The Dragon Delasangre

Once fashionable, the area's on the wrong side of US1 now, almost hidden beneath the concrete columns that shoulder the weight of the elevated Metrorail tracks. Only the restaurant's legendary gargantuan steaks at picayune prices continue to lure patrons.
People still come even though they have to park their oversize luxury cars in an unguarded lot, illuminated by only a few murky yellow security lights. They scurry past the dozens of winos who spend their evenings lurking nearby - some of the homeless hidden behind the bushes and others crouching in the shadows.
Max Leiber nods to me when I enter, motions me past the waiting crowd. "Mr. DelaSangre," he says, winks a wrinkled eyelid, "the table you reserved is waiting."
The ancient maitre'de grasps my right elbow with his bony hand and guides me to a small table in a dimly lit alcove. "You always seem to stay so young," he says as he hands me a menu he knows I won't use and lights a small table side candle I don't need. "I wish I knew your secret."
I smile in return, hand him the twenty-dollar bill he's come to expect. "Tell the chef, the usual," I say, wishing him gone. He smells of age gone bad, weakened bladder and stale cigarettes.
"Maria will take your order. I'll make sure it's right." He rushes off to calm his waiting throng.
Everywhere people consume meat. The aroma almost overpowers me. I can close my eyes and still point to which tables have pork or fowl or beef - and where the rarest meat is puddling blood on its plate.

Maria looks almost too young to be waiting tables, a slightly plump girl with wide, strong hips and bright black eyes. She is in her menses. The smell of it floods my mouth with saliva. I have to swallow before I speak.
"I'll have a twenty-four-ounce Porterhouse steak, blood rare. Tell the chef it's for Mr. DelaSangre - he'll know how I want it."
She stares at me, asks what else I want - salad, potatoes?
I shake my head.
Still, she stares.
My own fault really. Father has laughed many times at my vanity. Like all of my people, I'm taller than most men. My muscles strain against my clothes, especially at the shoulders and neck. But where Father's face is angular - his nose, long and sharp - his lips, thin and cruel - my features are softer, more middle-American.
"Your eyes," she says.
I grin at her.
"I've never seen such green eyes . . . like emeralds."
"They run in my family," I tell her. It's true. There's much about ourselves we can change but no one of the blood has ever been able to conceal their eyes. In the old days that's how they would find us. Thankfully such knowledge has long been lost.
Maria lingers at the table. "If everyone else in your family looks like you . . ." she coos, then blushes and rushes off to place my order.
I grin again. I can hear Father saying, "It's your damn ego, calling attention to yourself."
Mea culpa. Father will never understand. He was born well before this time. To him all human forms are equally unpleasant. "You might as well admire cattle!" he says anytime I remark at anyone's beauty. But I'm young enough to have been shaped by the movies and later, TV. It's only natural for someone like me - brought up in a world where appearances matter more than reality - to choose to improve his looks. Father laughed most, when after viewing Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, I suddenly decided to have a cleft chin.