Beyond that there did not seem to be very much to say, but after a moment I remembered that I was paid by the City of Miami to investigate things, so I asked her, “Tyler Spanos?”
“What?” she said.
“You two were friends,” I said. “But you seemed to have nothing in common.?
?
She nodded, and the half-dreamy smile slid back onto her face. “Yeah. Nothing except this,” she said.
“This was her idea?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “These people have been here for, you know, years.” She nodded at the jars filled with blood and smiled. “But Tyler, she’s a little wild?” She shrugged and her smile got bigger. “Was a little wild. She met this guy at a dark rave.”
“Bobby Acosta?”
“Bobby, Vlad, whatever,” she said. “So he’s trying to impress her, you know, to hook up? And he says, ‘I’m in this group; you wouldn’t believe what we do. We eat people.’ And she says, ‘You can eat me,’ and he thinks she doesn’t get it and says, ‘No, I mean really eat them.’ And Tyler says, ‘Yeah, well, I mean really, too, me and my friend.’ ”
Samantha shivered again and hugged herself tightly, rocking back and forth very slightly. “We had talked about finding somebody like this. I mean, we did the Yahoo chat groups and all, but it’s mostly bullshit and porn, and anyway, how can you trust somebody you meet online? And now this guy comes right out with it and says, ‘We eat people.’ ” She shivered more, really big this time. “Tyler comes to me and says, ‘You won’t believe what happened last night.’ Which she says a lot, and I’m like, ‘Okay, again?’ And she says, ‘No, really,’ and she tells me about Vlad and his group.…”
Samantha closed her eyes and licked her lips before going on. “It’s like a dream come true,” she said. “I mean, it’s too good. I don’t believe her at first. Because Tyler is—was—kind of flaky, and guys could see that and they would say stuff to her just, you know, to have sex with her? And I’m sure she’d taken X or something anyway, so how can I be sure this guy is for real? But she takes me to meet Vlad, and he shows us some pictures and things, and I think, ‘This is it.’ ”
Samantha looked straight at me and brushed the hair from her forehead. It was nice hair, a mousy brown color, but clean and shiny, and she looked for all the world like a normal teenage girl telling a sympathetic adult about something interesting that happened in French class—until she started talking again.
“I always knew I would do this someday,” she said. “Find somebody who would eat me. It’s what I wanted most. But I thought it would be later, you know, after college or—” She shrugged and shook her head. “But here he was, and Tyler and me are like, ‘Why wait?’ Why should I spend my parents’ money on college, when I can have what I want without it, right now? So we told Vlad, ‘Okay, totally, we’re in,’ and he takes us to meet the head of the group, and …” She smiled. “Here I am.”
“And Tyler isn’t,” I said.
Samantha nodded. “She was always lucky. She got to go first.” The smile got bigger. “But I’m next. Soon.”
And her apparent eagerness to follow Tyler into the cauldron dried up all my professional zeal, and I had nothing more to say. Samantha just watched me to see what I would do—and for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what that would be. What is the correct facial expression to put on when someone tells you their lifelong fantasy is to be eaten? Should I go for shock? Disbelief? What about moral outrage? I was quite sure the subject had never come up in any of the movies or TV shows I had studied, and even though I am considered a clever and creative person in some circles, I could not imagine anything at all that might be appropriate.
So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach. I had been trying so hard lately to achieve some close approximation of normal life, but if this was it, I thought I would prefer something else. Outside of Salvador Dalí I really can’t believe the human mind could handle anything more extreme.
And at last even the mutual staring began to seem too strange, even for two dedicated non-humans like us, and we both blinked and looked away.
“Anyway,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?” I said. “Wanting to be eaten?”
She shrugged, an oddly genuine teen gesture. “Whatever,” she said. “I mean, they’ll be here soon.”
I felt like someone was tickling my spine with an icicle. “Who will?” I said.
“Somebody from the coven,” she said, and she glanced back at me. “That’s what they call it. The, you know. The group that, um, eats people.”
I thought of the file I had seen on the computer. Coven. I wished I had copied it and run for home. “How do you know they’re coming?” I said.
She shrugged again. “They have to feed me. Like, three times a day, you know.”
“Why should they?” I said. “If they’re just going to kill you, why do they have to take care of you?”
She gave me a you-are-so-dumb look, combined with a head shake. “They’re going to eat me, not kill me,” she said. “They don’t want me to get all sick and skinny. I gotta be, you know. Chubbed up. Marbled. For flavor.”
Between my job and my hobby I have to say without bragging that I have a pretty strong stomach, but this was putting it to a real test. The idea that she would cheerfully eat three healthy meals a day so her flesh would taste better was just a little too much before breakfast, and I turned away again. But happily for my appetite, a practical thought nudged its way in. “How many of them will come?” I asked.
She looked at me, then looked away. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s usually just two guys. In case, you know, I decide to change my mind and run. But …” She looked at me. And then down at her feet. “I think Vlad is coming with them this time,” she said at last, and it did not sound like a happy thought.
“Why do you think that?” I said.