Wicked Game

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  “And it explains how you got out.”

  “But not why I left at night.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted a life. A purpose. The music gave me that. This place—” He gestures to the ramshackle building appearing ahead of us. “—gave me that.”

  We pull into the parking lot and get out of the car. The air feels warm and stalker free.

  Shane stands with me next to the car and takes my hand. “Tell me what I can do to save the station.”

  I gasp. “You mean it? You want me to exploit you for the greater good?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t put it that way, but yeah.”

  “Thank you!” I can’t resist hugging him. “Your public is dying to meet the mystery vampire. You should see all the speculation on the blogs.”

  “On the what?”

  “You’ve gotten more press than the other five put together, and you haven’t even shown your face.”

  Shane tries to look like he doesn’t care. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Guys hate pressure. They want to believe everything they do is their idea.”

  “This is my idea, to ... go along with your idea.”

  “The problem is, I’m not sure Elizabeth wants to sell the station to make money or retire the six of you. I bet she wants to get away from David.”

  Shane sighs and looks off into the woods. I can tell he wants to share gossip.

  “She still bites him, doesn’t she?” I ask.

  He hesitates. “He’s the only human she’s ever tasted.”

  “Then no wonder she wants to cut ties. I’d hate to be so dependent on an ex-boyfriend. It’s just not healthy. And why would David let her bite him when she makes him miserable?”

  “You’ve obviously never been in an addictive relationship.”

  I put up my hands. “Ugh, no. Not into the whole needing thing. But if this is all about Elizabeth and David, it might not matter how many ads we sell or how much the ratings increase.” Shane doesn’t reply, just keeps staring into the woods, so I answer myself. “Then again, maybe it’s only one factor in her decision.”

  Shane opens the driver’s-side door. “Get back in the car,” he says quietly.

  “Why?”

  “Casually. Now.”

  Once we’re in the front seats, he says, “Someone’s watching us.”

  I glance out the back windshield but see nothing. “Twice I’ve felt like I was being stalked in the parking lot. Regina said it was an old vampire named Gideon.”

  “I smell human.” He rolls down the window. “A human who smokes Marlboro Light Menthols.”

  “You can tell all that with one whiff?”

  “I’m kidding about the brand, but the rest, yeah. It’s on his breath and in his pores.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the woods, I think. The wind makes it hard to tell until he gets closer.” He pats his leg. “Put your head in my lap.”

  “Huh?”

  “If he thinks I’m distracted he might get bold.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Go on.”

  I lean over and rest my cheek on his thigh. At first it seems like a nice place to be, except, “The emergency brake is in my stomach.”

  He slides his hand between the brake and my waist, creating a cushion. “Better?”

  “Yes, thank you. Hear anything?”

  “Just you talking.”

  I clamp my mouth shut. His other hand strokes my hair, soothing and stimulating at the same time. I understand now why dogs like having their heads petted.

  Shane looks suddenly to the right. He adjusts the side-view mirror with the manual control knob on the door. “He’s behind us, but not close enough that I need to start faking an orgasm.”

  I can feel Shane’s nerves on alert. He focuses on the side mirror, leg muscles tensing. His hand slides down the armrest toward the door handle.

  He lunges forward. “Move.”

  I sit up. Shane opens the door and jumps out of the car. I lean out to see him race across the parking lot and into the woods near the radio tower. A few moments later, the high-pitched rev of a small engine shatters the night’s silence, then recedes quickly into the distance.

  Shane reappears from the back of the building and returns to my car’s open passenger door. “Son of a bitch had an ATV hidden back there. Almost got him.”

  “Did you get a good look?”

  “Dark hair, mustache. Nothing special.”

  “But you didn’t recognize him.”

  “Why would I?” He props his arms on the roof and peers in at me. “Could be one of your old boyfriends.”

  “I’d never date a smoker. Especially not menthols, yuck.”

  He chuckles. “Hypocrite. You had a cigarette with Deirdre.”

  “Who?”

  “My donor, the one we visited.”

  “Great. Now I know her name. Now if I see her in the produce aisle, I can say, ‘Hi Deirdre, how’s your torso? Any new holes?’”

  “You sound jealous.” Shane sits in the passenger’s seat and tugs me into his lap without a struggle. “You sound like a girlfriend.” He strokes my cheek with the back of his hand. “I’d like you to be my girlfriend.”

  My stomach flips, but I remember Regina’s warning about hurting him. “That’s sweet, Shane, but can’t we just enjoy each other? Going steady is so old-fashioned.”

  He sighs. “I hate the new millennium.”

  “Now who’s the hypocrite? You put your hands all over those women you bite, yet you expect me to sit at home in a sackcloth.”

  “It’s different. I have to drink, you don’t have to see other guys.” He runs a finger down the side seam of my camisole. “Besides, you’d look damn sexy in a sackcloth.”

  I push him away, a few inches. “It’s not different. You would have slept with Deirdre that night if I weren’t there. In fact, drinking blood is probably a great excuse to get laid, not the other way around.”

  “What if I stopped drinking women? I could make some trades with the other vampires. Would that change your mind?”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “I already did.” He brushes the hair out of my eyes. “The last woman was Deirdre, the night you came with me to visit her.”

  My chest constricts, and I wipe my hand over my forehead. “Shane, I can’t be your girlfriend.”

  His face falls. “Why not? I thought we were over the whole Beauty and the Beast issue.”

  “Not when I’m still a beast.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You want the truth? It’s not pretty.”

  “It usually isn’t.”

  I move clumsily out of his embrace, back into the driver’s seat. “You remember that guy, the one David told you about? The one who wouldn’t press charges after I conned him?”

  “Mark, right?”

  “That wasn’t his name. That was his function.”

  “Whatever.”

  “It’s not whatever.” I take a deep breath. “He was my boyfriend.”

  He blinks hard. “You conned your last boyfriend? Out of how much?”

  “He only thought he was my boyfriend.” I run my hands over the steering wheel. “Okay, rewind. I’ve always scraped by on short cons, the kind that take a few minutes or a couple hours. Bar bets, card tricks, pool hustling. Sometimes I’d join up with another con to do pigeon drops or the badger game.” I pause, waiting for him to ask what those are. He doesn’t. “But I was tired of scraping by. I thought if I did one long con, I could take off the rest of the year, live like a normal person.”

  His voice hardens. “Ciara, how much?”

  “Thirty thousand.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars?”

  “A year’s tuition, plus living expenses.”

  “Holy shit.” He takes several moments to digest this fact. “How’d you do it?”

  “I convinced him to invest in a get-rich-quick land deal. I made out like it wasn’t quite legal, so he’d
give me cash and so there was no way he could check up on it. They say you can’t cheat an honest man.”

  “But why would he trust you?”

  “Lust can make a fool out of anyone. He would’ve bought the Brooklyn Bridge from me.” My face heats. “I did things his wife wouldn’t do.”

  “His wife? Did you know he was married?”

  “That’s why I chose him, because I knew he wouldn’t jeopardize his marriage by pressing charges and making it all public.” I can’t look at Shane, so I focus on the nicks in the steering column. “I was right. He told her he lost the money at the craps tables in Atlantic City. He had a gambling problem, so she believed it.” My throat tightens around the rest of the truth. “I didn’t know he had kids.”

  Shane pulls in a sharp breath. “Did his wife ever find out?”

  “Not that I know of. I took his money and disappeared. He called the cops, but dropped the charges when he found out he’d have to testify against me.”

  “Did you give the money back?”

  “I couldn’t, not without his wife knowing he’d lied. And technically I didn’t break any laws. I never used the postal system, so they couldn’t charge me with mail fraud. Everything was in person. They couldn’t prove the money wasn’t just a gift from a lover. His loss, my gain. Of course, most of my gain was re-gifted to my attorney, so I still had to take out a loan for school last year.”

  “This is bullshit,” Shane says suddenly.

  “No, I’m telling the truth.”

  “And you’re right, it’s not pretty. But what does it have to do with me? I have no money to steal. You’re with me because you like me.”

  “Yes. I like you too much to see you get hurt.”

  “How do you know you’ll hurt me?”

  “I betrayed my parents. I betrayed—” I still can’t say his name. “—that guy. Someday I’ll betray you. I don’t know how or when, but it’s in my nature.”

  “Again, bullshit. You’re using this as an excuse to keep us apart.”

  “Why would I do that?” I take his hand, against my better judgment. “I want to be with you, more than I’ve ever wanted anyone. When I’m with you, I feel... decent.”

  His eyebrow twitches. “Decent. Not a goal for most guys.”

  “And indecent, too.” Again ignoring my inner voice of reason, I lean forward and give him a deep, passionate kiss. He pulls me as close as he can, given that the emergency brake is still between us.

  It all seems so simple, at moments like this, as if nothing else matters but the heat between us and the perfection of the kiss. But moments like this last only as long as a pop song, and bear just as much truth.

  Which is to say, none at all.

  I lie in bed later listening to the end of Regina’s radio show, Drastic Plastic. Sleep tugs at me, but I want to hear Shane’s intro.

  The Siouxsie and the Banshees song fades, replaced by Regina’s voice. “94.3 WVMP, the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. It’s two fifty-nine on a very special night for all you vamps and vamp lovers. One of our own is finally coming out of the closet.”

  “Thanks for spoiling the surprise,” Shane says.

  “What surprise? Like VMP would let a ninety-eight-point-sixer have his own show.”

  His warm laugh makes me curl into a ball around my spare pillow.

  “So what changed your mind, Shane?”

  “A couple of blondes.”

  “Two at a time now? You’re such a dog.”

  “No, it’s not like that. See, one represents the past, and the other, the future.”

  “Ooh, how mystical. You haven’t been dropping acid with Jim again, have you?”

  “I always keep an eye on my drink around him, after that last time.”

  “Yeah, after that last eight times.”

  “Anyway, where was I?”

  “Blondes,” she says with exaggerated distaste.

  “Right. So I’ve started thinking about the future, for the first time since, you know—”

  “Since I turned you into a glorious beast.”

  He scoffs. “Whatever. I realized that I need to move on, get over the past. Time to take a few risks, and one of them is admitting to the world that, uh—”

  “Repeat after me. ‘I’m ...’”

  “I’m a vampire.”

  “You did it.” Regina applauds softly. “That was totally brill.”

  “And I’m going to start playing gigs like the rest of you.”

  “The babes will ooze off their chairs when you break out that guitar.”

  “And now for the big news: I’m announcing a change in format to the first hour of my show, as of tonight.”

  She hesitates. “What kind of change?”

  “I’m going to play new music.”

  I sit up straight in bed and stare at the radio. Regina obviously shares my shock, because she allows four or five seconds of dead air (so to speak) to pass before she reacts.

  “Why?”

  “There are a lot of good bands out there that don’t get enough airplay in today’s radio wasteland, and some of them have inherited the spirit of the nineties. Also, some bands that got their start during my Life Time have gotten better.”

  “Like who?” Her voice drips with disbelief.

  “Like Green Day, for instance.”

  “Green Day? Bunch of bleedin’ posers! They wouldn’t know real punk if it crawled up their arses and burst out their colons.”

  “Are we allowed to say ‘arse’ on the air?”

  “It’s three o’ clock in the effing morning, I can say anything I want.”

  “‘Arse’ is one of those cute British profanities, so I guess it doesn’t count. Anyway, Green Day is a different kind of punk. They’re not trying to be the Sex Pistols or the Stooges. They’re pop-punk, like the Buzzcocks.”

  “They’re crap is what they are,” she says.

  “Because they can actually play their instruments, they’re crap. Whatever. This song’s for you, Regina, to keep you from slitting my throat. Friends, wish me luck.”

  A quick, stabbing chord introduces Green Day’s “She’s a Rebel,” off the very same American Idiot CD he bought five hours ago. Though I should be sleeping, I throw off the covers, stand on the bed, and jam at the top of my lungs for two solid minutes of triumph.

  18

  One Way or Another

  July 11

  Shane goes “on the road,” playing his first gig as an acknowledged vampire DJ at a Sherwood coffee bar called Legal Grounds, next to the county courthouse.

  Curious onlookers flow out of the cafe, past the outdoor tables, and onto the sidewalk. I make a note to investigate the price of a private security detail. Before leaving the “stage,” Shane plays a short set on the guitar, ending with “Ciara.”

  July 12

  Though perhaps only a hundred people can fit into Legal Grounds, today on the blogs approximately two thousand people claim to have seen Shane’s first show, making it proportionally the most inflated gathering since Woodstock.

  Some reviews complain about his “eclectic” tastes, how they didn’t know what to expect from one song to the next. One reviewer was pissed that Shane didn’t look enough like a vampire or a grunge-head, as if they expected him to show up in a full-length flannel cape.

  July 15

  We begin podcasting. Each DJ will do a weekly fifteen-minute interview about the music and culture of their Life Time, supplying anecdotes known only to those who lived in the Way Back.

  To keep the casual listener’s interest, we’ll include a few details about life as a vampire—a small fraction of which are actually true.

  July 22

  The week two WVMP podcasts briefly appear on today’s Top 100 Most Downloaded list on one popular site. The T-shirts go back for a third, quadruple-size printing. Our Web site crashes under the load of too many visitors.

  I get a whopping four hours of sleep in one night, the most I’ve had all month. I consider taking
a sledgehammer to my alarm clock, if only I had time to buy a sledgehammer and the strength to lift it.

  July 23

  David notices my preternatural paleness. He orders me to spend tomorrow outside before I come down with a case of rickets.

  July 24

  I become one with the sun.

  Lying on a lounge chair beside Lori’s pool, I inhale motes of light and beams of heat. Sweat tickles my back as I convince each muscle in my body to forget about my job.

  Lori creates a soothing background noise, telling me about SPIT’s efforts to help raise funds for the town to erect a Battle of Sherwood monument.

  The battle’s details are a little fuzzy to me, but the basic gist is this: Some Union guy with a magnificent mustache led a charge against some Southern guy with a magnificent beard. The beard guy had the skinny on Union troop movements, but because of the scuffle in Sherwood, he didn’t get to Gettysburg in time to deliver the intelligence, so the Confederates didn’t know what they were getting into. And that’s why Martin Sheen lost the Civil War.

  Or something like that.

  “So what do you think?”

  I realize she requires words from me. “Huh?”

  “You’re not even listening, are you?”

  “Sorry. I was thinking about the battle. Sad, all those guys dying.”

  “It was two soldiers. Just two.”

  “Oh. Good, then.”

  “I was saying it would be cool if we could find one of their ghosts.” I hear her tear the wrapper of a bag of chips. “Or if we could make one.”

  “Make a ghost?” I sit up and squint at her just as my cell phone rings. I open it to see an unfamiliar number on the caller ID. I slap it shut again, hushing the sound, and turn back to Lori. “You mean kill someone?”

  “No, we get a vampire from Civil War times to pretend to be a ghost. Then when investigators ask them questions only someone from that time would know, it’ll make it more believable.” She waves her scarlet barbecue chip. “So what do you think? Can you make it happen?”

  I think it’s the nuttiest idea I’ve ever heard. Luckily I have a better reason for saying no. “None of our vamps are even close to that age.”