Staked

by J. F. Lewis

  “What?”

  “Blood booze.” He took a swig from the bottle, shuddered, and then coughed. “Smooth.”

  “How does it taste?” I asked.

  “Like blood,” he admitted, “but with a serious kick.”

  “Can I try it?” asked Rachel.

  Roger agreed and I disagreed in unison.

  “She doesn’t need to start drinking blood, Roger.”

  “Oh, like that won’t be part of this evening’s festivities for you two.” Roger handed the bottle back to me. “Blood is the only bodily fluid we’ve got.”

  Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Come on, Eric. What do you think it tastes like when I kiss you?”

  “Fine.” I handed her the bottle. She took two small sips and passed it back to me.

  “Not bad,” Roger told her, “but save the rest for the vampires, if you please. It cost me more than you know. They don’t just sell this stuff at the local liquor store.”

  “Where’d your boyfriend get it?” I asked. Roger’s eyes lit up from within, a dull orange pinpoint encompassed by his pupils. The fading brown pigment in his irises set it off nicely. He normally wore contacts to conceal the fade. Plenty of vamps do. Vamp irises typically lose their hue with age, resulting in a washed-out shade of the original color.

  Talbot once told me that truly ancient vampires have red irises, and sometimes even the whites of their eyes go permanently crimson. Mine hadn’t faded at all, but most Vlads have weird traits that set them apart, like my ability to turn into a white cat instead of a black one. My guess was that my blue eyes were like that. I once heard a rumor about a Vlad who can eat hamburgers. I’d have rather had the hamburgers and worn contacts.

  “Well?” asked Roger.

  “I drifted off there for a second,” I told him. “I was thinking about hamburgers.”

  He tossed his head back and laughed. “You could drive a saint to murder, you know that?”

  “Game’s starting,” I answered. “Are we going to fight or watch the game?”

  The row behind us was enthralled by our conversation. I looked at the fat guy behind me and bared my fangs. “Don’t mind us,” I told him. “We’re vampires.”

  “My son plays that game,” he replied. “Aren’t you guys a little old?”

  I turned my attention to the start of the game without answering him. Halfway through the first period I took a swig of the fermented blood. My taste buds couldn’t tell the difference. Maybe they had all died, or perhaps my palate is unrefined. I enjoyed the kick, though. It burned going down my throat and every swallow sent a dagger of heat into my heart, like heartburn would feel if it involved real fire.

  “Good?” Roger asked.

  “It’s different,” I shrugged. “Anything different…” I yawned. “When are they going to start playing?” I asked.

  “They are playing,” said Roger.

  “Not that I can see.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Roger said.

  “Which game are you watching?” I took another pull off of the bottle and realized that it was empty. Roger opened the other box and handed me a second bottle.

  “This is total crap. Sparky hasn’t even cross-checked anybody.”

  “You can tell him about it after the game.” Roger smirked. “I have a friend who knows the owner. We’ve got permission to go and talk with the team.”

  “Cool.” I offered Roger a drink from bottle number two. It had a red label on it with Unidentified Female—1982—O positive written on it in bold black letters. If anything, the burn was worse with the second bottle, but there was a taste to it, acidic and bitter.

  Sparky Parker played like he was more intent on ice skating than cross-checking anybody. In the second period, Fordman, the Howlers’ left winger, had about as much chance of scoring as a hippo in a full-body condom. They weren’t even trying. Halfway through the third period, I finished the bottle.

  “Let’s just go,” I told Roger.

  “What about meeting the team?”

  “Screw ‘em.” My tongue felt heavy and things were a little blurry. I was completely wasted.

  “Please, can we stay and meet the team?” Rachel asked.

  “Fine.” I cupped her breast. She didn’t seem to mind. “Anything you want.” We kissed and time rolled away. She moved onto my lap, grinding against me. Some parts of my body became more engorged with blood than others. The little voice in my head that normally would have thought twice and worried about consequences had passed out in the middle of that first bottle of blood booze. In his place was a horny little voice that I hadn’t heard since college. He didn’t care if we got caught or if security threw us out. All that mattered to him was getting inside Rachel’s jeans.

  The world blurred around us like time-lapse photography. Only Rachel and I were still, cocooned in cinnamon bliss. I wondered if it was some kind of magic or just the booze, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

  “Guys?” Roger whistled in my ear, then thumped me in the forehead.

  The game was over, the crowd all gone. It was just the three of us. Rachel got to her feet, blushing sweetly as she straightened her outfit. What the hell had happened? Without her to hold on to, I fell backward and began sliding off the bleachers. Maybe blood booze had been a bad idea. Roger pulled me to my feet.

  “Jesus, you are totally crocked,” Roger told me. “Let’s go meet the team.”

  Resting one arm on Rachel and the other on Roger, I stumbled in the direction that they led me. “You’re my best friend, Roger,” I slurred. He didn’t answer.

  12

  ERIC:

  BISCUIT IN THE BASKET

  Arm in arm, Roger, Rachel, and I stumbled down a long hallway behind the bleachers. I vaguely remember singing at one point. Then, suddenly we were in the locker room, meeting the Void City Howlers.

  My vision cleared long enough for me to see Sparky Parker, my former hero, the king of the ten-minute penalty, transform into a werewolf. A snarl started at the base of his toes and ran up his entire body, leaving hair, fur, and muscle in its wake. The only signs of his human form were the green and white Howlers jersey he was wearing and the hockey stick gripped tightly in his left paw.

  You’d think I’d have put it all together. After all, the team was called the Void City Howlers. In my own defense, though, the Mighty Ducks had never turned into mallards on ice. So the deductive reasoning wasn’t as intuitive as it might seem. Plus, I was totally wasted for the first time in forty years.

  Autograph book in hand, I looked around the room. It was just me, Sparky, and the other Howlers…no sign of Roger or Rachel. “Where did they go?” I asked.

  “Your friends just ditched you, vampire,” Sparky growled. “They ran.”

  “That’s good.” I blinked. “Did I run away too?”

  “You shouldn’t have done it, vamp,” he growled.

  “You’ve got spots.” He did have spots. Wolf Sparky looked sillier than any werewolf I’d ever seen. Coarse white fur covered most of his body, but it was speckled with dark black spots. He blurred. A large Dalmatian-spotted blob hit me in the face with something long and thin with a curved end: a hockey stick. I was grateful, because when the world stopped spinning everything was a little clearer.

  He grabbed me by the face, palming my head like a basketball, and tossed me through the double doors that led out to the rink.

  Other blobs expanded. They were angry fuzzy blobs with white and green middles, kind of cute, really. My vision cleared a little and a very wavery Wolf Sparky loomed over me. A long trail of drool dangled from his muzzle and pooled on the souvenir jersey I was wearing. I wondered if it was the one I’d bought for Rachel, and if so, how I’d ended up in it.

  “You have a droopy ear,” I observed. “Did you know that you had…have a droopy ear? I think your mom got a little drunk one night and…oof.”

  That time he grabbed my leg and tossed me out onto the ice. I felt kind of bad about mentioning the whole parentage
thing. I’m kind of a happy chatty drunk and my mouth gets away from me. Cold hard ice broke my fall and I slid along the freshly resurfaced rink. The top layer hadn’t quite refrozen and the glacial water soaked into my clothes.

  No crowd cheered the Howlers when they took to the ice this time, but I was impressed. “You guys just skate around me, okay?” I told them. “I don’t think I can get up.”

  I don’t know who took the next several shots at me, but they must have been pissed off about something, or maybe…“I’m starting to think you guys don’t like me,” I complained.

  “He’s totally hosed,” growled a dark black one with a bobbed tail and brown highlights like a Doberman’s. “Just stake him and get it over with.”

  Trying to roll over, I lost my balance and fell to the ground with a loud crack.

  “Lookit. One of his eyes is blinking.” Strobelike red light flashed rapidly on and off, upsetting my stomach.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said to no one in particular.

  “He’s gonna yack,” one of them said, gliding past me.

  “Vampires can’t yack,” called number 45 from one side. Each of them moved as easily on the ice bare-pawed as they had with skates, but in wolf form their strides were more confident, their reflexes better.

  “You guys ought to skate like this all the time,” I said. “Then you might win a game or two.” That didn’t come out the way I had meant it.

  A sharp pain in my side sent me spinning along the ice quickly. Sparky was driving me down the rink, a human-size hockey puck, across the blue line, straight through center ice, and toward the goal.

  “Yeah, Sparky!” someone shouted.

  Two of the other Howlers, Fordman and Hartaff judging by the jerseys, skated in to try and steal me from Sparky with more resounding thuds. One of my arms gave way with a crack and pain lanced up to my shoulder; my blood was smeared all over the ice.

  “Okay, fellas,” I said. “That’s enough.”

  Sparky brought me in, shoving me across the goal line and into the boards. About that time, I realized they weren’t just playing, they were fighting. My growl was louder than Sparky’s.

  “Stake him!” Fordman shouted. Sparky’s custom stick plunged into my back and out through the front of my souvenir jersey. I didn’t want to think about how much strength it took to jam a blunt handle completely through a man’s torso. Red illumination flashed on the boards in spurts. Off. On. Off. On. Blood wine erupted violently from my throat. It ran down the stick and onto the ice. The glow from my eyes blinked twice more and stayed on.

  “Biscuit in the basket, baby!” several of them roared.

  “Get the cooler.” The hockey stick wasn’t made of real wood, but I was still moving far too slowly. Two of them ran off of the ice and then came back toward me with a cooler.

  “This ain’t football,” I complained. “What the hell are you guys—” They dumped the cooler over my head. It burned like acid. Holy water. I think they thought it would kill me. It was a good try. It would have worked on a Soldier, or possibly on a Master, but as I keep trying to remind everyone, I’m a Vlad and we are damn near indestructible.

  “I am so fucking killing you guys,” I said as my skin peeled away and caught fire. Holy water is powerful stuff. It ate right through my clothes, my skin, through the bone, mixing with my liquid remains and flowing out onto the ice like gruesome pancake batter.

  The blood wine I’d spewed mixed with the puddle of water and with, well, me, turning the mixture into a bubbling red mess, with smoke pouring off the top as I sizzled and popped like a fried egg. I knew I was going to survive, but a vampire who has been melted is in bad shape even if it doesn’t send him to the great beyond. We need blood to re-form. Fortunately for me, I was lying in a puddle of it.

  As the holy water boiled away, the smoke stopped and bit by bit the grotesque liquefied mass developed solid chunks, drawing in on itself. I floated above the ice, looking down on my body, detached and clearheaded, glowing that same ghostly blue I’d been the one time I tried to turn to mist.

  Being melted was pretty damn low on my list of sobriety quick fixes, but it did the job. My bones re-formed first. One of the werewolves rammed another hockey stick through my ribs where my heart was going to be. I guess he thought the stick was made of wood, but it was some high-tech plastic. Plastic doesn’t do dick.

  My body lay naked on the ice and I found myself drawn back into it, momentarily disoriented, but regaining my senses just fast enough to pull the stick out of my chest before my clothes came back.

  It’s good to be a badass. Using my anger as a focus, I turned into a bat. It took longer than usual and felt different, like when your dick falls asleep because your underwear is too tight and there is that long agonizing wait followed by a pins and needles sensation exactly where you never want one. I flew out over the rink and landed in the stands. When I changed shape again, my clothes were back. I’d instinctively regenerated my usual outfit, but at the high price of what felt like every last drop of blood in my body.

  I missed the Howlers jersey, but it was okay. I was over them. Now these assholes had it coming. They’d lured me back to the locker room with Roger’s unwitting help, used me as a hockey puck, and been the first group of people to ever melt me down with holy water. Worst of all, they’d made me sit through a piss-poor game of hockey. There is no excuse for bad hockey.

  They’d make it up to me though. I was hungry.

  This time, I wouldn’t make the mistake of holding back like I had with the guys who’d wrecked my Mustang. I was tired of talking, and at this point the hunger wouldn’t have let me hold back anyway. I felt the blackout coming, bitter and cold like winter rain. Yep, these jerks had it coming. They had it coming Dracula style.

  As my vision started to blur, I hovered at the edge of awareness just long enough to make one last taunt. “So are you motherfuckers going to come and get me or do I have to hang a steak around my neck?”

  13

  TABITHA:

  HIDDEN DEPTHS

  The whole no-reflection thing was really starting to grate on my nerves. I needed mirrors. There is only so much a girl can tell about how she looks by craning her neck and bending over backward. The other girls were busy, so I did the best I could on my own and then called up front to ask Talbot if he had a few minutes to come to the back.

  “Why?”

  “I need someone to check my makeup and stuff; the other girls were busy, so I tried to do it myself, but—”

  “Ten minutes.” He laughed and hung up.

  While I waited, I finished up the second pint of blood he’d brought me earlier. It tasted a little funny, but I didn’t want to have to argue with Talbot over it when he came back to check me out. I was tired of being cooped up in the club and I wanted to go outside for a while after my set. After I finished the blood, I still had five minutes to wait, so I practiced popping my claws and making my eyes glow. It was cool and all, but I wanted to know more about what I could do. I wondered what would happen if I used a power that I didn’t know how to undo. What if I turned into a bat and got stuck that way?

  When Talbot came into the bedroom, I retracted my claws and let my eyes turn back to normal.

  His smell wasn’t human and it was thrilling to be near him, to not know what he was. He looked me up and down and I studied him in return.

  “You look fine,” he said. He turned and started to leave again.

  “Wait. Talbot, do you have a few minutes?”

  He looked at me over his shoulder. “Why?”

  “I wanted to try and figure out what other powers I have.” I walked over to the dresser and fiddled with my hairbrush. He showed up clearly in the mirror even though my reflection would have been blocking his.

  He closed the door and turned back to me. “You don’t need me to do that.”

  I looked down at the brush in my hand. It was silver. For a moment, I was lost in the shiny surface. My grandmother had lef
t it to me when she’d died. She had always intended it for Rachel, but cancer had taken my sister away from us earlier than anyone could have expected. She was so angry at the end, she blamed me for not finding a way to save her.

  “I’m afraid,” I admitted.

  Talbot came closer, put his hand near my shoulder, and then pulled it away. I could feel the heat of him behind me. It was like standing with my back to the fire on a cold winter day. I leaned into him involuntarily and closed my eyes. “You feel so warm.”

  Gentle, but firm, he pushed me away from him. I was off balance and I almost didn’t catch myself. Something was wrong. “You don’t want to play the kind of games I like, Tabitha,” he told me softly.

  How embarrassing! Did I have to throw myself at every warm-bodied man that crossed my path? I shivered. “I’m sorry. It just feels so cold.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and I realized that it was the first time that I had ever seen Talbot sit down. He was always leaning on things, but never actually sitting.

  “So how do I do it?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  I put down the brush and threw my hands up in the air. “Do anything! I’ve read lots of books, but it isn’t something that Eric ever talked about. I could ask Roger, but—”

  “You don’t want Eric to get jealous.” He nodded. “I get you. Which do you like best: bats, cats, fleas, wolves, frogs, or do you want to try for something funky, like a virus?”

  I turned around and leaned up against the dresser. “What?”

  “You don’t know yet how powerful you are. If you’re a Soldier or a Drone, you might only be able to do the first one you try, or you might not be able to do any of them. You might not get a choice, but if you do get a choice and you can only do one…” He shrugged. “Well, they say that’s what happened to Froggy.”

  “So, it’d better be one that I like,” I mused. “Okay. Wait, a virus?”

  He laughed. When he did, I could tell that even with his fangs retracted, his canines were a little longer than normal. “It’s been done. I guess it was a good way to avoid hunters back in the day, but it sounds kind of gross to me.”