'Mare Pacificum,' he was thinking, 'this was where we stopped.' The Portuguese sailed on to the Japans, but his people came for this continent only, wound up sealing it as theirs with their blood and their names, and then disappeared into its dirt just as they had sent down to the dirt those who were here before them. Only the names lingered, and they fade too. Like this city's, which his people founded as La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles, whose mayor now was a German who called it Lasanglees.

But all of that was mortal life, and mortal life quit mattering to him long, long ago. In an era when the hills here were marked with three or four missions and the disease and the conversions had been started. There remained a big dark cross at Olvera Street that had been here in his time; the rest was novelty.

Which was fine with him. He liked novelty. It kept him entertained, and it kept him invisible. Both good things.

The Santa Monica Pier was always good hunting. Under the strung lights and the loud carousel was the underlife of any mortal party: the pickpockets, muggers, buggers, drunks, junkies... they would be down below, on the lower level or on the beach itself, wandering among the dark pilings with their frosting of barnacles and algae. Someone turned up dead down there about twice a week.

When he was in town, even a little more often than that.

But as with all things, in recent decades, records had gotten better. Police had gotten interested in small matters like little nibbles along the neck. Better now to grab one in the dark and take him a mile out to sea after finishing, to let the fish and crabs add their nibbles, to make the absence of blood less intriguing when the body came back to shore. If it did.

Inconvenient, but still easier than most kills.

And the rest of the time, there was the club in town, the amusingly named Ash Grove with its population of mortal folkies and immortal blooddrinkers who listened to humans wail the blues there through the late hours. There had even been the old Delta singer who'd walked into the club one night on a gig, looked around, looked directly at the vampires one by one, his big dark eyes sliding past the mortals without question or hesitation, muttered "loup-garou," and gone to the bar for straight whiskey.

The bluesman had opened his first set by saying, "we got the devil heah wid us tonight folks, so y'all be watchful. This stage has known the print of the cloven hoof, um-hmm," and then made the music of a sad, bitter and forgiving angel. All night.

And he, since he played, had watched the old bluesman acutely, picked up the fingerings, listened for the fractional syncopations the man could hide in a simple twelve-note blues. The artistry, the soul, African transplanted in slavery to the Americas and then freed to poverty for generations, was far from the gypsy music of his home country and yet shared some powerful truth with it, the thing that in Andalusia they called 'duende,' an access to the darkness that was in a human soul, an alchemy in art that could wring that darkness into a great joy of the heart-- even a mortal one. Or perhaps only a mortal one, since the artistry of it was beyond his reach, even after nearly five centuries of loving his instrument...

"Esto es un mujer, Javito," Dominguin had said, putting the small wooden box in his hands. "Ella llora y ora, ella quema y queja, y mas que nada, ella canta." //This is a woman, little Javier. She weeps and she prays, she burns and complains, and most of all she sings.//

His mind filled now with the image of old Dominguin, the Andaluzeno, native of the country shaped like a bullshide, who talked about something you couldn't see and the priests didn't know, something about the soul, which was duende. It was like the thing that was hidden in women, but also even stronger that than, little Javier. The Andaluzeno was telling this to a boy who had none of a man's hair yet, none of a man's needs, and the instrument that Dominguin said was a woman sat in that boy's hands like all the mysteries in the world. Something's in there, Javito. Something that was hidden in the wooden box with its strings pulled from deersgut, its soundhole covered with a grille like the one between you and the Father in the confessional... the old words you sent through that grille, bless me for I have sinned, and the words that always came back, ego te absolvo, I forgive you...

Guitar notes... the veering of the onshore breeze was bringing the notes of a melody and a bassline to his ears.

He wasn't so hungry that he wouldn't investigate.

A moment later he was approaching a figure sitting in the sand in front of lifeguard tower 22, about a third of mile south down the beach. He came up from behind but didn't touch, simply said, "Hi."

The guitar player didn't react with fear. Stoned or stupid, maybe. She just turned around and said "Hi," and then paused for a good look at him.

He was a medium sized man in this era, though he'd been tall in his own. His hair was black, and the wind was whipping it around his shoulders; that made him a hippie in this place and time. His clothing was simple, as it usually was these days; bluejeans, a light sweater, a fringed buckskin jacket. His eyes were dark and large, and he had a lush black mustache that ran down nearly to his jawline, another hippie touch.

The girl was wearing hippie signatures, too. Long straight hair, parted in the middle and braided into Indian plats. Jeans and a blue workshirt thickly embroidered with flowers and birds. And the ubiquitous love beads, just simple glass beads on a string, but in this time and place they amounted to a whole social and political manifesto. So they smiled at each other, allies. And the vampire smiled inside himself, differently.

"You play?" said the girl. He nodded and reached out a hand, squatting down next to her in the sand.

She passed him the guitar. It was a cheap instrument, acoustic, strung with poor nylon strings, but it was a guitar and it came to his hand like a pet. He corrected the tuning as well as he could, though the strings and posts were both so bad that the tuning was sure to slip after only a few notes. Then he let his hands go to work, and his mind go to dreams.

She was a pretty girl, not very formed, very young. And still small, still a hundred pounds or less. She was watching his fingers, long and slender fingers with small knuckles, perfect for a guitarist, as he worked through the Malaguena, and then went backwards in time to gitano melodies, and forward to the bridges of one or two songs that were high on the rock n roll playlist that month.

"Wow, you really do play," the girl said. "That's amazing." She leaned forward, studying the set of his fingers on the strings at rest. "You should be in a band -- or are you?" Now her eyes came up to his.

"Not exactly." He had a little amused smile. "I do backup for bands sometimes." He passed the guitar back to her. "You?"

She laughed. "Oh sure. No, I just..." she looked at him, and decided to say it exactly. "I play for the wind. I just make stuff up-- I don't know anything."

His eyebrows went up. Put up, or shut up. She nodded, resigned. "I don't know how, you know." He nodded again. And she was right, she didn't know how-- but she was finding her way into the instrument note by note, looking for melodies, looking for resonance... she had a way of coupling notes that appealed him, telling the same melody twice, as if trying for counterpoint in the melody and then having an ordinary two-string bass beat anchoring it. Naive, but enough to be charming, and something more. It might be the beginnings of a true musical intelligence; certainly there was a genuine and individual spirit trying to find a voice in the strings, the mark of someone who should stay with the instrument. The accident of tripping across something so close to its beginnings pleased him.

"Why are you down here alone?"

"Why are you?" she shot back.

He smiled. "I asked you first." His eyes said, It's not the same, and you know it.

A shrug. "My Mom's out on a date." She looked him in the eyes. "I come down here all the time. Nothing bad has ever happened." She thought for a moment and laughed, "weird stuff, but nothing bad. There's always someone around."

"Like me," he said softly.

"If you'd been around, I would've remembered," she said, momentarily bold. "Most of the freaks are down at Venice, not here. You really play professionally?"

"Sure." Always amusing, the shortcut way of impressing girls. In one place it's daring the bulls, in another it's a certain accent; here it's being a boy in a band. He spoke on impulse: "Want to come to a session? There's one tonight."

The girl's face reflected her thought: there it is. The pitch. The famous "one thing" her mother said was all men wanted.

He ignored the expression on her face. "Tracks for some local group called the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band." What the hell, he thought, everyone has a groupie at a session these days, why not me? The girls with bangs down to the eyelashes, the eyes heavily lined with black or brown, over and under. Some of them with pale blue above it, like that English model. And all with long straight serious hair, parted in the middle, brushed to the sheen and texture of cornsilk, and more beautiful than flags in the wind. They sat in rows along the punchboard walls of the soundproofed rooms, passed joints and giggled. They whispered about their rock 'n roll boyfriends, and worried about each other, because they were predators in their own way.

"Thanks, but no." She smiled. He looked at the face, still forming, almost nothing written on it by time yet.

"You think I'm lying," he said, with a small smile.

"I -think- I'm not going to get in your car," she shot back.

He flashed a wicked grin. War. "You usually pass for eighteen, don't you? And you're twelve or thirteen, right?"

Bang. A girl pretending to be almost a woman, and she usually got away with it. No way she could know that this one guy had senses that told him exactly what hormones were and weren't circulating in her blood. Or that as he played, he set the rhythm of his thoughts to the heart he heard beating strongly in her chest, the slightly slowpaced heartbeat of someone who swam or ran a great deal.

She was reacting to both the strangeness and the correctness of what he said. Fear and pleasure. Be strange, but not too strange, that's what the hippie chicks want. Even the babies.

"OK, you're right. I'm complete and total jailbait, okay?" Lots of intelligence in her smile now. She liked the challenge, and she liked coming out in the open to be herself. He envied her the pleasure.

"Someone should be watching you," he said abruptly. "You're a nice girl." In his day, such a girl was never alone, not even in the poorest families. This was a girl who would have a clean life, a moral life, a noticed life that would be enveloped by other people. Not his kind.

"Oh, ew, nice?" But she was relaxing her guard, thought she understood where he was coming from. She preferred to be recognized as a good girl, because she thought he was now seeing her as offlimits. Even dangerous, which was why she had chosen the word 'jailbait.' And yet to be called nice was just a little more than she could bear.

He grinned again. "Interesting too," he said reassuringly. "Fascinating, really."

"Oh, go -away-," she said. She was back in her cloud of nice-girl safety now. She thought they'd reached some understanding, that they were dealing as equals again. "No, wait. Don't go away, just hush and play for me some more." She handed him her guitar.

"Yes, my lady," he said. "As my lady commands." But he settled himself comfortably into the sand, returned the guitar as best he could, and played more. He played what he thought her tastes would be, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, and found that he'd guessed right. Slightly intellectual acoustic hippie. She cooed at him, "wow, you have a nice voice, too." When she was being perfectly candid, her voice was still at the cusp of childhood, had a simple music of its own that he liked.

"What grade are you in?" he said.

"Ninth." She misunderstood his incomprehension. "Really. I just skipped a couple." He shook his head. He didn't care. It was something he'd heard mortals say to youngsters, but he realized he had no idea what came next, after the answer.

"The session is real," he said. "On Fountain Avenue." He gave her an address. "We start at eleven, if you want to come." She started to stiffen, and he teased her fear: "Not in my car. I don't have one, anyway." He handed her the guitar back. "If you show up, I'll see you." He smiled a little. "I have to go catch a bite to eat now." He started back up the beach towards the pier, stuck with walking in the sand because her eyes would surely be following him.

"Hey-- my name is Victoria," she shouted after him.

He turned around, summoning his current name to mind. "I go by J.D.," he said. She waved, and he waved back in imitation, then turned his senses forward, to the pilings. The dark space where he belonged, where there should be someone who would not be a nice young middle class girl trying out fragmentary melodies on her cheap guitar "for the wind." Someone who would never, never be reported missing. Someone whose blood would give him his life in the intimate act that was the wicked heart and greatest joy of his existence. The act that alone raised the dark singing inside him, the thing that never quite came from his guitars, the bloodborne hymn in his body that his teacher and the old bluesman would have understood as having duende, that dark transformation of death into something that mixed life and art and was music.