by Helen Allan
“And she’s a journalist too?”
“No,” ‘she’s a vampire’ “she’s a musician, plays in a rock band at pubs.”
“Cool,” he nods, “so tomorrow, if you are not too tired, do you want to come to the woods with me?”
I grin, “Is this where the axe bit comes in?”
His laughter echoes around the bar, it is relatively empty now, just a few people at the pool table, a couple more at the dart boards and the odd regular nursing a drink in the darker corners.
“Nope,” he says, his lips shiny with syrup, “no axe, but a lot of timber. I need to source some Oregon for our business in NZ; this is one of the main reasons for my visit. There’s a lumber yard way out west; I thought you might like to come explore.”
“You mean you are worried you will get lost and need someone to hold the map?” I smile.
“That too,” he nods, running his finger around the edge of the plate to get the last of the syrup and putting it into his mouth.
I take my eyes off his mouth, shake my head to dispel my, seriously sick, thoughts and tell him he can pick me up outside the bar.
“Why not your apartment?” he frowns. “Oh wait, I get it, axe murderer.” He points to his chest and shakes his head.
“Yeah, that,” I giggle, “and I don’t want you waking up Tanya. She sleeps all day, and if she gets woken up she gets, ‘fucking deadly,’ uh, pretty angry.”
He looks at me and turns his head to the side, serious all of a sudden.
“So your name, Freely, is it short for anything?
“Nah,” I sigh, I’m sooooo over this question, I get it regularly. “It’s from a church hymn ‘Freely I give to you, freely I give to you,’ I sing the lines for him, more embarrassed than I usually am to do that, I like to think I can sing, in the shower, but I’m not your centre-stage type by any means.
“Right so your parents are what? Religious?”
“No,” I laugh and sip my wine, “far from it. Definitely atheists. It’s an old family name, somewhere way back in my past Freely was a name, and it has been carried through, it’s my mum’s middle name.”
“Nice,” he says, his eyes kind of roam my face for a second and I like it, “what is your middle name?”
“What is this? 20 questions?” I splutter on my wine.
“No,” he smiles and pushes his plate away, “I just want to get to know you, that’s all.”
I sigh, I really hate answering questions.
“My middle name is Roma. We apparently have some gypsy ancestry, and some Scottish and some French, but mum liked the name, so I’m Freely Roma Lille.”
“It’s pretty,” he smiles.
I look down so he can’t see me blush. “What about you? Any hidden reason for your name?”
“Well,” he smirks, “not my first name, my mum just liked the name ZinZan, it’s not that uncommon in New Zealand. But my last name, McKenzie, isn’t our real family name.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah we have European ancestors, our real last name is Karishnokov, but my great-grandfather changed it, to make it sound more Scottish for business purposes when he immigrated to New Zealand in the 1800’s.”
“Cool,” I breath, “although, Karishnokov sounds way more sexy than McKenzie, you know that right?”
“That’s why I told you,” he says, taking a drink and looking me in the eye, “so you’d think I’m sexy.”
“Well, keep trying,” I laugh. I look at my watch and sigh. I’ve promised Tanya I’ll go with her for her feeding tonight and stop her if she goes too fast. Apparently, the camp didn’t go as well as she had thought, I need to find a new Chinese restaurant now.
“Anyway, I’ve gotta go meet Tanya now, ‘blood-sucking thing,’ “girl-thing,” I rise, “I’ll be here waiting in the morning.”
“Nine sharp, he says, don’t be late or, you know, the axe….”
I’m still giggling as I get into the taxi.
The drive out to the forest lumber yard was taking way longer than I had anticipated. We had already been in the car three hours and, according to the map, had a couple more to go. Not that I was really concerned, it was nice being alone with him for so long; we were learning all sorts of things about each other. Mostly though, I was thinking about throwing myself at him and kissing him all over.
“So,” I say, watching his dark curls blow around in the breeze from the open window, “if we don’t find a gas station soon, we are kinda fucked, you know that right?”
He laughs and stretches out his arm to flex his long, artistic fingers from where they had been gripping the wheel. I haven’t seen any bit of him that I don’t find attractive so far, it is kind of irksome.
“We will find one; there’s always a petrol station when you need one,” he chuckles.
“Are you always so optimistic?” I frown, turning the map this way and that and trying to stop it from flying out the open window.
“Yep,” he grins, looking briefly away from the road and towards me, “glass half full. You?”
I grin. “I’m a terminal sceptic, I always work on worst case scenario, so glass half empty.”
“Well,” he smiles, “we balance.”
I stretch and put my feet up on the dashboard, dragging my eyes away from his baby blues and smile as I look out the window. But the pretty rural scenery makes me think horrible things. Like Tanya, eating her way cross-country, leaving a trail of bodies in farmhouses from Kansas to California like a bad, blood-thirsty Barbie. I start to drift off and think about the night before when I had gone with her ostensibly to ensure she didn’t kill anyone. That hadn’t gone so well.
I shake my head to try and dispel the image of her eyes, squeezed tight in feeding ecstasy while I tried, unsuccessfully, to prise her hands off her victim and save his expensive-suited arse. I didn’t have a hope in hell, and neither did he as it turned out.
Of course later I also had to deal with her disgust with herself as she dropped his empty shell onto the asphalt and wiped her bloody lips onto the back of her coat sleeve.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” she screamed, lashing out and kicking the body.
“I fucking tried. You are too strong Tanya and what the fuck? Why is this happening now? You told me you had learned how to control this at camp.”
“I did. I was terrific at self-control. I mean they wouldn’t have let me come home if I wasn’t. It’s just, it’s like, my hunger is on overdrive lately, it’s this neighbourhood or something, it’s like I’m starving when I know I’m not.”
“Maybe you’ve got worms,” I say dryly, trying to cut the tension, bad things happen when Tanya is this upset, she had to take it down a notch. As per usual my attempt at humour works. She snorts and playfully hits my arm, and I punch her back just as playfully.
“Ouch,” she frowns, “hands off the merchandise.”
“Yeah like that hurt you,” I mutter, “Tanya we need to dispose of this bastard, or you will be in the shit with the queen.”
I could see Tanya was considering walking out of the alley and leaving me to deal with the dead banker or whatever he was, it wouldn’t be the first time, but there was no way in hell I was wearing that tonight.
“And why is he so old? He must be at least 35. You know you have to keep the youth quota up or again, the queen will be pissed.”
Tanya bites her lip and nods. Part of the many rules that she lived by meant she had to eat young blood, and once a week she had to visit the queen and let her ruler drink from her. It was all part of a big, messed up blood youth ritual.
I could see tonight it was all getting to be a bit too much for my friend. Sometimes I wondered whether that holidaying vamp who bit her when we were in high school didn’t get the wrong chick. I would have made a way better vampire in a lot of ways. But apparently he hadn’t thought so, he had looked at me like I was a peanut butter sandwich and he was allergic to nuts. Tanya however, was the perfect sweet jelly sandwich, apparently, because rather
than just suck her dry, he’d decided to turn her. That summer our lives and our relationship had changed. I was the only one who could help her adjust, the only one who knew her secret, and just like when we were little girls; she knew she could rely on me to keep it.
Luckily for her, she was big-boobed, so she looked far older than she was, and was able to live a reasonably carefree adult existence. Me, I was ageing like any normal girl did, I was 18, always watching my weight, always wishing I looked more like my best friend, I think that is pretty normal though.
What wasn’t normal was having to defend myself against a psycho best friend who occasionally went blood fucking crazy and her equally deranged vampire friends. What also wasn’t normal was standing in a dirty alley behind some Italian restaurant figuring out how to dispose of a dead guy.
“Pick him up, Tanya.” I sigh, “Where did you find him?”
“Golf club,” she mutters petulantly, eyeing him up and down and giving him a kick.
“Well then, we can dump him in the golf course lake, maybe they will assume he had one too many drinks at the club and fell in.”
“Yeah,” she says, kicking him again, “maybe.”
“Stop blooding kicking him,” I growl, “drowning won’t explain bruises.”
“He won’t bruise,” she says rolling her eyes, “there’s no blood left in his body – bruises are blood under the skin. Don’t they teach you anything in journalism school?”
“Don’t they teach you anything in vampire school?” I bite back.
Oh har dee har,” she mutters, picking up his body and walking towards her car, “you know there’s no such thing.”
“Yeah well, maybe there should be,” I say quietly, “because vampire camp sure as shit didn’t work.”
We put the body in the boot and drove to the golf course. It was a long night, I didn’t get enough sleep, and I’m a definite minimum eight-hours kind of girl.
This morning I had deliberately worn a long-sleeve white cotton blouse and jeans ready for my woodland trip with Zan, it hid the bruise on my arm where Tanya had thumped me. I was tired, grumpy, waiting for him on the kerb, and not really in the mood for a long haul trip into nature. And I was a little pissed that he kept me waiting.
“You’re late,” I say as I hop into the passenger seat.
“Yeah sorry,” he sounds sincere, which mollifies my pissed-off-ness slightly, “the traffic between here and my hotel was terrible.”
“Where are you staying?” I ask, turning to watch him as he pulls off the kerb and into the traffic.
“Uh on the other side of town, the Palatial, do you know it?”
“Jeezus! How did you end up at Nuts ‘n’ Beer, on the other side of town?”
“I don’t know,” he chuckles, “I was flicking through the in-hotel advertising flyers, and the name of this bar just jumped out at me. I went for a drive, not really intending to go there, looking for food actually, but I kind of found myself drawn in. And then I saw you at the bar, and, I kept coming back.”
Looking out the window now, I replay this conversation in my head and can’t help but grin. Not many men had ever said anything like that to me before and meant it.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Zan says quietly, making me jump.
‘Yeah dead man’s penny,’ I shake my head and try to focus on the now. “So what exactly do you do for work? I mean, you work with wood, you work for your father’s company, but what are you? A builder?” A very hot builder?
“Ah, no, we are fine furniture makers,” he says, taking a slow turn left at a sign saying ‘lumber.’
“Hang on,” I frown, “this isn’t the place you said we were going. That is still a few hundred miles away.”
“I know,” he laughs, “but I saw the sign and thought I’d check it out. Like you say, we are going to run out of fuel if we just keep driving so low on gas.”
“Oh so you were listening,” I grin, holding onto the door as the bumps and corrugations in the dirt track rattle my fillings out.
He smirks and looks forward, but his grin slowly disintegrates as the building comes into view.
“Ah, have you seen the film Deliverance?” I ask, as skinny, snarling dogs race out of a dilapidated grey timber barn and surround the car, “you know, banjos and all that…”
“I was thinking Cujo,” he chuckles and turns the engine off, but his eyes look guarded.
“Is something wrong?”
“Ah, no, I guess this just seems really familiar,” he muses, his eyes taking in all the buildings and old car bodies, “but it can’t be, I’ve never been here before.”
“Huh,” I say, seeing a man in worn grey overalls walk slowly out of a timber shack near the barn.
“What do you kids want?” he snarls, as he draws close to the car. His angry voice is slightly incongruous with the soft way he pats his dogs’ heads. They stand by him, resting against his legs as he leans into the window to get a good look at us and draws in a sharp intake of breath.
“Karishnokov!” he gasps, leaning back suddenly, “you can’t be here.”
Zan turns and looks at me, and I give him a blank stare.
“Guess you have been here,” I say quietly, as the old man stares at Zan, a look of anger and something else, fear? Clouding his expression.
Chapter 3
I pour the drinks and keep my eye on the door.
Zan is late. He is usually in around this time, ordering his pint of Guinness, cluttering up the bar with his elbows, making me all nervous and flustered. The fact that he is late, after such a bizarre day, makes me worry.
I think about our conversation with the freaky deliverance man. He was Russian, I think, that’s what his accent sounded like. And his first words when we entered the house totally freaked Zan and I out.
“Karishnokov, it is dangerous for you here, you need to catch the first flight out. I see you found your gypsy, time is of the essence.”
‘Your gypsy?’
I look up and smile as Tanya enters the room, there are hardly any people drinking tonight, everyone is at home watching the big game on television, but I can always count on Tanya to alleviate the boredom on a slow night. I want to tell her all about my day, about Zan and the trip to the crazy man in the woods, but I don’t get to open my mouth before she starts pouring out all her woes – it’s always the same with Tanya. I nod and listen politely, washing and drying glasses as she updates me, with heavy sighs and rolling eyes, about her evening so far.
“So then the queen says to me,” she continues, “that if I ever, and I mean ever, drink anyone older than 25 again, she will drain me, drain me. Can you believe that?”
“She sounds kind of scarier than usual,” I comment, putting another dry wine glass in the rack.
“Yeah, she’s edgy. I tried to tell her about my, you know, hunger.” She lowers her voice dramatically, “and she said they were all feeling it, that there was a change coming, a wonderful change. She’s put all of us on red alert. We have to come to her every single night after we have fed so she can sip us, but she won’t tell us why.”
I shudder. I knew the vampire queen drank blood from other vamps, and that she needed this to stay young, but for some reason this seemed kind of kinky to me, far stranger than vamps feeding on humans. It was strange really, the whole ‘vampires are immortal’ myth, cos they weren’t, not really.
“But if you only have to feed on other vamps once a week to keep your youth, how come she has to have so much vamp juice?”
“Well, I guess cos she’s like, 500 years old,” Tanya rolls her eyes again, “and I’m pretty sure no one wants to look like an old hag vampire. I mean,” she tosses her blonde hair over her shoulder and eyes herself in the bar mirror, “I’m all for living forever, of course, but I wouldn’t want to if I was old and ugly.”
“Of course,” I say sarcastically, “God forbid a vampire should be old or ugly.”
I’ve seen my share of vampires since Tanya had been turned,
and I have to admit, they are most often pretty spectacularly hot, and pretty spectacularly bloodthirsty up-themselves cunts. But I had kept this last observation to myself, mostly.
I look past Tanya and swallow as I see Zan making his way into the bar, threading his way through the tables, towards me, ‘God he is hot, hot, hot’. I feel my face flush, I’m not sure if I believe in love at first sight, maybe, but I definitely believe in lust at first sight, and I am seriously in lust with this guy.
I am so focused on him, his shoulders, his face, serious tonight, that I ignore Tanya’s gasp at first. But I can’t ignore her words to him as he sits down and looks at me.
“I want you to come home with me, sailor,” she breathes, turning to him and looking him directly in the eyes.
I know what she is trying to do; she is trying to use her vampire hypnosis to turn him into her willing sexy blood-bank. There is only one person I know for sure who can resist her vampire death stare – me.
I lean over and bang Zan’s Guinness glass onto the hand Tanya has resting on the bar, hard, she winces, but completely ignores me.
Zan doesn’t.
“Uh, no thanks,” he says politely, turning away from her and looking to me, “Hi.”
I smile, but it is slightly tinged with alarm. Beside him, Tanya is livid and believe me when I say anger management is not in her repertoire of skills.
“I said,” she puts out her foot and swings his swivel stool towards her, “I want you to come home with me.”
Zan takes a sip of his Guinness and puts the glass gently back on the counter before answering.
“And I said, I’m not interested. Now if you wouldn’t mind, your friend and I are having a conversation.”
