by Rachel Caine
Eh, I’d had lots worse matchups. At least none of them had fangs.
“You’re at our table,” the center one said. He was wearing a Morganville High cutoff muscle tee, with the school mascot—a viper; go figure—and I finally placed him. He was a native son, and he’d been just starting to get a rep as a decent defensive lineman before I’d left town. He’d been a bully back then, too. “Move it, loser.”
“Oh, hey, Billy, how’s it going?” I asked, without actually moving an inch. “Haven’t seen you around.”
He wasn’t prepped for chitchat, and I got a blank look from him, then a scowl. “Did you hear me, Collins? Move it. Not going to tell you again.”
“No?” I looked up at him and sipped my latte. “Common Grounds, dude. You really going to start some shit here, with him staring right at us?” I nodded toward Oliver, who had his arms crossed and was watching us with so much intensity I was surprised some of us weren’t catching fire. I sipped my latte, and waited. This nonviolence thing was kind of fun, because I got to see Billy squirm without breaking a sweat.
Only problem was, Billy wasn’t all that smart, and he punched me in the face. Just like that, a sucker punch to the jaw.
I dropped my latte and came up out of my chair in a single surge of muscle, my fist clenching even before the news of the pain hit my brain like a sledgehammer. Counterattack was instinctive, and it was necessary, because nobody, nobody got to hit me like that and not have a comeback.
I was pulling back for a real serious hit when I heard Theo Goldman’s voice say, clear as a bell, Twenty-four hours.
Hell.
I gulped back my anger, opened my fist, and blocked Billy’s next punch. “You owe me a latte,” I said, which was something I hadn’t exactly expected to say, ever. The table was a mess, spilled coffee and milk dribbling off the edges of it. My heart was pounding, and I wanted to punch all of these guys until they were too stupid to move. This time, holding back didn’t feel good; it felt like losing. It felt like cowardice. And I hated it.
But I sacked up and walked away. The table was theirs. Now they had to clean up their own mess.
Outside, the air felt sharp and raw on my skin, and I leaned against the bricks and breathed deeply, several times, until the red mist that still clouded my vision started to clear up. My fight-or-flight reaction had just one setting, I was starting to realize; that wasn’t smart. It was fun, but it wasn’t smart.
Eve came running out, still in her apron. She saw me standing there and skidded to a stop. “Hey!” she blurted. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “He’s too wimpy to break anything except his own hand. Doesn’t throw from the shoulder.”
“No, I mean—Jesus, Shane, you just . . .” Eve stared at me for a second, and I thought she was going to say something that would make me feel a hell of a lot worse, but then she threw her arms around me and hugged me hard. “You just did something totally classy. Good for you.”
Huh.
She was gone before I could explain that it wasn’t really my choice.
Classy? Girls are weird. There’s nothing classy about getting sucker punched and walking away.
But I guess today was about fighting myself, and God help me, I was kind of winning.
• • •
I had a date late afternoon to walk Claire home from campus; she didn’t really need the escort, but I enjoyed pretending she did, and spending time with her was always a plus. I had a lot to make up for, with Claire; I’d lied to her, and when things got dark on me with the fight club, I’d gone dark on her, too. She hadn’t deserved that, or any of the terrible things I’d said, or thought. It was going to take some real effort to get back to where we were, but I was determined to make it happen.
And normally, I wouldn’t have let anything interfere with that, but as I was passing the empty house on Fox Street, the second from the corner, with the broken-out windows and the ancient, peeling paint job, I heard something that sounded like muffled, frantic crying. It’s a cat, I told myself. The place was a lifeless wreck, and the yard was so overgrown that just getting to the barred-over front door would have meant a full-blown safari, with the added benefit of thorny weeds, possible snakes and poisonous spiders, and who knew what else. I’d feel really damn stupid if I ended up snakebit to save a cat who wasn’t even in trouble in the first place.
But it didn’t really sound like a cat.
In Morganville, the principal survival rule was always keep walking, but I’ve never been one for that strategy; it’s soul-sucking, seeing people hurt and doing nothing to help. Goldman was right—I did have a savior complex—but dammit, in Morganville, people sometimes did need saving.
Like, most probably, now.
I sighed and started pushing through the tangle of waist-high weeds toward the house. The front door was a nonstarter; I could see from here that the padlock was still intact. Whoever had found a way in had done it with at least a small bit of stealth.
The windows were still full of jagged glass, so even if someone else had gone in that way, I wasn’t about to try it—and I didn’t need to, because the back door was standing wide-open, a not very inviting rectangle of blackness.
I could hear scuffling now, and the crying was louder. Definitely being muffled. It was coming from upstairs, and from the thumps, it sounded like there was a fight under way.
The stairs creaked and popped, alerting anybody who was paying the slightest attention that I was on the way, and I wasn’t surprised when a girl of about fourteen appeared at the top of the steps, gasping and sobbing, and plunged past me toward the exit. She looked relatively okay, if panicked.
The boys—two of them—at the top of the steps weren’t much older than she was. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. Local kids, but nobody I had on my radar.
They looked real surprised to see me.
“Hey,” I said, and stopped where I was, halfway up, blocking the way down. “You want to explain what just happened?”
One of them opted for bravado. Not a good look for him. “None of your business, jackhole,” he said, and flipped me off. “We’re not doing anything.”
“You mean now,” I said. “Here’s a pro tip, kids—when the girl’s crying, she’s not that into you.” I was angry now, angrier than I’d been at dumb-ass Billy with his sucker punch. That would have been a meaningless fight. This one, on the other hand, had some meat to it. “You know who I am?”
One of them had some sense, at least, and he nodded. “Collins,” he said, and tugged at his friend’s arm. “Dude, let it go.”
The friend wasn’t that smart. “You can’t prove nothing,” he shot back at me. I shrugged.
“Yeah, I might really care about that if I was some kind of cop, but I’m not. I’m just a guy who gets pissed off a lot. So here’s the deal. I’m going to give you one chance to promise me you’ll stop being giant douches. Do that, and you can get the hell out of here.” My voice went cold for the next part. “You break your promise, you touch any girl in this town again who doesn’t sincerely beg you for it, and I’m going to rip off any parts that dangle, you got me?”
“Who died and made you Batman, dickhead?” the bigger one asked.
“For the purposes of this discussion, let’s just say my dad,” I said. “Because he’d already have left you room temperature on the floor. I’m the kinder, gentler version.” Not quite true; my dad hadn’t possessed any real moral compass. If these fools had been vamps, he’d have been all over it, but regular human idiots? He’d shrug and walk away.
They didn’t need to know that, though.
“Dude, let’s just go already!” said Lesser Douche Bag, and didn’t wait for his friend to make up his alleged mind; he held up both hands in surrender and edged by me down the steps. When he hit the ground floor, he ran.
The remaining guy reached in his pocket and flic
ked open a fairly serious-looking knife. I respect knives. It raised him a notch or two in my threat levels, though he wasn’t yet even breaking orange. “Bad idea,” I told him, and began climbing the stairs toward him. “Real, real bad idea.”
He started backing off, clearly spooked; he’d thought just having a knife meant he won. I hit the top step and lunged, knocking his knife hand out of the way, twisting it, and catching the weapon before it hit the floor.
Then I put a forearm against his chest, shoved him against the wall, and showed him the knife. “Bad idea,” I repeated, and drove it into the wall next to his head, close enough for him to feel the passage of it. He went really, really pale, and all the fight bled out of him as if I’d actually stabbed him. “You just got upgraded. You no longer get a full pass, jackass; you get to look forward to seeing me a lot. And I’d better like what I see, you got me? Any girls crying, even if it’s at a sad movie, and we’re going to finish this in a way that’s not going to look real good on you.”
I wanted to punch the little bastard, but I didn’t.
I just stared at him for a long few seconds, and then pulled the knife free, folded it, and put it in my own pocket. Then I let him go. “Scat,” I said. “You’ve got a ten-second head start.”
He made use of it.
I sat down on the steps, toying with the knife he’d left behind. I hadn’t lost my temper, but I hadn’t exactly been nonviolent, either. I called that one a draw.
I hadn’t heard him, but all of a sudden I realized that someone was at the bottom of the steps, looking up in the gloom. Pale skin, curly wild hair, out-of-fashion old man’s clothes. Small wire-framed glasses pushed down on his nose.
Dr. Theo Goldman.
“You following me?” I asked. I felt surprisingly relaxed about it.
“Yes,” he said. “I was curious how much effort you would put forward. I’m pleasantly surprised.”
I gestured with the knife. “So, how does this count?”
He smiled, just a little. “I’ve never really been a fan of the teaching that you should turn the other cheek,” he said. “Evil must be fought, or what does it matter if we’re good? Goodness can’t be weakness, or it ceases to be good.” He shrugged. “Let’s call it a draw.”
I could live with that. “You were right,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be all fight, all the time. But I’m going to miss it. Kind of a lot.”
“Oh,” he said cheerfully, “I’m quite sure there will be plenty of chances for you to indulge yourself. It’s Morganville, after all. See you tomorrow.”
He was already gone when I blinked. I shook my head and started to pocket the knife.
“Leave it,” his voice drifted back. “I trust you better when you’re not armed.”
I grinned this time, and dumped the knife through a crack in the boards. It was swallowed up by the house.
It wasn’t twenty-four hours yet, but somehow, I felt like I could probably make it the rest of the way.
Probably.
AUTOMATIC
Another anthology tale, written for the Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions collection, edited by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong. That amazing anthology is the result of Melissa and Kelley inviting a bunch of their author friends along for a road-trip signing tour called the Smart Chicks Kick It event, and it was a huge success and blowout fun. To help fund the tour (because all of us pitched in for costs), they put together this anthology, which also allowed us to give back a little to our readers.
This stand-alone story is set late in the series, but before the Daylighters show up, and it deals with something I’ve always wondered about. . . . We have vending machines for snacks, cold drinks, even hot drinks. Why don’t the vamps have one for blood?
Well, this examines why it might not be such a great idea, by way of Michael’s experience. A sweet little love story, too, in an unexpected way.
Fun factoid: I was addicted to soft drinks in college (not coffee) and if I couldn’t find a working machine that served Dr Pepper, my day was bound to go almost as badly as Michael’s is about to in this story. Physics class without the sweet relief of soda? Unthinkable!
There was a new vending machine at the Morganville Blood Bank. In the withdrawal area, not the deposit area. It looked like a Coke machine, only instead of handy ice-cold aluminum cans, there were warm cans labeled O Neg and A and B Pos—something for everybody. The cans even had nice graphic logos on them.
My girlfriend, Eve, and I were standing in front of the vending machine, marveling at the weirdness, and wondering a lot of things: First, what the hell did they tell the can manufacturers about what was going in those containers? And second, would the blood taste like aluminum? It already had a coppery tone to it, like licking pennies, but . . . would it be any good?
There were twelve vampires in the room, including me, and nobody was making a move to get anything out of the shiny new machine. The Withdrawal Room itself was clean, efficiently laid out, and not very friendly. Big long counter at one end, with staff in white lab coats. You took a number; you got called to the counter; they gave you your blood bags. You could order it to go, or drink it here; there were some small café-style tables and chairs at the other end, but nobody really liked to linger here. It felt like a doctor’s office, someplace you left in a hurry as soon as you could.
So it was odd how all the tables and chairs were full, and the sofas, and the armchairs. And how there were vamps standing around, watching the machine as if they expected it to actually DO something. Or, well, expected me to do something.
“Michael?” Eve said, because I’d been a long time, staring at the glossy plastic of the machine in front of me. “Uh, are we doing this or not?”
“Sure,” I said, resigned. “I guess we have to.” I had actually been asked—well, ordered, really—to lead the way on this particular new Morganville initiative. Morganville, Texas, is—to say the least—unusual, even for someplace as diverse and weird as our great state. It is a small, desert-locked town in the middle of nowhere, populated by both humans and vampires. A social experiment, although the vampires really controlled the experiment. As far as I knew, we were the only place in the world vampires lived openly—or lived at all.
I was on the side of the vamps now . . . not through any plan of my own. I was nineteen years old, and looking at eternity, and it was starting to look pretty lonely because the people I cared about, that I loved . . . they weren’t going to be there with me.
Somehow, the machine summed up how impersonal all this eternal life was going to get, and that made it so much more than just another Coke machine full of plasma.
I was still amazed that eleven other vamps had shown up today for the demonstration; I’d expected nobody, really, but in the end, we weren’t so different from humans: novelties attracted us, and the blood dispenser was definitely a novelty. Nobody quite knew what to make of it, but they were fascinated, and repelled.
And they were waiting.
Eve nudged me and looked up into my face, concerned. She wasn’t too much shorter than I was, but enough that even the stacked heels on her big Goth boots didn’t put us at eye level. She’d gone with subdued paint-up today: white makeup, black lipstick, not a lot of other accessories. We were so different, in so many ways; I wasn’t Goth, for starters. I wasn’t much of anything, fashion-wise, except comfortable. And she seemed okay with that, thankfully.
“Swipe?” she said again, and tapped my right hand, which held a shiny new plastic card. I looked down at it, frowning. White plastic, with a red stripe, and my name computer-printed at the bottom. GLASS, MICHAEL J. My dates of birth and death (or, as it was called on the vamp side, “transformation”). The cards were new, just like the vending machine—issued just about two weeks ago. A lot of the older vampires refused to carry them. I couldn’t really see why, but then, I’d grown up modern, where you had to have licens
es and ID cards, and accepted that you were going to get photographed and tracked and monitored.
Or maybe that was just the humans who accepted that, and I’d carried it over with me.
It was just a damn glorified Coke machine. Why did it feel so weird?
“So,” Eve said, turning away from me to the not-very-welcoming audience of waiting vampires, “it’s really easy. You’ve all got the cards, right? They’re your ID cards, and they’re loaded up with a certain number of credits for the month. You can come in here anytime, swipe the card, and get your, uh, product. And now, Michael Glass is going to demonstrate.”
Oh, that was my cue, accompanied by a not-too-light punch on the arm.
I reached over, slid the card through the swipe bar, and buttons glowed. A cheerful little tone sounded, and a scrolling red banner read MAKE YOUR SELECTION NOW. I made my selection—O negative, my favorite—and watched the can ride down in a miniature elevator to the bottom, where it was pushed out for me to take.
I took the can, and was a little surprised to find it was warm, warm as Eve’s skin. Well, of course it was: the signs on the machine read TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED, but that just meant it was kept blood temperature, not Coke temperature. Huh. It felt weird, but attractive, in a way.
They were all still watching me, with nearly identical expressions of disgust and distaste. Some of them looked older than me, some even younger, but they’d all been around for centuries, whereas I was the brand-new model . . . the first in decades.
Hence, the guinea pig—but mainly because I’d grown up in the modern age, with swipe cards and Internet and food from machines. I trusted it, at least in theory.
They hated it.
I rolled the can indecisively in my hand for a few seconds, staring at the splashy graphics—the vampire fangs framed the blood type nicely. “How do you think they got away with getting these made?” I asked Eve. “I mean, wouldn’t somebody think it was a little strange?”
