Bite Somebody Else

by Sara Dobie Bauer

  “Imogene, will you please cover yourself?”

  She reached her hand up and touched his red-brown hair. “You look really sexy at sunset. Hair all a mess.”

  He ducked his head away from her, hands still in protective claws.

  “You’re coming out with us tonight.”

  “Fine. One drink. Just have some bloody decency.”

  She smacked her lips together in an air kiss and then rewrapped herself in the sheet like a walking mummy. “Don’t wear a suit. Where we’re going, you’ll get unwanted attention.”

  “But I always wear suits.”

  She opened the fridge and pulled out a new bag of blood. “You can borrow something of Ian’s.”

  “Ian’s pants would be five inches too long.”

  She hopped up on the counter. “You seriously don’t own a pair of jeans?”

  He furrowed his brow and looked angry at the sink. “I brought one pair of jeans.”

  “Good job, Nicky.”

  “I told you not to call me that,” he growled.

  “You shouldn’t have. Now, I know exactly how to piss you off.” She sipped and smiled.

  “I think you’re very good at pissing people off.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet.” She slurped and burped. “We’ll leave at eleven. Get your responsible shit done before then.” She yelled “cheers” in her best British accent before heading upstairs for a shower.

  She called Ian. “Drift Inn?”

  “Yeah. Celia’s at work, and I finished my assignment early. They’re making a video game about killing vampires. I mean, seriously?”

  “I dunno, sounds kind of fun.”

  She heard his office chair creak across phone lines. “What time?”

  “Eleven. And I have an agenda.”

  “Drink whiskey?”

  “No. I mean, yes, but something else. I’m bringing Nicholas.”

  “That’s cool.”

  She sifted through her many outfits. “No, it’s not cool. I had to flash him my tits to get him to come.”

  “I don’t think I understand that sentence.”

  “We need to get him drunk.”

  “That’s what we always do at The Drift Inn.”

  She pulled out a low-cut blue top with stripes of shiny, black leather. “He says he doesn’t drink to excess. We need to get him to drink to excess.”

  “You’re not going to get him drunk and take advantage of him, are you?”

  “Sort of, but not in the way you’re picturing.”

  Silence.

  “Ian. Stop picturing.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Look.” She sat down on the edge of her bed. “I think he’s hiding something. Whenever I ask him personal shit, he always skirts the issue, like he’s a secret agent or something. If we get him drunk, maybe we’ll find out more.”

  “So this is, like, an investigatory mission?”

  “For a himbo, you use really big words sometimes.”

  “That’s what Celia says. Am I really a himbo?”

  She tilted her head. “Sweetie.”

  Ian made a sad little pouty noise through the phone.

  “Eleven. Be there.” She hung up and got ready. She blasted Billy Idol at full volume and danced in the shower, then got dressed.

  Her black skirt was practically painted on. The blue shirt was the same way. She made sure her purple curls were big as ever and went with black eyeliner and lipstick to match. She found her highest pair of black stilettos, plus matching black-rimmed sunglasses, and winked at herself in the mirror before gracefully descending the stairs to find a very different version of one Lord Nicholas Christopher Cuthbert III.

  “Oh,” she said.

  He set down his glass of blood and turned to face her. “I look like a child.”

  “No.”

  The jeans were… well, it took some serious control to keep her fangs in her mouth, and she wished there was a way to cross her legs while standing. Like the rest of his clothes, the jeans looked expensive, made of dark denim that hugged his thighs just right. He had on a dark green button-down that really made his weird, holographic eyes shine. She wanted to suction herself to his chest like a starfish. Even better, she wanted to lick every inch of his body.

  She cleared her throat. “You look really hot actually.”

  “Hot? Okay.”

  “Shit, man, can’t you take a compliment?”

  “Oh. Thank you.” He put his hands in his pockets and did look noticeably younger than the man who usually wore suits and took care of pregnant vampires. “You look very nice, as well.”

  “I know.” She winked. “Chug that blood. Let’s move!”

  They walked to The Drift Inn side by side with Imogene expounding over all the wonders of her favorite dive bar, including Angry Santa, the bottomless rum punches, and her favorite guitarist: a mangy middle-aged woman who could shred like Clapton.

  They found Ian outside, waiting. She ran up to him, jumped, and wrapped her legs around his waist. “Gorgeous boy!” She licked his cheek.

  Ian was pretty much nocturnal now, what with his vampire wife and baby on the way. He was almost as pale as a vampire with fewer freckles than he’d had when they first met—although still enough to make her swoon. Make all girls swoon, really. Ian was just that kind of guy: sweet, sexy, with no idea of how good-looking he really was.

  When she jumped out of his arms, Ian reached out to shake Nicholas’s hand. His green eyes darted from Ian to Imogene, no doubt wondering over their odd relationship.

  “Come on, let’s get drunk.” She led the way to the entrance.

  The front door was open to the summer heat, so smoke poured out like upside down ocean waves. Inside, the place was humming with conversation and clinking bottles. The band would start in an hour—maybe. They started whenever they got drunk enough.

  “This.” She held her hands above her head. “Is The Drift Inn!”

  Nicholas mumbled behind her, but Ian walked right up to the bar and ordered three shots of whiskey. Angry Santa had grown to like Ian, too, it seemed. Then again, everyone liked Ian. The bartender returned with Ian’s request as fast as his bitter, old man legs could move. His t-shirt choice for the evening: a big picture of Kermit the Frog.

  “Come on, Nicholas.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him forward.

  “I’m not drinking that,” he said when they reached the bar.

  “Sure, you are.” Ian handed him a shot glass. “To Nicholas, for keeping my wife from freaking out about our baby.”

  “Now you have to toast to that.” Imogene stuck her bony elbow into his ribs.

  They took the shots together, before Imogene beckoned to Angry Santa and ordered a rum punch. Ian ordered a cheap beer, and Nicholas faltered.

  “Vodka mart… Vodka… Just vodka.”

  Angry Santa gave him the stink eye. “You old enough to drink?”

  “Yes.” Imogene tossed a hint of glamour at her favorite bartender, who started making their drinks.

  Nicholas turned to Imogene. “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re having fun. Or you will be, once you pull the stick out of your ass.”

  His eyes roved around the bar and stopped near the shelves of bottles near the back. “Is that a mannequin?”

  “Yep.”

  “She looks disturbingly like you.”

  “I know. Celia calls her Imogene II.”

  “There’s an open table in the back.” Ian gestured with his bottle.

  “Get it, baby.” She smacked his ass as he walked away.

  “He’s a married man, Imogene.”

  She lifted her sunglasses. “Nicholas, it’s how I am with Ian. It’s how I’ve always been. It doesn’t bug anybody.”

  “Not even his wife?” He took a sip of vodka.

  “No, because Ian loves her. He worships her. I’m just his grabby friend.”

  “You saved his life.”

  “I wasn’t alone.” She licked a drop of
peach juice from the side of her glass.

  “You mean a lot to them, you know.”

  She groaned. “Can you stop with the emotional shit? Jesus, we’re in a bar. We’re going to get drunk, and we’re going to dance.”

  He glanced at the jukebox, which was blaring Blondie.

  “Wait for the band to start, dumb-dumb.” She latched onto his arm and tugged him past beach bums and over-tan women, still in bathing suits from their day at the beach. Most of them turned to stare as they passed, and Imogene couldn’t blame them. If Nicholas weren’t a vampire, she would have had him glamoured and in her bed by then.

  They found Ian on one knee next to the table. He stood and gave the table a shake. “Fixed it!”

  “Crooked table?”

  He nodded. It was delightful how excited the man got over simple pleasures.

  Imogene sat down facing the stage, and Nicholas, after inspecting his chair—probably for chewing gum—sat, too. She watched him look around the bar. Yeah, he had the face of a nineteen-year-old, but he didn’t carry any lingering baby fat. His face was long and slim and almost more pretty than manly. He wouldn’t get cast in a blow ‘em up action movie anytime soon, but he’d possibly make an excellent drag queen.

  “So this video game,” Ian said. “The creators obviously didn’t do their research, because we all know you can’t kill vampires with stakes or silver bullets.”

  “Silver bullets are werewolves,” Nicholas said while spinning his glass of straight vodka on the dented table.

  Ian’s nose wrinkled. “Werewolves are real?”

  “Of course.”

  Ian looked at Imogene. “Did you know about this?”

  Imogene shook her head.

  Ian spun back toward Nicholas. “You’re telling me there are werewolves just wandering around out there?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Oh, my God, I think he just made a joke,” Imogene said.

  Nicholas looked away from her, smiling.

  “So he does have a sense of humor.”

  “Shut up, Imogene.” He took a longer sip of vodka.

  She smacked the table. “He’s not a robot!”

  “Imogene,” Ian said.

  “No, she’s right. I’m out of practice. I’m much more accustomed to dealing with books than people. And the people I deal with, or vampires, aren’t usually very nice.” He finished his drink.

  Imogene jumped to her feet. “I’ll get you a refill.” She grabbed his glass before he could stop her and rushed to the bar. A woman in a bright pink tube top, two sizes too small, nudged her and exhaled smoke in her face. “You with the single one?”

  Imogene took a second to understand what was being asked. Ah, of course every chick in the bar noticed Ian’s silver wedding band. But Nicholas…

  “Yeah,” she said without thinking.

  “Lucky bitch.” The woman turned back to her beer.

  Imogene looked at their table. The boys were laughing about something. When she returned with another round, Ian pointed at Nicholas.

  “He met Wharf?”

  She rolled her eyes. “He didn’t meet him. They ran into each other in my hallway.”

  “Does he really look like a caveman?” Ian asked.

  “Yeah. Kind of.” She slid Nicholas his vodka.

  “Imogene’s my best friend, and I’ve never even met the guy. I feel cheated.”

  “He’s nothing special.” She rolled around the flavor of fruit juice and rum in her mouth.

  “Then why do you sleep with him?” Nicholas asked and looked her right in the eye.

  “We don’t do much sleeping.”

  Nicholas cleared his throat.

  “He’s a great lay, and there are no strings attached.” She smiled. “No muss, no fuss.”

  “Do you sleep with other clients?”

  “Wow, that’s none of your business.”

  Nicholas shrugged. “You know what they say about mixing business with pleasure.”

  “It’s good for profits?” She winked at Ian, who smirked.

  “That you shouldn’t do it,” Nicholas said.

  She leaned her elbows on the sticky table. “Is that why you won’t sleep with me?”

  Ian choked on his beer.

  Nicholas licked his upper lip and looked at the bar. “I think I need another shot.”

  “Done!” Ian hustled away.

  “I embarrass you a lot, don’t I?” she said.

  “Yes, you do, and I think you enjoy it.”

  She gave him a huge fake grin with just a hint of fang.

  The band started soon after, following another round of Jameson’s, and although Nicholas’s lips didn’t get any looser, his shoulders did. He even slumped a little in his seat. An older lady that reminded Imogene a little of the serial-killing black widow Heidi grabbed Ian’s hand when the band started a hard rock cover of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

  “Come with me, handsome!” She sounded like maybe cigarettes actually grew in her throat.

  Ian laughed and gave in to her relentless dragging until he ended up on the dance floor, surrounded by what had to be the older woman’s posse: six ladies with skin like leather and hair dyed the color of a bruised peach.

  “Dance with me,” Imogene said.

  “To what? This isn’t even music.”

  She stood. “You’re deader than most dead people I know.”

  He glared at her and pushed his chair back. With Imogene in high heels, they were nose to nose. He took her hand in his roughly. “Try to keep up.”

  As it was a Queen cover with a classic beat, Nicholas turned a hard rock medley into a perfect excuse to mix the Charleston with the Lindy Hop—two forms of dance Imogene hadn’t experienced since swing was all the rage in the late nineties. She, embarrassingly, did have to “keep up,” and soon—what with all the twisting, twirling, and foot kicking—they’d pretty much emptied the dance floor. Even the old ladies with Ian just stood there cheering, and the band went into a lengthy jam to give them more time to work.

  Nicholas flipped her and spun her until her eyes crossed, but she kept smiling. Imogene loved to dance, always had. It’d saved her when she’d been a misfit in the Midwest, escaping to secret dance clubs where older men showed her a thing or two or three. Now, another “older man” did the same, and by the time the song finally ended, they were nose to nose, huffing into each other’s mouths.

  She leaned in to kiss him when one of the leather-skinned ladies latched onto his shoulder and spun him out of her arms. “Mine next!” she shouted to a chorus of tobacco-laced cheers.

  Imogene wandered to the bar for another shot.

  Later—much later—Ian jumped on his bike outside The Drift Inn after giving Nicholas a firm bro hug. “Off to visit the wife at work,” he said as he rode with surprisingly good balance down the uneven pavement of Barkentine Beach.

  Imogene challenged Nicholas to a race home. Then, she challenged him to a race into the ocean. She tore off most of her clothes as she ran and dove headfirst into the white-capped waves. The summer water felt like sitting too close to a fire.

  She turned just in time to see Nicholas dive in behind her and cursed herself for not stealing the opportunity to check out his bod. All she saw was a flash of pale skin before he surfaced nearby and shook his hair like a wet dog.

  “My God, I haven’t been swimming in the ocean in—”

  “Centuries?”

  He floated on his back, which gave her a quick view of his flat abdomen and hairless chest before a layer of dark water slid across his skin. “Not that long.”

  She paddled next to him, hair surrounding her like a tickly pillow. “Where’d you learn to dance anyway?”

  “I learned Lindy in Chicago. Tango in Barcelona. I practiced ballet in Russia. Then, there was—”

  She chuckled like Butthead. “Did you wear tights?”

  “Of course I wore tights. It’s ballet.”

  She guffawed.
<
br />   “I was in the Andalusia region when a beautiful barmaid taught me flamenco.”

  “Shit, man, you get around.”

  He submerged and came up with another shake of his head. “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.”

  Imogene watched droplets of water pool beneath his eyes and under his cheekbones before dripping off the edge of his thin chin. He stared at the beach.

  “This reminds me of the Thames,” he said.

  “The disgustingly polluted river in London?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “This is nothing like the Thames. This is the beautiful, wonderful, clean, and clear ocean. In Florida!” She splashed him.

  “All right, maybe not in the literal sense but in the way it makes me feel—swimming, free of distraction, with a beautiful woman, while the world burns.”

  Imogene looked around for a beach bonfire. “The world isn’t burning.”

  “God, but it is,” he said.

  “Lord Nicholas, I think you might have consumed to excess this fine evening.”

  “Might have, but truly, the last time I felt like this was in September of 1666. I was terribly bored and set a bakery on fire.”

  She stopped swimming to stare at him. “You what?”

  “On Pudding Lane. I was newly turned, mind you, and distraught over never again eating a puff pastry, so I decided to burn down a bakery and ended up setting half of London on fire.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  He chuckled. “No, really, I didn’t mean to set half of London on fire. I didn’t. When I began to realize what I’d done, Amora and I dove into the Thames and floated while the city burned. God, it was gorgeous, and thank Christ no one got hurt.”

  “That is…” She tried to think of the proper word. “Wicked.”

  “Only you, Imogene, would be impressed that an immature immortal set an entire city on fire.”

  “I’m totally impressed.” She kicked up and floated on her back. “I’m all for wrath and destruction. I mean I wouldn’t, like, set Admiral Key on fire or anything. Maybe Lazaret. It really is a shit hole.”

  He didn’t say anything as an eerie quiet settled in. She sat up and studied her surroundings only to find that Nicholas had disappeared.

  “Nicholas?”