Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires

by Adrian Phoenix

  Time sped up again. I watched the blood spurt from his jaws, splattering when he hit the wall of the alley with a wet cracking noise. Bones had broken when he landed. Some of them sounded important. My twenty-dollar bill hit the ground and I dropped the Dumpster to pick it up, the crash of metal on concrete reverberating in my ears.

  Wolfy was still breathing, but he was down for the count. With a grimace, I walked over and tucked the cash into his hand, then added another twenty to it. His jaw was really going to hurt if it healed that way and had to be re-broken. Adding a third twenty, I shook my head.

  “Walk away,” I told him. “You gave it a good try.”

  At least the buildings on either side of me were tall enough to keep most of the alley safe from the sun, but not for long. I had to get out of here somehow. I ripped off the lid of the Dumpster and dropped the bin down over myself. “God, this stinks,” I complained.

  The front page of theVoid City Echo was stuck to one wall of the Dumpster. I could make out a headline about the decrease in crime, the record drop in the murder rate on East Side. It was bullshit, of course. There’s a reason the paper is called theEcho . It’s a fang rag, heavily influenced by vampires who want to keep Void City’s human populace fat and happy. On the plus side, the captions jogged my Swiss cheese memory and I suddenly remembered where I was, and for that matter, which alley I was in. My club wasn’t far from here.

  I put my hands on the brownish sludge caking the walls of the Dumpster and felt it squish between my fingers as I began to push my makeshift sunblock toward the end of the alley.

  Tabitha was going to find me so appealing when I got back to the club. The thought of her pretty little nose turned up in disgust brought a smile to my lips. A wet clump of refuse fell from the Dumpster’s upturned bottom, slapping me messily across my hairline. “Shit!” If it wasn’t, it certainly smelled like it. I wiped whatever it was from my face, leaving a trail of brown sludge in its place.

  I put my hands back on the Dumpster wall and began to push, leaving long scratches in the road as I went. The sound of metal on asphalt was earsplitting, but I picked up speed anyway. The strip club was only three blocks away and all I could think about was washing this shit off and making Tabitha help. Tabitha was one of a long line of human girlfriends I’d had. There were always girls willing to do anything a vampire might want as long as they thought there was a chance they might get immortality out of it.

  My Dumpster-pushing progress came to a sudden halt as I slammed into my Hummer. It was new; only a couple of weeks old. My car alarm started going off. It was the last straw. The next thing I knew, I was punching holes through the Dumpster with my bare hands. It came apart like tissue paper. It was all very satisfying until I caught fire. Note to self: The big burning ball of gas in the sky is the sun.

  I walked back into the alley, rolled on the ground, and beat my head against the wall to put out the remaining flames. Then I checked on Wolfy. He was still unconscious, so I pulled out my cell phone and called my club.

  Roger answered the phone. “How refreshing! Did you actually remember the phone number or did you have to look it up?” He sounded tired and angry, as if he’d answered the phone only because he’d recognized the name on the caller ID. I decided to let it slide. After all, Roger needed more sleep than I do and he was my best friend. I also needed a ride.

  “Remembered,” I said.

  “Thank heavens!” Roger’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “It’s Eric,” he called to someone else on the other end. “Safe and sound, our lost little lamb. We were all so worried about you.” In the background I heard a woman let out one scornful “Ha!” I ignored it.

  “I’m three blocks away, in the alley at Thirteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Bring the party van around to pick me up.”

  “Sun’s up, pal. I can’t come get you,” he said more seriously. “I’ll send Candice over.”

  Candice is the kind of golden-hearted stripper other strippers pretend to be. She’s working on her nursing degree, and if I were still human I’d be all over her. As it is, I just pay for her college and watch her dance naked in the club. And, okay, sometimes I pretend I’m with her when I’m with Tabitha. It’s just better for all involved.

  “I smell pretty bad. Is Lillian still around?” I asked. Lillian had come in late three days in a row, just in time for the evening rush. If she thought early afternoons were shit duty, I’d show her shit duty.

  “Yes,” Roger answered, laughing. “Don’t want to smell bad in front of your little groupie?”

  “Lillian’s more deserving,” I said. “Send her over, then tell Talbot he’s going to need to get the van cleaned up after we’re done with it.”

  Roger hung up and I waited for the van, admiring my handiwork on the Hummer. From the damage, I must have really picked up some speed before impact. I took a perverse joy in having demolished the shiny new SUV. Roger had talked me into buying it, but to be honest, I hated the thing. I’m only comfortable in my Mustang. It’s old, but so am I, and we both have plenty of miles left in us.

  A few minutes later, the party van rounded the corner, screeching to a halt just inches into the shade. Lillian glared at me through the windshield, bleary-eyed through her half-removed makeup. She looked really pissed. As I walked toward the van, I found out the hard way that the werewolf had been playing possum for the last few minutes. I’d never known what it was like to be picked up by the ankles and slammed face-first into a brick wall. The experience isn’t much to write home about.

  He swung me back around to repeat the process and I felt time begin to slow down once more. I was giving Wolfy too many chances to kill me. I’m pretty damn hard to wipe out, but I supposed he could get lucky. After all, he’d killed those other two vamps somehow.

  I bent backward at an angle usually reserved for circus acrobats and grabbed his jaw. He would have whimpered if he’d had the time. The jaw had healed broken; each portion pointed in opposite directions at odd angles. I re-broke it for him and slammed it shut on his lolling tongue.

  As time shifted back to normal, he screamed. It was part pain, part fear; a real little-girl scream. He dropped me, and I rolled to the ground and came up facing him. Wolfy smelled scared. I guess he finally realized the first round hadn’t been a fluke and the little five-foot-ten bastard he was up against actually could kick his ass up and down the alley. He held up both paws and backed away from me. My twenties had scattered across the alley, mixing like dried leaves with the trash. For some reason, it pissed me off.

  The edges of my vision began to blur. It happens sometimes when I get really angry. The werewolf tried to say something despite his mangled tongue, but I couldn’t quite make it out. It was too late for talk; I was too far gone to rein the anger in.

  The next thing I knew, I was knee-deep in werewolf, shoving bloody twenty-dollar bills into my jeans. His chest had been cracked open like an oyster and gutted. I was standing where his organs ought to have been, but they were scattered about the alley like mismatched socks. I never remember what happens when I’m really mad. I black out.

  I couldn’t decide whether the scene would be more or less disturbing when the sun rose high enough to fill that portion of the alley and his corpse turned human. A dead werewolf reverts to human form in the light of day. Too bad it doesn’t do the same to live lycanthropes. Part of his stomach was under my left shoe, the bile already staining it beyond recognition. At least the blood had washed some of the garbage off. Lillian, her face contorted in disgust, climbed out of the van, opened the back, and threw me a towel.

  Sometimes being a vampire is truly fucked up. If you don’t believe me, ask the poor vamp I’d killed in the alley earlier. I couldn’t remember why the hell I’d killed him, much less why we’d been arguing. For all I knew, it was about football. Definitely fucked up.

  2

  ERIC:

  DEMON HEART

  My strip club, the Demon Heart, is in downtown Void City in a district loving
ly referred to as East Side. I couldn’t tell you why, because it’s actually on the south side of town. The club sits on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, across from the old Pollux Theater. The Pollux is a beautiful art nouveau popcorn palace that dates back to the days when there was a cartoon and a sing-along before the movie and a nosebleed section for the folks white people didn’t want to see.

  I bought both buildings cheap since hardly anybody gives a damn about East Side anymore. Roger says Sable Oaks is where all the high society vamps want to build. If you ask me, it’s too far from Void City. I’m not commuting an hour into town to hunt.

  The Demon Heart kept me close to people nobody would miss and the Pollux gave me a place to be by myself. Besides, I hate society vamps. We have a nonaggression pact. If I don’t see them and they don’t see me, then there’s no need for aggression.

  I considered buying a pizza parlor once, but I decided I would go crazy from the smell. I love pizza. If I smell pizza, I have to stop and take a good whiff; I have to look at it, see what kind it is, and watch a lucky bastard take a few bites. Chicago pizza, Italian pizza, brick-oven pizza, anchovies, pepperoni, olives, mushrooms, peppers, kiwi, it doesn’t matter to me, so long as it’s pizza. I think I miss pizza more than I miss the sun.

  I smelled pizza the instant Lillian smuggled my lightly toasted, stinking, quilt-covered ass in through the back entrance of the Demon Heart. The tangy Sicilian aroma made my mouth water, by which I mean blood filled my mouth, a poor imitation of saliva. It’s Mother Nature’s way of reminding me that I’m a walking corpse that hasn’t fallen down yet. Thanks, Mom. Shower forgotten, I followed the smell of the pizza down the hall to the girls’ dressing room behind the stage.

  I opened the door and found Candice eating a slice of pepperoni. She was mostly naked, and when she saw me, she began ostentatiously licking the side of the pizza to remove the excess cheese. My fangs came out and a certain lower portion of my anatomy paid attention, too. If she had been wearing her glasses or her contacts I think she would’ve had a harder time keeping up the act. Even so, when the smell hit her, the revulsion was hard for her to mask. “Good Lord, Eric. What have you been doing?”

  “Eat your pizza,” I snapped. It was all I could do not to jump on her, so I left the room and headed for my shower. Maybe I’d been rude to Candice, but it was better that way. If she was smart, she’d quit in a huff and go start a normal life somewhere the hell away from me. In the end, a friendship between a vampire and a human is like a friendship between a dog and a chicken nugget. Sooner or later, the nugget is going to get eaten; the only real question is how many bites it will take.

  On my way down the hallway, I caught Tabitha’s scent. Fresh out of the shower, she smelled like fizzy citrus-scented soap. She opened the door of our bedroom wearing nothing but a bathrobe. I don’t know if she was on her way across the hall to borrow some lotion or to see if she could score a slice of pizza, but it didn’t matter since she wasn’t going to do either.

  I kissed her, filled with the need for sex and blood. She didn’t even mention the smell, answering the urgency of my kisses with her own, pushing me out into the hall, pressing my back against the wall. When we kissed, her heat washed over me all at once. Her robe came open, revealing the smooth surface of her sex. She’d just waxed.

  “Are you okay, baby?” She asked the question between kisses, but I didn’t answer. She didn’t ask again, didn’t complain or wrinkle her nose as I left trails of blood and grime along her breasts. I would have had sex with her right there, but I was afraid the gunk from the Dumpster might make her sick. I carried her into the bathroom, the tile still slick with moisture, mirror still cloudy, and got into the shower.

  Tabitha was the only kind of girlfriend I let myself have anymore. She had a great body, a bad attitude, and extremely low self-esteem. She wasn’t dumb, but she wasn’t smart, and she thought that she wanted to be a vampire when she grew up. I knew she had a sister named Rachel whose photo she carried in her billfold, and I guessed she had parents, but they never seemed to be around. In short, if I broke her by accident I wouldn’t feel too bad about it and no one would really miss her. It’s cruel, I know, but I am a vampire, remember?

  I meant to have sex, but that’s not what happened. We made love instead. It was passionate, tender. It was a mistake. When we got out of the shower, Tabitha wore that stupid look she gets when she thinks she’s being sly. I turned away and rolled my eyes; my memory, for once, clear as crystal.

  It was like a formula with her. Before she even opened her mouth I knew the basic ploy. She would compliment me on the act, even though I’d know she was faking it for my benefit. Even when she wasn’t, she always put on a big show. I guess the whole preternatural senses thing hadn’t clued her in to the fact that I could tell. I didn’t blame her for faking it a little; unless blood turns you on, having it stand in for all the normal bodily fluids can get a little nasty, especially during sex.

  After the compliments, I predicted she’d snuggle for a minute and then ask me how old I am. I’d answer and she’d pretend like she’d forgotten. She’d tell me how cool it is to be immortal, how wonderful it must be to know that no matter what happens to the rest of the world, you will go on, forever. I’d attempt to disabuse her of the notion. She would tell me that she heard one of any number of a recycled little list of activities is much better when it’s between two vampires. She’d insist it would make us feel so much closer, claim we’d be able to read each other’s minds. I’d disagree.

  She’d say it would be different with us because we’re in love. I’d point out that I don’t love her and then I’d wait to see if she cried or started yelling. If she cried, I’d leave. If she yelled, I’d leave. So predictable.

  “You are so good at that, you know,” she started up. I sighed. She walked across the room still damp from the shower and I thought about taking her again to see if she would take another shower and leave me alone when we were done. I let her rub up against me.

  Tabitha was an extremely attractive woman; she was big where she was supposed to be big and narrow where narrow is good. Her long and luxurious hair was the same dark black I dyed mine, only hers wasn’t a dye job. Cutting it would have been a crime. She had the sexiest green eyes I’d ever seen, though she claimed she wished they were blue like mine. Tabitha’s smiles took complete advantage of her full red lips. Other girls had to use makeup to achieve the qualities she already possessed.

  Tabitha would go to great lengths to vary her soaps and perfumes, to wear just enough that I would notice, but little enough that it rarely annoyed me. She even got a tattoo at the base of her spine where I once mentioned one might look sexy. I designed it for her: a multicolored butterfly. She’d be a great woman if she didn’t act so dumb.

  “…and I mean my legs were so totally shaking.” Oops, I missed part of it. It sounded like we were still in the “what a sex god” section, though. She hugged me from behind and I felt her breasts against my back. Her warmth overwhelmed me again. Vampires don’t generate any body heat so we’re always cold unless we’ve just fed. Even then, humans feel warm by comparison.

  Despite her flaws, she was soalive . Maybe it was that I could still smell pizza in the distance, or maybe it was her perfume, but I began to feel a knot of panic in my chest.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “I’m not even a hundred, Tabitha,” I told her halfheartedly. “You know that.”

  She kissed my neck tenderly. It wasn’t a sexual kiss, more a touch of possessiveness. Oh, shit.

  “I always forget. You seem so much older. God, it must be so cool to be immortal. Time wears down mountains and changes the flow of mighty rivers, but not you. To be changeless, forever…”

  I felt caught, trapped. It was like a snare closing in around me. What the fuck was wrong with me? This crap didn’t work on me. I’d heard it a thousand times. It was all bullshit. I didn’t believe a damn word of it. I knew she didn�
��t believe it either. Then I realized that this morning had been different. I could hear her breath, her heartbeat. She’d meant it all, and it was too late to do a damn thing about it.

  “Maybe,” I said finally. There is nothing more terrifying than the heartbeat of a woman in love. It complicates everything.

  I could hear the muscles in her face draw her lips into a smile. Her heartbeat sped up and I felt it as if it were pounding in my own chest. Her breath was a little faster, too. She knew something was different. Was it the way she helped clean me up after the fight?

  She hadn’t looked disgusted once. Not when I’d walked in covered with blood and filth, not when I’d pulled her close before we’d even made it to the shower and not when the act was complete and my blood swirled down the drain. She was into it. It hadn’t been fake this time. If it wasn’t love, it was a close cousin. I was so fucked.

  “I want us to be together, Eric. I’ve heard that—”

  She was so alive, so warm, and I was so dead, so cold.

  “Shut up,” I said softly.

  “What?” I felt her heart skip a beat.

  It won’t be what you’re expecting, I wanted to say. If I make you a vampire, you won’t be warm anymore; you won’t smell like you anymore. Before long, you won’t even act like you. Just looking at you will be a painful reminder of what I am and what you used to be. And then you’ll have to leave.

  Instead, even more softly, I said, “I’ll do it.”

  When women truly fall in love with me, I can’t say no. It’s like a sickness.

  She hugged me so tightly her entire body seemed pressed against mine, squealing as she did so. I smelled her excitement for almost the last time. I was so stupid. I was dumber than she was. I knew better. I’d seen what happens. The transformation changes people. Even when they turn out just the way you want, there are problems. Like with Greta…