by D. N. Hoxa
“I am not Hammer, Bugz. And I’m not going to let you, or anyone, tell me what to do. If I want to go after Morta Fox, I’m going to.”
“You don’t understand. If you go after her again, you’re done,” she cried.
“There is no again here. I wish you could see that.”
“I won't run behind you, you know. I won't. Not again.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m thankful for all you’ve done for me, and I will forever be grateful to you. I will always be your friend. But you can’t expect me to run behind you, either.”
She smiled sadly, a heartbroken smile. “I really thought I could make things turn out differently this time.” Again she spoke to me as if I were someone else. I didn’t interrupt her. Suddenly I felt a little lost. This was goodbye—my heart knew it. And I would be on my own after.
It was okay, I told myself. I chose to be this way. I chose to be free to make my own choices.
“I’ll miss you, you know,” I admitted.
“Yeah, you idiot. You better miss me.” She wrapped her arms around me. She took my mask off and touched my cheek with the tips of her fingers. She was seeing what wasn’t there, but when she leaned in to give me a kiss, I let her.
She needed it, and I wouldn’t deny it to her. After all, she had been my only friend for the past three months.
“We’ll see each other again,” I said. At least I hoped we would.
“We will. But please be careful. I know you won't listen to anyone, ever, but do try and be careful.”
“I will.”
But I lied. I didn’t plan to be careful. I planned to go after Morta Fox.
XVIII
I found a group of twelve humans, and I fed off three while they slept. Once that was done, I ran.
I had no idea what I was going to say or do when I saw her again, but I was sure I’d figure it out soon.
I didn’t.
On my fourth night, while I was on my way back to New York, I heard the heartbeat. When I didn’t get blinding by the craving, I knew it was her.
I didn’t rush. I took my time in following the steady beating of her heart. The land around me was dead. I recognized it as South Carolina from the broken arrow-shaped building that Bugz said had been an energy center once.
When I got close enough to Morta to smell her, I realized she wasn’t alone. I could smell others, too. And their scent was dangerously close to Johnny and his friend. I began to run.
Not long after, I heard the shouts. They were fighting. I jumped up a building and made my way roof by roof so I could see better. They were inside somewhere.
The house was big, three stories high, and they seemed to be on the top floor. Without thinking, I jumped onto the second floor balcony, and from there, onto the third. The glass of the windows was intact. Scratched, but intact, and I could see everything inside.
There was Morta, with a knife in her hand and a smile on her face, and there was Johnny and his friend, circling her. They weren’t smiling.
I wasn’t thinking straight, and I realized that when I broke the window and jumped inside. I just wanted to help her.
“My lucky fucking night,” Johnny said. “Two birds with one stone.”
“Get the hell out of here,” Morta said through gritted teeth.
Her silver eyes threw daggers my way. Instead of listening to her like I should have, I took out one of the knives I’d borrowed from Dublin’s house.
A second to prepare would’ve been fair, but Long Hair jumped at me faster than I could see. My back hit another window, broke it, and I fell all the way down to the street.
My ribs broke and the pain was excruciating. I’d experienced worse with the silver bullet, but it still took me a few moments to heal, and those few moments gave Long Hair enough time to jump after me. His fists were on my face and chest faster than I could blink.
Everything broke. I still had the knife in my hand, and I used it to cut through his legs and arms, but I did no real damage. The vampire kept cursing at me with words I didn’t recognize.
He hit me so hard that when I finally managed to throw him off me, I felt twice as much pain while my bones recovered themselves.
As soon as I was on my feet and adjusted my mask to see better, Long Hair was at me again, and something dropped on the ground right next to us. We both looked; it couldn’t be avoided. What we saw was Johnny, but I could only tell because the corpse had a red leather vest on.
Other than that, he was black, withered, unrecognizable. Long Hair growled before he turned around, just in time to see Morta jump down from the balcony. Her knife was gone. There was blood around her mouth, but otherwise, she looked fine.
She looked like a fucking demon, and despite the situation, I couldn’t help but notice how dangerously beautiful she was. Long Hair jumped her with everything he had, but Morta was faster. And it all lasted no longer than ten seconds.
The scene played in slow motion in front of my eyes. The small, white-haired vampire, dancing around the hits and kicks of the other, much bigger one. And then the small vampire turned around, caught the bigger vampire’s arm with her hands, and sunk her teeth in his flesh.
Then, it stopped.
Long Hair was no longer Long Hair. He was just a black mass of rotten flesh covered in clothes when he fell to the floor, face first. Lifeless.
Morta wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket, her eyes never leaving mine. I saw how they transformed from silver to black and brown, and how her teeth turned square again. And I knew why the guys had been so afraid of her before. I knew why I should’ve been afraid of her, but wasn’t. Dublin’s words crossed my mind. There is one person who kills differently. I had no doubt that he had meant her.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Morta hissed at me.
“Are they really dead?” I asked instead. My eyes couldn’t adjust to the horror in front of them.
“You will be, too, if you don’t tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”
“But you just bit them. And I’ve seen other vampires bite other vampires before. That’s not what happened,” I said, pointing at Johnny’s red vest.
I wasn’t looking at her, so I didn’t see her move. I only saw her when she was barely two inches away from my face.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “Why the hell do you sound like that?”
I froze. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to say to her, but it seemed the decision had already been made. There was no other way around it. I knew what she was going to say before her lips moved.
“Take off your mask.”
I did.
XIX
“Before you say anything, I am not Hammer. I know everyone seems to think that, but I’m not,” I said after what felt like an eternity of her staring at me with those wide beautiful eyes like she couldn’t quite believe them. She looked paler, and her heart, the one that had beat steadily while she’d fought, was now beating like crazy. Like it wanted to fly out of her chest.
“How is this possible?” Her voice sounded like she had just woken up from the longest sleep of her life.
“I don’t know, but I’m not him,” I repeated.
“No, I know you’re not. You’re nothing like him…” she said, narrowing her brows, “but you look exactly…exactly like him.”
The weak voice didn’t suit her. She sounded like someone who didn’t even care enough to be desperate.
“I know it’s a shock to you, and everyone, and I can't tell you how, but I came after you because I wanted to…I wanted to help you.”
“Help me? You don’t know anything about me,” she said.
“That’s the other reason.” I looked away from her. I was a bit embarrassed to admit it. Unfortunately, I never did know how to keep my mouth shut about the things I thought. “The first, actually. I came because I wanted to know you.”
Her bottom lip shook. It wasn’t working. She took half a step back and I took one forward, instinctivel
y. A minute ago, I couldn’t stand the thought of looking at the vampire bodies around her, and now I couldn’t even remember they were there. I hated crying.
“Morta…”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say my name. Put your mask back on, please.”
It was the first time I hated that stupid mask. Morta didn’t want to see my face.
“I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to…” I wanted to say make you cry, but she wasn’t crying. She looked kind of numb.
“I don’t want to be a bitch, but could you please disappear?”
I flinched before I realized it. That was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. I’d been so lucky to find her in just four nights. I thought I’d need at least a week. And now she wanted me to disappear?
I heard her teeth clenching and her hands were curled in shaking fists. I considered saying no, but then, she’d just leave herself.
But then I realized, she would’ve run away before she even asked me to disappear. She couldn’t. She couldn’t move.
“Can’t I stay?”
She looked away from me.
I turned around and ran.
***
I ran far. Very far. In what direction, I couldn’t tell. A strong smell hit my nostrils all at once. I stopped and tasted it on my tongue.
Salt. I ran faster.
After another five minutes and I saw it. For the very first time in my life, I saw the ocean. It was amazing how vast it was. I’d never seen so much of anything. It was nothing like I’d imagined, how my mama said it would be. Blue and green and shiny. It was black. The foam from the waves close to the shore filled with garbage was grey. The blue was all but gone.
I sat on a rock with my eyes stuck at the horizon I couldn’t see. Black sky and black sea. I couldn’t see where one ended and the other began.
Thinking about something else was impossible. I remembered the look on her face. The way she looked at me and begged me to put my mask back on. She couldn’t even look at me.
I didn’t know which was worse. Bugz, who wanted the mask off all night long, or Morta, who couldn’t stand to look at my face without it. Bugz, who believed I was Hammer no matter how many times I told her I wasn’t, or Morta who knew I wasn’t him and refused to talk to me because of it.
Maybe I should’ve just left, disappeared like she’d asked me to. But was it fair that I had to suffer because my face was similar to some dead guy’s? Was it fair that I couldn’t talk to Morta, make her smile instead of cry, follow her like I wanted to?
She was a vampire who had a beating heart and who killed other vampires by biting them. It was funny how none of that made me want to run away. No. It made me run back.
It wasn’t fair.
I took one last look at the black ocean and I headed back. The fear that she’d left grew the closer I got to her. When I finally heard her heartbeat exactly where I’d heard it last, I smiled. Until I got closer to the building, and I heard her crying.
She cried in silence, but I heard it nonetheless. I heard her sniff, and I heard her shaky breath. So I gave her space and waited for sunrise in another building.
When I woke up the next night, she was gone.
XX
I understood. It was unfair, but I understood. She didn’t want to be near me. It wasn’t her fault that I was infatuated by her. She probably got that a lot. It wasn’t like I could blame her.
Stuck there in that building filled with empty rooms, I had no idea what I was going to do. I talked myself out of following her for two nights in a row. I would find something to distract myself with.
My first thought was Mohg. But then, what if Morta had been right? What if he really was going to join Chandra? I didn’t know her enough to trust her, but I trusted in her desperation. There was no way that could lie. I knew it from experience.
Dublin was out of the question. Others were after him, and having me as a burden would just slow him down.
Bugz wasn’t the solution, neither. We didn’t want the same things.
So, where was I to go? It wasn’t a question of where I wanted to be, but where I could be. And the answer was nowhere. Nowhere but where I was, on my own.
So be it, I said to myself on the third night. If the world had nothing else to offer me, I would take what I could get. The next night, I ran all the way to North Carolina, and I set up my living there.
I searched around and collected every new thing I found. Within a week, I had a new-looking sofa, dusted off and soft. A room filled with water barrels and a cupboard filled with bottles of wine and other poisons. A semi-decent bathroom with an unbroken mirror, and I even found some towels, still wrapped in plastic.
I gathered as many books as I could find. The closest humans were about three hours away from me, but I could travel twice a week and feed. That was exactly what I did.
And that was how the first month passed.
Some nights, I would stay inside, reading, thinking, feeling sorry for my pathetic self. Other days I would fight against walls and pillows and pieces of wood. And the rest, I would sit by the ocean and read.
It wasn’t living, but it was an existence. I managed just fine. If it wasn’t for those intrusive thoughts of Morta Fox that wouldn’t leave me alone, I would’ve been even better.
I was well into my third month in North Carolina, hiding, running whenever I heard someone pass by. Someone without a heartbeat.
But that night, I was feeling sorry for myself, more so than usual. Nobody ever suspected I was there. It would be a nice change if I stuck around and just watched who was passing by what I now called my neighborhood. So that’s what I did.
I hid on the top floor of my building, behind the blanket-covered window with a hole big enough to see outside, and I waited.
The three vampires walking together were ones I’d never seen before. They didn’t speak to each other. They just walked with their heads down. What a boring fucking experience.
I waited for them to disappear before I went on my way. I fed from four that night, feeling more depressed than usual.
It took me a while to get back. My mind was everywhere at once. I didn’t hear nor did I smell anything. When I saw the three boring vampires coming out of my building, it felt like a fist to my face.
How was I even still alive?
“Well, well,” one of them said.
“What do we have here?”
Another. Another who had a bottle of my wine in his hands. I reminded myself of Dublin’s words. I couldn’t allow myself to look afraid. I was. They were three, and I was still just a baby for them, but I couldn’t let them know that.
“Don’t you know it’s rude to steal?”
“Are you calling me a thief?” the one with the bottle grinned and took a step forward. I did the same.
“That’s what you call a vampire who takes things that don’t belong to him, right? And that right there is mine,” I said, and pretending my balls were bigger than they actually were, I ran to him and took the bottle right from his hand.
Maybe I had a death wish. Really. Maybe I wanted them pissed off so they could kill me, and I could get this over with. But then, the other guy laughed.
I didn’t know what to expect. One was laughing, another was looking at me like he wanted my head off, and the third just shrugged.
“The man is right. You shouldn’t take what doesn’t belong to you, El,” the laughing man said. He had some kind of an accent I couldn’t place.
He came forward then. He was bigger than the others, his hair blond and cropped short, and his eyes almost green. They looked out of place on his wide forehead and square jaw.
“I’m Drag,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”
“Yeah,” the thief said dryly. “And I am no thief. I was going to ask for the bottle. I didn’t even open it.”
“That’s El,” Drag pointed at the thief, who was the shortest, with hair and eyes brown, and a face white as a ghost. “And this here is Zuke.
He doesn’t speak.”
I raised my brows at the guy, but they couldn’t see them. Zuke was built almost the same as me, with short dark hair and brown eyes. He had a weird look on his face as he watched me, like he couldn’t decide what to think. He finally nodded, and I returned the favor.
“I’m Mask,” I said.
“Obviously,” El mumbled.
I had no longer than a few seconds to make a decision. They could be playing me, sure, but was that worse than where I already was? I was alone, talking to myself all night long, reading to myself out loud. Maybe they were just friendly vampires. Maybe they could stay a day or two, and I would actually have someone to talk to.
I took the risk fast. I handed El the bottle back. “Here. You can have it, since you asked nicely.”
Zuke looked at me with his brows raised. He definitely couldn’t pick a thought about me, but he still shrugged again.
Drag grinned. “Nice,” he said. “I noticed you had more. Would you mind sharing another one with us?” He pointed between himself and Zuke while El greedily opened the bottle and drank.
I must’ve been crazy because I nodded.
“Sure. If you can prove that you’re not going to kill me and take all I have up there.”
Drag laughed again. I never saw another vampire laugh so much in such a short time. Not even Bugz.
“We’re not going to kill you,” Drag said.
“If we were, we would’ve done that by now,” El said, somewhat reluctantly. I expected nothing from Zuke.
“All we want is a safe place to spend the day in, maybe some poison, and we’ll be on our way,” Drag continued.
I invited them up.
***
The reason why I opened the door of my shelter to three strangers was because they were the only ones I’d met so far who hadn’t called me Hammer after hearing my voice. And the accent made me believe that maybe they weren’t from around there. Not from the US, even.
I was careful when I handed bottles to Drag and Zuke. I stood while they sat on my couch and chairs. I felt more comfortable that way. They noticed it, too, but didn’t mention it.