Perching on a bar stool, I ordered a white wine. The bartender, a short, stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair, served it and pushed a fresh basket of popcorn within reach. "Could I ask you about that waitress who just left?" I said.
"Corazon? What about her?" he said in accented English.
Yeah, what do I want to know, anyway? Whether she has drug connections? I decided to start simply, adding a psychic nudge to make him cooperative. "How long has she worked here?"
"Couple, maybe three months."
"Do you know anything about her past? I mean, where she's from, where she worked before?"
"Lady, she's legal and she never misses her shift. What else do I need to know?" He started to move down the bar.
I increased the mental pressure and switched from English to Tagalog. "Wait--I'm just wondering if she goes out with many different men."
"What are you asking all this for?" he said in the same language. "She steal your husband?" His faint smirk suggested that he figured he'd guessed right.
"No, that's my son she just left with."
The bartender's expression turned serious. "Don't worry too much about him. He's not the first, probably not the last. It never lasts long with her."
Great, now I have to worry about his heart getting broken. "I don't want him hurt--Is she married?"
"Not that I ever heard."
"What else, then?" I sensed an undercurrent of hostility, mixed with a tinge of fear, in his comments.
The bartender muttered a word that sounded like--no, it couldn't be. "What did you say?"
"Danag," he repeated more distinctly.
I took a deep breath to tame the racing of my heart. "What do you know about danag?"
"Just a fairy tale. Nobody believes that stuff anymore. But if I did--" he glanced around and lowered his voice--"that's what I'd call her."
"Why?" I couldn't keep the sharpness from my tone.
"Bloodsucking monster, that's what she looks like. You must've heard the legends back home. Like vampires in the movies."
I reminded myself that lashing out at this superstitious fool wouldn't help my son. "Not quite like the movies."
"The story goes, they used to live with the hill folks, the Isneg tribe. The danag worked with them in the taro fields, and the farmers gave blood to feed them. Until the demons got carried away and started draining people to death."
"I've heard that their side of the story is a bit different. The danag did not become greedy; the mortals became selfish. They began refusing to donate the small amounts of blood they could easily spare. So the--others--had no choice but to take it by force." I drew a deep breath to quell my anger. "And if this girl seems not quite human, well, our people have tales of other kinds of 'vampires.' The aswang and the tiyanak, monstrous ravishers who entice and drain men without mercy--" I cut off the lecture with an impatient shake of my head. Lurid legends would always prevail over facts. Why did I waste time defending my race to this idiot? Especially when I wouldn't allow him to remember the conversation anyway.
A trace of fear crept into his eyes. He sidled toward the end of the bar, where one of the waitresses stood with her tray and an order slip. "I can't talk, I got work to do."
With a command for him to forget he'd met me, I ended the conversation. I hurried back to the car, my thoughts churning like a storm-racked sea. The woman who'd seduced Jeff wasn't one of my kind, but could she be something even less human?
)
