by Maria Arnt
Oh god, I’m getting old. Up to that point, she could easily assume that anyone in a position of authority would be older than her. From now on, that wouldn’t necessarily be true.
“It’s probably just how you wear your hair.” Her mother tried to console her. “You’d look younger if you’d let it grow out a bit.”
Self-consciously, Tanya touched her auburn curls. They were about chin-length, the longest she could afford to let them get. When she was young, her hair reached halfway down her back. It had been a pain to take care of, but she was an only child; her mother had spoiled her, combing out the mess twice a day and turning it into a river of waves. That and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose were the only contributions from her dad’s Irish background. The rest of her was a carbon copy of her Russian mother.
“It’s way easier to take care of this way.” Tanya dredged up the familiar excuse. She was in no mood to tell the truth: long hair was a great handle for an opponent. Her scalp ached with memories.
“Spending time on your appearance is a good investment,” her mother countered.
Tanya resisted the urge to roll her eyes. How many times had they had this argument?
Her mom went on, though. “I know we taught you that it’s what’s inside that counts but—”
“But the rest of the world is pretty shallow and will judge me by my appearance, yeah, I know,” Tanya finished. In truth, it was a good concept, and she had used it in ways she was sure her mother would not approve of.
Stabbing at her macaroni, her mother sighed. “Well, as long as you know, Tanya.”
Her father, who had wisely stayed out of the small spat, changed the subject. “So who did you submit your story to this time?”
“The Enquirer.” She grinned.
“Ooh.” He looked impressed. “I’ll have to keep an eye out next time I’m at the grocery store!”
They laughed together, although her mother didn’t join in. Tanya knew her mother didn’t approve of her line of work. She told her friends at the hospital that her daughter was an investigative journalist. Tanya and her father had decided a long time ago, right after the attack, that she just didn’t need to know what her daughter was really up to. It would only upset her.
“Any idea where you’ll find your next story?” he asked.
Tanya shrugged. “I was thinking I would head up to Chicago. There’s some funny business going on at one of the museums.” Her investigation of the name she had gotten, Seth Walker, had turned up a couple articles about a permanent exhibit at the Field Museum.
“Chicago?” her mother lit up. “Sharon went up for a weekend last month, and she had a blast shopping. I should come visit you!”
Tanya and her father exchanged a brief look. She was torn. A shopping spree with her mom did sound like fun. She wasn’t much of a shopper herself, but her mother was a real enthusiast, and her excitement had a way of rubbing off on others. “I dunno, Mom... I’m gonna be really busy...”
“Just for a weekend?” she suggested.
Tanya smiled. It would be kinda nice. “Okay, just for the weekend. I’ll tell you where I’m staying when I get up there.” She would probably check into a different place when her mom arrived. Tanya wasn’t picky about where she stayed—as long as they had wifi she was happy—but her mom would probably freak at some of the dives she’d crashed in.
Her dad gave Tanya a concerned look, and she shrugged. Yes, she was going to Chicago to hunt vampires, but there were always a couple weeks at the beginning when she did pretty simple recon. It wouldn’t be too dangerous for her mom to be around.
After dinner, her mother hugged her and went off to bed, since she had to get to the hospital at four the next morning. Tanya and her father wandered out to the garage and talked about nothing and everything while he messed around with the engine on the old 66 Camaro he had been “fixing up” since she was in high school. Eventually, it got late enough that he wanted to turn in, too.
“Sure you don’t want to stay over?” he asked. “We can pull out the hide-a-bed from the couch.”
She made a face. That old thing was so lumpy she’d have better luck sleeping on the floor. “Nah. Thanks, Dad, but I’d like to get back to my place and get some laundry done.” She yawned.
For a moment it looked like her father was going to offer to let her do her laundry there too, but last time she had insisted that doing laundry at your folks’ house was for jobless moochers. He must have remembered because he closed his mouth and smiled. “All right. Drive safe, there’s idiots out there.”
Tanya smiled back. It was his usual goodbye, even though they both knew there were worse threats than idiots out in the night. She gave him a hug and then walked out to her Beretta, the same car that her dad had fixed up for her sixteenth birthday. He still fixed it up whenever it (frequently) broke down. One of these days, she was going to need to get something more reliable, but that would require a steadier source of income than she had right now.
The drive from her parents’ house to the apartment she rented was short, so she rolled down the windows and breathed in the Missouri night air. The breeze carried a host of memories in its wake, and she indulged herself in a little bitter-sweet nostalgia. Driving at night always gave her a wild sense of freedom tinged with anxiety, carried over from teenage years when she and Jake would ‘explore’ the moonlit back roads. It was good to be back home, but at the same time, she was antsy to get working on the next hunt.
Once she unlocked the front door and got her things inside, though, she knew she had made the right choice. The whole place smelled like her Nana—lilacs and homemade bread. Nana was her great-aunt Ulyana. As a baby, Tanya hadn’t been able to pronounce ‘Ulyana’ and had shortened it to ‘Nana,’ and it stuck. Nana, in turn, continued to call her Tatiana long after everyone else shortened it to Tanya, in the Russian fashion.
Sometimes she wondered how Nana would have reacted to the attack. Would she deny it, like her mom? Tanya would like to think she would be as supportive as her dad, but it was hard to imagine Nana encouraging her to kill anything. Still, it was nice to have some normal memories to fall back on when her adult life got too freaky.
Locking the door behind her, she smiled. “Hi, Nana,” she whispered. It was an old habit she never had the heart to break.
She dumped the laundry on her small kitchen floor—it could wait until tomorrow—and collapsed on the bed, which still had the same old crazy quilt, patched by her inexpert hand a dozen times or more. She had meant to get up and change into her PJs, but the smell of the quilt had her eyes fluttering shut. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, so she just kicked off her shoes and climbed under the covers.
In the parking lot below, a lone figure gazed up at the darkened windows of Tatiana’s apartment. It is truly a shame that she lives on the third floor, he mused. It would be much easier to keep an eye on her if she were on the first. The lights had never come on, so he assumed she had gone straight to bed. For a moment, he imagined what she must look like while sleeping, her beautiful face relaxed and untroubled.
He would have liked to stay there all night, but he knew she would soon move on to Chicago. She liked to keep moving, and it kept him on his toes. He would need to get there before her, in order to make the proper preparations.
The radio did little to soothe his nerves as he drove the long stretch of I-55. He loathed being away from her for any length of time and usually spent it imagining all sorts of horrible things that might befall her. It was foolish, he knew. She was an incredibly capable young woman, and not as susceptible to the dangers of the world as she had once been.
Still, the distance between them tugged on him like a lodestone, and he fought to ignore it. Soon, very soon, she would be near him again. What were a few days when he had waited this long? And then, in a month, perhaps two if she were overly cautious—which he doubted, knowing her—she would, at last, be his.
Tanya rolled over in her
sleep, bringing her legs in close to her stomach. She moaned softly as the familiar tug of memory pulled her down into the darkness.
“Ungh... Tanya...” Jake grabbed Tanya’s hips and pulled, making their jeans rub together harder.
She smiled at his reaction and tugged off her sweater, knocking her hand against the dome light of his Corolla in the process. To make matters worse, her long curly hair was now a static-filled mess. She felt like a dork, but he hardly seemed to notice, grabbing her breasts as soon as they came into view. They had been sneaking out for the last two months, and he still couldn’t get enough of her shirtless. It was a hell of a high for her.
“Oh yeah, babe,” he grinned, and she grinned back, leaning forward to kiss him.
He started fumbling with the button of her jeans, and she put a hand on his to stop him. “Did you bring it?” she asked.
Jake slumped against the back door. “No, I forgot. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal, anyway, it’s not like we’ve been with anybody else,” he argued for the millionth time. “Right?” There was just enough hesitation in his voice to make her feel insulted, but she didn’t bring it up.
“It’s not about that! What if I got pregnant?” she whined. The week before, her PE teacher had put the fear of god into her by making her health class watch a video of a real live birth. She wasn’t going to budge on this subject.
“I love you, Tanya, I’ll take care of you,” he offered, sitting up and wrapping his arms around her.
“Jake, you’re eighteen. And I’m not going to be one of those horrible drop-out teen moms.” She leaned back and rummaged in her purse. “Lucky for you, I thought ahead,” she rattled the little foil packet at him. Asking him had only been a test, and she had been pretty sure he would fail.
He made a face.
“C’mon, it’ll be fun.” She grinned and began to unbutton his pants.
There was a sound outside the car, and they both jumped. “What was that?” Jake asked, turning around to look out the fogged-up window. “I think there’s someone out there!”
“Shit!” Tanya grabbed her sweater and yanked it back over her head, before scrambling into the front seat. If it was the cops, she was going to be in serious trouble. A sharp rap on the driver’s side window made them both jump again, and Jake climbed into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window.
But instead of a cop, it was just a girl, maybe a couple years older than them. She smiled, and she was very pretty, despite her teased-out blonde hair.
“Hey, you guys got any reefer?” she asked. When she leaned down to talk, they could see down her baggy sweatshirt. She looked like something straight out of The Breakfast Club.
“Um, no?” Jake answered nervously.
Tanya snorted. He probably doesn’t even know what that is.
Leaning forward, she leveled a glare at the intruder. “We don’t smoke that shit,” Tanya told her. “But I know a guy in town who does.” She hoped the offer would make her go away. Jake finally stopped staring at Retro Barbie’s cleavage to give Tanya a shocked look.
“Really? Gnarly, man. Where?” She loudly cracked the bubblegum she was chewing.
Gnarly? Tanya thought. What kind of loser chick is she? “He lives over in Montreal, by the gas station. The big white house with the boarded-up windows.”
At that the girl pouted, and then stood up, speaking to someone outside the car. As the fog faded from the windows, Tanya saw that someone was standing on her side of the car. It looked like a guy in a jean jacket. She could hear his voice, low and deep, but she couldn’t make out the words.
When they were done talking, the girl leaned back down, reaching into the car to play with the lock button on Jake’s door. “Yeah, we already went there. Now we got the munchies.”
The car doors opened, and Tanya was pulled out into the chilly night by the arm. She struggled as the man in the jean jacket dragged her out in front of the car. She kicked him right in the balls, just like her dad had taught her, but it only made him laugh. He was tall and skinny, with greasy hair and oddly perfect teeth. Distantly, she thought they looked out of place on such a greaseball.
He wrenched her around, holding her arm up behind her back. When she tried to wiggle out of the hold, he wound his free hand in her hair and yanked hard, effectively trapping her. Jake shouted, he had got out of the car on his own, but before he could come any closer the girl roughly pinned him down on the hood. She flashed a grin up at Tanya or the guy who was holding her, she wasn’t sure, and then she bent down to kiss Jake’s neck.
Except she wasn’t kissing him. Jake screamed. Tanya screamed out his name and started sobbing, but the girl just kept biting him, smearing red all over his neck and her face. Tanya yanked on her arm until it hurt like hell, but the guy didn’t budge. He just laughed and pulled her hair tighter, making her watch as she sobbed hysterically.
And she had to watch, how could she look away, while Jake fought less and less, going pale and struggling to breathe? He looked at her like he was trying to ask for her help, but he couldn’t even talk. After a while, he stopped blinking and just stared. His eyes were still locked on Tanya, but slowly they lost focus and clarity.
At last the girl pulled away, letting Jake’s body slide off the car and onto the ground, just a couple yards from Tanya’s kicking feet. Slasher Barbie wiped her face on her sleeve and giggled.
“Better?” the man holding Tanya asked.
“Much.” She walked over to them, and Tanya noticed that even though she wore stilettos, she didn’t wobble at all on the gravel road. She kept coming closer, and for a moment Tanya thought she was going to attack her too, but instead the woman pressed herself up against them both and kissed the greasy man. Caught between them, Tanya tried to catch her breath, tried to think, but she was only struck by the awkward absurdity of her position. They took their time about it.
When the girl pulled away, she had a lot less blood on her face, and Tanya felt sick. “Your turn,” she told Tanya, smiling wickedly.
“Hold onto her,” the guy pushed her forward, and the girl snatched her up before she could break free, wrapping one iron-strong arm around Tanya’s torso and grabbing her breast through the sweater. With her free hand, she toyed with Tanya’s curls, and her scalp ached from the abuse.
The man kept a vice-like grip on her wrist, and slowly pushed up her sleeve up past the elbow. “I want to watch her face.” His eyes, she saw, were a strange metallic color, like stainless steel, and they almost seemed to glow in the darkness.
The girl laughed. “You’re such a pervert,” she joked. Her voice and laughter reverberated against Tanya’s back, and the intimacy of it made her skin crawl.
When he bit down on the soft skin on the inside of her elbow, Tanya screamed. It hurt, worse than even the time she had broken her wrist falling out of Nana’s tree. She screamed until her throat was raw and she, too, tasted blood.
Suddenly, the man lifted his scuzzy head and looked down the road. The girl holding her turned too. Tanya couldn’t look, all she could see was Jake—Jake’s body, she realized—staring off into the distance.
“Shit,” the man cursed, and then they let go of her and stood up, as if on command. They stared down the road for a second more and then ran away in the opposite direction.
Tanya toppled over, trying to crawl to Jake. Her shoulder and wrist ached, and her elbow was still gushing blood. She managed to reach Jake’s hand and grab onto it.
A long silence was interrupted by a voice. She hadn’t heard anyone coming. They sounded surprised, but she couldn’t make out the words. Someone pulled her up into a sitting position with strong hands. They turned her arm to see the elbow and hissed a couple words.
“Are you alright?” he asked her. It was a man’s voice. She couldn’t look away from Jake to see what he looked like. “Tatiana, are you alright?” He shook her gently, and then cursed again, standing up. She could hear the sound of a cell phone being opened, a short number dialed,
but all she could see was how Jake’s eyes weren’t moving, weren’t blinking. There was blood all over him, but his eyes kept staring.
“Yes, I need an ambulance right away on rural Route 8,” she heard the man say. The world tilted beneath her, and then everything went dark....
Tanya sat up in bed, gasping for air. Pushing the covers away, she swung her legs out over the edge of the bed, trying to decide if she needed to run to the bathroom. She was drenched in sweat, dizzy and nauseous, but her mouth wasn’t watering, so she probably wouldn’t throw up.
It had been a long time since she’d had the nightmare. A year, maybe? She had started to think she wouldn’t have it anymore.
When the dizziness passed, she got up and lumbered into the kitchen, squinting into the brightness of the refrigerator to grab the water pitcher. She found a glass by feel, her night vision ruined by the light, and poured the water into it.
She downed it, poured another, and returned the pitcher to the fridge before sitting at her rickety table to remember.
When she had woken up after the attack, she had been in the hospital. Jake was dead. There was a big mess while they tried to figure out what the hell happened. Being the 17-year-old idiot she was, she told them exactly what she remembered, and they immediately decided she was delirious from the trauma. Obviously, she and Jake had been attacked by some wild animal. Vampires simply were not real.
She had tried to point out the obvious proof: why would she and Jake have gotten out of the car? How did her shoulder and wrist get sprained? Didn’t the teeth marks on her arm, through the stitches, look like a human’s?
In a sick twist of irony, the psychiatrist had tried to use that last bit against her. Wouldn’t a vampire have fangs, he reasoned? Wouldn’t there be just two puncture marks instead of two half-crescents? When she had refused to “accept the truth” they had doped her up so much she didn’t even cry at Jake’s funeral. She was so out of it, she hardly remembered anything. Somehow she managed to go back to school after a couple weeks, catch up, and keep plugging on.