by eden Hudson
The painful melody drifted through my mind and scoured my throat. This must be the kind of blind jealousy Scout was feeling. I had to force the words out—“He used to love you.”
“Nothing happened between us,” Harper said. “Tough’s always been like my brother and Jax was always my whole heart.”
I glanced toward the front room.
“Jax loves you a lot,” I said. “I think he might be a real warrior in disguise.”
That made Harper smile.
We stood there for a while, listening to the film noir music from Jax’s game and the guitar tripping along upstairs in a snarky-sounding song. Then something else from yesterday came back to me—Tough laughing when I walked in on him listening to “Harper’s Song,” like it reminded him of something funny and a little bit stupid. If I was going to go the optimistic, possibly-mentally-ill route, I should keep that in mind.
And I should go see him.
“Are we done here?” I asked.
“Will you please go to the Dark Mansion?” Harper asked. “For his sake.”
“No.” I actually sounded like someone who could get her way for once. “Not tonight anyway.”
Then I turned and headed for the front room.
“Nicely handled,” Jax said.
“Thanks,” I said, jogging up the stairs.
Tough was lying on his bed just like I’d found him the day before, no shirt and picking that tattooed acoustic guitar. It ought to be a sin for a man to look so good with a busted lip, a black eye, and a hundred cuts, scrapes, and bruises across his face and chest. No mp3 player today, but there was an open notebook beside him and a pencil strapped across the guitar strings with a rubber band.
“Hey,” I said.
When Tough opened his eyes and saw me, he smiled, beautiful even all beat up like that. Then he put his pick in the unhurt side of his mouth and leaned the guitar against his nightstand. A teal and magenta box was lying on the stand next to a half-empty forty sweating in the afternoon heat. Tough sat up, grabbed the box and underhand-lobbed it to me.
Despite my serious lack of coordination, I managed to catch it without looking too stupid. I turned it over. Skintimacy Condoms—100% Hypoallergenic for Your Most Sensitive Skin!
“Pretty presumptuous,” I said.
He unwound the pencil from the neck of the guitar and flipped a page in the notebook sitting beside him. He wrote something and turned it around so I could see.
I literally don’t know the meaning of the word. Most folks round here just say cocky.
I unlaced my boots and kicked them off.
“Guess you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘literally,’ either,” I said, climbing up on the bed beside him.
Tough scribbled something else in his notebook.
I know what multiple orgasms means. Want a demonstration?
Colt
With soft, burning hands Mikal wiped the sweat and saliva and tears from my face, unbuckled the restraints, and cleaned the gouges my fingernails had left in my palms. Then she carried me to the shower and washed me with hot, soapy water. I wanted to push into her touch, to soak up the comfort like gauze soaks up blood.
Fuck, I was so weak. How long had it taken me to give up? A few minutes? An hour? I wanted to put a .45 in my mouth and empty the magazine.
Mikal’s lips grazed my temple and I relaxed.
Good dog, my burning angel said.
Tough
“You’re late,” Tiffani said when I got to the bakery.
I checked her clock. Ten to seven. I shrugged. Only by twenty minutes, and anyway, I’d figured since she had the super-smeller, she would prefer I take a shower before I showed up smelling like sweat and sex and the best fucking afternoon of my life.
Ha—literally fucking.
“This is serious,” Tiffani said.
I shrugged. I got that, but I couldn’t think about just how serious it was. If you let yourself focus on how much something is going to hurt, all you’ll do is make yourself sick.
“What?” Tiffani said. “You think I drink some of your blood and you drink a little of mine and you’re a vamp? Easy as pie?”
That was exactly what I thought.
“That’s not how it works.” Tiffani closed the last big-window blind in the bakery and turned back to face me. “I need to drink most of your blood because you’re going to drink most of the blood-like stuff inside of me. The volume of vampire venom has to be greater than the volume of human blood for the crow magic to work.”
I nodded. Drinking was something I had a real talent for.
Tiffani shook her head at me and leaned her hip against a table.
“Don’t think you’re going to slurp, slurp, done, either. It’s not easy to drink. It burns like hell going down and it’ll start poisoning you before you get enough, but you can’t stop drinking. Too little and you’ll come back as a zombie and I’ll have to kill you for good. Understand?”
I gave her the double thumbs-up.
“Can we wait ten years to do this?” she asked. “Vamping turns you into a more intense version of yourself and your self is an asshole.”
It’s probably a good thing I couldn’t talk because I would’ve told her she didn’t wait, so I’d take my chances, too. What did she want me to do—sit there and let her change her mind because she didn’t think I could handle voluntarily drinking a couple gallons of poison?
I tapped my chest and mouthed I. Can. Do. It.
“You know you’re not going to get your voice back doing this,” Tiffani said. She pointed at my black eye. “Most of those bruises and all the swelling will go down because of fluid loss, but however you die, that’s pretty much how you stay.”
I nodded. That whole voice thing was something to worry about later.
Tiffani stared at me for a long time. She took a breath and sighed.
“Change your mind, Tough,” she said. “There’s got to be a different way to save—to save them both.”
I shook my head.
She pursed her lips and headed for the stairs, then turned back when I didn’t go after her.
“Well, come on,” she said.
I waved my hand at the open space.
“Yeah, right. Making someone is a messy process. Maybe I can get this place cleaned up before I open tomorrow if I go all-out vamp speed all night, but I’ll still be able to smell it.” She pointed at the ceiling. “We’re doing it in the bathtub. End of discussion.”
I agreed to that, but I didn’t agree to do it naked, which is why we hit our second speed bump in the upstairs bathroom when she told me to get undressed.
“Do you have another pair of jeans with you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have another pair of jeans, period, or I wouldn’t be wearing Ryder’s raggedy-ass hand-me-downs.
“Then you’re going to want your clothes off and probably far away,” she said. “Hand them here and I’ll throw them in my bedroom.”
I didn’t take anything off.
“Fine. If you’re comfortable with your body flushing twenty years’ worth of binge drinking, junky food, and generally bad decisions out of every hole you’ve got and onto your clothes, then keep them on.”
I made the gesture for her to turn around.
“That’s what I thought.” Tiffani crossed her arms and faced the door. While I was taking off my jeans, she started talking again. “You know, I’ve seen you naked before. Mitzi showed me.”
She let you listen in while we did it, so why wouldn’t she let you watch?
“And I’m going to have to have my eyes open while I make you.” Tiffani shrugged. “I just didn’t figure you for the shy type.”
Normally, I wasn’t. Even though some people thought I looked like Ryder, I was okay with my body. I wasn’t real tall and I could’ve probably stood to bulk up some, but I was solid enough. On a normal day, walking around naked wouldn’t have bothered me any, but the seriousness of this whole thing kept trying to push in thro
ugh the cracks in my make-Colt-and-Desty-undead-happily-ever-after fantasy. I was getting a little freaked out.
Tiffani took my clothes and John Deere hat to her room.
I took a deep breath and blew it out. Tried to imagine Desty and me having insane, fast and hard vamp-sex. That calmed me down some.
When Tiffani came back, she was naked. She looked down at my hard-on.
I hoped my glare said, It’s not for you.
Tiffani just pointed to the bathtub, one of those old cast-iron claw foot ones retrofitted with a showerhead above it. I stepped in and she followed me.
“Okay, here’s how it’s going to go.” She grabbed my hair, tilting my head back and to the side, then touched her thumb to the vein in my neck. “I’m going to bite you here. I can’t use bite sedative while we do this, or you won’t be able to drink and I can’t force down enough venom on my own to make you. So, don’t struggle.”
I nodded.
Tiffani didn’t look convinced.
“If you struggle, it could blow the vein, and I’ll have to go to another one.” She grabbed a handful of my package, making an already awkward boner the good side of painful and the bad side of your mom’s friend just grabbed your dick. “There’s a nice, big vein here. That’s number two on my list if you blow the one in your neck struggling. It’ll hurt about ten times worse.” She squeezed tighter and I started sweating. “Blow that vein—” In any other situation I would’ve laughed until I cried. “—and there’s a good chance this is the last time you’ll be able to get it up. Are you getting an idea of the gravity here? Do. Not. Struggle.”
Whatever Tiffani saw in my face must’ve convinced her. Or maybe it was the fact that you could hear me gulp across town. As long as it did the job, I don’t care what ended up making her believe that I wouldn’t struggle. She let me go and stepped back.
“Change your mind, Tough,” she said again.
I couldn’t.
Tiffani took a really long breath so she could let out a really long sigh. Then she balled up her fist and tore through her wrist veins with one fang. Reddish-brownish vamp venom oozed up, but didn’t drip or run down her arm.
“If it starts to heal over, I’ll cut it open again as fast as I can, but it’s not that easy to pay attention while I’m drinking,” she said. “So try to make it fast and maybe we won’t have too much trouble.”
I nodded.
Tiffani bent my head to the side again. Her fangs grazed the vein under my jaw and goose bumps jumped up all over my chest and back. For a second, I remembered Mitzi running her ice-needle fangs down my neck on purpose because she thought it was funny that I could get goose bumps. Then Tiffani put her torn wrist up to my mouth and the burning-hair, rotting-blood, hot sauce smell of the vamp venom hit me in the back of the throat.
I was going to have to gag that down. Whiskey or ‘shine was one thing, but that was real-life actual poison.
I’m going to die. I’m going to drink that and die and come back full of that. I’m never going to turn twenty-two. I’m never going to get the rest of my chest hair in or get old and when someone finally puts a stake through my heart, I’m going to Hell.
“Last chance to back out.”
But what about Desty? I could protect her from Kathan. If I didn’t make her a vamp, that dick would enthrall her so he could have a twin threesome and take over the world. That would kill her—maybe not her body, but that thing inside her that was so innocent and funny and awkward.
I could get her out of town. I snuck out twice, and I’m high-priority. How hard could it be to get a random girl out of Halo? Rowdy gets deliveries on Thursdays. Just load her into the back of the truck and never see her again.
But Kathan had her scent. He would send the Tracker after her.
You think Dad was just preaching to hear himself preach? Even Mikal’s scared of Hell, and we’re talking an eternity of hellfire, not just a visit.
What about Colt? He was still fighting, holding out indefinitely.
He doesn’t think anybody’s going to ride in and save him. He’d never know I backed out. I’m supposed to damn my eternal soul to Hell on the off chance I’ll be fast enough to make him before Mikal stakes me?
Colt would do it for me, though. Sure, we’d been assholes to each other over the Mitzi thing, but this was serious. “I got you, Tough, I got you”—that’s what he was yelling when I got cut off from our troops in the last up-close-and-personal battle of the war. He came after me, semi-auto and sword blazing, and he got me back safe.
Even if all I ended up doing was kill him, at least he would be free from that bitch.
“Tough?”
I grabbed Tiffani’s hand and pulled her wrist into my mouth. The venom hurt more than it tasted—like concentrated pepper-spray sauce—so bad that I had to shut out everything else just to choke it down.
Thank God.
That was the last thing I thought before everything inside my body caught on fire. Somewhere along the line my heart gave out. I died. I remember feeling relieved that it was finally over.
Desty
“Oh, I fell asleep.” I yawned and stretched. I was alone and the room was dark. “Tough?”
Maybe he was in the shower, getting ready to head to the bar. I turned over and laid with my face in the pillow, breathing in his smell—beer and men’s body spray and sweat.
Jeez. And I had called Tempie a stupid twee-girl.
But it felt like maybe I loved Tough.
PART II: IN BETWEEN
Tough
Only a handful of people were ever supposed to come back from the dead—Jesus, Lazarus, Dorcas, a couple little kids—and only because God told them to. Vamps are damned to Hell forever and ever because they come back outside the Will of God. They use crow magic to trap their soul in this earthly body, denying Christ’s offer of eternal salvation in exchange for a little more time.
Heck, I guess I did pay attention to some of Dad’s preaching after all.
Tiffani
I sat on the toilet lid and lit a cigarette. Held it with the cherry up, the way the Smoking Man always did. Times like that I hated my super-smelling. The smoke didn’t even begin to mask the bathtub filled with a half-inch of various bodily wastes.
Forcing the last couple of mouthfuls of vamp venom down Tough’s throat had worn me out. No matter how prepared a person thinks they are, the human body panics and fights back when you try to poison it.
At least my skin was warm. That’s one thing about drinking from a living body—blood feeds the crow magic, so for a little while, you get to feel alive. And the smoke helped give me the illusion of heat from the inside out.
Another lungful, then I reached over and turned on the shower.
When you’ve been a vampire long enough, you start to get these feelings of coming full circle. You see things begin and then, later, you see them end. Seeing Tough’s corpse lying in my antique claw foot bathtub gave me one of those full-circle feelings. I’d known him before he was born. The day Shannon got the ultrasound, she came into the bakery to tell me the news and to order a batch of clove cookies with “Another penis!” written in blue icing as a surprise for Danny.
I’m a bisexual divorcée who chose vampirism and eternal damnation over dying alone, so even ignoring my history with Shannon, there were plenty of reasons Danny and I never got along. We tried to keep things civil for Shannon’s sake, but making Tough a vamp… If Danny was still alive, this probably would’ve been the end of his no-staking rule.
If Danny was still alive, though, he would have to face the fact that this was his fault. If he would have just taken care of his damn kids instead of convincing them they needed to start a war they couldn’t win for the sake of a woman who was already dead, none of this would’ve happened.
I took another deep drag on the cigarette and let the smoke out with a sigh. It didn’t help that I understood Danny’s motivation now more than ever. Just made me hate us both.
The scratch
es on my arms and face started itching, but they weren’t as bad as the cut on my wrist. The worse the wound, the worse the healing process. I pinched my cigarette between my lips and used my left hand to scratch the scabbing and dying skin from that spot so the new layer could grow through.
Tough had always looked more like Shannon than like Danny—him and Ryder both. They had the black hair and Whitney eyes, but they were shorter, with her oval face and long nose. Something about death made Tough look even more like her. Maybe how hell-raisers always seem to go so young.
There was still time to stop this. I could put a stake through Tough’s heart and burn his body before he came back. But he looked so much like Shannon lying there, and he’d been so sure he could get Colt away from Mikal.
I flicked my filter into the tub and grabbed some toilet paper to wipe my eyes. One of the great things about being a vampire is not having to worry about smeared makeup. The vamp venom gives your skin a more even tone and undeath means no new wrinkles or blemishes. Of course, if you want a haircut, you had better get one you’re ready to stick with. After that initial post-death skin tightening, your hair and your fingernails never grow again.
I stood up and found a pair of needle nose pliers in the sink drawer. Tilted Tough’s head back and held his mouth open with my thumb while I pried the canines out of his upper jaw. It hurts like hell to feel your fangs force your canines out. I always figured if I ever made anyone I’d save them the trouble, but pulling teeth was harder than it looked. Tough’s left canine was already loose—maybe from that beating he took—but the right one really had some roots. It cracked and broke off when I tried to get a better grip.
“Damn it.”
Well, it was probably better than nothing.
I washed my hands and the pliers, then reached for the door knob. It’s eerie being in a room with a corpse. Makes you feel as if you need to talk out loud. Explain yourself.