by eden Hudson
“Going to go get some blood,” I said. “You’re going to be starving when you wake up.”
Tough
I can’t think about that yet. Maybe I won’t ever be able to. But I know why vamps hate holy things now. Crosses, Bibles, holy water don’t burn them—us—they don’t burn us. It hurts in their soul, remembering they gave that up.
Oh, God. I gave that up.
Tiffani
“Stop, Tough,” I yelled. “Let it go. You have to let Him go.”
Even though my mouth was next to Tough’s ear, he didn’t hear me. I tightened my arms around his throat and stomach and braced my feet against the base of the toilet. He bit me and twisted until he smacked his head against the tub.
“Listen to me, you little bastard!” I wrenched his head back and smashed it into the tub again. A fractured skull would slow him down. “It’s gone. It’s never coming back. You have to let it go. You’ll just make it that much harder on yourself if you don’t.”
Good thing I had kept the old cast-iron claw foot instead of updating the whole bathroom. I doubt porcelain or tile could stand up to something as hard as a twenty-something-year-old boy’s head.
One last solid hit. I let Tough drop and put one knee up on the edge of the tub. Good thing, too, that he hadn’t had any blood yet, the crow magic was only half-done. Until then, he was still in that middle ground between dead and undead, and I could still knock him unconscious. My jeans and shirt were ruined, though. I should have gotten undressed again when I heard Tough waking up. Should’ve remembered how violent making a male vamp is.
My connection with Mitzi opened.
You made Tough? She was pouting. I wanted to make him!
Sounds like something he’d trust you to do after you let Jason steal his voice, I said.
Jason can actually make something out of that voice without getting dragged back to Halo, she said. If anything, we did Tough a favor. Now the world can hear him sing.
Yeah, you’re saints.
My foot slipped a little in the mess.
Kind of knee-deep right now, huh? Mitzi sounded more amused than sympathetic.
More like ankle-deep, I said.
Shit’s shit, no matter how deep.
Tell me about it, I said. What was the name of that last guy you made?
There in Halo? Finn.
Finn. Not much going on upstairs, but easy on the eyes.
That’s why I liked him, Mitzi said. She checked out the scene through my eyes. I always thought Tough was all right. You know, minus the shit. But that’ll wash off.
I shrugged. Jailbait’s your thing.
We used to call them innocents, Mitzi said. A few more years and he might’ve filled out into something more your style. Then he could’ve taken St. Lover-boy’s place mooning over you.
I bit back what I wanted to say. Vamps mature as they get older. They gain strength, speed, and cunning, get a better handle on their reflexes, hone their abilities. Mitzi was at least twice my age. I didn’t want to start something I couldn’t finish.
Tough’s body started struggling to breathe again as he regained consciousness.
Got to go, I told Mitzi. Time for round two.
Have fun.
The connection closed. I kneeled on Tough’s throat and got a slimy handful of hair.
“All right, kid, listen up.” He gritted his teeth, but his arms were still trying to get ahold of something. I yanked his hair. “You think that crack in your head hurts healing up? It’s about to hurt a lot worse if you don’t stop fighting me. Got it?”
He almost threw me off, so I hit him in the nose. The bone crunched under the heel of my hand and the rotting blood-like venom that’s inside of vampires seeped out of his right nostril.
“Get control of yourself, Tough, or I swear I’ll end you. Give me some kind of sign that you heard me.”
There was an unfolding sensation in my brain. A new connection.
Tough
What was I supposed to do, sing her a song? Say something clever?
Smartass. Tiffani’s voice was like a radio turning on inside my brain. She got off my throat and let me go. I was trying to keep you from destroying my bathroom and massacring the first ten people you got ahold of.
I slid myself up. Then I inhaled through my nose and the world turned into a fuzzy black and white picture someone had smeared with ashes. Except for the blood. It was cold and dead and packed in sterile plastic bags, but it glowed red like a taillight in the middle of the night. I tried to lunge for it, but Tiffani smacked my head against the bathtub again and lightning flashed behind my eyes.
I know you think you’re starving, she said. You’re not. It’ll pass.
Her smudgy black and white arm reached past me and picked up one of the glowing bags. My shoulder hit her in the stomach and pinned her against the bathroom wall.
Before the blood bag hit the floor, I was flat on my back again with one of her knees on my throat and the other on my chest.
“Dammit, Tough, stop,” she yelled. She kicked with the knee on my neck and I gagged. “Just give me a second.”
She tore open the blood bag and the smell filled up the bathroom. Pain stabbed through my upper jaw like someone was shoving a pencil down through the gums. The bone on the right side popped and creaked and felt like it was going to break unless something made room. Then a tooth dropped out of my gum. I almost choked on it, but Tiffani shoved her hand in my mouth to grab it.
“Bite me and I’ll beat the piss out of you,” she said.
As soon as she pulled the tooth out, I reached for the blood bag again. She slapped my hands down and squeezed it into my mouth. I was so hungry I couldn’t even taste the blood, just felt it sliding down my throat and into my stomach. It burned in my chest the way liquor did right before it hit me. The world got a little clearer, and in the back of my brain somewhere, I felt Tiffani smack my hands away again, this time from her breasts.
The blood bag ran dry and she reached for another one. Almost before I thought about moving I was on top of her.
Tiffani kicked me in the balls. Pain exploded all the way up into my stomach and I almost threw up everything I’d just drank. It hurt so bad I forgot I couldn’t yell.
Son of a bitch!
I’m always going to be faster and stronger than you, she said. Don’t try anything else or I’ll rip them off and never give them back.
Tiffani rolled me onto my back and sat on my chest. It was so hard to hold still while she ripped open another blood bag I thought I’d lose it. Time got stuck in place. My teeth kept snapping together and tearing at my cheeks. I was trying to bite something. There was a noise, too. Like the sound of a growl without vocal cords to support it. Tiffani was teasing me—the way Mitzi used to when she knew I was dying for her—letting me go crazy waiting. I could rip her apart and she wanted to dick around. The first glowing red drop hung on a jagged strip of the torn plastic. By the time it finally started to fall, my whole body was shaking so bad that Tiffani looked like she was vibrating.
Is it good for you?
Drink your blood, she said. I’d like to take a shower sometime today.
A couple more bags of blood and the smoky, ashy smears faded out of my vision. By about the seventh one, I could smell and see why she wanted a shower.
I’d never been big on embarrassment. When I took the biggest crap of my life—which I guess still held the record now that I was dead—I went and got Harper and Jax and a tape measure. But that was in a toilet and I didn’t try to mud wrestle and grope and I think possibly rape someone in it.
How was there even that much inside me?
Then I remembered Tiffani could hear what I was thinking. I waited for the top part of my cheeks to start burning, but nothing happened.
It’s easier to seem alive after you feed from a human, Tiffani said. You’ll figure out how to close the connection, too. Just takes practice.
I tried to run a hand through my hair and ended up
with a handful of crap-pudding.
Tiffani stood up and grabbed me under the arm. “Come on, let’s wash off. Then you can clean my bathroom.”
Tiffani
I changed the heat setting on the oven, then leaned with my back against it to soak up the warmth. Closed my eyes and listened to my tablet playing an old X-Files episode. The one where Krycek ends up locked in the abandoned missile silo.
It used to be that watching X-Files made me feel like I was with Shannon. She had gotten me into the show back when she was still with the Derringers. She loved it so much that she had “Believe the Lie” tattooed up her arm, the centerpiece of her right sleeve. Whenever she had a concert during the show’s timeslot, my priority job went from body-guarding Shannon to making sure I got the latest episode taped so we could watch it.
Tough’s voice came through in my brain—Are you seriously daydreaming about my mom right now?
If you don’t want to know what I’m thinking, learn how to shut the damn connection, I told him and forced myself to think about something else. Are you still cleaning?
Just got done, he said.
If I can smell—
You won’t. I got it all.
I checked the clock. It had taken more than five hours for Tough to clean the bathroom because he couldn’t figure out how to make his vamp speed work for him and his muscles were still fighting rigor mortis. Any time you slow down in the first couple days after you’re made, you have to worry about that. Mitzi claimed she met a vamp once who couldn’t move his legs because he sat in a chair for too long after his transformation, but I couldn’t say how true that was. Sometimes you had to take her with a grain of salt.
Right? Tough thought. One time she told me she’d had sex with lots of black guys because I didn’t like her hair dyed red and she wanted me to be insecure about my dick.
Then I heard water running through the pipes.
What are you doing? I asked.
Taking another shower, he said.
Praise be.
Don’t say that, okay?
It’ll get easier, I said.
Well, it’s not right now, so don’t say it, he snapped.
Not having Him anymore is part of the reason it feels so cold, I said. Once your body cools off, it’s going to be twice as bad.
Great, Tough said. Something to look forward to.
I took a deep breath through my nose. About twenty seconds left on those scones. Then a grainy video-clip of Tough’s girlfriend sucking him off flickered through my head.
Can you wait until you learn how to close the connection before you masturbate? I asked.
But it’s cool for you to think about nailing my mom?
I wasn’t—
You think I don’t know what happened? You can’t keep a lid on shit in this town. Especially not a preacher’s wife nailing a vampire.
Keep talking, kid.
What’re you going to do, stake me?
I shook my head and pulled the scones before they started drying out. Changed the oven temperature for the bread knots. Things could get out of hand between vamps fast and I wasn’t going to end Tough because of something a dumbass kid like him couldn’t even understand.
If you don’t want to know what I’m thinking, I repeated, Learn to shut the damn connection.
Can’t you shut it off? he asked.
You opened it, you have to close it.
Damn it.
I started knotting bread.
Have I been, uh, dead for very long? Tough asked.
Overnight.
What time is it?
Four fifty-one. I slid the knots in the oven and started plating the scones. Running late?
By about seven hours, he said. Hey, cool.
If I hadn’t had the vamp senses, Tough would’ve scared the hell out of me, going from my upstairs bathroom to standing beside me and pulling his ratty John Deere ball cap on his still-damp hair in almost no time. The post-death skin-tightening had given him a shadow of stubble along his jaw and grown his hair enough that it flipped out a little at the ends. He had inherited Shannon’s curls.
What you watching? he asked, leaning over my tablet.
Telling him to mind his own damn business would just fuel the fire, so I ignored the question.
“Going out?” I asked. “You know the sun comes up in about twenty-nine minutes.”
I’m just headed to the house.
“I can’t babysit today,” I said. “I’ve got a business to run.”
I’ll be fine.
He probably would. He’d eaten the equivalent of a person and a half when he woke up. Most vamps can run on a whole lot less than that.
Tough leaned over the scones and took a deep breath. His stomach growled with phantom hunger pains.
“Don’t touch,” I said.
They smell good.
“Does the term ‘violent rejection’ mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“It will if you swallow anything but human blood or vamp venom from here on out,” I said. I started putting the plated scones in the display case. “It’s like food poisoning for vampires, except it happens immediately and the ‘violent’ part is really an understatement. They don’t make a detergent that washes out stomach lining.”
I can’t believe you’re going to let those cool down before someone eats them. It’s like sacrilege or something.
“Big word.”
Smart girlfriend. He stared down another scone as it went into the display. How often do you slip up and eat one?
“I don’t anymore.”
But you own a bakery because you like torture?
“Weren’t you going somewhere?”
Yeah, he said, glancing up at the clock. He left the kitchen and I could hear his footsteps headed for the door. And the Tracker’s probably looking for me, so that’s a thing.
I dropped the plate I was holding and had to kick in the vamp speed to catch it and the scone before they hit the floor.
“The Tracker? Tough!” The bell over the door jingled, closing his scent off. Why is the Tracker after you? He’s going to be able to smell you all over my place.
I missed a meeting with my probation officer, he said. How did I make the speed work before?
Shove it up your—
Oh, there it goes.
I slammed the display case shut. The Tracker in my bakery. I’d have to scrub the place down with lye. Maybe I could meet him outside, tell him Tough had already left. Zombies almost never deviate from their commands, but it was worth a try.
You damn well better hope he doesn’t insist on coming into my bakery to follow your scent, I said.
Will you quit your bitching? You’re getting whatever you want out of this deal.
I looked down at the scones and tried not to think about what I wanted more than anything. On my tablet, Krycek started banging on the missile silo door and screaming for someone to let him out. I reached over the counter and shut the sound off.
Tough
For a second on Main Cross I thought I saw the Tracker’s big blue Dodge Ram, but it had an Iowa plate, so I let out my breath and headed for the house. I guess that breathing thing was reflexive, though.
It’ll stop after a while, Tiffani said.
When’s this freaking muscle crap going to stop? I asked.
It’s rigor mortis and probably a day or two.
Whatever it was, it felt like different parts of my body kept falling asleep. I probably looked pretty stupid busting in and out of vamp speed and limping along, dragging a locked up leg or trying to work the pins and needles out of my arms. I didn’t even know there was a muscle in my balls. That was a bad one.
And the breeze kept making me shiver. I’d thought since it was summer that being cold would feel right, like when you go swimming on a hot day. But it didn’t work like that. The grass was brown and it was too hot out for dew, but the chill kept going deeper into my muscles.
The shado
ws were getting sharper when I made it to the porch. Jax’s car was gone, but through the screen I could see him on the couch, talking on his phone.
“He wouldn’t have gone after Jason again,” Jax said.
I could hear Harper on the other end of the line like she was standing in the room, too.
“No one in the band has heard out of him,” she said. “And I just asked Logan. He didn’t see Tough around town last night. I’m thinking he’s got to be in Nashville.”
“Not with Kathan all over Desty like this,” Jax said.
“Is she back yet?” Harper asked.
“Yeah, she came back a few minutes ago to take a shower,” Jax said. “She ran into the Tracker over by—”
The Tracker? If he touched Desty… I hit the screen door open so hard it bounced off the wall.
Jax jumped.
“Scared me,” he said. He told Harper, “He’s here. Just walked in.”
“Thank God,” Harper said.
Hearing His name sent shards of ice stabbing through my eardrums, down into my chest, ripping open that part of me that wasn’t supposed to be connected to my body—my soul. Without thinking, I smacked the phone out of Jax’s hand.
“What the hell, man?!” He stopped and squinted at my mouth. Guess you couldn’t miss the fangs. “What…? Somebody made you?”
Tiffani had made me so I could do something, but it felt like my brain was having that rigor mortis problem.
You were going to save Colt, Tiffani said.
And make Desty, I remembered.
Yeah, so don’t you think you should get started before the Tracker finds you?
The Tracker. Desty wouldn’t have been taking a shower if he hadn’t put one of his slimy hands on her.
I turned toward the stairs.
“Where’re you going?” Jax’s voice felt far away. I could barely hear him over the sound of Desty. She’d just gotten out of the shower and she was walking down the hall toward my room. I could hear the bottom of the towel sliding over her thighs.
The vamp speed wouldn’t kick on so I jogged up the steps.