You Suck (18 page)

But as it got lighter, and we saw all the homeless people around, Jared and I realized that our masters would not be safe here when all the homeless people who lived under the bridge noticed the tarps and our delicate youth or smelled my Gummi Bears and came after us. So Jared went to get the garden cart, some trash bags and duct tape, and hopefully his stepmom’s minivan so we can move our masters to a safer realm.

Oh, check it, before the Countess passed into the inky sleep of the undead, I was like, “So what did you get me for Christmas?”

And she was all, “Ten thousand dollars.”

And I was like, “I didn’t get you guys anything.”

And she was like, “That’s okay. You are our most special favorite minion and it’s all good.”

Which is why I love her and will guard her to the death. Then she like kissed the vampyre Flood and passed out. I’m sure their love will span the ages, if Jared and I don’t fuck up and fry them during transport.

OMG! I just remembered, we forgot to feed Chet!

T
he Cheddar Princess of Fond du Lac was toasted. It wasn’t just the bursting into flames that had crispied her up more than somewhat physically, it was that Drew’s blood tasted like bong water, and she was still a little mentally baked from feeding on him. She’d made the mistake of trying to get the taste out of her mouth with some orange juice and had been rewarded with five minutes of the dry heaves.

She brushed at her arms and great black flakes of burned skin came away, revealing fresh, unscarred skin below. Drew’s blood was healing her, but it appeared that the process was going to take time and, like life in general, was going to be messy.

Maybe a bath.

She padded naked into the bathroom, which was done all in slabs of granite and green glass, and ran her bath. While the tub filled, she picked the last few burned tatters of her dress
away from her skin and dropped them into the toilet. There was a swath of gray dust across the black tile, the remains of the original owner, and she was tracking him all over the bathroom and bedroom suite, so she stopped to sweep him into the corner with a towel. That had sort of been a surprise (in what was turning out to be a long line of surprises) when her first victim had disintegrated in her arms two nights ago, just as she was getting the hang of blood drinking.

“Oops.”

He had been so nice, too. Had picked her up in his Mercedes not two minutes after she’d stumbled out of Lash’s apartment building wearing nothing but a leather bustier and thigh-high platform boots. It wasn’t the first time she’d been on the street with her ass hanging out—that wasn’t what had thrown her. It was waking up feeling like her tits were on fire to see her body rejecting the giant silicone globes she had spent so much money having implanted. Even as she tried to push them back in with her hands, the implants pushed through her skin, opening her up like they were aliens hatching out of her. She screamed as they broke through and rolled to the floor, then lay there, quivering on the carpet. As she watched, her skin mended, her breasts tightened and lifted, the pain had turned to a tingling, but now she felt a squirming in her face—her lips specifically, and she wiped her mouth and came away with two sluglike lines of silicone that had been injected years ago. It was only then, in looking at the grotesque globs of lip filler on her hand, that Blue realized she wasn’t blue at all. Her palms were baby
white. Her arms, her legs—she ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. An old familiar stranger looked back at her—the Cheddar Princess of Fond du Lac. She hadn’t seen this person since high school; the milky-white skin, hair almost white blond, still in the severe cut of the blue call girl, but looking somewhat like a pageboy cut now. Even the tattoos she’d had done in her early days in Vegas were gone.

I’m alive,
she thought. Then:
And I’m going to be alive forever
. Then:
And I’m going to need some fucking money.

She ran to Lash’s bedroom to where she’d left her makeup case. It was gone. Her money was gone!

She ran out of the apartment and down the steps like she might see a green trail of bills blowing in the wind in the direction her money had escaped, but once on the street, she headed for the only place she knew, toward the Marina Safeway. She got half a block before the Mercedes pulled up and the electric window rolled down.

“Hey, you need a ride? It’s a little chilly out here for that outfit.”

His name had been David, and he did something that had to do with moving money around. What ever it was, it must have paid well. He was wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and his pent house apartment on Russian Hill looked out on Golden Gate Bridge and the massive dome at the Palace of Fine Arts.

He’d given her his coat to wear up in the elevator. It was in the elevator that the hunger had come upon her. Poor David. They hadn’t even talked price before she’d had him
bent over the green glass vanity in the bathroom, drinking his life away.

“Oops.” The difference, she realized, between what had happened to her and what had happened to David had been the bloody kiss she’d taken from Tommy. But for a kiss, she, too, would be a pile of dust.
There should be a song like that,
she thought. At least she’d learned before she took her victims.

Now she swept the last of David into the corner, then scraped him up with a piece of cardboard from his shirt drawer and dumped him into the wastebasket. Then she slipped into the tub full of bubbles and began to scrub off her charred skin.

She wouldn’t be able to stay long. David had been married or had a girlfriend. Blue had found a whole closet full of women’s clothes—expensive clothes, and the woman would probably be back. Of course, this would make a great base of operations, maybe she could just wait for the wife to return and sweep her into the wastebasket with David.

Blue leaned back and closed her eyes, listened to the bubbles popping, the wires humming through the building, the traffic out on the streets, to fishing boats leaving the wharf—then a sudden intake of breath from the living room, then another, deeper gasp as the second one found life, then a long man-scream. The dead Animals she’d collected were coming back to life.

“Sit tight, boys,” Blue said. “Mama’s just going to get cleaned up and put on a new dress, then we’ll go get you something to eat and pick up my money.”

She ran a sponge over her arm and smiled. She really could be Snow White now.
One dwarf at a time,
she thought.

E
lijah Ben Sapir had roamed the planet for eight hundred and seventeen years. In that time he had seen empires rise and fall, miracles and massacres, ages of ignorance and ages of enlightenment: the full spectrum of mankind’s cruelty and kindness. He had seen all manner of freakishness, from the perversions of nature to the perversions of mind, twisted, beautiful, terrifying: he thought he had seen it all. But for all of his years, and all the acuity of perception enabled by his vampire senses, he had never seen a huge shaved cat in a red sweater, and sitting there in his newly washed yellow tracksuit, still warm from the dryer and smelling of soap and fabric softener, he smiled.

“Hey, kitty,” the old vampire said.

The huge cat eyed him suspiciously from across the loft. The cat could sense that he was a predator, just as Elijah could sense that the cat had been prey to a vampire. Kitty treat.

“I’m not going to eat you, kitty. I’ve fed quite enough.”

It was true. Elijah was feeling a little bloated from trying to keep the body count up. Perhaps he should just kill the next few, not feed. But no, the police wouldn’t know it was a vampire then, and there’d be no joy in terrorizing the fledgling. He just wasn’t ready to feed yet. There was someone in the stairwell right now, he could hear her breathing and smell patchouli and clove cigarette
odor wafting under the door.
Soon enough,
he thought.

“Perhaps we’ll find something for you to eat, hey, kitty?”

Elijah vaulted off the bar stool and began opening cupboards. In the third one he found pouches of Tender Vittles. He took a bowl from the cupboard that looked as if it had never been used, dumped in the meatish nuggets, and shook them around.

“Come, kitty.”

Chet padded a few steps toward the kitchenette, then stopped. Elijah put the bowl down and stepped away. “I understand, kitty. I don’t like to eat in front of witnesses either. But sometimes—”

The vampire heard a car pull up outside, a car that hadn’t been tuned in a while. He cocked his head and listened as the doors opened and slammed. Four got out. He heard their steps on the concrete, a female voice, hissing at the other three. In an instant he was at the window looking down, and in spite of himself, he smiled again. There was no vivid life aura around the four down on the sidewalk. No healthy pink glow, no black shadow of death. The visitors below were not human.

Vampires. On one hand, an indication of an enormous problem—one that just might attract attention that he could ill afford—but on the other, exciting in a way that he hadn’t felt in a hundred years.

“Four against one. Oh my, kitty, how ever will I prevail?”

The old vampire ran his tongue over his fangs. For all the rage, frustration, and discomfort he’d endured since
choosing the redhead as his fledgling, he was, for the first time in de cades, not bored. He was having the time of his very long life.

“Killing time, kitty,” he said, slipping into a pair of Tommy’s Nikes.

J
ody awoke to the smell of clove cigarettes and the crunching of Cheese Newts. There was music screeching, too—a whiny guy singing about some girl named Ligeia, who apparently he missed a great deal because he was talking about dragging her worm-worn corpse from the earth and caressing her cheek on a cliff above the sea before throwing himself off, with her in his arms. The singer sounded a little down, and like he could have used a throat lozenge.

She opened her eyes and was initially blinded until she adjusted to the black light, then she yelped. Jared White Wolf was sitting on the bed about two feet away from her, shoving handfuls of crunchy Cheese Newts into his mouth. There was a brown rat on his shoulder.

“Hi.” Newt crumbs sprayed and fluoresced on the black sheets and clothing.

“Hi,” Jody said, turning her head to avoid the crumbs.

“This is my room. Do you like it?”

Jody looked around, for once not really that thrilled with her vampire night-vision abilities. There were disturbing stains glowing on the sheets, and almost everything else in the room was black with a patina of vibrant blacklight-
enhanced dust or lint—there was even lint on the rat.

“It’s swell,” she said.
Interesting,
she thought. She was no longer afraid of gang members and street criminals, and would even throw down with an eight-hundred-year-old vampire if need be, but rodents still sort of gave her the willies. The rat’s eyes were glowing silver in the black light.

“This is Lucifer Two.” Jared scooped the animal off his shoulder and held him out.

Despite an attempt at self-control, Jody climbed backwards halfway up the wall, shredding a Marilyn Manson poster with her nails in the process.

“Lucifer One went on to his dark reward when I tried to dye him black.”

“Sad,” Jody said.

“Yeah.” Jared turned the rat and rubbed noses with him. “I was hoping we could turn him to nosferatu when you bring Abby and me into the fold.”

“Yeah, sure, that’ll happen. Why am I in your room, Jared?”

“It was the only place we could think to bring you. It wasn’t safe under the bridge. Abby had to go, so I’m in charge.”

“Good for you. Where’s Tommy?”

“Under the bed.”

She would have known that—would have heard him breathing if the music wasn’t cranked up to coffin-splitting volume.

“Could you turn the music down a little, please?”

“’Kay,” Jared said. He tucked Lucifer Two in his pocket and spidered across the bed, getting a little tangled in his black duster, then rolled to the floor and across the room in a commando-under-fire move until he got to the stereo, where he twisted the dial, putting the keening Emo singer out of his misery, or at least shutting him the fuck up.

“Where are we?” Tommy’s voice from under the bed. “It smells like gym socks stuffed with ground-up hippies.”

“We’re in Jared’s room,” Jody said. She let a hand drop off the edge of the bed. Tommy took it and she pulled him out. He was still partially wrapped in duct tape and garbage bags.

“Was I a hostage again?”

“We had to cover you up to keep you from burning in the sun.”

“Well, thanks.”

Tommy looked at Jody, who shrugged.

“I was unwrapped when I woke up,” she said.

“That’s because Abby says you’re the Alpha vamp. Do you guys want to play Xbox or watch a DVD? I have
The Crow Special Collector’s Edition
.”

“Gee,” Jody said, “that would be great, Jared, but we’d better be going.”

Tommy had already picked up the Xbox controller, but set it down with marked disapproval, as if he’d notice a little botulism there on the trigger button.

“Oh, you can’t go until the ’rents go to bed.” Jared giggled, high and girlish. “The door is right by where they watch TV.”

“We’ll go out a window,” Jody said.

Jared giggled again, then snorted a little, then started to honk, then took a hit from the inhaler that hung around his neck before he went on. “There’s no window. This basement is totally windowless. Like we’ve been walled up in here with our own grotesque despair. Isn’t it sweet?”

“We could go to mist,” Tommy said. “Go out under the door.”

“That would be so cool,” Jared said, “but my dad put rubber gaskets around the door to contain my disgusting Goth stench. That’s what he calls it: my ‘disgusting Goth stench.’ Although I don’t think I’m really Goth, more like death punk. He just doesn’t like cloves. Or pot. Or patchouli. Or gay people.”

“Philistine,” Tommy said.

“Oh, would you guys like some Cheese Newts?” Jared picked the box up off the floor and held it out. “I can open a vein on them if you need me to.” He waved the thumb Abby had stabbed to prepare their coffee the night before, now wrapped in a ragged ball of gauze and medical tape the size of a racquetball.

“I’m good,” Tommy said.

Jody nodded in agreement; although she would love a cup of coffee, she didn’t think she should ask the kid to stab himself quite so soon.

She checked her watch. “What time do your parents go to bed?”

“Oh, around ten. You’ll have plenty of time to stalk the
night and whatnot. Would you like to wash up or something? There’s a bathroom down here. And a washing machine. My room was the wine celler, then my dad crashed his car and started twelve-stepping, so I got this sweet room for my own. Abby says it’s dank and disgusting—and she says it like it’s a bad thing! I think it’s just her perky side manifesting. I love her, but she really can be perky sometimes—don’t tell her I said so.”