Original Fic Friday: Hunter's Tales Volume One: Billy Price

A/N: Vampires, snark, meta, all manner of good things lie within. Want to start at the beginning? Click here. Want to read it all at once? It's .99 at Amazon.

Chapter 11.

I spend the next two days with Billy, talking to him about being a vamp and who I am when we’re alone, about school and my cover life when his parents are with us. He slips into a coma a bit after dinner on the second night.

A bit of work with my glamour gets his parents to go out for dinner on the third night.

As soon as they’re out of the room, I pull the IV out of his arm and spend a moment gently massaging it, pushing as much of the morphine tinged blood back out of him as I can. Not that I mind morphine, but it tastes pretty mucky. I wipe his arm off and lay my lips upon the wound, pulling his blood into my mouth.

I eat my fill, which isn’t a whole lot. I’m not really hungry. It takes about a week before I start to feel hungry. The two or three mouthfuls I take won’t kill him, but they don’t have to. I don’t know precisely how the magic works, but I do know you need at least some of the soon-to-be vamp’s blood in your system.

With his blood still on my tongue, I pull back. I bite my finger, feeling my own blood welling up, and then open his mouth, tracing a line of my blood on his tongue. Then I kiss him, deeply, mixing his blood with mine.

Almost done.

Our blood mixed with theirs is toxic. I don’t know why, but it is. But it’s not enough to let them drink your blood, nor is it enough to drink theirs. You’ve got to mix them together.

It acts quick, too. Less than a minute later, his heart stops and the monitor begins to beep. Gotta get this done fast.

‘The blood is the life.’ True, but blood isn’t all there is to life; there is breath, too. I hold his face in both of my hands, draw in his last breath, and exhale it back into his lungs.

Gives new meaning to ‘the kiss of life,’ huh?

I put the IV back in and get out of there fast.

Chapter 12.

April 2, 2017

The Libertine is absolutely slamming. It’s an Enlightenment Club. NeoClassical music pours out of the speakers. Electric guitar, violin, and drums pound out a quadrille faster and better than it had ever been in the old days.

I love it here. So do a lot of other vamps. Mostly old vamps, ones within a hundred years of my age. If I had to guess, I’d say only two-thirds of the crowd here is human. The rest are like me: voraciously enjoying a version of the world we left behind, a version that had all the fun of the old world, with a modern twist.

It’s beautiful. I never saw the salons of Paris, but they couldn’t have held a candle to this.

The music switches into a waltz with a hip hop arrangement, more drums than anyone in Vienna ever thought could go with this sort of music, and the tempo’s way faster. It works. And I’m working it.

The prey for tonight is dancing with another woman, but he was in my set for the last quadrille, and he will be in the next.

It’s different here. He knows I’m a vamp. My corset’s so tight that no one who has to breathe could pull it off. He thinks we’re flirting for sex.

Of course, I know that’s not quite how this is going to work out.

The music shifts again, and he’s once more in my dance set. As we clasp hands and turn to the music, he compliments me on my frock. Frock… Hell, he might even be old enough to remember when that was the word for a dress. He’s not wearing contacts, and his eyes are awfully light blue. I’m thinking he’s from the 1820s originally. Not quite old enough to remember the world The Libertine is trying to recreate, but old enough for it to seem familiar.

Unlike the old days, none of us are wearing wigs. It’s his own hair that’s curled and pulled back into a ponytail. My hair is the only bit of my outfit that’s out of time. Instead of the sky-high piles of curls most of the women are wearing around me, I’m sporting a simple bun with two hair sticks.

At the end of the set, he offers me his arm. I take it gracefully. We don’t really need to talk. He’s confidently leading me toward the back of the club.

Because of the nature of the clientele here, there’s a large number of secluded nooks, corners, a few private rooms, and a long and usually deserted hallway in the far back. He’s taking me to one of the private rooms. I change his direction. The private rooms are lavishly appointed, all velvet and gilt, and I don’t want to get blood and ash all over them.

The management appreciates that I’m a polite guest.

I steer him gently toward the back hallway. It’s concrete block and cement floors. Much less romantic, but significantly easier to clean up.

“Want to play a game?” I ask him as we get into the hall.

“Yes.”

“Good.” I push his damask silk coat down his arms, unbutton his very fine silk shirt, and pull it down so his arms are trapped behind his back in his shirt and coat. Did you know that silk has the same tensile strength as steel? I didn’t either until recently. But it certainly works to my advantage. I slip off my stockings, also silk, and finish up the bundle of his arms by tying them in a precise knot.

“Ohhh… fun.”

“I certainly think so.” I push him against the wall and begin to unbutton his breeches.

He certainly is old school; he’s got nothing underneath them.

Until the moment I bite into his femoral artery, he thought this was foreplay.

He’s kicking and struggling, but he’s not strong enough to get away from me.

He suddenly stops fighting. “Please, help me!”

I can feel the vamp behind me grin. Okay, I can imagine the vamp behind me grin. A familiar voice says, “May I join you?”

I look back and see Billy in full 1770s garb, including powdered wig, smiling at me. I scoot over a bit, leaving the vamp’s left leg free. Billy settles in, eating with the famished hunger of the young.

After a minute, the vamp is unconscious. I stake him to finish it off.

“You found me.”

Billy licks his lips, getting the last of the blood, dusts vamp ash off of his silk coat, and then smiles at me.

“Of course. He really was tasty. I understand why you hunt us.”

“Do you now?” I tuck the hair stick back into my bun.

“I think I do. Mistress Pruitt, would you do me the honor of a dance?”

"Certainly, Master Price."

Original Fic Friday: Hunter's Tales Volume One: Billy Price

A/N: Vampires, snark, meta, all manner of good things lie within. Want to start at the beginning? Click here. Want to read it all at once? It's .99 at Amazon.

Chapter 9.

I leave Billy when it’s time to go to school. Amazingly enough, none of the nurses told me to leave. Or, maybe I should say, none of the nurses succeeded in getting the full sentence out. Several of them began to tell me to leave, but one look from me and my glamour and they shut up.

I don’t have any interest in drawing things out with Jack, not even to track him back to his place. I’m getting hungry, and if the next few days go the way I think they will, I’ll need to be well fed.

He breaks away from his crowd of friends and heads toward the bathroom during lunch. Best chance I’m going to get all day. Not my favorite location for something like this, but it’ll work.

Now, as you might remember, I mentioned we don’t digest. What goes in comes out. This is useful to know for a few reasons. In relation to hunting vamps, it’s good to know because human nature tends to work the same way for everyone.

Guys have a sort of code. When they’re in the bathroom that code is: ‘Thou shalt not look at the other guys.’ So if one of them is at the urinal and he hears someone come in, he’s not going to look up and around to see who it is. He’s going to keep looking straight ahead.

Go in moving faster than he can see, and he won’t even have the time to notice something is wrong.

I go in fast, tackle him into the handicapped stall at the far end of the bathroom, and have his arms pinned behind his back, a hair stick pressed into his chest (I usually try to get far enough in to get past the ribs but not into the heart. You poke a stake that far into a vamp and he’s going to go very still, not wanting to risk having it go in further), and my fangs in his neck before he knows what is happening.

“Let me eat, and I don’t press it home.”

I can feel him trembling under me, fear or rage, I don’t know. He’s doing what I tell him to, so I don’t care, either. I prop his feet against the stall door, straddle his hips, and get to it.

Boys come in and out, giggling, talking. I press a finger to Jack’s lips, and he stays quiet.

You can’t actually kill a vamp by draining him dry. He’s going to be in awfully bad shape after something like that, but he won’t die. From the way he looks at me, I guess he knows that and is willing to let me drink up if it means he’s going to get out of this alive.

“Good boy.” I pat his cheek patronizingly as I feast. Someone else in the bathroom must have heard that and seen our lower bodies under the stall. Chuckling and sexually unimaginative comments are the soundtrack to my meal.

I don’t pull back. I don’t do anything to signal I’m done. I don’t want him to figure out the next move. I can feel I’ve had enough, so mid-suck, I shove the hair stick home.

Interesting bit about vamps: we do turn to ash or dust or something when we die. Our clothing does not.

I debate leaving the clothes or not.

Screw it. I leave them. Worst come to worst, people will think he spontaneously combusted. No, I don’t know for a fact that dusted vamps is where that idea comes from, but I’d give even odds on it.

I dust myself off, tuck the hair stick back into my bun, stroll past a few shocked boys in the bathroom, glamouring them to forget me as I walk past, and head off.

Good-bye Jenks High.

Chapter 10.

I pull up a chair next to Billy’s bed.

“Helen?” He sounds groggy, like he just woke up. He probably has just woken up.

“Yeah. How you doing?”

“Been better.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

He turns his face to my general direction and reaches a hand out toward me. I take his hand in mine, not in the least concerned about keeping up the appearance of humanity. For a moment, he just holds my hand.

“I got about fifty Facebook updates telling me Jack Cross went missing today. Rumor around the school is that his clothing and a pile of ash were found in the boy’s bathroom.”

“I heard that.”

“You know, he was room temperature, too.”

“Yeah, I bet he was.”

“He had this unnerving habit of not blinking for way too long.”

“I noticed that, as well.”

“Hypothyroid, huh?”

I sit on his bed next to him and wrap my arm around him. “Well, I don’t have any thyroid function at all. Technically, it’s true.”

He smiles at that. “So, you’re what, Blade?”

“Not quite. I really don’t think dhampir exist. I’ve never seen or heard of one. I have a proposition for you.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Do you still want to be a vamp?”

“Could I stay with you?”

“No. Baby vamps aren’t my thing.” He looks disappointed. But baby vamps annoy me, and no matter how cute he is as a human, I don’t want him around as a vamp until he’s grown up a bit.

“How would it work?”

“I’ll wait until you fall into a coma, finish you off, and the next night you’ll wake up in the morgue or funeral home and have to fend for yourself. In five or ten years, when you’ve had the time to grow up a bit and see if you can survive as a vamp, then I’ll want to see you.”

He thinks about it. I can see him pondering how he’d survive, what his parents will think when his body suddenly goes missing, weighing that against having maybe a few weeks, most of them unconscious, of life left. He gently pokes my wrist with his thumb.

“You’re soft.”

“All of us are soft. The hard as stone vampire thing… I don’t know where that comes from. Modified Golem myth? Anyway, hard things don’t bend all that well. They tend to crack and break. If you want to move, you need to be soft.”

He nods at that, still holding my wrist. I realize he’s feeling for my pulse.

“I really don’t have one.”

“Appears so.” His fingers stroke down my wrist a few times. “Will they notice the bite marks?”

“I’m not going to bite you. I’ll use your arm, where the IV is, and put it back when I’m done.”

He thinks about that for a moment. “I’m full of morphine. Will that be a problem?”

“I doubt it. I’ve smoked opium and didn’t notice any issues.” Vamps can get high and drunk and anything else really. It just takes a ton of whatever it is to do it. I don’t know why that’s true, but my guess is it would take about three times a lethal dose of morphine to get me even buzzed, let alone loopy.

“Really?”

“Really. San Francisco, back in the 1890s. I’d never seen real Asians before and was fascinated by them. I spent a lot of time in the opium dens because they were there, and no one made any sort of fuss about my kind eating the customers as long as I paid the house well.”

He thinks about that for a few minutes, too. “Did you kill them?”

“Very rarely. A bunch of them thought they had some really intense hallucinations about a blond girl sucking on them.” I pause for a moment, thinking of a good way to explain how it works.

“Do you know about the Masai tribe in Africa?”

He shakes his head.

“They live on a diet of cow blood and milk.” He looks a little nauseous at that, but I keep going. “They don’t kill the cows often, because a dead cow makes no more blood or milk. That’s how most of us treat humans. A pint here, a pint there, and we’re good. Young ones tend to need more food, but even then, you’re usually full by two or three pints. I mean, think about it: how big is your stomach? Even full to bursting, it’s not much more than three pints. Most humans can survive that level of donation.”

“But you killed Jack, right?” He looks a little dubious, and I’m not sure if he’d be happier with me saying yes or no. Either way, I’m not going to bother to lie to him.

“Yes. If you eat cow blood, there’s no reason to kill the cow. Not like it’s going to hunt you down in your sleep. Me, I eat grizzly bear blood. Turn your back on one of them, and it will kill you.”

“Oh.”

“So, do you want me to do it?”

“No demons?” I’d laugh at the earnest doubt on his face if he were anyone else in any other situation.

“No demons. If you’re a basically decent human, you’ll be a basically decent vamp. We’re just like sharks.”

“You know, that’s not usually a compliment.”

I smile at him and realize he can’t see it. “Some of us like being sharks. And you don’t have to be one. I won’t think any less of you if you say no. Most sharks don’t live a long time. It’s hard work being a shark.”

“Well, even if I turn out to be the least effective, most bumbling vampire ever, I’m still looking at a longer lifespan than I’d have otherwise.”

“Probably true.”

“So what do I have to lose?”

“Doesn’t look like much from where I’m sitting.”

“Yes. I’ll be a vamp.” He looks very young and very certain at that moment. And then, for a second, very scared. “Will you stay with me until…”

“Sure.”

I can see him pushing fear aside. “How will I find you? In five years, I mean. Will we have some sort of special mojo? Some sort of maker/child bond?”

“Nah. Luck. Perseverance. Google. Facebook. After all, it’s not like I’ll look different. I’ve got friends here and there, and I’ve been around for so long, a lot of the older vamps know me. It won’t be easy, but I’m not impossible to find, either.”

“Will you have sex with me? I don’t want to die a virgin.” His smile tells me he’s not entirely kidding. His sightless eyes let me know he’s more asking just to ask; he doesn’t have the strength for it anymore.

“Nope. Once again, five, ten years from now, when you’ve got a bit more experience, and yes. But right now, I’d break you, and not in a good way.”

“Damn.” He shakes his head, looking sad and relieved. “Even on my deathbed I can’t get a girl to sleep with me.”

“Even on your deathbed.” I smile and kiss him on the temple.

“So, tell me about being a vampire. Obviously, the bursting into flames thing is off…”

“Just a bit…”

 

Original Fic Friday: Hunter's Tales Volume One: Billy Price

A/N: Vampires, snark, meta, all manner of good things lie within. Want to start at the beginning? Click here. Want to read it all at once? It's .99 at Amazon.

Chapter 6.

What to do about Jack? The immediate satisfaction of just tracking him to his home and eating him wars with the desire for the greater satisfaction of a real hunt.

An hour of that and I am just as undecided.

Better question, or at least a question I could likely come up with a real answer for: what to do about Billy? He is kind of cute...

Okay, stop it right there. This is not a YA paranormal romance. Do you sleep with your food? No! You don’t. (And if you do, I don’t want to hear about it. That’s a bit kinkier than I want to get, and my own tastes on the subject are already pretty damn broad.) Do you fall in love with your food and expect to have a long-term relationship with it? No! You don’t. I am a vampire. He’s a human. Basically, to put it in human terms, he’s a steer. Steer may be cute, they may, on rare occasions, make good pets, but really, the reason you keep them around is to get them nice and fat so you can eat them.

But, I do kind of like him. And, there is something to be said about occasionally breaking in an eager virgin. There’s a certain look on a guy’s face the first time… Anyway… We’ve way too far into TMI territory here.

Okay, it’s true that some of the young vamps do sleep with humans for fun. And it’s true that these days the humans more or less expect us to have sex with them before or during eating them. From what I can see, that’s about as exciting for the vamp as kissing your 97-year-old great-grandmother is for most humans. (And yet another reason I don’t go after humans anymore. I wear most male vamps out. What the hell am I going to do with a human? Please!) Usually, if we’re looking for a bedmate, we’ll turn them because humans just don’t have the stamina to keep up with us.

Oh, and for all you paranormal romance reading girls out there, heads up: sex is a learned skill. Turning into a vamp does not suddenly make you Mr. Romance or particularly good in the sack. Just like any other learned skill, you need time and practice. Expecting a vamp to be good at sex is like expecting him to be able to speak perfect French. If he’s put the time and effort into it, he’ll probably be better at it than anything you’ve
ever seen. If he hasn’t…

Here’s the thing; I’ve let several of the ones that hang out at high schools ‘seduce’ me, and they were pretty damn lame. I don’t know if they were still pretending to be teen boys, or they were holding back because they thought I was a human girl, but, even if I wasn’t dead, those few kisses wouldn’t have gotten my heart pounding.

Likewise, I’m pretty damn sure Anne Rice never met a real vampire. We don’t get off on eating. Even the best meal of your life wasn’t a literally orgasmic experience. It’s not for us either.

Okay, all clear now? Good.

Back to Billy. I do sort of like him, the kind of fondness one might have for a particularly cute kitten.

But now that I know what is up with him, keeping him around could only mess up my chances of catching Jack. One thing most vamps don’t go for is the girl who already has a visible boyfriend.

Of course, keeping him around might be fun, and that’s also the point of this. After all, there’s nothing that says I can’t outright hunt a vamp, instead of letting him think he was hunting me.

But just a straight, outright hunt would be awfully fast. Find vamp. Follow him home. Break in. Kill him. In, out, and done—not a lot of finesse there.

And not a lot of finesse is boring. I might as well eat humans if I’m not going to bother with finesse.

I can try seducing the vamp. Try being so fabulous that he’ll want to be seen with me. Make him decide to drop Evie and move up the food chain.

Well, it’ll be a challenge. And, if I’m going to be popular and cool, I could have friends, like Billy.

Might be interesting.

It would certainly be different.

It’s pretty close to midnight. Time for me to go to sleep. Yes, we do sleep. Just like with humans, as we get older we need less of it. Three, four hours does me just fine.

Tomorrow, I’ll be fabulous.

Chapter 7.

“You look nice,” Billy says as he slides into his seat.

“Thanks. Wanted to be pretty today.”

“You’ve succeeded.”

I am pretty today. I skipped the black clothing and went with a pink cheongsam, white leggings, and cute, little pink pumps. I left off my Goth makeup and went for something that emphasizes how good my skin really is.

I have my hair in its usual bun, hair sticks at the ready, with a few artfully curled tendrils wisping about, looking soft and romantic. I’m so damn cute it would make a puppy cry. With any luck, it will also intrigue Jack.

It seems to be working. He’d checked me out three times by lunch. That was a start. Give it a while longer and he might actually decide to talk to me.

I set my glamour so that everyone near me will feel a desire to get a little closer. They’ll look in my direction and want to know who I am and what I’m doing. It’s subtle; most of the humans won’t even notice they aren’t the ones generating the desire to go check out the new girl.

By the end of the day, I’ve said hi to close to fifty people. There’s a small clot of them chatting with me in each class. Jack’s in my sixth period class, and he did look my way when I walked in with a collection of teen girls all babbling away about my outfit. I look back at him and smile. One of the other girls saw him and starts cooing about how cute he was.

I agree with her and let the wash of blather rush around me.

A brief fantasy of glamouring them all into shutting up and just following me around flits through my mind. I smile at the image and dismiss it. I’ve never had a herd of minions, though I’ve met some vamps who have. Herds of minions are for the people who don’t like hunting.

When the final bell rang, I’m sure of one thing: I am not cut out to be popular in high school. The vast vapidness of it is killing off IQ points at close to fifty an hour. Too much more of it and I’ll be a talking monkey.

So, back to plan A? It’s a bit late for that. I can just ditch this town and go looking for the next one. Maybe head back to Charleston and go for a different sort of hunt. Been a long time since I’ve done an urban hunt with prey that acted like an adult.

That sounded good. Catch Jack. Eat him. And then get out of high school for a while.

I was sure of one other thing: the crowd of kids kept Billy away. He vanished shortly after English.

No point on being here if I’m going to be surrounded by morons.

So, tomorrow I’ll be me again. I’ll hang with Billy. And at the end of the day, I’ll track Jack to his lair. In, out, and done. So much for finesse. The day after tomorrow, or the day after that, I’ll head home: back to warm air, soft breezes, blue, blue skies, and my Charleston single.

My cell buzzes, pulling me away from my image of home.

“Helen Grace?” I don’t recognize the voice. It’s an adult woman.

“Yes.”

“Hello. This is Rebecca Price, Billy’s mom. We’ve had to take him back to the hospital, and he wanted me to call you.” For a second, I wonder how he’s got my number, but then I remember that I friended him on Facebook and my cell number is listed there.

“Oh. What’s happened?”

She sounds like she’s in danger of starting to cry, but holds it together to say to me, dispassionately, “He got a nap this afternoon. He woke up with a massive headache, unable to see.”

“What room is he in?”

“145.”

“I’ll be there to see him as soon as I can.”

She didn’t say anything, but I get the feeling she’s relieved to know her son has a friend who wants to visit him.

Chapter 8.

I’m not a huge fan of hospitals, but they’re way, way better than they ever were in the old days (defined as any time before 1980). Sick humans smell bad and taste worse. And, of course, the vast majority of people in a hospital are sick. So, for comparison purposes, imagine going to a grocery store where all the food is going off. Some of it minutes from rancid, some of it barely past its prime.

What, you don’t want to visit? Amazing.

The cancer ward isn’t all that bad. The chemicals sort of mask the smell of dying human.

I poke my head into Billy’s room.

“It’s not looking all that good for you, is it?” I say it like a joke, and he responds in kind.

“Nope.” He smiles in my direction, but I can see from the tilt of his head that he can’t actually see where I am. “Worse and worse by the minute.” His voice goes serious. “I turn eighteen day after tomorrow, and as long as I’m not in a coma by then, I’m going DNR. My parents don’t want me to, but… This is futile. It’s not worth a few extra days.”

I enter the room and stand next to his bed. “I didn’t press your mom for details. She sounded like she was about to start crying on the phone.”

“Tumor’s so big it’s pressing on the nerves that let me see. So no vision. It’s growing fast, so obviously the chemo isn’t doing its job.”

“Are you in pain?” I can’t smell it, but like I said, the cancer ward smells chemical.

“Nah. Got all the morphine I could possibly want.” He fumbles around for a switch on the bed. “Hit this little button and I’m just dandy.”

“So, you weren’t kidding about doing morphine for fun?”

“Only a little. It’s pretty nice. Nothing hurts; my mood is good; if my skin would stop itching, all would be zippy.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now… I’m here. I keep pumping myself full of drugs. Eventually, my brain stops functioning, I slip into a coma, and then…”

“Then…”

He smiles at me. “You know what they say: live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. Would have liked a little more fast living, but you take what you can get.”

 
“That you do. Can I do anything for you?”

“This’ll sound dumb, but, can you read me my Facebook feed and update it?”

“Sure.” And that’s how we spend the next hour.

 

Original Fic Friday: Hunter's Tales Volume One: Billy Price

A/N: Vampires, snark, meta, all manner of good things lie within. Want to start at the beginning? Click here. Want to read it all at once? It's .99 at Amazon.

Chapter 5.

Gym class. It’s required to graduate, and it’s another experience I could easily go the rest of my life without. Lucky for me, I can use my glamour to get out of gym.

But I don’t do it all the time. For example, any sport that’s a solo thing, like jogging or yoga, I attend. Team sports are a dead give-away, though, so I get out of them. You can act clumsier than you actually are when moving slowly. But when I’m playing a game, I tend to move at my natural speed, and my natural speed is way too fast. Other vamps seem to have the same issue. Smart ones skip sports. Ego-mad ones want the glory and flock to football and basketball.

This is one of the reasons I always go to the home games, and also why I take gym, even if I don’t always participate.

Mid-November in Nebraska means we’re doing mostly indoor sports. The football team is still outside, but the rest of us are inside. I join the yoga group and watch the rest of the kids.

All the kids in yoga are girls. I don’t much care about girl vamps. I leave them alone. They leave me alone. For a high school hunt, I’m interested in turning the tables on the boys playing the seduction game. I watch the other girls carefully; none of them are vamps. The gym teacher is pretty serious about this yoga thing, and the girls are flushed and sweating.

I shift into The Archer and watch the basketball game.

Now, we can’t actually fly. At least I’ve never met one of us who figured out how to do it. But, we are awfully strong, so we can jump a good long way. If I put some effort into it, I can jump seventy feet. So, when one of the guys pulls off a jump that would make Michael Jordan burn with jealousy, I’ve got my vamp.

He’s young, sort of. His body looks sixteenish. He’s tall, thin, and gangly. His hair is light brown, and he’s got it brushed into a Justin Bieberish ‘do. My guess is that it’s actually cut into a ‘70s Luke Skywalker shag and he’s just brushing it forward. His eyes are a light, but still pretty natural looking, shade of green. He’s probably less than fifty years old.

The other boys are playing full-out; they’re pink, sweating, and breathing hard. He’s pale and calm. He takes a hard elbow to the face, a shot that would split the lip of a human, but he just shakes his head and retreats to the sidelines for a minute.

He catches me staring at him. I look away, fast, but not so fast that he doesn’t catch me doing it. I sneak a glance back up at him, and he smiles at me.

Good.

The guy next to him pokes him gently with an elbow to the stomach and nods at me. I focus my hearing on them and catch a slightly salacious comment about my body.

This one is going to be easy.

***********************

I catch sight of him again at lunch. For the number of dead girls in this town, I was expecting to see someone who didn’t really know how to blend. But this one is good.

He’s eating: really eating, looking like he’s enjoying every bite of the third-rate pizza the cafeteria serves. He’s got his arm around a pretty girl and is feeding her bites of his pizza.

They’re cute. Ridiculously cute. Painfully cute. And she’s so damn happy it’s sickening.

“Enjoying today’s edition of America’s Sweetest Couple?” Billy slides into the seat next to me.

I smile, feeling pleased to see him. “Oh yes, nothing like young love to set the heart to skipping with unfeigned joy.”

“He’s Jack Cross. She’s Evie James. They’ve been dating since about homeroom this morning.” Damn! It’s hard to pry a vamp away from a brand new acquisition.

“Lovely. Nothing like the first blush of a new relationship.”

“Yeah.” He rolls his eyes at me. “So, how are you enjoying day two of the glorious adventure that is Jenks High School?”

“I’m having the time of my life.”

“Glad to hear it. How’d you end up here? Not like we get a lot of mid-year transfers.”

I’ve got a few stock answers for this question. “Parents split up a few years ago. On my eighteenth, mom was done with me. She left. Rather than hunt for my Dad, I took out a map, grabbed a dart, and tossed. I wanted to get somewhere she wouldn’t be able to find me when she woke up and decided to be mommy dearest again. So, here I am.”

“Ouch. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” He’s looking at me hard. Really seeing what’s in front of him. It’s the sort of look that makes me glad I’m in one of my fun Goth outfits. This one has a short navy skirt, black and red striped leggings, a black long-sleeve tee, and a dark gray short-sleeve tee over top. To finish the look off, I’ve got a cute little black scarf, with skulls on the bottoms, wrapped around my throat. Without it, he definitely would have noticed my lack of pulse.

“So, what do people do around here for fun?” I ask.

“Tip cows.” He winks. “Nah, we’re not that far into middle of nowhere. This here is the most holy and devout land of First Church of Christ at the Mall. Everyone in school worships there daily.”

“Brilliant. I like malls.”

He looks a little disappointed.

“Really?”

“Well, I like clothing, and clothing tends to be at malls. I could probably take or leave the actual mall part.”

“Ahh…”

“How about you in specific? What do you do for fun?”

He grins at me. “Morphine.”

The bell rings, and before I have a good comeback, he heads off to his next class.

**********

I don’t see Billy again for the rest of the day. I do see Jack and Evie. They appear to be surgically connected.

This is something of a complication.

It’s not like I usually show up at just the right time when the vamp is between feeds. Yeah, it’s great if it happens, but it’s only happened twice in ten years.

But most of the time, we’re… fickle is as good a word as any. Look, if you’re as old as we are, teens can be pretty boring companions. Fun for a little while, but over time they just get dull, so, if he’s good at his glamour, he takes care of the girl and goes onto a new one. And look, there I am, new, really new, with no visible attachments, slouching away, looking ripe for Mr. Romance to come and sweep me off my feet.

Most of the time is not all of the time though. And if Jack is anything like most of the other vamps I’ve met who feed on teens, he’s pretty into the new one while she is new. Basically, without a crowbar, I’m not going to be able to pry him off of her. And if he’s really responsible for all three dead girls in this area, he’s averaging eight months before he gets bored.

I’m not sticking around here for eight months waiting for him to get bored.

He’s sitting on the back of a bench, waiting for his ride. She’s standing between his legs. They’re cuddling. He hasn’t looked in my direction since gym class. I don’t see any bite marks on her, but it’s cold out, so most of the obvious parts are covered in clothing.

So, Jack, how to get you…

************

Home again, for a little while at least. Drop off my stuff, change my outfit, watch some Sherlock, and then, to the mall.

Remember my suck-ass town comment? Okay, so one of the things a town needs before I’ll deign to consider it a hunting ground is a decent mall. And a few good clubs are nice too, but usually that’s too much to ask for in a small suburb like this one.

I like to shop. I like to dance. So, if I am going to grace your town with my presence, you have to be able to provide me with at least one of those options.

Jenks, Nebraska has a good mall.

Back in the dark ages, when I was a girl, clothing worked something like this: mother went to the dry goods store and purchased cloth. That cloth was wool. It was hot and itchy and smelled like sheep and sometimes pee. (Urine was used to fix certain dyes. Aren’t you glad you don’t live in the 1650s?) She then made a dress out of it. The best thing you could say about it was that it fit. She was a competent, but not talented, seamstress. That dress was my Sunday best for about a year or two. Then it would have enough wear to get demoted to my shop dress, and she’d make a new Sunday best dress. The shop dress was worn six days a week while I tended my father’s shop. I also had a nightgown and a dress that had gone past shop dress to chores dress. I had one pair of boots. One pair of shoes, they were worn only to church and were passed down to my little sisters when they got too small. A winter cloak, a few scarves and aprons, a bonnet to keep my hair covered, two pairs of stockings, and a few unmentionables rounded out my entire wardrobe.

In that my clothing wasn’t homespun, and I did have a new dress every year or two, I was a notch or two above most of the rest of the world.

My fortunes rose, and eventually, I had a few closets full of clothing. But the whole made-for-you-from-scratch-thing was pretty much how clothing worked until the 1920s, when suddenly, there were department stores and ready-to-wear clothing.

So, I like clothing. I like shopping for clothing. I like looking at it, touching it, picking it out, and trying it on. I like all sorts of styles, though I tend to go for mostly Goth looks when I’m on a high school hunt.

I’m at the mall, happily petting a selection of silk corsets, when I sense someone watching me. Nothing magic or supernatural about that, just that feeling that someone is paying attention.

I look up.

“Come here often?” Billy asks.

“Every single day.” I smile at him.

“Is this also punishment for pissing off God?”

“Nah. This is my reward for being a good little consumer.”

He steps closer to me and looks at the piece in my fingers. He gives me a very interested look, like he can’t believe I’d ever put anything like that on, and says, “I’d love to see you in that.”

I lift the magenta corset and flip it over. “You and me both.” I point to the price tag. “Too much for a girl on her own.” I do make a note of what store I’m at. I’ll probably order it online tonight. It’s way too cute to just leave.

“That’s a crying shame.” He looks genuinely disappointed.

“Indeed. So, you spend a lot of time shopping for women’s clothing?”

“Nope. I decided I needed a new hobby this morning and this seemed like fun.”

“Wonderful.” I look around and notice there’s no one else with him. A quick mental inventory reminds me there’s never anyone else with him. “I don’t want to be rude, but… most kids are here in packs. I know why I’m on my own, but why are you alone?”

“Wanna take a walk with me?” Interesting non-sequitur.

“Sure. Lead on.”

He takes me to an ice cream shop by the food court. “Want anything?”

“Yeah. Split a milkshake with me?”

He laughs at that. “You got a poodle skirt hiding somewhere?”

I pretend not to get the reference. This is the second out-of-time thing he’s done. Why?

He shakes his head at my blank look. “Never mind. What flavor?”

“Pick your pleasure. I’m good with any of them.”

“Nope. You get to pick. Lady’s choice.”

Interesting. Are you just terribly polite and old-fashioned, or is something else going on here? I scan the menu and order a chocolate malted. There’s something to be said for these little middle-America towns. Sometimes I can get a decent taste of the past.

The guy behind the counter gives Billy the shake. Billy grabs two straws, and we find a bench in a somewhat quieter section of the food court.

He puts the straws in, holding it toward me. I take a decent size sip. He takes a tiny one.

“Don’t like the flavor?”

“It’s fine. Nothing tastes right to me these days. It’s a side effect of the chemo.”

I nod at him. Something else, indeed. “I figured something like that had to be going on with you. Not too many bald high school kids. That why there aren’t a pile of kids trailing around with you?”

“One of the reasons. I’ve actually only been here for a year. The local hospital has a really good specialist for what I’ve got.”

“And what do you have?”

“A neuroblastoma.” I give him a blank look, even though I do know what a neuroblastoma is. He continues explaining, “Brain cancer. It’ll probably kill me in less than six months.” He sounds surprisingly upbeat about it. “What’s up with you?”

I really wasn’t expecting that question. I take another sip of the shake. “I just moved here…”

“No. I mean, what’s wrong with you?”

“Ummm… What do you mean?” He now has my entire attention, and he’s once again watching me very closely.

“You’re room temperature. Ever since they started me on this last round of chemo, I can see heat. Everything that’s warm has a glow to it. The warmer it is, the more intensely it glows. You’re not glowing.”

Well, that’s something I’ve never run into before. I think frantically for a good lie. Finally, a word springs to mind. “Hypothyroid. Gives me a low body temperature, makes me tired and pale. They’ve got meds for it, but I don’t like the side effects.”

“Oh. I was hoping you were a vampire.” See, here’s the thing; we don’t live in the open, but these days, there are enough of us around that a lot of people believe in us, ‘proof’ to the contrary notwithstanding.

I snort at that and look amused. “Why, did you want me to eat you?”

“I’d love it if you’d eat me. Even better if you’d let me do you, too.” He grinned again, a lovely touch of amused lewdness on his face. I was beginning to think I could really get to like this kid. What can I say; I’m a sucker for gallant snark in the face of adversity. “However, I was hoping you’d turn me.”

“Oh, please, Buffy much?”

“Well, yes, that episode did cross my mind, but really, what else do I have to look forward to?”

“You’ve got a point.”

“I suppose being a demon isn’t much fun.” This kid has seen way too much Buffy.

“I don’t buy the demon thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if there are vampires, humans would have to make them seem bad. It’s natural. But they wouldn’t have to be evil or anything, just hungry. We aren’t evil for eating cows. But, if cows could talk, don’t you think they’d have stories about the evil, cow-eating humans?”

He takes a sip of the shake. “You’re a very odd girl.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“We call the principal Wanker, and sometimes, if we’re feeling respectful, Mr. Wanker.”

“I did not know that.” A genuine smile creeps across my face.

“Good. I like the idea of cows sitting around a campfire telling stories about the evil humans. It’s a good image.”

“I’m glad you like it. Really, when you think about it, the idea that there’s some sort of special evil that goes with killing other people is all about maintaining some sort of functional society. But really, the universe is amoral, and I think, so are vampires. I mean, I’m sure there are some out there who get off on fear and pain, but most of them probably just want a good dinner.”

He doesn’t look like he really believes me. “If you say so.”

“I probably spend too much time thinking about stuff like this. I write vampire stories sometimes.”

“Cool. Could I read them?”

“Not yet. Maybe when I get a good one done, I’ll let you see it.”

“You better write fast, then. So, if you can’t make me a vamp, how about eating me?”

I snort a brief laugh and very gently shove him.

“You know, I tell most people I’m dying and usually they get all pity party on me.”

I need to deflect that line of conversation pretty quickly. In addition to my eye color, my ability, or lack thereof, to produce the correct emotional response at any given time can be a dead giveaway that I’m not human. “Well, it seems like it’d be odd to be more upset about it than you appear to be. You’re really quite upbeat.”

“It’s remarkably freeing. I mean, I never have to do anything I don’t want to. What happens if I skip my homework? Oh right, nothing. Not like not getting into Harvard is going to napalm my future. And, it’s not like being sniffly and tragic makes anything better.”

“I guess that’s true. Might make girls more likely to sleep with you.”

“Not interested in pity fucks. I know I’m not gorgeous, but I like to think I’ve got enough personality to interest a girl without pulling the ‘I’m dying’ card.”

“I like your personality.”

“Thanks. But not enough to have sex with me?”

“Not yet.”

“So, there’s some hope?”

I smile at him. “There’s always hope.”

He grins back at me, checks his cell, and says, “Gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be sitting there at school.”

“Good.”

***************

I circle the mall twice more, slowly sipping the remains of the shake. Jack is there, with Evie at his side.

Screw this! He hasn’t looked at me more than the one time in gym. I need to go home, think, and come up with a better plan.