Undead and Unpopular, page 8
part #5 of Undead Series
“Is that why you came over tonight by yourself?”
“You only sent for me.”
“You’re the only one whose name I can remember,” I admitted, and he laughed.
In the distance, I could hear barking and yowling and toenails clicking on sidewalk. I figured we had about two more minutes before all the neighborhood dogs descended. There was a reason I didn’t like taking walks.
“Let’s head back.”
“We only just—”
“Dude, trust me. You do not want to be here five minutes from now. We can talk more in the garden behind the mansion. Behind the fence.”
He obediently turned with me as I did a one-eighty and started heading back up the sidewalk to the house. He was right; it was a little silly. We were barely out of the shadow of the mansion. I had barely talked to him about anything. Wait—had it been my idea to go for a walk? I tried to remember. No. He’d asked me.
“I have another question for you, Majesty.”
“Oh, great. My turn again. Except we’re not playing a game.”
“About that, señorita, you are wrong. But here is my question: are you going to turn your friend into a vampire? Or wait for her to die and bury her and mourn her?”
“How do you even know about that?”
“You mean, before you asked me what it was like to make a vampire? I guessed. I know she is ill, and after seeing you and her in the same room, I could make some assumptions.”
The mansion loomed larger before us, the dark and forlorn branches of surrounding trees still waiting for rebirth. The baying of dogs was coming closer.
He broke the silence again. “You do not seem the type of lady to give up her friends so very easily.”
I chewed on that one for a moment. The thing about Alonzo was, even when he said something nice, it wasn’t like he was sucking up. Maybe it was in the translation of his ideas from Spanish to English; but his well-crafted words betrayed a certain attention for my well-being. In fact, he made for a pleasant change from most vampires here in America, who either (a) ignored me or (b) tried to kill me.
“I only just found out my friend was sick,” I said finally. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, yet.”
“I beg your pardon. But I believe you do.”
We stopped together at the iron gate on the west side of the house. It led to the brown and lifeless gardens behind the house. But neither of us reached for the latch. Instead, we watched each other for several seconds. Game indeed, I thought.
“Well,” I said finally, “you’re assuming my friend will even go along with it.”
“She has a choice?”
“If she didn’t, she wouldn’t really be my friend, would she?”
“Your uniqueness,” he offered, “is both blessing and a curse. Blessing, in that you are different from others, which I always see as a positive. A curse, in that you generate problems of your own making—problems that vampires like me do not trouble with.”
“For example?”
“I have never known a vampire to remain friends with a human—certainly not long enough to consider a careful plan to turn that friend.”
“Never? And you’ve been around, what? A hundred years? Two hundred? And in that time, you’ve never made a friend and then wanted to keep them around?” My situation with Jessica couldn’t have been that out there…and neither could Sophie and Liam’s.
“Not a living human,” he answered with arms stretched and palms up. “And when you generate two estimates of my age, you would do well to round to the higher one.” One of the hands lifted higher than the other.
I laughed.
“There’s us,” he said, finally swinging open the gate and entering the garden, “and there are them. The two cannot mix. No good comes of this. Your situation—forgive my boldness, Your Majesty—I see your situation as the inevitable, and unfortunate, end result of your unreasonable attachment to your human friends. Someday, you will end up in the same place with your doctor friend. Each of these endings will devastate you, weaken you—and to no good purpose.”
“I don’t see it that way at all.” I felt a little defensive, but also grateful to this vampire. Which was amazing in and of itself. But Alonzo was giving me the first chance I had really had to organize my thoughts. A rare and wonderful thing, in my case.
“How do you see it, my queen?”
My thoughts assembled rapidly as I said the words, and I felt more secure in my opinion with each new idea. “I gain strength from my friends, not weakness. My ‘situation’ with Jessica is not the ‘end result’ of anything. It’s a step in our journey together. Maybe she dies, maybe she lives. But she is an essential part of me, either way. What am I without these friends?”
“Faster, stronger, generally superior,” he suggested.
“Superior,” I muttered. “I’m afraid I don’t like that word very much. Especially when vampires use it.”
“Oh dear.” He gave a knowing smile as he walked beside me on the dead garden path. The baying of the dogs faltered in the distance. “No wonder you had a problem with the former regime.”
Chapter 17
We slipped into the back entrance of the house and just sort of stood around for a moment in the mudroom. I wanted to go to the kitchen and hang out with Jessica for a while—give her a chance to maybe tell me how the doctor’s appointments were going. How everything was going. The thing about Jess—you couldn’t force information out of her. She’d tell you or she wouldn’t. I planned to make the atmosphere as welcoming as I could.
Anyway, I was pretty much done with Alonzo. I’m sure he was done with me. And Sinclair wasn’t the “hey, let’s go play golf in the dark” kind of guy. In fact, I had never seen Sinclair with one man friend. In further fact, as far as I knew, Tina was his only friend.
Anyway, Sinclair was done with Alonzo. Tina probably wasn’t even there—she was tracking Jon down for us.
So it was that part of the party where you want your friends to leave, and they want to leave, but it was too early to look at your watches.
“It’s getting late,” Alonzo said, stealing another glance at his big silver watch. Thank God! Normally that weird tic of his made me wonder if a bomb was set to go off somewhere. But this time I welcomed it. “And unlike some, I must feed before dawn. With your permission, Majesty…?”
“Of course. Um, try not to kill your food.” I tried to say it as a joke, but it probably sounded like an order. Enough—I was too emotionally exhausted to try to explain. Let him figure it out. “Thanks for coming over.”
“The pleasure was mine.” He smiled at me, showing me how very pleased he was. “I was waiting and waiting for the phone to ring. And now, I will go back and wait some more.”
“Hmmmph.” I was 98 percent sure he was fucking with me, but he had enough slipperiness in his tone that just made it quicker to repeat, as I did, “Thanks for coming over.”
He went. I listened for Sinclair but he didn’t pop out from a hidden shadow the way he usually did. Nobody was pulling up in the drive. Tina was standing unobtrusively in the short hall to the kitchen, ready to spring forward with a cup of tea. Guess she’d quit looking for Jen for the night.
I slung my coat into the mudroom closet, kicked off my boots, and made for the kitchen.
Sinclair was there, sitting with Marc and Jessica and reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. His sleeves were rolled up. His feet were bare. He looked as comfy as ever.
Not that I wanted him breathing down my neck, but…
“Shouldn’t you be, uh, waiting breathlessly to hear about my walk with Alonzo? Did he swear allegiance? Did he bone me at the intersection of Dale Avenue?”
“Oh.” He turned a page. “About the first, Alonzo is gradually falling under your spell.”
“My spell?”
He looked at me innocently. “Why, dear, your natural charm. No doubt you had it before you were a vampire queen; but it’s all the stronger now. No one of any intelligence can resist you for long.”
See, there it was again, just like Alonzo—the 98 percent certainty that this guy was just fucking with me. I just waved a hand and let him continue.
“I only have to wait a few more days, and then he will be yours and, by association, ours. As for the latter, if you wanted to use your walk to, ah, show carnal interest, there is nothing I can do about it. And if you bit him, or allowed him to bite you—”
“Fat goddamned chance.”
“Yes, well.” He shrugged. “I was not especially worried.”
“Okay, there’s got to be something between total disinterest and hanging all over me. This”—I gestured—“isn’t it. But anyway, even though you seem, uh, not too worried about it, I’ll tell you how the walk went.”
“The walk with the guy who’s going to fall in love with you?” Marc asked.
“He’s not going to fall in love with me. Besides, I think he’s—I mean, if he was going to fall in love with anybody—which he’s not—look, can we stay on track, please?”
Just then I saw Marc slip Jessica something small and white—it looked like a business card—and whisper to her. I cut myself off. “What was that? Are you telling secrets? What did you tell her? Share with the class! Are you getting sicker? You’re not getting sicker, are you?”
I couldn’t smell anything different about her. Of course, I didn’t go out of my way to smell my girlfriends, so I didn’t exactly have a baseline for comparison purposes. But still. You’d think I could tell something.
“Take a pill,” Marc said. “I’ll give you one. I was giving her the business card of a guy I want her to see. He’s a really good doc—my dad saw him.”
And is still alive, right? I was embarrassed to ask. I knew Marc’s dad was sick, but surely I would have heard if he’d died. Somebody would have told me, right? We share with the class!
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s really good.” Weirdly, Marc said this in an almost glum tone. “They got him in this new place, he likes it a lot. It’s a real house, not a hospital or anything. He’s one of a couple guys who lives there, and the nurse who owns the place keeps an eye on them, you know, makes sure they get their meds and see their docs, but she’s not, you know, taking care of them in an obvious way. If he wants to retreat to his own space and watch a baseball game, he can. Or he can eat in the dining room if he wants company. It’s a pretty good compromise.”
“That’s great.” I said this with total sincerity. And it was, beyond obvious reasons: so, so great to hear good news for a change. “You should bring him by to—”
“Meet all my cool new vampire friends?” Jessica smothered a snicker as he continued. “Honey, he had a huge problem with my lifestyle when I was just gay. Now I’m gay and living with vampires.”
“Well, it’s not like you’re sleeping with any of us.” I shrugged.
“Hmm.” His eyes searched the hallway behind me. “So, what’s Alonzo’s story? Did he go home? Is he sticking around? I just thought—”
“Alonzo’s not an option, Marc. Honestly.”
“Yeah, well. You never know. You know how it is. You’re new in town, you don’t know the good bars, you—”
“Go out and kill a waitress for the fun of it?”
“Still working through that?” Jessica asked.
“Well, no matter how we deal with it among vampires, I’m sure Marc can agree that murder is a really great reason not to date a guy, doy!”
“Oh, I dunno. That whole ‘falling for the dark side’ thing worked out kind of good for you,” Marc said, his gaze sliding to Sinclair for a moment.
My mind went blank. A cliché I completely understood: I could feel my brain trying to make words and not coming up with a thing. Nothing. Empty. Nada. Finally I managed, “Do as I say, not as I do. And Eric’s a good guy. When he kills in cold blood, he does it for a good reason. You know, like love in his heart.”
“Ah, darling,” Sinclair said, gaze on his book.
“And I know he’s cute and all,” Jessica said, “Alonzo, I mean, but I don’t think he dates. You know, those types have minions and contemporaries, but I don’t think there’s much emotional attachment anywhere, with anyone.”
“True,” Sinclair said, still not looking up, “but do not discount Dr. Spangler’s scruffy Gen-X charm.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, ignoring how Marc suddenly looked pleased and puffed up a little. “I’m on to you, bud. You’re not sneaking under Alonzo’s radar by having one of us date him.”
Shit, when Detective Nick asked Jessica out, Sinclair practically drove her to her date. He loooved the idea of a cop being on our little “go, vampires!” team.
“So he’s headed back to the hotel?” Marc pressed.
“After a quick stop to commit felony assault,” I said glumly.
“You two are getting so chummy,” Jessica said, “I’m surprised he didn’t ask you to go with him to rustle up some dinner.”
“No thanks.”
“You talked to Sophie’s people lately?”
I slunk into one of the chairs. “What people? It’s her, and it’s Liam. And no. All’s quiet from their end. They’re waiting, I guess. For me. To do whatever.”
Like Alonzo. Like all of us: stuck in the same web of waiting. If I could get my hands on the guy who made the web, I’d throttle him.
“So, what?” Jessica asked. “Did Alonzo try to jump your bones?”
“Or did a slobbering horde of golden retrievers descend on you before he could make his move?” Marc piped up.
“Shut up, shut up. He didn’t make any moves. He didn’t do anything. He asked me some stuff and I asked him some stuff. And then we came back.”
“What ‘stuff ’?” Jessica asked, suspicion making her tone heavy.
Oh, whether or not I was going to put the chomp on you, nothing to worry about. “Vampire stuff,” I said, and wouldn’t say more, no matter how much she bugged me. Which, by the way, was a considerable amount.
Chapter 18
It was the next night and we were back in the kitchen. Half the table (and it was a big table) was covered with liquor bottles and half-full drinking glasses. It looked like we were all going on a bender, but the truth was, Marc was trying to teach us how to make rainbows.
Jessica was having a bit of success; she’d get her rainbow halfway made and then the grenadine would sort of squiggle into the rest of it.
All my rainbows looked like mud. I was so fucking thirsty I didn’t care; I drank the mistakes. The real tragedy was, I didn’t feel anything close to drunk.
“Just—okay, watch me again. See? You slooooowly let it sort of dribble off the spoon. Otherwise it’ll all moosh together.”
“I can get the first layer,” I said, watching Marc (who had put himself through med school tending bars) carefully build a rainbow-colored drink of grenadine, vodka, that blue stuff that looked like Windex, sweet and sour mix, and something else I didn’t know the name of. I wouldn’t have wanted to drink it (well, I was drinking it, but if I were still alive these concoctions would have had me on my ass) but once Marc made it, it sure looked pretty. “Then it all goes to hell.”
“Free booze and a metaphor for life, too!” Jessica watched her rainbow come apart, rushed it to her lips, and then made a face and put the glass down. “Why are we all learning how to make a drink none of us like to, um, drink?”
“I saw one of the bartenders at Scratch make one and thought it looked cool. Once I was sure one of the layers wasn’t blood—”
mmmm, blood, precious blood
“—I thought it’d be fun to try. And I wasn’t going to ask that vampire how to do it. She’s fairly surly as a bartender, and worse when she’s hostess.”
Where had that come from? Actually, I was starting to think about blood a lot more and more. You know those cartoons when the wolf looks at his friends and they turn into rib roasts and stuff before his eyes?
Jess and Marc were starting to look reeeally good.
“Maybe if you were a little friendlier to the Scratch vampires,” B-positive—I mean, Marc, began, “they’d treat you—”
“Look, nobody’s trying to kill me right now and that’s just fine. If they don’t like me, that’s just how it goes. I got over needing people to like me in tenth grade, when I spied the captain of the cheerleading squad on her knees in front of the offensive line of the football team under the bleachers, one day after school. I figured that wasn’t the life for me.”
“Of course,” Jessica observed as she experimented with different rainbow colors, “she somehow still pulled off Miss Congeniality two years later.”
“What was your secret, Betsy?” Marc’s eyes glittered with a fascination. “Did you do the defensive line instead? I hear that’s where all the votes are.”
“Honey, you tell me. You probably blew more guys in high school than I did.”
He laughed. “Miss Congeniality! Seriously, that’s great! Do you still have the crown and sash? I could get a date in no time if you’d lend me those props for five minutes.”
I drank another failed rainbow and ignored an empty bottle of vodka as it tumbled to the floor and rolled under the table. “Forget about it.”
“Yeah, but just think—”
“Marc, I said fucking forget it, okay? Do I have get out the hand puppets? Knock it off!”
“Jeez, Betsy, I was only kidding around.”
I resisted the urge to throw my empty glass at him. I wasn’t mad at him. I wasn’t mad at anybody. I was just…
Just really thirsty.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not meaning it, but that was what people said in such circumstances. “I’m a little on edge these days.”
“Sure, no problem. I had half your problems, I’d stress out, too.”
Well you don’t so why don’t you SHUT THE FUCK UP?
“Uh-huh,” I said brightly. The smell of all the booze was making me a little light-headed. Not to mention the smell of B-positive’s aftershave. I probably shouldn’t have been drinking so much on an empty stomach. Not that I could get drunk. Well, maybe I could. Eventually.
