There are two kinds of people in my world: prey and threats.
The man who just walked by my perfume shop, sheltering from the rain? Prey. Not even petrichor can cover that animal smell, the rich savor of blood a finger’s breadth beneath the surface. Had I not just fed, the rain would soon be the last of his worries.
Giulia Melizzi, patroness of the Milanese shadow court? Threat. All the creatures of the night dance to her command, every lesser little leech like me a toy for her to use and discard. If I want to stay useful, I need to finish this batch on time.
Then the bell rings, and my tidy categorization upends.
“We’re closed,” I call out.
“Oh,” says a voice, with an odd flatness I can’t place, a vocal affectation I’ve never heard from anyone, mortal or Kin. “I’m so sorry, signora. I was hoping you’d make an exception.”
I look over the counter. Through the flowers I keep, I see… a person? I think? But she’s no mortal, and not one of mine either. What I first take for a porcelain complexion, I realize is actual porcelain. Where a human would have a neck (and yes, of course that’s the first place I looked) she has a filigree column with slowly turning gears and pulleys. I can’t see anything more than that beneath the cloak she’s wrapped herself in.
There is no animal smell – traces, perhaps, in the cloak, but there is no living being here. She smells like metal polish and leather, an oddly comforting aroma.
I stand, the batch of ambergris forgotten behind me. “What… who are you?”
“Please don’t be frightened,” she says, and I nearly laugh. Does she not know what she’s talking to? “I was told you’re the most… discreet perfume maker in the city, and I need something that is, well.” She gestures at her face, at her sculpted lips that don’t move when she speaks. “Unusual.”
My mind is made up at once, without even really thinking. “Close the door behind you,” I say. She does. “I’m Vittoria. And what you’ve heard is true – I do specialize in the unusual.”
“I am called…” She pauses. “I have been given a name, but I am running from my creator.”
This creature knows nothing of subterfuge. In a human, such naivete would be appetizing, but here I’m just on uncertain ground. “I. Well, I need to call you something.”
“Sofia,” she says immediately.
Wise. Well, maybe in time. “What do you need?”
“I need help smelling human.”
“You need help with a lot more than that. Hu… We are not creatures that operate on smell, primarily.” I gesture, a little wryly, at her face.
“I’m working on that part,” she says. “But people can smell something wrong. And, worse, so can animals. I want to cover all possible routes of discovery.”
“Hmm.” I know a thing or two about unnerving beasts. I still don’t know what I’m doing here, she’s completely outside my classification of food and foe, but something about her calls to the part of me locked away behind the scared predator. “Come in. We’ll see what we can do.”
Turns out, there are greater predators than my kind. The ground of Europe is hungrier for blood than anything with fangs.
My flight from Italy was anything but graceful. A half-crazed clandestine scramble, escaping the sucking gravity of the collapsing vampire courts and the suffocating madness of mortal war. Tithes to Giulia and her ever-rotating court of mosquitoes notwithstanding, I had socked away a tidy emergency fund – and bled out most of it getting across the ocean to here, following a desperate trail by a few lost kindred.
The vampire scene in New York is surprisingly chummy, at first. There are the usual cliques and covens, but everyone here is running from something. The shadow courts haven’t got a foothold here, it’s all tinpot replications of mortal power structures, easily broken or ignored.
I end up with a little corner store in Harlem (not my usual occupation, but there’s less demand for perfumes these days and a mortal front is a mortal front), and the new friends I make here – living and otherwise – have been making me rethink some things. I go by Vick, cut my hair, occasionally pass as a man for the hell of it, get by on little sips and memory charms instead of weekly binges and corpse disposal. Things are changing, and I’ve seen what happens when a vampire refuses to change.
My bell rings, and I put down the box of hair pomade I’m stocking. “Can I he…”
It’s her. The underlying scent is different, a little less leather and a little more diesel, but the topnotes are the same human-replica blend I made for her a quarter of a millennium ago. She’s swapped her porcelain face for something that’s a dead ringer for human skin, smooth dark complexion and inky tight curls over the collar of her pinafore. Her eyes go wide as she sees me, sees my reaction.
“I go by Sophie now.” Her accent is perfect for the area, and that wax-cylinder scratchiness is way toned down, but it’s definitely her. “How… how are you alive? It’s been over two hundred years!”
She and I had kept in contact for a while, after that first meeting. Eventually I had decided to hell with profit and embraced friendship, and just taught her the recipe for her own signature scent. But the last I had seen of her was 1663 – fortunately, just when it would be getting a little obvious that my youthful looks weren’t just good breeding. But, well. No ruse lasts forever. I rolled up my shirtsleeves and leaned over the counter. “You’re not the only one here who’s not what she seems, miss.”
She frowns. Goodness, but it’s nice to see her able to make facial expressions. Expressivity suits her nicely. “You’re… but there’s no way you could be… like me. I would have… surely…”
“I’m not. I’m… something different.” This could be dangerous… but she’s less likely to freak out about this than anyone I know. I lift one lip, let one fang extend. “Why do you think I was so able to help you pass for human?”
“No dice,” she says. “You’re messing with me. Magic isn’t real.”
“Magi–” I huffed. “Excuse me! What are you, then?”
“A self made woman, at this point,” she says. “Pretty much nothing left.”
She smiles. “Except the perfume.”
I step around behind her and flip the sign to CLOSED. “Okay, I don’t know what you came in here for, but it’s officially time for us to catch up.”
Gallery openings are exhausting, even for an immortal.
The older I get, the less I want to interact with the pretentious pricks in the Fine Art Community and the more I just want to hunker down in my workshop and sculpt. I certainly don’t mind putting on a nice suit and drinking nice wine. But it helps me tolerate the schmoozing to have my gorgeous wife by my side the whole time.
Of course, half the social climbers in the Galleria Azure are there for her. Sophie Sparks, founder of the biotech nonprofit that was turning the medical world upside down, was easily as much of a draw as her reclusive wife, famed sculptor V. Rosso. Still wearing the face I saw her in that little hole in the wall in New York, but now it’s made of nicer stuff, bespoke biomimetic silicone with microcapillary matrix for those imperceptible facial movements that humans pick up on so easily.
She waves at the door of our apartment and it opens automatically. She points at our stereo, once inside, and it starts playing soft jazz. I giggle – it’s a trick I never get tired of. I have magic, but my wife has Bluetooth, and somehow the latter is more impressive.
I sprawl out on the couch. “I am completely dry,” I say.
“Can’t have that,” she says. I hear the refrigerator door open and close, and something approach my head. I snag it out of the air – those predator reflexes aren’t gone – and snap the cap off the pack of SparkTec SynthBlood. I take a sip. “Oh, wow. Is this the new stuff?”
“Fresh from the bioreactors at the lab,” she says. “You like?”
“Damn.” I suck down the whole pack. “I was happy when you figured it out enough to keep me alive, but I think you’ve officially reached the point where it tastes better than the real thing. Less gamey.”
“The biochemists at the lab think I’m completely insane for asking for the tweaks I do.” She sits down next to me, her blue dress parachuting around her on the couch. “Kinda hard to tell them that it’s all for the sake of my wife the vampire.”
I give her a kiss on the cheek – after wiping off, of course, I’m not an animal.
“Oh,” she said. “By the way. Something happened today.”
She held up her right hand. “That last brass spar, I was keeping around in my pinky? Slipped out of joint today. I… don’t think I’m going to bother getting it fixed up and putting it back.”
I put my arm around her. “That’s the last piece, isn’t it? Of your… original body?”
“Well,” I say, raising my empty SynthBlood bag. “Here’s to something new.”
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