

Vampire Morgue

by Maggie Jagger

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Maggie Jagger

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Chapter 1

My useless body lay still and quiet with no gurgle of gas to remind me I once ate and digested. Undead wasn't an option I wanted to suffer for eternity. I lay sprawled on a hospital gurney in the darkness. Alone in the silence. Helpless.

Quiet footsteps drifted into my silent world. My heart didn't beat with fear. No rush of adrenaline jolted me to life.

Wasn't seeing supposed to be the first sense to go? My eyes were shut, but I could see through my eyelids. I could see all around, even behind my head. I could see to the ocean and to the stars.

The metal door creaked open. Something fluttered against it in the gust of warm moist air. A sign with old-fashioned lettering, its edges curled with age, warned I was in the Vampire Morgue. As if I needed reminding.

"Time for your bath," said the vampire in a gentle voice. "There is no need to fear me, Calista. I am keeping you alive for us." A strand of seaweed decorated one shoulder of his dark clothes.

His face radiated an eerie masculinity, mournful and beautiful. The sign on the door warned me where I was, but I didn't remember how I got there.

My death meant nothing to him because he knew I was undead. Why else would I be here, if I hadn't been poisoned by his venomous fangs?

The darkness didn't stop me from watching him.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

The way he leant over me reminded me of something lost in my mind. If only I could remember all the things I'd forgotten. As soon as I tried to grasp a memory, it vanished into a gray mist.

I only remembered I hated vampires.

He reached for the hose coiled over a hook on the white tiled wall and adjusted the water to a trickle. It soaked the light sheet covering me, flowed off the plastic-coated mattress and spattered on the tile floor to swish down the drain.

My skin responded with pleasure.

"Feels good, I know," he said. "Saltwater to soothe you."

The vampire brought the hose nearer my face. He spread the stream of water with his fingers to let it run over my closed eyes.

He blinded me with water. "Remember how you wanted me to help you. Remember how it all went terribly wrong."

Intense heat touched every cell in my brain. Something crawled inside my mind until every part of me united in tingling horror. All the dead connections fused together in an agonizing rush of memories and feelings.

A sob rattled inside me unable to escape.

I drifted to a memory emerging from the fog. I was six years old and I wanted to go to school. How small I looked in my new uniform. I needed help and the only person awake was the man in the walk-in freezer.

My mother had told me he was trying to kill himself. She'd warned me not to disturb him, but I needed help now.

My mind tried to remember having a mother. I could only watch the memory, hoping to learn from it.

I tiptoed down the curved stairs to the hallway underneath the music room. I hated the new house. Ever since we'd come here, Momma was different. She stayed away from me and sometimes she growled at Daddy in the night. We were all miserable.

The sun was up. It didn't shine in the rooms down here, so I switched on all the lights I could reach. This part of the house was creepy. I wanted to go back to live in Santa Barbara, even if it sometimes smelled like gasoline.

The freezer door creaked at me as I tugged at the handle. I propped it open with the little metal leg, just like Nanny had shown me. The man stood next to the shelf with the ice-cream, where I'd met him yesterday. I'd offered to share some with him when he'd helped open the box. He told me that he never ate anything.

"I need you to read something for me." I waved the letter from the school at him. "Nanny has done most of it. I need to do the rest and I don't know what it says, because the words are too big."

The man turned to stare at me. He looked sad and not friendly. "Ask your mother to read it for you." He didn't speak like us. Momma said he spoke BBC, and that's what happens when early television travels in space.

Sometimes my mother talks nonsense. He spoke English, like Nanny Jillian from England. Not that she'd liked him for having the same accent. She left us the day she met him.

It was his fault we couldn't keep a nanny.

I explained nicely, not accusing him of anything, "I'm not allowed to speak to Momma during the day. Daddy's taken Mary to the airport, she wanted to go home, so I can't ask them." I watched the frost slowly creeping up the man's dark clothes. "Does it say I need to take a lunch?"

"Make a lunch if it says to take lunch," he said in gloomy tones.

"I can't read what it says to bring. This is my first day of school. I need someone to wait with me for the bus, or I can't go." I was sure he didn't understand anything about school. I'd missed Kindergarten and I was determined not to miss first grade. Julie had promised to be there. It was the only place to meet her after Momma banned her from the house.

I stared at the man in a pleading way that even used to work on my mother.

Daddy said the man was very, very old. He didn't look old. We'd inherited him, along with the house, from Great Aunt Suzanne. Momma called him a strange name, Quiz Ling. Momma didn't like him much.

"Why are you trying to freeze to death?" I asked.

"I'm lonely." He sounded very sad. "I thought it might make time go faster."

"I'll be your friend, if you'll be mine." I smiled at him. I wanted to go to school and he was the only way I was going to get there. "Julie, she lives next door, she's my friend too. Her brother sends her postcards and she always shares them with me."

"Friend," he said, and he held out a cold hand. I shook it carefully in case his frozen fingers broke off.

I followed him up the stairs to the kitchen. He walked in a floating kind of way, as if he didn't weigh much. It made me laugh, though I tried to do it silently. Only a few sniggly sounds snuck out.

He made a lunch for me, after I told him how to do it. We waited for the school bus together. I told the kids he was the butler and we'd inherited him with the house, and it nearly wasn't a lie.

When I got home, he was waiting for me in the same place I'd left him. Momma waved from her window and blew me a kiss. That's how I knew she'd forgiven me for speaking to him.

When I went to bed he waited for me to wake up, while he watched over the ocean through the window. He wasn't interested in the beach or the shallow part of the bay, he only liked the deep water. He never hurt anyone, though Momma said he could if he wanted to. Daddy said we had promised to look after him. I didn't think making him live in the freezer was keeping the promise, but Daddy said he could live anywhere he liked.

He didn't work like my father did, seeing patients and saving them from their own brains. He worked in the deep ocean sometimes, and when he wasn't doing that he mostly watched me.

Daddy asked him to watch from outside my bedroom, so he'd climbed on the roof to peer in my window upside down, hanging from the tiles by his toes to be near me. I opened the window to let him in, I didn't want him to fall.

"What's your real name?" I asked one day after school. "Julie thinks Quiz Ling is a Chinese name. You don't look like Miss Lee, who really is from China. My guess is you have another name that you'd like better. Momma never gives nice names to people."

"You can choose," he said. He wore a pair of old shorts and a golf shirt of Daddy's that I'd borrowed for him. Great Aunt Suzanne had made him wear a tuxedo but that looked weird when we played on the beach.

"How about Quinn? You can be the Mighty Quinn, like the song. That's my favorite. Quinn starts with Q, like Quiz does. Do you want to play Buffy with me? You can be a vampire."

"Can I be an expendable vampire?" he asked hopefully.

"What does that mean?" I liked big words. "Expendable?"

His head lowered until it merged with mine. It felt weird, it didn't hurt. If Momma saw him do it, she might get mad. I didn't mind. I wanted to be Buffy when I grew up and that meant weird things were always going to happen to me.

Expendable meant not worth saving, like all those bad vampires Buffy staked.

My mind saw Quinn on the beach in the sun. "Do you want to play at building sandcastles?" I asked him.

He gave a weary sigh. "I don't think I'm a terrestrial vampire. Shall I pretend?"

He merged again to explain terrestrial meant a being from a planet with a solid surface.

"Can I stake you?" I hopped about on one foot to make him say yes.

Quinn agreed. He looked interested in playing the game with me. I had to tell him what to do, because they didn't play on the planet he was from. That's what Daddy said when I'd seen Quinn walk on top of the ocean to stare into the deep, and I'd wanted whatever it was that helped him do it.

Then Daddy had said Quinn wasn't Jesus come back to save us all, even though I hadn't asked if he was.

Momma said Quinn was damned for eternity, and no one was coming back for him. That made him even sadder. He'd asked if, at the end of time, there'd only be him and Momma left. That question didn't make either of them happy.

I ran to get the props for the Buffy game before Quinn wandered off. I picked up the heavy stake and mallet Daddy kept beside his bed. Daddy never watched television, or he'd have known a little stake worked just as well, and he didn't need a wooden mallet to stick it in a vampire.

Our house only had one television and it was for the nanny. Nannies never took a job without one. They were always lonely and liked me to watch with them. I thought that would make them nicer to Quinn, because he was lonely too, but they were all scared of him.

I struggled to carry the huge stake down to the sand. Quinn came to help me. I hurried after him with the mallet. I had to get them back before nightfall, just in case Daddy needed them. For the first time I wondered if he was a vampire slayer and if I could be his helper. The idea made me laugh. Daddy wouldn't make a good slayer. He was always too busy trying to save people from their own brains to kill anyone. I giggled and tripped over my own feet.

Quinn caught me. His laughter warmed my insides and made me laugh more. He was excited about learning to play. That's when I knew I liked him more than Momma, whose laughter was scary. Even Daddy thought so.

I struggled with the mallet while Quinn lay down to hold the stake where his heart would have been if he'd had one. The mallet was very heavy. I almost dropped it on him. It took several tries before I managed to lift it high enough to strike the top of the long stake.

The stake went through him. Right through, as if he was not solid. It squished in silently. He disappeared in a huge plume of dusty smoke that smelled awful, like death.

Dark deadly bits stuck to my skin and swirled about me. I took a deep breath to scream and some of him went inside me. Every breath inside the dark cloud fried my lungs. Dust stuck to my eyeballs and flew up my nose. I tried to cough him out and swallowed some of my lung stuff. It burned going down. It stung so much when it hit my stomach that I tried to make myself vomit in the sand to get him out.

I'd killed Quinn! Now I only had one friend left!

I'd eaten him by accident!

Sobs shook me even more than the coughing and the trying to throw him up.

I scrambled up the path to the terrace overlooking the bay. "Momma!" I howled, outside my mother's private door.

"Momma! I've killed Quinzling!" I mangled his name and didn't care if the sun had not kissed the ocean! A nervous glance showed it was nearly there. Momma might not get mad enough to kill anyone.

The doors opened and my mother appeared dressed in a long negligee. She stayed in the shadows.

"Momma!" I wiped my tears. Momma hated me to cry. "Momma, I killed Quiz Ling."

A voice behind me said with a mournful sigh, "Expendable vampires never really die."

I almost swallowed my tongue to see him there. I wasn't a murderer! Quinn led me away before my mother replied.

Momma never spoke until the sun kissed the ocean. It was a rule. She was allergic to the sun, and food, and me, and Daddy said it was better to leave her alone, because she'd never recovered after she'd been so sick she nearly died.

Quinn held my hand to comfort me. "I won't die again," he promised. "It is even sadder to die than it is to live. Don't cry, Calista."

I nodded and swallowed the snot dripping down the back of my throat. What if Quinn was a vampire? What if vampires didn't die when Buffy staked them?

I clutched his hand and hoped it wouldn't hurt when he claimed the bits of him I felt churning inside me.

From far away in the sky a voice asked, "What happened?" Only he didn't say it in words. The stinging bits inside me answered, "Eaten by predator."

Someone up there laughed.

Chapter 2

Quinn held the box of calligraphy pens I'd gotten for my ninth birthday, while I worked on a sign for the door, using red and black ink. It was dark and creepy in the freezer room, with only the light from the hallway and the slow drips of melting ice. Even a vampire morgue needs to be defrosted.

Julie lolled on a shelf, wearing a glowing green necklace and one of my old princess dresses. She never grew any bigger. Most of the time she pretended to be younger than she was. "You should write it in blood." She gave a menacing growl to add atmosphere, the sound she always made when she got scared.

"Is Zavier home?" I always asked questions because it freaked people out if I just knew things. Julie always went weird when her brother showed up. She missed him when he was away. It was his return that made her act crazy.

"Yes, he's back and I wish he'd go away again." Julie was frightened of Zavier.

I worried about her living all alone in the other house on our bay. Julie worried about having company. She adored my mother from a distance, because she didn't have one of her own to love.

Julie's parents never came home from their cruise ship. She couldn't remember what they looked like. Her brother played in a band and traveled all over the world. Their house was lit with glowing sticks because Julie didn't know how to fix the electricity.

Momma said Julie was a liar and her parents were dead, but Momma always said bad things about people. Daddy said just because Momma told her version of the truth, it didn't make her bad or wrong.

I taped the VAMPIRE MORGUE sign on the freezer door.

Momma was coming.

Quinn went to the deep, as he always did to get out of the way. Julie fled with him, using him as a shield in case Momma tried to rip her head off. Even Daddy wasn't sure if that was a joke or not.

We were worried about Daddy. All of us. Even the one up there worried about Daddy. I'd heard him talking to himself in the night. If I woke up and lay still, I could hear him speak. Sometimes he wanted Quinn to do something, though I never understood what it was. I only felt the alien bits inside me react to his voice.

Momma ignored the sign I'd stuck on the door, though she gave me one of her eagle looks as if she could see into my soul. The one up there watched us, I could feel his interest. Maybe we were like television to him.

After I'd helped my mother wash and dry the floor, I went to find my father. I had to confide in someone and Daddy was used to people telling him horrible things. I thought it might help him to know what was wrong with me, because the older I got the more I realized he knew it had something to do with Quinn.

Daddy hated him for it.

The white garage doors were open. I'd heard the music from the freezer room. My father sat in his antique convertible, the pale yellow one he didn't drive to work. He listened to sad songs about breaking hearts and lost love, and it being over and finished. Sometimes he cried. He always said, into each life some tears must fall because we are human.

Quinn knew all about being lonely and sad, but he couldn't talk to my father. He'd tried, then Daddy had asked him so many questions that Quinn's brain had shut down. After that he left my father alone.

I asked Daddy to take me out for ice cream to get him away from the house. He turned off the music and started the old convertible with its big fins and lots of shiny chrome.

The antique car smelled and the engine made me nervous. Only it wasn't me who was scared, not really.

My father said, "Let's go for a long drive."

I could feel my guts twisting, warning me to be safe. The throbbing noise from space intensified from a background hum to pulsing so loud I could barely think inside it. "Not too far, Daddy." I worried about taking the alien bits on a wrong trajectory.

"Quinn can wait for you. You are not his slave." Daddy tried to smile at me. He'd given me lots of talks about free will and my equal rights, while someone else listened with me.

The bits stopped hurting so much. Someone up there used my mouth to talk to Daddy. He spoke actual English words through me for the first time. "Slavery is wrong. Free will must not harm others." I sounded like Quinn.

Daddy slowed down until someone honked at him as they sped by. "Did you just talk for Quinn?"

"Don't get mad, Daddy."

"Hey, I never get mad," he said, in a strangled voice. He coughed and tried to be honest. "Upset and sad sometimes."

We didn't speak again until he pulled into the parking lot in front of the ice cream parlor, where the sun cast long shadows from the palm trees. "Can you hear Quinn when he's not with us?" he asked casually.

My secrets spilled out in a rush. "I can hear lots of things. Sometimes Quinn talks to someone up in the sky and sometimes the one up there says things to me. That's the first time I've heard him talk like we do. He wants you to know he understands. Usually he speaks in streams of light." I wanted to tell my father everything, all the weird things I knew, even if they were supposed to be secrets. If Quinn never blabbed about the one up there, I was sure I wasn't supposed to tell either. "Sometimes," I whispered, "I think he might be God."

A tickling sensation swept over my entire body. I giggled and couldn't stop. Someone up there was laughing, and I had to laugh with him.

Daddy stared at me like I was crazy. "What's so funny?"

My laughter ended, though the tingles still tickled. For a moment I only remembered the one thing the alien being wanted me to say. "He says he's not God."

Daddy stared at me like I'd grown another head. "Who said he is not God?"

"The one Quinn is waiting for. Sometimes I can hear them talking but it isn't very interesting. It's mostly about light stream trajectories." I talked fast to get it all out. "Quinn is a beacon to lead him back here. That's why Quinn doesn't know much. He's only part of the one up there, an emanation, like a shadow."

"Can you talk to the real one, or does he only tell you things?" Daddy liked to ask neutral questions, instead of reacting to what was being said.

"We don't have things to talk about, not like you and I do. He's up there, far away." I waved at the sky, glad Daddy didn't look like he was going to die of a heart attack. "He won't arrive for a long time."

"How long?" Daddy went all pale and sweaty.

"A long, long, long time from now in human years, Daddy. Do you think he might be God and maybe he doesn't know it?"

"Not a chance, my darling girl. No."

I gave Daddy a tissue from the glove box. He wiped his face, but it took a while for him to calm down enough to buy our ice cream. We ate in the car. I was very careful not to get any on the leather seat.

"You know you can tell me anything, don't you?" asked Daddy.

I nodded. I knew I'd told him more than Quinn and the one up there wanted me to say. Not that they'd tried to stop me from saying it, I could just feel them waiting for his reaction. And we all knew I hadn't told the worst yet.

"Does your mother have anything to do with Quinn and the one in the sky?" asked Daddy. "Are you afraid of her?"

"No, Momma doesn't know. She thought we were playing." I didn't tell him about listening to him and Momma fighting, and how it frightened me. I said, "Sometimes I worry about you."

Daddy thought about that. "I worry about you, too. Shall we go away and live somewhere else. Just leave the house, leave Quinn, just go?"

My father wanted to save me by taking me away. I knew from the churning bits inside me that I risked my life and something worse, if I tried to leave Quinn. I didn't want to talk about it. "Momma would miss us." Not that I was sure about that.

My father wanted my mother to love him again. But she stayed away from him after we moved to the house and she got sick. When she recovered, they didn't hold one another and kiss and laugh like they used to. We never had family hugs. They never went out on dates with Momma dressed in blue jeans and her sparkly shirt, wearing her dancing cowboy boots. He never sang Wild Stallions to make her laugh.

I ate ice cream to stop my tears. There was no escape for me, no way to leave and not die from it.

"Your mother can come with us if she wants to, or she can stay," said Daddy.

"We can't leave!" Those weird bits inside me jiggled strangely. I'd have to give back Quinn's bits and then I'd die. Dead as in not coming back ever.

Daddy ate his melting ice cream. I waited until he'd finished, trying to think of a way to tell him about my problem. Not that I expected him to be able to fix me, I just wanted him to understand what was wrong.

I started off sideways. "I'm good at math. Really good."

"Great!"

"Not so great. I got the power from Quinn. Answers jump into my head before I understand the question."

My father turned his head away to take a weird breath. It took him a while to look at me again. He smiled as if nothing was wrong. "How did you get the power from Quinn?"

"Not on purpose, I got it by accident. I breathed him in. We were playing Buffy and I hit him with your stake and it all went wrong when he turned into dust and I breathed him in." I wiped away my tears.

Daddy watched me, pale as the yellow paint on the car.

"Quinn didn't know not to do it. It's my fault, not his. I've got bits of him stuck inside me. In the night, when it's quiet, I can hear things."

"Is that why Quinn wants to be close to you?"

"He's lonely and he likes me." I lowered my voice to a whisper. People were crossing the parking lot. "One day he's going to need those bits, I'll have to give them back." There, I'd told my deepest, darkest secret and no bolt from heaven had struck me dead. I peered up at the blue sky as shivers ran down my back.

"How do you know you must give them back?" Daddy tried to put his arm round my shoulders, but I slid away from him. I didn't want to get him blasted by an angry space alien mad at me for telling secrets.

"Quinn told the one up there, when I was listening. Now they mostly talk when I'm asleep. Quinn said it'll kill me. I cried, and the one up there said he was going to save me and not to worry because it wouldn't be for a very long time."

"How long?" My father tried to control the expression on his face.

"A long, long time." My body went silent to listen to its alien bits. "The one up there says he'll get here before I die." I felt my heart start to beat with a strange energy pulse that magnified the tickling sensation.

Daddy stared at me as if I'd just shot him. I tried to distract him by telling him something new. "I can hear his voice all over my body, like an electric power is flowing in me. The alien bits send information to him all the time."

"If he's in space, far away, how can he communicate with you over such long distances?" Daddy always wanted to know how things worked, but he was gabbling to hide his pain. He knew I was doomed, sooner or later. "How can there be no time delay? What does it feel like when he talks to you without words?"

I put my hand on his chest. "Feel it, Daddy."

His heart stopped with one last enormous beat. It stopped with a bang I could hear. Then it just jangled inside him without beating properly. His blood didn't go anywhere that I could hear. He died from a jangling heart.

I'd killed Daddy by accident!

I opened my mouth to scream and Quinn appeared beside the car. He restarted my father's heart by reaching into his chest. I could hear my father's heart squishing. It suddenly started again.

I'd almost killed Daddy. Shock made me silent and froze my body, not even my heart worked, though I knew that wouldn't kill me. I silently swore never to touch a human being again. I swore it on my heart and hoped not to die. Not yet. Not soon. Not before my father. He'd cry too much over me.

We all went home together. I sat in the back with Quinn and held his hand.

Daddy didn't blame me, he never blamed me for anything. He drove us home and never said a word about me killing him.

My mother was out when we got there. Quinn made Daddy a special drink. The glass was huge and round, and the drink was pale and glowing, like the moon. He drank it and fell asleep. He only whimpered a bit in the gap between his snores.

Quinn and I watched over him. My alien bits calculated the length of my life as energy versus output, and then compared the result to my father's probable life span.

I couldn't survive long enough to wait him out. There were too many variables to be precise, but if I wanted to survive my teenage years I'd have to conserve energy and reduce output.

Why were the bits so concerned with that? I'd almost killed my father by touching him! I could never touch a human, because I wasn't human. What use was my life? I might as well die now and get it over with.

"What if he dies again and you are too busy to save him?" I asked Quinn. "Take your bits back. I'm ready to die now so I don't kill Daddy again."

"I can't take them back, Calista. You have to live until he returns," said Quinn sadly. "He can save you, I can't."

I knew he meant the one zooming in space, but we both knew he was also we. Quinn was a living bookmark, a part of the space alien left behind to guide him back to Earth. That meant I was the same thing, half a shadow, and his return meant my death. For sure I'd have to give the bits back to the space alien. God might have let me keep them.

There was no use arguing with Quinn. I went to bed, thinking about how to go to school and not kill anyone. There were no useful suggestions from up there, I heard him say that stasis wasn't an option, then it all got too complicated to understand.

My mother came home just before dawn. I was awake, taping up the ends of my fingers. I'd decided to say I'd burnt them baking cookies. She raged at Daddy for nearly dying, and pleaded with him to live with her forever, but he refused to listen to her arguments, and even worse, he called her Suzanne.

I hoped she wasn't going to kill him for it. He only called her that when he was mad at her. Daddy said he wanted me to be happy for as much time as I had left, and he didn't care if he lived a moment past the end of my life.

Quinn came in later to tell me it was time to get ready for school. "Don't worry, Calista. Momma wants to make Daddy a vampire to keep him safe. He doesn't want her to do it. I gave him the antidote, just in case Momma gets scared for him and bites him."

My mother was a vampire. I had alien bits that could kill people. What else could go wrong?

Chapter 3

Momma made breakfast for me to celebrate my seventeenth birthday. Not that I was overjoyed about it. My mother was never in a good mood when she played the Ride of the Valkyries loud enough to wake the dead. She'd been singing her Valkyrie role in college, when she met my father. She'd dragged dead soldiers over the stage until she dislocated her shoulder. Daddy was a med student then and he'd put it back in for her.

I watched to make sure she didn't slip any of her blood in my mushroom omelet. I had enough problems without her adding vampire to the list.

My parents still liked to be called Momma and Daddy as if I was a child. If it made them happy, I was up for it. There were so many things about me that made them unhappy.

The kitchen blinds blocked the sun and the view of the ocean, where Quinn worked in the deep, testing trajectories. Earth never stayed still. My fragile planet tilted and twirled through space, giving him lots to do.

My mother slid the plate across the marble counter to where I sat on a tall chair. I took a bite and waited for the alien bits to analyze it, before they let it down.

She lowered the volume on Wagner. "Zavier is going to try to steal your body now that you're all grown up." She rested her elbows on the marble to give me her eagle stare. "Steal it and sell it to space aliens, so they can dissect you to use the interesting bits." She was joking, I hoped. Usually, she accused Quinn of having designs on my ovaries.

"But that would kill me, wouldn't it?" I gave a superior smile. "Nothing wrong with dying. We all do it eventually."

Momma gave a low growl. She could dish but she couldn't take.

Quinn suddenly appeared next to Momma. I could tell from the way her body went twitchy that she wanted to lash out at him. He smiled at her politely, and waited for her to strike him. She snarled under her breath and turned the music up. With a fierce glare she added her own apocalyptic rocket fire sounds, as if that and her hatred could kill him.

Watching them, I retreated in case she attacked. I'd enough alien bits inside me, I didn't want more. Not that I thought she'd win. She looked at me and decided against trying to kill Quinn, but it didn't make her happy to resist the temptation.

He followed me, as he always did when I was home and he wasn't working in the deep.

My body did strange things now I was grown up. At first I'd worried that Momma might smell me. My friends from school were all suffering from growing up and finding out they had weird parents, who watched them all the time for signs of drug use or promiscuous behavior. Not like my parents, who watched me for other reasons like imminent death, or kidnapping attempts by space aliens.

Daddy invited me to his office for lunch on schooldays. We talked, free from worries about the future, just enjoying being together. It made me realize how little time I spent with my parents at the house. I slept a lot to conserve energy. Quinn had to stop my father from waking me up by trying to resuscitate me. After that my father liked to tell himself all teenagers slept like the dead, and I was no different.

Julie came over after sunset. She'd been jealous when I grew breasts and changed into a woman. But she'd gotten over it after I bought her a bra and Daddy gave her silicone breasts to stick on her flat chest.

Her brother, Zavier, had tried to stalk me. That gave Momma something to do that she enjoyed. Not that she'd ever seriously tried to catch him, but it did make him keep his distance.

He'd gone on tour, so Julie wanted to celebrate his absence with me.

We lay on beach towels and stared up at the stars, pretending to sip iced tea through long curly straws, with our legs propped up on sand pillows. The sound of the ocean lulled the alien bits inside me to a quiet hum.

"Do you think the one up there has superpowers?" Julie asked in a whisper, as if the one up there wasn't listening to everything anyone said to me. Julie was always asking me things about him. I don't know how she found out he existed. I didn't tell her.

"Maybe he's an angel," I said casually. He was either a space alien or an angel. My father thought space alien. I preferred to imagine he was an angel. Who wants to have space alien bits churning inside? I could live with being part angel, even when it killed me.

"Angels don't have gentiles," she said, as if she knew it for a fact.

Julie always insisted on calling genitals, gentiles. Even though she knew it was the wrong word.

I didn't want to think about it. Hanging around the men's underwear department in the mall with my friends was my only furtive pleasure. Even Momma, on one of our rare shopping evenings when we were buying for Daddy, said I took far too much pleasure in the underwear men. She warned me never to trust anyone who looked like that, because they were probably vampires. Trust my mother to spoil a perfectly innocent hobby.

Julie pulled a funny face and snorted a giggle. "Find out if Quinn has gentiles. Tell him to take a shower because he smells bad."

"He'd know I was lying. Besides, who wants to see him naked anyway? Guys have strange things hanging from their bodies." The angel theory comforted me, even if Julie was wrong about the genitals. I didn't want to see a freaky space alien's dangling bits. Angelic light from heaven, maybe.

Suddenly Quinn appeared beside us. He looked very tall against the night sky.

A light flashed in the dark sky for glorious seconds. I knew what it was from the way my alien bits churned. The bits knew he was a long way from here, too far for anyone but Quinn and me to see him. Julie didn't notice anything in the night sky. My emotions surged in equal parts of fear and love.

Someone up there was afraid, though I didn't know why.

Quinn said, "Light is always naked in space."

What? Was he naked and shy up there? Did he not want to offend my human sensibilities?

I knew there was no spacecraft, no clothes, just a being flashing through time and space forever, alone with his emanations. Quinn was one of his emanations, and I was Quinn's spare parts kit.

The absurdity of it made me laugh. Someone up there laughed with me.

Julie heard Momma and ran for home.

My mind jerked awake. For a moment I didn't remember where I was. I wanted to go back to the dream world, where I could move and talk, and live my life. Waking up on the gurney shocked me.

My body felt as if it was wrapped in a lead blanket. My eyes couldn't open to make me look alive.

Quinn held the hose and directed a stream of water with his fingers to fill my lungs with saltwater. It gave me a strange energy, and almost made me hope I could recover.

Momma's voice called my name.

My parents entered the freezer room. My father turned the lights on. He was the only one who couldn't see in the dark. He tried to hold my mother by the waist, as if he could persuade her to be good by his touch. She kissed him on the mouth to say goodbye, like she always did.

Momma hadn't come to the vampire morgue to be good.

She left Daddy stroking my cheek. He couldn't tell that I was awake and could see him through my eyelids. I tried opening my eyes but the strange energy inside me didn't allow me to move. My father's distress over my death still contained some hope that Quinn could save me.

No hope stopped Momma's leap to kill him. She knocked Quinn into the freezer wall, in a tangle of hose. How had she managed to hit him?

I knew. Energy versus output. Quinn was suffering from the same terminal illness as me.

The gurney knocked against the tile wall. Not even all Daddy's strength could hold it against my mother's force. The hose went wild, spraying us all. The water hit the ceiling to short out the lights, leaving us in darkness.

Daddy shouted, "Don't! Leave Quinn alone!" He didn't try to stop my mother by force. He couldn't see where she was and he knew he wasn't strong enough.

Momma gave a nasty laugh. She bit Quinn hard on the neck. She wasn't feeding. She jerked her head from side to side, like a shark biting off a chunk, trying to rip his head off.

Quinn waited patiently until Momma released him. He'd only kept his neck there to be polite. He could have stopped her, except it would take too much energy so he'd let Momma bite him. Conserving energy kept us just barely alive.

"I hope you die!" cried Momma. "I hope you all die!"

Daddy found her. He put his arms around her. "Don't, my darling!" He tried to pull her away. "It's too late," said Daddy. "Can't you see, Quinn is trying to save Calista. He's our only hope!"

"Quinn is giving our daughter to his lord and master!" cried Momma. "And what does that damned space alien want from her? Eggs, that's all!"

Quinn loomed close to my parents. He smiled at Momma to be polite. "Please, come with me to the towel room," he ordered. Momma had to obey him. He'd proved himself far too powerful for her to fight.

Daddy followed them. He couldn't let Momma go alone.

I tried to stay awake, fighting the mist, trying to keep it from engulfing me.

Quinn returned to merge his head with mine. I tried to communicate my wish to die, for him to protect my parents and help them, not kill them. He said, "I am keeping them safe for you."

Quinn never lied, but keeping them safe had many meanings. Was I safe, locked in my dead body with a dying brain?

Another memory began to play like a movie in my mind.

Chapter 4

Life was quiet and boring after I graduated from high school. No one had suggested I go to college. All my friends went away or were busy with their lives. Not doing anything made me the weird, boring one. I didn't dare date in case I killed someone by accident. Daddy tried to tell me his heart attack had been a coincidence, but why risk anyone's life for a relationship doomed to end badly, even if it survived my first kiss.

Lustful longings plagued me during the day. They were worse in my dreams. All the time, a space alien listened to what I was thinking and dreaming, until I almost died from embarrassment.

I distracted him with music, playing classical from my mother's collection and country from my father's, anything with a driving beat that reminded me of the pulsing hum of space. Sometimes he sang along with the Toreador song from Carmen, and once I heard my voice singing the Habanera, which freaked me out because I didn't even know the words.

It was a long, rainy winter. When summer finally arrived I was happy to be alive, to feel the sun warm me. Deep inside I knew this was my last summer.

No voice from space argued with me. All I felt was a sad silence, as if I was being mourned before I died.

After a long afternoon watching the sunlight play on the ocean, I asked Quinn if he wanted to come for a drive with me. He said yes. He always tried to say yes to anything I asked of him.

I borrowed Daddy's antique convertible because we weren't going far. My father was out scuba diving with my mother. She didn't trust him not to drown. It gave them something to do, instead of watching me sleep the rest of my life away.

Quinn looked like an old-fashioned movie star dressed in his tuxedo. I felt guilty at my rush of lust when he got in the car. Lust and Quinn didn't go together. I bet Great Aunt Suzanne had her lustful and disappointing nights with him, if she'd ever tried to make him more than a friend.

I turned on the radio. It helped if I listened to music. The space alien didn't like me to drive, it made him nervous. Music filled my mind to lock him out. Funny, him worrying so much about me dying in car accident, when really I had not much longer to live.

Thinking about dying always silenced the one up there for a while, even though I knew my fate was my own fault, not Quinn's. I never accused either of them of killing me.

Sometimes I laughed to distract the one up there from my lustful thoughts, and sometimes I could feel him laugh with me at the weirdness of humans. An old, creepy song came on the radio, about some guy listening to every breath he ex-girlfriend takes. I tuned to a classical station, and my mother's Ride of the Valkyries blasted out. I turned it off. Silence and the blue summer sky were all I needed to be happy.

We drove on the private road because I wasn't taking Quinn far. We were just going to watch the sunset from the point. At Julie's house, a huge trailer blocked the road. It was too big to get down the narrow driveway. Inside the trailer, Julie's brother, Zavier, crouched in the dark shadows, picking through a box.

He came to look at us, though he stayed out of the low sunlight. He stood near the raised door to stare.

The pale beauty of his long Japanese face was marred by his flare of hate directed at Quinn. He looked like his posters, with wild, razor cut hair and a lean body, dressed only in torn jeans and a mocking expression. The way he stood there staring at us, was both a threat and a challenge.

Julie said he'd been adopted as a baby, after he'd been forgotten at their house by a sushi chef and his wife who'd catered a party for her parents.

Julie always lied.

The flat roof of their house was piled with gear. A bridge connected it to the road and a railing made the roof a dance floor under the stars. My parents didn't even allow me to visit the house when Julie was alone.

Even Julie didn't like to be there when Zavier held parties. Once, we'd watched from the beach until my father called us in. He'd locked all the doors and closed the storm shutters over the windows. It had been so scary that Momma let Julie stay with us for the night.

I turned the car carefully on the narrow road, not wanting any contact with Zavier. Quinn was all the protection I needed. For all I knew, I could kill people with my hand over their heart.

The other direction past my home took us on a long, looping drive down towards the town. Before we got off the private road, Quinn said, "He is watching us."

I'd been thinking of Julie's false brother and wondering if he'd moved in when he found out her parents were never home.

Before I had time to reply a voice spoke out of the sky, calling to me.

Quinn grabbed the wheel and knocked my foot off the accelerator to press on the brake and clutch. My ankle hurt. I thought maybe Julie's brother was playing a trick on us with the speakers for his band.

All the alien bits inside me suddenly began to dance, as if heavenly music called to me alone. The car wavered in the heat. The cliffs, ocean, and scrubby trees shimmered into nothingness.

My entire body disappeared. The car and Quinn were left on the road. I soared into the sky like an angel returning home, full of hope and glorious anticipation.

Higher and higher, faster and faster, not breathing, not alive, nothing but a streak of light in the dark heavens far beyond Earth's atmosphere. Far out past Saturn with its rings I hit a force coming towards me with a bolt of intense pleasure, like a huge rushing high, so high I knew I'd never want more than to stay with him, streaking through space forever.

My light collided with his, reversing my direction in a heart-stopping ripple that dissolved essence and held me caught inside him, engulfed in a light so bright that I felt I'd hit the burning sun.

I suddenly felt nothing. I was nothing. Just a silent light suddenly extinguished. Not sentient, not sacred.

Slowly, I began to regain my senses. He held me inside him. I felt him examine my memories, my body, and I didn't even care if he took the alien bits back and it killed me.

His light shimmered and pulsed in time to my racing heart.

From inside him I could see the rainbow of colors sending messages to the light stream. Space seemed to move and I lost the sensation of speed. I felt as if every particle of him sang to me alone. Not words. Light and love in a voice so perfect he touched my soul.

Tiny lights sparkled towards us. He kept them from touching us by slowing time to let them slip silently into our wake.

"They are looking for me." He spoke like Quinn with the same accent.

I wanted to drown in his voice. Every part of me vibrated to the sound of him.

Part of me wanted to understand him, as he understood me. "Why?" I asked. I meant everything in that one word. Every question in the universe.

"They are looking for my beacon. I am a time pilot. We are useful."

I was the danger because I was his beacon. No one could find him in space. They searched for the cosmic bookmarks he left to guide him back to planets. They searched for his beacon as it sent the ever changing trajectories he needed. Quinn knew enough to stay on Earth, while I knew nothing. I'd merged by accident. He didn't want me!

"I love you, Calista." His voice banished my fears. He wanted to be with me, to save me, to love me. He loved me! Me! I wanted to be with him, to be part of him, to live inside him for eternity.

Intense waves of love colored his light streams blue. I felt the shadows he tried to hide from me, the sorrow he felt at causing my death. I wanted to die there with him. If my essence could have stayed inside him, I'd have chosen to be with him until the end of time.

Pleasure so high it was unbearable to think of it stopping, suddenly stopped. I hurtled towards Earth with his voice pulsing light within me to soften the shock of leaving him.

In the car my body thrashed in orgasmic release. I couldn't stop. Every breath, every movement set me off again until I curled in a quivering heap on the seat.

Quinn sat beside me, unmoved, as if he didn't know what my body was doing, or he didn't care. We were on the side of the road and I wished I was dead. I wanted more. I wanted it never to stop.

A shadow slid over me.

The urgent trembling spasms stopped. The hot core of my body chilled.

Julie's brother watched me from beside the car, blocking the light from the sunset. His strange leering expression frightened me. His mouth opened to taste the air, to smell me. Long canine teeth glinted in his mouth. Some people had teeth like that naturally, but there was nothing natural about him. He was a vampire.

Zavier gave a sneering laugh. The setting sun turned his dark hair red and gold. Flames of color snaked down the edge of his naked chest. He growled a threat, though I knew he didn't dare attack me, not with Quinn beside me.

Quinn dried my tears. I let him drive me home. "Don't cry, Calista. Terrestrial vampires have lost most of their powers."

It didn't matter to me what powers Zavier retained. My life was over.

All was gloomy, sad, dark and lonely here alone. I wanted to be with the time pilot. To live forever inside him. I made a conscious effort not to capitalize what he was. He was not an angel, a divine being, or a god, he was from another planet. A time pilot. The word planet somehow was wrong, but it was the only way to explain him.

"Shouldn't he be here by now?" I asked. "Saturn to Earth is nothing to a time pilot." Even I knew that.

"He is trying to slow down." Quinn drove us into the garage. "It is very difficult to do from light speed. Once he slows down enough to land, he must regrow to be with you, but he must also take care to descend correctly."

"In case he dies?" I couldn't bear the thought of him dying.

Quinn turned off the car. "In case he destroys your Earth."

Earth destroyed! Every emotion the opposite of love suddenly seethed inside me, fear, dread, and the awful realization that I might be the cause of my planet's destruction. The alien bits stopped me from moving, while they analyzed my emotions. I froze in the car, with Quinn guarding my body, watching over me.

The danger to my beautiful planet blew my mind into a jumble of loathing, mixed with all the lust and longing leftover from meeting the time pilot. I tried hard to control myself so I could move again. I watched the darkness grow, watched the bats hunt, hoped my parents didn't find me like this, and then at last I could move.

I knew immediately I got out the car that I had used a lot of energy. My alien bits worked harder to keep me alive. They decided to keep me breathing slowly while I was awake, and reduced my heartbeat to once a minute. Who needed a heartbeat when Earth was in danger? My stupid body didn't matter to me.

From the garage I went slowly to the storage space that had been Great Aunt Suzanne's bedroom. No one wanted to sleep there now. It took a while to climb the stairs to the top of the house. A window from floor to pointed ceiling gave a view of the bay. Moonlight rippled over midnight blue water, in harmony with the waves.

Quinn suddenly appeared beside me. I went to search the boxes.

"What are you doing?" he asked. Strange how he wanted to know something now. He usually never asked me questions. My jumbled emotions confused him. He spoke in code to the time pilot asking for instructions.

I found a box of photographs, among all the unwanted junk from our old house. Framed photos of Great Aunt Suzanne with Quinn had lined the walls of the music room when we'd moved in. Momma had wanted to throw them out, but Daddy said they were witnesses and we should keep them.

Quinn held the lid for me. Photo after photo of them together. Suzanne glowed with happiness and held Quinn's hand. He held her drink for her and sometimes she clutched someone else with her free hand. They weren't famous people. They looked like her cook, her gardener, the pool man, people who worked for her. In every photo she looked happy and something else, another emotion. Was it sated?

Did she look like me, all orgasmed out? Did she wait with Quinn because she loved Quinn? Or was she waiting for the time pilot?

She never looked at Quinn with adoring eyes. Her smile was kind, gentle, and slightly weird.

He gave me a photograph of them looking up at the sky together. I'd seen Quinn stare like that, wishing for it all to be over, like a finger craving to belong to a hand. I'd stared up at the sky with him. I'd been moved to tears. Great Aunt Suzanne just smiled her slightly loopy smile at him, the same smile she gave to everyone in every photo.

My body ached with the effort of searching the boxes. I needed to sleep, but the horror of knowing all life and even Earth itself might be doomed, kept me on my feet.

Anger and fear flared in reaction to the sudden knowledge that I was stupid not to die now to save my planet. If I died now, the time pilot had no reason to try to land, did he? I couldn't risk Earth, just because he wanted to get here to save me. My early death wasn't going to be his fault, or Quinn's. I played Buffy on the beach and killed myself. It was no one's fault.

I was a fearful idiot! I could see Quinn for what he was, and I yearned with all my heart and soul to merge into the time pilot, his space alien boss. I wasn't going to adore him and risk Earth, just because the alien bits were his! For all I knew it was the bits that loved him, not me. As for Great Aunt Suzanne. she was an idiot, too. Why hadn't she lived her life, loved a human, had children, or not, just done what she wanted instead of being content to hold Quinn's hand?

Quinn tried to hold my hand.

I slowly shook him off. "Never touch me again." I'd wanted to shout at him but the bits didn't allow it. I could only shout inside my head.

He protested, "We loved Suzanne. Why are you angry? Why are you blaming us? He will be careful when he lands."

"Did she love the time pilot?" My bet was the time pilot had that effect on everyone, love, adoration, lust.

"Suzanne never met him. Humans cannot meet him." Quinn gave a sad sigh. "She was lonely, like me. We were friends. People were always trying to steal from her, because she was wealthy and she liked to live here on the bay. They didn't dare harm her when I was with her, not even the vampires dared. She was human. Not like you."

"When is being _not human_ going to kill me," I asked. Stupid question! It didn't matter. "Take your bits back, now!" I tried to back him up against the wall so I could merge inside him.

He let me do it.

I had to look carefully to see his few light streams. He was a candle compared to the sun.

I spoke inside him, "Why won't you take them back?"

"Killing you is not possible. Not an option." He politely removed himself from me.

I heard my parents on the beach and went to look out the window. My mother carried my father in her arms. He was humming the intro to his crazy song about her to make her laugh.

They didn't need me, I only complicated their lives.

"Remove your bits," I ordered Quinn.

"I don't know how. You need the fixer. He can do it."

"Make the time pilot send the fixer."

"If I could make him do what I wanted, I wouldn't be here," Quinn said sadly. "Why do you want to die? Why do you want us all to die?"

"I am not his love slave." There I'd said it out loud. "I am not going to betray my planet. I am not a quisling!"

Momma tapped on the door. She'd heard us from the bay. She entered the room sniffing the air, scenting everything on me and from me. "Is Zavier here? Is it okay to kill him?"

Another of Momma's jokes. Zavier never dared come to our house and she'd never ask my permission to kill. She just wanted to make sure I was safe. I must be getting weirder because I liked her sense of humor. She looked at me with a mother's love. She wanted to destroy Quinn, Zavier, and the time pilot, to keep me safe.

Not that safe had any meaning for me.

Chapter 5

I had to get away. I worried my first independent decision might end the world, but Quinn told me he'd know when it was time for me to come home. Not that I intended to sleep and wait. I meant to waste all my energy in one last squandering riot of pleasure.

Without Quinn guarding me, I'd die from it. Solving my problem and Earth's at the same time. I knew he couldn't leave the deep to follow me.

No, to being a time pilot's love slave! No, to wasting my life waiting endlessly for an immortal being to claim my body and my planet! No, to interstellar orgasmic communication!

I fled to Harvard, trying to race away from my panic. Away from my fear of destroying Earth and all life on it. It took my mind off the wild dreams about bodiless sex with a time pilot, and the nightmares about Japanese vampires.

Mathematics was my entry to any university.

Answers just emerged in my head without me even understanding the questions with the part of my brain that used words. Equations wrote themselves.

When I wasn't in class I went out to see the fall colors, alone. What could I say to anyone? Hey, I'm here to save the world by killing myself. Why? I'm part space alien, and one day I might be the reason our planet is destroyed. Enjoy life now, who knows when it's all going to end.

The feeling that my death was coming sooner and sooner, grew with every day I lived. My body wilted. I fell down a lot. I had to remember how to breathe. Stupid illusions made me stare at all the atoms of paint on the walls. I fell in love with the color blue. My heart beat erratically, more than once a minute, whenever I saw blue sky. Sometimes a vision of Earth from space held me for hours. A glowing beautiful world I wanted out to touch and protect. My heart began to worry me. Every time it stopped I waited for it to start again, the human part of me afraid of dying alone.

I could feel the time pilot approach, feel the burning need to slow down, feel the pain it caused him. If he landed too soon, he'd destroy the planet. Visions of my blue planet looped endlessly in my brain. The ocean attracted him. I worried he'd drown. None of my thoughts were rational, nor were the sudden bursts of joy.

The time pilot laughed at my worries until I couldn't help laughing with him. I laughed freely for the first time in years. My legs unlocked. I fell down to writhe on the floor, giggling my delight, feeling his voice with every part of me.

My enormous rush of longing to merge with him hurt, until I wanted to scream and throw myself into the sky. I rushed there in my mind to search for him. Swishing through the air, feeling it caress me, wanting, searching, while more of me died.

I woke in a dreamy haze of passion, tired from all the orgasms. My body throbbed with the pulsing beat of space. The air shimmered and swirled with silvery streaks of light coming from the being beneath me. The time pilot lay on the floor under me, using my body to give him gravity. He glowed with light, not human at all. He looked like a beautiful, angelic Quinn composed of heavenly music and pulsing light.

"Don't die, Calista. I am here for you." His voice created threads of atoms streaming inside me.

He shared his light to make me part of him, without any pretense of being human. It helped ease the pain from my dying heart.

"Calista, not yet. Wait for me." He stroked my back with more hands than he should possess. "I need you. Help me to live here. Please."

"Where are you?" I asked with my last breath.

"Close. Almost slow enough." He spoke inside my body. Speaking was beyond me now. Breathing was something from my past life. Nothing worried me because he was here with me.

Another one of him reached through my back to touch my heart to stop it from hurting.

Flashing sparks suddenly made me translucent. The touch on my heart eased my path to death as I became a being scattering rainbows on the walls.

"He is my fixer, Calista. He is me."

More than one of him, only one of me. I forgot how to count, lost the ability to distinguish his many emanations. I wanted to love him forever. But he was hiding something from me in his thoughts. Dark thoughts hidden in the coded streams of light, like shadows in heaven.

He tried to comfort me, to distract me. "Forgive me, Calista. I want to be with you for the rest of time."

Light pulsed out of him to sweep over us in rapid intense colors, changing so fast I could only see them with the alien bits inside me. He spoke his strange language of love to me.

Unable to breathe, unable to talk, my body merged with his in a collision of color. We pulsed a dying silver together, until he lured the brilliant blues to soothe me.

The alien bits inside stopped burning. They fit into him with a sense of heaven, of returning home. I wanted to give them to him. I wanted to live inside him forever.

Only one of us was afraid.

It wasn't me, lost in love. I lived only to pulse with him, to flash silver and blue, surrendering to death.

I was one with him in silence. The hum from space muted as I drifted slowly to my human death. He glowed for me and said, "I have traveled through time and space to hold you."

My life ended.

He slowly faded away.

I was left on the floor unable to move or speak. My human life was over. My mind tried to hold my memories.

My father arrived with an ambulance. He drove my body the long miles across the country. alone with his undead daughter. The journey didn't rot me. A gray fog rolled into my brain to swallow my memory, leaving me lost in an unknown world.

I couldn't sleep, I couldn't wake.

Just before dawn, two vampires met the ambulance at a house on a bay. They wheeled the gurney down the long path to the beach. Nothing made any sense to me. Fear of the unknown filled me with dread.

The driver followed them until the female vampire turned to hold him. He was crying. I watched through my eyelids, afraid of the night. A vampire picked me up off the gurney as if he had the right to touch me. He walked on the ocean, carrying an undead human who wanted only to die, to be left in peace.

Vampires lined the bay to watch. In the distance, a long dock built on rocks echoed with their footsteps as they raced to the end of it. Far out over the water, they gathered silently to stare at us.

The vampire holding me knelt to push me under the surface. My lungs filled with saltwater. I couldn't feel if the water was warm or cold. I couldn't feel if it was wet.

It didn't cure the gray fog shrouding my mind. I watched the bubbles rising up through the dark water, the last of the air in my lungs.

Too bad it didn't kill me dead.

Chapter 6

I woke up in my own personal morgue. How long had I lain there lost in a gray fog? Quinn had pushed it away to restore my memory, but knowing why I was there didn't help me endure it. Time passed in strange ways, always slithering aside when I tried to count the minutes.

My parents were frozen in time, in the towel room. Daddy tried to keep the stake away from my mother's heart. He held it with all his strength to save her life, braced against the wall. Quinn had slowed their time to nothingness. The stake belonged to Daddy, but it was Zavier who had flung it at her heart. I could smell his scent on it. Momma stared at the stake, unable to move away from it, frozen in time and her own fear.

I heard Julie tiptoe in from the beach in a useless effort to evade detection. If I could hear her, so could Quinn. She cracked open the door to slip inside.

Her little hands shook as she uncapped a syringe. The needle entered my neck. I couldn't feel its sting. She pulled aside the pink sheet covering me to inject into my dead heart. "Calista," she whispered, "death can't be worse than this. Forgive me for killing you, someone has to do it."

My silent body waited for her poison to work. The only problem was death had many meanings, and none of them applied to me.

Eternity in the vampire morgue reminded me of the rubber toad I'd found on the beach, washed in for a brief rest on its endless journey in the ocean currents. Poor toad. Unable to move. Unable to rot. I'd buried it in sympathy for its fate, as Julie hoped to bury me.

Sleep, in the hope of death, crept over me.

Why was I always doomed to be disappointed?

I found myself downtown with Quinn in my father's antique car, only it looked all wrong. No substance, just facades all the way, windows without reflections, no weather. The people walked aimlessly as if none of them had anything to do, and the only vehicle on the road was ours.

Quinn gave a sad sigh as he pulled over outside my father's clinic. Nothing was real, except I was there, able to move, almost alive. Suddenly, the time pilot appeared to open the door for me. He looked at me with dying eyes streaming silver light. For a few glorious seconds I got lost inside him, blinded by his light, full of love and lust for him.

The time pilot left an emanation in his place and vanished, unable to hold the illusion for long. I wondered if the part of him he'd left was the fixer, but the alien bits told me the fixer worked inside me. How had it got there? I was afraid to move in case I squashed anything vital. The emanation laughed gently at me. A strange burst of energy gave me the power to laugh with him at my foolish human fears. We walked into the fake building together.

"Hello, Calista." The receptionist smiled and looked familiar, like a friend whose name I'd forgotten. "Doctor Terry is waiting for you." She opened the door to announce us, "The time pilot and Calista are here." She wasn't real. None of us were really there.

Daddy welcomed us into the room where he had lunch with me when I went to high school down the street. He looked wary and alert, not scared. It took a lot to scare Daddy. Somehow he knew he was still in the towel room, holding the stake away from Momma's heart, while he was also here with us.

Daddy shook hands with the time pilot. My father wanted to touch him to see if he was real. "Please, sit on the sofa together."

We sat close together on the sofa in the fake room, the emanation's arm round my waist.

He smiled politely at my father. "I am sorry you are locked in time. Don't worry, it will be over soon." He spoke like Quinn, only with more emotion, as if he was truly sorry, not just saying the words.

"What exactly will be over?" asked my father.

"Our lives. Calista can only live a few more hours. We die with her."

Far away, Quinn gave a mournful sigh.

Daddy asked, "Can't you save her?"

"You don't understand. The pilot is in worse condition than your daughter. No one survives space travel. It's impossible to survive it--impossible to be in any condition to live in gravity."

"You are not him?" Daddy hid his surprise well.

"We are all part of him. I am the most of him he can send to talk to you. Think of me as his soul. Please try to understand and endure these last hours of our lives."

"Why does Calista have to die with you? I am sure she'll agree to donate an egg for you to use." My father gave a reassuring smile, as if offering my eggs was a normal human activity.

"Calista is dying," said the soul. "We love her and must save her. Please understand, Quinn can't release Momma until it's over, and the time pilot fears what you might do. I am here to warn you, if you kill him, Calista dies with him."

"So you hold my daughter hostage for my good behavior!" My father rolled his chair nearer to the soul. He explained slowly, "We'd both gladly die to save our planet."

"The time pilot wants you both to live." The soul tried a benign smile. He managed to look angelic and hurt at the same time.

My father got closer to the soul. A human would have recoiled from the expression on his face.

No sooner had I thought it than the soul leaned away from him.

Daddy took a shuddering breath. "How many of you are coming here? Is this the start of an invasion? Do you want world domination? Is he going to kill everyone on the planet to claim it for himself?"

"The time pilot's search for sentient life is not to kill you. What use is an empty universe?" The soul laughed softly at my father. "You live in heaven here on Earth. Time and space are one and endless. Lonely even for us. He has come here to die with you at last, not to live forever. If you must try to kill him, do it when he is mostly human and Calista has been regrown. That is all he asks of you."

"What do you mean by regrown?" asked Daddy. He couldn't resist hope, not while the pilot's soul talked so calmly of impossibilities for a human.

"We love Calista. She may not love me after being regrown, after she is no longer part of us. Killing me will be easier when we know we are not loved." The soul muddled his pronouns.

I felt him tiring from the effort to appear human. My body half merged into his. At the edges where we joined light leaked out.

"Why does the time pilot want to live here on Earth?" asked Daddy, as he tried not to react to what he was seeing.

"You are highly sentient. Most corporeal beings forage for food as they try to escape being eaten. They cannot imagine anything else is important, except killing rivals, mating, and raising another generation." The soul had just described human activities.

Daddy thought so too. He changed the subject. "How many time pilots are there?" he asked in his neutral voice.

"Only the ones far out in space survived the big bang, as you call it," said the soul. "They will come here if they are close enough to pick up the signal from the beacon."

He had not answered with numbers. To a multiple being, numbers are not of prime importance as they are to humans. If the time pilot needed to make an army of his emanations, he had the power to do it.

"How many?" My father waited for his answer.

The time pilot denied knowledge through his soul. "We don't know."

Daddy gave me a sad smile. "I love you." A tear trickled down his cheek.

I suddenly heard Momma in the distance, wailing, shrieking a warning.

"We are sorry Calista is dying," said the soul. "Don't you want her to live? She will be regrown with him. Is that so hard for you to understand? I know you don't do it here, but it is normal for us. The time pilot has been regrown several times."

"But will she be human?" asked Daddy.

The soul said, "Human enough."

Daddy didn't try to argue about his answer. "How does the time pilot control the space craft when he is a child?" Daddy wiped his eyes and listened intently.

"A child cannot pilot. We are regrown to adult size. Our memories are stored in an emanation, like me, which merges to let him regain all the knowledge he needs."

Daddy looked hopeful. "My daughter's memories?"

"The time pilot has them, but Quinn thinks he is guarding her mind because parts of him need fixing. He won't let us do it because he fears to lose her. We cannot force him. He was given powers to survive on Earth. They cannot be given back until he merges with the time pilot."

"If Quinn doesn't merge, then you all die?" asked Daddy.

The alien turned into a dragon made of pulsing light.

He gave a low dragonish roar. "It is difficult to hold her mind. She thinks I'm a dragon because Quinn played at dragons with her."

My head drooped through the time pilot's soul, back to the gurney. My body sprawled unmoving as it always did. Zavier leaned over me, so close his breath cooled my neck.

Fear sent electric shocks to limbs that didn't move. My lungs were full of saltwater. Fingers on my temples sent me back into the dream, leaving me at the vampire's mercy--only Zavier had no mercy for me.

I cried out in the dream world of my father's office, "Stake him, Daddy! Kill him!"

The look of horror on my father's face broke my heart. He faded away, leaving me on the gurney, alone with Zavier.

The vampire stripped the sheet from my body. He bent his head to bite my breast.

Julie ran into the vampire morgue. She leapt over me to snap his head back. I hoped she'd broken his neck, but no such luck. He just let her cover me with the pink sheet. I didn't want to be naked, not when I could hear them coming. His friends were on our beach.

Vampires approached the house to surround us. Julie straightened the sheet over me. As if that made any difference. "Don't get them excited," she warned Zavier, "or you'll have nothing to bargain with."

My mind looped away to spin with endless screams for Julie's poison to work. For any end, except the vampire option.

Thin, like emaciated drug addicts, the vampires surged into the freezer room. They were Zavier's fans and friends, who were never allowed in our house or on the beach.

They drifted warily around me. I watched through my eyelids. I didn't want to be a vampire. I didn't want to be one of them.

Julie whispered in my ear, "We are taking you somewhere safe, where you can die in peace."

Zavier's friends grasped the gurney to wheel it out the door. They pushed too hard. It crashed open the towel room door opposite. Julie caught the gurney before it hit the shelves stacked with beach towels.

Momma stood against the wall with Daddy's stake sticking out of her chest. She darted her eyes towards me. Julie gave a dance of shock. The vampires laughed as they raced away, glad it wasn't them staked to the wall.

"What happened?" Julie asked.

"Terry let go of it."

"Never mind that!" cried Julie. "Come with me. We have to hide Calista until we can negotiate a deal."

"I'm dead!" snarled my mother. "What part of a stake sticking out of my chest do you not understand?"

"It won't kill you!" Julie gave a shrug. She reached up to pluck the stake out. "It got stuck in the wall and you were too scared to move. Come on, we have to do something before the alien can regrow."

Momma felt her chest. She moved her body and gave a ferocious growl. "My husband has gone to save the planet from invaders. I'm going to bite my daughter." She bent over me. "It won't hurt much, I promise."

"Venom doesn't work, I tried it," said Julie.

My mother turned vengefully on her.

Julie escaped to shelter on the far side of the gurney. "Don't look at me like that, Quinn let me do it. I gave Calista a syringe full of venom with no effect at all. It didn't work. Nothing happened. Look!" She pointed at me, the silent corpse between them. "It's too late. Calista is dying."

My mother touched me with love. "My daughter wants to die, not to live forever. She is just like her father. You shouldn't have done it, Julie, but I'm glad you tried. Better Calista hates you, not me, with her last thought!" Momma pushed the gurney out of the towel room. "And don't think I forgive you for biting me. You are a vampire brat!"

Julie followed us. "Brat! I am over a hundred! I didn't ask to be a vampire, even if I think it's kind of cool now I'm used to it. I don't bite people much."

"You bit me, Julie, because you wanted a mother." The gurney rolled up the hallway, past the vampire morgue. Saltwater sloshed in my lungs. Neither of them noticed Zavier hovering above me, near the ceiling, his hands and feet pressed against the walls.

"Biting you did help me at all," whined Julie.

"Yes," agreed Momma. "Vampires don't make good mothers when they are trying to mother a child who wants to grow up to be a vampire slayer. Damn Buffy!" She put an arm round Julie's shoulders. "Okay, I forgive you. Now where can we hide Calista, before I rip you apart and burn the bits." She sniffed the air.

"Very funny! We don't have time for jokes." Julie jiggled my body to distract my mother. "Zavier's gone. Let's get Calista out of here. Where did Quinn go?"

I knew but I couldn't say. He was in the deep waiting for the time pilot. If my mother hid me from him, would it put Earth in peril? I had some beacon bits inside me. If the time pilot landed wrong because of me, all life perished. Warning her not to move me was impossible. No one was listening to me.

The knowledge my life was nearly over didn't comfort me. Not if I took the world with me! Even the nearly dead can fear how they'll die.

I listened to the sudden babble of voices. The time pilot argued with his emanations.

"Calista is dying. We cannot fix her. Without energy she cannot survive. What she wants is irrelevant. Take her, use her. You have no more choice about it than she does." The fixer stated the obvious.

"Arguing with myself uses too much energy," said the time pilot. "All the arguments are mine alone."

"You have to be with her," said his soul. "Dreams are not reality for her."

"I have not much energy left." Quinn in his quiet way, summed up without emotion his simple solution. "Meet her. Ask her. We cannot live here without Calista agreeing to die with us."

"The beacon on the arm of the galaxy will draw the others soon." The time pilot's voice wavered with stress and pain. "We must not delay. If Calista does not agree, I die with her. Quinn, you must use my energy to meet the first and help him."

"I want to die with Calista," protested Quinn.

A stream of coded light almost fried my brain. The alien bits inside suddenly glowed through my skin.

Julie screamed at the light show. My mother scooped me off the gurney. She raced to the beach to dunk me in the ocean.

My body steamed in the shallows. She took me out deeper to push me under. Julie sat on me to help her.

The time pilot called, "Merge for descent."

Chapter 7

I woke up on the gurney inside Julie's house. The great room was lit with glowing sticks. Zavier and his friends wore glowing necklaces. Julie, unadorned, stood on a chair next to me to pack ice over my steaming, glowing torso, to stop the alien bits searing my undead body. My dying light reflected on her skin, turning her silver and gold.

My mother threw a female vampire through Julie's glass doors, out to the deck covering the rocks. The vampire landed lightly on her feet. Shards of tempered glass spun over her head like a peacock's tail, stained blue and green with light from her glowing necklaces.

Zavier laughed and his sycophantic friends laughed with him, even the ones who had not seen and did not care. He led the shouting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

My mother disappeared under a hail of vampire bodies. They groped her more than they fought her, but she couldn't rise from the floor, not while they mobbed her.

Quinn appeared next to me, faded, nearly out of energy. He brushed the ice off me to straighten the pink sheet covering my body.

Zavier gave a cry of triumph at the sight of him. "Dear Calista, why does no one save you?" He snarled a threat at Quinn. "Let me bite her for you." He held my arm outstretched for his teeth to slip easily into a vein.

"Don't be an idiot!" Julie smacked him on the chest. "Calista has enough venom in her to change half the world to vampires." She decorated me with his glowing necklaces, as if a glowing stomach wasn't enough. "Don't waste time! Go ask him, Zavier, please go," she begged. She ran to the doors to tear them off their hinges to clear the way for the gurney.

What Julie wanted to ask the time pilot would have to wait. He had not landed. Earth still existed. I was still waiting to die.

Zavier pushed the gurney out over the broken glass. The dock jutted along a rocky point, almost to the deep. A moonless night made the stars brighter. Up on the roof glowing necklaces twinkled in ever changing clusters.

Each wooden post on the dock glowed with a circle of light. Far in the distance, an eager Julie led the way. If she wanted to trade me for something useful, I didn't mind. The only thing she'd ever wanted was to grow and have an adult body. My dying bits rejected the idea as impossible, but hope was sometimes all anyone had to live on.

A ghostly Quinn walked beside me to guard my useless body. His tuxedo held its shape only at his shoulders, it wafted with every breeze from the bay. His weakness persuaded some of Zavier's friends to follow us. Their dark clad figures melted into the night as they climbed the rocks alongside the dock. Only their faces and teeth reflected their glowing necklaces, like beings without bodies.

A streak of light sizzled into the dark sky with a series of sonic booms. It aimed for us, getting bigger as it neared us. The entire sky lost all its stars as the time pilot neared. Night became day, so bright it hurt my undead eyes. Everyone hid their faces from it. Only Quinn turned to stare. I had no choice but to watch it, while I prayed for the safety of my planet.

Blinding light flashed streams of code with a fiery heat that scorched the edges of the sheet covering me and singed my hair. I wanted to scream a warning to my father, the only human near enough to die from it. I prayed he survived and I worried what Momma had done to him to stop him from being here with me.

The time pilot plunged into the ocean. The sky darkened, time stood still. A whirlpool formed where he hit, to drag the swirling water down with him. Light flashed up to the heavens in a single focused beam. An enormous water spout shot up from the deep to engulf it, until both light and water fell back into the ocean.

A strange noise pulsed up from the deep to calm the vibrations, to deaden the recoil to a deep resonating bass sound. I felt the gurney shaking under me. The long dock rattled against the rocks. The vampires raised their heads, silent and awed by a power greater than theirs.

Crows burst into the night sky, squawking a warning. Fish leapt out, great schools of them fleeing away, as the water moaned a strange unearthly sound.

The ocean slowly stilled to leave choppy, bouncing wavelets splashing against the dock.

The time pilot exulted in the deep. The bay glowed silvery green with his light. He called to me, and my body shuddered its desire to go to him.

Earth had survived! We were safe, life had not ended. I had not doomed my planet. My brain went crazy with joy. I didn't even care if I died now or later. The bits inside me suddenly stopped glowing their dying silver and gold. They streamed rapidly changing colors of the rainbow, illuminating the steam rising from my body.

Suddenly, the fixer emerged from inside me. His appearance startled the watching vampires. They screamed and fled to join their friends on the roof terrace.

Only Zavier stood his ground. For a moment he teetered perilously close to the edge of the dock, where silver water fizzed up to wet us with a fine spray. It revived Quinn. He wheeled me slowly along the dock, taking no notice of the fixer merging inside to work on me.

Zavier walked with us. "Pay homage to me and I'll let you share Earth."

Did he think he ruled the world?

The fixer emerged to say to Quinn, "I must give you both more energy, or we fail."

Zavier jumped to stand on the gurney, his feet on either side of my waist. "If you acknowledge me as your lord and master, and put your power under my command, I shall let you use Calista's eggs."

The fixer ignored Zavier, to merge inside me again.

"After the pilot is reborn, you can talk to him," said Quinn politely. He pushed the gurney slowly along the dock.

Zavier gave an evil smile. "He can't be reborn, if I destroy her eggs."

The time pilot called to me in his language of light. I wanted to go to him, to merge with him, to live inside him forever in a feverish glow of hormones. Quinn gave a sad sigh, he felt the same way. It made me laugh inside my head and calmed my lustful human urges. Why had the fixer bothered fixing those?

As we neared the deep, the sheet covering me flapped in the wind from the ocean. Quinn wrapped the pink cloth round my naked body in a semblance of clothing to stop it from blowing away.

The bravest vampires gathered near us on the rocks.

All I knew was that I must go to the time pilot. I wanted to die with him, to love him for one last time. The soaring urge to merge with him ached in my dying human brain.

Zavier jumped off the gurney to block the way along the dock.

Quinn pushed until Zavier had to hold on to my feet and ride along with me. "You do not love Calista," accused Quinn as he faded from draining his energy to win.

"Love her?" shouted Zavier. "You stupid idiots! You've killed her! You've sacrificed her, so you can use her eggs to grow into human form. How dare you accuse me of not loving her? I want to give her life, not death!"

"Calista does not want to be a terrestrial vampire." For Quinn that was all he needed to know.

"The time pilot cannot live here unless you swear to do my bidding," said Zavier. "You won't survive in human form if I am against you. Pay homage to me and I'll make life easy for you. I know what you need and how to get it."

The fixer left my body. He disappeared without speaking. Fixer's knew nothing, they never argued.

Quinn said, "Calista's eggs have been removed by the fixer to keep them safe."

"What?" Zavier pulled the scorched sheet from my body.

My mother swooshed out of the water beside him. She gripped him by the head to twist it so he stared at her. With her fingers she wrenched out his long canine teeth that looked so much like fangs. She threw them on the rocks, and with a kick on the side of the dock that almost knocked me off the gurney, she fell with him into the ocean.

Saltwater sprayed over my useless body.

Julie picked up Zavier's teeth from the rocks. She ran back along the dock to throw them through the broken doors. She set the house on fire. Flames roared up to the railing on the roof, where waiting vampires watched.

They weren't afraid of fire. They cheered and danced in the shooting sparks. Some of them jumped off, drawn closer to watch.

The time pilot's voice tickled inside me, "Calista, wait to die with me."

My mother fought Zavier in the bay. They breached like whales, throwing huge plumes of white spray against the night sky.

My body had already changed, my details smoothed out, my nipples were no more than a faint smudge of pink. An alien skin covered me in a vaguely human shape. My navel had disappeared. Quinn made a new one with his fingertip. I was too close to death to worry about being naked. My mind wanted to be with the time pilot at the end.

The fixer appeared next to Quinn. "Take Calista to him now, she is dying. He says, you must do this or we all die with her."

"Death is not the worst fate Calista can suffer," said Quinn. "Dying with her is better than forcing her to live against her will."

"Then you gamble both lives for her agreement." The fixer stated the obvious.

"She must agree. And to agree she must see him."

"You don't have enough energy to take her there," said the fixer. "If you use it all, she'll die down there with him. Let me merge with you. Take my energy to save her."

"I have enough." Quinn showed no emotion. He faded to a shadow of himself. "Give Calista your energy."

My body felt the energy pulse in my not human cells, the ones still laboring to keep me alive. The fixer merged inside me to give me strength. I waggled my toes for the first time since my orgasmic death.

Quinn smiled his triumph. "You have enough energy to resist the time pilot, if you decide you don't want to share your life with him. Fixer's are easy to fool, they know nothing."

Chapter 8

Flames roared through the house, engulfing it all, painting the rocks a flickering golden red.

Momma emerged from the water to help Quinn push the gurney to the end of the dock. She wanted to come with me, but he shook his head. A kiss from my mother and one last stroke of my cheek to comfort me.

Quinn stepped off the dock with me in his arms. We sank under the surface. The saltwater caressed my body, but I couldn't feel it as water. It felt like air, like space, not dense or watery. We descended to the deep with a school of fish darting close, curious. Down into darkness, following the rock face, deeper and deeper. The fish dashed away to patrol the perimeter of a glowing light, like a giant fisheye swaying in the current. They stared at it, with their fins waving in unison as if hypnotized.

I felt the same pull, the fierce need to see. The time pilot called to me in his strange language of light. Quinn released me. His energy faded away to leave his clothes slowly rising towards the surface far above us.

My pliant body felt intoxicated by the saltwater. The ability to move brought such pleasure that I wanted to live forever. The slippery surface of the giant glowing sphere caught me. My fingers tried to cling to it, but I could only slide down helplessly. Inside, the time pilot turned towards me.

He looked like a glowing Quinn, without any illusion of mass. Slowly, he reached for me. I sank down, trying desperately to glue myself to the soft bubble of light. His hand reached through to hold my knee, to stop my descent.

With the energy he gave me, I pressed my body against the strange shield he'd created.

Bubbles rose, swirling up from the deep to stick to me. They caught in my hair and on my alien skin, threatening to carry me upwards. I clung on with the last of my energy. Suddenly, my body slid inside the sphere, leaving the bubbles outside to rise to the surface far above us.

Daddy rose from the deep in his wetsuit. Air hissed from the tank on his back. He glared fiercely through his goggles and clutched a spear-gun in his hand.

He was too deep to survive. My father wanted to die with me.

My body thrashed in the stinging liquid. I could feel it start to eat through my alien skin. The time pilot caught me. He was only an image of a man made of silver light.

My body merged into him where we touched. The stinging stopped. Peace began to seep through me.

Daddy peered at us. He looked deranged. He tapped on the surface of the fisheye with one hand. He tried to knock on it with his spear-gun. With a blast of bubbles he sank out of sight.

The fisheye began to rock. Daddy was trying to dislodge us. The time pilot's shape shifted and blinked. He moaned a stream of light and wanted me to merge entirely into him.

Instead of merging, I pressed my hand against the fisheye wall. Daddy rose in a cloud of bubbles to place his hand on the other side. Love for my father streamed through me to the time pilot and to Daddy. I blew him a kiss. My final act before I merged to end my life.

Trust in the time-pilot was the only gift I had to give.

It felt good, not like death, as I slipped away. It felt like life. Living in peace forever, merging into heaven, one light stream at a time.

Poor Daddy wept inside his goggles.

Zavier appeared behind him. He pulled my father away and pointed up. With the one lungful of air he retained, he bubbled at my father, "Go up slowly, decompress."

Daddy shook his head.

Zavier growled, "Idiot!" with a lungful of water.

The fisheye rose slowly towards the surface with Daddy clinging to one side and Zavier to the other.

They guided us to the shallow water, towards Momma and Julie. Daddy shouted to them, "Where is Quinn?"

They pointed to a body floating in the water, face down, wearing Quinn's tuxedo. My father hurried over with us bobbing behind him, slowly dissolving.

"I think they are both dead in that thing, but there is a chance they are being regrown," said Daddy. "I don't know what to do! If he lives, do I try to kill him before he gets his memory back? There are other time pilots coming here. What do we do? What good does it do to kill him? Maybe we need him alive to help us learn to live with them. I can't kill Calista. She was so happy with him. I risked Earth for our child."

Momma hugged Daddy.

The fisheye cracked loudly. It hissed, but I wasn't inside.

Fog rolled into my mind. Every molecule of water hurt where the oxygen atom touched me. Me in multiples of me. Sound deafened me. The rising light of the moon blinded me. My body started to disintegrate.

"Calista's dissolving!" Zavier leapt out of the water to get away from what was left of my human body.

I watched the flesh fall away into tiny particles of sea food for the fish. I watched them eat me. My bones dissolved into nothing but chalk and a few chemical traces. Nothing left. Nothing.

"Where is the time pilot?" She climbed on Zavier's back to peer over his shoulder into the water. "Are they both dead?"

Daddy waded about in the shallow water, searching for us. He winced in pain, and had to stop to rub his eyes.

"They can't be dead!" Momma howled her grief over the bay to the watching vampires on the long dock.

My father searched underneath me.

It disturbed my lungs. I coughed.

"Suzie, help me get Quinn out!" He held my head out of the water so I could breathe.

My mother carried me to the beach, to leave me with my head and shoulders on the sand. She went back for my father, who knelt in the water as if he couldn't move. He asked her to guard Quinn while he searched for me.

They didn't know who I was.

Was this me for eternity, unable to move or speak? Panic sent me into rapid distress. I couldn't breathe. The air in my lungs hurt, breathing hurt. Air felt toxic.

The fixing didn't hurt at all. I felt good! I felt sparkling!

The fixer emerged in human form to stop Daddy from trying to give me mouth to mouth.

"Are you Quinn," Daddy asked the fixer.

"No, he is," said the fixer, pointing at me. "They are not out of danger yet. Cool them with saltwater, please."

"Calista has been reborn?" Daddy stared at me. "Like that? Good God!" He winced in pain as he scooped water over me.

"I am not God," said the time pilot inside my head.

The fixer merged to stop me from rupturing the new cells. I was not me. I was not a single person able to live my life. I was the most insignificant facet of a multiple being from space!

How was I going to get out? The time pilot held me gently inside him to keep me safe. I needed him to help my father before he died of the bends. Poor Daddy had gone too deep and come up too fast.

Julie and Zavier came over to stare down at me. He said, "I tried, Julie."

I took a shuddering breath.

The time pilot rose to his feet. I stood up because he took me there, to feel sand between my toes, to wonder at the feel of lapping water at my ankles. I was inside him. All the light streams ran between his cells and mine, and out of his eyes. He was not really human at all, and neither was I, not anymore.

Momma kept looking at me hopefully while she helped Daddy take his scuba tank off. He didn't want to let her have the spear-gun but he was not strong enough to stop her. Two of his fingers snapped. He never felt it, not while the bends twisted his body and destroyed his sight.

"Terry, go back down! Decompress slowly!" She checked his air. "Tell me you have another tank!"

Daddy shook his head. He collapsed at my feet. Momma gave a scream of anguish. She pointed the spear-gun at me. "Save him or you all die!"

Chapter 9

Daddy lay on top of the grand piano in the music room. Dead. Momma stood over us with the spear-gun, which would have been funny in another life. If she couldn't kill Quinn with her vampire strength, how was the spear-gun going to frighten the time pilot?

His voice answered my unspoken question, "Momma can kill you by mistake."

I wasn't worried. My emotions were kept in check by knowing the fixer worked inside Daddy, and with the time pilot holding my mind in a strange duality. The shock of being suddenly corporeal made him silent and still. He wore Quinn's tuxedo and I wondered where my friend had gone. I hoped he'd survived. There was no sign of him inside with me.

The time pilot glowed in the dark room. His light examined everything, lingering on my father, sounding notes on the piano, coding them, while he gave orders to the fixer. His eyes were shut, but who needed eyes to see? Not us.

The fixer emerged from my father to get more energy, not a good sign. The time pilot reached out to touch the fixer's fingers. A bolt of energy passed between them to make me gasp with shock. My head briefly emerged from the time pilot's chest. He stopped me from calling to my mother, who was looking at my father. Instead, he sent Quinn out.

My friend had no clothes to wear. He appeared naked down to just below his shoulders, with a blank area between there and where his legs started at his knees.

Momma recognized him. She ignored the missing parts. "Where is Calista?"

"Don't shoot her. She is inside the time pilot." Quinn took the spear-gun away from my mother.

"Why won't she come out? Is he holding her prisoner?" Momma stared at the light pulsing from us, scattering over her and everything in the room. "Isn't he supposed to be human now?"

"He is Earth drunk," said Quinn in his emotionless way. He opened the sliding doors. "He must fly it off."

We soared skyward into the heavens. Free to fly.

My naked beacon, clad in rainbows to hide the embarrassing bits, stood next to Quinn, holding his hand. Momma thought it was me, but it was really only a shadow of my real self, without emotions or much sense.

It pleased Momma to see it, and after Quinn told her I must recover from being reborn, she went back to Daddy's side to hold his hand.

The time pilot flew to find clouds. We were a streak of light in the dawn sky, like a high jet trail. The cool vapor hid us and stroked our light streams. My body slowly emerged from his light, high above the ocean as the sun rose.

I gripped an invisible being, afraid of falling. He turned into a beautiful Quinn with all the knowledge of the universe in his alien eyes. There wasn't much room for both of us inside the tuxedo.

He left it for me to wear. I flew with a naked man, who was not wearing anything at all except for giant wings and rainbow underwear. The wind ruffled his feathers. He wrapped them tightly around me to keep me warm and stroked me with the tips of his angel wings. The rainbow underwear tingled where it touched me.

He laughed a wonderful sound. "I remember, Calista, naked human bits are not allowed. Underwear is good."

I laughed with him, feeling weightless and fearless. We flew together inside the clouds with our light streaking them all the colors of the rainbow.

"Are you an angel?" I felt blissful. Surely I had to be in the arms of an angel.

"No, I am not an angel." His wings turned dark and bat-like, with leathery skin and a sharp claw where they folded. "I am not a bat." He turned into an eagle, and stooped downwards headfirst with me clinging on, wrapped in his wings. "I am not a bird."

We swooped back up into the clouds to brighten them with his angel wings and human form.

I tried an easier question. "Do you have a name?"

He stopped flying. "Quinn. You named me."

"I named your beacon."

"I am the beacon, the fixer, my soul, all of them are me. I am Quinn." He smiled at me and looked almost human. "The question you need to ask is, what am I?"

The clouds grew darker as he stopped emitting light. A flash of lightning seared down to the ground. He held me carefully, as if I had the power to hurt him, and whispered, "I'm sorry Calista. If I could change what I am, I'd do it for you."

I stroked his naked chest. He looked like one of the underwear men I'd admired so much in high school. I remembered my mother's warning about them being vampires.

"What are you?" I asked, totally unafraid of his answer. Whatever he was, I wanted to be with him forever.

He smiled sadly at me and held me closer to whisper, "I am a vampire."

An extraterrestrial vampire! It couldn't be true! I struggled to be free. A vampire! One powerful enough to end all life on Earth, stronger than any of the others here. Now he was on my planet that meant he was a terrestrial vampire like Momma, Zavier and Julie, only he could fly. Humans were nothing but prey to him.

He wanted to live here, and I had helped him do it. Was I a vampire, too? I knew I'd never be human again, but I wanted to be someone good. I wanted to harm no one and hurt no one. I wanted to be as angelic as he looked. I wanted to be good, not evil.

"Calista, I am not like terrestrial vampires. We have no need to eat. Seawater is enough to take me to the end of time for this planet."

"Who is we?" I asked with growing horror.

"We is me," he said, but inside him dark shadows hid the truth.

I pushed myself out of his arms. He let me do it. I'd been regrown as a terrestrial vampire! I'd crave human blood and live as a blot on humanity, forever. The ground beckoned me. From this height, surely even a vampire could hope to die.

He fell with me. Down and down, faster and faster until I reached terminal velocity. He slowed to match my speed.

We fell into the ocean, far out in the middle of the Pacific, without a splash, alive.

The time pilot was Earth drunk, I became saltwater intoxicated. We made love like extraterrestrial vampires, with endless orgasms of pulsating light.

I was alive and wanted the pleasure to never end. No memories or knowledge troubled me or made me doubt my right to live. I remembered only that I loved him with every stream of light between my human cells.

Creatures from the deep rose to watch us, attracted by the strange glowing beings merging and emerging. The oarfish, with its regal upright posture, swam closest to peer at us with curious eyes. Long tentacles reached up towards us from the black void.

We flew home to escape a giant octopus caress. To live happily meant embracing my vampire lover and accepting myself as one of them. When the glow of sensual love wore off, could I accept this new reality? He couldn't keep me love intoxicated forever, could he?

The time pilot laughed at my questions. "Yes and yes." We swooped down low over the bay, warm in the sunshine. "We can never be terrestrial vampires. We are us, together." He kissed me like humans do. "I'll love you until the end of time, Calista."

We landed in a flurry of light in the music room, a blur to everyone. My beacon wore clothes chosen by my mother. The prom dress I'd never worn, a slinky charcoal sheath covering everything but my arms, and the long red gloves she'd added to protect my date, if I'd decided to risk any boy's life to attend.

I merged into my beacon to leave the tuxedo for the time pilot.

My father sat on the edge of the grand piano, alive, but not human.

Julie knelt beside him, looking like an old-fashioned porcelain doll.

Momma held his hands. They all knew the instant I merged with my beacon, even Daddy.

Instead of standing dumbly near the piano, I went to sit next to him, to hug him for the first time since I'd killed him long ago. "Hey, Daddy, how are you feeling?"

"Surprisingly good!" He looked happier and healthy. The fixer had made the change easy for him. "How about you?"

"Part of the evil empire." I shrugged as if it didn't matter, and peeled off the gloves. There was no use freaking out about it. I asked, "Who bit you?"

Julie gave a squeak of fear. She leapt off the piano to run to Zavier, who was trying to look innocent near the door. He let her hide behind his back.

I should have known everything that had happened from my beacon, but my mind was not able to do it. The human part of me limited my power. My beacon only knew she was glad I'd returned.

My mother broke the silence. "I tried to do it but Terry was immune to me, so I asked Julie to bite him. It was the only way to save his life." She gave her wicked laugh. "Poor Zavier wanted to do it and couldn't."

Julie held her brother's hand. "I like him better defanged."

Momma scoffed, "His teeth will grow back, didn't you know that? I've pulled mine out many times. What kind of a vampire are you, Julie! You bit Zavier, you bit me, and you must be happy we begged you to bite Terry. Tell us, who bit you?"

"I don't know." Julie turned to the time pilot. "Do you know? I want to grow, can you help me? No terrestrial vampires bite children. Was it one of you?"

I waited for the answer with shivers in my empty stomach.

Quinn came out of the time pilot to hold my hand. It helped. Even though I knew he was only a beacon, he was my friend.

The time pilot knelt down to talk to Julie face to face. "Yes, it was one of us. We set off at the same time for Earth. He was nearer. After he landed, I could not read his signal. Even now, I can only read it in your code. He must be in stasis. If you are regrown with him, you'll be an adult. But it won't be easy, and it won't work unless you have two viable eggs."

Julie looked hopefully at me.

"Sorry, I have no eggs." I didn't know how I knew it, I just did.

Julie threw herself into the time pilot's arms. "Please, make Calista give me two eggs," she begged.

The time pilot sent the fixer to me. He merged into my body and as quickly left me.

"What were you doing?" I demanded.

The time pilot said, "The fixer put the rest of your eggs back."

My mind went into a loop of little glowing babies that grew up to live forever. But I didn't even know if I'd actually made love with anything except my mind and the time pilot's. From now on I'd have to be careful.

The time pilot smiled at my confusion. He only knew one way to make love to me and it wasn't with his body, though he looked interested in learning how it worked for humans. He said inside my head, "Please, teach me, Calista. Isn't that what freaky dangling space alien bits are for?"

I laughed out loud. Giggles of delight, as I tried not show my lustful, hormone drenched thoughts on my face. He half-merged with me to enjoy my laughter. No one seemed to think it an odd sight after all we had been through.

"Calista, please, please let me have two eggs," begged Julie. "You have hundreds of thousands. Please, please, I want to grow up. I've been stuck like this for over a hundred years." Julie begged with her pleading, pathetic expression.

I was a pushover for pathos. "Sure. What's two more for the evil empire."

Epilogue

Rain spattering on the roof woke me up. I reached out of Quinn's chest to gently push on the ceiling, to send us drifting down towards the bed.

Not that he ever slept in it. While I dreamed and recovered from endless orgasms, he held me and listened to the hum of space.

I was reluctant to emerge for my warm place inside him. At first I'd insisted on sleeping with covers, like humans did, then I'd tried lying on top of him to weight him down. Now I merged to sleep with Quinn.

I'd finally accepted the time pilot using that name. He was my lover and my friend. The happy glow lasted through every hour of every day. I'd seen no sign of him wanting world domination and I adored living my endless life next to his. Though I still had to make him let me out when he wanted to protect me from threats I never understood. I was a singular person and I liked it that way.

My parents were out enjoying the night. They loved dancing, karaoke, and the opera. I never worried about dinner. They left no dead bodies in their wake, and no new vampires appeared to share our lives.

Zavier asked Daddy to hire a company to rebuild the house for Julie and him, while he was away on tour. He promised not to have wild parties, but his invitations to the time pilot were always refused.

Quinn didn't trust terrestrial vampires, except for my father. Momma had tried to kill his beacon too many times for him not to be wary of her, and Zavier had wanted to own him.

Neither could do it, but Quinn had spent eons of time being hunted, because time pilots were useful for interplanetary communications. He was bored with explaining he was no one's phone. The messages were always threats of annihilation, or warnings that God was on their side. He always had to explain that he was not God.

Julie disappeared on her quest to be an adult. I hoped she was safe trying to persuade a time pilot to help her grow. Quinn watched over her from a distance. Time pilots never met in space, and rarely shared a planet without regrowing. He hoped she could persuade her time pilot to become terrestrial.

I heard my parents come home at sunrise. Daddy was singing the chorus of his song about my mother, "Suzie, Suzie, Suzie, Wild Suzie." They danced up the stairs to their bedroom. Tango music began.

Time to go!

Quinn flew out the open window with me. He didn't mind listening to them make love, but then he had no choice about it. He heard everything. Before I had to smother laughter, he took me far away. Higher than we'd ever been.

Our beautiful blue planet glowed beneath us. We flew to the night, to see the lights of the cities glittering like constellations of bright stars.

Quinn sang the chorus of Hallelujah, repeating it over and over as we flew round the world, full of love for this heaven of ours in the darkness of space.

The End

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