Free Gypsy Blood by Steve Vernon Page A

eye sockets, watching him; the wiper blades were bayonets sweeping grimly across the windshield. He rolled down a long highway with street signs that looked like shouting mouths, moving somewhere way past the speed limit.
    You’ve broken your cup.
    There was a body in the car, sitting beside him. It was Olaf. He was trying to talk to Carnival only his mouth wasn’t moving. The wound in his throat flapped like a pair of great black lips. Like bat wings. The lips make a sound like the flop of a punctured tire. There’s words hiding behind the flat rubber sounds but Carnival couldn’t make them out.
    You’ve spilled your water.
    And then Carnival was hanging from the limb of an ancient jack pine. The wind rattled through his body like there wasn’t an ounce of meat left on his bones but none of that bothered him. What bothered him most was that he didn’t know where Maya was. And even though this was just a dream, this last thought bothered him most of all.
    Who holds the knife?
    Carnival sat up suddenly, awakened by the sound of a giant mechanical bee buzzing in the walls. It sounded like the grandfather of all electric razors. Like a giant power cable, sizzling in the darkness, a fuse burning down and down.
    He knew that sound.
    It was the tattooist, upstairs. It was the sound of his electric needle, buzzing steadily like the burring of a patient electric drill. If the lights had been on they would have flickered.
    Carnival grinned ruefully.
    He still didn’t know where Maya was.
    And that bothered him more than anything else.

Chapter 12
     
    Dirty Dealings
     
    M aya stood haloed in a sea of bright darkness.
    It looked like a church but no church like any god ever dreamed of.
    Walls of white madness rose high above her. Steams of incense and decay. Crucifixion haloes danced about in tattered straitjackets. Meat rotted upon the walls, hung on the two tined hooks of hope and prayer. A cathedral of screaming saints sung silent hallelujahs to the gods of pain and damnation.
    Maya wasn’t sure if she was there or not. She thought she was in her coffin but life and a lot of other things can happen all at once. She waited. She listened. A voice slid from a clot of shadows. It sounded like the oozing of blood cut with slow grease.
    “Did he fall for it?”
    The voice startled her. It wasn’t easy to startle a vampire. She got over it quickly. She knew who it was.
    “Better than I expected,” she said. “He even got his hands bloody. He used a knife. Can you believe that? I didn’t think he had it in him.”
    The shadow oozed a slow wet chuckle like guts spilling over rain soaked granite.
    “Oh there’s a lots of blood on that boy’s hands. Don’t you let his looks fool you.”
    “He’s not that tough. I had to hold his lamb for him while he opened the plumbing.”
    The shadow flared like knives of dark lightning. The walls breathed, loud and wet, like tubercular lungs. Anger rose in the air in a cloud of fulminating sulphur.
    “You pushed him? Did he catch you at it?”
    “Don’t be stupid.”
    “Did he catch you at it? Holding the meat? Did you push him?”
    Maya waved a hand dismissively through the air. “I nudged him a little, maybe. I was bored. Sunrise was coming. I nudged him and held the lamb with my heart’s eye while the gypsy used his knife. He didn’t catch me. He couldn’t catch me. How good do you think he is?”
    “Better than you.”
    “I’ve lived generations.”
    “And I’ve seen eons. Doesn’t make you wiser. Doesn’t make you sharper. Just makes you hungry, and hungry makes you stupid.”
    That did it. Maya hissed like a shotgun-blasted steam kettle. She flexed her back and grew twice her size. Sharp edges of glass and steel and razor blades sprouted from her joints and angles. A hint of wings danced in the shadows behind her.
    The shadow just smirked. You could feel the smugness rolling from within its turgid density like an eel of self satisfaction. A tiny puff of dust blew