American Vampire

by Jennifer Armintrout

  If Mom had been alive, she would have chastised Jessa for that kind of thinking. “There’s nothing a man can do for you that you can’t do for yourself,” she’d always said. She hadn’t liked Derek, definitely hadn’t been thrilled with her daughter’s devotion to a high school jock. Mom had been right, of course. She’d always been right. When Derek had finally left her for Becky, left her grieving and alone, she’d thought she would have been better off dead with the rest of her family. She’d even considered trying it out. In the end, though, she hadn’t needed Derek. She’d only needed herself.

  She didn’t need Graf, either, but he was good to have around. A good distraction.

  Who was she kidding? She was as in love with him as she had been with Derek. Falling hard and fast was a curse, but there it was. She loved Graf, despite what he was, and despite the havoc he’d caused in her life.

  She rolled over, every movement causing her limbs to tremble in pain and her chest to burn, to put her arm over Graf’s solid chest. She pressed her lips to his cheek. He didn’t stir. He didn’t even breathe.

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t so in love with him that she was totally okay with lying beside his dead body. She stood gingerly, biting back cries of pain as the blisters on her feet tightened and popped under her weight. Even if he seemed dead to the world, she had no doubt that any noise of discomfort she made would wake Graf so he could rush to her rescue, and he needed his sleep. At least one of them needed to be strong enough to fight this out to the bitter end.

  And it would be bitter, she realized, limping to her dresser. They were still stuck in this town, with a whole mess of people who wanted to kill them to solve their problems. She pulled a rolled-up pair of socks out of the top drawer and made her way to the bathroom for the potted aloe plant that sat on the high windowsill. She sat on the edge of the tub and carefully smoothed the plant’s sap over her burned soles, then pulled on the clean socks, hoping that would prove enough of a barrier that her feet didn’t become horribly infected. The sap felt good and cool, and she shuddered with the small relief from the pain racking her body.

  The living-room light was on, and as she rounded the landing, she saw the hooded sweatshirt over the back of the couch.

  “I hope you don’t mind, I drank a little of your shine.” June stood in the kitchen doorway, a half-empty glass still in her hand.

  Jessa’s fists clenched at her sides. “Get out of my house. You’re not welcome here.”

  “I didn’t figure I would be. I thought I might be needed, though.” June sat on the couch, her long braid flipping over her shoulder.

  “Well, you were wrong. We’re doing just fine.” Jessa stalked to the armchair. She didn’t want to sit. She wanted to pace angrily back and forth, but her feet wouldn’t cooperate.

  “You’re doing just fine with one of you nearly crippled and the other one starving to death?” She shook her head. “You’re not going to be able to feed him on your own, and you’re not going to be able to fight off intruders in the position you’re in.”

  “You would know all about feeding vampires, wouldn’t you?” Jessa snapped, knowing it was unfair, somehow, to bring up June’s past. Either way, she wasn’t getting near Graf.

  A hard expression came over June’s face, as unfriendly a look as Jessa had ever seen on the woman’s usually cheerful face. “You wouldn’t be so high and mighty if you knew what kind of people you were getting yourself in with, messing around with vampires.”

  “Graf is not like that,” Jessa said, certain of her words as she was certain that the sky was blue. “Not all vampires are the same, like all people aren’t the same.”

  “You think the same rules apply to them as apply to us?” June shook her head. “He’s playing nice now. That’s how they do it. But you don’t understand their world. If you got out of this town, and he didn’t need your blood, or there was some other human who looked good to him, he’d take them in a second. And what do you think he would do to get rid of you?”

  A shiver went up Jessa’s arms, but not from doubting Graf. “I’m sorry about what happened to you.”

  “You’ll be more sorry when it happens to you,” June said, refusing to relent. “I’m telling you, Jessa, the best thing you can do right now is give him over to the mob, when they come.”

  “Why? So I’ll be defenseless, and they can take me then?” She closed her eyes, and the image of the flames still licked behind her eyelids. “No way. I’m not going to be helpless.”

  June’s face crumpled as if she was going to cry. “Look around, Jessa. You are helpless. Give them the vampire, tell them you’ve repented, tell them anything. You’re a good liar, you can get them to believe you.”

  “No. I’m not going to hand him over. It isn’t an option.” Her gaze flicked to the gun beside the couch. June was between her and it.

  She didn’t think June would do anything crazy. But she’d misjudged a lot of people lately.

  “Derek knows what the monster is after. He told me. We could get rid of both the monsters in this town, Jessa. You just have to trust me on this.”

  Jessa hoped it was the moonshine talking, or just fear, because she didn’t like this side of June. She’d always played the role of the neutral party, the tough, fair judge. Never the backstabber.

  “First shift is over.” Graf came down the steps from the landing, his feet making exaggerated noise as he descended. He’d been waiting for a while, listening. Something tight in Jessa’s chest loosened at the sight of him, and some long-missing part of her recognized that feeling as safety.

  June knew he’d been listening, that much was clear on her face. She stood, looking almost guilty, and faced him, but said nothing.

  “Get upstairs, get some rest,” he said to June, and the implied threat of “Or I’ll make you” hung in the air.

  She nodded, not meeting his eyes, and went up the stairs.

  “You can’t trust her not to try something,” Jessa whispered. “Maybe you’d better not sleep until she does.”

  “We can’t all stay up around the clock. If she tries to take a run at me, I’ll just have to wake up first.” He sat on the couch and patted the cushion beside him. “You want to curl up here and sleep. You know you do. I’m all room temperature over here.”

  She forced away the giddy smile that threatened to erupt into a volcano of giggly idiocy. “You should be sleeping. I got enough. Besides, I need to get a look at that binder, while there’s still time. All I wanted to do before was hide it, but it was in Derek’s house. He had it for a reason, and he was looking through it for a reason.”

  “Fair enough,” Graf replied with a shrug. He stood and helped her to the couch, and Jessa was thankful for the hand even though she would never admit it. When she was settled, Graf knelt and rummaged under the couch, emerging with the black plastic binder. “I like the glitter.”

  On the cover, a large star in a circle in silvery, glittery puff-paint peeled off in flecks. Jessa pushed the rubbery paint with her fingernail and made a face before opening the cover. “‘The grim…grim ore.’ Is that how you say it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “‘The Grimoire of Raven Nightshadow.’ I’ll assume that’s Sarah.” Jessa read on, flipping through pages. “I guess grimoire is a fancy name for a spell book. She must have really thought she was a witch.”

  “Well, the rest of the town did,” Graf pointed out. “But none of this stuff looks that serious. Red candles for a love spell, stuff about getting back at the idiots at school. How old was she?”

  “She’d have been about a high school senior when they took her. I guess Derek likes them young.” Jessa rolled her eyes.

  “What’s this back here?” Graf pointed to where the paper changed sizes at the back of the book.

  She flipped quickly, past pages of notebook paper to the thicker cardstock in the back.

  “Must be serious, if she used nicer paper,” Graf snorted.

  Jessa’s fingers trembled
as she flipped over the first page, heavy with pasted-on photos.

  “Oh my God, Jessa, that’s—”

  “Shut up.” She touched her fingers to her mother’s face beaming up from the page, and her father’s, and Jonathan’s. What had Sarah been doing with these? How had she gotten them?

  Her stomach clenched. She knew exactly how Sarah had gotten them. The thought that Derek would have given them to her for some sick little game made her want to vomit.

  Graf didn’t disobey her, so he sat next to her like someone watching the numbers count down on a time bomb.

  “I don’t understand…” She flipped again, but all that filled the next pages were Sarah’s handwriting. “She didn’t know my family. She shouldn’t have had these.”

  “I think we know how It got here,” Graf said slowly, cautiously.

  “No. No, that doesn’t make sense! Derek controls It. You saw him. You saw him.” She realized that she sounded almost pleading. “You saw him, Graf.”

  His expression was pained. “I did. But I’ve seen the way he acts with you and with Becky. I saw him stand by and let them tie you to a stake to burn you. He was going to let that happen. What’s to say he didn’t do the same thing before?”

  “What, you think he let them kill Sarah so that he could get control of the monster?” Something about that didn’t make sense. “And what does it have to do with my family? Why are they in here?”

  Gently, Graf took the book from her hands. “I don’t know. Give me just a minute.”

  Though she could read the writing just fine over his shoulder, she didn’t. Whatever sick thing Sarah thought she was doing with pictures of her family was something Jessa could safely lock out of her mind.

  “It looks like they were somehow a component of whatever it was that she did. It doesn’t say anything about Derek.” He frowned and thumped the page with his thumb. “But why aren’t you in here? Why just them?”

  Jessa waited, numb, while Graf continued to read.

  “I know why.” A cold chill raced down her spine. “Because they’re dead. That’s why Derek wants me dead. To finish whatever this spell is.”

  They stared at each other, both of them shocked. Jessa more so, she decided. Somehow, the words had escaped her mouth before she’d even managed to piece together that thought. Now, her brain had to race to catch up.

  Derek wanted her dead. He’d proved that much. Derek controlled the monster, somehow, and he knew how to get rid of it. So, why hadn’t he? And what would have made Chad willing to murder her? What would make anyone willing to murder another person, on someone else’s say-so? Why had Sarah done a spell that trapped them all in the town? Why did she die without telling the truth?

  All it would take was her death, and the whole thing would be complete. Whatever the point of it was.

  “You don’t know that,” Graf said, swallowing so hard she could watch his Adam’s apple move in his throat. “You don’t know that.”

  “You do.” Otherwise, it wouldn’t have hit him so hard. “If it isn’t true, then why does he want me dead? What does It want?”

  Graf didn’t have an answer, and that was her answer.

  “Look,” he said slowly, quietly, “you can’t tell anyone about that.”

  “Why not?” Her voice pitched up hysterically, though she felt oddly calm and detached. “They want me dead, anyway.”

  “Because we’re going to figure something else out. We’re going to get out of here alive. Both of us.” He swore and ran a hand through his blond hair. “You didn’t tell June this, did you?”

  “No, but she’s smart. She’ll figure it out, if she hasn’t already.” She paused. “If Derek hadn’t already told her. Shit, that’s why she wanted me to get rid of you—”

  “Because I’m protecting you…” He jumped to his feet and was instantly gone. Jessa knew where to follow, though she hadn’t seen him move up the stairs with that unnerving speed. She was halfway up when she heard him swear and pound his fists on the windowsill.

  “She’s gone!” he shouted, striding back down the stairs. Jessa ran to her room, where that damned tree that had helped her sneak in and out so many nights in her teen years stood placidly beside the open window.

  “Graf, wait!” She raced down after him, but by the time she reached the door, he was gone.

  He’d left her alone, the door standing wide-open. Outside, rain fell in huge drops that splattered themselves across the front of the house. She stared out the door at the darkness, paralyzed. It seemed like any second a group of angry people would swarm up the lawn, and she would be too late to shut them out.

  Or It would appear, and rush at the house with its terrible claws, and she would still be standing there, framed in the doorway, the light from the lamp a beacon.

  And Graf had left her there, alone.

  She stood for a long time, unable to move to close the door and shut herself inside the safety of the house. Because it wasn’t safe if he wasn’t there to protect her. Once upon a time, she would have hated that thought. After Derek had abandoned her, she’d learned that she couldn’t rely on anyone. She needed to cling to that lesson now.

  The creature wanted her dead. Well, it was going to have a hell of a fight. It had already taken everything else from her; it wasn’t going to have her life. She picked up her gun and carried it with her upstairs. She took a pair of her father’s boots out of the closet, since her shoes had been burned in the fire and her feet would be too swollen to wear any of her mom’s pairs, which didn’t fit great under the best of circumstances.

  If Derek was responsible for trapping them all in Penance, then killing him would solve the problem just as easily as her death would.

  The walk to Derek’s house was difficult. The burns on Jessa’s feet made themselves painfully known with every step, and every step was impeded in turn by her damaged ankles inside her father’s too-large boots and also by the rain that made the grass slick and turned ditches into mini-rivers. By the time the lights of the house became visible, her tank top and shorts were soaked through, and she shivered despite the warm July air. Her boots had filled with water, and they squished and sloshed like buckets on her feet, but she kept walking, hugging the gun to her chest like a baby.

  You can do this. You can do this, she repeated as a mantra in her head. She could do it, despite the flood of memories that the very thought of Derek’s name brought back to her. Prom. Driving around in his car. Making out in the woods behind her house. Stupid, childish memories she had clung to for too long. That wasn’t love. That had been hormones and teen rites of passage. It wasn’t enough to let someone walk all over her for. It wasn’t enough to die for.

  She didn’t knock on the door. It wouldn’t be locked. She pushed her way in, the gun in front of her, cocked and ready to fire, her arms trembling from chill and exhaustion.

  “You really think you can do it?”

  At the sight of him, Jessa’s resolve quaked. Derek sat in an armchair covered in torn tweed fabric that had been patched with duct tape. He held a jar of moonshine on his knee, his handsome face made harsh and ugly by shadows of sleeplessness and the yellow light from the floor lamp behind him.

  She didn’t lower the gun, but she didn’t fire, either. “You could do it to me.”

  “I could. If you were dead, I could leave. I could go find Becky and the kids. I could go down to Richmond and get a job. All of this would be gone.”

  “How do you know that?” Her palms sweated, and she wanted to wipe them on her shorts. But she didn’t want to lower the gun.

  “How do you think?” he snorted, lifting the jar to his lips to drink.

  “Derek, what did you do?”

  “I didn’t expect it to be like this,” he said so quietly she almost missed it for the rain on the roof. Was he crying? It certainly appeared that way when he dipped his head and covered his eyes. Then, he spoke loudly and removed all doubt. “I didn’t want it to be like this!”

  Jessa h
ad only seen Derek cry one time before. The day he’d gotten his final rejection letter, the one from Arizona State, the twelfth school to break it to him gently that, though he was a talented player, there wasn’t a place for him in college football at their university. It unnerved her to see it then, and it unnerved her to see it now. She didn’t want to put the gun down, but she did want to comfort him. A sick, pathetic part of her insisted that she should hurry to his side and make him feel better, make herself more important and understanding than Becky.

  She shook her head to clear that thought away. “What do you mean? What did you do, Derek?”

  He looked at her, like a child admitting to stealing candy from the drugstore. “I did a spell.”

  Her finger relaxed on the trigger. She wanted answers more than she wanted to blow his brains out. “What do you mean, you did a spell? That kind of stuff isn’t real.”

  He nodded stubbornly, drunkenly. “Yes, yes, it is. I got Sarah Boniface to help me do it, too. She had all these books, and she got on the internet and looked stuff up for me.”

  “Why would she do something like that?” Jessa asked, but she already knew the answer. Derek had charmed her. Maybe he’d promised her popularity or a way to get even with all the kids who teased her at school. Derek always knew exactly what to promise to get what he wanted.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen like this!” His face screwed up in anger. “She did it wrong! She did it wrong, and worded it wrong, and lied about it and then that bitch got what she deserved!”

  “She was just a kid!” Jessa’s grip tightened on the stock; her finger twitched but did not touch the trigger.

  He snorted drunkenly. “She was a witch! She helped me get this thing here! She just did a bad job, was all.”

  “Why? What was she supposed to accomplish? What was that monster going to do, be your pet?” How could he be so stupid? And how could he really believe that a girl like Sarah could competently summon monsters, just because she wore black nail polish and had a spell book?

  “It was supposed to make everything better. It was supposed to make everything go back to how it was, before we graduated.” He sniffed as more tears came to his bleary eyes. “I just wanted to go back to how things were. I wanted to play football again. I wanted to mean something.”