by J. R. Rain
My career has just run naked into the sun, and turned to ash.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Monster
The Damocles’ Sword of termination hanging over me fills my days of sitting around at home with dread. I’m happy to be with my family all day, but I can’t enjoy it. Every minute I spend not thinking about what I’m going to do with myself feels like I’m wasting time.
I do a little looking into other possible jobs that would let me work a night shift and offer enough money to be worth pursuing. Though, I do circle back to wondering about Danny’s suggestion of private investigation. It’s a crazy/scary thought, the idea of not having a ‘real’ job. But, I suppose in some way, it might prove liberating. But when my kids’ security is on the line, I’m not quite willing to take that chance if I can find something more stable.
It’s been four days since I left Nico’s office, and I haven’t had any contact from HUD other than my visits to Chad in the hospital. That’s another bit of anxiety I’m dealing with. There’s still the (albeit remote) chance of them charging me with a crime or suing me. All things considered, either of those outcomes are pretty unlikely, but I can’t go to prison. It would literally kill me the first time they left me in a cell with a window. Of course, I am uniquely equipped to be a fugitive. But, that would mean being away from my family…
The sun bath it is.
But, those thoughts aside, I have to focus on my immediate circumstances, and do everything I can to avoid losing the house we put so much sweat into.
Danny’s picked up a potential boon of a case, snagging a well-off client who’s being sued by a number of women. Whenever I ask him about the case, he goes bright red in the face and won’t come out and tell me who the man is. I’ve got no idea where it came from, but the idea that he’s representing some kind of porn kingpin or a sleaze peddler gnaws at my brain.
Are we really that desperate?
I sigh at the darkened curtains in the living room from my seat on the sofa. Yeah. I guess we are.
He’s typing like mad on the laptop behind me in the dining room, having continued working after arriving home from the office.
“Oh, crap,” says Danny, at a sudden lull in the clickety-clack of computer keys. “I forgot to swing by Albertson’s on the way home.”
“I got it.”
“But you’re, you know...”
“I’m what?”
“Unwell.”
I kill the TV and stand. “It’s dark out. I’m fine now. More than fine. Besides, you’re up to your eyeballs. I think I can handle picking up milk, cereal, and a pack of diapers.” At the thought of diapers, my heart grows heavy. It won’t be too long before Anthony’s done with them, and I’ll never have to make another diaper run again. Like, ever. Okay, that thought sucked.
“He takes after me, you know.”
“Took you forever to potty train, too?” A grin spreads across my lips.
Danny shakes his head. “No, silly. I think our son is just sort of lazy. Why take the hard way when you can take the easy way?”
“Crapping in your diaper is the easy way?”
“Takes less effort to let it out wherever he happens to be at the moment instead of walking to the bathroom. In a way, I envy him.”
Now I’m laughing. “You? Lazy? I never could’ve imagined.”
“Then we’re even. I still can’t imagine you streaking around the woods as a hippie child.” He leans back in the chair and stretches, yawning. “I grew out of it. When I was a kid, I think I had sloth genes.”
“Oh, I usually put clothes on if I planned on going more than fifty feet from the house. It was Clayton who streaked all the way to town. Okay, need anything?”
“Uhh, how about a win in court?”
“They don’t have that at the store, I’m afraid.”
Danny leans forward and resumes typing. “Nothing I can really think of.”
Except, I get the strangest notion he’s running a short list of groceries through his head that he wanted to ask me to get, but he feels bad sending the bloodsucker to pick up food that I can’t partake in. I guess he figures it’s as cruel as asking an ex-smoker to stop and grab a pack of cigs. It annoys me that he’s basically lying, but because he’s trying to spare making me feel like an outsider, I let it drop.
“Okay. Back soon.”
After checking on the kids, kissing Danny on the cheek, and grabbing my sneakers, I head out to the Momvan. It’s a little after nine, so Albertson’s should still be open, and best of all, I don’t have to worry about sunblock. A mile or so away from the house, oncoming cars start flashing their lights at me.
Oops.
I turn on my headlights and squint at the brightness on the road, but eventually, my eyes adjust. Technically, I’m still a paid employee of HUD, but despite going to buy food for the kids, I can’t help but wince at spending money, like I’m stranded on a desert island and rationing my last canteen of water.
After parking, I stroll across the lot, enjoying not having to hurry out of the roasting glare of the sun. The inside is painfully bright, but I keep my head down and tolerate it. Overpowered fluorescent lights and mirror-polished white floors are way nicer than sunlight. Soon, I’ve got a basket on my arm and I’m running around collecting a few necessities we’d run out of. Shopping is such an automatic, normal task, my body runs on autopilot while my mind gallops off on a tornado of worry about what I’m going to do with myself once I’m officially terminated. Or resign. Or… whatever.
A tantalizing aroma filters out of the background din of uninteresting people food when I near the cooler aisle in search of milk. Like a salivating dog, I find my head turning to the left at the meat counter, my attention honing in on a middle-aged worker in the meat cutting area upending a plastic basin into the sink, dumping blood.
It’s about time I have a meal… I’ve been so worried about work that I’ve gone two days without eating. Guess anxiety works on vampires too? It’s tempting to leap the counter and swipe the basin away from the guy, but I have enough control over myself to resist making a scene. Plus, I’ve got plenty of blood back home.
I turn away from the counter, hurrying around the endcap into a cooler aisle.
A shrill high-pitched scream startles me to a halt.
Five feet in front of me, a little girl about Tammy’s age is leaning half-inside one of the cooler doors, her hand on a carton of ice cream. She’s frozen stock still, staring at me and shrieking every ounce of air out of her lungs.
“I’m thorry?” I lisp, and realize immediately what’s wrong.
She bursts into tears and runs away, crying out for her daddy and shouting, “¡Papi! “¡Papi! ¡Es una diablesa!”
Crap!
My fangs are out.
Cheeks burning, I duck out of sight around the corner of the aisle and huddle against the endcap, a case of frozen pizzas, hiding my mouth with my hand. My God… what if that had been one of my kids? Overwhelmed with shame and horror, I squat to the floor and bury my face in my hands, shaking. A little girl screamed and ran away from me like I’m some kind of monster.
Aren’t I?
I’m not even human anymore.
If my kids ever looked at me like that, I couldn’t handle it. Nope. It would break my heart into a million pieces. I can never ever let them see that side of me. Hell, even I’m disgusted with myself, by these daggers in my head. The tension in my facial muscles relaxes not two seconds before an agitated man appears at the end of the aisle and starts machine-gunning me with Spanish. I follow enough that he’s pissed off and wants to know what I did to his daughter.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure.” I peer up at him, probably looking like a terrified little girl myself. As soon as we make eye contact, all the venom drains from his expression. “She just saw me and screamed. I have no idea.”
The man rubs his forehead while the child cries in the distance. A woman, perhaps her mother, whispers “Todo está bien,” and “Cálm
ate, cariño.”
A sniffly, tiny voice replies, “¡Vi una diablesa!”
Yes, I can hear voices whispering from halfway down the aisle.
The man before me lets his arm flop to his side with a sigh, and switches to English. “My kid thought she, uhh…”
“Saw a devil…” I flash an apologetic smile, wide enough so he can see my normal teeth. “Entiendo un poco. I’ve got a lot on my mind, maybe I looked angry or something. I’m sorry for scaring her.”
“It’s all right.” He offers me a hand, to help me up off the floor.
“Thanks.” I feel unworthy of his kindness after what I did to his daughter, so I stand without accepting his offer. “Sorry.”
The man nods at me and hurries off to his wife and daughter at the far end of the aisle.
Head down like a scolded child, I collect two bottles of milk and make my way to the register.
I can’t let that happen again. Never. This isn’t 1498. It’s the modern age and I can easily get blood in bottles. These fangs are a holdover from days gone by, and I will not let them scar my children. They’re not coming out to play again, if I have anything to say about it.
I may be a vampire.
But I’m a mom first.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Cheers
It’s going to take some planning to work out the logistics of being a stay-at-home vampire mama.
For now, Mary Lou has been watching the kids until about five in the afternoon, so I can rest in a dark bedroom with heavy curtains. Danny’s kept the fridge stocked with at least two bottles of animal blood for my nutritional needs. That’s one good thing. Now I don’t have to go prey on people. Doing that still feels wrong, despite it likely being what God or maybe the ‘other guy’ intended for vampires to do.
Staying up all day and all night doesn’t appear to be having any long-term effects on my ‘health,’ though I can’t say for sure if it will affect my sanity down the road. Continuous wakefulness isn’t what our minds were made to handle, after all. Oh, and even with Danny’s big case, we’re going to lose the house in a few months if I don’t find work.
Geez. This stinks. Count Dracula didn’t have a day job… or even a night job.
Fiction, Sam. That’s a character in a book.
Real world. Real worries.
Six days after my night raid, I have a moment at home with Danny while the kids are at Mary Lou’s. He gets all the truth. Me throwing Renton around, Eva shooting me, the whole nine yards. By the way, the ATF boss, Frank Baker, was happy about what I did. Saved his people a lot of work and they found a serious amount of not-civilian-legal firepower in that armory building. M60 machine guns, M249 machine guns, grenade launchers, land mines, claymore mines… holy crap.
Danny nods through my story, and laughs when I comment how much like that video game it felt when I snuck into the place.
Truth be told, he’s been acting a little weird around me, especially when Tammy and Anthony are close by, so I talk at length about how I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Eva, even after she shot me. She’s just an innocent child poisoned by a hateful set of parents. I really hope she grows out of that mindset. If anything sugars the pain of my resignation, it’s remembering the look of astonishment on Eva’s face when she held Terrell’s hand after realizing he saved her life. I’d like to think that’s the facial expression caused when a bunch of bullshit preconceptions shatter.
My husband’s smile gets more genuine as I go on and on about not being willing to harm a child, but he can’t fully conceal a note of worry. I don’t blame him too much, though. It’s not every day a person comes to terms with creatures like vampires being real… and living with one, not knowing for sure how much of them is still the person they knew and how much might be something else pretending to be them. I know I’m me, but he’s not inside my head. No, something else is in here with me. I’m sure of it.
“I’ve decided to resign,” I say after finishing up the story of the raid. “There’s a chance I would’ve been fired anyway, but since I’m willing to resign and not make any kind of stink about it, they’ll probably just let me slip away quietly. This new existence of mine doesn’t seem compatible with being normal anymore.”
“Oh, that.” Danny grins. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I raise an eyebrow.
He takes my hand and tugs me to my feet. “Your hands are cold.”
“Your hands are hot.” I attempt a smile. “Hot and cold. Yin and yang.”
Danny chuckles and leads me out to our detached garage. I haven’t sunblocked up, but it’s a short dash and doesn’t hurt too much. We go inside, and he approaches a large rectangular block under a sheet. “Ta da.”
“The ghost of a dead appliance?” I ask.
He chuckles. “No, silly. I haven’t had any luck finding any real information about your, umm, condition, but I have been able to help a little.”
“Oh?”
Danny pulls the sheet away to reveal a small refrigerator, the kind of thing bachelors put in their basements to hold beer. “Look inside.”
I lean forward and tug the door open. It’s full of plastic pint bottles, all containing blood. “Oh, wow… Danny, what is this?”
“Blood.”
“Obviously.” I poke him in the side, and decide not to mention I can smell it through the plastic. Lately, it seems reminding him how inhuman I’ve become hasn’t been going over so well. “I mean, it’s so much…”
“Remember that butcher I defended in a drunk driving case? Jaroslaw? I’ve made an arrangement with him. Up to a reasonable cap, I’ve agreed to represent him for future litigation should any arise, and waive my remaining fees for his old case. In exchange, we get blood. He’s only going to dump it down the drain anyway.”
I blink. “What on earth did you tell him we are doing with it?”
“Gardening. Not sure if he believes me, but he didn’t seem to care. Saves him the trouble of dumping it, and saves him on legal fees. Win-win.”
“Hmm.” I select a bottle, pop the cap, and sniff. It’s quite a bit weaker ‘feeling’ than the blood I remember taking from Dale, but it’s also guilt-free. I don’t have to hurt any people. “Hah. This is like the vegan version of a vampire. No humans were harmed in the production of this food.”
He smiles wider than he has since the attack.
Guess I passed some kind of test. Yes, Danny, I’m happy to exist without harming people. A sigh slides across my brain. It’s not reassuring that he doubts me, but given the supernatural element, I can’t really fault him too much.
“This is great,” I say. “Thank you, Danny.”
“You’re welcome, Sam.” He stoops to pull open the drawer at the bottom inside the fridge, and pulls out a can of Heineken, which he taps against my blood bottle. “To us.”
“To us.” I tap his can back.
“Cheers,” he says before taking a giant swig.
I glug down a few mouthfuls. The little bits of flesh and hair are irritating, but again… no one is getting hurt for this blood. It’s not gourmet, but it’s survival.
Danny nudges the door shut with his foot. We stand there for a moment in the annoyingly-detached garage of our dream home, staring at each other like we did so many times during the year of fixing up the place. Every time the stress just got too much, we’d wind up ignoring it all, skipping a day of work on the house and just be there for each other.
This feels like one of those moments.
Money-wise, we’re still barely getting by. I can’t sit around doing nothing or we’re going to get foreclosed on, and I refuse to let what happened to me take anything more away from my life. First, I need some income. The paid suspension won’t last forever.
Time for Samantha Moon to fight back.
“So,” I say, with a hint of a smile. “Tell me more about that private investigator thing.”
The End
Samantha Moon Origins will return!
Bo
ok #3 coming soon!
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An error at a particle physics laboratory has altered the dimensional alignment of the world, strengthening magic and revealing long forgotten magical creatures. Investigating the story of a lifetime, reporter Solstice Winters is about to discover why she never fit in... she’s about to discover what she really is...
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Return to the Table of Contents
Also available:
The Devil’s Eye
A Maddy Wimsey Novel
by J.R. Rain
and Matthew S. Cox
(read on for a sample)
Chapter One
Entirely Different
Unorthodox methods work for me―such as jumping off a bridge after finding a dead man on the side of the road. Not the first thing that comes to most people’s minds, but I tend to regard ‘normal’ as an insult.