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 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. 

Original Fic Friday: Hunter's Tales Volume One

A/N: So here begins the first Original Fic Friday post. These are stories by me, featuring my characters. Some are already published, some are new and upcoming bits. I'll see how the muse hits.

That said, welcome to Hunter's Tales Volume One: Billy Price. (Yeah, that's it, in it's entirety over on the right.)

Chapter 1.

With a last flick of the foundation brush, my skin is done. I look as close to human as a vampire possibly can. Now it’s time for lipstick, and, to go with this outfit, that lipstick has to be red.

I glance at the suit sitting on my bed with adoration. I love that suit. I bought it in Berlin in 1931 and have kept it in pristine shape ever since. Granted, I haven’t worn it for anything but costume parties since 1944, so the upkeep isn’t too difficult. 

It always bothers me that, when people went retro, they skipped the ‘30s. The ‘30s had style, especially compared to what would follow. And in 1931 Germany, the Weimar-era party wasn’t quite dead. There were still cabarets where a beautiful woman in an exquisitely tailored men’s suit was welcomed with open arms. By ‘33, it was dead, and by ‘33, I was back in the States.

“Delilah” by the Dresden Dolls comes on. Perfect. Mood music to go with dressing.

I wrap my hair into a low bun. Yeah, it’s not quite right for the era, but I’m not about to cut it. Yes, vamps can cut their hair. I don’t know what Anne Rice was on with her image of a vamp sitting in a room filled with hair, but it’s not even close to true. We’re dead; we don’t grow. We certainly don’t grow hair. So, if we cut our hair, it stays cut. When I was turned, my hair was long enough to reach my hips. In the 1920s, when everyone else was bobbing their hair, I cut mine to mid-back length and left it there.

As much as I love the style of the thirties, the tools for achieving those styles are so much better now. I pick up a scarlet lip pencil, color the whole lip in, apply lip stain, then the setting liquid. Let it dry. Five minutes' work and I have a perfect fire-engine red mouth, and it will stay that way as long as I want it to.

Eyes take another five minutes. I wink at myself in the mirror. Okay, I’m not as pretty as Dietrich, but my makeup is better.

Time to dress. I go for vintage from the skin out. Two reasons for that: I do really like the old style, and the scent of old clothing will confuse my prey.

The iPod micro I clip to my bra will help confuse him further. It plays a soft heartbeat on eternal repeat. I don’t usually do this, but if tonight goes the way I think it will, he’ll be close enough for it to matter. If the mark is really alert, he might notice my heart rate never varies, but I haven’t seen a really alert one in a long time. Theoretically, if he is really sharp, he might notice the lack of pulse at my throat, or he might have, if I hadn’t buttoned the collar of my shirt all the way.

A few dabs of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Hermia will confuse him further. I might not smell perfectly human, but between the perfume and the clothing, I’m awfully close.

I set the gray fedora that goes with the suit at a jaunty angle on my head, take one last look in the mirror, and head to the party.

When I was an actual teenager, girls didn’t go to school, let alone high school. Rich girls were tutored at home. Everyone else was already working or married. My family was well-off and trying to do better. I, like the rest of my family, helped in my father’s butcher shop. I had a fine hand, so I ran the counter, did the paperwork, and kept inventories.

But that was a very long time ago. I’ve been eighteen for over 350 years now, and I’ve spent most of the last ten of them in high school.

I hate high school. But you go where the prey is, and the prey is in high school.

For that, I have Stephanie Meyer, Joss Whedon, and whoever wrote the Vampire Diaries to thank. They made the whole vampire thing so cool to the kids. Little girls are falling over themselves in the search for a never-ending, mystical love of epic proportions with a vamp.

My eyes physically cannot roll far enough to express my disdain.

But it does make my job easier. I know where the prey is. I set my trap. Usually in about three months I’ve gotten him to the point where he thinks I’m easy pickings. He thinks he’s seducing me. We head off to a secluded point, he gives me this lame-ass ‘It’s so lonely being immortal, eternity is such a long time, but I’m all but making his dead heart beat again’ speech, I pretend to fall for it, and then, when he thinks he’s in charge, I drain him dry and stake his ass.

Yeah, that’s right. I hunt vampires. I am a vampire. I add a whole different level to vampire hunter.

And, no, it’s not some sort of angsty, self-hating, saving-humanity crap. I am not now, nor have I ever been, Angel, nor do I have any interest in being him.

Meyer got something right: we’re the ultimate predators, the top of the food chain. And now food will literally fall into our laps and beg us to eat it.

How painfully boring.

Sure, some of my fellows adore this. They sit back and take advantage of this age of easy food. They’re always flushed with fresh blood and have gotten lazy. Good for them. Me? I live for the hunt.

Until 1980 or so, humans feared us. They stayed away. We had to work to get them into a situation where we could eat them. Hunting them took skill, and it was marvelous.

They don’t know what precisely is wrong with us, but they know on a gut level to stay away. Before 1980, it was harder to hide the fact that we don’t quite look right. As Arlene said on True Blood, “Honey, we’re white. He’s dead!”

The whole sunlight thing has nothing to do with us bursting into flame. It’s entirely about how hard it is, even with good makeup, to look right in full sun. (And no, we don’t sparkle. God, Meyer, what the hell were you thinking with that? You don’t want to know how many twits I’ve seen spraying themselves with glitter in an effort to look the part. I consider it an honor and duty to put them down.) We’re really pale, and our eyes never look quite right. Mine were brown, but every year I’ve been dead they’ve gotten a little lighter; they’re sort of cream-colored now. These days, I wear contacts.

In the pre-electricity age, when everything was lit, dimly, by flame, we could blend in pretty easily at night.

Then, suddenly, even in the darkest parts of the night, everyone had full on light anytime they wanted it. Do you think it’s a coincidence that belief in vampires lingered on much, much longer in the less educated, less technologically advanced parts of the world? Ha!

Blending in from the ‘30s to the ‘70s anywhere in the first world was a pain in the ass. Not impossible, mind you, but not easy either. There’s a reason why most of us are good with makeup and costuming.

But in the 1970s and ‘80s there was Punk and Goth, and suddenly we could skip the makeup (well some of it) and wander about in plain sight. (I understand we did this when Elizabeth I was Queen of England, and for a long time, one in three Geishas was a vamp, but I don’t know if that’s actually true.) People just assumed we were part of a counter culture, and if they weren’t part of it, they left us alone.

By 1980, something shifted, and we were starting to be seen as romantic.

By 1985, you couldn’t go to a punk club and not have someone offering to let you eat them.

I gave up on humans then.

I spent more than a decade looking for new prey. Five years hunting Werewolves convinced me they’re just too animal. You can manipulate them too easily. And they always know exactly what we are. You can’t fool their noses. So, it’s not so much a hunt as an all-out fight. I like a good fight, but that’s not the fun bit. The fun bit is the hunting.

I spent three years trying to even find a fairy. I keep hearing they’re out there somewhere, but if they are, I’ve never seen one.

Can’t eat ghosts or demons or anything of the spirit world, so I never bothered.

I spent a year in the west going after Wendigos, Coyotes (not the little doggie things, the Tricksters), and other creatures of Native American lore. Some of them are fantastic hunting, but they don’t taste very good. And while I do want a good hunt, I also want to eat well when it’s over.

Hunting Wendigos pissed off a Shaman who had been turned a long time ago. I ended up hunting him and realized not only was it a blast, but, since he eats the same stuff I do, he was awfully tasty.

I’ve been hunting vamps ever since.

I stare at the Riverland High School parking lot. He’ll be here soon, ready to finish up his hunt. He wanted to pick me up at my place, but I won’t let that happen. I’m willing to play a teenager. I’m not willing to live like one.

I’m a few minutes early and take the time to adjust my posture. Vamps like girls who look like they’ve got low self-esteem. They like the loners. People with lots of friends who think well of themselves are not so easy to manipulate. So, when I ‘transfer’ to a new school, I start out as funky, low self-esteem, art chick. This lets me be pale, dress in eclectic clothing and makeup, be ‘deep’ and interested in ‘death.’ I write lame poetry. (Okay, I steal lame poetry. There are so many angsty teens spilling their sad little guts in blank verse on the web. I just crib from them.)

I am catnip for vamps. I start off slouchy and avoiding eye contact. Really defensive body posture. I blow everyone off for two solid weeks. Two reasons for that: First of all, it’s in character. Secondly, it lets me figure out which one the vamp is.

Look, we don’t have any magical ability to tell who’s a vamp and who isn’t. We’ve got good hearing, vision, and sense of smell, but if we could hear well enough to focus in on the heartbeat of everyone within fifty feet, we’d end up screaming from the louder sounds. If we could smell each person around us… Well, we probably can, but most of us learn how to shut that off. You don’t want to smell everyone around you. Our vision is good enough to see if the person has a pulse at his throat. I can see it across a room. A human who’s looking can see it from three or four feet. I have a large and interesting scarf collection, plus several thick chokers in unique patterns and colors. And, if the vamp is really into the long, slow seduction thing, I’ll eventually break out my cheongsams, which have the advantage of looking fabulous on me and hiding my throat.

This one isn’t really into seduction. I started school on October 1st. Today is the 29th. I’ve just gotten to the point in the routine where I’ll make direct eye contact during conversation and slouch a little less when he’s around.

I spot him walking toward me from the far end of the parking lot. It’s a Halloween party, and he’s dressed in his usual fare. See if you can guess which vamp type he’s going for: long black trench coat; tight black pants; dark blue T-shirt; black, chipped fingernail polish; and spiky, bleached white hair.

At least he doesn’t have an English accent. And the name he’s using, Alex, is normal enough.

So, how do I know he’s the vamp at Riverland? Besides the fact that he keeps trying to cozy up to me?

First off, his skin is too good. One month and not a single pimple, blemish, or blackhead. His skin, like mine, is always perfect. Pale, but perfect. The kind of skin you get when you spend fifteen or twenty minutes very carefully applying layer after layer of makeup to make yourself look alive. (I make sure to add a pimple or two at any given time.)

He’s too still when he gets bored. We’ve got a few classes together, and I watch to see what he does when he’s not paying attention. He slouches back in the chair and zones out. When people do that, they move. They fidget, they sigh, and they blink. (For God’s sake, if you want to appear human, you need to blink! People might not notice if you don’t breathe; they will notice if you don’t blink for ten minutes.)

He’s too graceful. If you’re supposed to be seventeen or eighteen, you should, at least on occasion, stumble, drop things, and bump into people. In the twenty-eight days I’ve been watching him, I’ve never seen him put a foot wrong.

He forgets to shower. Look, we don’t need to bathe unless we get dirty. We don’t smell. We don’t shed skin cells. We don’t sweat. He’s had the same small ink stain on his wrist for three weeks now. It’s tiny really, just the spot where the tip of my pen touched his wrist. (Think that was an accident? Yeah right!) On a normal person, even a normal person who somehow avoided bathing for three weeks, that mark would be gone by now.

And, of course, I can’t see his pulse. Granted, that’s not fool proof. Some people have skin that’s thick enough that I can’t see it. But add that to everything else, and you’ve got a vamp.

“Hi, Kate,” he says from a few feet away.

“Hey, Alex. Nice costume.”

“You know me; I’m all about the Halloween spirit. I like yours, though. You’re what, Marlene Dietrich?”

Rookie mistake. He’s let me know he’s way older than he looks. The role he’s playing wouldn’t know who she was. Hell, the role he’s playing wouldn’t be able to identify what decade my outfit comes from.

“Yes. I’m surprised you know.”

He realizes he’s made a mistake. He thinks of a fast lie. “My grandfather and I used to watch old movies when I was a kid. I liked her.”

“Ah. Not a fan of old movies. But I do like historical fashion and clothing, and she’s one of the iconic looks of the thirties.”

“Will I be seeing you in ballet flats, black leggings, and a tight black shirt?”

“No. You need to be built like Hepburn to pull that look off.” One of the signs of wealth when I was alive was being ‘plump.’ We were plump. By current standards, I’m a size 12. Nice and curvy. I look great in this suit. I looked even better back in the corset years. I don’t need to breathe, so I can make myself into a perfect hourglass if fashion so dictates.

He’s looking deeply into my eyes, trying his glamour. This is the hard part. I’m a vamp, so I don’t fall for the glamour. But the girl I’m playing should. What I don’t know is if he’s actually any good at it. So, I have a hard time deciding how glamoured I should be.

I settle for letting my eyes go soft, sighing, and looking back at him with deep longing. I blink a few times, sigh again, and say, “So, you wanna dance?”

“Sure.” He holds his arm out to me. I wrap mine around his.

Dances are great from the point of view of letting the vamp think he’s got me. They suck from the point of view of keeping up the charade of being a human. It took a long time before I had all the details worked out.

Another reason why I love this suit: it’s got pockets. And in those pockets, I’ve got a mister filled with slightly pink salt water. A few quick spritzes of that and I look slightly flushed and… what’s the polite term these days? Glowing?

One of the great things about today’s dances, you don’t always have to be facing your partner. Every now and again when I’m turned away from him, I give myself a fast spritz. When we move too fast to see, it’s not just human eyes that can’t track us.

We dance for an hour. Finally, a slow song comes on, and this is always the acid test. If I’m lucky, he’ll be so interested in the seduction he’ll miss the fact that I’m not as warm as I should be.

He pulls me close to him, whispering trite nothings in my ear, as we rock slowly together with the music.

I can feel which bit of him is making the decisions now.

I press against him deliberately, lifting my face to him. He kisses me. His role is to be the aggressor. He’s supposed to be in charge and know what he’s doing.

I play the never-been-kissed, fumbly girl. I let him ‘coax’ me into liking it. He breaks away from me just as I begin to tremble slightly and press more tightly against him.

“Let’s go somewhere more private.”

“Sounds good to me. Where?”

“My place.” Interesting. Usually if they just want a snack and sex, they suggest somewhere nearby and quiet. If they want to take you home, it’s because they want you dead, too. We’re usually quite private about our homes.

“What about your parents?”

“They’re out.”

“Wonderful.” I smile up at him.

The car ride is very quiet. He puts his hand on my thigh as he drives. I giggle and move it to my knee.

“Alex…” I let his name trail off.

He turns toward me. “What, Kate?”

“It’s just… Well… We’re going back to your place. And, like, I think I know what you want to do when we get back there. But, like… ButI’veneverdoneitbefore,” I say in a huge rush. Then I look away and discreetly blot off a bit of the ‘sweat’ I applied earlier.

He pulls my face toward his and grins at me. “I’ve never done it, either. But I want to. With you. You look so good and smell so good, and I’ve just never felt this way about anyone before. I want to take you home and make love to you.”

I give him a shaky smile. “Good. How long until we get there?”

“Now.” He pulls into the driveway of a nondescript suburban house. We get out of the car, and I immediately cross to his side of the driveway, pressing tight against him, letting my head rest on his chest. No heartbeat. Perfect. I got fooled once; dude had some sort of thyroid condition, so now I always make sure to check, several times, in a few different ways, that he’s got no pulse.

He opens the door. As soon as we’re through, he’s pressing against me and kissing hard. I pick up a very faint scent of decay about the place. There’s at least one dead body hidden here.

Usually, this is the point where he starts his tragic vampire speech. But he doesn’t. He keeps kissing, heading toward my ear. When he gets to my throat, that’s the end of this game.

I’ve got less than a minute to take care of this. Plenty of time. I push against him, shoving his coat off and pulling away from his lips so I can kiss his throat.

He hisses a little at that. Apparently, he likes me taking charge.

“You need to take off your shirt.”

He’s fine with that. When his shirt is over his head, tangling his arms, I strike.

Most vamps go for the femoral artery or the aorta. In this situation, I go for the brachial artery. I use one arm to pin his arms and face in the shirt. The other holds the stake at his heart. I bite a chunk out of his arm and go to drinking.

Ahhhh… Tasty. Baby vamps are kind of flat and flavorless. But as we get older, we get more interesting. He has about a hundred years on him. Not fine ambrosia by any stretch, more like a good, solid pilsner.

He’s struggling hard, trying to break my hold, but one of the things the Whitewolf guys got right is the more of our own kind we eat, the stronger we get. Right now, a truck could run into us at full speed and it wouldn’t break my hold on him.

He flails less and less as I suck each mouthful out of him. Because we’ve got no pulse, eating a vamp takes more work than eating a human. And since he’s quite unlikely, even when very weak, to let me just prop him against the wall and have at his ankle, it means I don’t get much more than a pint.

Oh well, I’m old. I don’t need all that much. A pint or two a month and I’m good.

When it takes too much suction to fill my mouth with his blood, I give the hand holding the stake a good hard push and feel him crumble into dust.

“Good-bye, Alex.”

I pick my hat off the floor, put it on, and follow the scent of decay to the basement. There is a chest freezer down here. I open it and find two dead bodies. Girls.

Odd he’d keep them in his home. Most of us aren’t into the whole trophy thing. Hell, most of us aren’t even into the killing our prey thing, it’s just… well… not cost effective.

I leave the lid open and go looking for a powder room. All of the new houses have them. And, while we usually don’t like having too many mirrors around, we rarely rip them out.

Yes, we show up in mirrors. Anything you can see with your own eyes is something you can see in a mirror. In the old days, we didn’t like them because they were used to increase the light in a room, and I already covered the problem with that.

I check myself in the mirror. No blood on the suit. Thank God for small favors. I’ve got a wizard of a dry cleaner at home, but he does look at me oddly when I give him fine, vintage clothing with bloodstains. I readjust my jacket, set my hat straight, and tuck the stake into my sleeve.

One last thing to do. I find his phone and call 9-1-1. “I’m at 1284 West Grove Street. There are two dead bodies in a chest freezer in the basement.” 

Then I drop the phone and head off into the night.

A/N: Like that? Want more? The whole story is .99 on Amazon, or you can wait for next Original Fiction Friday for chapter two.