"You'll be our guinea pig. Frankly, we're astonished you're alive. This may be related to your peoples' cockroach-like ability to adapt and withstand toxins. We'll use you for testing, and if you cooperate, we may only sterilize and monitor you."

I was missing pieces of the puzzle, but I was pretty sure they added up to a really ugly picture. Okay, I was infected with something, Sebastian thought I should be dead, and Oswaldo was the carrier of the infection. "You're so majorly loco. What have I been infected with?"

" 'With what have I been infected,'" he corrected.

I wouldn't kill him quickly. I began imagining Ian Fleming-type torture devices for Sebastian.

"You were swapping blood with a vampire, you fool," he said sharply. "You've been infected by a vampire."

"Are you living in the Dark Ages?" I shouted. "At least tell me a plausible lie."

"Do I look like I'm kidding? Would I be here with you otherwise?" His face flushed red. "I wanted to leave you so far in the past that I could forget you entirely, but here you are again." He paused and closed his eyes. "You seduced me with your base animal appeal and you tried to drag me down to your level. I reject you, Milagro, I reject you and all creatures of darkness."

"Is that a swipe at me for being a Latina?!" I snapped.

"Spare me your politically correct outrage," he sneered. "I was referring to your vampire-tainted flesh."

Fear flooded through me, but I steeled myself by thinking of my mother Regina. I hadn't lived this long only to quiver in fear of an F.U. snob, albeit a completely insane F.U. snob.

I had a flacon of Jovan Musk cologne in my purse. Yes, it was retro, but in an amusing disco way, and besides, I could spray it in Sebastian's eyes once we stopped. I had a pen, too. I would spray him, then jab him in the jugular with the pen.

"You are so completely deluded," I said, attempting to distract Sebastian while I waited for an opportunity to attack. "Vampires were based on Vlad the Impaler, who was a murderous sadist, but a human murderous sadist. Vlad, vampires, look up the etymology of the word."

"I know damn well that Vlad wasn't a vampire, but that doesn't mean vampires don't exist. I'm talking about medical fact. I bet you're wishing you could bite my throat right now." His voice lowered. "I bet you're thinking of sinking your teeth into my flesh and clamping down, sucking out all my juices, sucking my very being into your voracious, scarlet mouth, your full lips opening wide, and swallowing me down..."

"Keep dreaming, Sebastian. I am so not interested in sucking any part of your repressed anatomy," I said disdainfully. "Excuse me for asking the obvious, but exactly why the hell do multinational corporations care about vampires? Hate competition from other bloodsucking parasites?"

"You've reached the point, Milagro, where you're no longer naive, but tediously ignorant," he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a compact little weapon.

"That looks like a gun, only smaller. Did you order it from the Sharper Image Spring Paranoiac catalog?" I was surreptitiously fishing in my pocketbook.

"Don't tempt me."

"Tempt you? That's what this is all about, isn't it, Sebastian. You can never get over the fact that you were tempted by me."

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" he shouted, and pointed the gun at me.

Chapter Six

survival of the fabbest

Suddenly something crashed into the car and the Bentley jerked hard to the right. I jabbed the butt of my hand up hard and hit Sebastian in the nose. He cried out in pain and another jolt bashed the car off the road entirely.

We were bumping roughly down a slope, and I didn't know how far we would go. Sebastian screamed time-honored Anglo- Saxon obscenities while holding his bleeding nose with his left hand. I grabbed the gun and twisted it away just as the car rocked over on its right side.

Sebastian wasn't moving. I unbuckled my seat belt and tried kicking the door. Suddenly it opened and a pair of huge hands attached to size-appropriate arms hauled me out of the car onto a slope covered with scrub brush. The moon was full, and the gorilla holding me didn't look happy. "You godless vermin, you godless vermin," he snarled. He had an unappealing snub nose between pale piggy eyes, and his neck was as thick as his head. He looked like an accountant who'd attended wrestling camp.

"Let her go!" cried a strong, lilting voice.

I twisted my head and saw that damn redheaded waiter scampering down the hillside toward us. Unfortunately, he was not accompanied by armed bodyguards and ferocious Rottweilers. However, he was wearing really cool jeans, a khaki shirt, and a leather bomber jacket-very Indiana Jones Goes to the Castro.

"Demon!" shouted the driver.

Although I wasn't in fighting form, a kick to the groin was still a kick to the groin. I didn't connect solidly, but Peters Previous automatically dropped me. Just as I regained my balance, he moved to grab me. I pointed the nifty gun in his direction. I assumed that Sebastian, filled with righteous fury toward me, had removed the safety or whatever.

Peters smirked. "You wouldn't kill a God-fearing American, would you, girlie?"

How clueless was this goon? "Nope, but I will kneecap you." He lunged toward me and I pulled the trigger. While I did aim for his knee, the shot went off course a considerable distance north. Peters buckled over, holding the injured part of his body and shrieking worse than a spoiled nina who finds her favorite Barbie decapitated.

I didn't have time to contemplate the result of my first gun-firing experience because the waiter had reached my side.

"Milagro, I have been looking everywhere for you! Thank God you're alive. We have to get out of here."

I instinctively liked the waiter because he was a cute Froot Loop. Nonetheless, I pointed the gun toward him and said, "Let's pause here for a moment. Why are you always showing up wherever I go? How do I know you're not in league with CACA?

How do I know you have my safety and best interests at heart?"

He threw his hands up and shouted, "Please, girlfriend!" He pronounced "please" as if it had about twenty vowels in it.

It was a very convincing argument, strengthened by the fact that Sebastian's blood-smeared head popped up out of the car door like a hideous jack-in-the-box. "Milagro!" he shrieked. "Milagro, you bitch!"

I shoved the gun into my pocketbook, and the waiter and I scrambled up the embankment. He held my hand and pulled me along, showing surprising strength for a small guy. My right foot slipped on a rock and I fell, breaking a strap on my sandal and tearing the knee of my pants. I began to slide, but the waiter held tight until I got my traction back. Coyote brush and brambles scratched us and snagged my hair.

A huge, shiny Ford truck was parked with the engine running and techno blasting from the sound system. We slammed the doors, and the waiter drove like a soccer mom late to pick up her Valium prescription. I tried to catch my breath, and he handed me a quart bottle of organic raspberry protein drink. I gulped it without thinking. When my heart stopped pounding, I said, "Who are you anyway?"

"My name's Gabriel." He kept checking the rearview mirror. "The raspberry juice is the right color. Your craving can be satisfied by a food with a color trigger. Cranberry juice, a good zinfandel, anything that's red works. In the summer, gazpacho is great when you can pick tomatoes off the vine."

I held up my hand. It had almost stopped shaking. "As much as I'd love to discuss chilled soups with you, can you tell me why you've been following me, where we're going, and why everyone is hunting me?"

Gabriel turned down the music. "We're going to a safe place, a ranch out in the country. You've been infected by, well, it's hard to explain." He gave me a concerned look. "It's a miracle you're alive."

"Yeah, I hear that all the time. Miracle, that's my name." I don't know if he thought I was kidding. "Oswaldo?"

Gabriel nodded. "Yeah, Oswald. He said it was an accident, the blood exchange."

"It was, I don't know... Wait a minute. You were at the party with Oswaldo?"

"Oswald," he corrected me. "He's my second cousin."

My heart was still racing, but now at the idea of seeing Oswald again. I thought that maybe I shouldn't be so excited to see the man who had infected me, but my desire for him was stronger than common sense. "What were you doing at Kathleen's?"

"I help our family with security."I was going to say something sarcastic, but Gabriel had run Sebastian and his thug off the road.

Gabriel continued. "Oswald went because he wanted to check out Beckett-Witherspoon. I was sent along to keep things in line."

"Oh, good job," I said dryly.

"I tried to warn you away, didn't I?"

Okay, so he had. "What's Sebastian got to do with your family?"

"CACA, or caca, as you call it, is the latest project of a ghastly group that has its origins in an ancient crypto-mystical organization. They've been building their wealth and power for ages. They hold on to some of the absurd superstitions of the past, but they're really all about the money." He shrugged one shoulder. "I guess it makes them feel special, the ritual and exclusivity. Try getting into that club."

If Gabriel was telling me the truth, his comments solved a few mysteries in my life. But not all of them. "What's wrong with me?

What do I have?"

"It's a genetic condition, like sickle cell or Tay-Sachs. Oswald and, well, me too, we have it."

"If it's genetic, how could I have contracted it?"

"You don't really have it, I think. But I'm not a doctor."

I mulled this over, then said, "Sebastian is under the lunatic impression that you're vampires."

Gabriel jittered to the music for a minute, letting my comment hang between us. Finally he said, "People are so uninformed.

They believe in folktales and have these crazy prejudices."

"Uh-huh. Your point being?"

"It's not like we drink human blood! That's like believing in the boogeyman or something. It's just that contact with our blood has consequences. Like mixing AB positive with AB negative."

I didn't think I was getting the whole picture. "And?"

"We don't process protein like most people. We require more protein in our diets, and it causes us to crave, uh, meat. You know, like those pregnant women who eat clay because of a mineral deficiency."

"With the difference being that pregnant women eating clay sounds wacky and quaint, while bloodsucking creatures of the night sounds grotesque and depraved."

Gabriel turned onto another highway, heading north. "I told you, we don't 'suck blood.' I would think that a woman of color would understand prejudice."

That shut me up.

Even in the middle of the night, there were plenty of cars speeding by, no doubt going home from the swing shift at work, heading to their drug dealers, or slipping away from affairs. I guessed that I was the only one on the road who was heading toward Count Dracula's country hacienda.

"You know," Gabriel said calmly, "lepers were hated and exiled before modern medicine came up with treatments for the disease."

"I'd be pretty irritated if a leper had infected me, too."

"If you had bothered to practice safe sex, this wouldn't have happened," he retorted. "We have to practice safe sex our whole lives! You have no idea what it's like to fall for someone who will never accept you because you were born different!"

"Ha," I said, "and ha again. One, I did not have sex with Oswald, and two, I think I know what it's like to be outside the norm.

And besides, being a vampire is completely different from being an ethnic minority."

"We are not vampires," he snapped back. "At least your people can intermarry and be open about who they are and share their culture."

As we sped northward, the landscape gave way to black hills silhouetted against the cobalt sky. Stars became more visible.

The rush of our battle against CACA and my desire to see Oswald dimmed considerably at the realization that I might be terminally ill. My life had been like my favorite dresses: cheap, frivolous, and too short. I began to cry quietly.

"It isn't all bad!" Gabriel said consolingly. "There's an upside. If you live, your life span might be extended. With really good skin for most of that time."

"I already had really good skin," I blubbered. All I could think of was "if you live." How had I gone through life not knowing about these creatures? "How many of, um, you are there?"

"Not many," he said sorrowfully. "Certainly not enough for us to amass any political power." He was silent for so long that I thought he was done talking, but then he added, "Part of me thinks that's okay, that our time is almost over. Another part hopes that someday science will help prevent our bloodlines from becoming extinct."

We drove in silence past miles of vineyards, and then took a winding road over a mountain. Huge trees crowded over the road, obscuring the sky. Reflecting road markers were our only guide. On a stretch where the hillside beside the road dropped off into a gully, I took the gun out of my pocketbook, wiped off my prints, and tossed it out the window down into the darkness.

Gabriel watched me without saying anything. Maybe I felt safe with him or maybe something in me just shut down. I fell asleep.

When I awoke just before daybreak, we were driving on a bumpy narrow lane. Gabriel must have stopped somewhere, because he was drinking coffee from a paper cup. The sky was growing lighter and I guessed the majestic trees along the road were ancient live oaks. Somewhere nearby, a rooster crowed. Birds sang and called.

Gabriel turned off the lane and stopped the truck in front of a white gate. "We're here," he said, and reached through the truck's window to a post with a security box. He punched in a code and the gate swung open. As soon as we drove through, the gate swung shut behind us. Ahead I could see the dark shape of a large house set back among the trees, lights on the first floor glowing warmly. "How many people die from-what do you call this anyway?"

"Usually we just say 'our condition.'"

"And the mortality rate?"

"I'm not qualified to answer your question. I'm not up on that stuff."

"Right," I said skeptically.

A pack of mixed-breed dogs came rushing up to the truck, barking out an alarm. Gabriel slowed down and parked the truck behind the house. "They won't bite." He hopped out and began petting the animals as they jumped excitedly around him, wagging their tails.

I exited the vehicle more hesitantly. Up close, I could see that the house was a squarish structure made of pale sandstone. I followed Gabriel to the front porch. He opened the front door and said, "I don't know if anyone's up."

Hesitating at the door, I wondered what sinister scene lurked inside. Satin-lined coffins, suits of armor, endless marbled halls that echoed with mad laughter? My expectations for a Transylvanian theme were undermined by the foyer's California Mission decor, terra-cotta pavers, and a stairway with a wrought-iron banister.

To my right, an arched doorway opened into a spacious living room with white plaster walls and unscary brown leather furniture. "You'd think vampires would go for more drama," I commented as I turned back to Gabriel, who had paused in front of the mirror and was trying to smooth down his hair.

He glared at me. "You're really funny-not. And, yes, we have reflections. Let go of your tired old prejudices."

"Did you chant that at the gay vampire day parade? 'We're clearly here, we're queerly undead, get it through your badly coiffed straight head'?"

Someone cleared her throat in a decidedly critical way. Turning toward the sound, I spotted a petite silver-haired woman on the landing of the stairs. Despite the early hour, she was dressed in neatly pressed jeans and a tailored pink and white gingham blouse. Her soft brown moccasins matched her brown leather belt. She stared at me with exotic, emerald-green eyes, and I felt like a deer caught in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler.

Gabriel flushed and croaked, "Grandmama!"