Certain Dark Things(38)

Domingo didn’t smell that bad, but she wished he would take a bath every morning, though she supposed it to be in bad form to point this out.

“You know, I really think this is, like, the coolest dog ever. Its coat is so shiny,” Domingo said, chatty as always. She was getting used to that. “How’d you get the Doberman?”

“Cualli takes care of me. I’ve always had a dog, since I was a child.”

When she’d fled south, she thought about leaving the dog behind. But she couldn’t part with it. Cualli was part of her life, her constant companion for many years.

“You know, I’ve never figured how that works.”

Atl clutched the dog’s leash. “What?”

“You know…” Domingo leaned next to her ear, whispering. “Vampire children.”

She thought about her childhood, her family home. Mexican families tended to be extended, several generations clustering together, but Atl’s family had been massive. The women lived in one house, a complex, really, and the men in another located just across from them. Boys were raised in the women’s complex, but at the age of ten they were sent to the male quarters to learn the way of men: agriculture, medicine, scribing in the traditional codices, and soothsaying. Women were schooled in combat, commerce, and politics.

Atl’s father was a talented soothsayer, could predict events none of the other men glimpsed, or so they told her. He’d left when she was very small. There had been an altercation, the discovery he’d been embezzling money. So he took off. Atl thought he might have gone to the United States. It hardly mattered.

“What about it?” she asked.

“Well … what’d you eat?”

“Milk. Fruits.”

“Not blood?”

She thought about pulling his leg and telling him yes, blood, but then he might actually believe it.

“My diet changed when I hit puberty,” she said instead.

“Was it scary?”

“Were you scared when you started growing hair in your armpits?”

The subway seats were rock hard and this with the scents around her aggravated the ride. Atl leaned forward, so her back wasn’t flat against the plastic seat, and looked at Domingo.

“Not really.”

“Same for me. It was what I expected,” Atl said.

Domingo sat quietly for a couple of minutes before turning to her again and whispering in her ear.

“Are you going to get old? Or will you look like this forever?”

A man walked the length of their subway car, selling potato chips and peanuts. The peddlers always worked in pairs: one sold the product, the other was the lookout who, whistling and making hand signals, would alert his partner if a cop was approaching. There was also a small-time Mafia at work. Certain lines were controlled by a specific group, and you couldn’t just show up and try to sell shit if you didn’t pay an initiation fee to the local boss.

The man with the peanuts glanced at Atl and Domingo, but seeing their Doberman, kept walking by.

“I’ll age, but I’ll look young for a very long time,” she told Domingo.

“How long?”

“I can easily remain young for decades and decades. It’s quite similar for most of us. When I’m eighty I’ll seem forty. There’s a point where our bodies just remain still, seem to stop aging.”

“That guy I went to see, Bernardino, I think there was something wrong with his bones.”

“Yeah, that’s an issue with his kind. Their bodies … age more quickly, grow deformed, though I’m not exactly sure how it happens.”

Atl was given to understand Revenants could absorb the life force of humans or vampires, and rejuvenate their bodies—even transfer that energy to others, like a walking battery—but her mother offered few details on their biology. She also offered few details on Bernardino. He was a rather obscure figure, someone her mother had had a feud with, one of the members of her old entourage.

“If I live long enough I’ll have health issues of my own, eventually,” Atl said, and chuckled.

“What?” Domingo asked.

“Nothing, it’s just not something I think about too often. Life expectancy is not very long for us right now. The drug wars are taking their toll.”

Atl had always known what her life would be like. Mostly it would consist of supporting her older sister. At one point she’d marry, likely one of her second cousins. Izel had spoken about Javier, who was a year her senior. But that milestone was still far off; their mother had said any planning in this regard was premature. Her sister had been pushing it, though. She had been worried about the stability of their position in Sinaloa, and she said maybe Atl could wed and head to Encinas, their home in Baja California.

At the time Atl had felt it was a way for Izel to punish her. She realized now it was an attempt to protect her.

She’d never see Encinas, or what remained of her family. If some remained.

A dog and a human companion, that’s what Atl had. Not much.

“Sorry,” Domingo said.

“No, it is what it is. It’s life. It’s a better life than many other people have,” Atl said as she looked to the train doors and shook her head because there was no point in crying over these things.

The doors of the subway car opened. The peanut vendor got off and more people climbed on. The car was getting fuller now, but it wasn’t rush hour yet. A man with a guitar boarded last and began strumming the instrument, singing a popular ditty. A corrido. She stared at a girl wearing a bracelet made of yellow beads, counting the beads in her head. This compulsion to count things was common of several vampire subspecies, an anxiety-reducing behavior that could assist the vampire in coping with the loud noises, sounds, or smells around them. It got worse when she was tired, the need to count. It wasn’t a good sign.