Sid spent the remainder of the night becoming acclimated to his new surroundings, taking note of the pantry full of rotten food and the three grotesquely decaying corpses dressed in chic lounge-ware he found scattered throughout the property. He would have to find some time to clean this mess up in the coming days, but for now, he followed Lacrima’s instructions to relax, selecting a tome from the bookshelves on tropical forests and paging lazily through its colorful illustrations while sipping red wine. Eventually, the sky outside of the wide windows grew purple and pink, and the imminent dawn drove him to ground. He pulled thick curtains over his bedroom windows and crawled beneath heavy sheets, feeling his body sink into the pillowed mattress. As the sun rose outside, sleep fell over him like a weighted blanket. He gave himself over to a deep and uninterrupted slumber, dreaming of a lush garden full of delicate orchids, overgrown ferns, and of course, ghost white jasmine blooming under a full moon.

The following evening, Lacrima took him to Federico’s, a popular haberdashery in the Miami fashion district, where a nervous little man with thin, dark hair pulled measuring tape across Sid’d various extremities while a the store’s namesake, a boisterous Argentinian in a ridiculous blue fedora, looked on. The fitting started on a good note, with Federico and Lacrima discussing which of the season’s latest trends and color schemes would best match his complexion. But things took an ugly turn after the seventh jacket the assistant pulled over Sid’s shoulders nearly tore as he strained to make it fit.

“It’s not my fault, Miss,” insisted Federico. “His shoulders, they are too wide.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Lacrima shot back, glowering next to a rack of pastel bowties as Federico’s nervous little assistant helped Sid peel off a dark red dress shirt that was at least two sizes too small for him. “They’re perfect. And with that narrow waist of his? Any tailor in the world would be thrilled to clothe such a marvelous frame.”

The Argentinian shook his head. “Not my clothes, Miss. They’re not for him.”

“I see,” said Lacrima, and she moved to the front of the store. “Well, I suppose we’ll take our business elsewhere. Come, Sid. I don’t think this place is quite what we’re looking for anyway.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, shoving past the assistant. “It’s all a little… What’s the word?”

“Tacky?” offered Lacrima.

“Yeah, tacky.”

“Overstated,” Lacrima continued.

Sid nodded. “Comes across desperate.”

“God, we’re so in sync,” Lacrima said excitedly as Federico’s face turned beet red. “I’m so happy we found each other, my love.”

“How dare you!” fumed the tailor. “You insult my clothes, you insult my art! Get out of my store, you tasteless mongrels!”

“It was fortunate,” agreed Sid, taking his cue from Lacrima and ignoring Federico. “So where will we go now?”

“Hmm… I think I know a place,” Lacrima said thoughtfully. “In New York.”

“I said get out! Hijo de Puta! Get out, maricon!” raged Federico.

“New York is pretty far,” said Sid.

“But not over water,” Lacrima pointed out as though this meant something. “It’s just a quick plane ride away, love. Still, it’s a long way to go on an empty stomach.” She turned back to the door and flipped the sign hanging on the handle so it would read “closed” from the street. “You should probably eat before we leave, I think.” She turned her gaze to the indignant Argentinian. “Go on,” she said. “Tuck in.”

“Well that was pointless,” Lacrima said as Sid hailed a taxi a few minutes later. They had left the store in a bloody mess after Lacrima instructed the terrified assistant to forget what he’d seen. Sid had wiped his face on a powder-pink suit jacket on his way out the door, but his black t-shirt was still wet with the Argentinian’s blood.

“I keep trying to shop local, but I don’t know why I bother with this city,” she continued. “If the climate weren’t so agreeable, I swear I would have packed up and gone north years ago. Never mind. We’ll find what we need in New York. Vincenzo has served my family for years.”

A yellow cab pulled up and Sid held open the door as she continued on about the museums and clubs they would visit on their trip. “Oh, and I imagine we could still find a room at the Waldorf if we call soon. We could make a weekend of it!”

“Yeah,” agreed Sid, stunned by her decadence. As he slid into the back of the taxi beside her, all of the concerns and fears he’d had, things that had seemed so critical to his very survival, faded into the background. “Whatever you say, boss.”

The tailor in New York was a stooped Italian man who worked wordlessly with large veiny brown hands that shook as they pulled the measuring tape deftly around Sid’s shoulders.

“Vino, Senora?” he said, his eyes glued to the red carpeted floor.

“Si, grazie, Vincenzo,” said Lacrima.

He called back to a plump woman in the back of the store who hurried in with two glasses and a bottle of red wine, the same vintage that Lacrima had offered him his first night in the house. Sid savored it, enjoying its subtle favors as Vincenzo helped him into a perfectly tailored black dinner jacket.

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“Marvelous as usual, Vincenzo,” said Lacrima. “Almost perfect. It just needs one last touch.” She rose from the leather arm chair she had been lounging in to examine a display of silk handkerchiefs. “This one, I think,” she said, selecting a deep magenta and tucking it into Sid’s jacket pocket. “You can pull off pinks. It’s your super-power.”

“My super power?” said Sid.

“Among others, I’m sure,” said Lacrima. “The dark gift is different for us all. Now let’s get out of here. There’s a show I’d like to see in Chelsea. Something called ‘Susan and the Banshees…’ Supposed to be very avant garde.”

Sid woke the next morning with the taste of fresh blood still in his mouth and the distant memory of a slim man with a yellow mohawk kneeling in front of him in a piss-soaked bathroom. “What the fuck,” he muttered as he rolled over to find the man was still in his bed, breathing deeply as he slept off the previous night’s hangover.

Guess you weren’t hungry, offered Lacrima. Sid searched the darkness, finding her shape outlined in the sparkling lights of the city below. The curtains that had shut out the sunlight had been drawn, and night had fallen once again.

And you? He said. Did you feed?

No need, she said, shaking her head. I can do with very little sometimes. When it’s offered willingly.

Sid recalled the grimy basement club where black clad youths drank flat beer and thrashed around to discordant riffs. Lacrima had stood beside him as the crowd instinctually maintained a perimeter around them, her eyes glued to the band as a woman with a heavy cat’s eye belted a gloomy melody from a makeshift stage. Even then, he had sensed from the intensity of her stare that she was taking in more than the ambiance of the venue. He had never seen her drink blood, but he still couldn’t quite grasp what it was that she fed upon. Lust? Pleasure? Energy?

After a few days of club-hopping in NYC, the pair headed home to Miami, where their life fell into a comfortable pattern. Together, they crashed venues ranging from the finest garden parties to the seediest underground clubs, all the while supping on a willing and delectable populace. Lacrima artfully played the role of the spoiled Miami socialite, blending seamlessly with any crowd she chose, while Sid followed his queen, ever content to kneel at her feet or stand at her side as the occasion would suit her. Wherever they went, they were greeted with hospitality befitting royalty, which Lacrima seemed to know instinctually how to exploit to meet their needs.

In their downtime, Lacrima started to teach Sid how to use some of his innate skills. “You have a sensitivity for the minds of others. A gift of persuasion,” she said one night as they strolled through a city park. “Have you ever found that you can convince people around you to do certain things? Maybe things that aren’t exactly in their best interest?”

“I… No, actually. I don’t think I’ve really tried that,” said Sid. “The idea kind of makes me… Well it makes me uncomfortable.”

“I see,” said Lacrima. “And what about animals? Maybe you’ve trained a bird or charmed a snake? Taught a dog to expect food at the sound of a bell?”

“Or a gator,” said Sid, picturing the large, dinosaur like creatures as they tore into the dead bodies he dumped along the banks of their swamp.

“So you have used your gift then,” said Lacrima.

Sid shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

She stooped down then and peered into a tall shrub. Dozens of flashing eyes shone out at them from within its branches, and she extended a hand towards them. “Come, little one,” she called sweetly. “Come here.”

The branches of the shrubs began to rustle, and a feral kitten the size of Sid’s palm trotted out from the shadows, its mother calling balefully after it.

“Roll over,” she said to the kitten. It regarded her with wide eyes the color of the sky above the Miami shore and flopped back on the concrete exposing the white downy fur of its belly. “Stand.” It obeyed, rising onto its haunches and batting playfully at Lacrima’s fingers as she waved them over it. “Now,” she said, the sweetness draining from her voice. “Place your head beneath my heel.”

Sid cringed, fighting the urge to reach down and rescue the little creature as it crouched and laid it head obediently against the pavement below her raised heel.

“Good,” she said, holding her leg steady over the little creature’s head. From the bushes, the mother continued to wail in protest. “Do you see, Sid? Do you see the power of this gift? Now you try. Give it a command.”

“Go back,” Sid said without missing a beat. “Go to your mother.”

The kitten extracted its head from beneath Lacrima’s raised heel and scampered back into the shrubs.

“I don’t like this kind of game,” he said, and he started off down the sidewalk, leaving Lacrima and the kittens behind him.

Lacrima dropped it then, deciding instead to focus on teaching him other skills. He learned to change his shape, shifting into the form of a large gray cat to slink around the house and chase after the rats that congregated under the dock. Then, she taught him how to convince a human bouncer that, no, his name was indeed on the list, so check again. And finally, he learned to move like a silent shadow in the darkness, slipping around the neighborhood and inside the adjacent mansion homes to spy on their unwitting occupants. In this way, he learned that they were not alone in wanting their privacy. Almost every house on their block was occupied by families with various criminal ties, or were used as safehouses for high-level members of the Cartel. As it happened, Lacrima could not have selected a better location.

This was the first of many such realizations, feeding into a nagging question. At times, his mistress could seem utterly helpless in the modern age, refusing to open a bank account or purchase any property of her own, but the role of the spoiled Princess was as much of a performance as the games she played with her prey. In fact, the more time he spent with her, the more he came to realize that she didn’t actually need him to perform any of the tasks she asked of him. So why, then, he wondered, did she keep him around?

This, and many more questions began to burn in his mind over the years he spent with her, and little by little, he came to understand the calculating mind beneath the beauty and the chaos. Immediately apparent was the duality of her nature. She was in equal measures kind, generous, and charming, but capable of thoughtless cruelty that bubbled up from a deep wellspring inside her. But from where did it stem, he wondered, and why? Most of the time, he was able to ignore it or write it off as a symptom of who and what she was. The games she played were like a housecat stalking insects and pulling the legs off of their wriggling bodies, all a part of some long-buried instinct too intrinsic to ignore. She couldn’t help it, and maybe someday, if he lived long enough, he would be like that too. And Sid was almost able to believe this happy lie, until one night at a cocktail party in Coral Gables, a Cuban physician named Alvaro Garcia entered their lives, and he was forced to watch in excruciating detail as Lacrima played her most favorite game yet.