by eden Hudson
“Why do I have vamp condoms?”
Ryder spit into his bottle and shrugged. “Somebody making an educated guess might say ‘boning a vamp.’”
I remembered Beth Ann at the drug store giving me that satisfied smirk people get when they find out a preacher’s wife has been cheating on him. That must’ve been when I bought them. I remembered smelling cinnamon, too. Or thinking about cinnamon. Smells are supposed to be able to trigger memory, but this one didn’t. Brain damage.
“I’ve only ever had sex with Mikal,” I said. I wouldn’t have forgotten, not even with the brain damage. Sex is a physical expression of love. That’s part of why I was so upset when I found out Tough was going to sleep with that pedophile bitch, Mitzi, so she and Jason would be his protectors. He was just a kid. He didn’t love Mitzi, but if you have sex with someone it’s hard not to feel like you love them, like you’re giving them your heart. And once they have it, they can crush it, the way Mitzi crushed Tough.
Ryder snorted.
“Yeah, Tough’s the one that got crushed,” he said. “You’ve got an unopened box of condoms, a rotten supper for one, and nobody, nowhere gave a damn when Kathan handed you over to Mikal.”
That feeling—I remembered it. Before Mikal, I used to train so I didn’t have to think about it. Some days I got in upwards of twelve hours. Near the end it had been sword drills mostly, because… I couldn’t remember why and I didn’t really care. The point was I’d been a sorry fucking loser trying to pretend like it was okay that all I’d ever done in twenty-four years was fight fallen angels or prepare to fight fallen angels or get my ass handed to me by fallen angels. Everyone in my family was either dead or hated me enough not to talk to me, I didn’t have a girlfriend or any friends, and everybody in Halo thought I was a homicidal psycho who got what he deserved. Mikal had at least wanted me. She loved me.
I pushed past Grace out of the room. Left the cabin door hanging open.
But when I got onto the porch, the lines were back, just like in the truck. Different colors of light stretching across the sky like strings. Some of them moved. The one that freaked me out the most was a yellow-orange one arching down through the woods and into the cabin.
I dropped onto the top step and leaned against a post. Tried to keep breathing and hoped the lines would disappear again.
After a while Ryder came out, leaned against the other post, and looked up at the lines with me.
“I hate this fucking town,” I said.
“I always did, too,” he said.
“Tough’s right. There ain’t any such thing as ghosts.”
Ryder shook his head like he was disgusted with me. “Come on, Colt, you ought to be able to recognize your own mental construct when you see it.”
Con-struct. The same way Ryder—the real Ryder—used to say gui-tar and con-cert. Dad’s old-Missouri drawl that Ryder always used to put on because he thought it made him sound badass.
“Tough did what he had to do to survive and so did you,” Ryder said.
I thought it over. “I made up my older brother to tell me what to do because I knew Mikal was going to wear me down until I couldn’t eat or piss or think without her permission?”
Ryder spit into his bottle and scraped his lip on the rim.
“I like to think you made me up to kick your ass if you tried to go back to her,” he said. “Thought I was going to have to for a second there.”
I looked back up at the lines in the sky, then had to look away when a green one followed something or someone through the woods too close for comfort.
“I was hoping those were yours,” I said.
“SOL,” Ryder said. He snorted. “Sunshine’s outta luck.”
I shouldn’t just sit there. Holding still, not doing anything—that was when everything piled up. I needed to be training, working on a new strategy, something. I needed a plan. That had always helped before Mikal. With Mikal… She hadn’t given anything the chance to pile up. Between the torture and the headfucks and the literal fucking, I’d barely had time to think.
My face burned. I scrubbed my hands across my cheeks like that would stop them from turning Whitney-red. I missed that sadistic bitch so bad my stomach hurt.
“I fucking love her. What the hell is wrong with me?”
“You want the short list?” Ryder asked. “Pretty much everything.”
I nodded. Tried to think. If there’d been a plan before, there wasn’t much chance it had included an “in case of survival” contingency.
“So, what now?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Ryder said.
Tough
Rian wasn’t still dicking around the west side of Halo—which was probably for the best or I might’ve ended up a really short-lived vamp—so I rolled on into town with the radio blasting. Rowdy’s was filling up, but I didn’t even slow down when I passed. I should’ve wanted to go in, but I had this feeling creeping up on me like I couldn’t face more than Harper and Jax right then.
Suddenly the radio was up too loud. The music hammered on my skull. My hands started shaking to where I almost couldn’t hold the wheel. It didn’t feel like a rigor mortis thing and it wasn’t from the cold. My heart pumped and that shocked me into breathing. Then it did again, hard enough that I felt it bang against the wall of my chest. I wasn’t seeing right anymore. I had to pull over.
What the hell? When I panicked, the connection with Tiffani opened. Please. Help.
Cold sweat dripped into my eye and more ran down my back. I couldn’t get goose bumps anymore, but I started shivering.
Where are you? Tiffani asked.
I don’t— I’m going to throw up.
I opened the door and fell out of the cab. A car hit its brakes. I tried to drag myself out of the road, but nothing would move. I was gagging and trying to breathe at the same time. Dying. This is what it felt like to die for real, forever dead. Hell dead.
“Tough?” It wasn’t Tiffani’s voice, but I knew it. “What’re you doing? Are you okay?”
A girl’s hand touched my face. Then she grabbed under my armpit and the back of my neck and pulled until we both fell onto the sidewalk. The heat of her body soaked into my skin and I hugged her against me.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need to drink? Here.”
She pushed on my jaw until my mouth was at her throat and I bit into the glowing vein there. I think I sighed. Her blood burned in my chest and the warm buzz filled my brain almost immediately. The shaking faded and my heart went still again. I kept drinking. I could hear her making shushing sounds and feel her rubbing my back. It felt so good. She slid her other hand between us and pressed against my erection through my jeans. Instinct was what made me push back. Trying to get at that heat. Grinding against her hand. When I came, I turned loose of her neck. I rested my face on her shoulder.
“Better, huh?”
Shit, shit, shit. Now I could tell who she was.
“Probably just a reaction to drinking that punk Desty’s blood.” Scout kept on talking, even though I got my arms to work enough to shove myself off of her. “Harper’s so retarded. I can’t believe she wants you to keep drinking that crap even though it does this to you.”
My head spun like I’d just chugged a fifth of Wild Turkey. I fell back on the concrete and pulled down on the bill of my hat with both hands.
Scout. I just got off on Scout.
“I bet Harper didn’t even show her that trick. Everybody knows vamps stop sucking when they come.”
The first time I’d had sex with Mitzi after she put me down—and I mean really stomped my heart into the ground—I felt hollow. Brittle, like any little thing could break me. Afterwards, I don’t know how I got myself home, but I went to bed and didn’t get up the rest of the day. Laying there on the sidewalk beside Scout, I knew I should’ve been tougher. I shouldn’t feel like this. Something had happened. My body had freaked out. It could’ve been anybody who saw me and let me drink.
Which meant it could’v
e been anybody I got off on.
Dammit, I wished it had been Desty. Her blood would’ve lit me up like a Taser, but at least I wouldn’t feel like there wasn’t anything inside of me. What the hell did I run out on her for, anyway? Telling me not to fight with Colt? She was just trying to keep me from messing him up worse.
Scout was still talking. She tried to touch my arm, but I jerked away from her.
“Well, excuse me,” she snapped. “You’re freaking welcome for the blood, by the way.”
Even if I could talk, I don’t know what I would’ve said to her. I stood up. After a second, the dizziness went away and I headed for the truck.
“She’s not like us, Tough,” Scout yelled after me, sounding all pissy and teenage. “She’ll never understand you like I do. She can’t give you what you need!”
Climbing up into the truck popped my broken rib like an M-80. The pain helped clear my head some more. I fired up the truck and headed for the house. I needed to stop fucking up just long enough to get something done right.
Tiffani
Tough jumped when I slammed his truck’s passenger side door. Vamp speed and reflexes plus moving vehicles can make for some impressive entrances.
I lit up a cigarette and he glared at me. The connection opened.
Don’t smoke in my truck, he said.
“It covers up the cum smell,” I said.
He’d just eaten, so a faint blush spread out over his cheekbones.
You’d be okay with the smell, though, if I was a chick, he said.
“Anybody ever tell you it’s illegal to feed off of a minor?” I let the cooled smoke roll out as I talked. “Even a seventeen-and-three-quarters-year-old.”
He huffed through his nose, a combination of a sneer and a laugh. My ex used to do that when he wanted me to know he thought I was being petty. But it was hard not to be petty with Aaron. More and more toward the end of our marriage.
Thanks for stopping me, Tough said. I forgot how much you like to watch.
“I’m not your damn mom,” I said. “And even if I was, I think it’s better for kids to learn from their own mistakes.”
Tough snorted again.
He drove and I watched the embers shifting in the cigarette’s cherry. If vamps get too hungry, our ultimate predator senses take over and it’s as if we can see the blood under everything else. I’ve heard that it’s not really seeing, but that’s how the semi-human brain understands it.
Tough caught the drift of my thoughts.
I wasn’t hungry, he said.
I nodded. Rubbed my forehead with the heel of my cigarette-hand. This was what happened when you made someone without thinking about the consequences.
“Damn it. Should’ve had you dry out before I made you.”
He looked at me like he had no idea what I was talking about. Dumb kid like him probably didn’t, either.
“Delirium tremens?” I said. “Alcoholic goes on a binge, then stops cold. His body panics.”
I’m not an alcoholic.
“Sure you’re not,” I said, rolling down the window to tap some of the ash off of my cigarette. “No one in Halo is.”
I’m not!
“It layers into your skin, kid. If I wanted to, the super-smeller could take me all the way back to the first drink you ever had. Which—since you were probably sneaking it from Ryder and Colt—I’d guess was Southern Comfort.”
Tough looked at me for a second as if I’d hit the nail on the head. It wouldn’t have been as impressive if he’d known the whole story.
He pulled into the drive of the crappy little house he shared with Harper Ives and Jax Carpenter. Shut off the truck. Pulled off his John Deere cap, scratched his hand through his hair, and tugged the hat back on.
I thought I was dying, Tough said. He was trying to figure out a way to tell his girlfriend.
“If she really wants to stay with you, she’ll have to get used to it,” I said. “There’s always somebody waiting for a vamp to lose control. Especially around here with all the groupies looking to get off on death.”
I’m not screwing around on her again, he said.
“Tell that to your body the next time the DTs hit.”
Tough went still. Obviously, he hadn’t considered there being a next time.
“The way you die is the way you stay,” I said. “Whatever diseases or injuries you die with—you’re stuck with them. I told you that.”
Tough stared down at the steering wheel.
Scout said it was Desty’s blood that did it.
“If you’re hell-bent on telling her, I don’t think I’d open with that.”
He glared at me.
“Blood’s blood,” I said. I took another drag on the cigarette and waited while the smoke cooled in my lungs. “No human’s blood is different than any other human’s. Otherwise, vamp protectors would eat out a lot more often.”
Tough shook his head.
Scout’s was like the blood bags, like a shot of whiskey. Desty’s was like bad meth.
“Can’t be. I drank some of hers the other day.”
That got a rise.
“Keep your pants on, it was in a blood bag,” I said. “She sold me some Sunday.”
Why?
“Why do people sell anything they need? They’re out of money and desperate.”
He looked down at the steering wheel for a while. A few chauvinistic thoughts flitted through his head. Things like he’d never let her get that desperate again. Well-intentioned, but offensive, the way men around here are still conditioned to think. Women who could take care of themselves made guys like Tough uncomfortable and had to be queer. And because I used to bodyguard for Shannon and her band, I must’ve been one hell of a bull-dyke.
Tough rolled his eyes.
Yeah, body guarding is why people think you’re a bull-dyke, he said.
“This is the reason men don’t last as vamps,” I said. “Everything’s so black and white. There’s no—”
Thanks, but I didn’t sign up for the feminist rally.
Smoke clouded out when I laughed. Both Colt and Shannon used to give me the business about “Tiffani’s feminist rants.” But growing up in the fifties gives a person a whole different perspective on what people call feminism these days.
Tough wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. His mind had wandered back to his girlfriend.
Who’re you supposed to be protecting? he asked.
“You remember Brady Johnson? The guy who drove for the Red Cross?”
Good job with that, Tough said.
“Just because you’re protecting someone from other NPs doesn’t mean you can keep them from getting hit by a moron who’s texting when he should be driving.”
That’s been five years ago at least. Where do you get your blood?
“I don’t cause any trouble for the big, bad boss man, so it doesn’t matter.”
Tough gave me a wry smile. Vamp-groupies looking to get off on death like that fat Goth at the bakery the other day?
I shrugged and put out the cigarette on my palm, savoring the lingering heat before the healing began.
“You remember what you had for dinner two days ago?” I said, flipping the butt out the window.
Cold, cold heart, he said. Colt was right.
I felt the wrinkle appear between my eyebrows. “He said something about me?”
About vamps. He said it gets hard for them to feel after they’ve been dead for a while.
“Guess you’ll have to take his word for it.”
Tough gave me a look.
“No feminist rally this time.” I took another cigarette out, but when he scowled at me, I sighed. Tapped the filter on the dash. Damn kid was too much like Shannon to listen to someone who had already been there. He’d have to try chewing toothpicks and straws himself before he took up smoking to ease the mouth boredom. “No, I’m betting you won’t even make it to your first violent rejection. You got a head start on stirring up trouble. Step out of li
ne just right and Kathan’s going to give Mikal the order to end you. So I’m going to tell you what my sire told me the day she made me.”
Tough’s eyes narrowed. The vamp senses had let him know I was a threat.
“I won’t think twice about staking you,” I said. “Male vamps are strong, but females are made for killing. Stir up trouble for me and you’re Hell-bound dead.” I put the unlit cigarette between my lips. “And if you’re too stupid for that to scare you straight, then remember the super-smeller. There’s nowhere your girlfriend can hide that I can’t find her.”
That set him off.
Put one fucking hand on Desty and—
Mitzi picked a bad time to turn the connection into a three-way.
You’re still here, Romeo? she said. I was going to ask Tiffani if she had to stake you yet.
Tough did the equivalent of slamming the phone down on his connection. Then he shoved open his door and jumped out of the truck. He grabbed his side when he hit the ground, but he didn’t look back.
Somebody’s touchy, Mitzi said, watching him through my eyes.
He just popped his feeding-cherry and he doesn’t know how to tell his girlfriend.
That’s one thing you can say for the guy—he doesn’t screw around, she said. Not even when I went on that two-week trip to Cancun. Horny as all hell when I got back, though.
Hope that kid knew to wear a condom, I said.
You haven’t been with the same snack twice this month, slut, Mitzi said. If anyone’s spreading postmortem STDs—
Shut up a second.
Tough had stopped moving a few paces from the porch. He swayed where he stood, then did a face-plant, head bouncing off of the bottom step. He didn’t get back up.
I could feel Mitzi laughing.
Holy shit, Tiffani, you made a vamp that sleeps at night!
Even I had to laugh at that.
Desty
For a while, I watched Colt talk to himself through the door’s broken window. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t contemplating the best way to commit suicide, but trying to keep up with a one-sided schizophrenic conversation was like listening to someone with earbuds in sing a song they don’t know.
