Bring On the Night

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  No response. Aaron’s face seemed unusually shadowed.

  Wondering how long it would take him to notice, I riffed into the ridiculous. “Did you know they drank blood in their initiations? And hey, Romania. So put it all together, and what do you get? Vampires.”

  A few seconds later, Aaron finally turned his head to look at me. “Wait. What?”

  “Or maybe they just used the vamps as hit men.”

  He stopped. “Are we still talking about the Iron Guard?”

  “I don’t know. Are we?” I gave him a playful smirk.

  Aaron shook his head. “Sorry, it’s been the weirdest day of my life, which is saying a lot.” He tugged me off the path so the other students could hurry by. “This morning after my workout I was on the way to Craddock Hall. You know that path through the woods that leads from the gym?”

  I nodded, though I’d never voluntarily gone near any venue of structured exercise.

  “I was about halfway there” —he pointed toward the line of trees to our right— “when suddenly I caught this hideous smell, like scorched meat. It got so bad I almost turned back.” He lowered his voice. “That’s when I saw the body.”

  My gut tightened. “A human body?”

  “Human shaped, what was left of it. The whole corpse was burned head to foot. No clothes, no hair, no shoes.”

  “Just a skeleton?”

  “I wish.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “Its flesh was—it was welded to the bones.”

  “How horrible.”

  “I say its flesh because I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.” He dropped his hand from his face. “Whoever it was, they died screaming.”

  I remembered something I’d read in the paper. “Maybe they were murdered and then burned. Like in a gang killing? Maybe the fire stretched the face so it looked like it was screaming.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “I guess hanging out with vampires, you’ve seen a lot.”

  “Unfortunately.” Too much of it had involved fire.

  “But gangs, here in Sherwood?” Aaron spread his arms.

  “The high schools have a major heroin problem. The kids usually go into Baltimore for the drugs, but maybe the dealers are coming out here now and fighting for territory. What did the cops say?”

  “Not much. One of them threw up. They took my statement and let me go.” He brushed his hand over his chest. “I had to shower again and change my clothes to get the smell out. But I swear it’s still in my nostrils.” He checked his watch. “And now that I’m done grossing you out, it’s time for class.”

  We headed into the building without another word. I thought of a time years ago when our little world had gone up in flames and Lori’s undead boyfriend Travis had been consumed.

  And unlike that corpse in the woods, when vampires burn, nothing is left—no bones, no flesh, no skin. No ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Nothing but nothing.

  6

  What Is and What Should Never Be

  Shane’s “wake” was just starting as he and I arrived at the station that night. Five vampire DJs (all but Monroe, who was on the air and avoided social gatherings, anyway) had gathered in the basement lounge. Cigarette smoke hovered thick, making the ceiling look like an overcast sky.

  His maker Regina was slow dancing with Noah to the Police song blasting over the boom box—one of the crossover tunes between Regina’s punk and Noah’s reggae. Their relationship was off and on (mostly off, due to Noah’s being a generally decent guy). I needed a baseball-style box score to keep up with their breakups and reconciliations.

  Leaning her head on his shoulder, Regina twisted one of the dreadlocks cascading down his back, her ebony-lined eyes closed in contentment. Noah’s eyes were open, probably so he could avoid stepping on the rug seams.

  Fifties rockabilly DJ Spencer stood at the card table, which had been shoved to the wall to make room for dancing. The refreshments were all liquid, other than a bowl of crumbled tortilla chips and a store-bought ranch dip. Spencer shifted the bottles, arranging them in a configuration only he understood. As the oldest WVMP vampire (next to Monroe), his compulsions were the strongest. Most of his brain was stuck in 1959, like the ducktail in his dark red hair.

  Jim stood alone in the corner, watching the rest of us. Tonight he wore traditional hippie garb—tie-dyed shirt and flowing white bell bottoms—instead of his usual Jim-Morrison-reanimated outfit of leather pants and black shirt open to the navel.

  But what Shane had told me on the phone last week was spot-on. Despite his peace-and-love getup, Jim looked less balanced than ever. His gaze shifted between me and Jeremy—the only humans in the room—as if we were the two tastiest-looking entrées on a buffet, and he was deciding which to sample first.

  There was a time when Jeremy would’ve jumped on the plate and handed Jim the fork. He’d been enthralled with the hippie vampire since the moment they met. But over the last six months, their relationship had cooled. Now it was positively subzero.

  Jim sauntered over to where Jeremy was setting up his laptop on top of our new LCD projector. He slowly brushed back the bleached blond hair that swooped over Jeremy’s face.

  To Jeremy’s credit, he didn’t flinch or spook, knowing that sudden moves can make a vampire pounce. He simply pretended Jim wasn’t there, even when the vampire’s hand traveled down his back, over the belt loops of his black skinny jeans, then up under his vintage Jawbreaker T-shirt. (Jeremy’s classic emo garb, along with his black guyliner, fit his radio show, which featured the music of the recently deceased decade.)

  “Look at me,” Jim said to him.

  “I’m busy.”

  “Look. At. Me.”

  Regina stopped dancing and turned to watch them, her nostrils twitching with worry. Noah kept his hands on her shoulders to hold her back. Jim was not only volatile but stronger than anyone else in the room, due to his age.

  Stronger than anyone except Spencer, that is. But the older DJ was captivated by the task of pouring drinks. He squatted to bring his eyes level with the six glasses, making sure they contained an even amount of whiskey. Spencer frowned at the glass on the right, then used a set of tongs to add another ice cube.

  “What’s your hang-up, man?” Jim asked Jeremy. “I said I was sorry.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry. There, I said it.”

  “You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.” Jeremy was fighting to keep his voice down, though the battle for privacy was long lost.

  Jim made no effort to lower the volume. “I’ll make it up to you. What do you want? Dinner? Drugs?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? That’s not fair, when you give me so much.” He grabbed Jeremy by the back of the neck and lifted him up on his toes. Then he pressed his mouth to Jeremy’s throat.

  We all gasped, and Regina stepped toward them. “Jim, knock it off!”

  Feeding on Humans Rule Number One: always bite below the heart. If Jim sank his fangs into Jeremy’s neck while he was standing up, it could cause an air embolism that could instantly kill him.

  “It’s just a game we play,” he growled, as Jeremy’s eyes flashed with fear. “Mind your own business. He’s my donor.”

  “He’s my donor, too,” Regina said.

  “Not anymore.” He put a possessive arm around Jeremy’s waist. “I don’t want to share.”

  I looked at Spencer, who was dribbling a few more drops of whiskey into the left-hand glass.

  “Jim, take it easy,” Shane said. “We know you don’t want to hurt anybody.” His grip on my hand belied the calm in his voice. “That would defeat the purpose, right?”

  Jim’s eyes turned to dark slits. “Depends which purpose you’re talking about.”

  “Donor loyalty. You keep messing with Jeremy’s head, he might cut you off.”

  Jim turned back to Jeremy. “Is that true? You’ll cut me off? Try it, and I’ll cut you off.” He drew his finger across
Jeremy’s throat. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll—”

  Spencer moved, his dress shirt a white blur. He grabbed Jim and pinned him face-first against the wall.

  “Never. Threaten. A donor.” Spencer’s voice was low and even. “Hear me?”

  Jim struggled in his grip, with as much success as a bug in a Venus flytrap. Jeremy stood next to the projector, rubbing his neck and breathing hard.

  “I asked”—Spencer slammed Jim’s forehead into the wall—“if you heard me. But I missed your answer. Maybe I’m goin’ deaf.”

  “I heard you,” Jim choked out. “I wasn’t threatening—”

  Slam! The wood paneling buckled under the impact of Jim’s head.

  “Okay, I was threatening him and I’ll never do it again. Swear! Now let me go.”

  Spencer shoved Jim’s knees into the floor, so hard the foundation seemed to shake. “How about you blow out of here, son. Take the night off.”

  Jim sprang to his feet, swaying. “I’m not your son. And this party is Dullsville, anyway.” He stumbled for the door, snapping his fingers at Jeremy. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  When he was gone, we let out a collective sigh of relief. Spencer went back to the table, then handed out the drinks he’d poured. I noticed there hadn’t been enough glasses to include Jim if he’d stayed.

  “You are not going with him, I hope?” Noah asked Jeremy.

  “No way.” He gave Regina a pleading look through his round, black-rimmed glasses. “Hey, if you turned me into a vampire, I could fight him off.”

  “No, you couldn’t,” she said. “He’d still have ten times your strength. And then you couldn’t escape him during the day.”

  He made a noise like a little kid. “I turn twenty-seven next month. It’d be perfect timing.”

  The DJs were each twenty-seven when they were turned. We play up that fact to the public, comparing our jocks to the Club of 27, the long list of rock stars who left this world at that mythical age.

  “You don’t want to die on your birthday,” I told Jeremy. “People will look at your tombstone and think it’s a typo.”

  “Shut up,” he snapped.

  Regina patted Jeremy’s cheek. “We’ve had this talk before, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at Shane. “Guess I have to threaten suicide to get you to save me.”

  Her fingers tightened on his jaw, but her voice stayed sweet. “We’ll discuss it later. Over a drink?” Her gaze on his neck told me what kind of drink she meant.

  “Maybe.” He pulled out of her grip, only because she let him. “Maybe not.” He stalked out of the room toward the back hallway. He didn’t take his coat, so he was probably just headed to the bathroom in as drama queeny a fashion as possible.

  “What a child.” Regina yanked a packet of cigarettes from her spike-heeled police boots. “He only thinks about himself. Not one fucking thought for what it would do to me.” She lit the cigarette and sucked in a harsh puff.

  “He doesn’t understand what you’ve been through.” Shane rubbed her shoulder, avoiding the long prongs of her studded leather collar.

  Her face softened, and she almost leaned against him for support before straightening up and turning away.

  If I didn’t know her progenies’ history, I’d think her momentary vulnerability was an act. The first was Shane, who made her the weapon of choice in his final suicide attempt; at the last moment she changed her mind and brought him back from death with her own blood. Later she turned a female friend to protect her from an abusive fiancé. That had ended in tragedy and almost got Regina, me, and several others killed by the vengeful aforementioned dickhead.

  David and Lori entered the lounge from the back door, each carrying two stacks of clear plastic food containers.

  “Leftovers from our meeting with the wedding caterer.” David set the food on the end of the card table.

  “You’re a godsend.” I opened a dish of pasta-peanut salad. “Vampires suck at snacks. I think that ranch dip expired when Spencer was still human.”

  “Hi, Shane.” Lori sent him a cheek-puffing, trying-too-hard smile. “Happy, um. You know.”

  “Thanks.” He leaned over to kiss her cheek. “And thanks for feeding my girlfriend.”

  She nodded solemnly. “Ciara maintenance is my most important job.”

  “Funny, mine, too.”

  A loud double clap snapped the stuffy air. “Ladies and gentlemen—” Regina gestured toward Jeremy, who had gotten over his snit and was now manning the projector—“time to honor our boy before his big day ends.” She squeezed Shane’s arm and smiled at his inscrutable face. “Glad you made it through another year alive.”

  Someone switched off the ancient halogen lamp in the corner as the projection screen slowly faded up on a photo of Shane.

  He was alive, but not. His eyes were more sunken than in his worst blood hunger. With gaunt cheeks and sallow skin, he looked ten years older than he did as we stood there.

  But sunlight glinted off his light brown hair, something I’d never seen in real life. And never would.

  Canned applause sounded as glittery red block letters scrolled across the bottom of the screen: THIS IS YOUR UNLIFE. The non-Shane vampires and David laughed.

  “I don’t get it,” Lori whispered.

  “It was a TV show back in the old days,” David told us. “This Is Your Life.”

  A song played, a cover of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” but not the Bob Dylan version I knew. A new photo showed Shane in a tux, standing at a sound board. Tiny lights like those of a disco ball played over his face.

  The photo slid to the left; on the right half of the screen, a video appeared, of Regina at her vampiest.

  “Welcome. This is my tribute to the guy who means more to me than the rest of the world put together. Shane McAllister.”

  She raised her fists, and the room broke into whistles and catcalls. The real-life Regina hugged Shane around the waist in a way that once would have made me burn with jealousy, before I (sort of) came to understand the maker-progeny bond.

  On the screen, Regina pointed her thumb to her right, toward the picture. “That was you the night we met. Not as happy as you looked.”

  I felt Shane tense beside me. “She wouldn’t…”

  The next photo shifted to the center, dark, and slowly came up in light. Shane sat at a table, writing on a piece of paper, balled-up pages scattered around him, his hand crumpling his hair and his eyes filled with agony.

  “That stupid note,” he said under his breath. I realized this was the last picture taken of him alive.

  “Turn it off,” he told Regina.

  Her fingers dug into his arm. “Just watch the whole thing before you judge.”

  “Jeremy, turn it off, or I’ll put your laptop through the wall.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “It’s station property, not mine.”

  Shane heaved a tight sigh and crossed his arms, his face a study in silent simmering.

  The photo faded, and the song crescendoed in the last verse. The black screen held nothing but a white caption: THE FOLLOWING NIGHT.

  We gasped at the transformation. Shane wore the same clothes as in the previous shot, but his gaze had sharpened to an animal stare. His muscles now bulged his T-shirt in smooth lines. His body was no longer an enemy.

  The photo shifted to the left again, and Regina’s face reappeared.

  “Foxy dude, huh?” She blew on her nails and rubbed them against her collar. “But things didn’t go so well, and you ended up here.”

  A long, squat brick building appeared—a Control nursing home, where vampires go when their frozen minds can no longer handle this world. A place where they can live out their many years in “peace.”

  Peace for humans, that is. A confused vampire is an unstable vampire, a danger to the living. I wondered how long before Jim would end up in Control custody, assuming he let them take him alive.

  Some nursing
homes had rehab units for infant vampires who had trouble accepting their new “life.” They’d be trapped there on suicide watch until deemed sufficiently stable. Shane had spent months in one.

  The onscreen Regina continued. “But then came our savior.”

  A photo of David replaced the building. Unlike vampires, we humans age a lot in ten years.

  Lori whistled. “Wow, David, you were hot!”

  “Gee, thanks for the past tense.” He ran a self-conscious hand over his stomach.

  “You look better now,” I told him. David gave me a grateful smile, which wasn’t worth Lori’s jealous glare. I had so little experience with truth telling, sometimes I let it out at inappropriate times.

  “Enough of that guy,” Regina continued in a voice-over. “Once we came here to WVMP, Shane’s popularity skyrocketed, as demonstrated by this montage.”

  A series of photos flashed on the screen, all of beautiful young women. Shane shifted his weight uncomfortably, and I could’ve sworn he was blushing, but that could’ve just been the red light of the exit sign.

  As the hot-chick montage continued, I asked him, “Are those all vampires?”

  “Um, mostly. Well, not that one. Or that one. That one’s a vampire.”

  “And they were your girlfriends?”

  “Uh.” He rubbed the back of his ear. “Not exactly. A couple of them.” He looked at Regina. “Where’d you get all these pictures?”

  “Various places.” She tugged his shirt. “I can get you copies.”

  “No.” He glanced at me, then at the screen. “When does this stop?”

  She signaled to Jeremy, who hit a key to advance to a blank screen. “In keeping with This Is Your Life’s format, we have a special blast-from-the-past guest.”

  The music changed to a Ramones tune I couldn’t place (they all sounded the same to me, frankly).

  “No,” Shane said. “No way.”

  A disembodied female voice said, “June 1998. Midnight. A Denny’s outside Hagerstown. We were fattening up our donors before the feast. The moment our eyes met over our humans’ Grand Slam breakfasts, we knew.”

  “Sheena,” he whispered, just as the Ramones started to sing about the eponymous punk rocker.