“Maybe you can’t tell, but I can.” He heard the smile in Jasper’s voice without looking. Some of the pain abated. “Walking death isn’t a good look on you, Jude. This is a good sign.”
Maybe when this was over, after he got some resolution, he might revisit living as opposed to bare survival… but there was still more going on here than met the eye, he knew that, if nothing else. With Jasper, things were rarely exactly as they appeared, even if no disguises were involved. “You know more than you’re saying.”
“Always,” Jasper said, and Jude opened his eyes in time to catch the end of his casual shrug. “It’s a universal constant by now. But it’s nothing that would endanger you, that I do promise.”
“So you really aren’t coming with me?” Jude pressed. He could easily see the hesitation and uncertainty in Jasper’s face and knew his resolve wasn’t nearly as ironclad as he’d like Jude to believe.
“Ask me tomorrow.” His black-lined eyes slipped away, as did any chance of solving that particular riddle. “I have… plans.”
“Plans?” Jude repeated, not at all reassured by the non-answer. “Doing what?”
“Just some store security errands,” Jasper said, an obvious evasion. So obvious, in fact, Jude got the feeling it was a hint for him to drop the subject.
“Well, that sounds ominous.” Anyone else might have been talking about changing the locks or upgrading the metal shutters over the entrance, but Jude didn’t think that was the case here. He wasn’t even sure how much he believed about Jasper’s supposed magic business, how much was real and how much was a distraction—but after what he’d seen the past two nights, he was starting to wonder.
“Not if everything goes according to plan.” Jasper gave him one of his enigmatic smiles, the kind that made it hard to tell if he was joking and, if so, how much.
“All right,” Jude backed off, hands raised. “I’ll leave you to it. And don’t worry, I will tell you everything. I blame you for about half of it.”
“What?” Jasper actually looked surprised. “What in the world did I do?”
“That holy water.” Jude gave him a dirty look before turning back toward the mall entrance. “Didn’t exactly work as advertised.”
“Oh.” Jasper frowned briefly, but brightened fast. “Well, that’s valuable information, anyway. Learning all the time!”
Shaking his head again, Jude left the store and kept walking, past the woman in black in her usual place outside. Some things never changed. She was still playing with her cards, laying them out in some form of Solitaire, and still wearing dark sunglasses. Did she ever leave? All Jude wanted to do now was leave. Maybe he could actually spend a few precious hours at home pretending none of this had happened, and that all he had to worry about was keeping the mall safe and orderly for its human inhabitants.
As he stepped outside, however, that dream went up in smoke.
It was close to sundown, Oregon rain coming down hard, with clouds so thick the day was almost dark as night already. Still, vampires weren’t supposed to come out in the daytime, no matter how cloudy. They were only supposed to appear at the stroke of midnight, emerging from shadows with fangs bared and eyes aglow like demons straight from Hell.
They definitely weren’t supposed to stand there like they’d been waiting for him all day, wearing sunglasses, a black hoodie (like the shirt from last night, it read ‘Chaos Chainsaw’), red winter gloves, that same scarf, and holding a dripping umbrella overhead.
“Hey!” Pixie stopped mercifully before completing Jude’s least-favorite joke, greeting, and song lyric, instead giving a smile and wave as Jude stopped in front of him. His face beneath the hood’s shadow was as grey as the rainclouds overhead, but as long as he didn’t open his mouth too wide, he could have been any other shopper.
“What are you doing here?” Jude had to ask, though he couldn’t imagine a single answer he’d actually enjoy hearing. Pixie wasn’t likely to be here for anybody else, much as he looked like he’d fit in with the goth store at the other end of the mall. Their employees tended to have the same kind of ridiculous, neon-fluorescent hair, and now Jude couldn’t help wonder if they had pointed teeth in common too.
It was probably where he got the scarf in any case. At least now it looked like he’d finally taken off the tags.
“Waiting for you!” Pixie reached out, offering him space to stand under the umbrella, but Jude didn’t move. “I’ve got something for us to start with. Wanna get going?”
“How are you here?” Jude asked instead, casting a confused look up at the sky. True, it was raining, and the sun would be down in an hour or so, but it was definitely still up behind the heavy cloud cover.
“Are you kidding?” Pixie returned, seemingly unperturbed both by the daylight and Jude’s general lack of enthusiasm. “You’re not exactly hard to find.”
“No,” Jude said, caught between exasperation and confusion. “I mean how are you standing here, in the daylight? I thought that…didn’t work for you,” he finished in a low voice, mindful of people passing by, but Pixie just laughed, nodding to his umbrella.
“Umbrella, hoodie, long sleeves—as long as there’s some clouds, that’s just about all you need, unless the sun actually comes out. Which around here really isn’t much. Probably why you tend to see more of us in Portland than most places.”
“Exactly how many of you are here?” Jude asked, interested in the answer despite himself. It wasn’t even a strategic consideration now. He was undeniably curious, especially now that he couldn’t help considering how many vampires he might have passed without knowing.
Pixie gave him the same kind of wry look that had reminded him of Jasper last night, when he smirked in the middle of a particularly good performance. Part of Jude found it annoying. The other part found it annoyingly endearing. “What, you think I know everybody in the vampire community?”
Jude paused for a moment, trying to decide whether Pixie was serious or not—though the look on his face gave the answer away fairly easily. Jude almost laughed, surprising himself and quickly turning it into a throat-clear. “I think that as long as…you exist, this is as good a place as any.”
“Yeah. Especially if you don’t technically exist. Keep Portland Weird!” Pixie grinned, just a brief flash of pointed teeth. “You should see the gang that hangs out under Powell’s.”
Jude wasn’t entirely sure he should, so instead he fixed Pixie with what he hoped was an intimidating stare as he stepped under the umbrella, careful not to get too close, but not enjoying the idea of walking home in the rain. He tried to project the air of an experienced vampire hunter and not someone who still half-suspected that most or all of this was a particularly weird and elaborate dream. “I assume you actually have a reason for being here?”
“Not now,” Pixie said, casting an anxious glance around he probably thought was subtle, but was anything but. “You have anywhere safer to talk?”
Jude had already done several things against his better judgement today. Now it was apparently time for one more. He started heading toward home and nodded for Pixie and his umbrella to follow.
Jude was halfway to his kitchen before he realized he wasn’t being followed anymore.
“What are you doing?” he called, looking back to see Pixie still standing just outside the doorway, looking a little embarrassed but not actually entering the apartment.
“Uh, would you mind inviting me in?” Pixie asked with a nervous laugh, in which Jude didn’t miss the undercurrent of anxiety. “It’d make everything a lot easier.”
“So some vampire stories are true,” Jude observed with only a faint sense of dismay at the directions his life had recently taken. At least it was nice to know he apparently had a choice in the matter, and Pixie was asking a good deal more politely than most humans tended to. He took a step closer, observing how Pixie’s toes almost touched the door threshold, but not quite.
“Yeah, mostly the annoying ones.” Pixie gave him a weak
smile.
“You got in here last night.” Jude frowned, recalling a shattered window and a near cardiac event, neither of which he was quite ready to let go. “I didn’t invite you in then.”
“You invited somebody in.”
“I thought you were Eva—wait. That counted?”
“I guess?” Pixie shifted anxiously and shrugged, apparently no more familiar with the intricacies of vampiric consent than Jude was.
“That’s cheating.” One of the only upsides to any of this was that vampires had rules, long-established and almost universally recognized. Or so Jude had thought. The holy water had been the first hole in that theory and even this didn’t seem to work in the way he’d predicted. Disturbing.
“Hey, we take what we can get. But yeah, keep that in mind,” Pixie advised, a couple degrees more seriously. “Vampires like loopholes and most of us aren’t as friendly as me.”
Jude didn’t acknowledge that. Instead he spent a few seconds weighing pros and cons, and wondering how private of a conversation they could have with his door wide open. Finally, he concluded that given the choice between being alone with a vampire in his apartment and neighbors overhearing anything he couldn’t explain, he’d take the vampire.
“This is a one-time only invitation,” he said, measuring every word to avoid ambiguity or wiggle room. “This is not a recurring arrangement. You do not drop by whenever you feel like it.”
“All right, cool, whatever,” Pixie said, folding his arms and shooting Jude the most sardonic look he’d seen yet. “Guess hospitality’s reserved for the living.”
Jude gave the look right back, complete with arm-fold. “You know, I could just leave you out in the hall and have you slip notes under the door.”
Pixie looked chagrined, and his large ears drooped a little. “Sorry. May I come in, please?”
“Yes you may.” Jude could swear Pixie looked relieved to actually cross the threshold without incident, as if he half-expected to be flung out of the room by a magical force. For all Jude knew, that might well be what happened to uninvited vampires. “Now what do you want?”
Pixie hesitated. Maybe he was picking his words carefully, just like Jude. Maybe the old ‘they’re more afraid of you than you are of them’ saying applied to vampires as well. Pixie’s attemptedly-casual tone when he finally spoke didn’t fool Jude. He’d been in enough uncomfortable interactions to recognize when someone was trying too hard. “I found a way we could practice working together.”
Jude folded his arms, not trusting this new ground for a second. They never had actually hashed out the details here. ‘Working together’ could have meant any number of terrifying things and he wasn’t likely to enjoy any of them. “What kind of practice?”
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing dangerous!” Pixie smiled, flashing his small pointed canines at Jude. He seemed to be getting more comfortable showing them. Jude wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or bad thing. “Just scaring some kids, like we talked about. I mean, that’s kind of your job, right?”
“Not exactly…” Jude hesitated, mildly astounded that he was even considering working in tandem with a vampire. This felt like a point of no return. After this first, real step, there would be no going back. “What did they do?”
Pixie’s pupils dilated noticeably as his eyes narrowed, and, for the first time, a truly aggravated scowl spread across his usually-smiling face. “They stole my guitar.”
Jude heard the missing guitar before he saw it. High-pitched noises like a distressed and wounded cat drifted from the empty parking lot ahead, where two figures stood under a streetlamp. It was a humid night, overcast and starless, just like before, when he’d cut through this parking lot and encountered a pair of fanged nightmares. The deja vu made him shiver, but he kept moving forward. It might be the same place, but this time would go very differently. These were kids, not monsters, and he wasn’t going to collapse into a terrified heap.
“Do they have an amplifier too?” Jude asked, wondering if these kids had made off with anything more valuable than a guitar, maybe from the mall itself.
“They like taking my stuff, okay?” Pixie grumbled, more worked up with every step. Still not intimidating, however. Maybe this wouldn’t be as terrible as Jude anticipated. Tonight might go a long way toward proving to Eva he was taking her, and his job, seriously. And, maybe, if he kept observing Pixie, he’d pick up some more useful tidbits on vampire wrangling.
Something spun and flashed beneath the streetlight. A lanky teenage girl was spinning on a skateboard barefoot, jumping and twisting to the discordant noise. Her ponytail of tiny, tight braids flowed behind her, and her skin shone a dark slate-grey under the light, a few shades darker than Pixie’s. Jude recognized her with a chill—would have even without the curving shapes that flared from her shoulder blades. Wings.
“No…” Jude murmured. This wasn’t going according to plan at all.
The smaller girl had the guitar. She also had short, spiked blonde hair and light grey skin. She wore a devilish smile as she picked at the strings, an awful screech emanating, as if she were playing it with very long claws. She was barefoot too, and every toe ended in a black, curved claw.
“Ugh, that’s just offensive,” Pixie groaned, mobile pointed ears pinned back tight against his head. “If you’re gonna steal a guitar, at least have the decency to play it right!”
“You’re offended?!” Jude said, more loudly than he’d intended to. The two undead teenagers weren’t close enough to get a look at their fangs, but there was no mistaking anything else. “Those are vampires! You tricked me!”
“No! I navigated a tough situation with grace and efficiency!” Pixie actually sounded indignant, as if he was the one who had just been hoodwinked into creeping up on a pair of monsters.
“I thought you meant human kids!” Jude hissed as the pair of monsters stopped their playing and turned in their direction.
“Yeah... that was kind of the idea,” Pixie admitted, as the girls set their stolen guitar down. The tall one kicked away her skateboard and it clacked against the streetlight behind them. Their eyes flashed blue-green. “I didn’t think you’d help me otherwise!”
“Also cheating! Just like the window!” Panic made Jude’s voice tight and he was overwhelmed with the urge to run. But instead of having no way out, his screaming brain was inundated with too many choices, none of them good. Bolt left? Right? Toward the closed mall, with its dark windows and locked doors? Back home, with the risk of bringing monsters right there? It was too much, everything was happening too fast, and Jude could hardly think.
“It was killing two birds with one stone!” Pixie fairly squeaked, sounding as scared as Jude felt. “And speaking of two birds—”
The vampire girls grinned and launched themselves toward their prey.
Jude stumbled backwards, but his back hit something—Pixie. They stood back-to-back, somehow in a stance that looked prepared instead of wildly accidental. “What do we do?”
“Just—try to look big!” Pixie raised his arms, his own eyes starting to flash the iridescent vampire warning sign. The girls seemed to further transform mid-run, fangs growing and faces warping into snarls. Their talons scraped audibly against the asphalt as the pair split from their straight-line dash and started to circle Jude and Pixie. The smaller one dropped down to all fours in an unsettling half-crawling run. “Get bigger than you are and make some noise!”
“That’s bears!”
“I’m thinking, okay?” Pixie shot back. “Kind of expected you to know what to do here!”
“Me?!” Jude yelped, ducking and trying not to topple over as one of the creatures zipped by him so fast he felt the wind from her half-folded wings. “You’re the vampire! You—”
He cut off as a familiar, deeply disturbing sound rose up from around them. High-pitched, eerie laughing. Laughter that, for the first time, became actual words.
“He never knows what to do with us,” said the tall, t
hin one who’d performed graceful spins on the skateboard. She made a similar twirl past Pixie now, long black braids flying as Jude stared in combined shock and horror. Somehow he hadn’t actually expected them to speak. “He’s jealous. Can’t blame him.”
“Oh come on, Maestra!” Pixie sounded pleading and annoyed instead of outright afraid. “Just give it back, this isn’t funny!”
“But you are!” The little one cackled, continuing to circle them in her crawl-walk, finger and toe-claws scraping loudly against the pavement. “Aren’t you glad you’re finally playing with us?”
“Stop it, Nails!” Pixie shuddered when she jumped into the air, spinning as if answering her friend’s dance before landing in a very low crouch, elbows and knees bending in a way humans’ never should. “That’s really messed up!”
“Are those names? Do you know them?” Jude demanded, but just being able to form the question almost made him smile despite his alarm. He was terrified, facing down creatures of the night and probably death itself, but he wasn’t overwhelmed, and he wasn’t running. He was fully present in his terror, not flying into a panic attack or flashback. Baby steps.
“We’ve met!” Pixie wasn’t trying to look big anymore. He’d lowered his arms and looked more frustrated than anything. “They think they’re so cool, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone and taking my stuff without asking, couple of trolls! What’d I ever do to you guys, huh?”
“You’re right,” said the little blonde one, stopping her scrabbling circling and standing up to her full, not-overly-impressive height. But she didn’t have to be tall to be dangerous—Pixie had called her ‘Nails,’ and considering her wicked-looking claws, it wasn’t hard to see why. “We should totally chat.”
“Like who’s your friend?” said the tall, darker-skinned one. Maestra, if Jude had heard correctly. She exchanged a sidelong, smiling glance with Nails, and again Jude was reminded of his shock in this very parking lot just last night. They looked and sounded like normal teenage girls—just with more sharp points than usual. She grinned at Jude, and gave a twirl with more wings and claws than had to be strictly necessary. “Did he come back for more? Is he just dying to get dazzled again? Because that was fun.”
The Secret Ingredient Is Love. No, Really Page 7