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  “What could you, or any man, possibly know about how I feel about rape?” And why am I telling him all this? Am I so weak I have to go running to a man for reassurance… or confession?

  “I haven’t been raped, if that’s what you mean. But I’ve laid my life on the line to bring in some crack pusher, or a wiseass pimp that keeps his girls hooked and beats them to a pulp if they squeak back. I’ve seen the smirks on their faces, knowing they’d be back on the street just as soon as their bondsman can hop to it. I’ve thought of all the decent people they’re going to hurt, and that one day they might get trigger-happy and blow my ass away. I think how much better this town would be without them. I think, I’m the one with the gun, and there’s no one else looking.…”

  Jodie held her breath, seized by the fire and darkness in his eyes.

  “You know what I feel,” he said. “Don’t tell me it isn’t the same. Nobody, not cops or women’s libbers or nobody, has a monopoly on righteous anger. But the bottom line is—my hands are clean, and yours are too, lady. The rest is nobody’s business.”

  Jodie could not rebut his argument, but she had yet to find a way of forgiving herself for wanting to kill, for the blood lust now that ran like an unbreakable thread through her dreams. She clung to her relationship with Mary as the one good thing that had come out of the whole incident, refusing to discuss her moving out. As the weeks passed, she became increasingly worried that she might have saved her from rape, only to lose her in another way.

  “Mary, I’m going to level with you,” Jodie said. “I, said I didn’t want to know it if you were dealing, but whatever you’re using is killing you. You’ve got to get help.”

  Mary Smith lay on the sofa, her eyes flat, trapping all the light that entered them. It was two months later, three months since she had come to live with Jodie, and her once rosy skin lay over her cheekbones like parchment over driftwood.

  “It is nothing. I will be better soon.”

  “Soon! You mean when you get your next fix! Mary, that’s not better, it’s only making you worse.”

  Jodie sat on the sofa and laid a firm hand on her friend’s shoulder, feeling the bones as fragile as eggshells. “I see what you’re doing to yourself. You look great, hyped up on super-crack or whatever you’re doing, we have a good time, and then you get wasted. Two, three weeks at most, and you’re a basket case. Look at you, you can barely sit up by yourself. How much longer do you think your body can handle that shit?”

  “Do you want me to move out?”

  “No, I just don’t like what you’re doing to yourself. I care about you.”

  “As I for you. We have much in common, two sisters in a world of hostile men.”

  Jodie backed off, realizing that there was nothing to be gained by further argument. Mary disappeared again while she was in the kitchen fixing dinner and she felt strangely bereft.

  It’s none of your business anyway, she thought as she drank her second glass of wine. At least she’s got some way to keep her going, which is more than you can say for yourself. You’re a damned hypocrite, Jodie Marshall, getting so worked up about Mary’s doing dope when you just bumped off two men. Morosely, she finished the bottle. I don’t care what Steve says, I wouldn’t feel this way… and dream this way, unless I’d done it.

  That night the dreams came again, dreams of blood and darkness, dreams of terror and hunger. The shadows welcomed her, the hallway as familiar as her childhood home. Again she halted before the last door, her hands slick with blood. Pleasure coiled around her, and she did not shrink from it. Only as she bent toward the hot red blood, almost touching her lips to it, almost feeling it slip down her throat to ignite the core of her ecstasy, did she awaken, terrified.

  * * *

  The morning papers carried the discovery of another partially unclothed male body, found in one of the less savory back streets of Hollywood, cause of death unknown. No longer big news, it was relegated to the second section, and Jodie saw it only because she felt so leaden it took two cups of coffee to fully wake up.

  Steve agreed to meet her in his office. He’d been up most of the night, working on a child disappearance case, and his eyes were red-shot, his face ashen under the stubble of his beard. He said, by way of greeting, “You look even worse than I do.”

  “Don’t joke, Steve. There’s been another body found.”

  He nodded. “I saw the bulletin. Why are you so upset?”

  “I don’t remember what I did last night.”

  “So? Neither can half the city, but they don’t come charging up here to tell me so.”

  “Steve, I don’t know how, but somehow I’m tied in with those murders—”

  “Not murders. Deaths.”

  “All right,” Jodie agreed. “Maybe I didn’t throttle them. But I could have killed the first guy, and on both the other nights I can’t remember what I did. Doesn’t that suggest something to you?”

  “What, that you’re somehow poisoning them in your sleep? They died of some weird kind of anemia, Jodie—not arsenic, not strangulation. And certainly not a bop on the head.”

  “Maybe I—”

  “We’ve already had three nutcases call in, claiming to be vampires. Forget it, you had nothing to do with them.”

  ”I want to believe that—and if I could only remember—or see those men’s faces and know that I’d never seen them before—”

  “You mean look at them down at the morgue?”

  Jodie’s stomach turned cold. “I hadn’t thought—” she began. “But then I would know, wouldn’t I? Steve, I swear I’ll never ask again—”And I also swore I’d never depend on a man for anything!

  Steve brushed her words aside. “All right, I’ll get you in to view the one from yesterday. Then I’ll hold you to your promise. Not another word about this thing.”

  The room was colder than she’d expected and had a strange chemical smell. A bored-looking technician, pulled the refrigerated drawer from its slot in the far wall. It’s a goddamned filing cabinet for bodies, she thought, suppressing a shiver. Steve unzipped the thick plastic bag.

  Jodie took a breath and bent over the drawer. The corpse was a Chicano in his twenties, black hair curling around the base of the skull. The body seemed to be made out of rubber instead of flesh, its expressionless face a flat uncompromising gray. The hair and eyebrows stood out like stiff, artificial bristles, and through the drawn-back lips, a fringe of yellowed teeth glinted.

  I don’t know this man at all, Jodie thought with some astonishment. And somehow I’d know if I’d seen him before. Even in my dreams. She looked up at Steve.

  “You’re no killer, Jodie,” he said, and recovered the corpse.

  I can’t be—I know I’d remember a man I’d killed, she thought as they climbed the stairs back to daylight. There would be some shock of recognition, something… I suppose I should feel relieved.

  Steve said, “I knew you hadn’t done it, but I think you’re using these deaths to cover up something else. You act as if you feel guilty, of what you don’t know.”

  “Guilty—for how much I wanted to kill that bastard with my own hands, for how close I came to it? Maybe. Even if I didn’t kill those men, I put myself on the line when I jumped that first guy. Something good did come out of it, but now… No wonder I can’t let go of this thing, watching what’s happening to her.”

  “Who?”

  “Mary, the woman I saved.”

  “She’s still staying with you?”

  Jodie shrugged at his implied criticism. “We only run into each other a few nights a week, and she has nowhere else to go. She’s using, I’m not sure what—coke or super-crack maybe. I think she’s got the cash for it. I’ve tried to get her into a treatment program, but she won’t listen.”

  “So you saved her from rape, only to lose her to dope? Do you know who she buys from?”

  Jodie shook her head, knowing what he’d say next.

  “We have to have more than that to make an arrest
, especially if we want the pusher.”

  “I could follow her. If I saw the deal, I could identify—”

  “Don’t you go taking stupid risks!” he said, his voice hard. “If she won’t turn him in herself, if she’s not ready to get help, then kick her out and let her take her own chances. You can’t save the world, Jodie. Not even the female half of it, and especially if she doesn’t want your help.”

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  They paused at the top of the stairwell, Steve’s hand unmoving on the knob of the door that led to the ground-floor lobby. He said, “I don’t want you getting mixed up with stuff you can’t handle. Leave it to the pros.”

  “You have no right—”

  “I’d like to have the right,” he said quietly, still keeping the door closed. Jodie felt his nearness in the half-lit space like a tingling all over her skin.

  “I like you very much, Jodie, or I wouldn’t have gotten you into the morgue. I’d like to see more of you—” He reached out to caress her cheek.

  “Keep your goddamned hands to yourself! You’re no better than the rest of them!” She wrestled the door open and plunged into the open space, trembling with anger and adrenaline.

  The next evening Jodie lay in bed, feigning sleep, remembering other nights when Mary had “gone out.” This time I’m going to find out who she buys from and put the sucker out of business, no matter what Steve Azusa says.

  Jodie held herself rigid as she heard the sound of cloth brushing against the door frame, followed by light footsteps. She kicked off the covers, pulled on her sneakers, and slowly opened the front door. The hallway was empty. Cautiously she went downstairs and through the foyer.

  Mary was halfway down the block, heading north. She walked straight, never swerving, without any apparent suspicion that she might be followed. It was easy to follow her through the garishly lit streets.

  Gradually Mary slowed, losing the directedness of her walk. She seemed by degrees lost and vulnerable. A couple of men stopped, obviously looking for a trick. Mary shook her head, her dark hair rippling about her face like a child’s mop. She made her way farther from the main streets to others less brilliantly lit, less traveled.

  This is a hell of a neighborhood to get lost in, Jodie thought, seeing the gun poorly hidden in the jacket of the pusher’s lookout on the corner. You go wandering around, looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to get jumped, or worse.

  With a sudden chill, she remembered the alley where she had first met Mary. Damn that woman, she’s asking for it— And then she realized, She’s been here before, she knows what it’s like. If she comes here regularly for dope, she should know how to walk to get left alone. But she’s an open invitation.…

  Jodie stepped back into the shadow of a phone booth and watched as Mary waited by herself at the bus stop. A man strolled up, wearing jeans and a workshirt. Jodie could read menace in his every movement. Mary nodded and hugged her hands to her sides, a perfect victim. The man moved in closer and she shrank from him but did not move away, even when he put one arm around her shoulder.

  It was all Jodie could do to force herself to stay hidden. Mary was breaking every rule in the self-defense book. It was only the knowledge that whatever Mary’s game, she had played it many times before, that kept Jodie from interfering.

  The man leaned closer, edging Mary away from the bus stop and toward the darkness of a side street. Mary made no sound as he shoved her back along the deserted side street. There was no point in calling out for help here, not in this neighborhood.

  Jodie found herself at the edge of a boarded-up building, clearly the haunt of more than one illicit operation. She heard scuffling, and approached with caution. Light from a passing car reflected off one crumbling wall.

  It was like a flashback to the first time she had seen Mary, pinned underneath the first rapist. The arch of this man’s back was the same, and the pale gleam of Mary’s thighs underneath her rucked-up skirt. Why doesn’t she cry out? Why is she doing this to herself?

  Jodie’s hands tightened into claws. This time I won’t stop, she thought, and stepped soundlessly toward the writhing pair.

  The man was heaving back and forth, but not, as Jodie had first thought, in the reflexive thrusts of rape. Again and again, each time weaker than the last, he threw himself backward… away from his victim. With a gasp he collapsed, rolling to one side. Mary rolled with him as if they were glued together, her mouth pressed to the side of his neck.

  “Mary…?” Jodie realized that it was not the shadows that made her lips look so dark, but the blood that glistened on them.

  Mary sat up, shifting into the light so that Jodie could not miss the radiance blooming in her skin.

  “…is he—”

  “He’s still alive,” Mary said with an odd lisp.

  “What are you?”

  Mary pushed the body to one side and got to her feet, walking toward Jodie with her arms outstretched. The blood spattered on her hands was in the exact pattern from Jodie’s first dream.

  “Join with me now,” Mary whispered. “Together we can put an end to this creature’s miserable existence—together feast, together live. For the sake of justice, for the sake of all women. All the women he’s already destroyed, all the women who will be safe from him now. It’s what you’ve longed for all these years.…”

  She drew Jodie to her in a lover’s embrace. Her perfume enhanced the smell of the blood, that dry spicy scent that was like no other. Jodie reeled with it, felt it flood her veins with fire.

  “It’s simple, really. A sip of my blood and you are one with me. You can have anything you want, forever, be anything you want. An avenging angel, slowly cleansing Mother Earth. Long have I searched for a companion to share this holy work, long—”

  “But to kill—” Jodie blurted, her voice a harsh parody of Mary’s silken whisper. “To kill is wrong.”

  “Wrong? Oh, my dear, these creatures are not worthy of your compassion. No honorable man need fear us, only those who have of their own free will chosen the bloody path. We merely complete what they have created for themselves.”

  “I don’t believe that—prison, yes, but—” Weak too weak compared to the ringing power in Mary’s voice, to the memories that rose up in Jodie’s mind.

  “Let us not speak lies to one another, lies about beliefs and political correctness. You know what I am and why I have come to you. In the silken darkness of the night I heard you call to me, even as I called out so many years ago. The fires that burn your soul were my beacon. It was your anger that drew me to you, your thirst for vengeance. I am what you’ve dreamed of, a woman’s weapon aimed against all mankind. And now, you will be too.”

  Jodie shook her head helplessly. Whatever kept her from that last doorway in her dream kept her back now, and she clung to it for her very soul.

  “Do you still deny the truth, my friend, my mirror? In everything but this single last step, we are already one.”

  No, wonder the body at the morgue confused me, Jodie thought in anguish. It was my hatred, not my hands, that killed him.

  A flickering movement behind Mary brought Jodie from torment into panic. “No!” she screamed and thrust her to one side.

  Mary whirled with the sinuous power of a leopard, but the man was too close, the jagged wooden splinter that he thrust at her too fast. She staggered under the impact as he stumbled to his knees. Jodie caught her in her arms and they both fell heavily into the dust.

  The blood that spurted from where the length of wood protruded from Mary’s chest was thick and black, rank with the scent of her perfume. The man heaved himself to his feet and staggered from the building.

  “I’m going for help,” Jodie began.

  A pale slender hand waved briefly. “A stake… through the heart… too late…”

  “There must be something I can do.”

  “Remember…” came a gossamer whisper, and then there was silence, deep and final.
/>
  Slowly the form of the woman who called herself Mary Smith collapsed in on itself. Without her artificially sustained life, gravity pulled the graceful structure into dust. Her perfume swirled in Jodie’s nostrils, a last moment of sweetness before it faded forever.

  In Jodie’s mind, the last door began to swing slowly shut. She knew that if she could hold on another moment, the dreams would vanish along with the woman in her arms. She had only to keep still, and the nightmare of guilt and recrimination would fade.

  No, she realized, it was more than that. Another Mary would come into her life, drawn to what Jodie had made of herself. And then more dreams of blood, more deaths, the choice recurring again and again until she finally decided—to become fully what she was, or to give up her hatred forever.

  The last motes of dust clung to Jodie’s fingers. She wiped them off on her jeans, got to her feet, and headed back to her apartment, walking a little unsteadily. For in that final instant she had touched her lips to the dark unnatural blood, and already she could feel the chill fires of the grave creeping toward her human heart.

  About Mary A. Turzillo and “Kill Dance”

  I met Mary Turzillo when I led a writers’ workshop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1987. She sold the story she started there, and went on to sell to a variety of markets, in addition to teaching English at three different colleges, playing a witch in Macbeth, designing theatrical costumes, and leading tours to the Grand Canyon, London, and Alaska.

  She says that the inspiration for “Kill Dance” goes back to “a crazy, mixed-up bald eagle named Martha,” who led her to an interest in golden eagles, who actually do try to kill each other as hatchlings. She lives in a small town in Ohio with her teenage son, who does not have a sibling hatchling. And she is working on a novel.

  Kill Dance