“Power? What power? I was ready to have the rat as a snack.”
“Well, you can have the rat if you need him, because that little fucker is creepy.”
Tommy pulled away from her. “Don’t.”
Jared came through the door then, pumping his inhaler. “Oh my God! Oh my God! She met the hottest guy who is a ninja, and they’re like totally into each other. And those guys you told us about, that kidnapped you, a bunch of them are vampires now. And there’s a tall woman vampire, too, who tried to bite Abs. And Abby totally took them all on and burned them up with some kind of portable sunlight. Oh my God, she’s so awesome. I wish I had balls like her.”
“Where is she now?” Jody asked.
“She’s having a Mochaccino at Tulley’s on Market. I loaned her like twenty dollars. Which she’s going to pay me back out of her Christmas bonus you’re giving her. Hey, do I get a Christmas bonus, because—”
“Call her and tell her to stay right where she is,” Jody said. “We’re on our way.”
“We are?” Tommy said. They could get out of here, find a—a donor!
“No, not you,” Jody said. “We are.” She patted Jared on the shoulder, careful not to get her hand near the rat.
“We are?” Jared said.
“Yes, Jared, you have to come out to your parents. You have to confess that you’ve had a girl in your room all day. We’ll walk up and you can just introduce me as your girlfriend.”
“Okay. I guess. You might want to borrow some eyeliner and touch up your lipstick a little first, okay?”
“I will slap the gloom off of you, rat shagger,” Jody said with a smile that was just a few degrees below being warm.
Over his very long life, Elijah Ben Sapir had been hunted, beaten, tortured, drowned, impaled, imprisoned, and even burned on two occasions—tolerance for those who live off the lifeblood of others being what it is—but in eight centuries, this was the first time he had been flash-fried by a tricked-out Honda. Despite the novelty of it, when novelty had just become his new joy, he figured that if he went another eight hundred years before it happened again, he’d be okay.
Creeping down a SOMA alley, snatching rats from behind Dumpsters and draining them to dust just so he could heal himself enough to hunt a real victim, was serving as an abject lesson as to why he and his kind were sworn to remain concealed. It was bound to happen: the application of new technology for the detection and destruction of vampires. Hadn’t he adopted technology to protect himself? His self-piloting yacht with its sensors and sealed vault had served him as well as any guarded castle. But he’d forgotten the rule—not forgotten, really, but ignored it—deciding to indulge in hope, to the point of faith, that he would always prevail. So some clever cow had figured out how to package sunlight and unleash it upon his arrogant carcass. The cow would never have found the solution had the vampire not shown him the problem. Humbled was Elijah, and angry, and hungry, and a little sad, because he had loved his yellow tracksuit, and now it was but beads of blackened polyester burned into his skin.
He picked at them as he listened for prey, tucked between a Dumpster and a white step-van full of bread racks. Here came one now—fat enough to complete the healing, Elijah could tell by the weight of his step. The back door of the bakery opened and the rotund baker stepped out and shook a cigarette out of his pack. His life aura was pink and healthy, his heart thumped strong, and would for a long time if Elijah did not suck it dry. Normally he only took the sick and the weak, those who were short for the grave anyway, but this was a desperate time. He leapt on the big man’s back and rode him to the ground, catching his scream in one hand, using the other to hit pressure points in his neck that had the baker unconscious in two seconds.
Elijah drank, listening to his blackened skin crackle, slough, and heal, even as the baker still breathed. There would be no neck snap, no body to find this time. He dumped the dust from the baker’s clothes and slipped into them. His white Nikes were the only survivors of his previous outfit, so he threw the baker’s clogs into the Dumpster along with his wallet, pocketed the cash, and took off, dressed in white from head to foot.
The vampire smiled to himself, not with joy, but with the grim irony of the situation. People often speak of things coming to them in a flash of inspiration, but the cliché held new meaning for Elijah. The flash meant that the game was over, that his foray into human desire, even for revenge, had gone far enough, and now it was time for damage control. They all had to die. He wouldn’t enjoy killing her. Not her.
After being burned up for the second time in two days, Blue was ready for a healing massacre—a bloodbath—but the Animals had stopped her, citing sissy ethical reasons like murder was, you know, wrong.
“You’re burned up!” Blue said. “This is no time to develop a conscience. Where was your conscience when you were making me do you a dozen times a day, huh?”
“That’s different,” said Drew. “You were in on it.”
“Yeah,” added Jeff. “And we paid you.”
“No one was hurt, amiga,” Gustavo added.
Blue broke off some charred crust coming over the seat of the Mercedes at Gustavo, who was in the passenger seat. Drew dragged her back into her seat by her hips. She crossed her arms and pouted, huffing out little flakes of ash in exasperation. They were supposed to be doing her bidding. They were supposed to be her seven—well, three—dwarves.
“You shut the fuck up, bean town. I was hurt. I am hurt. Look at me.”
They didn’t look at her. They were all burnt black from the waist up, in the front at least. Their shirts hung on them in charred shreds. The linen dress that Blue had been wearing had incinerated almost completely. She was wearing only her pan ties and a severely singed bra. Her face was still a bit lopsided from where Elijah had banged it on the car hood.
“We didn’t do this, Blue,” Drew said.
Blue smacked him repeatedly in the head a half-dozen times, knocking off most of one of his charred ears and all of the carbon strands that were what was left of his hair. The tip of her little finger broke off in the process, at which point she sat back and growled like a beaten dog.
“We need blood to heal,” Blue said. “Lots of it.”
“I know,” Jeff said. The charred power forward was driving. “I’m takin’ care of it.”
“You just passed five perfectly good teenagers,” Blue said. “Where the fuck are you going?”
“Somewhere where the donors can handle our action,” Jeff said.
“Well, we’re broke until you get my money back, so your donors better have some fucking cash.”
“We can’t exactly go into a bar in the financial district,” Drew said. “Not looking like this.”
“Oh, like they’d let you dirtbags in at your best.” Blue found that being burnt up put her on edge more than normal. She’d tried taking a Valium left by the Mercedes guy, just like Drew and the other had downed handfuls of his painkillers, only to find their vampire systems rejected them with extreme violence.
“We’re here,” Jeff said, pulling the Mercedes into a wide public parking lot.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Blue said. “The zoo?”
Tommy waited half an hour before he called Jody’s cell, only to get a dropped signal, then voice mail. He called three more times in the next half hour, played two rounds of Gunning for Nuns Xtreme on Jared’s Xbox, called Abby’s cell only to get voice mail, then made his first sincere attempt at turning to mist. Jody had said it was a mental thing, you just had to see yourself as mist, force yourself to mist, “like flexing a muscle,” she had said. “Once you’ve done it once, you just know how it feels and you can do it again. Like getting up on water skis.”
It wasn’t that he could get out of the basement undetected, it was what Jody had said about being in the mist state—that time sort of just glided, like you were in a dream. It was the only reason, she said, that she hadn’t beaten him senseless for having her bronzed. When you were
mist, it just wasn’t all that bad. Maybe if he could turn to mist, he could pass the time without driving himself nuts with worry.
For all his mental flexing, all he got was a flatulent toot that sent him diving for the door and fanning the room out with it. He was truly a foul dead thing—fouler than he’d even guessed. He looked for paint peeling off the walls.
That was it. He was not a kid hiding in his friend’s basement, he was a—what did Abby call it?—he was one of the anointed, a prince of the night. He was going to walk out of here, right past the family, and if he had to take them out, well, so be it. That would teach Jody for leaving him behind and turning her phone off. How do you feel now, Red? Huh? Massacred, dismembered family? Huh? Glad you saved your anytime minutes now?!
He tramped up the steps and into Jared’s parents’ family room.
“Hi,” Jared’s father said.
Tommy had expected a bit of a monster based on Jared’s description of his father. Instead what he saw was a bit of an accountant. He was about forty-five, in pretty good shape, holding a little girl on his lap who was coloring a picture of a pony. Another little girl, who looked about the same age, was coloring on the floor at his feet.
“Hi,” Tommy said.
“You must be the vampire Flood,” Jared’s dad said, with a bit of a knowing smile.
“Uh. Well. Kinda.” It showed. He could no longer hide among the humans. It must be because it had been so long since he had fed.
“Sort of a weak ensemble, don’t you think?” Jared’s dad said.
“Weak,” repeated the little girl without looking up from her pony.
“Huh?” Tommy inquired.
“For a vampire. Jeans, sneakers, and flannel?”
Tommy looked at his clothes. “Black jeans,” he pointed out. Shouldn’t this guy be cowering in fear, maybe begging Tommy not to put his little daughter in a sack for his vampire brides?
“Okay, I suppose times change. You know that Jared and his girlfriend went up to Tulley’s on Market to meet Abby, right?”
“His girlfriend, Jody?”
“Right,” said Dad. “Cute girl. Not as many piercings as I expected, but we’re just happy she’s a girl.”
An attractive blond woman in her late twenties came into the room carrying a tray with carrot and celery sticks on it. “Oh, hi,” she said, dazzling a smile at Tommy. “You must be the vampire Flood. Hi, I’m Emily. Would you like some crudités? You’re welcome to stay for dinner. We’re having mac and cheese, it was the girls’ night to pick.”
I should drink her blood and put her kids in a sack, Tommy thought. But his vicious predator nature was overcome by his Midwestern upbringing, so instead he said, “Thank you very much, Emily, but I really should be going if I’m going to catch up to Jared and Jody.”
“Well, okay then,” said the woman. “Girls, say good-bye to the vampire Flood.”
“Good-bye, the vampire Flood,” the girls sang in chorus.
“Uh, bye.” Tommy bolted out of the room, then back in again. “Where’s the door?”
Everyone pointed through the kitchen, whence Jared’s stepmonster had just come.
He ran through the kitchen and out the door, then stood with his back against the minivan in the drive, trying to catch his breath. “That was fucked up,” he gasped, then realized that he wasn’t out of breath from exertion at all. He was having an anxiety attack. “That was really, really fucked up.”
28
Wallflowers of the Night
It was a lot like trying to get your courage up to ask a girl to dance, except that in this case it wasn’t so much the fear of rejection, or that you’d be awkward and embarrass yourself, although that was a consideration, but that whoever you picked was going to be reduced to dust, which was somewhat more significant than trampling her toes.
Tommy stood on Castro Street looking for his next victim. His first victim, really. He was tired of being the apprentice. If Jody was going to just leave him in the basement because he wasn’t vampire enough for her, then maybe he’d have to become like her. Maybe he’d learn about this predator nature she talked about. Maybe, like that guy in the basement in The Phantom of the Opera, he would have to hear “The Music of the Night.” He wasn’t sure what had happened to the basement guy. He’d gone to see the movie with a girl from his high school, but had to leave halfway through to keep from taking his own life. It hadn’t been a good date.
There were plenty of people out on the street, even at this hour, but none of them screamed victim. There were no women in low-cut dresses who had just turned an ankle. There were no girls in negligees running down the street, glancing back over their shoulders. There were, in fact, not many girls at all. Lots of guys. Lots.
He reckoned that it wasn’t really necessary that he pick a woman. After all, he’d fed off of William and Chet, both of whom were male, but this was different. This was really becoming the hunter, and despite his hunger, there was no little bit of revenge in his decision to bite someone. So it had to be a girl. He had to get back at Jody for ditching him at Jared’s. He had to show her that she wasn’t the only vein in the circulatory system. Or what ever.
The few women he saw were so healthy, with big bright pink life auras around them, and weren’t alone either. He had to get someone alone.
Frustrated, he backed down the alley and started pacing back and forth. After a short time he took a run at the wall, ran up ten feet or so, then turned and ran back across the alley and up the other wall about ten feet, then back, and up the wall fifteen feet—like a skateboarder working a half-pipe, he ran back and forth, feeling the strength and speed of what he was—feeling his confidence rise.
I am a superior being, he thought. I am a friggin’ god!
Then his foot went through a window and he sank up to his crotch into the building, then dangled over the alley upside down, three stories up, flailing.
Stupid place for a window, he thought. Then he saw her.
She was sort of tall, but dressed in a red evening gown, with athletic curves, and long red hair that had been lacquered into ringlets. She was perfect, and she was coming down the alley. It was like he’d ordered her from an old Hammer film to be the hapless victim. Sweet!
So he was hanging upside down by one leg. That could be a tactic. He felt his fangs extending and he drooled a little, which hit her on the shoulder.
She started a little, and that’s when he made his move. He’d always loved the scene in Dracula where Jonathan Harker sees the Count climbing, facedown, down the castle walls and thinks, Hey, something is up here. Tommy had pleaded with Jody to try it, but she never would, so this was his chance. He pulled himself out of the window, hooked his fingers between the bricks, and began his climb.
And dropped thirty feet to the alley, landing flat on his back.
“Ouch.”
Upon Tommy’s impact, his intended victim had let out a very masculine scream, jumped three feet straight up, and came down sideways on her high heels. She knelt over him rubbing her ankle.
“Cheesy Christ on a cracker, darlin’. Where did you come from?” Southern, and deep.
“Slipped,” Tommy said. “You’re a man, huh?”
“Well, let’s say that is a street which I have walked, to which I do not wish to return.”
“You’re very pretty,” Tommy said.
“Sweet of you to say.” He tossed his hair a bit. “You want I should call an ambulance?”
“No, no. Thanks. I’ll be okay.”
“What were you doing up there, anyway?”
Conve niently, Tommy was still staring straight up at the sky, framed by the buildings, and he could see that she thought he’d fallen from the roof. “Listening for ‘the music of the night.’”
“Were you watching the DVD? I heard people tried to kill themselves rather than sit through it.”
“Something like that.”
“Honey, just push pause. Just push pause.”
“I’ll rem
ember that. Thanks.”
“You sure you don’t want me to call someone?”
“No, no. I’ll call someone as soon as I catch my breath.” Tommy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handful of broken plastic and wires that had once been his cell phone.
“Okay then, y’all take care.” She stood, turned, and walked slowly out of the alley, trying not to limp.
“Hey, miss,” Tommy called after him. “I’m not gay.”
“’Course you aren’t, darlin’.”
“I rule the night!”
She waved without looking as she rounded the corner.
“Redheads,” he growled.
He could feel his broken ribs knitting together. It wasn’t pleasant. As soon as they were healed enough, it was back to Jared’s house to eat the rat. Move up the food chain slowly, maybe.
An hour later the torn and tattered vampire Flood limped up the driveway to Jared’s house. Abby and Jared were smoking in the driveway.
“Lord Flood,” Abby said. “What are you doing here?”
“You look like someone opened a whole six-pack of whup-ass on you,” Jared said.
“You shut up. How did your family know I was a vampire?”
“Well, certainly not from your wardrobe.”
“Jared, I am all busted up, and I’m feeling hungry, and a little fragile. Now answer my question or I will go inside and murder your family, feed on their blood, step on your rat, and break your Xbox.”
“Whoa, drama queen much?”
“Fine,” Tommy said. He shrugged, which hurt, and headed for the kitchen door. “Find me a sack big enough for your two little sisters.”
Jared jumped in front of him. “I told them we were playing Vampire the Masquerade and that your part was the Vampire Flood.”
Abby nodded. “We used to play all the time before we actually became minions.”
“It’s like Dungeons and Dragons but way cooler,” Jared said.
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