Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (36 page)

“Why?”
 

“It makes me wonder if I’m any different from the rest of them. From the assholes who tried to execute you.”
 

Reginald shrugged. “You’re a vampire. You were training and preparing to be a vampire for years before you became one. You knew the deal. This is who you are now. Maybe it’s who you always were.”
 

She looked away. “Don’t say that.”
 

He reached through the window and put his hand on her arm. “Nikki. You’re still a good person.”
 

She shook her head and shifted the car into reverse. “That’s exactly the problem, Reginald,” she said. “I’m not a person at all anymore.”
 

B
AD
N
EWS

NIKKI RETURNED IN BETTER SPIRITS. Reginald took it as a temporary reprieve.
 

Ever since being turned, Nikki had been subject to mood swings. Reginald wasn’t sure what his role was supposed to be in helping her through her rough patches, or even if he had a role at all. She’d been turned right before the now-infamous “Ring of Fire” incident, and he’d feared even then that she was making an ill-informed, emotionally rushed decision. They’d had a few weeks of whirlwind activity followed by the almost-end-of-the-vampire-world, and after that, as things returned to their current state of abnormal normal, cracks in her armor had started to appear.
 

It was hard to blame her for being up and down. These days were enough to give even the most stalwart vampire pause. So Reginald decided to do the American thing and ignore it, hoping
 
that the problem would go away on its own.
 

“They’re happy,” she reported, referring to the four anemic people she’d schlepped to the bowling alley. “I bought them Chunkies.”
 

“Like, fat people?” said Reginald.
 

“Candy bars.
Chunky
. I thought you were a connoisseur.” Then she looked from Reginald to the other side of the room, where Reginald had forgotten the TV was on. He didn’t want her to see the news program he’d been watching, so he quickly clicked to another channel.
 

Nikki gave him a sarcastic smile that said,
You’ve got to be kidding me
. “Turn it back,” she said.
 

“Nikki…”
 

“I’m not as fragile as you think I am. I’m a big girl. Now turn it back to the news or I’m going to screw you until you die, even if you can’t die.”

“Um…?”

“That was supposed to be an ominous threat. I forget why.” Then she looked at a plate that was sitting on the end table. Reginald’s taquitos had finished cooking while she was taking out the trash, and he was eating them with guacamole and sour cream.

“Taquitos,” she said.
 

“Shut up, mom,” said Reginald.
 

“It can’t be healthy, the way you eat.”
 

“I’m a vampire. Is this food going to kill me again?”
 

“Exactly. You’re a vampire.”

“I ate a whole dude earlier!”

She shook her head, as if he were a lost cause.
 

“I also just ordered a pizza from that all-night place,” he added. “It will arrive shortly.”

“How the hell can you still be hungry?”

“Really?” he said. “Three hookers
you
ate.
Three
.”
 

“Strippers.”

“Give them a year,” he said.
 

Reginald was in the middle of the couch. He had to reach all the way across the rightmost cushion to reach his plate of taquitos, which he did as Nikki stared at him. He supposed he should have moved the plate to the coffee table, but that seemed like entirely too much work.
 

Nikki picked up a throw pillow that was occupying the non-taquito side of the couch and tossed it onto a recliner. “Move over, fatass,” she said, pushing him aside with her rear. Then she plopped down next to him, very close. Reginald was normally possessive about his personal space, but that didn’t apply to Nikki. She leaned over and wrapped an arm around him.

“I’m serious about the TV,” she said. “Please stop protecting me.”
 

“It’s just more of the same. Humans misinterpreting things, vampires being murdering fuckers. Neither of us need to hear about it. That includes me.”
 

“Flip it back.”
 

With a sigh, Reginald raised the remote and flipped back to the news.
 

On the screen, a newswoman with an immobile blonde hairdo was saying, “… south wing, and spread across the rest of the building quickly. Authorities are blaming a gas leak combined with improper ventilation for the spread of the fire…”
 

“Gas leak again,” said Reginald. “Same as the time the roof blew off of the Council building. Why do humans blame everything they can’t explain on gas leaks?”
 

“Shhh,” said Nikki.
 

“… almost fifty fatalities. Henry Jacobs is live on the scene. What’s the mood like there, Henry?”
 

The screen changed. The woman with the immobile hairdo was replaced by a man with an immobile hairdo.
 

“Wendy, the only word for it is ‘devastated.’ This neighborhood has been shaken by a tragedy of tremendous magnitude. Forty-seven people died last night when what used to be the Tremont Hills apartment building, behind me, caught on fire. Those who escaped are dumbfounded. Eyewitnesses say that the fire didn’t seem to spread rapidly from the outside, suggesting that many of the deaths were due to smoke, blocked exits, or simply failing to get out in time. Those outside waited and waited for more people to emerge, but they never did.”
 

“They’ll get wise to it,” said Reginald. “In fact, I’d bet the authorities that matter already are. You can tell whether people died in a fire or whether they were killed beforehand. They just must not want to alarm the public.”
 

“Wise to what, though?” said Nikki. “They don’t know what they’re looking at. They might get that the fire was started to cover up something else. But drained, bitten people? What will that mean to them?”
 

“Hmm.”
 

“We should do something,” she said.
 

“Do what, exactly?” said Reginald. “There’s nothing illegal going on here. Not by vampire law, anyway.”
 

Nikki shook her head. “Murderers. We’ve become murderers.”
 

“If by ‘we’ you mean ‘vampires,’ then ‘we’ have always been murderers. You joined this club willingly, my dear.”
 

“To sip and ship. No respectable, sensible vampire kills people outright anymore. It’s too hard to get away with, and it’s just plain
wrong
.”
 

Reginald nodded. Eleven months ago, he’d been a human.
Every
vampire had once been a human. But it changed nothing. How quickly some vampires forgot their human roots, and raised themselves above those they hunted.
 

“It’s not as hard to get away with as you’d think, apparently,” said Reginald, gesturing at the TV. “If you kill fast enough, they can’t keep up. Or if enough parties are doing the killing, they can’t pin any one of them down.”
 

And that was the bigger problem. One killer could be caught. A race of killers was much harder to put a finger on. Since the Ring of Fire, the Vampire Nation as a whole had been absolutely terrified. Vampires seemed to feel that they had dodged a bullet, and that the end of their kind was looming if they failed to do what the angels wanted. The problem was that nobody
knew
what the angels wanted. Balestro and his kind had been mute since that night on the German hilltop. So the Nation panicked and the Nation fretted, and eventually the Nation begged to be told what to do in order to quell their terror — and vampires like Charles Barkley were all too eager to provide that direction.

Charles, prominent on the Council since Maurice deposed Logan, had stepped up with a three-stage plan designed to “right the game” that vampires were playing against humans, thus saving the species. Stage one was to kill and turn humans. Stage two was to kill and turn humans. Stage three was to kill humans, and maybe turn them.
 

“I can’t watch this,” said Nikki.

“I told you.”
 

“And what kills me is that I’m part of the problem.”
 

“No you’re not. You’re different.”
 

“I’ve spilled my share of blood.”
 

“Sip and ship,” said Reginald. “It’s no different for them than donating blood. They’re just donating it to us.”
 

She shook her head. “I was always conflicted as a human, Reginald. I loved animals, but I ate meat. How could I justify that? I couldn’t. But I just let it go. I ate meat and I loved animals and I pretended that there wasn’t a conflict. And now I’m a vampire who is aghast at all of this murder, and yet I drink their blood.”
 

Reginald shrugged. There was nothing he could say. She was determined to beat herself up. He couldn’t change her mind, so his only option was to distract her.
 

He turned off the TV, then pointed into the corner. “Hey, look over there!”
 

She looked, then looked back at Reginald.
 

“What?”
 

“Nothing. But you were distracted for like a second, so it was worth it.”
 

She raised her hand, about to grab something heavy and throw it at him, but at that exact moment, Reginald’s doorbell rang. Nikki’s eyebrows went up.
 

“My pizza,” Reginald explained.
 

Reginald got up and tried to use his vampire super-speed to run to the door faster than Nikki could see, but instead he tripped over the ottoman, which was still soaked with Vito’s blood and dusted with pieces of his shredded hat feather.

The doorbell rang again.
 

“Did you see my awesome speed?” said Reginald from the floor.
 

There was a blur above him. Nikki opened the door, then dragged the pizza man down beside Reginald, her hands pinning him to the carpet, her mouth on his neck.
 

Reginald, climbing to his feet, yelled down at Nikki. An answering yell came from the pizza man, but the pizza man’s yell was much higher-pitched than he would have expected.
 

Reginald looked down. Around a mouthful of flesh, Nikki said, “It was a girl.”
 

The pizza man, who’d turned out to be the pizza girl, was staring up at Reginald with terror. She’d stopped screaming, which was a good thing because the door was open. Reginald kicked the door closed, then kneeled over the pizza girl, over Nikki’s back and greedily drinking head.
 

He looked into the girl’s eyes and said, “You’re into this. You’ve always been bi-curious.”
 

Instantly, the terror left the pizza girl’s face. Her eyes closed and she gave an erotic sigh.
 

“Oh, gross,” said Nikki. She pulled away and looked at Reginald, her mouth covered with blood. “Make her less turned on.”
 

“Why should I?” Reginald snapped. “You just cost me a pizza.”
 

The twin punctures in the girl’s neck were bleeding crimson blood into a pool on the carpet. The girl herself was oblivious to the wound. She was writhing and moaning in ecstasy, her hair soaked with carpet blood, changing from a dirty blonde to a wet red.
 

“No I didn’t,” said Nikki. She pointed to the coffee table, where a large pizza box was sitting among Reginald’s magazines. She must have run the pizza to the coffee table before taking the girl down. Reginald hadn’t seen it happen. Damn, she was fast.
 

Nikki returned her mouth to the girl’s neck. The pizza girl began rubbing herself.
 

“
Grooooooss
,” Nikki moaned. “Reginald, snap her out of it!”

“Snap her out of it? Hell, I’m going to get the video camera.”
 

Ten minutes later, Nikki stopped drinking and patched the girl’s wounds. Then she changed the pizza girl’s clothes and took her into the bathroom to wash her off — and then, seemingly because she felt guilty, she washed and braided the girl’s hair. She did the last while wearing only a bra, having discarding her own bloody shirt. Reginald watched and made more video camera jokes.
 

When she was done and dressed, Nikki went to one of the blackout shades on Reginald’s windows. She took a quick glance at the wall clock, then peeled back the shade to peer outside.
 

“I can’t drive her home,” she said. “It’s too close to sunrise. If our overlords want us to evolve, when are they going to create those light-tight cars for us, like in that Ethan Hawke movie?”
 

Reginald assessed the girl and declared her fine to drive. He gave her a cookie, a big tip, and sent her on her way. As she was leaving, the girl asked Nikki to call her so that they could “go out for drinks sometime or something.”
 

After she was gone, Nikki stood with her back to the door, her face troubled.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I just couldn’t help it.”

“That’s four,” said Reginald. “
Four
humans in one night. I barely go through that many in a month.”
 

“I was ravenous.” Then a frightened look crossed her face. “And what’s more, I’ve realized that I kind of… I kind of… Oh, it’s
terrible
.”
 

“What?”
 

“I guess I feel like I… I
want to hurt them
.” She sat down and put her face in her palms.
 

“It might be blood ties,” said Reginald, sitting beside her and putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ve read a bit about it. It’s like being psychically linked to those whose blood you share, and whose blood
they
share. Sometimes I hear Maurice in my head as if he’s standing right beside me, and a time or two I’ve heard someone that I assume is Maurice’s maker. I don’t even know who he is, except that he has an accent. I sometimes get emotions directly from both of them, rather than from myself. It’s unsettling.”