As Franklin delivers the goods, I take people’s money and give them change. From the corner of his eye, he watches me handle the cash, probably making sure none of it finds its way into my pockets.
When the next customer walks away, T-shirt in hand, I lean over to Franklin. “Relax. Con artists don’t steal. We take.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Why go to the trouble of robbing someone’s money when they’re perfectly willing to give it to you?” I unzip the cash pouch and pull out a ten-dollar bill. “For instance, if I took this and turned it into twenty, with Stuart’s help, that wouldn’t be stealing.”
Franklin frowns at the ten. “How do you turn that into a twenty?”
“I’ll show you.” I start to approach the bar, then stop, gesturing to the six-person-deep crowd. “He’s too busy now. We’ll just practice here.” I step to the other side of the table. “Hey, mister, I’d like to buy one of those swell ‘Feed the Need’ buttons.”
He hesitates. “That’ll be a dollar.”
I hand him the ten, and he gives me nine dollars in change. “Oh wait.” I look at the cash pouch. “This won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have enough ones to do the whole trick.” I dig into my pocket and bring out a wad of dollar bills. “Here, let me give you ten ones for that, and we can start over.”
“Okay.” He gives me the ten.
I count out some ones. “Why do people come to bars with big bills? It drives Lori batshit.” I place the ten he just gave me on the bottom of the pile of nine ones, which I hand back to him.
Franklin recounts the money, eyeing me suspiciously. I wave my bare arms to show I have nothing up my sleeves.
“Hang on.” He holds up the stack of bills. “You gave me too much. There’s nineteen dollars here.”
“Crap.” I grit my teeth. “I’m so out of practice it’s pathetic.” I sigh and pull out another dollar bill. “Here, let me just give you one more and you give me a twenty to even it out.”
“Thought you could outsmart me, heh?” He takes the bill and pulls a twenty out of his pile.
I smile sheepishly. “I wanted to impress you. You are the master, after all.”
He slaps the bill into my palm. “Better luck next time.”
I pick up my negative-nineteen-dollar button. “Buy you a drink?”
I decide not to add, “sucker.”
The Goth music fades as a light comes up on the stage. Spencer steps up to the microphone, the light glinting off his slicked-back auburn hair. The crowd hushes to murmur level as he surveys them with dark, hypnotic eyes.
“Thank you all for coming out to hear our little show.” He holds the mike in one hand and shifts the stand in a gesture of false bashfulness. “Along with playing some tunes to get you moving, we’ve been asked to tell our stories tonight. Stories of how we became vampires.” The crowd emits scattered snickers, but Spencer’s face bears such an earnest look of wild innocence that most people just stare.
“Some of us wanted to live forever,” he says. “Some of us just wanted to live.” His Adam’s apple bobs once, and his eyes go far away for a moment so brief I’d have missed it if I’d blinked.
“But for all of us,” he continues, “it was about the music. The music turned us as much as the blood.”
At the last word, the crowd buzzes, titillated.
“Lotta people say rock ’n’ roll is about goin’ all the way, seeing as that was the original meaning of the term.” From beneath his long, dark lashes, he sends the women to his left a look that says, I wouldn’t know anything about that, but maybe you could show me.
“Rock ’n’ roll is really about immortality,” he continues. “Thanks to Mister Edison’s invention, your great-great grandchildren can hear Elvis and Jerry Lee like they were sitting right there with them in that Memphis studio. That’s living forever, folks.
“But immortality isn’t just about not dying—it’s about never growing old, never growing up, never wanting to grow up.” He tosses off another self-effacing smile, as if surprised by his own conclusion. “You might say being vampires has given us the ultimate rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.”
He hits a switch on the turntable, launching into “Blue Suede Shoes”—the Carl Perkins version. Within moments the crowd is bopping and twisting and whatever else-ing the music inspires their bodies to do. Spencer eyes the line of adoring women again. I watch him for signs of bloodthirst, but instead of rubbing his face, he just runs a hand through his hair and smooths the front of his white T-shirt in a classic cool preening gesture.
“What do you think?” says a familiar voice in my ear.
I turn to see David. “I think Spencer slinked out of telling his story. Do you know it?”
He nods. “But it’s not for me to tell.”
“What about yours?”
“What about what?” He leans toward me, pushing the top of his earlobe forward.
“What’s your story?” I yell.
He shakes his head, taps his ear, and shrugs, like he can’t hear me over the music. “Got a reporter to talk to,” he says, and walks toward the bar. He moves differently in this getup than his work clothes, like he’s finally wearing his own skin.
At the bar, David displaces a tall brunette who turns away with her friend. They each hold a pint of blood-red beer, the heads of which spill onto their meticulously manicured fingers. The brunette scowls and turns back to grab a bar napkin, her face illuminated by the overhead light.
Jolene.
My first instinct is to look for the closest red EXIT sign. But I have a job to do.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Franklin.
Jolene and her attendant move to the far wall, in front of the silver-on-black cemetery tapestry. They sullenly sip and watch the show. As I approach from an oblique angle, Jolene’s redheaded friend starts to groove a little to the music, nodding her head and tapping her finger on the outside of the pint glass. Jolene notices and jabs an elbow into her companion’s rib, spilling more beer.
With a deep breath, I tap Jolene on the shoulder and speak her name. She looks at me without recognition, probably because of the makeup.
“It’s me. Ciara. Bane of your existence.”
“You bitch!” She takes one hand off her glass as if to slap me, then stops herself. “I got arrested because of you. Public indecency.”
“Plus drunken disorderliness and resisting arrest,” her friend chimes in.
“Shut up, Kendra.”
“That’s not my fault,” I tell Jolene. “If you’d explained to the cop—”
“I did.”
“—in words he could repeat to his own mother—”
“I can’t ever get that night back,” she says.
I gesture to the wedding ring on her finger. “You still got married.”
Kendra laughs. “Yeah, who knows, Jolene? If you hadn’t gone to jail that night, you might’ve shagged some dude and given Jeff gonorrhea for a wedding gift.”
Before Jolene can assault her friend with another sharp body part, I hold up a hand. “Just give me your address so I can send back your shirt.”
Jolene opens her mouth, then gets a crafty look. “Send it to my office.” She whips out a business card like a weapon and shoves it a few inches below my nose.
Jolene Scoglio
Marketing Associate
Skywave Communications, Inc.
So that’s what she meant when she said we’d all pay.
Crap.
“That’s right, Miss Griffin.” Jolene flips her hair. “Soon you’ll be working for me. For the two minutes it takes to clean out your desk.”
I flick her card with my fingernail. “You don’t have that power.”
“It won’t be up to me to fire you, but that’s how these things work. You’ll all be let go after the buyout. The weak succumb to the strong.”
“‘Succumb’? Did you learn that whopper on your Word-a-Day toil
et paper?”
“At least I’m smart enough to get a job with a company that’s on the way up. Even this retarded vampire gimmick can’t save your station.”
“How much do you want to bet?”
A strong hand lands on my arm. I expect to see David telling me to get back to work.
It’s Shane.
“Can we talk?” His expression is inscrutable in the low light, but his voice is dead serious.
“Hello, Shane,” Jolene says. “Shirt thief.”
He turns to her. “Leave us alone.”
She shrinks back like he’s radioactive. He walks toward the kitchen. I steel myself and follow him.
Out of the frying pan and into the crematorium.
12
What’d I Say
“Thanks for the rescue.” I beam up at Shane, which must look ridiculous with the undead makeup in the kitchen’s fluorescent lights. “What do you think of the party?”
“Congratulations.” He holds up a headstone-tipped cocktail stirrer. “You’ve turned us into a farce.”
“The decorations were Stuart’s idea. At least I kept him from calling it a ‘spooktacular’ celebration.”
He points to the kitchen door. “No one out there cares about the music. They only care about blood punch, and blood beer, and blood salsa.”
“I know the party trimmings are dorky, but they’re a means to an end—namely, saving your asses from unemployment.”
“If you change us, there’ll be nothing left to save.”
“How am I changing you?”
Shane glances at Jorge the chef, who doubles as a dishwasher since the Smoking Pig doesn’t do much edible business. He ignores us as he bastes buffalo wings—or “bat wings,” as we’re calling them tonight—and bobs his head to the blaring kitchen radio.
Shane turns and heads for Stuart’s office at the back of the kitchen. I follow him, though I should get back to work. But if I could convince Shane to play, that would be worth a lot more than a few peddled bumper stickers.
As soon as I enter the office, he turns on me. “Do you know how many taboos you violated by asking for stories of how we got made?”
“What’s the big deal?”
He groans and rubs his forehead, where deep vertical creases have appeared. “That story, Ciara, is one of the few things that truly belong to us. A vampire only shares it with someone he trusts. Rattling it off in public cheapens everything we are.”
“Spencer didn’t do it, and maybe the others won’t either.”
“That’s not the point.” He brushes past me and shuts the office door. “Just asking was an insult.”
“I’m sorry.” A flush of shame creeps up my neck, which pisses me off. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s the problem. You met us what, three weeks ago? And you think you can understand us and expose our secrets.”
“They’re not secrets if no one believes them. They’re fairy tales.”
“It doesn’t matter!” He moves toward me, slapping aside the hanging ribbon of a black balloon. Suddenly he stops. “What’s that smell?” He wrinkles his nose in my direction. “Did you fall into a vat of chemicals?”
I bring a lock of hair to my nose. “I touched up my highlights. You know, because I’m a big shallow phony.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. Look, I know I have a lot to learn about you guys. But while I’m ramping up on the subject, Skywave is planning to put you out of work. Maybe you can find another job to keep yourself from fading. But what about your friends?”
“I don’t want them boiled down to a bag of cliches.”
Suppressing a sigh of frustration, I turn away to regroup. The office chair is full of papers now, so I sit on the edge of the desk.
Perhaps a softer approach is in order. “Shane, I understand you want to be free of commercialism. You want to be pure. I admire you for it. But outside of monasteries, this is how the world works.”
“I know, but we should be better than that.” He frowns. “We used to be better than that.”
“Until I ruined everything.”
“You didn’t—” Shane lets out a harsh sigh. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Making it personal, so I can’t attack the campaign without attacking you. Which I would never do.”
“Why not? This was all my idea. Except the ‘Bite Me, I’m O-Positive’ buttons. That was Franklin.”
“I don’t want this campaign to come between us.”
A high-pitched “Us?” pops out before I can stop myself from sounding like an eighth grader. “There’s an ‘us’?”
“I’d like there to be.” He looks at me—really looks at me—for the first time tonight. His gaze drops to my thigh, sparking a flame at the base of my spine. He clears his throat. “How’s your leg now?”
I wait for him to look me in the eye again before saying, “It’s better.”
He swallows. “All better?”
I shift on the desk, keeping my legs crossed but now at the ankle instead of the knee. “All better.”
The office seems to shrink as Shane takes another step toward me. “In spite of the spectacle, I was looking forward to seeing you tonight.” He moves close enough to touch, his smile turning ironic in the green light from the banker’s lamp. “But this makeup, it’s not you.”
“I look more like a clown than a vampire, don’t I? Just say it.”
He leans in and inhales, his face close to mine. “It covers your scent.”
Plus it itches like a poison ivy facial. I tilt up my chin. “Then take it off.”
He peels off his short-sleeved T-shirt, the brown one he’s wearing over a white T-shirt with long, frayed sleeves.
“Let’s start with this.” He wipes the shirt across my lips, slowly. I close my eyes. He wipes again.
“Is it working?”
“No,” he whispers. “Too dry.”
His mouth brushes mine, just the barest edge. His tongue flicks over my upper lip, tasting, moistening. A little moan escapes my throat. He does the same to my lower lip. My ankles uncross.
He pulls away a few inches and draws the shirt across my mouth. “There. Red is better.” He leans in to kiss me again.
“We really should get out to the bar.” This definitely no longer counts as a work-related activity. “I told Franklin I’d be right back.”
“We can leave if you want.” His thumb grazes my shoulder, then slips under the thin black strap of my top. My skin comes alive, every nerve begging for another touch.
“Then again, I’ve been working all day.” I slide my arms around his neck. “I think there’s some OSHA rule that says I get a break every eight hours.”
“Wouldn’t want to get David in trouble with the feds.” His eyes turn serious again as they stare into mine. “I know you’re not what you seem. You’ve probably got a hundred different layers under there.” His fingertips glide across my makeup-caked cheek, then into my hair. “I want to peel them all back until I find the real Ciara.” He insinuates his body between my thighs. “I want to get inside you.”
The heat of his skin radiates against me, so much warmer than the last time I held him. I need to feel it within me.
I lock my legs around his. He gives a low growl and brings his mouth to mine.
The velvet shock of his tongue makes my back arch. I pull him tight against me with all my limbs, though it feels like it can’t be close enough. As our kiss deepens and our bodies strain against each other, I hear only the rasp of our breaths, the creak of my leather skirt, and the roar of my own blood.
“Lock the door,” I manage to gasp.
“Uh-uh.” He scrapes his human teeth over my neck. “I want you to feel safe from me.”
I get it: he bites, I scream, him and all his friends— dusted. “Then hurry.”
His hand slides under my skirt. He breathes hard when he discovers I’m already ready for him. With one arm he lifts me off
the desk while the other hand slips under the string of my thong and pulls it down.
As I reach for the button of his jeans, I’m slammed with the thought that thwarts. “Do you have any condoms?”
“We don’t need them. I can’t carry disease or get you pregnant.” He wipes the side of his face, which is smeared with my makeup. “Remember, I’m dead.”
He smiles like it’s a joke, but a chill rips through me. My mind suddenly returns to rational-thought mode.
“Wait.” I put a hand between us. “Won’t that be kind of messy? I have to work the rest of the night.”
“Don’t worry. When I have an orgasm, I feel the sensations, but I don’t, you know, produce anything.” He goes to kiss me again, but I plant my palm against his chest.
“When you say,’I don’t produce anything’—”
“Not me personally.” He takes my hand and shifts it lower. “Vampires.”
My mouth goes suddenly sour, and my stomach twists into a knot, the kind only sailors and Eagle Scouts can untie.
I’m about to fuck a vampire.
A vampire’s about to fuck me.
Uh-uh.
This is Shane, my brain reminds my body. He’s a good guy. More human than half the men you’ve bonked. Now de-quease yourself and unbutton his pants.
My gut wrenches again.
“What’s wrong?” Shane says.
“I just remembered—I need to—I should get back to work.” I push past him and move for the door, hoping I make it to the bathroom in time. I’ll come back for my underwear.
My foot catches on Regina’s backpack. Ah, subject change to the rescue.
I pick up the bag and flash him a weak smile. “Hey, Regina brought some of your music. Maybe you can play after all?”
“Why are you so nervous now?” He takes a step toward me. The memory of his blood-drenched mouth flashes in my mind.
“Nothing!” I back away fast, bruising my spine against the doorknob. “I mean, I’m having—I think I’m coming down with the flu.” That and a severe case of being an asshole.
His eyes widen, and hurt creeps in around the edges. “You’re scared of me again.”
“No, of course not.” My voice pitches up, a sure sign of deception. What good is honesty when I can’t lie to save his feelings? “Shane ...”
Wicked Game Page 12
