Charlotte After Dark

Chapter 9

The next evening, Cormac announced that Charles' friend Audra would be coming by with one of her "overpriced cloth drapers" by Charles' request in order to dress me more appropriately for my afterlife. The thought made me a little uncomfortable. I liked my old clothes; nothing seemed to be wrong with them. It took one glance around the penthouse to realize why my old clothes simply did not fit in. 

"Why doesn't he make you dress up like a doll?" I asked.

"He knows better," Cormac responded, smirking at me.

"Why can't he just buy me a couple pairs of blue jeans and call it a night?" Absentmindedly taking a sip of blood from my glass, trying not to gag on the chemical taste that seemed to accompany every drop of blood Cormac received from the blood bank.

Cormac laughed. "When you meet Audra, you'll understand."

Audra arrived promptly at eight. When she arrived, she came about in a flourish and looked the way I had imagined every vampire would look. She was tall, svelte and was dressed to the nines in something that looked custom-made and expensive. She wore a tight mini-dress with shoes that looked painfully high, but she wore them like they were nothing. Her walk was confident as she came through the door without glancing at Cormac. She was the type of girl who didn't have to worry about someone opening the door for her. She was everything I wished I could be. 

"Did you have to bring that thing with you?" Cormac said, pointing to the Cavalier King Charles spaniel that Audra led into the room.

Audra rolled her eyes. "Really Aldous, did you expect me to leave Gustav the car?"

"Stop calling me that," Cormac said. "You know I hate it."

"All the more reason to use it," Audra said, greeting him with a kiss on the cheek before turning to her dog. "Besides, he's much too precious to leave all alone with some strange new driver Charles hired." Her tone was sickly sweet and almost made me nauseous. The dog snapped at Cormac as he went to pet him.

"Absolutely precious," Cormac said sarcastically making me giggle. 

"Oh, no, no, no! That's bad luck!" Audra said, turning her attention elsewhere while shaking her head and stopping dead in her place.

 "What is?" I asked, perplexed.

I stared at her in disbelief as she fretted over the broken frame of the Monet I destroyed the night before.

"Dead for 30 years and she's still afraid of old Hungarian superstitions," Cormac said, leaning against the wall behind her.

Audra shot him a dirty look as she started to look at me, sizing me up in a few seconds. "This will be a lot of work, but not impossible," she said to no one in particular as she lifted up a few strands of my hair and examined them for split ends.

"I'm not asking you to turn her into a masterpiece, just put some clothes on her," Cormac responded.

"Everything I do is a masterpiece," Audra asserted.

"Even Beatrix Kolbe's Deathday Ball?"

"Don't speak of such things," Audra snapped, dropping the few strands of my hair. They fell limply to my shoulder. 

She returned to look at me, lifting my chin up to examine me better. Her jewel-like eyes bore into me almost like they were burning through a flimsy piece of paper. I couldn't help but stare into her sapphire eyes, so bright and blue that they almost seemed to be perfectly plucked from an expensive piece of jewelry. She looked at me intently like an artist surveying a lump of clay that would be her next masterpiece—I hoped.