat Club. What luck. I slid my Nova into the slot. Parallel parking is not my best thing, but luckily the car that pulled away was twice the size of my car. There was plenty of room to maneuver, back and forth from the curb.

When the car was lurched nearly onto the curb but safely out of traffic, I cut the engine. Jean-Claude lay back in his seat, staring at me. “I asked you a question, ma petite, what do these people mean to you?”

I undid my seat belt and turned to look at him. Some trick of light and shadow had put most of his body in darkness. A band of nearly gold light lay across his face. His high cheekbones were very prominent against his pale skin. The tips of his fangs showed between his lips. His eyes gleamed like blue neon. I looked away and stared at the steering wheel while I talked.

“I have no personal stake in these people, Jean-Claude, but they are people. Good, bad, or indifferent, they are alive, and no one has the right to just arbitrarily snuff them out.”

“So it is the sanctity of life you cling to?”

I nodded. “That and the fact that every human being is special. Every death is a loss of something precious and irreplaceable.” I looked at him as I finished the last.

“You have killed before, Anita. You have destroyed that which is irreplaceable.”

“I’m irreplaceable, too,” I said. “No one has the right to kill me, either.”

He sat up in one liquid motion, and reality seemed to collect around him. I could almost feel the movement of time in the car, like a sonic boom for the inside of my head, instead of my ear.

Jean-Claude sat there looking entirely human. His pale skin had a certain flush to it. His curling black hair, carefully combed and styled, was rich and touchable. His eyes were just midnight-blue, nothing exceptional but the color. He was human again, in the blink of an eye.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

“What is wrong, ma petite?”

I shook my head. If I asked how he did it, he’d just smile.

“Why all the questions, Jean-Claude? Why the worry about my view of life?”

“You are my human servant.” He raised a hand to stop the automatic objection. “I have begun the process of making you my human servant, and I would like to understand you better.”

“Can’t you just...scent my emotions like you can the people on the street?”

“No, ma petite. I can feel your desire but little else. I gave that up when I made you my marked servant.”

“You can’t read me?”

“No.”

That was really nice to know. Jean-Claude didn’t have to tell me. So why did he? He never gave anything away for free. There were strings attached that I couldn’t even see. I shook my head. “You are just to back me up tonight. Don’t do anything to anybody unless I say so, okay?”

“Do anything?”

“Don’t hurt anyone unless they try to hurt us.”

He nodded, face very solemn. Why did I suspect that he was laughing at me in some dark corner of his mind? Giving orders to the Master of the City. I guess it was fu

The noise level on the sidewalk was intense. Music blared out of every other building. Never the same song, but always loud. The flashing signs proclaimed, “Girls, Girls, Girls. Topless.” A pink-edged sign read, “Talk to the Naked Woman of Your Dreams.” Eeek.

A tall, thin black woman came up to us. She was wearing purple shorts so short that they looked like a thong bikini. Black fishnet panty hose covered her legs and buttocks. Provocative.

She stopped somewhere between the two of us. Her eyes flicked from one to the other. “Which one of ya does it, and which one of ya watches?”

Jean-Claude and I exchanged glances. He was smiling ever so slightly. “Sorry, we were looking for Wanda,” I said.

“A lot of names down here,” she said. “I can do anything this Wanda can do, and do it better.” She stepped very close to Jean-Claude, almost touching. He took her hand in his and lifted it gently to his lips. His eyes watched me as he did it.

“You’re the doer,” she said. Her voice had gone throaty, sexy. Or maybe that was just the effect Jean-Claude had on women. Maybe.

The woman cuddled in, against him. Her skin looked very dark against the white lace of his shirt. Her fingernails were painted a bright pink, like Easter basket grass.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but we don’t have all night.”

“This is not the one you seek then,” he said.

“No,” I said.

He gripped her arms just above the elbows and pushed her away. She struggled just a bit to reach him again. Her hands grabbed at his arms, trying to pull herself closer to him. He held her straight-armed, effortlessly. He could have held a semitruck effortlessly.

“I’ll do you for free,” she said.

“What did you do to her?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I didn’t believe him. “Nothing, and she offers to do you for free?” Sarcasm is one of my natural talents. I made sure that Jean-Claude heard it.

“Be still,” he said.

“Don’t tell me to shut up.”

The woman was standing perfectly still. Her hands dropped to her sides, limp. He hadn’t been talking to me at all.

Jean-Claude took his hands away from her. She never moved. He stepped around her like she was a crack in the pavement. He took my arm, and I let him. I watched the prostitute, waiting for her to move.

Her straight, nearly naked back shuddered. Her shoulders slumped. She threw back her head and drew a deep trembling breath.

Jean-Claude pulled me gently down the street, his hand on my elbow. The prostitute turned around, saw us. Her eyes never even hesitated. She didn’t know us.

I swallowed hard enough for it to hurt. I pulled free of Jean-Claude’s hand. He didn’t fight me. Good for him.

I backed up against a storefront window. Jean-Claude stood in front of me, looking down. “What did you do to her?”

“I told you, ma petite, nothing.”

“Don’t call me that. I saw her, Jean-Claude. Don’t lie to me.”

A pair of men stopped beside us to look in the window. They were holding hands. I glanced in the window and felt color creep up my cheeks. There were whips, leather masks, padded handcuffs, and things I didn’t even have a name for. One of the men leaned into the other and whispered. The other man laughed. One of them caught me looking. Our eyes met, and I looked away, fast. Eye contact down here was a dangerous thing.

I was blushing and hating it. The two men walked away, hand in hand.

Jean-Claude was staring in the window like he was out for a Saturday afternoon of window-shopping. Casual.

“What did you do to that woman?”

He stared in the storefront. I couldn’t tell exactly what had caught his attention. “It was careless of me, ma...Anita. My fault entirely.”