The headphones were digging into my
ears, but I was willing to put up with the pain as long as they kept blasting
hardcore music therapy into my brain. Ten hours in a kitchen on a Friday night in
August is pretty much the seventh circle of Hell in New Haven. At least with the drowning
loudness of the phones I could numb out the sad fact that I had no life outside
Jim’s Deli.
I was a
line cook at the deli, and Friday nights were the worst. Followed only by
Saturday nights, oh great. I had started working at Jim’s when I was eighteen
and a dishwasher, which is worse than a line cook but only slightly. The main
reason is because as a line cook, you didn’t have to deal with Harriet, the
industrial strength washing machine from Hell. By the way, it’s called Harriet
because that’s Jim’s wife’s name. I’ve never seen the woman, but if her shrieks
over the phone were any indication, the dishwasher was actually the nicer of
the two. At least it couldn’t talk.
Three years
ago, on a Friday of course, one of the normal line guys hadn’t shown up to work
(We found out later that he didn’t show up because he got eaten but that’s beside
the point). Jim pulled me out of the clutches of Harriet and threw me into the
line, and it stuck. Despite having no culinary background, I’m not ashamed to
say I am a damn good cook. Not that it really takes a culinary background to
make one hell of a hamburger, but hey.
The bonus
to being a line cook was more hours, more work, more stress, and a tiny bit
more money. Joy. I kept working as a line cook because, despite it all, I
really enjoyed cooking. Hell, I might
even love it. As a guy, that’s a pretty big thing to admit, especially when you
used to be the star forward of the New Haven Angels. Haha, the Angels from New Haven.
Get it? The town thought it was cute. The guys on the team thought it was
bullshit. Not to mention the baby blue uniforms. And the cherub mascot.
Like I
said, it was Friday, I had been on the line, and Jim’s is famous for being a
hole in the wall restaurant with more customers in a night than any hole in the
wall restaurant should be allowed in a year. I was wiped. Add to that I was
trying my best to make my ears bleed with my favorite band on shuffle. I was
pretty much walking pulp by that time, so I have to cut myself some slack that
I jumped six feet in the air when a paper white hand materialized out of the
black and wrapped itself around my arm.
I hadn’t
seen or heard anything, besides the music, and all of a sudden I was in the
death grip of some druggie or another. Not the best place to be. I tried to
pull away; no dice. The arm was much stronger than I could have anticipated.
Hell, it was stronger than a bodybuilder on roid-rage. What drug could do that
to you again? They had said it on the news awhile ago but I don’t really watch
the news and that important bit of information seemed to have slipped my mind
right now.
The hand
tightened, and I freaking winced. I
am not a weak guy. I am 6’2” of still-in-shape line cook, kept that way by
constant gym time and tossing around heavy duty cast iron pans in a 6 o’clock rush. My mouth opened
involuntarily the same time my head dropped and I finally got a look at my
leeching companion.
It stayed
open as my brain took in long, lean, delicious paleness. Tight jeans, black tee
over nicely perky C’s, leather jacket, and yellow eyes… Yellow eyes? Fuck shit
shit fuck yellow eyes. That meant one
thing: vampire.
This wasn’t
happening, this couldn’t be happening. Not now, not in New Haven, not to me. I
started running through the options in my head. Demon? Demons had red eyes,
damnit, and didn’t blend in with humans so nicely. Except succubi, but she was
wearing way too much clothing for that. Were? Full moon was out, she wasn’t
furry. Not a Were. Ghoul was right out of the question, as was zombie, since
there was a distinct lack of rotting flesh. Vampire? Pale skin, yellow eyes,
strong enough to snap me in half. Check. Fuck.
New Haven is a small town
in the middle of no where. The biggest city around boasted a whole two movie
theaters and a bowling alley. This was not a town where vampires would want to
even drive through, let alone hunt in. What in God’s name was she doing here?
While my
brain was screaming outrage at the absolute wrongness
of the situation I was in, my vampire friend hadn’t been standing around waiting
for me to come to my senses and scream. She had pulled off my headphones (How?
I hadn’t even noticed she’d moved) and was pulling me along the road.
“Don’t.
Scream.” Oh, great, thanks lady, I’m sure you say that to all your future
meals. I didn’t though, which was to my credit, since I’m pretty sure it would
have sounded something like my soul escaping through my mouth. “You’re being
hunted. Just shut up and follow my lead.” Well no duh I was being hunted. I was
already caught. What was the big deal anyway? Right in the middle of my train
of thought, she tilted her head up and just kissed me.
My brain shut down. It had had
enough apparently. Too much to take in at once had forced it to just shut down
and I now saw the world through a veil of numbness. Which was sort of neat,
except that it made logical thinking pretty much impossible.
“…and then
Jess was like, no way, you are so not gonna wear that! And I was like, oh my
god just shut up already, you know?” She was going on about something; where
had I been for the first part of this conversation? I was suddenly aware that
she was talking really loudly for some reason, like she was projecting to
someone across the room. Didn’t vampires have super sensitive hearing? What the
hell was going on?
She looked
up at me, a very human gesture, except she was a vampire. She was a vampire god
damnit she wasn’t allowed to have very human gestures. My brain clicked just
enough to realize she wanted a response, so I let loose some sort of primal
grunt. Apparently, it worked, because she started talking again. Her Valley
Girl voice would have normally been a cheese grater on my ears if I wasn’t
completely disconnected from my senses; as it was, it was still annoying as hell.
She kept it up the whole time she was dragging me to some unknown destination,
presumably to eat me. My bad, drink
me. Vampire, after all.
I felt her
tense for just a fraction of a second, then release. She even let go of my arm,
which was nice since it had lost feeling five minutes ago. “He’s gone.” She
stopped walking, and in my state of numbness I stopped right along with her. “What
in God’s name is wrong with you? Do you want to die?!”
This was
new. Valley Girl was gone and in her place was this pissed off bad girl in
leather and heels. I’m sure in any other situation this could qualify as a
fantasy but right now, not so much. Whatever it had been that was keeping me
numb snapped and I did something exceptionally idiotic. I yelled back.
“What the fuck
is wrong with me, what the fuck is wrong with you?! This is New Haven for Christ’s sake! What the fuck
are you even doing here?!”
“Saving
your life!”
“So you can
eat me yourself?! No fucking thanks!”
Stupid stupid stupid. It’s in the
Book of Common Sense somewhere that if a vampire grabs your arm, drags you
somewhere, and then lets you go that you have an obligation as a human to run
the fuck out of there. Or there would be if any vampire had ever let a human
go. I was failing this test miserably.
She didn’t
get mad. She didn’t scream. She got very still. The still that isn’t human kind
of still. The still that only a corpse can be. “I’m not going to eat you.”
Do not
antagonize the vampire, please please please Josh for once be smart and do not antagonize the vampire. “Yeah, and
I’m screwing Margaret Thatcher.” Oh goddamn.
“Go home.
Get a cross. Do not go out after sunset.” She turned away. She started walking.
She was walking away from me. Why was I not running as fast as I could in the
opposite direction?
“I can’t.”
I was suicidal. That was the only answer I could come up with as to why I was
continuing to talk to an undead killing machine.
And she
stopped. Oh hooray, my brilliant get-away strategy had worked in that she was coming back. “You do not understand. You
have been marked. If you go out after sunset again, you will be eaten.”
“I’m a line
cook. I work nights. There is no way I can all of a sudden just ask to switch
hours.”
“Quit.”
Why was I
continuing this conversation? “Give me another option.”
She
shrugged, another one of those human gestures that was just completely wrong
coming from a dead body. “Die.”
Fantastic
choice there. My brain, already planning my body’s death, continued on and
tried another angle. “You said I was marked. What’s that mean?”
She was
walking again, and I was following. At least she hadn’t eaten me. Yet.
“The vampire
who was following you was alone. There are no vampires in New Haven normally,
but he must have wandered in. He marked you, and now you are a beacon to any
vampire within fifty miles. If he does not eat you...” She let her sentence die
midair. No sense in finishing what we both knew. I was a walking hamburger.
“But, how?
I didn’t even freaking see anything.”
She just
stared at me like I was being retarded. Which I was, of course. I hadn’t seen
her either, and she had been close enough to grab me. “Technically, he threw a
bit of his aura over yours. Human aura mixed with vampire aura to create a
beacon for any vampire in the area.”
“Well…how
do I get rid of it?” It seemed like the logical thing to ask, and she was still
not eating me, so why not?
Something
akin to surprise crossed her face. I realized with a sudden start that I had
been staring into her eyes the whole time. Not looking a vampire in the eyes is
like, rule number one to survival. “I…do not know.” She stopped at the foot of
a set of porch steps, and hesitated. “Can I…come in?”
“Yeah.” The
word was out of my mouth before my neurons could fire the correct response,
which of course, is HELL NO. If I hadn’t said that one word, I would have been
home sweet home and safe in my bed. She wouldn’t have been able to come in.
Except that I invited her in. Now it didn’t matter how many times I changed the
lock or doused the threshold in salt, she could come in. So why wasn’t I
pissing my pants in fear?
Because I
believed her when she said she wasn’t going to eat me. Call me the biggest
sucker in the world, but I believed she was telling the truth.
“You have no
wards at all.” The phrase came out disappointed, but not necessarily surprised.
I guess I hadn’t made the greatest impression on her.
“Yeah I
don’t uh…” How was I going to finish that sentence? That I didn’t place wards
on my house because then I’d be acknowledging that the magical world wasn’t a
fantasy? That it was part of the real world and that I wasn’t willing to accept
that? That not buying wards was my small way of rebelling against that fact?
And how the hell exactly was I going to explain that to a vampire, of all
things?
“You will.
Crosses?”
“Uhh…”
She
snorted, which was actually kind of funny. “Those too. Silver.”
“And garlic
too?” Sarcasm is apparently my default tone in hanging-out-with-a-vampire
situations. Since I seemed to be having so many of those lately.
“Not everything
they write in books is correct.” She stepped right in the line of salt on the
threshold. So much for that line of protection. “Sea salt, not iodized.”
I really
wish I had known earlier that a vampire was going to come into my apartment and
inspect my defenses against the supernatural. I might have made an effort to
clean. I worked so much that the apartment tended to collect...things. Like half-eaten sandwiches and
dirty laundry. Although, when I did clean it, it looked like no one lived
there, since I owned almost no furniture. Maybe there was a happy medium
somewhere in-between. It only occurred
to me after the thoughts had already run through my mind that that was an
absolutely idiotic thing to be worrying about since I had just given an undead
bloodsucker free access to my home for all time. Priorities, you know.
“How long
will this marking thing last?” I flipped the light switch on and cringed at the
trash lying across the living room floor. Of course, she already saw it, since
that whole vampires-see-in-the-dark deal. Still. This time I didn’t bother to
think why I was concerned with what she thought about my living conditions.
She didn’t
settle down on the couch, not that I could blame her, but instead went to the
windows and started inspecting them. “Well, taking into consideration the fact
that no one who has been marked has lived more than a week, I do not think that
is the first priority.”
“A week?”
She had just given me a death sentence. Why was I so calm? Had she charmed me?
Weren’t vampires supposed to be able to do that, if you looked into their eyes
long enough? And believe me, I had looked long enough.
“I am being
generous. The longest is three days. There was torture involved. I am hoping
you can avoid that bit though.”
“Why did
you even bother saving me if I’m gonna die in a week?” No answer, just the
deathly stillness that was still unnerving as hell. “What were you doing in New Haven?” And here is
Josh. He likes to talk to walls. Man, I would have never guessed vampires could
be annoying. “You are a vampire…right?”
I didn’t
see her move. All I know is one second she was staring out the window (which
her reflection didn’t show in by the way, creepy) and the next she was on the
doorstep. “Do not go out after dark, even to work. Ward your home. And buy
yourself a cross.” And then she was gone.
I slumped
down onto my couch, pushing a pizza box onto the floor in the process. I had
just been stalked by a vampire, saved by another one, invited her into my
house, and then had her tell me I had a week to live. Well, a week if I was
very very lucky. I had to do something about this.
So after my
fifth beer, I was starting to be more optimistic. Whoever the vamp I had
invited into my house was, she wasn’t interested in eating me. Or at least,
hadn’t been tonight. I was willing to go on faith that she’d keep on that path,
seeing as how the alternative involved a very nasty death and then potential
rise from the grave. Maybe not as a vampire, since she probably wouldn’t be
interested in turning me, but possibly as a ghoul. Lots of violent death
victims came back as ghouls. Or a zombie. I had always suspected my landlord of
being a Voodoo priestess; maybe she’d raise me so I could keep paying rent.
Ok, I was
being ridiculous, but seriously, how would you take the news that you’ve got
three to seven days to live? My solution just happened to involve alcoholic
beverages made from grain and some morbid thinking. Not the best, but it was
all I had on short notice.
I wasn’t
going to work tomorrow, of that I was damn sure. I was going to march my pansy,
refusing-to-use-wards ass down to the charm store tomorrow morning and buy as
many protective wards, charms, and crosses as I could afford. Since a vampire
had given me tips on how to keep vampires out, I figured they were reliable and
at least worth some monetary investment. Then maybe I’d go to the nearest
church and bathe in holy water.
But what
was she going to do? Stupid. She’s a vampire, she’s going to eat other people,
not worry about your retarded, left-for-dead self. Why did that bother me? I
should just start making plans to check myself into a psych ward because I was
seriously unhinged if I was upset about a vampire standing me up.
I stood up
to lock the door before I went to bed, but the spinning nature of the floor was
a bit discouraging. And besides, if I really was marked by a vampire as a happy
meal on legs, one itty bitty bolt lock wasn’t really going to do much.
I stumbled
to the door and locked it anyway.
