Ravenous (Triskaidekaphilia Book 2)

by Wendy Nikel

  “Am I?”

  John nods and widens his eyes. “The temptation must be agonizing with all those razor blades around. Don’t you sometimes want to press a little too hard when you’re shaving an unsuspecting customer? Make the slightest nick?” He leans in conspiratorially. “I know I would.”

  Of course it tempts me. Still, I’m not without scruples. I no longer have a soul, but its presence or absence shouldn’t make a difference since I never believed in souls when I had one. Besides, nicking customers would be bad for business. The undead have to pay the rent somehow if they don’t want to dwell in sewers and old cemeteries. I was a barber before I became a vampire, and I’m a barber now. Not everything has to change with death.

  I take a sip of my beet juice. It’s sweet and iron-rich like blood, and it stains my tongue the same deep color. With a little salt added, it’s heavenly. “Maybe you should have taken my work into account before you changed me. Or provided some sort of vocational rehabilitation to ease the transition.”

  “I would, if the Vampyre Guild offered insurance for this sort of situation.” John’s smile at his own joke exposes his eyeteeth. They don’t look much sharper than a normal human’s. No wonder I fell prey to him so easily that night.

  “If only there were a Vampyre Guild. Satanic rituals at cemeteries, live sacrifices, plans for world domination—sounds a lot sexier than the life I’m leading now.” I look around the juice bar. Customers file in and out for hangover-preventing vitamin-and-mineral fixes after all-night benders. Drunk people smell terrible. Their blood is all piss and bitterness.

  John rolls his eyes. “As if you’d like that any better. You’re too much of a softie for that kind of thing. Most of us are.”

  “Just saying. Think how much you all could accomplish if you allied yourselves with the Dark Lord.”

  “It’s not ‘them,’ Keith. It’s ‘us.’ You need to start accepting that.”

  “I don’t have to accept anything I don’t want to.” I try to believe it, even though an ache grows at the back of my tongue as we speak, a longing for blood that can only be ameliorated, but not slaked, by the beet juice I keep sipping.

  John reaches across the table and takes my hand. “You know I didn’t mean to change you, darling. You were just so sexy. All I could think about was making you come. I’m sorry I got carried away. If I could travel back in time, you know I would.” He pouts. It’s not an act.

  For a moment, I remember what I saw in John that first night. He was pretty. Pale. Anemic but not sickly. He looked like a piece of fine china, his skin almost translucent and offset by thick black eyelashes and a dark brown head of hair. Later, when I came to on the tile floor of the bathroom stall, his beauty was no longer so haunting. His skin was ruddy and opaque, his cheeks stained with tears. He buried his curls into my shoulder and cried I’m sorry, I’m sorry until the words lost their meaning.

  “I know, but ‘sorry’ won’t improve my situation. And don’t call me ‘darling.’”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so cold. We’re in the same boat. Why not be friends instead of just sire and spawn?”

  In spite of myself, I give his hand a soft squeeze. “Be patient. After a few hundred years, my resentment might fade enough that I can look at you without wanting to punch you in the face.”

  “I guess that’s something.” John pulls his hand back and looks down at his own glass: also beet but laced with a shot of tomato juice. He likes the tanginess of it, says it’s reminiscent of sweat mixing with blood when he sucks on a human quarry’s skin. “Look, I want to help you. I really do. I have a friend at a hair salon—”

  “I hate hair salons.”

  John rolls his eyes. “You’re gay. Is that even possible?”

  “Remember what I said about punching you in the face?”

  His expression goes meek. “Fine. You hate hair salons. Even though the only difference between a hair salon and barber shop is that in a hair salon, there aren’t razors everywhere and the same cut costs three times as much.”

  “The scissors are as sharp.”

  “I suppose. But that can’t be what’s keeping you from working in one. What is it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. To me, at least. I’m your sire.”

  I give John a look—the kind my mother used to give me when she suspected me of trying to peddle bullshit to her. “If you cared that much—”

  “—I wouldn’t have changed you. Yeah, yeah. I could have left you there, you know.”

  “For dead? I wish you had.”

  “Nah, it was too late for that. Our essences had already mingled.”

  The word makes me shudder. “‘Essences’ sounds like something from a bad porno.”

  “So if I keep it up I might get laid yet tonight?” He winks at me lasciviously.

  Truth be told, he is kind of hot when he does that. But not hot enough. “You won’t be getting laid by me.”

  “Can’t blame a vampire for hoping.” John downs more of his drink. “Anyway, I do care. Not just because I have a sense of responsibility for what I’ve done. I’ve gotten to know you. And you’re a decent guy, Keith. You deserve happiness if any of us soulless undead do. So why do you keep torturing yourself at this barbershop instead of getting a job at a hair salon?”

  A woman walks into the juice bar, tottering on too-high heels and laughing into her cell phone. I can smell her perfume from here—and her hair gel, conditioner, deodorant, nail polish, toothpaste, scented panty liner, sweat, and acrid drunkenness. It’s a car crash of odors, mangled and hopeless.

  “It’s the smell. Perm chemicals and hair dye, a hundred different products that are supposed to be infused with pomegranates and rain but smell more like a bomb went off in a chemical factory. I can’t stand it. And it’s worse since the change.”

  John tilts his head. “So you’ve been in a hair salon recently?”

  “I’m not an idiot. I know I might do better in a less… tempting profession. But I’ll stay at the shop for now. The scents are simpler.”

  “They’re hiring at the hospital.” Half the vampires in the city work at the hospital, mostly in menial positions that keep them away from temptation but give them access to bloody gauze, spent lab samples, and the like.

  “I’m not going to work at a hospital. That’s so… stereotypical.”

  “So is being a gay hairdresser, but that didn’t stop you.”

  I glance at my watch. “That’s your second gay hairdresser joke in three minutes.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m gay. Aren’t I allowed to?”

  “I thought you were omnisexual.”

  “You young ones and your terminology. Back when I was a human, any guy who fucked other guys was simply a ‘sodomite.’ Now there’s a different term for every decimal on the Kinsey scale. Drives me nuts.”

  I rub my forefinger back and forth over my thumb, a bow across a string. “You know what this is?”

  John crinkles his nose. “The world’s smallest violin playing the world’s saddest song especially for me. Fuck you.”

  “You wish.” I gulp down the rest of my juice and look at my watch again. “An hour to sunrise. I should get going.” I rise to leave.

  “You should think about the hospital. Or a hair salon that doesn’t smell so bad. One day, those razors will get the better of you, and I’ll be the one you come crying to when it happens.”

  I head to the barbershop. It’s my turn to open today, and no one needs to know if I show up two hours ahead of opening time to avoid the sunrise. It’s not that the sunlight would kill me. If only it would—the idea gave me hope back when I first turned, that I could end my pathetic nonexistence by simply stepping outside in daylight.

  John disabused me of this fanciful notion several days after my transformation. I’d been moping around the apartment, saying little except when I would threaten to off myself. “You want to kill yourself? Well, let me help you!” It was noon; the curta
ins were all closed. I thought he was going to open them. Instead he dragged me up the emergency stairs and pushed me out onto the apartment building’s roof, where I sprawled on hands and knees.

  The sun was high and bright, the asphalt reflecting its heat in visible waves the way it only does in summer. The light stabbed my eyes. I closed them and waited for the sizzle, to hear my own skin wrinkle and crisp like bacon, for the smell of my own cooked flesh to penetrate my nostrils.

  Nothing happened.

  I pushed myself up, smiling. Perhaps I wasn’t a vampire after all. I’d have to come up with some other reason for the sudden non-vegan cravings and the fact I’d gone through John’s entire supply of refrigerated pig’s blood. “I’m not a vampire!”

  “I hate to break it to you again, but you are.”

  “No, or I’d be—”

  “Frying? Yeah, well, you don’t see me frying either, do you?”

  I blinked. The light made it difficult to focus, but I could see his skin was still like it had been that first night I’d met him: smooth and translucent, not cooked at all.

  A wave of exhaustion, and then nausea, swept over me. It was my first time feeling tired since the change. “Fucking fuck.”

  John pulled me up. “We should get back inside. The sun won’t kill you, but it will make you sick as a dog.”

  “I thought the queasiness was a response to my existential dilemma.”

  “Those are big words for a barber.”

  “I’m a well-read barber.”

  “You’re cute when you get angry. Did you know that?” I’m sure my scowl grew, because so did John’s smile. He patted my back. “Now let’s get back inside before we’re both too wiped out to move and get stuck here.”

  Over the following months, John taught me to tolerate diffuse sunlight in small doses and make accommodations without rousing other people’s suspicions. I used to have my chair toward the shop’s front window; now my chair’s in the back, and if anyone asks about the move, I say I had a skin cancer scare. The light that filters back there doesn’t make me feel violently ill, just slightly weak and prone to the ravages of time—not much different than when I was human.

  John’s showed me other things about being a vampire, too, like where to buy animal blood (it’s not a replacement, but it drastically reduces the craving for human blood) and where to scrounge up the real stuff when you need just a drop to take the edge off (the women’s bathroom is a favorite destination for many, but since I’ve never had a thing for vaginas, I stick to the sharps container in the men’s).

  John hasn’t left me floundering, wondering how to go on in a world made for the living. I guess that makes him better than a lot of other sires.

  I hate him, anyway.

  Which is why I didn’t tell him the real reason I won’t leave the barbershop.

  His name is Andres.

  He drops in every three weeks for a cut and shave, and he’s due for another visit.

  With any luck, I’ll see him today.

  I was attracted to Andres even before the change. He’s tall, with wide shoulders and a solid chest I can’t help but want to lean into. Muscular instead of muscle-bound, with a thin layer of fat running over his belly. A sharp nose and eyes as soft and brown as the fur of a doe.

  His handsomeness is unselfconscious. He never spends much time looking in the mirror when I’m done and doesn’t go for any grooming beyond the haircut and shave. His eyebrows are heavy, dark strips that accentuate his eyes. Occasionally one or two brow hairs go wayward, sticking perpendicularly from his forehead or back over the bridge of his nose, but even that has a flattering effect, like the intentional asymmetry of Japanese pottery made in the wabi-sabi style. Sometimes I comb them with my fingers while I wait for the hot towel to open his pores, but that’s as much for the excuse to touch him as anything else.

  After the change, the attraction became more intense. I could smell him now, the blood swimming through the capillaries near his skin. To describe the scent of good blood is difficult because that’s exactly what it smells like: blood, metallic and slightly salty, with the vivacity of ocean water. Had someone told me those things smelled good when I was human—not only good, but arousing in a way that surpasses the sexual—I wouldn’t have understood.

  Back then, my closest experiences to this kind of olfactory ecstasy happened when I ground cardamom in the kitchen and its notes of floral, zest, and spice impregnated every surface in the apartment; and in spring when the lilacs and hyacinths opened. Those scents were enough to stop me in my tracks, to make me forget whatever I’d been doing or thinking or caring about, to cut short appointments and phone calls so I could concentrate on their exquisite beauty.

  That’s what Andres smells like—but better. He smells like life itself.

  Vampires’ scents aren’t as strong as those of humans. They’re quiet, less bombastic. John smells like licorice and coffee and perfumed violets—not the scents themselves but the areas of the brain they trigger, the associations they invoke. When he’s been in my apartment, I can smell him for days later, the way vanilla lingers in a kitchen long after the cookies have been baked.

  When Andres arrives, the old analog clock on the wall reads 8:37. I smell him before the bell on the opening door jingles. He nods when I look up. I turn back to my work, running the clippers through the hair of an old man who smells like talcum powder, Old Spice, and vitamin B shots. His blood has a sterile quality I’m not fond of, common in people who take lots of medications. It’s not bad, but it’s not tempting.

  Andres, on the other hand—my mouth is watering already.

  I eavesdrop on him talking with Greta, the owner’s daughter and the shop’s factotum, who currently plays the role of receptionist.

  “I’ll see Keith when he’s done if no one else is waiting for him,” Andres says.

  “Sam’s free right now,” Greta says.

  “I’ll wait.”

  Sam is sweeping the detritus from his previous customer off the floor. He makes a scowl Andres can’t see, then looks up and mouths big shot at me. Soon another customer arrives and takes Sam’s chair. I finish up with the old guy. Andres’s sweet-salty scent overpowers everything.

  The smell grows stronger as I step toward Andres, a bouquet of rough minerals and sharp hormones, savory proteins and sweet sugars: the iron cool as earth, the testosterone musky and strong, and the nitrogenous amines like air after a lightning storm, crisp and pure. “I’m ready for you,” I say. It’s a lie.

  The cut is first and cursory. There’s not much to work with. Andres keeps his hair marine-short, and it doesn’t grow fast despite his healthy blood supply. He closes his eyes and sighs as the clipper vibrates his scalp and drops bits of fuzz onto the haircutting cape gathered around his shoulders. I smell his adrenal glands slowing down and blissful oxytocin entering his bloodstream. If a cat’s purr had a smell, this is what it would be, soothing and rich like the texture of velvet.

  Andres and I have done this dance together for a long time. He knows each move I’m going to make before I make it. When I recline the chair he cranes his neck back slightly, exposing his delicious throat so I can wrap the warm towel around his jaw. The heat draws his blood closer to the surface, heightening the clean scent of fresh blood pumping through his carotid artery, underlain by the slightly tangier odor of deoxygenated blood in his jugular vein.

  I remove the towel and move to the next step in our ritual, a lemon cream to open his pores. Andres’s nostrils flare happily as I apply the first daub and then rub it in. I relish in the intimacy of the touch, conscious as I am of our capillaries’ separation by only the thin barriers of our skin.

  Another towel, more heat, more blood rising to the surface. I work a pearl of oil into his skin to ease the drag of the razor, then brush lather over his face, careful not to bury his stubble so I can still see the grain. He’s almost dozing, his heartbeat half the rate it was when he first sat down. If I opened an arteriole now, the g
ush of blood would be almost lazy.

  The key to a good shave is applying enough pressure to match the resistance and no more. I start at Andres’s jaw; the contours are clear and relatively easy to follow, and the time here gives me a chance to steady my hand before moving on to the more vulnerable areas of his landscape. I don’t get nervous shakes the way I occasionally did when I was alive—I suppose it’s the lack of cortisol—but I can lose control in ways that are far more dangerous.

  Andres lets out another sigh as I move down to his throat. The scent of his arousal is unmistakable. His testosterone burgeons and is joined by the sharp, spicy fragrance of vasopressin opening his blood vessels into full bloom. I don’t have to look to know he’s getting hard, but I do anyway. He’s bunched the black drape around his waist, and I can see the fabric of his jeans shift over his lengthening cock as I glide the razor along his throat by feel.

  I could do it with just the slightest press. His neck is outstretched like a swan’s, the blood vessels forming a taut web beneath his skin. I only need to pluck one thread to bring his blood to the surface. He probably wouldn’t notice a nick but remain in his blissed-out state as the red bead blossomed on his skin. I could brush my finger over it, staining my fingertip scarlet, and stick it in my mouth as if it were my own blood and myself that I had nicked.

  It would be so easy. Greta is on the phone and Sam is talking animatedly about Saturday’s game with the customer in his chair. Andres seems to have floated to another dimension, the sharpness of the blade against his skin instilling no fear, only comfort and pleasure. I can smell the precum blossoming from his dick. It’s not the first time, and he’s not the only man who reacts to a good shave like this. But he’s the only one I want to devour.

  I remove the razor from his throat and place it on the caddy.

  “How’s it look, doc?” Andres doesn’t open his eyes.

  Even without touching him I can see that I’ve done my job well. I touch him anyway, running a fingertip over his jaw. “Smooth as butter.”