Vampires Don't Sparkle!

by Mia Archer

  “I said I always thought it’d be awesome to be chased by a bunch of cheerleaders, and I’m learning I should’ve been a lot more specific in what I was wishing for,” he said. “Big fucking difference.”

  “Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes again for good measure and stopping to listen. “Doesn’t sound like they’re following us anymore. Maybe we lost them.”

  “Or maybe they’re moving quietly because that’s what they want us to think,” he said. “You’re walking along minding your own business thinking you’ve escaped and then boom, the attack comes from the cheerleaders you never knew were there.”

  I stared at him for a long moment and sighed. “That sounds like you’re quoting something, so out with it.”

  “Jurassic Park?” he asked. “Come on. That thing is a classic of modern cinema.”

  “And it’s not all that modern considering the movie is nearly thirty years old grandpa,” I said, grabbing him by the arm. “Now come on. We need to get to an entrance so we can make our escape and…”

  We rounded the corner and sure enough there were the two cheerleaders I didn’t even know were there. Only it was Veronica and Stacy staring at us. Not any of the vampire horde who’d been chasing us.

  I jumped. I’m not ashamed to admit it. They surprised me. It’s possible to be surprised even if you are the living personification of death.

  “Told you they’d come around here,” Stacy said, grinning.

  I flexed my fist a couple of times around my scythe. I really wanted to reach out and hurt that vampire bitch. So I did just that.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jimmy asked.

  “Taking care of business!” I shouted.

  I landed on top of Veronica and we went tumbling around and around through the halls. Sure it probably would’ve been a better idea to maybe use some of the old death magic to take her on, but I wanted to hurt this bitch.

  So that’s exactly what I did.

  We rolled over and over. She punched at me a couple of times and I nearly blacked out with one of those punches as she hit me hard enough to cause some serious damage. That was the bad thing about being a reaper versus being one of the other many supernatural creatures that made their home on this world.

  We could take damage in the sense that we could absorb it and then come back from the dead after the fact since we sort of controlled the whole death thing, but that wasn’t quite the same as being able to shrug off the kind of damage a vampire could take.

  I slashed at her with my scythe, but it turns out the scythe wasn’t really a good close quarters weapon. I lashed out at her with tendrils of the old death magic, but those tendrils of the old death magic weren’t doing that much good because I couldn’t see where to aim them.

  Finally we came to rest and I was on top of her. I didn’t have my scythe, the thing had gone clattering to the floor at some point and then disappeared to wherever it was a reaper’s scythe went when we didn’t need it, so I figured I’d use a good old fashioned knuckle sandwich.

  My fist slammed into the girl’s nose a couple of times. I figured if I was going to hit her then I was going to make sure I was hitting her for keeps. There was a crack as the cartilage in her nose snapped, but it started healing as soon as the hit landed.

  Which was just fine with me. As with the last vampire, her healing meant I could hit her all over again and smash the bitch’s face to my heart’s content.

  “That hurts you bitch!” she cried out, putting her hand up to her nose.

  The broken nose looked a little weird. She didn’t have any blood coming out of the thing, but that made sense considering she wouldn’t have much blood running through her veins. At least she wouldn’t have any that wasn’t borrowed from someone else.

  All the more reason to take care of her for good. I slammed my fist into her nose one final time, that was really fucking fun to break her nose over and over again, and then stood and wrapped tendrils of death magic around her now that I could see what I was doing.

  I wanted to rip that vampire soul out of her and make this as painful as fucking possible.

  “Were you the one who did it?” I growled at her.

  “Did what?” she asked.

  “Were you the one who turned her into a vampire?” I growled.

  I held my fist up again, for all that if this fight was going to go anywhere then it wasn’t going to involve my fist making contact with that annoyingly pretty nose. I hated that I was thinking about how pretty this girl was, for all that her sense of style was a few decades out of date, because it got me to thinking about how Stacy might be thinking the same thing now that she was potentially going to spend an immortal life with this girl.

  The girl, annoyingly enough for someone who should be terrified considering what I was threatening her with, threw her head back and laughed.

  “You really have no idea what’s going on here, do you?” she asked. “Then again I wouldn’t expect much more from a reaper. Your kind never could see past escorting people to the grave. Stick to what you know and keep out of our business.”

  I slammed a tendril of death magic into her. That changed her smug tune pretty fucking quick. Her head thrown back in laughter quickly became a head being thrown back in pain as I dug around her insides and discovered the vampire spirit lurking in there.

  Veronica let out a scream that sounded pretty gnarly. We’re talking the sort of noise Cary Elwes made when he had fifty years of his life sucked away all at once near the end of The Princess Bride.

  I grinned. Good. I was very interested in testing the limits of this bitch’s pain threshold, and I wanted to make sure she suffered for the bullshit she was pulling on me and my girlfriend, damn it!

  The only problem with that plan? Someone grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me away before I could do any serious damage. The tendrils of magic flew out of the vampire bitch as I went flying across the room and slammed against the wall. Stars danced in front of my eyes and I felt a little twinge of something that usually meant a hit had been hard enough that it would’ve caused some serious damage if I was a mortal.

  I looked up. Found myself staring at the most terrifying vampire I could possibly go up against in a fight right about then.

  Stacy. She grinned down at me, then pulled her fist back like she was getting ready to land a hell of a punch. A punch that already would’ve been pretty strong when she was mortal, but now it would be backed by vampire strength too.

  Motherfucker this was going to hurt.

  29

  Girl on Girl

  “Are you seriously going to hit me?” I asked.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

  She glanced between me and Veronica. A flash of jealousy ran through me at that glance. She was looking at our vampire friend with the kind of interest that said she was having fun with this. The kind of interest that said maybe she’d found a replacement for yours truly.

  I knew there could be hella drama when it came to teenage dating, but I never thought that drama would involve me getting replaced by a fucking vampire of all things!

  “You don’t have to do this Stacy,” I said. “You don’t have to do whatever the thing inside you is telling you to do.”

  “You’re right,” she said after a long moment. “I don’t have to do any of this.”

  I thought for a moment that maybe I was getting through to her. That maybe she was going to come around. Maybe I’d have one of those moments in the horror movie where the person you thought had been turned to the forces of evil turned around and turned the tables on those forces of evil and started kicking some serious ass or something.

  It would’ve been nice, but it wasn’t to be.

  “Yeah, I don’t have to do any of this,” she repeated. “But I’m going to do it anyway, so tough shit for you.”

  “But why?” I asked, a tear coming to my eyes as I said it.

  Hey, this might be the weirdest dramatic breakup that’d ever happ
ened in the history of teen love, but it was my breakup damn it. It was also the first breakup I’d ever gone through.

  Which meant it fucking sucked, for all that it was also really fucking weird at the same time.

  “Why?” she asked. “Because you never do nice things for me. You never take me up to Lover’s Lane like Vampire girl does.”

  “What the hell are you…”

  “Yeah, you just never figured it out,” she said with a wink.

  It was the kind of wink that almost would’ve had me thinking she meant something with what she was saying. I would’ve thought she was trying to send me a message, but the fist that connected with my face a moment after she said it really communicated exactly how she felt about me.

  Also? It turns out I was totally right about the whole vampire thing only adding to her freakish strength. Everything went black around me, and I found myself floating above my body.

  “That sucks,” Arnold said, his arms crossed as he watched Stacy walk over to that vampire bitch and get her up.

  Stacy was surprisingly rough with the girl, for all that she’d been acting like they were lovers or something.

  Weird.

  “Shut up, Arnold,” I said.

  “No, seriously,” he said. “I know how much it sucks to have someone dump you like that. I’m sorry you had to go through with that.”

  I turned and stared at him. Sure it probably wasn’t the nicest thing to stare at him incredulously when he talked about dating someone, but whatever.

  “You had a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I did,” he said. “Didn’t last very long though. Maybe a week before her mom decided to break us up because I was a junior and she was a freshman. Didn’t make it suck any less when the breakup happened though.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Though it was a little odd thinking about him dating a freshman girl. At this point that girl might be a grandmother considering how often people had kids in this town if they didn’t manage to break free and go off to college.

  “What are they doing with Jimmy?” Luke asked.

  I blinked. Realized that Jimmy was still very much down there and in the mix, and he didn’t look all that happy about still being down there and stuck in the middle of the fight.

  In fact, the vampire girl was in the middle of dragging him away. From the way he was struggling against her he didn’t like he idea of being carted off by a vampire hottie.

  Stacy sure as fuck liked the idea of being carted off by a vampire hottie. I hated that this was happening, but that hatred was turning to anger, and to quote a little green guy I’d watched recently while I was showing the prequel trilogy to my ghost friends, that anger was going to turn to suffering.

  Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the exact quote, but what the fuck ever. The point is it was time for me to get back in my body and make them regret the day they ever decided to fuck with me and my relationship. I was going to take care of these bloodsucking motherfuckers, and I was going to make them regret the day they ever messed with me.

  So I dove back into my body. When I came around it hurt like a motherfucker. It felt like the injury was in my neck which was never fun. It was even less fun as I reached up and grabbed my neck then moved it just so to align everything.

  I had to hold it there for a long moment. I bit my tongue the entire time. The last thing I needed was for the vampire bitches trying to get away with Jimmy realizing that I was down here and back in action.

  Finally everything felt like it was back in working order. The only way to tell was that the pain was gone, which meant everything was good and healed up. I moved my neck around a couple of times to make sure that everything was in good working order, then floated up as a cloud of dark death magic gathered all around me.

  I held my hand out as darkness closed in on the hallway. My scythe appeared in my hand and I grinned as I looked at Stacy and the vampire bitch.

  Jimmy was the one who noticed me first. He suddenly went limp as he looked at me floating there, and his eyes went wide.

  He wasn’t the only one to notice, though. No, as soon as he stopped struggling that was a cue for Stacy and vampire bitch to turn and stare at me. Stacy smiled just a little, no doubt thinking that I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt her, but the reaction from vampire bitch was by far the most interesting.

  She stared at me for a long moment, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. I thought maybe we were going to have a big fight or something. I could really use a fight that ended with me shoving my scythe through her heart and ending her for good.

  Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. No sooner had she finished looking surprised than she turned and ran. And we’re talking she was running fast enough that I was going to have trouble catching up to her.

  Not that I wanted to take the time to catch up to her. I was more interested in Stacy who stood there staring at me with that unreadable smile on her face.

  “See you tonight,” she said with a wink, and then she turned and was running just as fast as vampire bitch. It was a little weird seeing her running that fast, but whatever.

  I floated down to Jimmy. He was brushing himself off and turning to look at the ladies who’d just left.

  “Man it’s nice watching her run away,” he said.

  “Yeah, it totally is,” I said, letting out a wistful sigh as Stacy disappeared around the corner.

  Then I realized exactly what he’d said and got annoyed, for all that she was no longer my girlfriend. Not strictly speaking, that is.

  “And I’ll remind you that you shouldn’t be staring at her like that,” I said with a sniff. “That ass is for me, thank you very much.”

  “That’s not what it sounded like to me,” he said. “Sounded to me like things are over with the two of you.”

  “Yeah, well that’s what she thinks,” I said. “But we’ll see what happens when I kill the vampire fucker who did this to her.”

  “Huh,” he said. “I’ve heard of jealous lovers killing the new one, but this is probably the first time that’s happened with the undead.”

  “Yeah, well there’s a first time for everything,” I said. “And that bitch is going to regret the day she decided to go after my girl.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Well it’s been nice and everything to watch you freaking out about your girlfriend and everything, but if you don’t mind I think I’m going to be…”

  He cut off as a tendril of dark death magic wrapped around his leg and knocked him on his ass. I suppose I could’ve done something a little gentler and just kept him from backing away from me, but I honestly wasn’t in the kind of mood where I wanted to be very gentle to any bloodsucking motherfucker who tried to cross me.

  “What makes you think you’re getting away that easily?” I asked.

  “Um, I was hoping you might do it out of the goodness of your heart?” he asked.

  “Yeah, not a chance of that happening,” I said. “You’re coming with me while I go on my vampire hunt tonight, and you don’t get a choice in the matter.”

  “Damn it,” he said.

  “Don’t feel too bad Jimmy,” Luke said. “You get used to Gwen after awhile. I don’t even think about how she could send me on to my eternal reward these days.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You know he can’t hear you.”

  “Who can’t hear who?” Jimmy asked.

  “You can’t hear Luke talking about how you get used to me after awhile. And if he keeps talking about me like that he’s going to find himself on the business end of getting his ass tossed through the portal that sends you on to your eternal reward.”

  Luke held his hands up. “Come on. We don’t have to do anything crazy like that.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Now come on. We have to get up to the town makeout spot.”

  “The town still has one of those?” Jimmy asked. “I didn’t think that was still a thing in this day and age.”

  “I mean the back seats i
n a lot of cars aren’t as comfortable as they were back when they were big bench seats, but people still go up there for some privacy. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” I said. “Though I do think they have groups that go up there and hand out condoms these days to make sure everyone has safe sex.”

  “Safe what?” Jimmy asked.

  I stared at him. “Are you seriously telling me that you’ve been undead for this long and you have no idea what safe sex is?”

  “Are you kidding?” Arnold said. “He had no idea what sex was before he was turned into a vampire. What makes you think it got any better for him in the years since?”

  I started at the geeky vampire. Thought about what it must’ve been like to be geeky and immortal like that. Never grow up. Never grow old. Never know the touch of a woman because you never move beyond the person you were when you were a geeky awkward kid.

  “Man, being a vampire must suck,” I whispered.

  “You have no idea,” Jimmy said. “But if you can figure out a way to stop these bastards and maybe make me mortal again I guess I’m onboard with whatever stupid dangerous thing we’re doing tonight.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because it’s not like you had much of a choice. Now come on.”

  30

  Lovers’ Lane

  “Would you watch where you’re swinging that thing?” Jimmy asked.

  I pulled my scythe in and grinned. Then looked out to all the cars parked around the wooded area that overlooked the town.

  It was the kind of thing you’d expect to find in the mountains outside LA or something. The glaciers hadn’t quite made it down to where we lived, though, and that meant the topography hadn’t been flattened quite as much as up north where all the good farmland was. The biggest example was the massive hill in the middle of town with the creepy necromancer mansion, but the local makeout spot was probably the best known among anyone who'd hit puberty and got their drivers’ license.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But something tells me you’re not the only one who’s saying something like that tonight.”