Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [35]
Madam Oksana hissed back.
Boris laid the girl on the ground and watched unblinking as Madam Oksana knelt, turned the girl’s head to one side, then bent and delicately licked at the seeping wound.
After a long moment, Hector laid his hand on her shoulder. “You must stop now,” he said.
Madam Oksana straightened and licked her lips. Her face was as blank as a doll’s.
Lenka looked at the girl. She lay as she’d been arranged, arms sprawled, neck pathetically arched to display an unbloodied expanse of white, unbroken skin.
While Lenka was digesting this, Kazimir swung the girl up and over his shoulders like a dead deer. “I’ll get some water down her and sprinkle some gin around. She’s already drunk, right, Boris?” Boris yawned. “Right. With any luck, she won’t even remember where she’s been when she wakes up.”
Boris stretched sleepily. “Why risk it? Why not make sure she won’t wake up?”
Hector gave him a look that would strip paint. “You are a savage, Boris, and very young. It is good for you that you have fallen among civilized monsters, who know better than to make messes where we eat. Kazimir will take your little inamorata where she will be found soon and cared for. And you . . . you will be more careful in the future.”
Kazimir disappeared into the tent, the girl’s dark head bobbing at his shoulder. Everybody relaxed. Carmen said, “I’m starved,” and folded abruptly like a piece of fabric. A moment later, Lenka saw a bat drop from the edge of the tent, catch an updraft, and glide out of the light. And then, shamefully, she fainted.
Lenka opened her eyes to darkness and silence. She felt like death on a cracker—exactly the way she’d felt when her parents had insisted on taking her to the emergency room in Cleveland a year ago. There was something heavy lying on her chest.
She moaned and tried to sit up. She couldn’t move.
A cat meowed right below her chin.
“Yes,” said Madam Oksana. “I know. Get off, Rima. We want her restrained, not smothered.”
Rima. The aerialist. Her friend. The cat. The vampire.
Rima walked down Lenka’s body and flopped heavily onto her ankles.
“Lenka Kubatovna,” Madam Oksana said. “What will we do with you? We have no wish to kill you. You are useful to us.”
Lenka wriggled uncomfortably. “Can you turn on a light? Talking about this in the dark is creepy. I feel like I’m in a bad horror movie, you know? Circus of the Vampires. It’s just too unreal.”
“This is not a time for joking,” Madam Oksana said stiffly. But she turned on a lamp. Lenka saw she was in her bed in the office truck, with Madam Oksana’s seven cats huddled around her, pinning down her blanket. She should have been able to throw them off easily, but no matter how she strained, she couldn’t budge them. They stared up at her as only cats can stare, their round, unblinking eyes glowing red.
Lenka suppressed a hysterical giggle. “No? It would make a great movie. Girl with leukemia runs away to join a circus of vampires who turn into cats and bats.”
The biggest cat, a brown furball like a miniature bear, shook itself and became Hector, sitting sad-eyed by her hip. “Spiders,” he said. “We can also be spiders and mosquitoes, but it is unpleasant to be so small.”
This was too much for Lenka, who started to laugh helplessly and couldn’t stop until Madam Oksana slapped her, bruising Lenka’s jaw and knocking the laughter right out of her.
“I do not like hysterics,” Madam Oksana said. “It is very simple. You will stay with us. We will buy a big computer and you will conduct the business of the circus and book tours and make everything smooth with the chinovnik. You will share your blood with us.” Her scarlet mouth stretched in a feral smile. “It will be what you call totally smoking.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Lenka said. “I’d call it incredibly gross.”
The cats turned back into circus performers and perched on the furniture. Free at last, Lenka sat up and glared at them. “I’ve got leukemia, remember? That’s a disease of the blood, in case you didn’t know.”
Dusan took her hand. He’d never touched