Daryl looked her over, she looked Daryl over. Windbreaker, cotton shirt, Longhorn hat that was mostly camouflage pattern. Nothing stained, nothing frayed, but all of it wrinkled, ruffled, pitching shadows that inundated him. Just like the crags in his face. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” Lucia lied. “But I talked to Mavis Quinn. She said that wasn’t a problem.”
Daryl’s head tipped down. The shadow of his cap soaked into his face. “That what she said?”
Lucia leaned forward, the folds of her jersey dropping, dripping off her. She put her hands on the window frame. “You know how it is. She can’t say she wants it. Not in public. She’s a good girl.” From her tone—it was so like Lucia, which was a crazy thing to think because it was Lucia—Mindy could imagine her rolling her eyes. “Deep down, though, us girls don’t want foreplay or cunnilingus. We want it hard. And we want some beer, too. If you have any.”
The cap pitched back up, his face came out of the dark like a great white came out of the depths. He was smiling. “Got some riding shotgun with me. Why don’t you hop in? We’ll go someplace private. Talk about that thing we discussed.” His laugh sounded like a machine breaking down. Lucia circled the truck as he started it up. Headlights came on, shot through Lucia as she flounced through them. Turned her jersey so white, Mindy thought she could see her skeleton.
Mindy moved before she quite thought what she was doing. She zipped across the street, down under another car parked behind the truck. She saw Lucia’s feet next to the truck’s right front tire. There was a broken beer bottle in the gutter of the curb. Lucia stepped on it after she opened the passenger door. It broke under her foot like she was wearing army boots.
Mindy had her cell phone with her. Typical teenage girl, never go anywhere without my cell phone, not even investigating X-Files. She knew the number for 911. She should call them. Get the cops here before something happened. She crawled forward, out from under the car, still crouched behind the truck. Right in front of the license plate. CS1-H821. She read it, repeated it, repeated it, had it in her memory. She could call the cops on him. Make this stop.
But the truck’s engine was growling, Daryl was wrestling his way through the gear shift, he was about to go and take Lucia with him, and Mindy couldn’t lose her. Couldn’t keep losing her.
Don’t do anything stupid, Mindy. She put her foot on the rear bumper and threw herself over the cargo gate, hit the truck bed with its litter of wood chips and small fleet of empty beer cans. Mindy pressed herself to the cold metal; it sent chilled shocks up her body, had her shivering like she was electrocuted, but all she could hope was that Daryl hadn’t seen her.
She could see him through the cab’s rear window. He was bent over, turning on the radio. Country music. It was like some people didn’t care about being a cliché.
Two turns and they were on the highway. Mindy hit 811, saw her mistake, cleared it, dialed 911. It rang, rang, rang. God, you’d think if anyone would pick up on the first ring, it’d be 911! Klik: “911, what’s your emergency?”
Mindy was not good at lying. “Hi, uh, I saw a driver in a red truck, red pickup truck, he had a license plate—” She gave the operator the number, reciting it like it was the first fifteen digits of pi. CS1-H821. “Yeah, he was driving really erratically, swerving and I think he was driving and drinking, drunk driving, driving while drinking—beer… He got onto North Bell headed…north. Bye.” She hung up. Ugh, terrible. Why couldn’t 911 take texts like a normal person?
Daryl turned them onto Carfax Lane, an ancient subdivision that was more trees than house—every yard was something like a quarter-mile. They hit Prize Oaks Drive, and halfway down that bumpy road, Daryl turned off onto a half-mile of rut-worn gravel. A driveway, but Mindy saw the foreclosure sign they passed. No one was in the house up ahead, and they stopped far short of it anyway. Daryl shushed the engine, the radio and lights went off with it, and the forest rushed in. Cicadas, frogs, a barking dog somewhere. The quiet kind of noise.
Somehow the quiet in the cab was loudest. Mindy looked through the rear window and saw Daryl dig up a beer from a cooler in Lucia’s footspace. It took him a long time; Mindy imagined him touching Lucia’s bare leg as he straightened and she thought she might punch through that safety glass just to get to him. What am I doing?
“Here. Have some,” Daryl said, pulling the tab like he was about to throw a grenade.
Lucia stared at it like she was looking through a microscope. “I don’t drink…Bud Light.”
“Well, I got something you will drink.”
The little slap of him working his belt leather out of his loop to work the buckle. The chime of the buckle springing loose. The hiss of his zipper coming down. Mindy thought she would do it. She would throw his door open, haul him out of his seat, toss him right down on the ground where he belonged. She could do it. If she moved fast, took him by surprise—sure she could do it.
“Why don’t you get down there?” Daryl asked. “See if you can relieve my condition?”
“But you’re so hard—all that blood down there. I really would prefer it up here.” She brushed his cheek. Her touch cold, clinical. Lucia didn’t touch that way. Not with Mindy. “Do you think you could blush? Maybe if I told a dirty joke?”
“This shit ain’t funny, little girl. You had time to play coy on the ride over, now get on down there and put those cocksucker lips to good use!”
“You want me to suck you?”
His voice roughened, gravel mixing into it. “Woman, do I have to stop asking nice like I been doing?”
Lucia just smiled at him, head cocked fondly to the side like he was a puppy doing something cute. “Hey, you know how us teens are always doing crazy shit like rainbow parties and sex bracelets—donkey punches?” He nodded testily. “Wanna see what all the cool kids are into now?”
Her head drifted back, fast, like a cobra preparing to strike. All of a sudden her eyeteeth were longer, a pair of switchblades flicking out, tapering to razor-sharp points. They were fangs; so white they could’ve been diamonds.
Daryl stared at them. He was more confused than afraid, but his body was rearing back, like he had smelled something foul, heard something loud. It tried to get away while his mind was still working through the torpor he’d been lulled into.
“Don’t worry,” Lucia said, as the whites of her eyes bled red, the irises bled black, the two almost oscillating they were so vibrant. So alive. “I’m just gonna put in the tips.”
Then she struck, so hard she jammed all Daryl’s two hundred and sixty pounds against the door. Her fangs dug into his throat, pulled in a killing stroke like a Marine with his KA-BAR, dragging through his jugular, carotid, windpipe. The blood exploded out of him, but Lucia was a cap on an oil well, latching onto the deep gorge she’d torn, her throat already working greedily.
Daryl’s hands flailed, slapping at the steering wheel. Lucia patiently collared them at the wrists and pinned them over his head. Her cheeks were blooming, a rush of blood to the head, just not her own.
At some point, Mindy started screaming, and at some point, Lucia pulled herself away from her prey to look at Mindy through the blood dripping down the rear window. Red painted a grisly smile on her from cheek to cheek and down her throat, down to the tops of her breasts.
She looked past Mindy, out the windows, out the windshield. Lights were turning on, little match points in the windows of the houses next door. Rolling her red eyes, Lucia opened her door and got out. “God, Mindy, way to player-hate. Now there’s gonna be cops, guys with guns, torches, pitchforks—”
It all made sense now. It made no sense at all, but it all made sense now. She thought she’d woken up from the nightmare of Lucia being a monster, but all this time, thinking it was impossible was when she’d been asleep. “You’re a vampire!”
Lucia shook her head condescending, her eyes rolling so far back in her head that Mindy wondered if it was a Bram Stoker thing. “I’m not a vampire, Mindy.”
“You have blood dripping from your fangs!”
Lucia closed her open mouth. Then shrugged. “Okay, I’m a little bit a vampire.”
“And you have fangs!”
Lucia huffed. “Okay, you got me, I’m not a werewolf! That doesn’t excuse you being a little B-word and letting everyone know there’s an episode of Supernatural going on in their backyard. Things get a little PG-13 and you scream? Wow, Minz, wow. What are you even doing out here?”
Mindy stood on shaking legs. She could barely keep herself from slipping right out of the truck bed. She held onto the top of the cab like a little old lady without her cane. “What am I doing out here? You’re drinking someone’s blood!”
“Yeah, but I, like, need blood or else I start to rot and stuff. You were watching me drink blood. That’s a lot weirder.”
“That’s weirder? Weirder?” Mindy sat back on the cab, Lucia casually climbing onto the truck bed, sitting down cross-legged at Mindy’s feet. Talking to her like they were friends.
Were they friends? “Are you gonna kill me?”
Lucia’s shock broke right through her Bela Lugosi impression. “Kill you? God, Mindy, no. We’re besties! I know we’re going through a rough patch, but once Tera and I liked the same boy and we didn’t kill each other!” She laughed.
“But you—but I saw you kill him—I’m a witness. Oh God, I could go into witness protection!” Mindy’s mom watched a lot of In Plain Sight. It did not look fun. And, Mindy belatedly realized, perhaps she shouldn’t be pointing this out to the murderer.
“He’s not dead!” Lucia giggled, flopping her wrist exaggeratedly. “I just took a little.” She glanced at the blood-smeared rear window. “Okay, maybe a lot. It’s that O-negative blood. Makes me such a pig. But yeah, he’ll be fine. It turns out, you don’t need all that much blood! Besides, I have it on good authority that guy went no-daddy-bad-touch on Mavis Quinn, so maybe that was the molesty part of his blood. I heard in history class that doctors used to put leeches on you to suck out the bad blood when you got sick.”
Lucia rose like she was weightless, suddenly sitting down beside Mindy on the cab. “That’s kinda what I’m doing, only I’m, like, sucking out the bad blood of society? It’s like a metaphor. Wow, I’m totally applying all these English class teachings to my real life. You think I’ll use calculus next?”
Mindy couldn’t think, couldn’t process. All her mind was taken up with the memory of Lucia biting Daryl, like a shark, teeth rending flesh, blood flying, the very stuff of him being ripped apart by Lucia, by her mouth, by her teeth… It wasn’t like The Walking Dead. It was all skin cells and blood vessels and real. “So, you—so, you—you just drink people. You just—”
Lucia reached out to Mindy, straightening her wind-blown hair, brushing her face. Her hands were warm now. Warm with stolen blood. “I know what you’re thinking. If you were a vampire, you’d just eat murderers and racists, jerks like that. But it’s not like people advertise they’re scumbags.”
From somewhere in her haze, Mindy found herself replying “Not unless they’re on Reddit.”
“Yeah, not unless nerd humor.” Lucia shook her head with a smile. She looked out into the distance. “I’m forgetting something—” Below her, in the cab, Daryl gave a gurgle. “No, not that.” She tapped the rear window with her heel. “Keep pressure on it, up-skirt shot, you’ll be fine.” Lucia snapped her fingers. “We need to make a thrilling escape, or like, they’ll probably put us in prison. I can hear sirens on the highway. My hearing’s really good now. I’m like one of those kung fu masters who go blind, but train their senses so they can still fight.”
Mindy didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was just that she’d gotten used to the sight of blood after she got her first period in the girls’ locker room. But something went ping and suddenly she was in survival mode. Lucia was a vampire, molester van guy was bleeding out, okay, fine—but she was not going to jail. “We should run! We’ll go into the woods and if we find a stream, we can wash off our scent so the dogs won’t find us!” she babbled.
Lucia stood, a casual finger on Mindy’s shoulder keeping her sitting. “Easy there, Jason Bourne, no need for a hike. Just open your legs.”
“We have time for that?” Mindy asked unthinkingly.
Lucia huffed a sigh. “Quit the lesbian act, I’m not playing soccer with you. Wrap your legs around me before I slap you.”
“We have time for that?” Mindy persisted, feeling like being a little bit of an asshole. But she opened her legs.
Lucia stepped in, pressing herself to Mindy. Mindy knew without being told that Lucia wanted her arms around her. She wrapped herself around Lucia and Lucia returned the favor, one hand at the back of Mindy’s neck to support her head like she was a newborn.
“Your hair’s really soft,” Lucia said. “Did you finally stop using that store-brand conditioner?”
“I splurged.”
“It shows. Now you might wanna close your eyes.”
Mindy did. Well, it was more like she blinked. Suddenly, her stomach lurched. She felt subzero air on her skin. Wind chill, pushing on her with physical force. She opened her eyes: Lucia was carrying her, she was facing backward, and the world was ripping past her in a blur. So fast she might as well have been flipping channels on her grandma’s TV. Woods, road, woods, road, grass, suburbs, turn, house, house, driveway, side-yard, stop.
Lucia set her down.
Mindy promptly vomited.
“That’s really gross,” Lucia said, “but it’ll probably be good for your dress size.”
Mindy fell to her hands and knees and managed to land to the side of her spew when she fell over. She was dizzy—completely discombobulated, and disconnected from her body, gravity, the world at large. Her vision swam like a kaleidoscope. Nothing was straight anymore. Someone had mixed all the paint together.
Lucia knelt down beside her, her hand massaging Mindy’s back. “Yeah, I don’t think you’re meant to travel at warp speed like that, puny human. We were going Mach 5 or something—shaving razor speed.” Lucia patted Mindy on the spine with her joke. “Pretty cool, though, right? And how about me supporting your head so no whiplash?”
Mindy rested her forehead against the grass. It was cold. Damp. Real. “How’d this happen to you? What…what’s going on?”
Lucia lightly scratched between Mindy’s shoulder blades. “Something bit me, now I’m superstrong and really fast… I think it’s obvious what happened. I’m Spider-Man now.”
“Oh God…oh God…” Mindy pounded her head into the soil. “We killed someone! We—I should’ve—what if he dies?”
“Mindy, it’s cool.”
“It is not cool!” Mindy turned over, scrambling backward until she backed into the wall of her house. She pressed herself into it like she could pass right through the brick. “What if he recognized you? What if he tells the cops, what if he comes looking for you?”
“It’s cool,” Lucia insisted. She reached into her mouth and drew back her lip with her forefinger. Mindy could see the petite point of her canines, still sharp. “I hab thib g’and…” Lucia let go of her lip, realizing she was muffling her words. “This gland in the roof of my mouth. Really hard to stop touching it with my tongue. Anyway, it’s full of this venom and, this is cool, it basically gives people amnesia. Like tequila, only much cheaper. So, yeah, he’s not gonna remember any of it. Oh, I can milk the venom out of my gland. It’s just like they do with cobras on YouTube, and it feels really good…”
“Are you high?” Mindy shouted.
Lucia canted her head. “There’s a bit of a sugar rush, I suppose. Blood sugar rush. Ugh, that was horrible, forget I made that joke.”
“You’re a vampire!”
“Keep your voice down.”
“You’re a fucking vampire!”
“People are trying to sleep, Minz, it’s a school night.”
Mindy looked at Lucia. How had it taken her this long to notice—really notice
—that Lucia’s entire jaw was smeared with blood? It stood out, black in the moonlight, but still a little red, vivid on her pale face. Real.
Mindy thumped her head back against her house. “Okay. Okay, I know what to do.”
“Do you, Mindy? Do you know what to do when you’re BFFs with a vampire? Because that is going to be some very useful knowledge now.”
“We need to get you cleaned up before someone sees you.” Mindy turned on the garden hose, cupping her hands under it, washing Lucia’s face with the water. Lucia knelt on her hands, leaned forward like she was going to have her first kiss. “We’ll go to the police, we’ll go to the FBI. Maybe someone knows about this and it’s just classified, maybe there’s a treatment or a cure…”
Lucia rolled her eyes. “Or maybe they’ll dissect me in Area 51 to figure out how to get a superspeed pill on the market. I’ve thought of this, Minz. The government can’t even keep the Obama girls getting bukkaked a secret; if they knew about this, it would be out there. People would tweet about it. But nobody knows, so… Plus, I need blood or I turn into Sarah Jessica Parker without makeup.”
There was so much blood on her mouth. It wasn’t just a bloody nose, a scraped elbow. It was like stripping paint. Mindy practically slapped at Lucia, getting it all off. “They’d give you blood! From hospitals! Not from—people!”
“I know I’m white, Mindy, but I’m not that white. I’m a twentieth Cherokee, so I’m not trusting The Man here.”
Finally, Mindy thought she had all of it off. She just held Lucia’s face. The spigot kept running. “What about animal blood?”
“I tried that, and I don’t think my little brother’s guinea pig is ever gonna forgive me.” Lucia saw Mindy’s look. “Tidwell’s fine! I just used a little syringe and did a taste test.”
“Yeah, on the guinea pig you use a syringe, on the dude—the human dude—”
“Tidwell never raped anyone, Mindy. Except my shoe once, and it was pretty adorable.”
“This is crazy.” Mindy felt her mind going again. It was a weird sensation—being able to pinpoint how insane you were going. “This is crazy, it’s crazy. Please tell me that it’s a prank. You’re the best at pranks, okay Lucia? You really got me, and I’ve really learned whatever it is you meant to teach me by pretending to be a vampire, but let’s just stop and—El, please.”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 15