Exsanguination and Other Love Stories

III. Audience with the Vampire

"Goodness," said Florian, "That sounds serious. And aren't the cats supposed to be in - "

"Yes," I said, "$%#%! Excuse me."

And I whirled and ran up the stairs, two at a time. That had to have been Momow: there was a certain nails-on-a-blackboard edge to the sound which was unmistakable. He must have doubled back through the garden, I thought, and snuck in through the front door while Florian had had me distracted. And he was just vicious enough, in his present state of senility, to get himself into a fight which he couldn't win...

"Oh, don't worry about me," came Florian's voice from below. "I know my own way to the west wing, you can come bring me dinner once you've got the two of them sorted out."

"Wait a minute," I cried, pausing in outrage on the landing, "What makes you think you can just start poking around? No, you wait for me right there for me to get back – Hey!"

I watched in disbelief as he strode off into the dark house, navigating between the sheet-draped islands of furniture in the parlor as though he lived there.

"Don't worry, " he called back, over his shoulder, with a wide smile that revealed every one of his teeth, white as porcelain: "I won't break anything!" And he winked at me.

I might have rushed down then, and an altercation of a much larger scale might have taken place, had not the renewed shrieks and low whining howls coming from upstairs claimed my full attention. I had to deal with the cats first – before anyone got hurt. After that, I would deal with him.

Momow, as I had expected, was the aggressor: he had made his way into my aunt's old sewing room, and was in the process of trying to dethrone the diabetic, balding Persian, Akasha, from her perch in the sill of the room's only south-facing window.

I didn't keep Akasha separately from the others – in the east wing where my own bedroom was – for her own safety. She weighed nearly thirteen pounds, and I could see Momow was already bleeding, missing a piece of his left ear. Why he'd chosen to seek her out and provoke her I don't know: perhaps out of a perverse desire to make my life more difficult. Or, more likely, after escaping being taken to the vet's, he had simply been primed for a fight, and had gone back into the house to find one.

As stealthily I could, I grabbed an old pillowcase from a wing chair and approached the pair. They were engaged in a duel of glances at the moment, Akasha peering down with rheumy fury from her windowsill, swelled up to twice her usual size, while Momow advanced slowly, his huge blue eyes dark and spiteful, his bony face contorted into a rictal hiss. He cast me only one contemptuous glance as I came up behind him, before turning his attention back to her.

He thought he had me cowed, I thought hotly, that I wouldn't dare tackle him: that I would just stand by while he did as he pleased. Well, he was wrong. I was sick of being led around by the nose.

I sprung with the open pillowcase, and by some miracle managed to shove him down to the bottom long enough to twist shut the top. He must have been exhausted, after so much exertion, though by the sound of the yowls he made and the way he writhed in the sack, before settling down into a sullen, bony blob at the bottom of it, with just the tips of his hind claws sticking out through the silk, you never would have guessed.

Akasha, far from being grateful for my intervention, merely let out an affronted growl from the sill and eyed me with great suspicion, as if she were trying to determine whether I was about to try and put her in a bag, too.

"Oh, fine," I muttered, taking a moment to inspect the bloody new scratches on my arms, courtesy of Momow, "Don't thank me or anything, your Highness, I'm just – damage control."