Sylvie

“Good to know.”  Sylvie giggled and walked out of the opposite door from her kitchen and into the long hallway that joined to the three bedrooms.  Taking the time to walk in and do a circle in all three bedrooms, Sylvie waited long enough for the device to memorize and save the rooms' different configurations.

Finally, Sylvie returned to the plush carpeted hallway and stopped at the main bathroom entryway. “Alright, do your thing.  I can’t see much really, other than the little gap of the tube lighting where it could just be the house settling.  It is over forty years old.”  She offered, with the embarrassment of talking to a computer having faded.  Right when Sylvie looked at the natural looking gap, the yellow grid flared and started flipping through the spectrum and settled on an ultraviolet outline. “What is that?” Sylvie muttered.

“Short range, high resolution motion video camera made by Linzo-video for home use.  Commonly known as a nanny camera.  Not used by professionals.”  Code paused, “Wireless connection feed twenty feet above at the edge of attic space, base reception located. One-One-Seven Fortune Way.”

Sylvie watched as her neighbor's name printed at the bottom,‘Carl Robinson’.  Pursing her lips tightly, the vampire knew the man must have installed the peeping camera when she’d hired him to install a new faucet.  Climbing on her small counter, Sylvie plucked the camera from its spot and turned it to dust between her fingers.

Hopping down, Sylvie went back into the hallway and pulled down the little stairs to the attic and traversed the length until she found the repeater.  Shrugging and shaking her head, Sylvie ripped the contraption free and also reduced it to nothing more than junk.

-I’ll think of something for you later, Carl.-

Sylvie told herself and shut off the contact lenses as she walked into the one bedroom she used for her personal space.  Opening a drawer beside the bed, she found the small blue case that the contacts were held in, as well as the special liquid that Kody had supplied so that the electronics would stay clean.  Unwilling to have any other electronic devices look at her while showering, Sylvie pulled the two flimsy plastic pieces out from her eyes and dropped them in the case where she watched them bubble for a second while she secured the caps in place.

Picking up the pace, Sylvie grabbed a clean set of clothes.  This included an athletic tee without any sleeves and printed across the chest, ‘Joker Blue Tequila’ with a couple jesters behind it in the outline of the playing card itself.  Quickly digging out a full length pair of black button-fly jeans, Sylvie took the bundle with her into the restroom and started the shower.  While pulling off her watch, She shook her head and knew that the promise of ten minutes was never going to happen. 

-I wonder what they are going to do without me there…this time..-

Sylvie laughed to herself and stepped into the shower, enjoying the warm water as it rinsed the events of the prior evening down the drain.  Dipping her short blue-gray streaked hair under the hot stream first, Sylvie matted her hair down long enough to pull her night violet shampoo free of her basket and massage the gentle soap into her dyed hair.  Breathing in the soft scent of violets and jasmine combined with a hint of cedar sap, Sylvie smiled as the smell of sexual sweat and whisky faded  away and down the drain.  After rinsing the sweet smelling soap from her hair, Sylvie leaned against the copper colored tile in her shower and ran her hands over her new tattoos and sighed.

-So much has changed in just a few months.-

Sylvie reflected on her past self as the prophetess and fortune teller of Phantasmagoria.  It had been simple to hide in plain sight with her Native American heritage, her long back hair and beads made the illusion come true.  Dreamcatchers and glass beads sold for good luck and good dreams while she gave a picture of what was to come, even through little bites to her customers' palms.  Things changed the night the Ripped leveled the building and all the vampires within it.  She’d lost her entire troupe and any hope of maintaining her fortune telling illusion to procure blood.  Knowing that she needed to change everything about herself, Sylvie had lightened her skin slightly and added three tattoos.  Traveling the length of her left arm, she could still feel the ink as an anomaly and it took a fair amount of effort daily to remember that she wanted the lovely picture of a black rose with a matching black stem and thorns that showed drops about to fall from the points.  Behind the dark blooming flower a crescent moon had been inked carefully with black and a certain white that gave the effect of the dust highlighting the craters.  Topping off the look, Sylvie had instructed the artist to make little sunlike stars within the craters that dotted the moonscape for a touch of golden color.

-Heaven knows I miss the sun. Two-hundred and seventy years without that warmth.-

Forcing the thought and memory to the recess of her mind, Sylvie pushed herself from the wall and loaded her handheld loofah with cucumber scented soap then washed her right arm and her second tattoo.  Unlike the near monochrome look of the moon, Sylvie had the artist create a blue-jay feather and color it cobalt blue, an egg white and a gray that matched her hair.  Pulled away from the rachis, the barbs of the feather first floated off and transformed into birds before flying off.

 Always nervous that washing the last tattoo would somehow cause a vision to occur, Sylvie washed the rest of her body before she cleaned the top of her inked well formed breast.  While she did like the artwork itself, there was a little part of her that questioned whether or not the decision to get it done was entirely hers.  Unlike the other two that were reflections of herself in some way, the last one was a testament to her ability to see an unlikely future.  Egyptian colors of black and silver made up the eye of Horus, where the circle of the god’s eye was completely filled to show his dominance of the night and moon.  Sylvie didn’t know why at the time, but she asked the artist to add gold rays as though the eye were actually the smaller part of a solar eclipse.

-I am going to drive myself crazy if I stay here any longer.-

Urging herself to stop reflecting on the past, Sylvie pulled herself together and managed to get dressed while leaving her room in a mess of wet towels and day-old stinky clothes.  Sighing when she looked at her watch, she once again noticed that she’d wasted exactly another ten minutes.  Fighting off the urge to look deeper into the odd coincidence, Sylvie grabbed the keys to her bike, jerked a leather jacket from the peg in the foyer and locked the house.

--

Grateful that the city of Colonial Heights was relatively small compared to others in the area, Sylvie casually rode her motorcycle from her street and onto Lakeview avenue and passed an elementary school with the matching name, then a mile later entered the parking lot where her bar was located.  Erected in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the semi-circular strip mall named ‘Colonial Plaza’ once had a bustling population of shoppers with a couple of big named anchor stores to bolster the smaller businesses within the rest of the strip.  Sylvie rolled slowly through the lot and remembered the myriad of people that once flooded the place until the internet revolution.  One by one the big stores closed their doors, the small businesses gave way to bigger conglomerates and left the little strip nearly devoid of activity.  Low interest and turnout was exactly the reason Sylvie picked the location for ‘After Dark’.  

Needing a place that didn’t turn too many heads or raise too much fanfare, Sylvie bargained her way into an extra large space and created her version of a speakeasy.  Unlike many of her decisions, the creation of her bar was not part of some vision, but rather a combination of things she’d learned from working with her late friend Livia Vegas.

-“Get the girls and get the guys, darling.”-

Sylvie had heard Livia tell her many times during their conversations.  Using that one simple phrase, Sylvie created a two sectioned place.  One side was designed as a heavy bar with dancing and a live band or a DJ that served a limited menu of quickly prepared food, the other was a more quiet and restaurant-like atmosphere that reflected the hushed tones of the old speakeasy’s of the 1930s.  A large kitchen with a full staff and sound proof walls like those of a recording studio made the place a small success.

Driving her bike towards her place, Sylvie looked up and saw that her sign of the moon shifting through its phases every few seconds and the purple letters were lit up and working properly.  Waving at the few guys that had already parked their own motorcycles in the lot for their nightly ritual, Sylvie heard the jeers and claps for her arrival on ‘Big Blue’.  Pulling the heavy hog onto the sidewalk, she shut off the engine and pulled off her protective helmet.