“We have people paying cover fees just to hear you sing, Nicky. You can’t just bail in the middle of your set.”
“I understand,” I said. “It was an unusual circumstance. Sort of a personal emergency. I don’t foresee it happening again any time soon.”
Tevin nodded. “Make sure it doesn’t.”
“Yes sir.” I walked past Tevin and into the empty club. I stopped, took a deep breath, and turned back to him. “Tevin, I’ll clean today for free. To make up for any refunded cover charges.”
“Alright,” Tevin said. “Kind of you to offer, but this isn’t an arrangement we can repeat. If this happens too often, people will just stop coming to your shows. No matter how good you are, Nicky, you realize you’re not our club’s regular cup of tea.”
“I know,” I said. “Thank you for understanding. I’ll be out of here in a couple hours.”
Tevin nodded. “Not sure how you do it, but alright. Be sure to lock up when you’re done.”
Once Tevin left, I cleaned the place in record time. Wiped the tables. Emptied the trash. Mopped the floors. The whole she-bang.
I don’t know why I rushed it.
I mean, it wasn’t like Wolfgang was going to show up during the daytime. Vampires avoid daylight hours, for obvious reasons. And meeting up with him wasn’t going to happen any sooner if I got my work done more quickly.
And I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to say when I met with him.
I couldn’t turn Wolfgang down. I knew that much. The chance to hunt down Alice was too tempting.
And I had to stop pretending I was actually better than these vampires. All things considered, during my prior existence I was probably responsible for more lost lives than most vampires.
My meals never survived.
Most of the time, vampires preferred not to drain their victims completely. They had ways of making humans forget. Mercy Brown, my vampire “friend” from back at the asylum, had an interesting way of doing it. She usually targeted people who’d been drinking.
A vampire bite filters the blood when they feed. All the alcohol stays in the bloodstream. That means that since a person’s blood-alcohol content is based on a percentage, even a small amount of alcohol in someone’s system would become a high BAC after a vampire fed. It was enough to cause the “blackout” phenomenon that humans often experience when they drink too much.
A fine cover for a vampire.
If the human thought they remembered being attacked, but they also knew they were drunk… they’d question it. And if they didn’t remember drinking that much, well, the whole issue with blackouts is generally that one drinks more than intended, and since they’d have memory loss as a result, people don’t question it.
I mean, if you started drinking and ended up blacking out, you’d probably assume things just got out of hand. You aren’t likely to default to the oh-shit-I-got-attacked-by-a-vampire explanation.
So Mercy’s method usually worked. And since vampire bites healed quickly—something in the vampire’s saliva sped it up—there usually wasn’t even a bite mark in the morning to rouse suspicion.
I don’t know if that’s the tactic every vampire used. But Mercy said she learned it from her sire, Niccolo the Damned. Also Wolfgang’s sire. It made sense that he’d likely learned the same method.
Very different from how my species, the Neck, fed. But when I fed, when I killed, there wasn’t any artistry in the aftermath. All of that went into the preparation, the seduction…
But the feast itself… only the bones remained when we were done.
I shuddered at the thought. Perhaps there was another way. Maybe if I became myself again, if I regained my abilities, I could do things differently.
I’m not a killer. I’ve never thought of myself as such.
I’m a hunter.
I used to hunt humans—for food. Now I hunt vampires in vengeance.
When I’m not working with them…
But still, I hunt.
I sing. I hunt. And I look sexy as hell doing both.
That’s me in a nutshell.
Not like you’d ever catch me dead wearing a nutshell. Not even if all I had was the choice between wearing a nutshell and Wal-Mart clothes. Okay, never mind. I’d probably wear something made of nutshells before I wore Wal-Mart clothes. I mean, celebs have done stranger shit on the red carpet, right? Whatever. You get the point.
I was never a complicated person. What I want, the things I like, are pretty easy to define. None of it has changed much since the day I took this form. It’s the world, this human world, that makes simple things so damned convoluted.
I mean, in the community there’s this big debate. Are people born with a sense of their true gender, or is it conditioned over time? Influenced by their parents and peers? I don’t know the answer.
But I didn’t have any parents or peers to tell me that my ass looked better when I wore heels. It was so clear to me. Those were my shoes… Yes, even that first pair.
Maybe they were Wal-Mart specials. But a girl has to start somewhere, right?
My taste has grown more refined over time. But my fundamental sense about who I am… it’s remained constant.
If I was “born” when I assumed this form, I suppose you could say I’ve been this way from birth. And nothing was going to change me.
Not that therapist in New Orleans.
Not the odd stares I received when walking down the streets.
Not the messages I received, albeit subtly, when watching television or movies, or absorbing whatever else this culture put forward that was meant to dictate the ways I should dress or behave.
No one tells me who I am.
I am who I am. Take me or leave me.
And for the most part, I love me.
For the most part… until I have to deal with these damn bloodsuckers. And I’m inevitably reminded that as vile as they are, I was once worse.
And to think that nothing drives me—at least, nothing drives Nyx—more than the desire to recover what I lost.
I know it was inconsistent. I realize it was a little bit fucked up. It didn’t make sense.
If I loathed what I used to be, how I used to be, why would I want to recover what I’d lost? Well, my abilities weren’t what made me vile. Shifting was a tool I’d used to hunt… but did it have to be limited to that? What if I had that tool and could use it, instead, to take my ideal form? Not sure how that would work, but maybe there was a way…
And I had to believe that I’d changed. This whole experience had changed me. I was different now. I could never go back to being the kind of creature I used to be.
I’d still have to eat, of course. But if I’d managed to get by on human food for the past five years, surely I’d find a way to survive as one of the Neck again.
I could eat chicken. Lots of chicken. Tastes like human, after all.
Not sure how, as an elemental, I’d go about hunting chickens. I’d have to turn into whatever they’re attracted to the most.
Humiliating.
But if I spent some time as a rooster, would I start to empathize with them, too? Hell! How would I ever find peace?
I scratched my head.
One problem at a time, Nicky…
CHAPTER SEVEN
Something about Wolfgang’s invitation didn’t sit well with me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a part of me that loves this body. I can see why it was the ideal form of beauty for Alice, when I’d targeted her as a meal… before I realized she was a vampire.
I didn’t hate this body. Not at all.
It just never felt right.
I mean, with a good set of heels, a little makeup, and a nice dress I almost felt like me. But there was always something that just felt out of place. Maybe it was that piece of dangling flesh between my legs.
Damn thing looked like an anteater’s snout.
Perhaps it was that my shoulders were a bit broader than I’d like.
All I knew was
that I was never meant to be like this… and I couldn’t stay this way indefinitely.
When I was feeding, it never bothered me much what form I assumed. Half the time I didn’t even pay attention to it. It didn’t matter to me; it was all about the effect my form had on my prey.
But once it was clear I was going to spend a bit of time in this form, I started paying attention.
At first, when I looked in a mirror in or my reflection in water, it felt like I was staring at someone else.
It still felt that way, I suppose. But I’d gotten used to it. I tried not to think about it.
But I had to think about this decision… I mean, cooperate with a vampire?
My experience with Mercy in the asylum excepted, I’d never met a vampire I could trust. Hell, I’m not even sure I could trust Mercy—we just happened to have aligned interests and a common enemy.
I still had a few hours to burn before sunset. I wasn’t on the schedule at Leotards and Lace, either. And I hadn’t been back home in a long time. Not my apartment with Donnie—I mean my old home. At least, the home that had been mine ever since the witches brought me from the old world.
In the old days, I dwelled in lakes in and around what’s now known as Germany.
When I came here, I was given a home in living water. Water that moves. In a river. It had a different energy to it, particularly in this part of Missouri where the river tends move quickly. When you’re in a natural lake, you have a sense of familiarity. Some might call it stagnation, but I’d call it home. Going back to the lake always felt like going home.
Going back to the river always felt like starting over. The water was always changing, always different. When I’d feed, the descent back into the water, while not at all frightening, nonetheless felt like a new experience every time.
Sort of like, I suppose, when a human transfers colleges or takes a new job in the same profession. There’s a familiarity, since the daily tasks aren’t all that different. But there’s also a newness that’s both exciting and stressful all at once.
For that reason, I hadn’t desired to return to the river since I lost my abilities. Sure, I tried a few times at first. When I wasn’t returning to my normal form, I thought if I just dipped a toe in the water maybe the energies would take over and trigger my shift. But it didn’t work.
So I stopped going there.
The easiest place to access the waters where I used to live was a public boat ram in Riverfront Park. Maybe it was the anxiety of my decision. I mean, I’d been looking for a lead on Alice for years now. So long as I was just looking for a lead, I hadn’t really been forced to ask myself why.
Why did I want to shift back?
Well, there were all the obvious reasons. All the things I didn’t like about this life. But there was also the fact that I’d grown rather accustomed to humans. I liked some of them—and not just for their flavor.
The idea of becoming what I was… it was exhilarating and terrifying all at once.
So I thought a visit to my old waters might give me a little clarity.
I don’t know what I expected. If the waters felt like the waters in the old country, the lakes… I mean, I just wanted the sense of going home again. The comfort of returning to my roots…
Of course, the old country didn’t feel like home, either.
I’d gone there, too, once.
Without any identity to speak of, you’d be surprised how hard it is to get out of this country and into another one. It took me a while, but I found a guy on the street who was able to get me the social security number of a dead person. I couldn’t believe it worked. I figured someone would figure it out when I flashed the passport of the deceased Phil Cromley.
But I suppose he looked enough like me that no one questioned it. Surprisingly, no alarms went off when I boarded the plane. I was nervous as hell.
I mean, if I got caught, would they arrest me?
They’d put me in a men’s prison, too… because that’s where the system thinks I belong. And I doubted my experience there would be altogether pleasant.
But I didn’t get caught. I made it to Germany. Found my old waters, and they were already inhabited by others…
Neck, like me.
I don’t know how they got there. But it was what I suppose it would be like to visit an old house that used to be your home when someone else lives there.
It felt awkward as hell.
And the waters there, even when I dipped my toe in them, didn’t change me back… If anything, I felt a negative energy. Something telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I was unwelcome. I was an abomination.
So I boarded the next flight back to America, and I’ve been hunting Alice ever since. All in hopes of returning to the river, the waters that always changed. Waters that never got stuck in one shape.
I don’t know what I expected to feel this time. I knew I couldn’t go back. Not yet. But maybe if I just looked at the water again, if I let myself try to remember what it was like…
If I let the water touch my toes one more time…
I slipped off my heels and walked barefoot down the boat ramp. I moved carefully; the ramp was a little slick. But I had a good sense of balance.
I stared at the water as the current carried it over the tops of my feet. It was cool relative to the hot and humid midsummer air.
That’s one thing I remembered: the river tended to resist temperature change more than the old lakes.
As an elemental, I didn’t care much. So long as it was above freezing and below boiling, I was fine. Another advantage of the rivers compared to the lakes in the old country: the river never froze.
When our waters freeze… well, it has the same effect on our essences. Not exactly our most pleasant mode of existence. Boil an elemental… that’s a recipe for hell on earth. You never want to boil water that contains an elemental.
Doesn’t happen often, and I’d never seen it. But from what I knew from the few encounters I had with my own kind back in the day, and the stories they told… I’ll just say, so the legend goes, that a witch once captured one of our kind. She boiled him in her cauldron, and when he turned to steam, she unleashed him on an entire village.
There were no survivors.
Before I’d become human, something like that was less nightmarish than it seemed now. It was a fascinating tale, as I recalled it. But now it was straight-up horror. I couldn’t imagine…
I took a deep breath. No grand insights. Just water on my feet.
Then water splashing across my face.
What the…
“Hey, putz!”
I turned. There, floating in midair, was a small creature. He appeared to be made of water, sort of like me but without skin. He resembled something of a human baby, but with wings.
“What the hell are you?” I asked.
He splashed himself into my face again. I turned, and he rematerialized on the other side of me.
“You seriously don’t remember me, Nyxie?”
I raised my eyebrow. “Should I remember you?”
“Yes and no,” the creature said. “I mean, I’ve always been there, but…”
“But what?”
“I’m a part of you, you shlep!” the creature exclaimed. “At least, I used to be.”
I shook my head. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m a sprite!” the creature said. “Every one of the Neck has a sprite. When you’re… more yourself, we’re more like one entity. Our waters mix together. Call me something like your conscience.”
I raised my eyebrow. “I don’t think I had a conscience back then.”
“Sure you did,” the creature said. “I was your conscience. But not anymore. I’ve developed a life of my own. Call me Brucie.”
“Brucie? Seriously?”
“Says the one who goes by Nicky.” Brucie dove into a pile of leaves, emerged with a cigar in one hand and a lighter in the other, and proceeded to puff on it, smoke clouding hi
s watery essence before he breathed it out directly at my face.
I waved it away with my hand, coughing a little. “Brucie, what the hell… I don’t understand.”
“Want a smoke?”
“No thank you,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
Brucie puffed on his cigar again, this time doing me the courtesy of turning his head before puffing out three perfectly shaped rings.
“That’s impressive,” I said.
“I’ve had practice,” Brucie said. “So have you finally finished the job?”
“The job?”
Brucie shook his head. “You really are lost, aren’t you?”
“You could say that,” I said, scratching my head.
“Have you finished your meal? It’s been what, half a decade?”
I snorted. “She was a vampire. She bit me.”
Brucie shrugged. “So what? Did you finish her?”
I cocked my head. “I couldn’t. She took my abilities and ran…”
“She borrowed your abilities,” Brucie said. “The reason you haven’t shifted back is because you didn’t finish your meal.”
“So if I do eat her heart, I’ll become myself again?”
Brucie nodded. “And I’ll have to go back to being your better half.”
I bit my lip. “I still don’t understand why I don’t remember you.”
“Tell me, Nyxie…” Brucie said.
“Nicky or Nyx,” I said. “Don’t call me Nyxie.”
Brucie smiled and took another draw on his cigar. “Tell me Nyxie, you haven’t felt like yourself ever since you left the water, have you?”
I shook my head. “No, of course not. I… And why aren’t you calling me Nicky? And more importantly, how did you know I went by that name before I even told you?”
Brucie slapped me across the face, leaving a streak of water behind. “Because I can still read your mind, dumbass.”
I furrowed my brow. “Fine. Then what number am I thinking of right now?”
Scared Shiftless: An Ex-Shifter turned Vampire Hunter Urban Fantasy (The Legend of Nyx Book 1) Page 5