Paranormal Bromance (2 page)

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.

S
O
. 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.