An Unattractive Vampire

by Jim McDoniel

  All of them sparkled.

  He shouted something. She leaned in, failing to hear him over the music. He shouted again and motioned.

  “Body glitter,” explained Amanda, after a game of charades.

  The booming speakers didn’t seem to present the same problem for him. Yulric turned his hand palm up. And that is?

  Amanda paused to figure out how best to simplify glitter. Eventually, she decided upon “Makeup.” She turned back to the dancing vampires. One of the shirtless ones had noticed her and was giving her a once-over.

  “Christ, I thought they were just minor coven members. I didn’t realize they were the only vampires here.”

  With a frown, the shirtless male stopped checking her out and turned away to dance with the man next to him. Yulric tapped the side of his mask.

  “What?” Amanda turned toward the sparkling vampire, who now had his back to her. “Did he hear me?” Yulric nodded.

  “Great! Just great!” she growled in frustration. “I need a drink.” She punched Yulric in the arm, earning her an annoyed glare. “Don’t do anything stupid. Remember”—she gestured to the people all around them—“witnesses.” Yulric pointedly looked away.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside.” And with that, she disappeared again into the crowd.

  Yulric stood still. Unnaturally still. Supernaturally, even. The press of the dancers did not move him. The vibration of the music did not sway him. Even the background hum of subatomic exchange that is a normal part of physical matter, for that instant, halted so that he could be unequivocally still.

  One by one, the dancing, shiny vampires noticed a chilling lack of movement out of the corners of their eyes and turned to face him.

  “Greetings,” he said, knowing only they would be able to parse his words from the cacophony of the current screechscreech song. “I come to speak with the elders.”

  “You’ll find them upstairs,” replied the male wearing a shirt. Yulric assumed that wearing more clothes was some display of rank.

  “Mortals, one and all,” said Yulric. “I have not come to see pretenders.”

  The vampires exchanged looks with their shirted leader, who smiled. This was why he had been put in charge of the coven.33 Deception, intrigue, archaic rules of grammar and hospitality: they were the calling card of role-play, a game the young bloodsucker knew well.

  “Wise words, my masked friend,” said the shirt. “If it is elder vampires you seek, you will find few older than we in this city.”

  “Truly?” replied Yulric, trying not to scoff.

  The shirted male backed up as much as anybody could in the middle of a rave and gave a little bow. “I am Karos, of the Cavielli line, the last to be sired by the great Cavielli the Black himself, almost a decade ago.” As if on cue, the brunette female appeared at the shirted one’s shoulder. “Lucretia is also of my line, sired five years ago by Cavielli’s eldest, Draka.”

  “I expect you’ve heard of him,” she boasted. Yulric gave a kind of noncommittal grunt, as if these names meant something.

  The blonde approached Karos’s other side while the other two men took positions behind the women, looming over them, despite the latter’s heels. “Rosetta, Darius, and Henri la Croix are all descended from Count Hedronus, through Gabrielle.”

  “Of course,” Yulric agreed. Again, this siring nonsense. Yulric had poured over all the vampire fiction and was no closer to understanding how it happened than he had ever been. Did you mingle blood? Did you replace the blood entirely? Sometimes just a bite was enough to do it, but undoubtedly, that would have ended the humanity currently grinding against him, so that couldn’t be the case.

  Yulric’s musings were interrupted by the one called Lucretia. “Why do you come among us masked, unnamed stranger?”

  Yulric almost laughed at idea of being challenged. “I was”—he paused for effect—“afraid. Your coven is famous. Your strength, your lineage, and especially your beauty. Though the reports do not do you justice.” The vampires beamed at this. Yulric bowed his head in feigned sadness. “I’m sorry to say those of my”—he tried to remember the term they had used—“line are not nearly so handsome.”

  “Well, your line must be very lenient then.” The shirt laughed. “Our sires were all strict when it came to the change, and so are we. We follow the pamphlet’s instructions to the letter.”

  “Pamphlet?” uttered Yulric, hoping to provoke another sharing session. The young vampires traded uncertain glances. Too late, Yulric realized his question was far too suspicious. “Yes, indeed, the pamphlet,” he said, trying futilely to cover his mistake. “The pamphlet. We lost ours long ago. At least three years.”

  “You say your line is not nearly as handsome as ours?” Lucretia asked threateningly. She was walking around him now, like the lawyers did on TV.

  “Yes,” Yulric replied.

  Lucretia stopped. “How not handsome?”

  “Very,” Yulric answered.

  “Show us?” she asked with venomous politeness.

  “I would rather not,” declined Yulric.

  “I insist,” she said.

  “It would dishonor your beauty to sully its sight with my humble plainness.”

  “Humor me.” Lucretia grinned.

  Yulric clearly wasn’t going to get any more from this conversation and was tired of showing them undeserved deference. And so, with ominous slowness, he pulled down his hood and removed his mask. The vampires gasped. As did the nearest of the human dancers, though a few nodded in approval. Apparently, they thought he would make a great album cover.

  “What are you? A mummy?” gasped Darius.

  Henri la Croix agreed. “Yeah, definitely a mummy.”

  “Why don’t you go find yourself a nice mummy bar?” Rosetta laughed dismissively.

  “Probably ’cause there aren’t any mummy bars,” said Henri. He regarded Yulric with the disgust usually reserved exclusively for videos of live births. “Really, who would want to be a mummy?”

  “Certainly not I,” goaded Lucretia.

  “I am not a mummy,” Yulric barked, letting loose his long-bottled rage. “I am not a werewolf. I am not a ghost. I am not a zom-whatever. I, dear children, am Yulric Bile. And I am a real vampyr.”

  And with that dramatic statement, bells sounded from all over the club and the sprinkler system went off.

  Screams louder than any Yulric could have hoped to elicit filled the air as cold water fell from the ceiling. The crowd began to run away to avoid the deluge. Where supernatural threats from a thousand-year-old creature of darkness had failed, discomfort and the prospect of ruined clothing succeeded. Not even the vampires were immune to this humiliation.

  “These are designer pants,” cried Darius.

  “My hair!” shrieked Rosetta.

  “Bastard. I’ll . . . Whoops,” said Lucretia as her high heels slipped on the wet floor and she fell. Then, trying to shield themselves from the torrent, they joined the rest of the crowd fleeing in panic. The shirt alone remained behind. With the proper dignity of one chosen for leadership by watching far too many movies, he posed for a good long time before slowly retreating backward. It looked ridiculous, most especially when he had to take two awkward steps to the right to find the doorway.

  Yulric was standing there in the pouring indoor rain, cursing the plumbing, when he was approached by a pair of drenched bouncers.

  “I think it’s time you left, buddy.”

  “Very well,” replied Yulric with a sneer, “I will go.”

  And he did. After taking his diamond back, of course.

  Chapter 14

  Outside the club, Amanda milled about with the rest of the soaked clientele. She was wet and cold, and fairly certain she was being ogled just because she was wet and cold. The looks she was receiving, after all, were lustful, not resentful, which is what they would have been if anyone had seen her pull the fire alarm. Sure, it may have saved all of their lives, but it wouldn’t fix
their makeup.

  And so Amanda stood shivering, being objectified, and waiting for Yulric. She didn’t really know why. She did not like him. She wanted him gone. This entire outing had been an exercise in exorcizing his presence from her couch. It even had a code name in the Linske household: Operation Get Rid of the Vampire. However, every time she’d made up her mind to abandon him here and try her luck at the vampire clubs up by NYU, what might happen would play out in her head . . .

  It was dark in the scenario she imagined. Unnaturally dark for the city. Maybe it was a blackout or something. Who cared? It was her vision. A minivan sat stopped in the middle of the road, engine smoking slightly. A soccer mom breathed heavily from behind the wheel. Her eyes were wide with fright; her hands shook from adrenaline. She turned to see that her two children—one girl, one boy—were all right. Amanda couldn’t help but notice that the boy resembled Simon.

  “Stay here,” the woman told her children as she unbuckled her seat belt.

  “Mommy, what happened?” asked the boy in a voice very like Simon’s, if he were normal.

  “Just stay here,” she replied. “Mommy has to check on something.”

  She opened the door and stepped out. The rain pelted down on her. (Because this wasn’t real, Amanda didn’t even wonder when it had started raining.) Slowly, the woman moved toward the front of her car, toward the person she had just hit. Excuses ran through her head. He just came out of nowhere. I was clearly visible, lights on, but he just walked right in front of me as if he didn’t understand the concept of crosswalks or right-of-way. I swear, Officer, that’s the truth.

  The soccer mom worried she had killed someone. She worried she would be arrested or charged with something and that her ex-husband would use that as an excuse to take her kids away. Only Amanda knew she should have worried about so much more.

  The man was dead, or so the woman thought, up until the moment he started cursing. She breathed a sigh of relief. Not dead meant a charge without the word homicide in it. The man—she assumed it was a man based on his baldness—continued to swear in some language she couldn’t recognize.34 Foreign, thought the woman. That’s why he didn’t stop. A deeper, darker part of her added, If he’s illegal, it won’t even go to trial. Liberal guilt chiding her, the woman approached the screaming man, who was now attempting to stand.

  “Here, let me help you.” She grabbed his arm to brace him.

  A furious face turned upon contact: a face full of fire and pain and swearing in languages that had died before the last ice age. She screamed as a thousand years of rage literally went for her jugular. The pair fell out of sight, with only dying shrieks, flailing limbs, and the occasional spurt of blood as evidence they had ever been there.

  Amanda’s focus now fell on the children, sitting in the minivan. Though the hood had shielded them from the grisly scene, they had witnessed the beginning of the attack: a man with scary eyes biting their mommy. Frankly, that was enough. Crying, they called out for her.

  Up popped the head of the vampire, his eyes glowing in the headlights, his mouth dripping red. The children bawled louder. If only someone would save them. If only someone would stop him.

  If only someone had waited for him outside the club, this could all have been avoided.

  And so Amanda stayed. A half hour. An hour. When the only people left were firefighters and cops, many of whom were trying to get her phone number,35 it was clear Yulric wasn’t dumb enough to waltz out the entrance after all, so she decided to wait for him in the car.

  Several catcalls and suggestive offers of “rides”36 later, Amanda finally reached the parking garage. She reluctantly fed most of what she had made the week before into a kiosk and took the elevator up five stories, where, after walking the final fifty feet to her car, she did what she had longed to do for hours: take off her boots and put on a dry hoodie.

  An hour and a half, she lingered in the parking garage, hoping, sometimes praying, that the vampire would show up. The picture of the imaginary woman and her kids kept playing in her head. She thought about leaving and going to look for him, but what could she do? Drive around a city of eight million people, calling his name as if he were a stray cat?

  Finally, she couldn’t stay any longer; she had to get home. She drove out of the garage, negotiating the extra two hours with the attendant by taking off her hoodie and leaning out the window. The bright lights of the city were soon left behind and replaced instead by the dull lights of the suburbs. And all the while, Amanda hoped desperately that the vampire would get caught out in the coming dawn.

  She really didn’t think she was that lucky.

  • •

  Outside the club, the shirt made a phone call.

  • •

  Much of Vermillion’s face was flayed open when the phone rang. For a moment, its owner considered just letting it go to voice mail. He was, after all, in the middle of very delicate and intricate work, manipulating muscles, tendons, cartilage, and bone into their ideal form. Right now, he was about to give the boy a chin. It was the least he could do, having lipo’d the three others away. But, in the end, he decided to take the call. It wasn’t like Vermillion was going anywhere. His face was pinned to the table.

  “Hello, Karos,” the man said in his English-accented baritone.

  Karos responded with a shocked pause. Even the youngest vampires, who had grown up with caller ID, were willing to attribute anything their leader did to supernatural power. He had long stopped pointing out little things like a name on the call screen. It was faster that way.

  “My lord,” Karos said. The Englishman rolled his eyes at this reminder of how into vampires Karos was. He usually encouraged such fantasies, but Karos had long ago reached the limit. It was part of why he had neglected to tell the coven leader he was in town.

  “My lord,” Karos said again, “I hate to disturb you. You are undoubtedly very busy.”

  “Indeed I am, Karos,” replied the Englishman. “If you could get to the point?”

  “You told us to call if we ever met a-an old one.”

  The man on the phone stopped licking blood off his fingers. Things had just taken a very serious turn. “What kind of old one?” he asked. He could be referring to a terrible monstrosity beyond time and sanity. Oh, how he hoped the young vampire meant a terrible monstrosity beyond time and sanity.

  “It was a—it claimed to be one of us,” explained Karos, extinguishing the small glimmer of hope that it was an eldritch, semivegetable horror.

  “What did it say? Tell me everything,” the man on the phone commanded. Karos obliged. He explained how the supposed vampire had approached, made suspicious inquiries, been unmasked and then driven away by the might of the coven.

  “Very good,” said the Englishman, not believing that last bit at all. “And did you see where it went?”

  “No, my lord,” Karos answered sheepishly. “The coward fled too quickly.”

  “Indeed?” hissed the elder vampire. “Perhaps next time you shouldn’t make it flee so fast.”

  “Er, yes, my lord.”

  The man rubbed his eyes in frustration. “Is there no way to track it?”

  There was a disheartening pause from the young vampire; however, when he spoke again, his voice sounded hopeful. “There might be a blonde, I mean, a lead, I can follow.”

  The Englishman’s eyebrow raised. “Well, by all means, Master Karos, follow your ‘lead.’” He hung up and immediately scrolled through the contact list on his cell phone until he came across a specific name. It was a name that most would have killed to have in their phones. They would have pressed Send with extreme excitement. There would probably have been ecstatic screaming. The elder vampire, however, did not relish this call. It was dangerous. It was also necessary.

  After two rings a voice answered. The voice was strong yet sensitive, soft yet sultry. It was everything that begins with the letter S. It was the kind of voice that beckons the brain of every woman with its understanding while
simultaneously beckoning to her less brain-related parts, as well, with its mystery. It was, in essence, a siren’s call. “Hello?”

  “Phantom,” said the man. “I have a job for you.”

  • •

  Outside the club, Yulric Bile brooded atop a garbage dumpster. A part of his brain, the part that had kept him unalive for over a thousand years, screamed at him to move from this exposed and vulnerable location. Another part of his brain, the one with a higher learning curve for this new world, told it to shut up, since there was no way any of the vampires would go anywhere near garbage. Not in those shoes, certainly.

  Things had not gone according to plan. Any plan. He had played out a dozen different scenarios in his head, and in none of them did he end up a soaked mess, hiding among refuse. He had no answers: nothing to tell him what exactly vampires had become or how they had become what they were or who he should kill for it. Without that, he was back where he started: sitting on a couch watching TV until something better came along. He did not want that, no matter how interested he was in the identity of the father of Caroline’s secret love child.

  Yulric heard sirens in the distance,37 announcing the arrival of Authorities. While the hungry, animal parts of his brain longed for the chase that only the discovery of two decimated bodies could bring, rationally, the vampire knew he wasn’t ready to face a force with frenzy-sicks: the CSIs, FBIs, and other letter combinations he’d learned from TV. And as they would definitely check dumpsters, it was time to move. With the ease of a spider, he scuttled up the wall and onto the roof of the neighboring warehouse. From this vantage point, he could see everything: the big red truck with rubber-clad Authorities, smaller white cars with blue-clad Authorities, the shirted vampire talking into a phone, Amanda, everything.

  Amanda. The young girl stood, inappropriately dressed for the cool night air. Surely, she was not waiting for him. Why would she, after all? She loathed him, as well she should, and what he felt for her involved words used only to describe tapeworm infestations. But there she was, naively expecting him to walk out the front door, right in front of Authorities.