“Heh. Nothing.”
Fists on her hips, she quirks an eyebrow. “So why are you apologizing?”
“For all the arguments we used to have whenever you asked me to do stuff. I could tell you’d mentally prepared yourself for a fight, even if you didn’t consciously intend to do it.”
Mom’s expression turns guilty. “Just a habit. You have to admit you were a bit selfish before.”
“Yeah, I know. Hence the ‘sorry.’” I wink. “So, when do they want to go?”
“The movie’s starting in about forty minutes.” Mom shakes her head at the ceiling. “So, naturally the boy asks for a ride two minutes ago. He actually thought I’d leave him at the theater on his own at nine.”
“Oof.” I grimace. “Sophia would have better odds of talking you into letting her get a cat.”
Mom laughs. “Hmm. Hard call there. Thank you, sweetie.”
“Sure. Drat.”
“Hmm?”
I wiggle my toes. “This is going to require socks. It’s November. I’ll get weird looks for walking around in flip-flops.”
“Don’t you dare.” Mom shivers. “That makes me cold even thinking about it.”
Chuckling, I trade the skirt I’d intended to wear around the house all day for jeans and socks, then head upstairs. Sam, plus his two friends Daryl and Jordan are waiting by the door. To most people, Jordan’s skinny, but not compared to my family’s genetics. I consider him average. Daryl’s a little heavy, and I can still smell birthday cake on him since he turned ten a week ago on November fourth. Or, wait, maybe I’m smelling him.
Nah. Can’t be. It’s too ‘daylighty’ in the room. My senses aren’t any sharper than normal at the moment.
“Thanks for driving us!” Sam hugs me.
“Yeah, thanks, Sarah.” Daryl gives me a double thumbs-up.
“Sweet.” Jordan grins. “Your sister’s cool.”
“Not so cool that I’m going to scam you guys into an R-rated movie. Which one are you going to see?”
“The new Avengers one,” says Sam.
I blink. “Didn’t they kill them all off?”
All three boys laugh. “Naw.”
“At least not yet,” says Sam, deadpan.
After I step into my sneakers, we hurry out to the old Sentra, none of the boys bothering with umbrellas. I’ve got a compact pink Hello Kitty one Ashley gave me for my seventeenth birthday. Naturally, Sophia saw it and had to have one like it. I swear, that girl… if Brussels sprouts were pink, she’d adore them.
Not quite four minutes into the ride, the stench of forty-thousand dead souls assaults my nostrils.
“Aww, man!” yells Jordan. “Dude!”
“Lies!” Daryl punches him on the shoulder. “He’s lying. He thinks you’ll blame the fat kid.”
I cough, eyes nearly watering. Good grief, that’s worse than anything Dad ever summoned and none of these boys are even half his size.
“You’re not fat, Daryl. Tim Dearborn is fat.” Sam eyes the door, but appears unfazed by the horror in the air. “We can’t open the windows because it’s raining too hard. That’s kind of unsportsmanlike.”
“C’mon, Sam.” Jordan leans into the front seat. “That’s a good one. You should be laughing.”
Sam sighs and glances at him. “My sister is in the car. Not cool to shred the atmosphere around her. She has to breathe too.” He sneaks a little wink at me that the boys can’t see.
The kid has a point. I stop breathing for a while.
Daryl continues to gag while pantomime-clawing at the window like he’s trapped in a chamber of toxic gas. This, of course, only makes Jordan laugh louder. Fortunately, even with rainy roads, it doesn’t take us that long to get to the theater. The boys leap out and run for the entrance as soon as I park. Not wanting to become drenched, I walk like a normal vampire with an umbrella.
Upon noticing them in line at a ticket kiosk, it occurs to me that Mom didn’t give me any money for tickets. Evidently, Daryl’s covering the boys’ tickets with his birthday money. I briefly debate mental trickery to get in. Stealing still feels wrong, even a movie ticket. Of course, I don’t have a job or any money of my own left. That means, I either cheat my way in or the parents are paying for me. Pretty sure Mom expected that since she asked me to take the boys, so I don’t feel any guilt whipping out the authorized-user credit card they gave me.
Okay, that’s a lie. As soon as I see it, my brain leaps to thinking about how Hunter doesn’t have one. Heck, I’m not sure his mother even has a credit card at all. My parents can afford to trust me with access to their credit card account. The moment of awkwardness passes when I blame society for such inequalities. My life hasn’t been comfortable because my parents exploited anyone, so there’s nothing for me to feel ashamed of. It’s the human dragons sitting on their piles of gold with fourteen yachts, six mansions, and more money than anyone could spend in a hundred lifetimes who should be ashamed of themselves. And yeah, I extend that contempt toward a handful of vampires, too. Aurélie has a crapton of money, but she’s also been around for several centuries, and she still has a lot less than some mortals. Doesn’t stop me from wishing Hunter’s family wasn’t in such a position. Or any family for that matter.
Anyway, I get my ticket and follow the kids straight to the snack counter. We go deep enough in the building that combined with the gloominess outside, my powers come online unexpectedly. I fake a sneeze to distract anyone who might be looking right at me from noticing the brief red glow in my eyes.
Right. Movie snack counter. Here, I have no qualms using my powers. In the hierarchy of scoundrel scumminess, you have simple thieves, people who embezzle millions, those who scam elderly couples out of their life savings, people who steal money from children’s charities, and finally movie theater snack merchants. No problems exploiting my powers here.
Daryl approaches the guy behind the register, who’s probably like sixteen or seventeen. He stares right over the boy’s head at me and smiles. Ugh. Here comes the lame pick-up line. Since he obligingly made eye contact already, I give him a compulsion to charge the boys only for one soda and popcorn. Still, for what they cost, it’s more than fair for three orders. I could make like six times that amount of popcorn at home for the same price.
Once he’s bucketed the kids’ orders and handed over the sodas, the guy leans on the counter and wags his eyebrows at me. “Hey. I’m Nathan. What’s your name?”
“Sarah.”
“Cool. Got plans for after the movie?”
“She’s got a boyfriend,” adds Sam in a slightly raised voice.
Nathan leans back, giving me an almost insulted look. “Really? What’s his name?”
“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
“Thought so.” He tries to revert to the suave smile, but is still giving off irritation. “You don’t need to use the fake boyfriend excuse. Girls shouldn’t lie. It’s not sexy. C’mon. You know you’re not busy after the movie.”
I narrow my eyes at him, trying to come up with something to say or do to him that won’t get the Persons In Black knocking on my door. Compelling him to run around the theater shouting ‘I am an asshole’ probably wouldn’t go over too well.
Before anything comes to mind, the soda fountain to Nathan’s left explodes in a spray of multicolored syrup, dousing him—and the area around him—liberally. He screams, flails, and promptly falls on his ass in the slippery puddle. Within seconds of him crashing to the floor, the eruption from the soda fountain stops.
Sam, Daryl, and Jordan burst into laughter.
Oh, that has imp all over it. Even though the little bugger can’t make himself invisible from me when my abilities are online, I don’t see him around. Still, not going to complain.
“Nice,” I whisper.
My brother’s backpack twitches.
Aha. Wow. Guess he really has become more of a friend than a pet.
While Nathan struggles to get to his feet, I shoo the boys
down a huge hall decorated in dark red curtains and movie posters among the theater entrances. Naturally, ours has the longest line, all along the right side wall behind those irritating fuzzy rope barriers. It’s not a big deal though since we have guaranteed seats. Another teen employee goes by, apologizing for the delay and informing us that the theater is still in use, should be open in about ten minutes.
The absolutely weird fact that occurs to me a minute or two later is that the boys and I are probably the youngest people in line for a comic book movie. Almost everyone around us is thirty or older. Sure, there’s a handful of kids, but three out of five people waiting for this movie are neither parents nor all that young. Conversations about characters, powers, and plot lines abound. It mostly goes over my head as I’ve never been much of a superhero fan. My dad, Sierra, and Sam are nuts for it, so a certain degree of information-by-osmosis has occurred.
Sam, in a moment of highly uncharacteristic extroversion, inserts himself into a conversation among three grown men about some story arc involving a secondary hammer or something like that. Other than a brief glimpse at each guy’s head to make sure they’re not a threat to my li’l bro, I largely tune their conversation out.
My ears pick up an older guy screaming at Nathan for making a mess. Heh.
Eventually, the theater doors open and a river of people shambles out. Most are ashen-faced, like they’d just witnessed some horrible tragedy unfold. A few seem excited, one or two look highly pissed off. One such angry guy glances over at the conversation going on between my brother, his friends, and the three guys still discussing that hammer.
“Thor dies!” shouts the angry guy.
A collective gasp comes from the line around me. The next thing I know, like fifteen people jump the rope barrier and pounce on this guy, beating the snot out of him. He crashes to the floor, screaming for help and trying to defend his face. A little girl who can’t be older than like eight scurries out there and furiously kicks him repeatedly in the leg.
Sam, Daryl, and Jordan stare at the melee with expressions of heartbreak.
Three movie theater employees run over, yelling at people to calm down. Some of the attackers slip back into line.
The little girl gets in one more cheap shot to the guy’s balls, yells, “Spoilers suck!” and darts back to her father.
I grasp Sam’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about that spoiler. He could be lying. But either way, it won’t ruin the movie for you.”
“What?” He peers up at me. Disappointment evaporates a few seconds later. “Oh! Yeah! Please.”
Once the people back away from the guy, I delete the last five minutes of the man’s memory. Hey, not condoning assault or anything, but spoiling a movie like that? Yeah, he deserved a bit of a beating. He also gets a temporary compulsion that limits his ability to speak for about an hour. No matter what he tries to say, he’s going to blurt ‘I’m a jackass.’ Next, I give the theater people an urge to walk away and forget they saw a fight.
Everyone more or less goes back to normal and we stand there in peace—despite much complaining and grumbling from the people in line about the spoiler—while the employees clean up the theater. Minutes later, we shuffle in and take our assigned seats. As soon as we’re comfortable, I erase the spoiler from the boys’ memory.
A short delay later, the lights dim and the preview reel starts.
“What kind of dickhead yells a spoiler like that?” asks a guy in the row behind us.
“Spoiler?” Sam looks at me, confused. Realization sets in, and he hugs me. “You’re an awesome big sister.”
“You’re a pretty awesome li’l bro, too.”
So, yeah. A bunch of fan-favorite characters went through the meat grinder.
My brother, his friends, and the people shuffling out of the theater at the end of the movie have the same shell-shocked expressions as the group ahead of us. The boys quietly mutter to each other about the odds that the deaths are some kind of trick. Either everyone will get brought back to life by a powerful demigod or new people will assume the identities of the fallen heroes.
Since I haven’t been following the story arc over the past three movies, my emotional reaction isn’t as deep. It’s a bit after six at night now, so the sun’s gone down. Hooray for winter, right? At least the boys don’t regret going to see it. This might be the first time Sam has seen a movie so soon after it released. I text Mom on the walk to the front of the theater, letting her know the movie’s over and we’re on the way home.
Besides spoilers, you know what else sucks? Prey instinct.
Not in and of itself, mind you. The sucky part is that I have it. More to the point, girls tend to develop it as soon as they realize the world is not a safe place for them. Ashley and I knew never to go to a public bathroom alone ever since we turned like nine. We never questioned it, just did it. The craptitude of that whole paradigm never really occurred to me until I rose to the top of the food chain. Like, I grew up trained to consider myself vulnerable to attack at any moment along with the nervous guilt that comes with being conditioned to accept that if someone did something to me, it would’ve been considered my fault because I screwed up and let my guard down.
Despite being immortal, my hopes of living long enough to see a world that stops blaming girls for everything that happens to them is pretty dim.
Anyway, as soon as we reach the front room with all the ticket kiosks, my prey instinct returns—and I don’t like it. I shouldn’t have prey instinct anymore. The feeling has returned because I feel someone staring at me the way no young woman ever wants to be stared at. It doesn’t take me long to locate the source: a twentyish Hispanic dude leaning against the wall on the right, acting far too casual. His hair is super short and dark smudges mark the sides of his face and neck, probably tattoos. Hard to gauge his build under a winter coat, but he definitely doesn’t look like he’s used to the weather here—and he’s also staring straight at me.
That’s pretty telling given the number of people in the room between us. Plenty of young women, quite a few I’d say are way hotter than I am. No, this dude is interested in me for some reason. This is no random creep looking for a girl to hit on, or even a darker creep with worse intentions. It’s fairly obvious that he’s a human, but for reasons beyond my understanding, his thoughts are walled off from my sight.
Okay, that definitely means something supernatural is about to bite me square on the ass.
Hmm. Do I storm over there and confront him in a public place where there’s less chance he’ll do something violent? Having my brother and his friends with me adds another layer of complexity. If anything happened to them, I’d never forgive myself. So, the best course of action is to get the hell out of here.
As casual as possible, I usher the boys out the doors to the parking lot while keeping one eye on the dude. Could he be another hunter, one who’s far more competent than the last group? That’s probably not likely since he looks like some kind of gangbanger. Admittedly, the winter coat makes him a little funny. Like this dude is trying to look so ‘hard,’ but he’s shivering, and it’s sorta amusing.
Predictably, he follows us out to the lot, tailing us two rows over. Rain’s still falling, but more of a drizzle than the aquatic pounding from earlier. It’s tempting to run for the car before he can make a move, but he’s not some random creep. This guy is clearly interested in me on a deep, personal level and I don’t at all feel like getting touchy-feely with him. At least, not without claws being involved. Since he’s already at the theater waiting for me, I figure he knows what my car looks like. He had to have trailed us here, and simply eluded my awareness during the daylight. When we reach the Sentra, the guy can’t help himself but sneer a little.
Okay, he didn’t know what I drove. Weird. And hey, this creep is stalking me and he’s got the nerve to critique my ten-year-old ride? Screw you, pal. Drat. Now he knows what my car looks like. How the heck did he find me at the theater if he hadn’t followed me in? Not
recognizing the Sentra means he also doesn’t know where we live.
Maybe I can lose him on the road?
“That dude’s following us,” says Sam.
“Yeah, I know.” I shoot the guy a ‘back off’ look before dropping in behind the wheel and closing my door. “Hurry up and get in.”
Sam jumps into the passenger seat while his friends cram into the back. “Is he…”
“Probably has a gun.” says Jordan.
“Dude.” Daryl hunkers down, peering over the seatback out the rear window. “You can’t just assume a Latin looking guy with tats is carrying a gun.”
“Then why are you ducking?” Jordan folds his arms. “The guy looks like he’s straight out of GTA.”
I back out of the space and drive a little fast down the row.
“Because, sometimes people who look like gang members are gang members.” Daryl pivots to keep watching the guy as the car turns.
“You contradicted yourself.” Sam looks back at his friend.
“Not really. Jordan’s thinking he’s carrying a gun because he looks kinda rough and has tats on his face. I’m thinking he’s dangerous because he’s following us and staring at your sister like he’s gonna do something bad.”
The boys proceed to debate the concept of stereotyping people while I focus on not crashing. Between the damnable sky water and traffic, I’m not going to be doing any Fast and the Furious type stuff tonight. More like the Sluggish and Mildly Perturbed. That’s probably what they’re going to call the fortieth movie in that franchise when everyone’s elderly. Maybe they’ll be driving their electric scooters recklessly around the aisles of Walmart while a security guard on a Segway chases them.
“Hey, can we go to that VR place?” asks Jordan.
“Sam’s gotta be home by seven for dinner.”
“Aww,” chorus all three boys.
Conversation shifts back to the movie for a little while once we’re on the highway and up to a reasonable speed. With three kids in the car, I’m driving like a responsible person despite wanting to fly (metaphorically) to get away from that guy. Unfortunately, there’s a small Toyota a few car lengths back that’s been there for most of the ride.
Ordinary Problems of a College Vampire (Vampire Innocent Book 7) Page 6