by D. S. Ritter
“Yeah,” said Sam, still irritable. “Apparently, that’s normal.”
“Normal? Normal for what?”
“Normal for this,” she said, rolling up her sleeve and showing him the twin holes in her wrist, which were scabbing over.
“Shit,” said John, peering at the wound. “Who bit you? Alissa?”
“Dude, she was going to die and there wasn’t any other option at the moment,” said Sam, who’d long since realized how stupid what she’d done had been. “You get a weird high from vampire saliva, I guess. I don’t know.
“I’m pretty torn between loving and hating this. One second, it’s amazing, the next, I feel terrible. Like I want to rip someone’s head off.”
“Not a great combination in the customer service industry,” sighed John. “You didn’t get super strength or anything, did you?”
Sam turned and shifted the garbage can beside them. It was enclosed in a steel cage, and she picked up like it was a heavy moving box. “I wouldn’t call it super,” she said, “but you probably wouldn’t like it if I punched you right now.”
“You’re under the misapprehension I would ever like being punched,” said John, still looking worried. “Here’s the thing though, you’re probably going to crash. Hopefully, it’ll be a little closer to dawn, but I mean, have you ever been really hung over? Like, black out drunk hung over?”
“Yeah, this one time...”
“This will be worse. Like, wishing for a coma worse.”
Sam sighed. “Why do people do this to themselves?!”
John shrugged. “So, to take your mind off of what inevitably lies in wait tomorrow, tell me about this lead you got from Alissa.”
“She says they’re held up in the basement of this new apartment building in Ypsi. Just went up this year, and she says they own it. I guess they’re part of the old world firm and it’s been taking over some territories across the US. She was really surprised though. I guess this isn’t the normal vampire way of dealing with these sorts of things and they’d been living in peace for a while.”
“Was the whole coven wiped out?”
“No,” said Sam, looking out onto the street. “About a dozen of the younger ones got away like we did. They’re in hiding until Alissa thinks it’s safe to get them all together again. The whole thing seems really fucked up. Like, an entire ecosystem is out of balance because of this invading species.”
“That’s close to the truth.”
“--Seven-One. HQ to Seven-One.” Sam remembered her radio and turned it up. “We got a customer having trouble in the lobby. You copy, Seven-One?”
She looked over at the lobby and sure enough there was a small knot of people gathered around the machine. “I gotta get back to work. Tell Smith. Let me know what he says, okay?”
John nodded, and Sam noticed the worried look on his face. Whatever. She doubted he could really care about anyone but himself. If he worried about her, it was probably more about how useful she could be to him during her hangover.
***
At the end of the night, Sam was still energetic. If a crash was coming, she still didn’t feel it. She checked the time on her phone and got on the radio. “Seven-One to HQ, I’m going to count cars now.”
“Ten-Four, Seven-One.”
It felt so good to walk around and have something to do. Standing around with so much pent up energy had been on a par with psychological torture. Longing to try out her borrowed strength, Sam jumped up on a small embankment. It stood only about two or three feet tall, but she doubted she would have done without vampire saliva running through her veins. To burn energy, she ran up the stairs taking them two at a time, all the way to the top of the structure. She would have never been able to sprint up so many stories without throwing up, but now she felt awake and alive. It was insane.
The roof revealed a new side effect; her night vision was much better too. She spotted detail she would have missed outside daylight hours, and she saw further. Was it worth the rawness and jitters? She wasn’t sure yet. But it was a new experience.
A slight breeze on the back of her neck made her stop, and she turned faster than she’d planned, almost getting off balance. A shadow, no, not a shadow, moved in the lee of the stairwell. “Who are you?” she demanded, ready to run, despite how confident she sounded.
“Someone who wants you to mind your own damn business, bitch.” The figure moved, and Sam recognized the vampire from the club. Now, she was certain he was also the vampire who’d attacked the woman on that very roof.
“Oh, shit,” she said, staring at him. “It’s you.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, walking out of the gloom. He was wearing black, skinny jeans, black motorcycle boots, a matching t-shirt, and he’d slicked his hair back into a greasy helmet. Sam couldn’t be sure how much product he used, but it was way too much. She smelled a combination of it and his cologne from about twenty feet away. “I’m the last thing you’re ever gonna see,” he hissed.
He came at her with superhuman speed and took a swipe with his long, albeit perfectly manicured nails. Sam dodged out of the way, faster than she should have been able to move, but he’d gotten close. So close, she could admire his cuticle treatment and cough on the cloud of cheap body spray that accompanied him wherever he went. Her quick movement had caught him by surprise, but she knew this wouldn’t last; he was faster and stronger than her though she doubted he knew the structure as well as she did. Oh God, I hope this works.
She feinted right, then turned left, dashing for the low wall around the structure. There was an alley on that side, and she really hoped it proved narrow enough for what she had in mind. He was on her heels as she stepped up onto the wall and pushed off toward the other building as hard as she could. Sam didn‘t try for the roof because that was at least seven stories above her. She hit the rough brick on the other side and keeping her wits about her, pushed off as hard as she could, while shifting her weight in mid-air. Somehow, this worked, and she grabbed the railing two floors down. Convinced this might work, she tried to repeat the process, launching herself at the building across the alley.
This time, she miscalculated, and when she hit the wall, panicked, and ended up falling about two stories to the ground. She landed with a thud and fell on her back in surprise, both at the fall, and also that it didn’t really hurt very much. She suspected she’d be feeling it later, along with the hangover on its way. Assuming she lived that long. From her position on the concrete, she saw the vampire dropping on her from the roof like a stone.
In a split second, she rolled out of the way. The vampire hit the concrete where her head had been, with so much force, he cracked it. The look on his face was one of dumb surprise. He was strong, but Sam wasn’t sure how smart he was. And he hadn’t expected her to put up a fight.
“What the fuck are you?” he demanded, his fangs gleaming in the streetlights.
“Out of here,” said Sam, bolting for Main street. He was about to give chase when his cell phone rang. Glancing over her shoulder, she found he’d stopped and answered it.
“What?” he demanded. “I’m working here! Oh, sir, it’s you...”
She did not slow down for a second, booking it with her slightly superhuman speed toward HQ. When she got into the office, she was barely winded, despite running three blocks at a full sprint.
Marcus looked up at her as she hit the front desk, using it to stop herself. “What are you doing Dejardin? You know you can’t come in this early. And you finish your car count? You need to call that in.”
“Yeah, sorry,” she said, looking back out at the street. “I guess my watch was a little fast. I’ll keep an eye on that next time.”
“You do that,” said Marcus. “‘Cause if this happens again, that’s going to be a write up. And for you, that’s a suspension.”
“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again,” replied Sam. She scrambled to find an extra copy of her paperwork and filled it out. “Is it okay if I clock out a
little early tonight?”
Marcus shook his head. “Can’t let you do that, D. But you can vacuum the office for a minute while you wait.”
So Sam, still jittery with vampire juice and freaked about possibly being obliterated any moment, took out the vacuum, plugged it in and tried to lose herself in the white noise of the work. This was one moment where she found her job so ridiculous it was almost surreal.
Chapter Thirteen
Sam wound down a bit as she drove home that night though she still worried about the vampire. There was no one else on the highway at three in the morning, but her eyes were peeled for anything unusual. The wind whistled through the car and the plastic bag she’d taped over her broken window rattled, bothering her as she listened for even the smallest of new sounds.
After pulling into the parking lot, she didn’t even bother to lock her door when she got out and made a beeline for the apartment door. She hoped the vampire myths were right about her having to invite them in, but bolted and chained her door behind her, anyway. She would take no chances. Pulling all the garlic out of her shoebox of a pantry, she lined the crack under the door and all the windowsills with it. There was a little pile of stakes beside her bed, and she sat on the old mattress, making a few more, the shavings falling forgotten on her low coffee table.
Not even a half an hour later, her door shook violently.
“Go away,” she called, sounding way more confident than she felt. “We don’t want any!”
“I’m gonna get you, bitch,” said the vampire on the other side. “I’m gonna drain you like a cheap forty.”
“Is there any other kind?” asked Sam, laughing at her own joke, even though it wasn’t really funny. Humor and bravado were the only things keeping her from hiding under the bed and sobbing. “You like Italian? I cook with a lot of garlic. You might smell it from there.”
The vampire listed all the horrible, painful things he planned to do in a level, serious voice that made Sam suspect they were closer to promises than threats. She looked at the little clock on the wall in the kitchen. Two hours until sunrise. She’d just have to deal for two more hours. Then the crappy sky lights in the hall would take care of things. A long time to hope that a psycho wouldn’t break down her door and kill her.
“You like stake?” she called, “I got a bunch of them here. Nice hardwoods.”
This only seemed to provoke him, and he rattled her door again, so hard she thought it might come off of its hinges. She fought the urge to lock herself in the bathroom. She’d face this guy down on her home turf, without cowering. That was what he wanted. Well, aside from murdering her.
The door stopped its shuddering, but Sam didn’t allow herself to relax. She was feeling like she would black out too, which made her even more desperate.
Things got quiet for about ten minutes, but that only made her more scared. What was he doing?
The sound of tapping on her second-story window sent shivers down her spine. She glanced over at it and swallowed a scream. The vampire hung there, upside down. He had so much gel in his hair; it had barely shifted, and his golden chain hung in his horrible face. If it hadn’t been terrifying, it would have been comical.
She stood up and, hesitating, lowered the blinds. “Go away, bloodsucker,” she said, trying to keep her voice level.
A wave of exhaustion and nausea hit her hard. She picked up her phone.
Sam D:
Crashing. Need help.
Not alone. Wait for dawn.
She looked at the phone as she sent the message, not sure who she’d sent it to. Then, she blacked out.
***
“Look, I’m not sure why you’re tying to paint me as the bad guy,” said a voice. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be trying to break in here.”
“He’s kind of got a point...”
“No, he doesn’t. We could have figured it out. And these locks suck, I mean—”
Sam pried her eyes open and clamped them shut again. “Turn off the lights,” she moaned, pressing her palms into her eyes as though to force them back into their sockets. Her head was exploding. Heather, Yolanda and John all stood over her bed, perhaps surprised she wasn’t dead. She wished she were.
“The lights aren’t on, Sweetie,” said Yolanda, sitting on the edge of the bed. She took a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses off of the top of her head and perched them on Sam’s face. “There, that better?”
Sam opened her eyes again. The room tilted and spun a little, but at least she wasn’t blinded, and able to bear squinting. “In a relative kind of way...”
“Dude,” said Heather, “what the hell happened to you? And what have you been drinking?”
“More like what’s been drinking me...”
“I know she’s not saying what I think she’s saying,” said Yolanda, fixing John with a nasty look.
“She’s an adult,” said John, shrugging, “I’m not her babysitter!”
“Why the hell —?” Yolanda turned her wrath on Sam, “I mean — I just; there are no words, Sam. No words for how stupid that is.”
“It was a life or death situation,” grumbled Sam, covering her face with a blanket. “I swear to God, I will never do it again. If I live beyond this hangover, I will mend my stupid ways...”
Yolanda snapped her attention back to John.
“She’s not going to die from a hangover,” he said, throwing his hands up. “She might wish she was dead, but the danger is pretty much over. Really, I don’t know why this is my fault.”
“Once you stop feeling like you’re dying, I’m gonna slap the shit out of you,” said Yolanda. “Why didn’t you tell us what was going on?”
“It really was a spur-of-the-moment thing. And I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Scaring us to death with a mysterious text in the middle of the night was better?”
Sam sighed. A wave of nausea hit her and she rolled out of bed, tripping over herself to get to the bathroom. She collapsed onto the cold porcelain of the toilet and puked, bodily. It was like her brains were sloshing around in her skull.
Exhausted, she seemed to melt onto the bathmat, and there she lay, inches away from sleep, that healer of all wounds.
“Okay,” said Heather, picking her up, “time to get you back to bed, Chunder Monkey...”
“No, no, this is fine,” said Sam, “just get me a blanket...”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Heather, not unkindly. Sam must have blacked out again for a moment, because when she came back to herself, someone had tucked her in bed. John was sitting on a chair in her kitchen. It seemed like Yolanda and Heather had gone home.
“Awake again?” he asked, looking more bored than concerned. “You sure get theatrical when you’re under the weather.”
“Screw you,” she said, rolling on to her back. “I feel like I want to die...”
“I’ve been where you are. Hell, I’ve been much worse places. But you need to get your shit together. We have work to do.”
“Dude, I can barely stand up,” groaned Sam. “Just let me sleep some more...”
John sighed. “And here I am, telling people you’re hot shit. Come on, we’ll go to Smith’s and I’ll get you fixed up with some hair of the dog.”
“I gotta—”
“Yolanda already called in and got you off work. She was getting ready to scream down the place ‘cause they were giving her crap about it.”
“God, I love her.” Sam squeezed her eyes shut again.
***
When she opened them again, she was sitting in a back booth in the House of the Sun. There was a tumbler glass full of what, she had no idea, in front of her, but it smelled foul, bad enough to threaten to turn her delicate stomach. As if suddenly finding herself in a new place wasn’t doing that already. “How the fuck--?”
“Just drink,” said John, sitting at the edge of the bench opposite her.
“But...”
“Questions later. Drink. Now.�
��
“I think this will make me puke more if I drink it. It’s so thick, and green.”
“You will puke more if you don’t drink it. Now, stop arguing. That’s Smith’s special brew and you’ll make him sad. Look.” He pointed to the bar where his cousin stood, watching. Smith pulled a theatrically sad face.
Sam scowled and put the glass to her lips. It smelled like a dirty garbage disposal after someone had put old gym socks in there. And it was thick, but also cold and sweet. Before she knew what had happened, she’d drained the whole thing and became, not completely better, but significantly more human. And more aware of how weird the whole situation was.
“Okay,” she said, setting the glass back down on the table. “Now that my brain isn’t dribbling out my ears anymore, how the hell did we get here?”
“Chaos magician secret.”
She sighed. “How did I know you would say that?”
Smith came over and sat in the booth beside her, and smelled so good. “Okay, kids?” he said, grinning. “Little hair of the vampire goes a long way, eh?”
“I’m not sure the high is worth the fall,” said Sam, inspecting the empty glass because she couldn’t bring herself to look at anything else. Her face felt warm.
“Alissa contacted me. Told me what you did. That was brave...”
Sam thought her cheeks must have been glowing. “Thanks.”
“And a little dumb,” finished John. “These guys aren’t messing around. They might rip your head off. And now, you’ve got one stalking you. And he’s not a small fry. Dude meant business.”
“You don’t think I know that? He almost got me at Seven-One. If I hadn’t been all hopped up on saliva, I’d be dead by now. But, we’ve got a lead now, right?
“That place in Ypsi? That’s the nest.”