Other Books by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty Norville

Kitty and the Midnight Hour

Kitty Goes to Washington

Kitty Takes a Holiday

Kitty and the Silver Bullet

Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand

Kitty Raises Hell

Kitty’s House of Horrors

Kitty Goes to War

Kitty’s Big Trouble

Kitty Steals the Show

Kitty Rocks the House

Kitty in the Underworld

Low Midnight

The Golden Age

After the Golden Age

Dreams of the Golden Age

Standalones

Voices of Dragons

Discord’s Apple

Steel

Short Story Collections

Straying from the Path

Carrie’s Website:

www.carrievaughn.com

I WAS HOPING my roommate Jack would forget that he’d made me promise to go out with him that night. He didn’t. As quickly after sunset as vampirically possible he slammed open the door to my bedroom. “Come on, Sam. Time to go. Up and at ‘em.”

At least he didn’t turn on the light. “Fine. Give me a second to get dressed.”

I washed, put on jeans and a T-shirt, ran a comb through my hair and wandered to the living room.

“You can’t wear that,” Jack said.

“What?” The clothes were clean. We had a washer and dryer, and used them. After being turned, I had been terribly disappointed to learn that vampires still had to do laundry, that we didn’t have some supernatural power that kept our clothing ageless and immortal as well.

“This is a club, you can’t wear that if you’re going to be convincing as an evil vampire.”

“I don’t have any other clothes and I won’t fit in yours.” I was four inches taller than he was, and not nearly as svelte. Jack was third generation Chinese-American and looked like an actor out of a hyperactive Hong Kong action movie. He dressed like a stereotype, on purpose. Suave silk shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, black trousers, trench coat, and just a little bit of eyeliner to give him a brooding appearance. I had to hand it to him, he really knew how to work it.

By his sigh, I’d have guessed this was the most frustrating thing to happen to Jack all week. “Not even a dress shirt? Do we need to get you some dress shirts?”

“When would I ever need a dress shirt?”

He looked at me bug-eyed, clearly expressing his belief that I was an idiot. “For when you go out to the club, duh.”

Maybe he’d get so annoyed with me he’d leave me home.

“You guys are yelling, stop it.” Aaron, our third roommate, was in his room, the door closed. I was pretty sure becoming a vampire hadn’t changed his lifestyle all that much.

“Here, I can fix this,” Jack said. He went into the hall closet and dug around until he found what he was looking for. “At least wear this.”

He presented me with a black leather jacket. One of mine even, from before I was turned. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn it. Nostalgia made me put it on. It still fit, because of course it did—I was the same size I’d been fifteen years ago. I looked myself over. What was it about black leather jackets that made any outfit look just a little bit cooler?

“At least try to look like you might be dangerous,” he said.

“I’m a vampire. I am dangerous.”

“You’re a shlub. Now let’s go.” He patted my arm and headed for the door.

We walked from our apartment to Psalm 23, a club at the northern edge of downtown Denver. A long walk, but we were strong, and we could move fast when we wanted to.

Saturday night, downtown was busy, crowded. Times like this, I was hyperaware of being a vampire and how it made the world different. I could hear heartbeats, smell the blood of people on the sidewalks with us, even those in the cars passing by with their windows rolled down. I could use these senses to hunt, stalk these people into dark alleys and strike. I didn’t have a heartbeat of my own, but I flushed thinking of theirs. I needed blood. Just a little every day or so, but I needed it. The streetlights and headlights glared, balls of energy in the darkness. I could feel warm summer air passing over my skin, prickling individual hairs. Every sensation was sharp. Even after years I was still getting used to this way of seeing.

“Okay, let’s go over this again,” Jack said. “You make the first move, totally aggressive. Don’t worry, I’ll give you a target. Act like as much of an asshole as you know how. But a vampire asshole, right?”

Everything Jack knew about vampires he learned from The Lost Boys. As much as he’d learned about them since, he still clung to some of his old ideas. I’d gone back to watch the movie since being turned. It didn’t age well.

“—and then I swoop in for the rescue.”

We’d done the bad vampire/good vampire act before. I knew how it worked. I kept letting Jack talk me into it because I was, as he observed, a shlub.

“Why do I always have to be the asshole?” I asked. “Can’t I be the hero once in a while?”

“I thought you said you didn’t care. You’re the asshole because you don’t care.”

I didn’t. I kept telling myself I didn’t. This was all just a game. Arguing with Jack was too much effort, so I didn’t.

Psalm 23 was the main vampire club in town. A high-end fancy place straight out of a movie. Some stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason—as it turns out, a great way to go hunting for blood is to open a nightclub, fill it with a bunch of bright and beautiful young things, fill them with booze, then seduce the hell out of them. And do it in such a way that they think they’ve had a wonderful evening and always come back for more. It was a place where the city’s vampires could safely and easily feed, watched over by the city’s Master.

Aaron and I preferred delivery. Even as vampires, we didn’t fit into places like this. Neither did Jack, really. He worked so hard at being a tortured, soulful vampire protagonist that he tended to stand out.

The club had been around for a couple of decades, rebranded a couple of times as the neighborhood gentrified around it, but it had always been popular. It had a line behind a velvet rope and bouncer doormen and everything. If we’d been normal mortal humans, no way would we get through that line. But we were vampires, which meant the bouncer had to let us in. We walked straight past all those beautiful people, all of them filled with rich, hot blood. I could understand why Jack kept coming back here.

“Hey, Braun,” Jack said to the bouncer, a black man in a tailored dinner jacket, quarterback-sized rather than linebacker, but still intimidating. He was also a vampire, one of Rick’s own inner-circle henchmen. “How’s it going?”

“Jack. Sam.”

Why was I nervous that he didn’t even have to think to remember my name? We’d seen each other maybe five times, ever. But it was his job as enforcer and bodyguard to know everyone’s name.

Jack clearly expected him to just open the rope and let us in, but Braun looked us over a good long while. Jack started bouncing a little. I thought he was going to say something when Braun finally let us past, giving us a pronounced frown. I waved a little. The frown got deeper.

As I understood it, there were Masters of other cities who were not as easy going as Rick. They expected some kind of loyalty, some kind of service. They required, you know, dress codes. Me, I figured Rick was nice to us because we were never supposed to be vampires in the first place. We were, in a word, an embarrassment. They cut us a lot of slack because of that.

The place was dark, lit by colored accent effects and recessed lighting, and sleek, lots of gray and chrome and high-backed booths and spindly tables. The music was techno, kind of relentless for my taste. Inside the club, Jack was a predator on the hunt. Literally. He scanned, watched for victims. Pulling us to a ledge by the wall, he leaned up against it and looked causal. To his credit he actually seemed comfortable here, even if he was trying too hard. But me? No other guy here was wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket. Denver had clubs where I would have looked right at home. I should hang out at one of those.

A handful of other vampires were around, and not just the ones who worked here. They blended in, beautiful and sinister, giving us cautious nods across the room—plenty of snacks here for everyone, right? I gave them cheerful waves in return, until Jack elbowed me to stop it.

I would have been happy just sitting back and admiring the scenery—skirts had gotten very short since the last time I paid attention. Short and skin tight. I caught myself wondering if some of these women were even wearing panties under their very short skirts, and if I was standing in just the right place when they sat, would I find out?

Turned out I didn’t have to work all that hard to play asshole vampire.

“There,” Jack said, and nodded. Three women stood by one of the side bars. Not stereotypical clubbers—their skirts weren’t quite short enough and their eyelashes not big enough. Mid-twenties instead of early twenties, out for some kind of celebration. A challenge, in other words. They had drinks, the bartender was somewhere else, and they were isolated.

I gave him a look. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I am, they’re the perfect age to have grown up reading Twilight.”

Oh, for God’s sake… “Fine. But you owe me one. No, you owe me five.”

I knew if I was going to do what Jack wanted and be the bad vampire asshole in this scenario, I couldn’t act the way I thought an asshole would act. My imagination wouldn’t go far enough. No, I had to act the way Jack thought an asshole would act.

I barged into the middle of them, shoving them apart, knocking over one of the drinks, a martini, breaking the glass. Perfect, couldn’t have worked it better if I’d planned it.

I grinned, showing fang. Because for Jack, that was the whole point. Not to hide the fact that we were vampires. “Oh, hey, sorry about that, how about I get you another one, huh?” I flashed a look at two of them, but focused my attention on the one I’d isolated. “Or maybe we could go somewhere else, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Put a little adventure in your life?”

“What the hell?” said one of the women behind me.

“Those are fake, right?” said the one in front of me, about my fangs.

I ran my tongue over them, making the gesture as skeezy as I could, disturbed that I had this behavior living inside me. “Baby, they’re totally for real. Wanna touch?” I leered and closed the distance, pressing her to the bar. Come on, Jack, any second now…

“Hey, is he bothering you?”

Jack appeared, standing so the light hit him in the most dramatic way possible, shadowing his face, making his eyes gleam. He was rakish and very striking. The bastard.

Two of them made polite we-don’t-want-to-make-trouble noises. But the third, the one I’d isolated, said, “Yes, he is.” Brave, stepping confidently into her role.

The rest was choreographed. Jack stepped in front of me, I let him get close and let the woman escape. “You want to maybe get the hell out of here?”

“You going to make me?” I leered. I was so going to get him for this later.

He bared his teeth, showing fang. One of them gasped. Jack glanced at her sidelong. “We’re not all like him. We’re not all… bad,” he said in his most suave, alluring vampire hero voice ever. Angel, eat your heart out. Geez, Jack was good at this. He had me fooled.

He grabbed the collar of my jacket, spun me around, and shoved me to the exit. “Get out.”

I hissed in outrage, fangs on display, like a dutiful asshole vampire. He puffed himself up, super strong and super heroic. All of it posturing. I fled, on cue.

My job done, I went outside to slump against the wall and reflect on how my life had turned out so far. I was too old to be doing this crap. No, scratch that—I still looked twenty-five. I was the perfect age.

But I felt forty. That didn’t feel good.

Braun spotted me and sidled over. “He’s not making you do the good vampire/bad vampire act again, is he?”

“Yes, he is,” I grumbled.

The bouncer shook his head and made a sympathetic tsk. “It would be pathetic if it didn’t actually work so often.”

That was the crux of the whole thing. I hadn’t bothered glancing over my shoulder as I left, but the fact that Jack hadn’t reappeared suggested he was still there, chatting up the women, winning them over with excruciating politeness and vampire heroism, seducing them with his hypnotic gaze. Because yes, the system worked. There was no justice in the universe, or the club scene.

“I have to admit,” Braun continued, “since the whole vampire thing went public he’s the first one I’ve seen use it to his advantage. It’s… kind of weird.”

Yes, yes it was. “I try not to think about it too hard.”

I stayed by the wall another few minutes, debating about whether to wait for Jack or to go home to my game controller and Left 4 Dead (I was aware of the irony of this). Home just about won out, when one of the women from the bar—not the one I’d isolated, and not the one who’d gasped, but the “What the hell?” one—came out the door and looked around as if searching. When she spotted me, I cringed. Yeah, I should have started for home about thirty seconds ago.

She regarded me for a moment, then said, “Does that always work, or did it just work this time?” She was talking at me like I was an actual person.

I smiled wryly. “It usually works. Surprisingly enough.”

“That’s kind of amazing,” she said.

“Mostly it depends on how eager his target is to meet an actual vampire. Do you and your friends, ah, read a lot of vampire novels?”

“Jenn has been talking for a year about how much she really wants to meet a real vampire.”

“See? That’s the real trick. Jack knows how to spot ‘em.”

She pointed a thumb over her shoulder. “Do I need to go back in and rescue them? Are they in trouble?”

I winced. “It depends on how you define trouble. But no, Jack won’t hurt them.” Much...

“And you… what? You just stay out here playing bad vampire?”

“That’s me. Bad vampire. Rawoar.” I couldn’t pull it off, here under the streetlights.

She crossed her arms, smiling gamely. “I figured you couldn’t be a total asshole if you’re wearing an old-school Metroid T-shirt.”

Was I? I had to look. And sure enough, there was Samus in her armor, facing out, beneath the blazing logo. The image was faded enough Jack hadn’t chastised me for it.

“Good eye,” I said. “Well, you got me, it’s true. I’d rather be at home playing Left 4 Dead.”

“Me too, actually. Jenn got a raise at work and really wanted to celebrate. She heard vampires hung out here. I told her she was crazy.”

“Not so crazy after all.”

“Yeah. I’d never have guessed Denver was interesting enough to have vampires.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.” Vampires, werewolves, some real haunted houses and a few other things besides.

“So. Left 4 Dead 1 or 2?” she asked.

“First one. Oldie but goodie. Just straight clean play, no bells and whistles needed. And Zoey kicks way too much ass for me to ever abandon her.”

“You don’t think it’s maybe a little… slow? No real strategy or tactics necessary, you just stand there and press down on the trigger. Some of us like a challenge, I suppose.”

Something in my non-beating heart popped. I tried to play it cool. “Yeah, well, you kids today don’t know how good you have it, with your 3D rendering and your games that require actual conscious thought. I’m old enough to remember when the NES was cool.”

“Hey, I played NES. When I was three.”

There came that popping again. “You’ve been gaming since you were three?” So had I, but when I was three the only game out there was Pong.

“What, shocked at meeting a real-life gamer girl?”

“No… you seem more of a gamer-woman to me. I’m just… I hardly ever get to talk about this stuff with anyone in real life. You’ve met my one roommate, and the other… well. I’m Sam.” I held out my hand for shaking because it seemed like the sanest, most stable thing I could do at that point.

“Ginny,” she said, accepting the gesture. “And you’re really a vampire?”

“I really am.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“You shouldn’t be. Jack mostly hits on girls who are sure, and I frankly find it a little weird. You know?”

She laughed. She had a really great laugh. I felt this powerful urge to reach for her, and I started salivating. Which wasn’t right. I pressed my lips into a tight smile. I did not under any circumstances want to start drooling. But seriously, she looked so good…

“I think I need to get back inside and check on Jenn and Anne. But we should, I don’t know, play together sometime. Xbox or Playstation?”

“Both,” I said, and gave her my screen name: CaptainHoboMan. She gave me hers: PrincessScruffy1. The latter-day version of trading phone numbers. Felt like a victory.

“Nice meeting you, Sam,” she said, waving as she went back inside. She looked awfully cute. I could feel the heat of her blood, even as she was moving away.

I was still drooling.

“Good job holding back,” Braun said. “I thought I was going to have to run an intervention there.” He was chuckling like he’d made a joke.

Yeah, he was an older vampire and I was the baby vampire. He didn’t have to rub it in. I could control myself and not rampage at the carotid artery of a pretty woman who stopped to talk to me. I was just fine.

“Good night, Braun.”

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket and marched off.

SO. I HAD this strange tickling sensation in my gut that Ginny was everything I’d ever wanted in a woman. The trouble was, these days, all I wanted was blood. I didn’t want to get laid anymore. I wanted to feed.

I was turned in 1996, when I was twenty-five, during a rampage that the local vampires still don’t like to talk about.

It takes more than just biting someone to make them a vampire. There’s a whole process. I got knocked on the back of the head as I was walking back to my downtown apartment after a midnight movie. Woke up three nights later in a closet in a parking garage, along with Jack and Aaron, who’d also been attacked and turned. It was the “lair” of a rogue vampire with delusions of grandeur attempting to start his own personal vampire army. I couldn’t help but think that if he’d succeeded in his plan, how very disappointed he would have been in the three of us.

The local Family of vampires caught the rogue and punished him—left him outside in sunlight, which was just exactly harsh enough, I thought. But they were left with us. The Family, run at the time by an okay guy named Arturo, offered to help us adapt to our new nocturnal lives. We could have stayed with him and others of his Family in his underground compound, worked for him, and he’d have looked after us and made sure we were fed. That sounded too much like moving back home, so the three of us found a basement apartment and decided to fend for ourselves. Arturo laid out the rules—no killing our food supply, no attempts to set up a rival vampire Family—and wished us well. That was years ago now, and we’ve been doing okay. Since then, a new guy had taken over from Arturo, Rick, and if anything Rick was even more laid back.

We didn’t much notice the local vampire politics. Seemed safer that way.

The truth of the matter is, Gen X-ers make terrible vampires. To be a good vampire—what most vampires think of as a good vampire—you have to be interested in power. You have to take the long view. Plan ahead, have a little ambition. Think about your place in the world and how to manipulate it. You have to want to manipulate it.

Me, I’m pretty happy playing another round of whatever my current game obsession is. I think about living forever and figure I can get really good at Xbox. It’s not that I don’t care about the big picture. I just don’t see why I should. You ask yourself, does the work equal the reward? And I have to tell you, the powerful vampires all look pretty stressed out for guys who are basically immortal.

I reviewed video games for living, writing for blogs and online magazines. I had a reputation, made decent money, and I didn’t have to leave the house. Which was important. I didn’t know how vampires made a living before the Internet. Maybe that was why the old ones always looked stressed out, like dragons guarding their horde.

I got home from the club and, thinking of Ginny and what it might possibly be like to invite someone here—not that I would, but maybe someday—and noticed what a dump we lived in. We didn’t do it on purpose. The apartment was actually pretty nice—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spacious living room with a comfy sofa and ridiculously big TV, and an okay kitchen. We never used the kitchen. We were a three-bachelor party pad. And nobody remembered to clean up after themselves.

A mountain of debris had somehow piled up after Jack and I left. Most of it was cardboard boxes and wads of packing paper.

“Aaron?” I called. “Aaron, you alive in there? So to speak?”

“I’m fine. Paying my rent here, stop nagging.”

I wasn’t nagging. I started to tell him, then realized that would make me a nag. “You think maybe you could take some of these boxes out to the recycle bin?”

Noises bumped from his room, like someone tripping over something or dropping books.

He called back, “Sam, if the place isn’t on fire, I can’t talk.”

“Okay, that’s fine. If you don’t want to take these out to recycling, can I do it?”

At that, he pounded out of his room and looked at me like I’d just offered to bleach all his clothes. He was a scrawny guy, not just white but pasty, with a mop of brown hair and an eternally startled expression. “No, I need them. For shipping.”

“All of them?” There must have been thirty cardboard boxes parked in the living room, piled around the front door, some of them collapsed, some of them not. Some of them were torn, stained, and disintegrating, obviously unusable. A stack of incoming boxes was piled next to Aaron’s room. I took the initiative and started at least nesting some of the boxes together, to clear space.

“I don’t know yet what sizes I need. I might need them all. I have five auctions finishing up right now—so yes, I need them.” That was why Aaron spent all his time in his room and why he always looked like a mole that’s been dragged out of his hole. He made his living flipping collectibles on eBay. I wouldn’t have believed there was an art to it until I saw him at work. He made a shockingly good living at it.

The empty boxes were only part of the mess. We kept the lights dim, but once you noticed the spider webs in the corners of the ceiling, the dust on the top edge of the TV, and the dirt that had been tracked into the carpet, you couldn’t unsee it.

I said, “Do you think maybe we could hire someone to come in once a week, just to keep the place habitable?”

He looked shocked. “You really want some stranger coming in here? Every week? I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

“Every other week? Once a month?”

He was already shaking his head. “No, I don’t think so. It’s not that messy, is it?” He picked up a box, put it back down again, and somehow managed to make the space look more chaotic. “Where’s Jack?”

“Hitting on chicks who grew up reading Twilight.”

“I can’t believe that works.” Shaking his head, he returned to his room, leaving a trail of toppled cardboard boxes in his wake.

I slumped into the sofa and started up the console, because I still had five hours until dawn. Ginny wasn’t online, because she was sane and mortal and had probably gone to bed like a normal person.

A couple of hours later, the front door swung open, crunching through boxes in the way. Jack didn’t even notice as he stormed in.

“That was an epic night,” he announced. “Aren’t you glad I dragged you along?”

I kind of was. “Yeah. Ginny was cool.” Ginny was perfect.

“Wait, which one was she? Was she the one who followed you outside?”

Nice of him to notice. “Yes, and she recognized my T-shirt.”

He came around to the front of the sofa and I spread my arms to display my shirt. He shook his head, baffled.

“So where’d all these boxes come from?”

“We were just talking about that,” I said. “What do you think about getting a cleaning lady to come in maybe a couple of times a month to, you know, make the place look not so much like a back room at UPS?”

He thought for maybe half a second. “No. Waste of money. We can keep the place up ourselves.”

I gazed ceilingward, because obviously we couldn’t. That was the point. But I knew when I was beat. Time to retreat and regroup at a later date. Maybe when they both woke up with spiderwebs draped over their faces.

I was cranky because I was hungry. Jack had obviously grabbed a bite at the club, but I hadn’t. “You guys hungry? Aaron, you want to call out for pizza?” I shouted to the bedroom.

The door opened and he wandered out, nodding. “I could use some food.”

“Sure, why not?” Jack said.

We had a favorite 24-hour pizza delivery place on speed dial. Actually, we had every 24-hour food delivery place in Denver on speed dial.

Twenty minutes later, the pizza arrived. Aaron zoomed out of his room like a hound on the scent. Jack and I studied the door.

“Ready?” I asked them. They were. I opened the door and offered a great big smile to the delivery guy. Kid. Eighteen, tops. Skinny, white, acne. Not a looker. But his skin was flush, and his heart beat strong. “Hi! Why don’t you come in for just a second while I get the money.”

“Um, yeah, sure?”

Jack divested him of the pizza and set it out of the way while Aaron slipped the carrier from his hands and set it on the floor so it wouldn’t fall. The kid was nervous, his heart started pounding, but I was right there in front of him, looking into his eyes. His gaze locked onto mine.

“It’s just fine,” I said. “No need to worry. It’ll only take a minute, and you won’t remember a thing. You okay? Nod if you’re okay.”

He nodded slowly, clearly baffled. Aaron and Jack each had an arm and were rolling up the sleeves of his windbreaker.

“Maybe you’d be better off if you went to sleep,” I said calmly, putting power into the gaze, letting my influence pour into him. “Nice, calm, relaxed.”

He swayed, his body going semi-boneless. Jack and Aaron propped him against the now-closed door and raised his wrists to their mouths.

“Perfect,” I murmured, feeling the fangs at the edges of my lips, identifying the pulsing vein at his neck. I tipped the kid’s chin up and bit. Hot, fresh blood surged against my tongue. Bliss.

I only had a few swallows. Three, four. Not really a meal, but enough to keep me going. That was what this was about. I drew away because I had to, because we could only live like this if we didn’t leave dead bodies lying around like cardboard boxes. I licked the wound so that it would heal. It wouldn’t even leave a mark.

The others did the same at his wrists. They might have taken a few more sips than they really should have. It was always hard to stop, but they knew the drill and pulled away before anybody needed to call 911.

We set the kid on the floor while I knelt beside him, slapping his cheek lightly.

“Hey, kid, you okay? You must have fainted. You had a little bit of a fall there.”

Blinking dazedly, he woke up, looked around at us staring down at him with nothing but concern.

“You okay?” I asked again.

“Yeah… uh, I don’t know what happened… must have fainted…”

“That’s it exactly, you must have fainted.” He blinked into my gaze, and understanding slowly filled him. “You want us to call a ambulance?” I sounded truly worried.

“No, no that’s okay. I’m fine.” He propped himself against the door and struggled to his feet. “Just a little woozy.”

“Hey, get him some water—”

Aaron was already there with a bottle. That was the routine.

“You going to be okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be fine… I just… I’m really sorry about that.”

I gave him a kind smile. “Not at all. Just as long as you’re okay. Here’s your money.”

He took the cash and water, wandered out. Aaron and I watched to make sure he made it back to his car okay. We saved the pizza for a homeless shelter a couple of blocks down the street.

The delivery guy drank half the water bottle before reaching his car. He’d never remember what really happened to him. We gave him a really big tip. We always did.

EATING AS A vampire wasn’t even really like eating. It was… energizing. More like getting a good night’s sleep. Or falling in love.

An hour before dawn, there was no point in starting another game, and Aaron hadn’t gone back to his room, which left us all crashed out on the sofa, digesting.

Jack said, “So I was leaving the club tonight…”

“With Jenn?”

“Just walking her home. Honest.”

“Right. And?”

“Something kind of weird happened.”

That meant weirder than being turned into a vampire in a rogue vampire rampage and then going to clubs to hit on girls by acting like the hero of a vampire romance. Even Jack had some idea of the actual weirdness of it all. I raised an eyebrow, indicating he should continue.

In reply, he handed me a plain business card. Aaron read over my shoulder.

Clarissa Carter

Freelance Journalist

“This for real? What’d she want?”

“She said she’s doing a story on vampires. What being a vampire has been like since the NIH announcement, what’s changed, what hasn’t, is it harder, easier, whatever.”

“She was at the club and spotted your routine?”

“That’s what she said. She also said she’s been having trouble finding non-celebrity vampires willing to talk.”

In the few years since the NIH came out and said that yes, vampires exist, a handful of vampire celebrities had been identified. And at least one werewolf—named Kitty, if you could believe that. She apparently lived here in Denver, but I’d never met her.

“Wait a minute,” Aaron said, disappearing into his room in a flash of vampiric speed—he didn’t even seem to notice he was moving that fast. It was the recent blood. He returned a second—literally a second—later with his laptop. “Let’s see if she’s for real…”

We scrunched together on the sofa while he opened a browser window and did a search. I was almost surprised when a good number of hits came up. Clarissa Carter appeared to have a blog and had written articles for a number of online outlets, some of which I’d even heard of. Her resume listed print credits as well.

“No pictures, looks like,” I said. “Which isn’t totally weird but it’d be nice to verify. I have some magazine contacts we could ask if we want to know more.”

“No, this is good,” Jack said. “She asked for a meeting tomorrow night. You want to come?”

“Backup?”

“Yeah. You up for it?”

“This isn’t another good vampire/bad vampire routine, is it?”

“No, this is going to be in a brightly lit public place, all in the open,” he said.

Aaron backed away. “I’m out. I’m not good meeting people.”

Jack said, “You just need practice. You should come out to the club—”

“Do I look like a bad vampire to you?” Aaron exclaimed.

Neither of us said anything, because Aaron didn’t much look like a vampire at all.

“Okay, Aaron doesn’t have to come. But you’ll come, Sam, right?”

“Are you worried? Are you actually worried?” I said.

“Some reporter stakes out the club—”

“No pun intended, I’m sure.”

“—for the specific purpose of talking to me? Does that sound right to you?”

“So she’s up to something. You think Rick needs to know about this?”

“No. But I’m going to go talk to her. I’d appreciate it if you could come watch my back.”

I thought a second. What I really wanted to do was log on as soon as it was dark and find Ginny. But Jack seemed genuinely worried, and I was getting curious myself. “Let’s check it out.”

“I’ll call Rick if you’re not back by dawn,” Aaron said, marching back to his room.

Then I started getting woozy, which meant the sun was coming up. If I went outside, the sky would be turning gray. I hadn’t seen sunlight in a long time. It was like thinking about a hometown I couldn’t go back to. No use in dwelling on fond memories; they’d just depress me.

The diner where Jack set up the meeting was, indeed, brightly lit and public. When you were a vampire you learned where all the 24-hour restaurants were. Not because you needed to eat, but because sometimes you needed a place to hang out. A place to meet people at three in the morning. It didn’t matter if you were a vampire, you held on to some of the trappings of your old life. Whatever trappings you could in the middle of the night. My deep dark secret was that I hadn’t been much of a night person before.

Carter was already there. I may not have known what she looked like, but she was the only one there with her smart phone on the table, a notepad and pen waiting, and a casual business look that totally didn’t fit with the atmosphere, which had more of a homeless hipster college stoner vibe. She waved when we walked in, because two twenty-something pallid-faced guys dressed in black walk into a place after dark, of course they must be vampires.

We joined her at the booth she’d chosen, halfway down the row and with a good view of the front and back entrances.

She stood to greet us. “Hi, I’m Clarissa Carter, thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me. Good to see you again, Jack.”

We sat and regarded her across the table.

“This is my friend, Sam,” he said, and I waved. I tried to catch her gaze, just to size her up rather than pull a whammy on her. Just to see if I could, if I needed to. She managed to not meet my gaze. She looked at my collar, at my hand when she shook it, at her notebook, at her phone when she moved it out of the way. She was very careful not to look right at either of us, which seemed kind of weird for a reporter who was supposed to be engaging with her interview subjects.

It meant that she knew vampires. She’d worked with vampires before and knew not to look in their eyes. Interesting.

“Can I get you something?” she asked.

“No,” Jack said. “We don’t eat.”

“And I guess things haven’t gone far enough that they’re putting blood on the menu yet, right?” She had a very sunny smile.

We just looked at her. I didn’t think blood would ever show up on any menus. It was one of those “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” items.

She was human, mortal. Her heartbeat was healthy. She’d make a good meal. She was wearing maybe too much perfume, something spicy. I could avoid taking it in by just not breathing. I didn’t need to breathe anymore, unless I wanted to say something.

“Thank you for talking with me. I’m hoping we can have a couple of meetings like this, so we can really get to know each other. I want to do a thorough profile, since you aren’t what most people think of when they think of vampires. Not exactly Dracula types.”

That sunny smile was starting to look condescending. I looked at Jack; he mouthed the word “shlub” at me.

“To be totally honest,” I said, “I haven’t really been around long enough for me to even think of myself as a vampire. I mean, I could still go to my twenty year high school reunion and people would think I just took good care of myself.”

“He’s got one of those faces,” Jack said. “Baby faces, you know?”

Oh, Jack. How I love you.

“Is this a technical thing?” she asked. She was making notes, just a few words. I tried to surreptitiously read them without cranking my head around. Her writing was illegible. She might have been doodling. “That really being a vampire—the powers, the senses, whatever—doesn’t kick in until after you’ve lived a certain length of time?”

Jack said, “Oh, I don’t know, for some of us it kicks in right away. Like a duck to water, you know?” The way Jack explained it to the rest of us, he had to embrace being a vampire or go crazy. Before he’d been turned he’d been doing well—managing a record store, managing for a couple of local bands, dating a girlfriend he was crazy for. They’d even been talking kids. He’d loved his life… and he’d cut absolutely all ties with it after being turned. His old friends, the girlfriend he’d loved, they all thought he was dead. He said it was better that way, and moving forward he was going to be everything a vampire was supposed to be to make up for it.

“Some of us take awhile to adapt,” I said. “Being nocturnal isn’t as fun as it sounds.”

“You miss daylight?” she asked.

“I miss skiing,” I said. “Kind of hard to justify all that effort for just a couple of hours of night skiing.”

She stared, because she had evidently never considered such a thing as skiing vampires. No one ever did.

“Right… can you talk to me a little bit about Families? As I understand it, in most major cities the vampires are organized in to Families. What’s the Denver Family like? There’s a Master here, isn’t there? I think I’ve heard about him…” She flipped back through her notebook, a move that had an air of artifice. “Ricardo?” She glanced up expectantly.

“Yeah,” Jack said. His foot had started bouncing under the table. “Rick. He’s an okay guy.”

“For a vampire?”

I said, “He’s an okay guy for anyone.”

“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “And how many vampires are in Denver’s Family?”

Jack started to say something, but I elbowed him under the table. “I don’t actually know. We don’t really have a lot of contact with the Family. We keep to ourselves, you know?”

“So you’re saying the Denver Family isn’t very centralized, for the most part?”

“I’m not sure I even know what that means,” I said.

Jack shrugged. “It’s like, we don’t bother anyone, no one bothers us, right?”

“And what if someone did bother you?” she asked.

This didn’t feel like an interview; it felt like a test. “I guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Anything else you can tell me about Rick? Do you know how old he is?”

Rick was old. Rumor had it he’d known Coronado and Doc Holliday and all kinds of people like that; that he’d been running around the American West before it even was the American West. Guy was a walking history book. I hadn’t had the guts yet to ask him about any of it. I was working up to it. Maybe in another decade I’d get the nerve.

“He’s pretty old,” Jack said noncommittally.

She glanced at her phone. It hadn’t made any noise, but she started gathering her things, shoving her notebook and phone into an oversized purse. She left a five on the table for her coffee.

“I’m really sorry, I have another appointment and I have to get going.”

“You always work late, I take it?” I asked.

“Part of the job,” she said, smiling, of course.

“Well, let us walk you out.”

We went outside to the chill night air, under the lights and noise of the city. We’d hardly paused when she was already marching off as she said her last farewells. “I’ve got your number, I’ll be in touch!” she called back.

She didn’t have a car in the parking lot, evidently. She walked west, deeper into downtown. Maybe she was staying at one of the hotels.

Jack said, “That was something.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

We started for home. It was six blocks before either of us said anything.

Jack spoke first. “I couldn’t catch her gaze. I couldn’t get her to look in my eyes.”

“You noticed that too?”

“So she knows vampires.”

“Then why is she interviewing us? There are a lot older, more experienced, more powerful, more interesting vampires than us.”

“Maybe it’s just like she said, we’re the common vampire on the street.”

I gave him a look.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “So what was all that really about?”

I thought for a minute, going over her questions with a slightly queasy feeling that we’d probably revealed too much about something. “She asked a lot of questions about the Family. About Rick.”

“She kind of acted like she knew about Rick.”

“Nobody knows about Rick,” I said. “He doesn’t go public.”

“Exactly,” Jack said.

“I suddenly want to know a whole lot more about Clarissa Carter.”

JACK ENDED UP going to the club again. That was fine, it was his thing. Back at home, half of the cardboard boxes had migrated to the kitchen counter, and there was a stack of vintage metal lunchboxes piled up along the living room wall. I looked them over and swore I’d had a couple of them when I was a kid.

I had intended on doing more Googling of Clarissa Carter. Instead, I logged on and looked for Ginny. I felt a ridiculous amount of glee when I discovered she was online, too. We put on headsets, and how crazy was it that hearing her voice made me smile?

“Hey, where’ve you been?” she asked.

“Had a meeting with a reporter.”

“For a gaming thing? I Googled you, by the way. Impressive.”

I blushed. I shouldn’t have been able to blush, I was a vampire and I didn’t have the blood to spare. All I did was write about games, and she was impressed? My heart didn’t beat but I was somehow sure I could feel it.

“Thanks. But no, actually. She said she’s doing some kind of article on vampires. Like, normal vampires, not the fancy powerful vampires. It was kind of weird, actually.”

“Normal vampires? Not two words I ever thought to hear together.”

“Come on, you met me. And Jack for that matter.”

“I don’t think Jack is normal.”

She had a point. I chuckled.

“But you said it was weird?”

“Yeah. Like, asking questions she already knew the answers to. Not asking much about us, but wanting to know stuff about the Family, other high-powered vampires in Denver. You know?”

“Like she was spying?”

“Exactly.”

It was probably nothing. She probably didn’t have any crazy ulterior motive. Maybe Jack was right, I’d been living in a basement for too long and needed to get out more.

I said, “You know, forget it. No more talking, let’s kill some zombies.”

“Roger that,” she replied.

And we did. For four hours. It was a blast.

While playing we had, like, actual conversations. It felt great. It felt human. I found out she was a paralegal who’d gone to CU Boulder and lived in Westminster but wanted to move closer to downtown because that was where she worked, and she had two sisters and a cat named George and she also liked to ski, and helpfully tried to think of ways to make a night skiing trip worthwhile, like sharing a condo and buying blackout curtains for the windows so no one would accidentally let in any sunlight. She made it all sound like a thing I could actually do. With her.

Finally, at something like two in the morning, she signed off because she had to work. I understood. So did I, but it was hard getting past the happy glow.

Aaron came out of his room after a stretch of quiet. “Who were you talking to?”

“Ginny,” I said, completely unable to keep the dreaminess out of my voice. “Her name is Ginny.”

“A girl?”

“Yes, a girl.”

“You can’t meet a girl. You can’t like a girl.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a vampire.”

“Jack does it all the time.”

“I don’t think what he does is exactly meeting girls.”

True enough. “I like her. We get along. She’s higher level than me on World of Warcraft.”

“But you’re a vampire.”

I knew what he was really saying, that I couldn’t exactly take her out on a real date, like out to dinner or something, and I couldn’t really meet her parents, and we couldn’t talk about getting married and the kids and the future because, basically, compared to me, she didn’t have one.

But I still liked her. Petulantly, I muttered, “So?”

“This can only end badly.”

“What? She’s just… she’s nice. It’s not like we’re soulmates or anything.“ Some people thought that vampires didn’t have souls.

Jack came in then, looking pensive, and Aaron rounded on him. “Did you know Sam’s been talking to this girl?”

Jack stared. “What, the reporter?”

“No, a girl!”

“Ginny?”

Aaron said, “How come everyone knows about Ginny but me?”

“You should come out with us so you can meet girls too,” Jack said with a grin.

“Jack, you can tell him it’ll never work out, right?”

“Of course it’ll never work out. Don’t worry, he’s just killing time.”

“Exactly,” Aaron said decisively before stalking back to his room.

It would never work. Right. Because she was alive, and I was dead.

One nice thing about being a vampire—no insomnia. Ever. Eventually, the sun came up, and I slept. I still dreamed, though. That was weird. I was supposed to be dead—undead. Brought back to life. Something. No one had done any research about the whole dead-or-not thing. Like done an fMRI on a sleeping vampire to see what really went on in their brains. All I knew was that I still dreamed. Usually about sunlight. About being outside. And being lost in a strange city or in a forest or in a cornfield, and the sun got brighter and brighter until I had to shut my eyes against it. But I had to keep moving, and there I was, stumbling around in the dark, wondering where I’d gone wrong.

If I were capable of insomnia, I might have lain awake thinking about Ginny. If I weren’t a vampire, I could handle this. I’d ask her to dinner, maybe a movie. I’d let things progress. Then maybe I’d ask her to come home with me, or let her ask me to go home with her. I was a grown man, this shouldn’t be hard.

But I got stuck at the “ask her to dinner,” part. Because my mouth started watering and I pictured that bright vein at her neck. “Ask her to dinner” didn’t mean the same thing that it used to. So why bother? Because we had a lot of fun tag-teaming on Left 4 Dead?

Relationships had been built on lesser things.

I didn’t even know why I was thinking about it. Things would never work out. I was a vampire. I didn’t want to hurt her.

The next night, I was back on the sofa. Ginny wasn’t able to log on tonight, so no tag teaming. I’d spend the night playtesting a bunch of pre-release games I’d been sent. Actual work. Vampires shouldn’t have to work.

The cardboard boxes around the place were arranged in a different pattern again, in their endless migration around the apartment. Boxes of toys, Lego playsets from the early nineties, Cabbage Patch knock-off dolls—super creepy. I hoped they didn’t stick around for long.

Jack came out of his room. “Guess who called?” he said, holding up his phone.

“Clarissa Carter,” I said, because he wouldn’t have announced it if it had been anyone else.

“Yeah. She asked more questions. And she wants another meeting. She asked if I could maybe get her a meeting with Rick.”

I hit pause on the game—it was boring anyway—and looked at him. “She just came out and asked for a meeting with him?”

“She wanted to know if I could set it up.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said maybe. I asked why.”

“And?”

“She just said she wants as much information as she can get.”

Well, how could you argue with that?

Aaron wandered out of his room. We didn’t have to be talking loudly for him to overhear. Vampire superhearing. “I don’t trust her.”

I pulled over my laptop, because maybe we missed something on that first search. This time, I Googled “Clarissa Carter” and “vampires” instead of just the name. Aaron and Jack came to watch over my shoulders.

“There, there,” Aaron said, jabbing his finger at the screen. “Look at that.”

“What? I don’t see it.”

“Mercedes Cook. Carter’s done six interviews with Cook in the last two years. Mercedes Cook is a vampire.”

“All that does is establish Carter as a reporter who’s interested in vampires, and we already knew that.”

“You don’t remember, do you?” Aaron said, clearly disappointed. “When Arturo bit it and Rick took over? It was when Mercedes Cook was in town. Cook was behind that. She started the war between Arturo and Rick because she thought Arturo would win and wanted to get rid of Rick. Weren’t you guys paying any attention?”

I thought I had been, and frankly I was surprised that Aaron had apparently been paying more attention. After all, this wasn’t eBay.

“This is why we don’t hang out with the Family, so we don’t have to pay attention,” Jack said.

“Well, there was something big going on, bigger than just whether or not Arturo or Rick was in charge. And now this Carter woman who has a connection to Cook is interested in Rick?” He shook his head.

So she was targeting Rick by going after the three junior vampires in the Family? How did that work?

“Maybe it’s time to call Rick with this?” I said.

Jack pursed his lips. He had a plan. He was going to go superhero. “Let me meet with her again. See if I can get any solid information out of her.”

We gave him unconvinced looks. “You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

“It’ll be great.” He seemed excited about it, the poor bastard. The vampire hero. He grabbed his coat, shoved his phone in his pocket.

“Call if you need help,” I said after him, right before the door closed.

Aaron and I looked at each other. His expression was sour.

“It’s time to call Rick,” I said, and Aaron nodded.

I called, and he answered right away, which I hadn’t expected. Like he’d have more important things to do than to talk to one of his lowly minions who wasn’t even really a minion. Thumping music and a rush of voices and laughter filled the background, which meant he was probably at Psalm 23. I supposed I could have gone to talk to him in person. I was getting hungry again. Aaron and I would probably just order another pizza.

“Hi, Rick?” I answered his greeting. “This is Sam. I’m sorry to bother you…”

“No bother, Sam. How are you? How are the others doing?” Rick didn’t sound like an ancient vampire. He sounded like that benevolent boss at your first job, wry and sympathetic but not about to suffer fools. I’d heard stories of less fair Masters. Demanding, condescending, abusive. My life as a vampire maybe wasn’t perfect, but it could have been a whole lot worse. Having someone like Rick I could call when I needed help? It made a difference.

“We’re fine, we’re all okay. But something kind of weird has come up.”

I told him about Carter, how she approached Jack, the kind of information she was grilling us on, and her connection to Mercedes Cook.

“I don’t know much about Cook, but Aaron seems to think she’s bad news and you’d want to know,” I finished.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Definitely. Thanks for calling. Do let me know if you learn anything else.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“Any other problems?” he asked. Like some kind of camp counselor, like he knew there was something I wasn’t mentioning. I liked Rick, but I was more than a little in awe of him.

“Actually…” I didn’t even know how to start this. “There’s this girl…” I winced, because that sounded ridiculous. “I’ve met someone,” which didn’t sound much better, but I had to start somewhere. “I really like her, and if I were still mortal I’d know exactly what to do. But now, being what I am, it all seems pointless. I’m not going to be able to give her what she wants. We can’t… there’s no way we can be normal. It’s all just… wrong. But I like her.” Now I just sounded like I was whining.

“Does she know what you are?” Very calm, not at all judgmental.

“Yes. But I don’t think she understands what all it means.”

“Ah yes. That’s always this issue. You’ll have to tell her, then let her decide. And if she walks away you have to let her go.”

What he said made sense. I’d known it myself. This just put it out there. “Yeah, I know.”

“That’s the trouble with what we are,” he said gently. Sympathetically, like he’d been through all this before. Probably dozens of times, and I couldn’t even imagine that. I’d only been a vampire for fifteen years. I might as well still be twenty-five. “We can take what we want. You can make her want what you want. Some vampires would tell you it’s your right to use your abilities for that. But… I for one believe we can do better than that. I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.”

That was Rick. He wouldn’t tell you what to do, but he’d subtly give you this moral imperative not to disappoint him.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll work it out. Thank you.”

“Have a good night, Sam.”

And that was that.

Aaron was standing outside the door of his bedroom, arms crossed. “I like Rick,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He’s right about the girl, you should just walk away.”

I glared at him. “And what the hell do you know about it?”

He shrugged, unconcerned. “You feel like ordering pizza?”

Yeah, that sounded like a good idea.

The boost of energy from the pizza delivery made me more jumpy, not less. Time to shoot up some virtual bad guys. When I logged on, I was surprised to find Ginny’s icon lit up.

“Hey, I thought you were going to be out all night,” I said on the headset.

She sounded amused. “The bridal shower got to be more than I could stand. They were about to start making wedding veils out of toilet paper when I left. I thought you might be logged in, and I was right.”

“What are we playing tonight?”

“How about something completely different. What have you got?”

“Borderlands?”

“Let’s do it.”

I felt better in seconds. Shooting bad guys with a good player at your side—even if you occasionally screwed up and shot each other instead—always made me feel better.

“So, you hear anything else from that reporter?” she asked.

“Yeah, actually. Jack’s out meeting with her again now.” In fact, it had been a few hours. I wondered if I needed to start worrying. “We’re pretty sure she’s not writing an article about the everyday vampire on the street.”

“Yeah? Then what’s she doing?”

“She’s either angling for an interview with someone more important than we are because she has the mistaken notion that we have some kind of influence, or she’s some kind of anti-vampire nutjob who’s going to try to infiltrate the Denver vampire Family and destroy us all.” Or, and worse, she was part of a rival vampire gang with designs on the Denver Family. That was what the Cook angle suggested. I was starting to freak myself out. “Or maybe I’ve been playing too many conspiracy-filled video games.”

“Are you worried?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. But I really don’t know what else we can do until she tries something or we get some clue as to what she’s really up to.”

“You want me to check her out?”

My brain skipped a beat at that, making me miss a shot I should have gotten. I hit pause. “How’re you going to do that?”

“It’s part of my job to dig up dirt on people. Find out where she’s staying, see who else she’s talking to.”

“Supernatural dirt, even?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“Ginny, you don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. I want to help.”

“But—” I sighed, took another breath, and tried again. “This isn’t your problem. I don’t want you to get in trouble. Or get hurt.”

“Yeah? Really? That’s sweet.”

“Well. I like you.”

“And not just because I’m O positive?”

“Are you? I didn’t know that. We can’t tell that, you know. It’s got more to do with, well. Hormones. It tastes different if you’re happy, stressed out, excited. You know.” It was only because I’d eaten tonight that I was able to blush.

“Huh,” she said thoughtfully.

Panic mode. I’d scared her off. Freaked her out by bringing up blood. Oh wait, she was the one who brought up blood. “I mean, I like you for more than your blood.” Wait, back up. “I mean, I haven’t even seen your blood.”

“Do you want to?” Her tone was very neutral. I couldn’t tell if she was offering or offended.

“No,” I said, after another deep breath. I was having trouble keeping enough air in my lungs to talk. Funny, before becoming a vampire I never realized how important breathing was to talking. “I don’t want to hurt you. I like you because I… like you.” This was really hard. Why was this so hard? I was supposed to have supernatural powers.

“Well. I like you to. Whether or not you’re a vampire.”

That was sufficiently… vague. I decided not to push. I could have talked a lot more. I really wanted to ask her how she really truly felt about the vampire thing—was she one of Jack’s groupies or was this an “in spite of” situation? But I needed to let it go. Just for now.

This was really hard.

“Um. I think my game just kicked me out,” I said.

“Yup, that’s what my screen’s showing.”

“You want to start over?”

It was nice, how easily we slipped back into that comfortable space. I sat back and enjoyed it. We played until well past midnight, when she had to bow out. She had to get up for work tomorrow and needed sleep. She was very sweet about it.

I had all the rest of the hours until dawn to sit up, alone.

JACK FINALLY CAME back from his meeting with Carter.

“Well?” I asked, setting aside my laptop. I’d been writing a new article.

He stopped, thought a second, and said, “Sam—you ever think there’s more to this? That we’re not… that we shouldn’t bury ourselves in a hole in the ground like this. You ever think about fifty years from now and wonder if we’re just going to be doing the same damn thing, ordering pizza and killing time?”

“Killing time. Isn’t that what you said about Ginny?”

“Who? Oh—wow, you really like her. You haven’t stopped talking about her.”

I didn’t say anything. He’d basically said it all. Any life I might have had before becoming a vampire wasn’t worth thinking about. It’s entirely possible I’d have spent the last fifteen years playing games and writing articles and wouldn’t be living any different. Then again, maybe not. I did wonder sometimes what my kids would have looked like. But there was no guarantee I’d ever have had any. I couldn’t say I’d lost something that might never have existed—and that was the whole future, right there.

He came around the sofa and made to slouch down; I scooted over to give him room. “Carter asked all kinds of questions like if I’m happy or not and if being a vampire was everything I thought it would be—”

“Had you even thought about being a vampire before actually being one?”

“No, why would I? And I’m thinking, of course I’m unhappy, but I’m not going to admit it to her.” He got this distant look in his eyes. Probably thinking of everything he’d lost, which was more than any of us had. I asked him once why he didn’t just end it. It would be easy—walk outside at dawn, and poof. He said that would be too easy. That it would be letting entropy win, and he didn’t want entropy to win. Then he laughed and went back to this guy, the Kiefer Sutherland wannabe.

I said, “Jack, are you okay? Clearly you’re not, but—can I help?”

He patted my shoulder. “Just keep on keeping on, man. I’ll be okay.” He looked tired. Not just hungry, pallid from lack of blood. Actually tired. I wondered if I ought to lock him in his room to keep him from doing something foolish come dawn.

“So, Ginny. You talk to her tonight?” Jack asked, changing the subject.

“Yeah, some.”

“I didn’t mean that. About just killing time.”

I snorted. A waste of breath, really. “No, you’re right. I mean, how serious can it possibly ever get? But I think Aaron may be afraid that I’m going to run off with her and leave him alone with you.”

Aaron, who must have been listening, stormed out of his room. “No, that isn’t it at all, if both of you ran off I would finally have some peace and quiet around here.” He crossed his arms, and he really did look serious. “I’m just worried about you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I can’t get hurt, Aaron,” I said wryly. “I’m a vampire.”

“You know what I mean.”

Jack got this very serious look on his face, so serious it swung around into goofy.

“What?” I shot back.

“I hate to say it, but I think Aaron’s right. You can still get your heart broken.”

“Guys, my heart is not going to get broken.”

Aaron just couldn’t stop. “Not to mention you’re almost old enough to be her father!”

“I am not!” But only by a couple of years… “We’re not supposed to be talking about me, we were talking about you and what you found out about Carter.”

“Nothing, I didn’t find anything.” He marched off to his room.

“Jack?” I called after him. “Do I need to worry about you?”

“I’m fine! Everything’s fine!” he called back.

Aaron just stood there, staring at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”

I almost spouted off an “I’m fine,” just like Jack, but the words stuck.

Ginny and I didn’t have to get serious. We could just have fun. Used to be, having fun meant going out. Movies, dinner, amusement parks. Hell, back in college I’d taken girls to the zoo for dates. Then we’d go to my place or her place, have sex, go on like that for awhile until something came up, like the end of the semester or her moving to Wichita for a job or…

I was still thinking like a twenty-five year old. I was forty. I had to keep reminding myself I was forty. I should be married with kids by now. I should have a mortgage and a 401k. Except I was a vampire now, and everything had changed. An eternity of sitting on my sofa playing video games and calling out for pizza under false pretenses stretched before me. And to think there were people who actually wanted to be vampires?

“I think I need a hobby,” I said, and Aaron went away with a huff.

The following night, a Friday, I logged on and didn’t hear from Ginny. Which meant that something terrible had happened to her. Probably not. I realized I didn’t have her phone number—just her online handle. She wasn’t online. I had another game to demo, but my brain kept skipping off it.

I knocked on Jack’s bedroom door to make sure he was okay. There was no answer. I knocked on Aaron’s door. “Aaron? You seen Jack tonight?”

“I think he went out right at sunset.”

“You think?”

The door opened. “Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. He’s probably just grabbing a bite at the club.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it.”

We stared at each other a minute. There was nothing we could do. He went back to eBay and I went back to the sofa. I resisted an urge to check the front porch for a pile of ash.

That night, I did something I’d never done before. I listened to The Midnight Hour.

I usually had better things to do than listen to talk radio. I’d known about The Midnight Hour since it started. The host—that celebrity werewolf named Kitty, for real and not even joking—started the show at one of the local alt radio stations. I’d learned about it right away, one of these “Hey, have you heard,” rumors. I figured it’d last six months and then vanish. Or something terrible would happen to Kitty because, hey, she was a werewolf and they were kind of violent. More violent than vampires, even.

Six months later and the show was syndicated, which just showed you what I know. That was part of what blew all this out into the open, that led to me being able to go to a nightclub and tell someone I was a vampire and not have them laugh in my face.

The show started with theme music: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” which was either incredibly silly or absolutely inspired.

“Good evening, true believers, I am Kitty Norville and this is The Midnight Hour. Step into my parlor, let’s have a chat or three.” She had a fast patter, a radio DJ enthusiasm to her bright voice. She definitely sounded like a Kitty; not so much like a werewolf. But then I tried to keep clear of the local werewolves. I’d met maybe two, and that was years ago. They were surly, suspicious, and kind of even looked like wolves, with broad shoulders and bushy eyebrows. I couldn’t picture what she must have looked like.

“Tonight, the recurring topic, the one everyone always seems to want to talk about, no matter how much we talk about it or how many times I say the same thing: vampires. Why people don’t want to talk about werewolves as much, I don’t know, they never seem to get as much attention, even though werewolves are so much more interesting as far as I’m concerned. I may be biased. My sound guy is making signs at me that yes, I am biased. Oh well. That’s what I get paid for. All right then: I want to hear from you, I want your calls. Are you dating a vampire and not sure what happens next? Are you a vampire and you’re thinking this has all gotten a lot more complicated than it really should be? I want to hear from you.”

What were the odds? My first time listening to the show, and it was like she was talking to me. With a morbid fascination, I listened. What kind of problems did other vampires have?

“Hello, first call of the night and you’re on the air.”

The caller was a woman who sounded young, but who really knew? “Oh, hi Kitty. Wow, thanks so much for taking my call. Anyway, I was wondering, how many vampires do you think sign up for online dating? Because I’d really love to meet a vampire, but I don’t even know where to start. So I was thinking of just putting it out there in my profile, you know?”

Kitty didn’t even hesitate. “A little advice for you: I wouldn’t go around advertising that you want to meet a vampire. Especially don’t if you’re looking to actually hook up with one. As I understand it, it’s kind of a turn off. It’s the crazy factor—you’re a bloodsucker, and here’s someone throwing herself at you to get her blood sucked. You gotta wonder if there’s something going on, you know? And I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

Jack notwithstanding. I wondered how I could get these two together.

“I don’t care about the blood sucking part, vampires are just so hot!”

Kitty sighed. “I can always tell the ones who’ve never met a vampire. Sure, they’re hot if you like donating blood.”

“It can’t all be about the blood, can it?” She sounded so sad.

“All right, I’ll take pity. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You have to get yourself to a pretty good-sized city. There has to be enough population to actually support the local vampires, it’s a predator-prey ratio thing. Then find the hottest, sexiest nightclub you can. One with a lot of dark corners so you can’t really tell what’s going on. And then make yourself as appetizing as you possibly can.”

The caller sounded doubtful. “That sounds so… cliché.”

“It does, doesn’t it? Next caller, Petros from Miami, what’ve you got for me?”

Petros—he had to be a vampire. No way he wasn’t a vampire with a name like that.

“Well, Kitty, I’m a vampire, and I’ll get to my question in a minute but I have to argue with you about that call—not all vampires go to nightclubs looking for fresh meat. That advice was really quite misguided.”

“So what, should I have gone ahead and told her to put up a dating profile, so that a bunch of vampire wannabe fakers can take advantage of her? Because I guarantee that’s what would happen.”

“Well then maybe if there was some kind of online dating specifically for supernaturals. Does such a thing exist?”

“Not that I’ve been able to find, and trust me I do a lot of searching online for weird stuff. If there is one it’s probably pretty darned secret. Why—you thinking of starting one?”

There was an idea—but the liability on that kind of thing had to be through the roof.

“No, of course not, it just sounds so crass.”

“Did you have a question or am I hanging up on you now?”

“I—I think I’ve forgotten my question.”

“Then it must not have been important. Call back when you remember. Moving on now…”

She moved the show along at a fast clip, taking four calls before the first break, returning with a rambling commentary on the latest vampire soap opera TV show, speculating about celebrities who might be secret vampires, and so on. Really, this sounded like any other talk radio advice show. Just the content was different. I had no idea what that meant.

Well, partly, it made me feel better. Like this was all normal somehow. Or could be made to seem normal. As snarky and punchy as she sounded, she also seemed really easy to talk to. Which was why her show had been going on for years, and why people kept calling.

If I really wanted to talk to her I could probably just find her. Ask Rick for an introduction. And did I want to talk to her? Hadn’t I already hashed over this enough? But the radio show was safely anonymous. I could do it. I could call.

I had a sudden horrifying thought: what if Ginny listened to the show?

What the hell. I called. I mostly expected to get a busy signal and told myself that if I got a busy signal I’d take it as a sign and hang up. But I didn’t. I got a screener who asked me to hold a minute. I supposed I could have hung up then, but once again I didn’t. What was happening to me?

“Hi, thanks for waiting,” the screener said when he came back on. “Can you tell me your name, hometown, and what you want to talk about?”

I wasn’t even sure I could say what I wanted to talk about. I really just… wanted to talk. “Um, yeah. Sam from Denver. I’m a vampire. I guess you probably hear this all the time, but I’ve met this woman and suddenly realize I have no idea how a relationship with someone who’s mortal would even work.”

“Well, you’ve called the right place.” The guy sounded bored when he answered, which told me that yes, he’d heard this one before. “Hold on and I’ll put you in the queue. There’s no guarantee Kitty will take your call. You’ll need to turn your radio down.” He put me on hold, and the show came in through the phone line.

Kitty wasn’t going to take my call, I was pretty sure. I wanted to giggle. I mean, who did this kind of thing? I kept listening.

“Hi, Kitty.” This was a woman talking, no-nonsense and brusque. “So, I’m a vampire. And I have to know—how do I convince people that I’m not some sultry man-eating sex kitten? For some reason everyone who finds out I’m a vampire expects me to be a sultry sex kitten. Even other vampires!”

“This is where the stereotype thing backfires,” she said, sounding as sympathetic as she had yet. “This is the same thing as thinking all vampires are hot. Can I ask a couple of questions? Do you have a job? Are you with a Family? How often are you actually running into this attitude?”

“I—I guess I don’t really have a job. I’m with a Family. I work for the Family, it’s just easier that way. And the Master—well, he puts a lot of store by appearances. He likes the seductive look. But it’s really not me, and just because I’m a vampire doesn’t mean I should have to act like someone else’s idea of one.”

This sounded like someone I’d get along with. It almost made me want to hang out with more vampires. Maybe I’d like more of them that I thought.

“That’s a tough one,” Kitty said. “On the one hand, if you’re working for a Master, you might think of it as a uniform. On the other hand, since it sounds like this is pretty offensive and difficult for you, you might ask if you can please do something else. Try to get across that you’d be much happier in a different role. Not being your Master I can’t speculate on what’s really going on or what that might be.”

“I just… the thought of doing this for all eternity just makes me kind of tired, you know?”

“Which is exactly why you have to do something about it. Offer a compromise, work it out. Other than that… well, turns out vampires have to live just like the rest of us—one day at a time.”

“Thanks for listening, Kitty.”

“Thanks for calling. Moving on... I’ve got a call here from Sam in Denver. Sam, you’re up, what’s your problem?”

What?

“Oh… um… hi?”

“Hello, Sam. You have a question for me?” She seemed amused. And why wouldn’t she, I must have sounded like I’d been pushed on stage naked.

Well, I was here. Might as well take advantage. “Okay, I have a confession. I’ve never really listened to your show until tonight. I just know you by reputation, and I figured this whole thing was a sensationalist gimmick. But—”

“There’s always a but,” she said cheerfully.

“But… something happened. I met this girl. Woman. Person. She’s great. And I’m a vampire. A young one, I’ve only been a vampire for like fifteen years, but still. I’m confused. How…” I stumbled, either from a sudden bout of stage fright or because I just couldn’t articulate it. “I’m having trouble figuring out the logistics of it. She has to work during the day, I have to sleep during the day, there’s an overlap of maybe six hours, and that’s only in winter.” Even I thought I sounded whiney.

“You know why I’m going to have way less sympathy for you than you’re expecting?” Her tone was sympathetic enough. She wasn’t being mean. But she wasn’t going to cut me slack. I was kind of hoping she’d cut me slack. “Because of all the mortal human couples who have to deal with swing shifts. Because of the nurses who work all night whose spouses never get to see them, for the night-shift cops who never get to go to the movies with their sweeties. Other people have been dealing with these problems for a long time. You’re not as special as you think you are.”

“Oh, it’s not that I think I’m special. I just…” I sighed. The problem had gotten much bigger in my head in the last few minutes. “This isn’t the life I thought I was going to have. I thought I’d have everything figured out by now.”

“Nobody ever has it all figured out. You actually seem to be trying to work this stuff out, which makes you an okay guy in my book. But I’ve said it before—don’t attribute to the supernatural what may just be ordinary bad luck.”

“But what about the supernatural bad luck that got me into this in the first place? I’m just starting to really get a grip what this means, how a lot of this works, and you know what I’ve figured out? That the real tragedy of vampirism is realizing I’m going to be around long enough to see that, eventually, no one’s going to remember Nirvana. You know they’re playing “Lithium” on classic rock stations now?”

She said, “Sam, that’s got nothing to do with vampirism. That’s just getting old.”

Don’t attribute to the supernatural… “You’re right,” I said, sighing again. “You’re exactly right.”

“As for advice, it’s pretty much the same, too. Be honest, set boundaries, and do the best you can.”

“Thanks for listening, anyway.”

“You know what you’re going to do next?”

I didn’t. I had some ideas. But I had to think some more. “I think maybe I’ll call her up and ask her to a movie. A late show.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said approvingly. “Good luck to you, Sam.”

The line clicked off.

AARON HAD TAKEN over the kitchen counter for some kind of expansive packing project—cardboard boxes, packing tape, rolls of bubble wrap, and things to be shipped. Dozens of things to be shipped, like he’d saved them all up for one big ship-fest.

One of the things to be shipped caught my eye. Cardboard box with a nostalgia-inducing look to it. Realization hit like a kick in the gut, and I picked up the toy.

“This is a Hoth Imperial Base,” I said, staring at the box in awe. When I was about ten, this was the coolest thing ever—that picture with the dinky little plastic action figures, the guns that never stayed in the plastic hands, the elbows that couldn’t move, that glorious Star Wars logo that would set any kid’s heart racing.

“Pristine, in original packaging,” Aaron said, emerging from his room, roll of packing tape in hand.

I said, “I had this when I was a kid. It had, like, an ice bridge you could blow up, and if you put the action figure on the thing just right you could launch it, like two feet.” The urge to open the box, pull the whole thing out and start putting it together was strong.

“Don’t you dare think of it,” he said, grabbing the box out of my hands. Like he could read my mind.

“Do you really make money selling this stuff?”

“I make rent, don’t I?”

“Well, more power to you,” I said, and wandered back to the game console. Ginny still hadn’t logged on. I was thinking of heading to Psalm 23 on the off chance her friends might be there and I could ask them what was up. Because that wasn’t creepy or stalkerish.

My mind wasn’t on any of the games I tried, so I went to writing. Which didn’t much work either.

Twenty minutes later, my console pinged—Ginny was logged on. But she wasn’t at her Xbox, she was texting. I dropped everything to IM her.

—Hey! I missed you, what’s up?

—I’m afraid I might have kicked the hornet’s nest.

—What?

—I found Clarissa Carter, she’s staying at the Brown Palace. But she’s not alone, she’s got a whole crew of people with her and I think they might be vampires.

Oh, this was bad. —Are you sure?

—I only saw them once it got dark.

—Did you see Jack? Was Jack there?

—I didn’t see him. I might be in trouble.

Jack wasn’t there. Or no—she just hadn’t seen him. But Carter really was working with vampires, and looking for access to Rick and the Family. Had Jack given it to her? Or had she just gotten rid of him?

I played video games because I was so shitty at this kind of thing in real life.

—Where are you? I typed back.

—Downtown. Have to take the light rail to my car.

—I’ll come get you, wait!

My phone rang. Caller ID said Jack. Which was weird, because he never called. In all the years we’d been living together, I couldn’t remember him ever calling.

“Jack?” I said. I couldn’t decide if I was happy or angry. I had no idea what he’d been up to the last couple of days. I supposed I was happy he was still alive. Undead. Whatever. But was he still one of us? “Jack, what’s going on?”

“We have a problem.”

“Problem? What problem?”

“They’re trying to kill me!”

“Woah, who’s trying to kill you?”

He took a breath—he was forgetting to breathe. “I wasn’t totally honest with you, Sam. Carter—she made me an offer. She said she could make me Master of Denver.”

“You can’t challenge Rick, he’d eat you alive! He could destroy you without even blinking. He’d snap his fingers and you’d be a puddle on the floor—”

“I know that! That’s why Carter said she’d help—she’s got vampires working for her, some really badass guys—if I agreed to be her ally when it was all over.”

“Oh, my God,” I could help but exclaim. “Were you really going to do it?”

“No! Well. I don’t know. I’ve just been lost, I was looking for something, Carter saw it… I listened, for just a minute, you know?”

Ginny. I went back to typing. —I’m on the phone with Jack, are you still okay?

—I don’t know.

“Jack,” I said. “It’s Ginny, she’s out there. She wanted to check them out, they might have found her—where are you?”

“Heading home from the Brown Palace. Don’t worry, Sam, I’ll find her. We’ll figure something out, I guess.”

That was not a good plan.

I couldn’t type fast enough. —Jack’s out there, he’s coming to help, okay?

—OK.

Jack said, “I don’t know if I can do this. There’s five of them, and they have weapons, and they’re definitely following me—”

“Jack. Think a minute. You’re a vampire. You have super speed and strength. You can hide in shadows. I know you can do it because I’ve seen you do it at clubs!”

“But they’re vampires!”

“Well, so are you!” That was as much pep talk as I could manage.

“I think I found Ginny… I can smell her… hanging up now.”

No, don’t get off the phone, how would I know everything was all right?

I desperately wanted to text Ginny but I didn’t dare. I didn’t want to distract her. And I sure hoped this wasn’t some elaborate deception, either Jack or Ginny or both working for Carter, all of them trying to get rid of us on their way to getting rid of Rick—

No. Everything was going to be fine.

Aaron was at the kitchen counter, staring at me. He’d heard everything.

“Aaron?” I said. “Do we have any weapons?”

“Weapons? What do you mean, weapons?” Thin, geeky in every sense of the word, he was the same age as Jack and me but looked five years younger. He did not look like a bloodsucking creature of the night. Not that I did, either. And we were up against a vampire assault squad.

“Jack’s in trouble, and he’s bringing it here. Do we have a chance?”

“No,” he said. “No, we don’t. We’re lame. We spend all our time holed up in our cave. We’re baby vampires! What are we supposed to do in a real vampire fight?”

“We’re smart people, surely we can come up with something!”

“Oh yeah? You’re the gamer geek, haven’t you picked up any tactics in your million hours of playing?”

That was a good question. I had to think about it. Hand on chin, I looked around. So you’re the shooter, this is Left 4 Dead and you’re cornered—what do you do?

“Actually… we’re pretty defensible here. We block up the windows—” The half windows by the ceilings all had blackout curtains over them already. But they were accessible as escape routes in case of fire. “Just nail some bars or spikes or something—we don’t have to block them, just keep anyone from crawling through. That leaves the front door, which should be plenty defensible. But we need weapons. Stakes, I guess. Do we have stakes?”

“Hold on a minute.” He disappeared back in his room. The sounds of cardboard boxes, of someone digging through a hoard of collectibles, drifted out.

In the meantime, still thinking about weapons, I called Rick.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, with a tone that suggested he very well knew it wasn’t.

“Um, I think we may have a little bit of a situation here. You know that reporter I mentioned, the one with a connection to Mercedes Cook? Well, she tried to recruit Jack, but Jack wouldn’t be recruited, and she’s got a squad of vampire henchmen after him. It’s looking like they’re on their way here.”

“It’s looking like it, is it?” Rick asked. “You need help?”

“I’m not so much asking for help as warning you. We think Carter’s really after you, and they tried to go through us, and, well. You know we’re not very good at the politics thing.”

“But do you need help?”

Aaron came out of his room just then with an armful of Nerf guns.

“Um. Probably. I need to go,” I said and hung up. “Aaron?” I tried to keep my voice as calm as Rick’s. We were immortal, as cool as rocks. “What do you plan to do with those?”

“I don’t know about you, but even with vampire strength I would suck in a hand-to-hand fight, right? So I want to keep my distance. I know these aren’t exactly machine guns, but maybe they’ll let us keep back.”

“Or maybe the bad guys’ll die laughing,” I said. He glared.

What we had was a broom closet. I had a vague memory of buying a broom and a mop when we first moved in, when I had assumed we’d have no trouble keeping the place clean. I might have used them at some point. They looked used. Well, they’d get used now. I broke the wooden handles over my knee—easier than I thought it would be, a surge of strength pouring through me, not feeling any pain at all in my leg.

Now we had four short spears with jagged ends, perfect for staking.

“Let’s make sure nobody uses these on us, right?” I said.

“I don’t suppose we have any Kevlar vests around,” Aaron said. “Would Kevlar work on wooden stakes?”

“No idea, but you might be on to something.”

What would have worked great would be some pot lids or cookie sheets or something like that. But we were vampires, we didn’t cook. We didn’t have a single cooking implement in the whole kitchen.

“We aren’t using this, right?” Aaron pointed at a cheap pressboard table in what would have been the dining nook if we ever actually ate dinner at a table. Right now, it was covered with action figures from the eighties.

“I guess?”

He carefully cleared away the action figures, setting them by the wall next to the lunchboxes. Then he tipped over the table and broke off the legs by stomping on them. That gave him four giant spiky pieces of wood that looked like they’d go straight through a vampire’s cold dead heart.

On the other side of the table, the pile of vintage lunch boxes sat there.

“You know,” I said. “The lids of those lunch boxes would make great chest protectors.”

I swore I saw a flash of vampiric anger storm in his eyes. In another minute he’d strike me down with Force lightning or something. “No. I got those as a lot and I can triple my outlay if I market them right. We are not touching those.”

“What’s more important, your profit or keeping us from getting stabbed?”

“If we stab them first, we won’t have to worry about it!”

“Well that sounds very nice in theory, doesn’t it—”

A knock sounded at the door. We froze.

“Is it them? The bad guys?” Aaron whispered.

“Bad guys wouldn’t knock,” I said.

“You don’t know that!”

The knock turned into a pounding, and the handle rattled, someone trying to get in. More pounding, and Jack shouting, “Sam! Aaron! Geez, let us in!”

“This is a trap,” Aaron said.

I grabbed a broken broom handle and peered through the peephole in the door. And there was Jack, looking like he was trying to press himself bodily through the door. Alas, his vampire powers weren’t that strong. Ginny stood beside him, looking worriedly over her shoulder. A sense of relief turned my legs to jelly.

Maybe Aaron was right and this was a trap. Ginny was working for Carter, or Jack was, or both of them were, and this was a ploy to get us to open the door and get rid of us. Thing was, a stake through the heart would kill anyone.

I threw the bolt and swung open the door. Jack and Ginny spilled inside.

“What the hell did you lock the door for!” he yelled.

“Because you said we’re about to get attacked by a bunch of vampires!”

He slammed the door shut, threw the bolt again. “Yes. They’re right behind me.”

I wanted to give Ginny a hug. Instead, I hooked my hands in my jeans pockets. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine,” Jack said.

“Not talking to you,” I answered.

Ginny smiled. Her heart was beating fast; she smelled of sweat and nerves. But her smile was honest. “I’m fine.” She was wearing jeans and a Blue Sun T-shirt, her hair was in a ponytail, and she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen in my life.

“Sam, what are we going to do?” Jack was stalking around the living room looking like he wanted to break something.

“Well, they can’t get in here unless you invite them, right?” Ginny said.

“I’m not sure that works on a vampire house,” I said. “I think that’s a human thing.”

“Well, I’m here,” she said.

“But you don’t actually live—” I stopped. I had this sudden vision of being normal, having a human girlfriend, and moving into an apartment together, sharing normal stuff. Everything I didn’t get to do before this all happened. How the hell had I gotten into this? And I realized, if I hadn’t been turned into a vampire, if I’d lived my life normally, I’d be forty years old and Ginny would be too young for me. We’d never have met. This was so confusing.

But I smiled, because who cared?

“Wait,” Aaron said, blinking as if he’d just seen Ginny for the first time. “There’s a stranger in our apartment. We talked about this—”

“Aaron, calm down,” I said. “Ginny, this is Aaron, our other roommate.”

“Hi—”

“Aaron, Ginny. There, now you’re not strangers.”

She seemed as nonplussed as the rest of us, which was understandable.

Jack pointed to the door. “Guys? Bad vampires, coming after us.”

Ginny had been carrying a mason jar tucked under her arm. She set it on the counter, and Aaron poked at it. “What’s this?”

“It’s holy water,” she said. “I stopped at a church—”

All three of us scrambled away from her, stumbling over furniture and bumping into walls, as ungracefully as we possibly could.

“What’d you bring something like that for?” I yelled. I had never actually seen in person what holy water did to a vampire, I’d just been told stories. Horrible stories. It wouldn’t kill us. It would just hurt. You’d think as a vampire I would be a little better about handling pain.

“I thought it’d be useful.” She was exactly right, of course.

“Wait a minute,” Aaron said. He went back to his pile of Nerf weapons and held up one of the little darts that went with one of the guns. The spongy little darts. Oh, that could work…

He found a pair of ancient rubber dishwashing gloves under the kitchen sink. Must have been left there by the last tenants. Ginny was helping him, searching cupboards for a stray bowl they could use for soaking the darts.

I watched her. She had the look of profound concentration I imagined she wore while gaming.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked out of the blue. “This isn’t your fight.”

She shrugged. “Because I put myself in the middle of it? Because they’re bad guys and it’s the right thing to do? Because I like you?”

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” I said.

“I’m already in this. They know who I am, they were already coming after me.”

I had to smile. I felt gooey. This was so weird. “Um. That thing you said, about being here. You said you wanted to move closer to downtown, right? You want to move in?”

She chuckled. “I’ve known you for like a week. This is only the second time I’ve seen you face-to-face.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I said.

“Sam, no!” Aaron said, horrified.

Jack added, “Aaron’s got a point, what exactly are you thinking here—”

I found a paper towel in the kitchen and the Sharpie Aaron had been using to label boxes. Sharpie on paper towel—lots of bleed. But I wrote out three lines of a sublet agreement: Ginny can live here if she promises not to mess things up too bad and maybe pays a to-be-agreed-upon rent.

I signed, then shoved the towel at Jack.

“Sign this.”

“No! I don’t want her moving in here—”

“Just for a couple of days, until we’re not being attacked by vampires anymore.” He stormed off. Shit. We all of us had to agree to it.

Jack said, “Someone around here has to be practical. Does someone maybe want to help me rig up a booby trap for the door? Aaron, you have any rope in that hoard of yours?”

“Yeah, I think so—”

He did. Miles of it. I didn’t know where he got all that rope—was rope a desirable commodity on eBay?—but he had a lot of it. Jack found the pieces of broken wooden table, and together they built something. Had no idea if it was actually going to work, but at this point we had to try everything.

Even the lunchboxes. I dug in a couple of kitchen drawers, the ones where all the junk ended up, until I found a roll of duct tape. The all-powerful duct tape. “I’m really sorry, Aaron.”

“Hey, what—Sam!”

“I won’t tear them up, they probably won’t even get hurt, not unless someone actually stabs at us. But you know, if they actually stab at us, you’ll be glad I’m doing this.”

I held a Dukes of Hazzard box against his chest, over his heart. “Hold that.” He held it, baffled. I stretched loose a long length of tape with that comforting ripping sound, and slapped it across the box, his chest, under his arms, around his back. I wrapped it around four or five times, with a couple of loops over his shoulders to stabilize the box so it didn’t fall. A regular duct-tape-and-lunch-box cuirass. I didn’t even have to worry about him being able to breathe.

“Now do me,” I said, handing him the tape and holding a Dragon’s Lair lunchbox to my chest. A minute later, I had my own armor.

“This won’t work,” he said, bemused, arms outstretched, staring at the box awkwardly taped to his chest.

“Or maybe it will?”

We looked dumb. We looked like total dorks. But you know what? Wasn’t nobody going to be stabbing any of us through the heart.

“You want one?” I said to Ginny.

“No, that’s okay,” she said. “I figure they won’t kill me, I’m food.”

Sobering thought, there.

Aaron was still looking at himself like he’d been drenched in slime. “I’m never gonna get that sticky tape stuff off these things. I’ll have to list them at ‘fair,’ tops.”

“Two words, my friend: Goo Gone. It’ll be fine.” I turned to Jack. “So, do you want to be taped up with Care Bears or The A-Team?”

He looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “The A-Team. Duh.”

BEFORE I COULD try one more time to get Jack and Aaron to sign the sublet towel before handing it to Ginny there was a scratching noise at one of the windows in the living room, behind the TV. Normally, I would have said it was an animal, a rat or raccoon maybe, clawing at the edges, looking for a way in, but the silhouette, shadowed by the streetlights outside, was of a human figure. After tapping at the window a few more times, the figure left, slipping away like smoke. I went to my bedroom, looked at the window on the back wall—again, the tapping came, a concerted scratching, testing access. We’d secured the windows. We’d be okay.

A knock came at the front door, and a voice called. “Jack? Sam? I just want to talk. Can’t we just talk? You don’t even have to open the door.” It was Carter.

“I think we’re just fine where we are, how are you?” Jack answered.

“There’s been some kind of misunderstanding—”

“Oh, like you hiding away your own vampire squad? Did I misunderstand that?”

Silence. Then glass broke. The sound came from Aaron’s room.

“Shit,” Jack muttered and grabbed one of the spear-like table legs.

We all started for the room, but I said, “No, Jack, stay by the door, we can’t let anyone get in.”

So much for the place being defensible. We suddenly had four fronts to cover, and we didn’t know anything about the bad guys except that they were vampires. I could sense them, cold eddies in the atmosphere. Ginny shut the bedroom door and I assumed locked it, but it locked from the inside, it would only slow an invader down a couple of seconds.

Aaron, protected by rubber gloves, and Ginny grabbed Nerf guns and moved in to aim them at the bedroom door, where we expected the swarms to come through. We were screwed.

“I gave you a chance. I was more than happy to give you a chance. You could have helped us. We need people like you. Vampires, young and hungry. Well, young anyway.”

A pounding struck the front door. This wasn’t knocking—this was someone hitting it with something large and heavy. A battering ram. A few seconds later the bang came again, and the door bounced in its frame. The third one, the plywood around the deadbolt splintered. The next one, the door would fly open.

“Everybody stand back,” I murmured. I glanced up at the ceiling, where Jack and Aaron had hastily installed a spiky rake chair thing and rigged it with rope around a couple of makeshift pulleys. We hadn’t had time to test it and I had no idea if it would work. We’d find out now.

“If you guys would just sign the sublet—” I muttered. Make this place Ginny’s, the vampires couldn’t come in—

“Too late for that,” Jack said.

More breaking glass from the back bedroom, and the thud of someone jumping down from the window. I couldn’t worry about Ginny and Aaron because the lock in the front door finally splintered.

The door swung open, yanking on the rope trigger, and the contraption on the ceiling fell.

At first, I thought it didn’t work—it just fell, dropped straight down as if whatever was holding it up had failed. But then, at the last minute, it swung—and three different splintered shards of wood caught the guy coming through the door square in the chest.

The guy, a vampire, fell under the tangle of wood and rope, made a kind of choking noise—and dried out. Turned desiccated, his skin going leathery, eyes sinking back in his skull. In the space of seconds, he turned into a dried-up corpse. No longer undead, just plain dead. He’d been holding a wooden spear in one hand and a hand-held crossbow, wooden bolt loaded, in the other. Yeah, they wanted to kill us. Good to know.

“Ew,” Jack said, lip curling.

“Yes, and if we don’t want that happening to us, we have to stop them.”

A second guy came through the doorway. The trap and its victim had the added bonus of gumming up the threshold. The guy had to pick his way over debris and his fallen comrade. The glare that he gave us was full of fury. He bared his teeth and fired his hand crossbow.

The bolt glanced off the lunchbox strapped to Jack’s chest.

“Holy shit, it worked!” he said, his voice filled with awe. He charged forward, his makeshift spear outstretched and impaled the intruder, who just stood there and let him do it, apparently in shock that his bolt had missed. The spear made a wet, cracking sound as it went in, and like the other guy he collapsed, arms splayed out, a look of pain and disbelief on his pale features. His corpse dried out, caved in, like a body left in the grave.

How old had he been? He looked about mid-twenties, but so did I. I had no way to tell. They’d felt… older. More powerful. Our only advantage here was surprise.

Jack yanked his spear out, stepped back, and stared wide-eyed at his victim.

“Why don’t vampires wear armor? Like, stab-proof vests or something? That technology’s been around for a pretty long time,” Jack said, knocking a couple of times on his lunch box.

Ginny and Aaron both let out shouts. The bedroom door had crashed open, another goon-looking guy was coming through. They both let fly with Nerf darts. Aaron had found a couple of big-ass repeater-loading bandolier-equipped Nerf guns in his stash. They didn’t have to reload. Droplets of water flew off the darts as they gently lofted and bounced against the vampire.

“What the hell—” The bad guy gave a short laugh, brushing away the darts like he’d swat at gnats. Some of them had hit his bare face and exposed hands. Then, his expression warped into a grimace. “Shit! What is that?”

Ginny and Aaron kept firing, damp projectiles bouncing harmlessly off the vampire’s face and clothes, but leaving angry red welts behind. He stumbled back into the bedroom, unslinging a spear from his shoulder.

“Ginny!” I shouted and tossed one of the loaded hand crossbows left by the dead vampires to her. She studied it for a second, gave a determined nod, aimed, fired.

A shout came from inside the room. I couldn’t see what happened, but given that Ginny quickly went to reload, the shot hadn’t stopped him.

“Sam!” Jack called.

Two more heavies came in through the front door, unceremoniously crawling over their fallen comrades. This time when Jack went to stab one, the guy in front grabbed the spear and yanked it out of his grip, just like that.

I threw Jack mine and went for another, one of the broken broom handles I’d set in a pile by the sofa. The heavy wasn’t expecting an immediate comeback, and Jack got him, leaning in to really wrench the spear home. The second guy came for me.

The doorway was defensible. It was pretty straightforward to stand there and knock the guys over as they came through. But once he got inside, I didn’t have anywhere to go, no place to hide. I held my spear out, aimed straight for his chest—pointy end in the other guy, that was how it went, right? I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, I wasn’t trained for this.

The guy pointed at me. “What… is that a lunch box taped to your chest?”

“Yes.”

“You look ridiculous.”

“But hey—I’m not the one getting staked through the heart.” I prepared to charge.

He just stopped me. Unlike the others, he was ready, he was expecting it, so he gracefully stepped clean out of my way, grabbed my arm, spun me and slammed me into a wall.

Something surged in me, some kind of power or survival instinct. When he went to hit me, I ducked, and the world blurred, or slowed down, or something. I was moving faster than I ever had, I felt stronger than I ever had. It wasn’t enough, because the next time I ducked, he was moving even faster than I was. He grabbed my hair, pinned me to the wall. I couldn’t shout for help because I couldn’t breathe in. Besides, I heard fighting—the others were busy.

He tipped my head back, caught my gaze. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help it.

He was older than me. Stronger than me. He could put enough force into his stare, enough strength into his grip, I’d just stand there while he took my head off. This was the real thing, the real power of vampires.

Screw that. Maybe he was stronger, but I didn’t have to sit here and take it, and I was a smart monkey. I didn’t need brute force.

I dropped, shoved, and it was just enough to throw him off balance and let me escape. He was right behind me, his hands grasping at the untucked tails of my shirt. But I had a target, and I didn’t look back and didn’t slow down. I crossed the room in a flash, reached the kitchen, and the bowl of holy water Ginny and Aaron had been using to soak Nerf darts. Grabbed it, flashed on the awareness that this was probably going to hurt like hell, but I didn’t exactly have time to stop for gloves.

I emptied the bowl right into the guy’s face. He screamed, bent fingers scrabbling at his face, trying to wipe the stuff off.

Some of the holy water splashed onto my hands, and the burning was like putting my hand on a stove, and no matter how fast you pulled your hand away, the burn would still be there. It didn’t seem fair. I wasn’t even religious, not before I was turned and certainly not now. But it burned. I wiped my hands on my shirt.

The vampire’s face turned red, a rash covering him, down his neck and under his shirt where water had soaked through. He let off a string of curses, keeping his eyes shut against the burn. It was like I’d heard: it didn’t kill. But boy, it hurt. I curled my hands and crossed my arms to keep from scratching at them.

The guy didn’t notice Jack coming up from behind and using a broken broomstick to stab him through the back, and through the heart. The splintered end didn’t come out through the front, which would have been cool. But it got the guy, and he dried out, his body decaying before our eyes, until he was nothing more than a dusty husk, a corpse on the edge of disintegration.

“Aaron, sign it!” That was Ginny, and there was Aaron at the kitchen counter, signing the paper towel.

He brought towel and marker to Jack, who pressed it against the wall. The ink bled through and left a mark. I didn’t much care.

Then Ginny signed it. And everything went still.

No more breaking glass, no more intruders climbing through the mess. Just the four of us standing in the living room, weapons ready, waiting. Ginny was the only one gasping for breath, and her heart was racing. I could hear it.

“Is that it?” Aaron asked.

Six vampires had gotten in. I tried to be impressed that we had rated, like, a whole platoon. But I was suddenly very tired.

We waited another minute. Still quiet. If there were any more outside they couldn’t get in. The sublet had worked. “Maybe it’s over?” I said.

Jack wasn’t letting his spear go. “Okay, but where’s Clarissa?”

“It’s all right. We have her.”

That was Rick’s calm, upper-crust voice. My muscles almost gave out. All of us almost gave out. Jack and I tried to clear out some of the mess and the desiccated dead vampires. But my hands hurt.

“Oh my God, Sam, what did you do?” Ginny said, reaching for me, then hesitating.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Does it hurt much?”

“Yes, yes it does.”

Jack wrenched open the door. Standing on the concrete stoop was Braun, the bouncer from Psalm 23, playing soldier now. Rick appeared next to him, with Clarissa Carter, whom he held immobilized, an arm across her neck, her hands held fast behind her. There were other vampires behind them, at street level, shadows in the darkness. I didn’t know if they were Rick’s or Clarissa’s.

“You see?” Rick said, showing her the destruction, the bodies of her minions. “You’re not wanted here, and this city is very much protected.” He turned her, put a hand on her face to tip her head back, forcing her to stare into his eyes. He focused his vampiric gaze on her.

“Go back to Mercedes Cook. Tell her not to try for Denver again. Ever.” In reply she nodded, slowly.

I had always thought of Rick as a nice guy. A benevolent Master. Right now, he was kind of scary. No, he was really scary.

She slumped his grip. He passed her over to Braun, who slung her over his shoulder.

“Put her in her car and leave her,” Rick ordered. “Do not harm her. But make it very clear we could have.”

“Understood,” Braun said, and went out with the unconscious Carter.

Rick stayed behind and tried to look us all over through the open front door. His expression was serene—when wasn’t it? He might have been out for an evening walk.

“Well done, gentlemen,” he said finally. “And lady. You are?”

“Um. I’m Ginny,” she said. “Just a friend.”

“Right.” Rick glanced at me, eyebrow raised, putting two and two together. I felt like a kid who’d gotten caught staying out too late. He just kept standing there. “There suddenly seems to be a prohibition on the place.”

We all looked at Ginny, who said, sheepishly, “Yeah, um. I signed a sub-lease.”

“Very creative,” Rick said, lifting a brow. “So, may I come in?”

“It’s okay, he’s a good guy,” Jack said.

But Ginny shook her head. “If it’s all the same to you, we can talk through the doorway, yeah?”

“Fair enough,” Rick said. I thought he would argue, but he really was that nice of a guy. He gestured at our so-called armor. “Nice work, there.”

“They were collectible,” Aaron said grumpily.

“I’ll help you clean them up. It’ll be okay.” I started picking at the duct tape and peeling off the lunch box, but had to stop. My hands hurt. I was a vampire, I was supposed to be invincible, why did my hands hurt?

“This one may be past saving,” Jack said, picking at the nice round dent right over Face’s, um, face.

Ginny came to save me, peeling off the tape for me. I held my rash-covered hands up. They hurt less that way. Ginny made a move to touch one, wincing in sympathy.

“I don’t know how to do first aid on vampires,” she said. “I didn’t think vampires could get hurt.”

“Learn something new every day,” I muttered. Apparently, vampires could also get adrenaline spikes and crashes, because I suddenly just wanted to sit down. My whole body felt like jelly.

“Blood,” Rick said. “You need blood to heal that. Then give it a night, you’ll be fine.”

Yeah, that was what I thought. Blood always came into it somehow.

Ginny got this look, wide eyed and full of trepidation. I hated to see her scared. But you know what would have been even worse? Her stepping forward. Volunteering. I didn’t want to hurt her. I couldn’t hurt her.

“I’m not going to ask you for that,” I said.

“Okay, thanks—but I thought that was what you guys were all about.”

“Maybe, sometimes… really, I’m just happy to have a friend I can hang out with and talk about gaming. You don’t even have to move in. I mean, you should probably pay a couple of bucks to make the good on the lease—”

“We’ll talk about it,” she said.

We stood there grinning at each other, me with my hands still raised and covered in red welts, Rick regarding us with obvious amusement.

Jack had been clearing debris from the doorway when he came over and grimaced at my hands. He called out, “Hey, Aaron—Sam’s hurt, he needs blood.”

Still wearing rubber gloves, Aaron had been cleaning up Nerf darts. “Okay, I’ll call for pizza.”

Rick looked back. “Pizza? Is that how you’ve been doing it?”

“Um, yeah,” Aaron said. “They don’t usually remember and no delivery place has banned us yet. Sam usually takes the pizza to the homeless shelter a few blocks down the street. But I guess this time… Ginny, you want some pizza?”

“You know, I think I do. Pepperoni.”

Aaron disappeared into his room, where we could hear him making the call.

“I don’t know why I ever worried about you three,” Rick said.

“Thanks for, you know. The help,” I said.

“No, thank you. You have no reason to look out for me, but I’m very glad you did. I’m happy to return the favor. In the meantime, I’ll get some people over to clean up the bodies. If that’s all right with you.”

“That would be great,” I said.

“Very well, then.” He nodded, a gesture that coming from him almost looked like a bow, and turned around.

“Who was that?” Ginny asked in awe.

“Rick, Master vampire of Denver,” I said.

“Really? Wow. Not what I’d have expected.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Oh, and when the delivery guy gets here… you may not want to stick around for that.”

“I thought I was getting pizza out of this.”

“Well, yeah, if you want it, I just thought maybe—”

She patted my shoulder and finished picking duct tape off my shirt. “Don’t worry about me, Sam.”

Impossible. Just impossible.

Ginny did not move in. Not entirely. But she paid ten bucks a month and kept some of her stuff here, and came over for dinner sometimes after work and to help playtest games or to just blow off steam. It was… nice. She never said anything about the mess.

Sometimes, Ginny and I would go out to a movie or coffee shop or something—she’d get a drink, I’d watch her drink. I didn’t know where this was going between us, or what was going to happen. I assumed at some point she’d get tired of hanging out with someone who could never take her out for dinner—or rather, who’d be all too happy to take her out for dinner. At some point she’d want to get married and have kids. All the things I couldn’t do for her. She’d find someone, and I’d maybe see her once a month instead of a few times a week. Or maybe we’d carry on like this for decades. Rick said you had to be fatalistic about these things. You had to be okay with letting go, you had to enjoy what you had in the moment. She didn’t want to be a vampire, so she would get old and I wouldn’t, and we’d have to deal with that at some point. But whatever happened, I hoped we’d stay friends.

Because I could apparently still make friends. I could still have a life. That made me happy.

We managed to get the place cleaned up in a couple of weeks, with Rick and the Family’s help. Windows replaced—and new grates put over them. Door and locks replaced, carpets cleaned, furniture replaced. Aaron even managed to sell the dented lunch box. So that was where we stood, with the living room still impressively cluttered, cardboard boxes waiting to go out for morning pickup, a table full of action figures waiting to be packaged up. Jack was out at Psalm 23, Aaron was in his room at his computer, and I was sitting on the sofa, playing video games. Ginny was on the sofa with me. All completely normal.

An entire fantasy world bridge on the TV screen exploded, sending a swarm of orcs—and Ginny’s avatar, unfortunately—plunging to their doom in an electronic abyss.

“I think your vampire reflexes give you an unfair advantage,” she said, frowning.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The response time on this game is awful. You can’t tell because you move the controls so fast.”

“No I don’t—do I?”

“The other alternative is that I’m a shitty player. Are you calling me a shitty player?”

“I’d never do that.”

“Good.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Reset that bad boy, I’ll get you this time.”

“You say you will. Hey, aren’t we supposed to be working together on this one?”

“I thought so, until you blew me up.”

“That was an accident. Won’t happen again.”

She smirked.

Aaron came out of the room then. He didn’t even blink anymore at Ginny being here. “Hey, anyone want pizza?”

We did.

Carrie Vaughn is the New York Times Bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings. She’s also written the Golden Age superhero novels, the contemporary fantasy Discord’s Apple, and the young adult novels Steel and Voices of Dragons. She’s a contributor to George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, and has written upward of 70 short stories for various anthologies and magazines. She attended the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in 1998, and was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2011. Carrie had the nomadic childhood of a typical Air Force brat, but managed to put down roots in Colorado. She collects hobbies and entertains a fluffy attack dog named Lily.

Paranormal Bromance

by Carrie Vaughn

Copyright © 2014 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design: Tiger Bright Studios

Copy Editing: Molly Tanzer

Formatted by:

www.emtippettsbookdesigns.com

Table of Contents

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About the Author

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