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 2.

Did I mention I hate high school? I do. There is nothing less appealing than being stuck in a prison-like building, forced to listen to drivel for eight hours a day.

For me, it’s even more fun. "Officially," I’m an eighteen-year-old in search of a few final credits to wrap up high school. The schools hate dealing with me because technically, I’m an adult, so I never have any parents around. Administrators loathe kids with their own power.

Full-on slouch mode.

I walk up to the office in full-on slouch mode. It takes seven minutes for the lady behind the desk to deign to offer me assistance.

“Can I help you?” No greeting or smile, her voice is bored.

“Can you?” Yeah, I’m a jerk when I’m in teen mode. But anyone who makes someone wait for seven minutes while she does paperwork deserves no better.

She rolls her eyes and sighs. “Which teacher sent you here?”

“None of them. I’m Helen Grace. Today’s my first day. I need to get registered.”

“Where are your parents?” See, she doesn’t want to deal with me. Kids are annoying to her, not worthy of even basic politeness.

“I’m over 18 and live by myself.”

“Oh.” She looks startled by that. “Let me find your file.”

“Thanks.” Interestingly enough, if we practice at it, vamps can produce a sort of anti-glamour; I’ve honed it into a razor-edged sarcasm that makes humans want to cry. I used it when I said thanks and noticed the receptionist’s mood crumble into misery. I smile to myself.

After five minutes of hunting around, she finds the manila folder with my name on it. It always boggles my mind how many of these little Midwest schools haven’t moved on to computers. And how many of the ones that have use systems almost as old as I am. Both work to my advantage. Old systems are easier to hack, so when they do have computers, I can insert myself into the system over the course of a night or two. A little breaking and entering, a bit of programming, and I’m a new student. As for paper, hell, it had taken less than ten minutes two nights ago to become a transfer student here.

Five minutes after that, I am in a tiny cubbyhole of an office with my guidance counselor. Guidance counselors come in two main flavors: bloody twits incapable of effectively organizing their own lives or power-mad bastards that get off on controlling helpless kids. Mine is part of the first camp. Lucky him. I don’t kill humans all that often, but one out of three high schools I go to ends up looking for a new guidance counselor shortly after I visit.

What can I say? My tolerance for assholes is minimal. Hannibal Lecter and I would have gotten along.

He finishes up my paperwork while asking about my goals.

I cut that short. I’ve got one goal here. Find the vamp and eat him. I’ll be gone as soon as that happens. I glamour him, get him to put me in every art class they offer, the advanced computer science class, AP US History, AP English, and, so I have a chance to practice, their highest level of French.

One of the things I do like about being a vamp is the chance to learn so much. Granted, I’d rather be at the library (which is why I’ve got a ton of study halls, all of which will be spent there), but it’s still great to have the time to really learn and hone my skills. That’s why I take art classes. If I had lived out my normal life, I’d have never developed more than a pretty hand for bookkeeping. But because I’ve had my normal life and about six others, I’m a skilled artist. There’s even some of my stuff in a few museums these days. And the computer revolution… Well, let me say, I like pixels as much as, if not more than, I did film, and I loved film more than paint, and I loved acrylic more than oil, and…

You get the idea. For me, it’s about the ability to create the end product, not the medium I do the creating with.

I shake those thoughts off and let my guidance counselor know we’re done. It is a bit before lunchtime and he offers to walk me to the cafeteria.

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

The first day in school is all about getting the lay of the land. My job is to learn faces, watch how and when people eat, figure out who is in which group, and listen in well enough to find out where the teens hang out when they aren’t at school.

And do all that without being seen doing it.

I go through the lunch line and get a Diet Pepsi, a salad, and a soft pretzel. First rule of acting human: eat! Unless, like a few female vamps I’ve met, you intend to use the eating disorder ploy, you have to eat.

We can eat. We just have to chew really well because we don’t digest. What goes in comes out exactly the same. And no, I don’t know precisely how that works. Not like I can turn on Discovery and watch a documentary on it. We eat blood, and we stay strong and healthy. Several hours later, nothing happens. We eat food and a few hours later, food comes out. So, unless we’re around humans or really have a taste for something, we usually don’t bother with it.

I settle down at a sparsely filled table. Geeks: I guess from the clothing and body odor. Geeks have a certain scent all their own, especially the computer geeks. I think it’s a combination of too much Mountain Dew, cigarettes, and not enough showers. From there, I watch the cafeteria for people who aren’t eating. About half to a third of high school vamps don’t bother with eating.

High school vamps like to look a little off. Human enough to pass, but off enough to add to the air of romance. The kind of girl who falls all over herself for a vamp will also notice little details, like he doesn’t eat. He wants her to notice that sort of thing and develop the inkling that there’s something mysterious about him.

In a word: Yuck!

I find five options before lunch is done. All of them boys. None of them eating. Two are playing with food, picking it up, touching it, but not actually putting it in their mouths. One has a lunch bag in front of him, but he hasn’t opened it. The other two have no lunch.

I like to stick to small high schools. If there’s fewer than five hundred students, I can scan the room and find the potentials in a few days. Huge schools like they have on the coasts are fun for occasional long hunts. I spent a year in NYC back in ‘07. That was a blast, but it took a full three weeks to even figure out who all the potentials were.

Of my potentials, two of them looked up at me as soon as I walked into the room. One keeps glancing back at me. That gets him booted to the top of the list. Instant awareness of the new girl and not eating: that’s often a vamp.

The other one came over at the end of lunch to offer to show me where my class was. At less than two feet away, I can smell the blood on him. Not one of us. As I look more closely, I notice the large band-aids on his arm and leg.

“What happened to you?”

“Gym class. We were playing football, and I got tackled into the bleachers.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“So, where are you from?”

“Kansas City.”

“Oh. Never been there.” Which is why I picked it. Lots of these Nebraska kids have never been much of anywhere. KC’s big enough that being art girl works, but close enough that me being here isn’t ridiculous. Sometimes I let it slip I’m on my own, so being somewhere nearish where I started makes sense.

“And here we are.” He points me into the classroom that will be my jail for the next forty-five minutes. US History. I enjoyed history classes when I started going to school. It was funny to see how bad they were. Now… Now I understand why people decry modern education.

The teacher is a middle-aged man with a brushy mustache and thinning brown hair. He looks at the paper I hand him and then gestures to a chair at the back of the room. A minute later, he tosses a textbook onto my desk. Obviously, he’s going for the Mr. Charm approach. The textbook is battered; pages are falling out. Flipping through it does nothing to make me think this is going to be any better than any other history class I’ve attended in the last ten years.

A few seconds after the bell stops ringing, he tells the class, “We have a new student…” Yes, draw even more attention to me. Not like they wouldn’t have noticed me in the back if you didn’t mentioned it. “Would you like to introduce yourself?”

“No.” That got a laugh. “But I will. Helen Grace.” Not my real name. Constance Pruitt, my real name, more or less screams 1640, the year I was born. I haven’t used it since the mid-1800s. “I just moved here from KC. I’m wrapping up my senior year.”

“Thank you, Helen. We’re starting on the American Revolution.”

“Wonderful.” I smile grimly at him. I’d been there. Well, for some of it. I was born in Boston and got out of there shortly after I was turned. Providence was close, and no one knew me. Unfortunately, it was tiny. I spent just long enough there to figure out I needed a real city to survive. In 1662, my options for cities big enough not to notice someone like me were limited. Boston, where people knew I was supposed to be dead. New Amsterdam was still under Dutch control. Philadelphia was British and more tolerant than NA. The Virginia Colony wasn’t known for cities in those days. I didn’t speak Spanish then and wasn’t interested in learning, so anything south of that was out.

I headed to Philadelphia and stayed there for more than a century, until it became clear that was where all the traitors were. I moved to NYC and waved a Union Jack when our soldiers captured it.

Obviously, back then I was a Tory. But the Colonials won, and I was stuck. I didn’t have the desire to liquidate my holdings and head to Britain, so I, like many other Tories, became a reluctant American.

No, I didn't know Washington, though I did entertain Cornwallis on more than one occasion. Met Franklin once, too. I liked him. Everyone liked him. It was a pity he changed sides. What, you didn’t know Franklin was a loyal servant of the crown until 1773 or so? Yeah, they gloss over that these days.

While the teacher drones on about taxation and John Adams, I catch sight of someone watching me. He is in a different classroom. There’s a courtyard outside of our room, and the windows look onto it. His classroom is one floor up on the other side of the courtyard.

Bald. That is interesting. Bald teenager is usually a vamp hint. I make sure not to let him see me notice him. I keep doodling in my notebook, taking exceedingly fast glances at him.

He seems to be breathing and blinking. He’s also awfully pale and thin. So, chemo or vamp? Remember what I said about cutting hair? Well, for girls, especially girls from the West, it’s not too big of an issue. Most of us had hair we could work easily with as the styles changed. The guys, not always. Lots of men shaved their heads when wigs were popular. More than a few tonsured monks were turned; just about all of them have shaved heads now. As a rule of thumb: cue ball bald Asians who look too young for male pattern baldness, they’re vamps. You wouldn’t believe some of the styles that were popular back in the Shogun era and before, let alone the more obscure tribal looks.

The other side of the coin is that some vamps shave their heads and pretend to have cancer. Back in the day, they pretended to have TB. Something about a pale, dying man drives a certain kind of girl (idiot gluttons for pain) absolutely wild. They’ll all but trip over themselves to fall in love with a dying boy. Plus, most vamps don’t actually like high school, and cancer gives you an excuse to show up as little or as much as you like.

Quick thing to check, kids who really have cancer have a certain scent to them: bitter and chemical. They also, often, have some sort of IV port and/or scabs from IV’s and needles. If you’ve got a “cancer” patient who smells like nothing and never, ever shows off his arms, it’s time to take his pulse.

Baldy catches my eye and winks at me. I don't remember seeing him at lunch. I'll have to get close enough to smell him to make sure, but he just became the top suspect.