Well, I couldn’t just keep lying here in bed staring at the vampire. Speaking of which, he probably was really there. He just wasn’t a vampire. That part was probably the hallucination. So, since he was here and I needed to let someone know so they could put me away, why not tell him? “I am so sorry, sir. I didn’t get your name.”
“Vansickle Stuart Masterson, First Duke of Monterey, and a string of other titles, not to mention names, throughout the ages, descended from the Stuarts of historic merit. You can call me Vance.”
That made sense since it did not make sense. More proof, as if I needed it, that I had officially gone mad. “Mr. Vance, I have apparently gone insane. I’m not really sure what happens next, but I am pretty sure, since I am running around waving steak knives, that I should be put away and given some sort of medication now.” There, that sounded reasonable. I wasn’t sure if I should have added some sort of title. He was a first duke…wait, we’re in Ohio. Screw that title crap. He was in America now, he could live like we did and we didn’t do royalty. Well, except Princess Di and her kids. Well, I guess we did Fergie, but only because she lost weight, and we gave kudos to anyone who loses weight, even the Subway guy. Wait, back to staring at the creepy guy who couldn’t be there. Vance laughed. He covered his face with one hand and laughed very hard.
I stared at him and waited.
After a moment, he rolled closer to me. I suppose he finally realized I was not going to join him in his mirth. He cupped my face in his hands. I shivered and tried to lay very still. I wanted to hit him with something, but then I would be criminally insane rather than just a run of the mill whack job. And I figured they would be nicer to me when they put me away if I wasn’t a criminal.
“Little one, you are not crazy.”
I clamped my teeth at this point. I don’t really like being condescended to, but, hey, I am the crazy person, so I let him continue uninterrupted.
“Every so often, in life, we find that things are not as we thought them to be. When you were a child, you believed in things that were not there. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy…all things you thought were real. Then as an adult you found they were fictional. You had to rearrange your world around that knowledge. Other things you believed, like the monster under the bed and vampires and witches, you assumed also to be make-believe. Maybe, though, the world is bigger than you thought. Maybe there are things that are real and fantastic all at once. Does this make you insane? Are you to doubt that which is right in front of you, merely because you were told it could not be?”
“You are not real. I mean, I am sure you are real, since you are touching me, but you aren’t really a vampire. There aren’t vampires.” I knew there weren’t, had been repeatedly told it was impossible.
Not moving or even seeming to breathe he stared back at me with eyes gone a glittering cobalt. I gazed back, captured by his intense regard. Finally, I glanced down at his mouth. His lips stretched back in a semblance of a smile. The canines descended to sharp points and pushed gently at his lower lip.
I trembled. This isn’t real.
He pulled my hair. Hard enough to hurt. “Ouch!”
“This is real. I am as real as you. Welcome to the world of the night.”
“Dude, what are you doing? Can’t I leave you alone for two minutes?”
Sven leaned on the door frame and continued, “Honey, Vickie slept through all your screaming and stabbing. Thank God for iPod, you know what I’m saying?”
“Vickie—” I tried to get up and realized Vance still had a hold of my head.
“Look at me, Janie. I am real.”
“Gotcha. Vampires are real. Noted. Can I go check on my kid, now?” My heart still raced, but Vic was more important than my slip and slide down the slope of insanity.
“I told ya, sleeping like a baby. Which is good because you have, like, a half an hour to get to Natural Foods and be back here to meet up with the terrible trio.” Sven unlocked his cell phone, checked the time and pointed to the glowing face to emphasise his point.
I groaned. I forgot. Not only are there vampires, but I’m supposed to go play ghost hunter with a trio of nut balls. I dropped back onto the bed.
Vance rolled over and landed on top of me. I looked up at him. “What?”
Vance stared down at me. “I will go with you.”
His breath smelled a bit like steak. Don’t get me wrong, I like my steak, especially if there is some beer and sharp cheese in the area. Although steak dinners are romantic, steak breath was not. I put a hand up in a stop gesture. “Not so fast, Romeo.”
There, my voice was not nearly as unsteady as I felt. He responded by jumping off the bed in one snake-fast move and opening the closet. Hehe, now there was a monster in the closet. Vickie’s movie about doorways and monsters popped into my head. At least it wasn’t under the bed, like that one Fred Savage movie when I was a kid… Oh, that’s right. I am insane now. I no longer make sense.
“We need to make another stop on our way,” Vance casually informed me, as if him tagging along had been decided. “Everyone thinks I am dead. As this is not so, I need to let them know. Mia cannot be charged with my murder if I am alive, so to speak, and so she must be cleared of the charges.”
Briskly removing clothes from Mia’s closet and tossing them aside, Vance did not spare a glance back at me to see my shock. “Mia? What are you talking about, charged with murder?”
Vance turned to Sven. “Does she know nothing?”
Sven shrugged, and smiled. “She just got into town. The kid was around, and I didn’t want to freak her out. Can I watch you change?”
“Get out, lover boy, and take the screamer with you.”
“As if I wanted to stay.” I huffed and tried to ignore the expanse of creamy white chest Vance exposed as he removed his shirt. The hole from my steak knife had closed and left no mark to show he’d been recently stabbed. Another wave of dizziness came and went in my head.
Stomping into the kitchen, I opened cupboard doors at random. No liquor. Damned health nuts. I pulled out a bottle of water instead and took a good long chug. Lurking against the far wall, Sven watched me. “Honey, when they say you can kill a vampire with a stake, they don’t mean a steak knife.”
“Shut up. What was he talking about when he said that Mia was charged with murder?”
“Oh, Mia had to leave town for something else, too. You see, yesterday at, like, noon? They found Vance’s body in a dumpster in the back of an abandoned building. Lucky for him it took them hours to clear the scene and do all of their stuff, or they would have brought him out in the sun and, poof, no more mega-old-hunk. Anyway, he looked dead. I mean, it was daylight. He was kind of dead, but not murdered. The last person seen with him alive was Mia, so she became the prime suspect. But, like, how do you prove that you didn’t kill a vampire? I mean, he is kind of dead.”
“I see.” Okay, I didn’t see, exactly, but I had read a few books with vampires, so it made about as much sense as one could expect.
“I brought tall, dark and undead back here and stuffed him in a closet, figuring we could fix the whole thing tomorrow, once Vance was in better shape. But, right before you got here, they found another body. It was Madame Zulu, and she is this psychic friend—”
“Like a real psychic friend?”
“No, she is a friend of Mia’s who is also a psychic. Stay with me, honey. Anyway, she was found murdered in the same way. Well, not the same way, since Vance is alive, well, undead…” Sven puttered off for a minute, apparently considering the complexity of the situation. “This is harder to explain to an outsider than I thought it would be. No wonder Mia had a hard time with the police.”
I nodded. Yup, if I was the cop on duty, I would have assumed Mia had flipped her lid. Hell, who was I to judge, though?
“So, anyway, Madame Zulu is dead, and they wanted to take Mia to jail overnight for suspicion of murder and—”
“Wait!” I held up a hand. “So, Mia is running fro
m the police? Isn’t that against the law?”
“No, because they got a hold of me, rather than her. So, she can say she didn’t know they wanted to talk to her, see. And they didn’t tell her when they talked to her not to leave town.” Sven smiled.
I rubbed my temples. “Isn’t that still against the law?”
“Ahh, she is not only a screamer, but she is also a law abiding citizen. What a diversified and interesting group of friends Mia has! So good that we are all finally able to meet in this time of tribulation.” I turned to see Vance leaning on a doorframe. I hadn’t heard him enter the room. Made sense that he was quiet though, if he really was a vampire. I mean, it meant he was a hunter and all… “As to the against the law question, we will go with, ‘not technically’ and leave it at that. Once she is cleared of charges, which is our job, then it will not matter that she left town, see?”
Plucking at his sleeves, he didn’t spare me a glance as he spoke. I nodded at the creepy vampire. Well, he didn’t look so creepy now, come to think of it. He wore a pair of very tight jeans that rode his legs like—
Maybe “rode” was a bad word choice.
Okay, he wore a pair of blue jeans that fit oh so snug and a pair of CAT boots. His floaty white blouse… I frowned then smiled. “Is that a woman’s’ shirt?” I couldn’t resist asking.
“Honey, does it matter? I mean, he looks good enough to eat.” Sven smacked his lips dramatically.
I nodded. He did. Couldn’t argue with that. However, I had no interest in men, living or undead, so I pretended to be past noticing the couple buttons he’d left undone or the fact he definitely gotten a bath while I was passed out. A loose French braid held his brushed hair. And yet even wearing the girl-shirt and with all that hair, he exuded male power in a way that I reacted to on some strange primal level. It was like a kilt, I guess. Some guys could just pull the look off.
“Speaking of looks, honey, you need to clean up real quick.” Sven tugged at my hair, and I went to the bathroom and peered at my reflection objectivly. Dried blood coated my blond hair. It hung in a mass of ickiness on one side. The same side of my face had drying ickiness on it, too. Even my eyebrow was gooed.
I ran water in the sink and rinsed my hair as best as I could while trying not to think too hard about what I washed off. Then I pulled it up into a wad at the back of my head with a scrunchie. I washed my face and peered in the mirror. Not bad. My eyes looked a little wild and my hair kind of wet. I walked down the hall and grabbed a Pitt State sweatshirt out of my backpack and replaced my yucky tee with it. I also threw the pillow I had used onto the floor. Down to nine…how would I get a good night’s sleep with only nine pillows? I thought, sarcastically.
As I reentered the kitchen, Sven looked up and laughed at me. “Honey, how you and Mia are friends is just beyond me. Mia never goes anywhere without make-up and sparklies. She wears skirts and blouses. Her hair is always in those gorgeous curls. You look like you wish you were born a teenage boy. Oh, please, tell me that is not a scrunchie.”
“Sven, I am not in the mood.”
“There is nothing worse than a woman who lets herself go. Was it the divorce?”
“Sven, I looked like this, minus the dried blood, before the divorce.”
He nodded. “Maybe that is why you ended up divorced.”
I considered the butcher block full of knives for a beat.
Vance followed the direction of my eyes. “Let’s hit the road, Blondie.”
“Fine,” I bit out.
~
Once we were on the road, I glanced over at the vampire.
Okay, so there are vampires. They did drink blood, they also healed super fast. Some of the stories were true, or at least they were in my hallucination, and that was what I needed to figure out, really. What are the rules in my big nutsy dream? “So, can you read my mind?” I asked the vampire.
“Sometimes. If I want to.”
I nodded. I pictured him screaming in the sun.
“Ohhh, that was not nice.”
I grinned to myself. So maybe I had to be more careful about what I thought about. “Where is Natural Foods?”
“On Route Twenty, toward Saybrook.” Vance tapped the windshield. I nodded. “But we need to make a stop first. Stay on Twenty, but head toward Ashtabula City instead of Saybrook.”
“That is the opposite direction and, depending on how far we go, at least ten minutes out of the way. We only have a half an hour.”
“So, you will be late for the cemetery. I will talk to the ghost hunters. It will be fine.”
I looked over at him again. He had one hand braced on the dash.
“If you can’t die, why are you clutching the dash?”
“I hate woman drivers. You are insane behind the wheel. Do you realize how quickly you could die?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mr. Eternal Life.” I sped up another ten miles an hour and passed a Ford.
He stuck a hand on my knee, and I sucked in air. I slowed down a notch. “We will get along fine, my little screamer.”
I snorted.
“Turn here.” Here was down a side road, State Road to be exact, past a BP station. He waved his hand toward the right again and I obediently turned, which put us on Tannery Hill. Tannery Hill looked to be primarily industrial. As far as I could remember from living here when I was younger, the only things down Tannery Hill were some factories and a strip club.
“Yes,” Vance answered me as if I had spoken aloud. “Only it is not a typical strip club. Those of my nature are drawn to the darker sides of those of your nature.”
“Is that a nice way to say vampires like to see boobies?”
He laughed. He didn’t say I was wrong, though. I pulled into the lot of Peaches, the strip club. Vance unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to me. “Stay here.”
Darn. I wasn’t going to get to go in and see the naked women. I nodded, and he got out. I sat in the car for a good ten minutes and looked at the green neon sign. The first three minutes, I didn’t care. The fourth minute, I realized I kind of did. The fifth and sixth were me thinking that I was playing chauffeur to a hedonistic vampire while he checked out the local…talent.
The seventh and eighth minute I spent calling him names.
The ninth minute had me thinking maybe I should go hurry him up, since I had plans. I conveniently forgot that I didn’t much care for my plans, anyway.
By minute ten, I got out of the car. He wasn’t so damned all powerful and mind-reader-y if he didn’t know that I was sick of sitting in the car when I could be home suffering from insomnia, like any other night.
I walked to the door of Peaches and noted that it was a very industrial building itself, probably just a redone old factory. A few random people mulled around the lot, and I tried to look like I was there on purpose, for their sake.
I opened the door to find a man sitting in a small entryway on a bar stool. He was about my height and, since I am only five foot five, short for a man. What he lacked in height, he made up for in girth. He weighed in at least three hundred pounds and sported a shiny bald head tatooed with an eagle.
“Can I see your ID, sweetie?”
I hate being called sweetie, honey, and any other cutsie name almost as much as I hate getting ID’d. I guess though, at my old age, I should consider getting ID’d a compliment. I mean, I am almost forty. Probably, though, it was the college sweatshirt, rather than any actual youthfulness on my part. I showed the nice tattooed man my ID, and he told me there was no cover for women. I smiled. I hadn’t considered a cover anyway.
I walked through a door covered with stickers from bands and a few lewd stickers like, “If God hadn’t meant for it to be eaten, he wouldn’t have shaped it like a taco.” I was pretty sure God killed whoever came up with that one.
Through the door, a bar ran the length of the wall to my right. The bartender wore lingerie. That seemed, somehow, less than hygienic to me.
Tables scattered around the roo
m in no particular pattern and a big T shaped stage took up the center of the room. Toward the back wall, a hall led off behind the stage and a woman in a Jessica Rabbit getup led a man who looked like an insurance salesman down it. Ah, lap dance hallway…got it. To my left stood a bank of pool tables. Yeah, like men who came here wanted to shoot pool.
I scanned the room for Vance and didn’t see him. At the bar, I ordered a Corona. They even had lime. The bartender smiled at me and offered to let me put the money in her bra. Ah, she probably assumed that since I was a woman alone in a place where women disrobed that I wanted to see women disrobe. Like I liked girls. Whoops. “No thanks.” I took a good hard swig of my beer. Ah, beer, good.
Another scantily clad woman sat down near me. She sniffed at me. Like she smelled me with her nose. Like a dog would.
I looked at her as if she was nuts. Okay, so I shouldn’t be one to call the kettle black and all. I was staying with a witch, and I gave a vampire a ride to a titty bar. But she didn’t know any of that, so I could give all the dirty looks I wanted.
She grinned. She had long, bright red hair and eyes smudged gray and black in a way reminiscent of Cleopatra. She wore a red thong with black lace trim, and what there was of the top did a surprisingly good job of hiding her nipples, but not the rest of her huge creamy white mounds. Actually, I rather expected the top to snap free and hit me in the face at any given moment. As I didn’t want to be blinded by a flying bra strap, I cleared my throat. “Hi.”
“You smell of Odd Stuff.” Her whispery voice floated around me.
I nodded. I had been bled on by a dirty vampire. I probably smelled pretty funky.
“The store.” She waved her hand in impatience when it became apparent I wasn’t making further conversation. “You smell like incense and sage.”
“Oh! Yeah. I am running it while my friend Mia is out of town.”
“Mia is my friend, too. And yet…I don’t know you. Who are you?” One delicate red brow arched at me, and I felt almost compelled to answer her further.
“Oh, I am her friend from school. Janie Smith—”
Odd Stuff Page 3
