Knock: A Void City Novella

by J. F. Lewis

  I still might get a Fang Fee because of the police time that would be wasted, but it wouldn’t be a big one, no more expensive than paying a couple of Oni to eat the leftovers and I’m not allowed to be alone with Oni.

  “Sorry, um... sis.” Kyle stared into the blaze, his eyes unfocused as if he were a million miles away. What goes on when he’s like that, I wonder... Was he wishing he could have done it all himself without my help? Was he missing the food? She was fungible, but not everyone sees things as clearly as me.

  “Do you ever think about what would have happened if you’d turned me instead of Eric?” He asked.

  Oh. That.

  “No.” I meant to pat him on the shoulder, but I slapped him instead. “No!” I was going to apologize, but I slapped him again instead. And again. And again. When I popped my claws, he apologized.

  “Dad is always right.” I hissed the words through clenched teeth, upper and lower fangs fully extended, eyes shining red. “Always!”

  He agreed with a nod because it’s hard to talk with your jaw dislocated. I popped it back into place and frowned. I don’t want to be hard on Kyle. I love him like a brother. It’s not how I loved him when he was human, but that had been wrong. Retroactively. Dad had made us brother and sister in undeath and siblings don’t-

  “I know!” I clasped my hands together between my breasts and grinned. “You need dessert!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Greta: Awkward Broness

  Three random humans and a few pets later and even Kyle was smiling again. Get a drone full enough and they actually act a little like really-for-real vampires. I was still hungry, but I keep several gallons of blood back in my apartment complex to drink in emergencies or when we want to stay in and watch TV.

  Apartments are awesome because, noise aside, there are all sorts of foods behind the nearest door just waiting to be consumed. A vampire gets to be familiar with the smells of her domain, the sounds, the movements and rhythms of our potential snacks.

  Kyle came out of my bathroom wearing a towel and a smirk. Like me, he’d worked out with a purpose when he’d been alive, sculpting the perfect body for eternity. I’d done it because Dad insisted that he wanted me to always be happy with my body once I couldn’t change it anymore. He’d made me grow my hair out long in case I wanted to cut it, to give me options.

  Usually I wear it long and blonde. Kyle wore his black and in a wave trim. A thin layer of moisture from the shower coated his body and I eyed his torso and abs, tracing them with my eyes. Before we’d been brother and sister, I’d loved to run my hands along his abs, eyes locked with his, as my fingers dipped lower-

  Nope. I growled. At me. At him. At both of us.

  “My clothes?” His voice fell gentle on my ears. Soft. Calming.

  He’s beautiful... Michelangelo’s David, but with a chin you could sink the Titanic with and a way better schlong. That last detail doesn’t apply to me anymore, but it’s a detail and details can be important. An uncomfortable ache pulled at me from down low and I tried to think of something else.

  “Can’t you smell them in the wash?” I had paid the Mage’s Guild for extra sound-proofing on my bedroom, living room, and especially the little alcove off the kitchen that hold my washer and dryer. Washers and dryers are loud in the annoying non-screamy way.

  “So, do you have a spare set of sweat pants or...?” He turned to hang his towel along the back of a chair.

  Kyle had a tattoo at the base of his spine that he hadn’t possessed when he was human. Intricate and beautiful, it was so startling I was almost able to ignore his nudity. In lines of crimson ink it whorled in arcs and patterns, strange symbols that were almost words marking its corners. I stared at it and my nipples hardened. Bad body!

  “What does that even say?” I asked. “What language is it?”

  “Vrykolakas,” he said. The word sounded familiar.

  “Isn’t that like Greek for werewolf?”

  “It’s means that to some people.” He turned to face me, a look in his eyes I didn’t like or couldn’t place. Both, I guess. “To others it’s more like vampire.”

  He looked where I was looking and smiled.

  “Sweat pants?” he repeated. “Unless you’d rather I kept my pants... off for some reason?”

  “Kyle! Pants. Now!” I pointed imperiously in the general direction of my bedroom which was enough to send him in the right direction.

  “You’re the boss, Applesauce.” I love it when he says that to me. I smiled a little off guard against a few... um... outdated emotions. When I saw his tattoo again, I wanted to lick it, touch it, bite it…

  “Get some clothes on, you goon.”

  “I’m going,” he said, but he didn’t move quickly. Grr.

  Drawers slid open followed by the sound of flesh on fabric. Ugh. Kyle lives near me. He lives in the same apartment complex, Void City Gardens, but not in the same building, and definitely not the same apartment. All the same, he should have known his way around.

  Finding someone to focus on other than Kyle felt like a good idea, so I reached out with my senses to check in on the neighbors.

  Mrs. Rosetti sat across the hall watching the 700 club and knitting. Concentration teased her scent out of the cloud of sensory input. Cheap dye of the yarn mixed chemical and artificial against the odor of her anise cookies and ricotta cookies still clinging to her lonely apartment. Her family hadn’t come, but she’d been expecting them. Weak and shuddering, her heart sounded worse than Mom’s, her lungs better.

  She hadn’t eaten and I could smell the ketones.

  Had I eaten them? Her family, I mean. I didn’t think so. Wait... Maybe. Oh, crap... I don’t know whether I did or not.

  A quick look at the clock helped me gauge how much waking time I had left. The sun hates me; dawn knocks me out hard and fast and I’m dead till the sun has well and truly set. It was going to be Saturday morning, too, which would have meant cartoons back when I was alive. Not anymore, though. Almost nothing can wake me up and keep me awake except the arrival of nighttime.

  It’s the only part about my brand of vampirism I don’t like. Dad barely sleeps at all. You’d think it would be the same for both of us, but vampirism is more personalized than that. It’s like the magic pulls out your core beliefs about vampires and makes a special version that lines up with your subconscious. Dad has called it the ultimate personality test.

  It’s one Dad passed with flying colors, I did pretty well on, and Kyle failed.

  Sunrise was around six o’clock, so that gave me a few hours to feed Mrs. Rossetti if I wanted, but there was no way I was cooking. Dad likes his food porn, but it pisses me off. What did she eat other than pasta and cookies anyway? She had both... I could smell the pasta in the fridge and dry pasta in her cupboard. Foods are hard to figure out.

  Well, not the important stuff, like how they are going to run and the best ways to catch and drink them, but the useless crap like why they do what they do and why-

  “Is it okay if I head home?” Kyle walked into my little living room wearing sweatpants and no shirt.

  “Mom is supposed to come by,” I said. I didn’t want Kyle to go, but I didn’t want him to stay either. If he would have agreed to hover in a simultaneous here and not here status, I would have appreciated it, but that’s not a real thing people can do. He stood right in front of me and I still missed him.

  Schrödinger’s Kyle.

  “You have fun with Marilyn,” Kyle said. It irks me that he still won’t call her Mom. “Just don’t eat Mrs. Rossetti or the Martinez family.”

  “I wasn’t going to eat any more neighbors,” I said with a growl. “I just don’t like having people live above, below or next to me. Across is fine.”

  “You’re the boss, Applesauce,” he repeated, hands raised to shoulder level, palms out in the universal gesture of whatever-you-say-lady.

  “Go home,” I told him and... he went.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kyle: Assh
ole Sun

  Morning came like a bucket of pain drenching my joints in sharp jags of burning heat, arthritic and unwanted. A loud series of knocks stirred me, making my head pound. This was not how I usually woke up. The usual way involved feeding, breakfast, sex, and coffee.

  Caffeine doesn’t work on me very much, but don’t underestimate the power of placebo.

  Through bleary half-open eyes, I glared at my alarm clock. Time is a lesser enemy of the immortal, but it’s a friend to no one.

  “Nine o’clock?” My voice cracked, trembling and uneasy, so I cleared my throat and tried again. “Cloe? Is everythi-“

  Right. Cloe’s dead.

  “Damn it, Greta.” Cloe was a good one, too. Deeply unhappy, but so overwhelmed with a desire to be loved that even being choked as I sat on her chest, drawing out enough of her life to revivify me made her feel special and useful. That’s a hard combination to find in a drop dead gorgeous girl who isn’t also on drugs. She had even been a good cook.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Why I can stand on the outside of a door and know who is inside, but not do the reverse from inside is one of those quirks of being a Vrykolakas that probably makes sense in an anthropological mythological way, but I don’t get it.

  No Cloe meant I hadn’t fed. No feeding meant I was basically a weak old wrinkly dickhead with no supernatural senses and very little physical power. Yet.

  Still...

  “Just a minute,” I yelled. Grumbled.

  Whoever it was, maybe I could eat them, or eat their sorrow or pain, or at least mooch enough of it to take the age off. Do other Vrykolakas deal with this? Having never met one, I have no idea. Since the same type of thing happened to me during the day back when I was a more traditional vampire, I suspect it’s just a little bonus pain in the prostate that carried over.

  Joints snapping, popping, and creaking as I rolled out of bed, my back protesting the whole time, I lurched in slow motion. My underwear was on the floor and I was not bending down to get it while I felt this old, so I grabbed the silk robe Cloe had given me for Christmas - actually it hadn’t been Cloe, but I can’t remember which companion gave it to me, so I gave her the credit, just as I would with her replacement - and fought my way into the garment.

  I don’t mind being nude when I’m physically in my prime, but I try to keep saggy old man skin exposure to a minimum. The song about balls hanging low played in my head, an indignity for which I blame Eric, but I pushed it out of my head with a rhyme of my own:

  How many Vrykolakas

  in a Vrykolakas fracas?

  There’s just me so fuck you.

  I didn’t say it was Robert Frost, but it works well enough.

  More insistent, the knocking grew louder.

  “Move your wrinkled old butt, Kyle,” I murmured to myself. I caught a glance at my reflection as I passed the mirror over the chest of drawers and tried not to look. Yep, I have a reflection. Seeing myself this way is a serious source of body dysmorphia for me. Covered in liver spots, wrinkles and sagging skin, my hair gone except for sparse strands of chaotic white... I don’t want to see myself that way.

  There should have been the smell of Cloe cooking breakfast or at least coffee. The mixture of fresh coffee and pain is an aroma of unparalleled delight. Well... maybe fresh cookies and sorrow trumps it, but they’re so close...

  “Kyle!” The voice, throaty and gruff, is one I recognize with a sigh. I know her, but I wonder if I shouldn’t just go ahead and feed on her anyway. I’ve had my hooks into her before, so all I would need is eye contact, but... Best to see what the wereboar wants first.

  “It’s unlocked, Bacon.” Using the nickname she hates made me grin, but I’m sorry, if your name is Kevin and you are a porcinthrope, you get called Bacon. Others might give her a break since her parents named her Kevin, but I’ve spent too much time around the Courtney family to be that kind to my friends.

  I was hobbling down the apartment’s only hallway to the living room when my front door swung open. If you ever watched the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling back when it was on the air, you probably remember a wonderful lady named Emily Dole who wrestled under the name Mountain Fiji… she looks like a larger version of Bacon.

  When she goes full boar, Bacon is the taller of the two, but she’s closer to five foot seven in her human guise. A long time ago, she was Greta’s best friend, but post-transformation Bacon hangs out with me. I guess because, in a way, we both lost the Greta we knew.

  “Where’s Cloe?” Bacon was wearing a leather motorcycle vest over a white tee and jeans. Aviator shades completed the ensemble and I didn’t need to see the cross around her neck or on her belt buckle to know they were there.

  Greta tried to kill her twice and the second time Bacon burned her necklace into Greta’s forehead. I’m not sure it would stop Greta now (Greta was still getting used to her powers then), but Bacon’s no slouch in the combat department either so I hope they don’t try for round three.

  Bacon sauntered the few steps to the kitchen and dropped a few takeout bags on the counter, kicking the door shut behind her.

  “You can guess,” I said, still working my way down the hall and regretting not keeping a cane or a walker in the bedroom like Cloe kept hassling me to do. Most women are right about everything, but their choice of mate. They almost all screw that one up... or maybe I see it that way because of my own experience with being a leech of a boyfriend.

  “Do not tell me she’s dead.”

  I didn’t tell Bacon anything. Instead, I mentally ran through the list of people in the complex I’d fed on over the last year trying to decide if there were any neighbors I didn’t like who could get the knock and fade treatment without me feeling too badly about it. Doug Ikeman and his bunch were annoying, but they didn’t need killing.

  The Martinez family and the Ambersons already had my personal brand of influenza run through their family this year and Mrs. Martinez is a single mom, so I try not to hit her clan more than once.

  I could feed on Mrs. Rosetti’s grief and loneliness, but I don’t like the way the numbness hits her. There are those who crave the numb I can inflict, but she’s old and... well, Greta did kill her grandkids.

  “Hey!” Bacon snapped her fingers in my face. “Dude, did Greta get Cloe or not? Seriously.”

  “She made it a joint effort.” I shuddered. I can drink blood and it’s okay, I mean I can squeeze a little life from it, but nothing like when I infect someone or hook into their emotions or straight up mainline their life while I sit on their chest and choke them.

  Did I mention I’m not actually a proper vampire? I was once, but whatever is wrong with Eric’s whole bloodline fucked me over and made me a Drone. Believe me, that took a hell of a lot of fixing. I’m still paying off boons I racked up in the process.

  “Kyle.” Bacon loves to use my name like it’s a whole sentence. This version, tinged with disgust and chased with an over-the-sunglasses glare summed up an old argument. “You really need to kill Greta. There are monsters and then there are monsters and then there is her.”

  Maybe it’s the set of my jaw that tipped her off that was one push too far, because she tried to look away before I could lock eyes with her. Emphasis on tried.

  She fought, but this wasn’t physical and once I’ve been inside your head, it’s damn near impossible to keep me out. Two years had been my record for not feeding on Bacon, but I stopped the count that morning. Squealing beneath me, trying to change, Bacon looked afraid, but for me feeding is never an uncontrolled frenzy like it is with standard vampires. I know how much I’m taking and I know how much my victim can spare and on the few occasions I’ve taken too much, it was cold-blooded murder.

  Drinking her life this close to a full moon felt amazing. The raw porcinthropic essence woke the other part of me and I transformed from old to idyllic physical specimen to furred lupine man beast in one swift draw of essential life force. Two deep breaths and then I was helping her up and she was
still blinking, hands at her throat as the breath came easily again.

  “You asked for that,” I said, “but I still apologize. I only have one button and you pushed it. Hard.”

  I wish I could tell you that feeding for me is all erotic and sensual, but it isn’t unless I’m feeding on a lover during the intimate act. Bacon and I have had sex a few times, but it was more of a release thing than a relationship.

  When Bacon took a swing at me, I let the punches land because she’s my friend and I deserved it. More because of the hard on I got while on top of her than the feeding itself in my opinion, but whatever. I’d heal quick enough and we both knew it was her energy I’d be using to do it.

  I’m more in my body than Greta is, so pain isn’t something I can turn off so much as all sensation has its merits to me now. Pleasure is better than pain, but pain is cathartic and focusing where pleasure is more distracting. Healing isn’t an automatic for me either; I have to choose to do it.

  “Cloe, huh?” Bacon said after breaking a few ribs. “Damn. I liked her.”

  Me, too. I healed my bruises, busted lip, and the broken ribs. I’m sure it looked less like healing and more like I was a video being rewound.

  “I guess that means we split her breakfast.” Bacon scoffed at my healing act, at the way blood flowed back into my lip as it sealed. Her anguish tainted the air like salted caramel, the taste fading as she moved past the loss, pushing it aside, and grabbed hold of the remainder of our usual morning ritual as if I hadn’t just fed on her and Cloe had been dead for years.

  “You can have her pancakes,” I said, which also meant, “I really am sorry I fed on you without permission.”