by Sonia Hartl
Rose’s brows pinched together as she frowned at Ida. “One time. That was one time I forgot to take out the body.”
“One time is too many,” Ida muttered.
Rose fixed a polite smile on her face when she turned back to me. “I occasionally enjoy a little snack at three in the morning, and fresh kills are harder to find at that hour.”
“That’s really not a good enough excuse,” I said.
“Thank you.” Ida threw her hands in the air. “Finally, someone else who gets it.”
“Anyway.” Rose’s fixed smile faltered for a moment. “Since Elton never bothered to fill you in on his past, I’m sure you have questions about us. We also have blank spots with you, since Ida and I didn’t meet up until after you’d been turned and moved down to Louisiana.”
“I’d like to hear from you first.” I wouldn’t give them a thing until they explained exactly who they’d been, what it had to do with me, and what this all meant.
Ida and Rose exchanged a look, as if they could communicate that way. Ida nodded, and Rose turned back to me. “I was the second. Elton turned me in 1954. He also fed me that line about how he’d been alone for half a century, and he didn’t believe in love until he met me, and blah, blah, blah. Ida came before you and me, but I didn’t know about her until she found me in New Orleans in 1989.”
I’d also been in New Orleans with Elton at that time. Which confirmed we all had the same clawing need to be near him, binding us for all of eternity. Just when I thought working at Taco Bell was the worst part about immortality …
“Why do we have to follow him everywhere?” I asked.
“We have theories, but we don’t know for sure,” Ida said. “We think it’s because he made us. His blood runs in our veins, so we’re a part of him. Where he goes, we have no choice but to follow.”
“And he follows no one? How is that fair?” I crossed my arms. Elton told me none of this before he turned me, but I’d been so in love, had trusted him so completely, I wasn’t sure; nor did I want to examine if that would’ve made a difference.
“His maker is dead,” Rose said. “He goes where he pleases.”
My breath whooshed out of me. “What?”
“We don’t fully understand how he did it,” Ida said.
As far as I knew, we were nearly impossible to kill since we were already dead. Most of the modern-day myths about vampires were wrong, even if they had the smallest basis in truth. We could go out in sunlight, but since we didn’t require sleep, we were also active at night. I imagined most vampires preferred to stay indoors during the day because of the amount of people around. We didn’t enjoy the company of the living any more than we’d felt the need to strike up a conversation with a cow or chicken before we’d become undead.
Stakes in the heart didn’t kill us; they just hurt like hell for a few hours while we healed. Garlic and crosses didn’t do a thing, but I could see a vampire acting like those things repelled them if they were in the mood to play with their food. We had reflections, and we didn’t require an invitation to enter a home, but we still waited for one because that was the polite thing to do.
When I’d confessed to Elton that I was becoming accustomed to immortality, he went ahead and ruined it by telling me about how we could be starved. It wouldn’t kill us, but we’d go mad with bloodlust, our bones would become brittle, and our skin would shrivel to paper-thin scraps clinging to our aging bodies. Yet we would live in that form until we could feed again. A cruel fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Just the thought of it made me shudder.
I’d once heard holy water could kill us, but it had to be the purest form, blessed by a priest without sin. So, good luck finding one of those.
“What’s your story?” I asked Ida. “How are you so sure you were the first?” If he lied to Rose and me, there was a good chance there were more like us out there, somewhere around this city where we’d all been drawn.
Ida shook back her hair. “Because I was engaged to Elton when we’d been living.”
I sat up straighter. Elton never talked about his life, nothing about who he’d been or where he lived before he’d been turned, and I’d asked him several times. A million questions burst through my mind. “What happened? Who made him? Did you know his family?”
“Slow down. I’ll answer all your questions, but we’ll go tit for tat.” Ida tucked her hands behind her head and leaned back. “So far we’ve done all the talking, and we need some answers from you too.”
“Okay.” That seemed only fair. And since they’d already had plenty of time to contact Elton or harvest my organs, I had to believe they hadn’t brought me up here for either reason. “What do you want to know?”
“Where did you live when he turned you?” Ida asked.
“About ten miles away from here, in this city.” So much had changed in thirty-four years, but the feeling didn’t. It coated my skin like the soothing balm of home mixed with the aftertaste of remorse for who I could’ve been if only I’d stayed.
“Interesting.” Ida exchanged another look with Rose, as if I’d confirmed something she already suspected. “I’m also from here. So is Rose. So is Elton. I was born in 1903 and died in 1921, just a month after my eighteenth birthday. Elton and I fell into a wild kind of love, but our families didn’t get along. They owned rival general stores, and the rivalry became more intense when I developed a knack for building vacuums in 1919. They forbid us from being together, which only made us want to be together more. How did you meet Elton?”
“He said he was a transfer student at my high school,” I said. “He saw me sitting alone under an oak tree behind the football field, engrossed in Jane Eyre, and he sat beside me.”
I’d never forget it. It had been a quiet winter with an early spring. Sweater weather. I’d taken my British Literature assignment out to the oak tree when my mom had forgotten to pick me up from school again. I had strawberries left over from lunch, and I’d just taken a bite of one when he approached me. Juice dribbled down my chin as I looked up at him. Instead of laughing, he swiped it away and licked it off his finger. It was annoying and sexy, and I didn’t know what to do with either of those feelings.
To this day, I can’t smell strawberries without thinking of Elton.
“Jane Eyre, huh?” Ida’s dark eyes sparked with amusement. “I knew it was either Austen, Brontë, or poetry. Elton certainly has a type.”
“Ida, quit being so judgmental,” Rose said. “I think more teens today would benefit from pleasure reading some of the classics.”
“It wasn’t for pleasure,” I said. “I had to write a paper on it, and he didn’t know I usually kept a Sweet Valley High book tucked into the pages during lit class.”
Ida let out a barking laugh. “Point for you, young one. Elton’s father had set him up with a girl named Amelia. Publicly, Amelia and Elton were to be married, but we made plans to run away. Amelia was reluctant to let him go. I don’t know the full story of how she’d been turned, but she made Elton shortly after, hoping to keep him with her.”
“Seriously? How many girls has he kept on a string? And what the hell is wrong with all of us that we fell for it? He’s not that special.” I could say that now, after we’d spent over three decades together, and I’d begun to see how selfish and careless he could be. We always had to move where he wanted, and we had to live with his coven. I got no say in who stayed with us. If we got in a fight, he would leave for a week to pout and try to guilt me into apologizing when he returned, without any concern for my feelings. It was always The Elton Show, and I was just his pretty little accessory. But when we’d met, he’d been incredibly charming, good-looking, and had a way about him. He knew exactly what to say to get what he wanted.
“I don’t think he kept Amelia on a string,” Ida said. “She was a spoiled girl who wanted him solely because he didn’t want her. He didn’t lead her on, and after he’d been turned, he came to me and told me what happened. I chose to be with him. I chose to be
come this.”
Rose laid a hand over Ida’s. “We all chose.”
Not knowing if it was my place, and not really caring, I stood and laid my hand over both of theirs. I was part of this too. “We all chose.”
Rose looked over at me, and her smile was equal parts sweet and terrifying. “Now it’s just a matter of what we’re going to do about it.”
“What can we do?” I asked. As far as I knew, we had no way out. We were at the mercy of Elton’s whims, stuck trailing behind him for all eternity. But it turned out there were a great many things I hadn’t known before tonight.
“He’s going to do this to someone else,” Rose said. “It’s why he’s dragged us all back here. It’s the only reason he ever comes back to Glen River.”
“Like Pennywise rising out of the sewers every thirty-some years,” Ida said.
My heart raced, and not just because I’d recently fed. I didn’t care for the living in general, not much, anyway, but the thought of another girl going through that made my blood boil. The promises, the future, the endless days of loving and being loved were all pretty lies sold in attractive packaging. Eventually she’d find herself alone, so painfully alone.
If present-me could go back in time and stop past-me from ever making that choice, I’d do it without hesitation. Even if that meant I’d be fifty now, and I’d have a handful of decades left, at best, before I died.
“We can stop him.” Rose squeezed my hand. “The three of us can stop him, save the girl, and free ourselves.”
“How?” My throat had gone dry. I knew. Deep down, I already knew.
Ida raised her dark gaze to mine. “We have to kill Elton.”
Chapter Three
“No.” I took a full step back. “I can’t.”
I had a lot of resentment toward Elton. I hated what he’d done to me without giving me all the facts, I hated who he’d been the last few years we were together, and I hated the way he’d left me, but that didn’t mean I wanted to kill him. We’d been in love at one point. That had to matter on some level.
“There isn’t another way,” Rose said. “If we don’t kill him, we’ll never be free from this binding; our deaths will forever be entwined. Not to mention the girls whose lives will be cut short before they know what they’re really getting into.”
“We cut lives short regularly.” Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I knew it wouldn’t be the same. Once he turned the next girl, she’d inevitably be on her own without a clue. The quick deaths we offered our meals were a kindness in comparison.
“If he turns the next girl, we’d have to wait decades to attempt this again, and if she doesn’t—” Ida stopped, took a deep breath. “Every time he turns someone new, it limits our chances. We could end up being bound forever.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We don’t want to get into that until we’re sure, but we’re working on it,” Rose said. “But we do know that everyone he’s turned has to be involved.”
“Can’t we set up an arrangement with him? Like, share custody of our time?” If someone came to me and presented the option of either living in a less-than-desirable city for six months out of the year or certain death, I’m fairly sure I’d make any location work.
“It’s not just about where we live.” She stood and paced the length of the living room. “You’re still young enough that you’re thinking short-term. I’ve seen a full century pass, and I’ll see another one soon enough. What do you think will happen when there are twenty of us? Fifty? All living within the same city limits?”
I couldn’t fathom next week, let alone centuries from now. If there were fifty of us in a city, even twenty, we’d be in over our heads. Too many bodies would begin to disappear. Vampires weren’t made for large packs. Occasionally we had small covens, but that was more for companionship than anything else.
“What Elton is doing is unnatural for our kind,” Rose said. “Vampires rarely turn more than one, if that. There’s so much risk in having that many vampires tied to one maker, and he’s not taking it seriously. It concerns us.”
A chill crept over my already cold skin. Memories of Stacey bleeding out on the concrete beneath the Dairy Queen sign flooded my mind. The night I made my best friend into a demon, and she never forgave me. It had been a painful process, like tearing the very fiber that stitched me together to give her a piece of myself. I wiped my damp palms on my pants. I had no desire to repeat the process ever again, and I had no idea how Elton had done it three times over.
“If he’s come to enjoy the pain of ripping one’s self apart to give life to another, we’re worried he’ll increase the frequency of his turnover, so to speak,” Ida said.
“I understand what you’re saying.” I really did. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around killing Elton. Maybe I was being sentimental for who he used to be, or maybe because I’d been frozen in time at sixteen, I’d always carry those old feelings with me, but there had to be another way. “Have either of you tried to talk to him recently?”
“We talked to him last week,” Ida said.
“We asked him what happened to you,” Rose said. “He said you were probably living in a sewer, since you had never learned how to take care of yourself.”
That pissed me off. Here I was trying to convince these girls not to kill his sorry ass, and he didn’t even care if I had a proper roof over my head. And so what if I didn’t really know how to take care of myself? I wasn’t supposed to know how to fill out a job application or balance a checkbook at sixteen. I was supposed to test-drive adulthood in college.
But Elton had made me into a toy, created specifically for his amusement and to feed his ego, until he grew bored and tossed me away without a second thought. Leaving me alone with the consequences of immortality.
“I’ll think about it.” It was the best I could offer.
“That’s better than no.” Rose gave me a gentle pat on the arm. “Ida and I have to run some errands, but we’ll be back in the morning. If you get hungry, that guy is still tied up in my room. If he wakes up and starts making noise, there’s some chloroform and a fresh towelette on the nightstand for you to subdue him again. You’ve already had to process a lot of information tonight. We’ll let this settle for now.”
“We don’t have time to—” Ida said, but Rose cut her off and ushered her out the door.
With the two of them gone, I had time to gather my thoughts and poke around the apartment. They didn’t have dishes in the kitchen, but the glass-front cabinets displayed mid-century styled ceramic figures. Blue cats with pink paws, birds with chipped wings, and butterflies made of sea glass. The guy in Rose’s bed, still tied up and asleep, wore nothing but boxer briefs. He had a tattoo of Foghorn Leghorn peeing on Tweety Bird on his right thigh. I’d never be able to unsee that.
Back in the living room, I found a photo album with painted sunflowers on the light-blue cover. I settled into the squishy cushions that seemed to swallow me up and looked through the pictures. They were all black-and-white, of Rose and her life before she met Elton. Her short mink hair was teased into the bouffant style of the early 1950s. There were pictures of her with her parents, with what must’ve been siblings, with a small kitten she held to her cheek. More pictures of her in a hamburger joint, laughing with a group of girls by the jukebox, sitting shotgun in an old Plymouth with a boy who looked at her like she hung the moon.
The longer I looked through her album, the more my heart broke for who she’d been and the reason why she’d given it up. My heart broke for all of us. The lost girls who could’ve been so much more, if only we’d been given the chance to grow.
I’d been staying with Ida and Rose for nearly a week when they came back just after sunrise with the battered rolling suitcase that held all of my worldly possessions. My clothes smelled like Taco Bell, thanks to one of my uniforms tucked inside. It couldn’t have taken them more than fifteen minutes to clear out my motel room, but they’d been gone for nearly six hour
s.
“Oh, good. You took a bath,” Rose said. “You can borrow some clothes from us until we get a chance to wash yours. We’re going out on a mission.”
“What mission?” I jumped up from the couch, where I’d settled in to read Alyssa Cole’s latest romance while I waited for the girls to return. “I don’t want to mission.”
“We’re at war now. Get your shit together.” Ida dumped my suitcase at my feet.
“War?” I tucked my fists under my chin. I couldn’t war. Other than my biweekly ritual of drinking the life out of a body and discarding it in the nearest dumpster, I was a pacifist. “What the hell happened while you were gone?”
A new guy in Rose’s room woke up and started screaming. I rubbed my temples. This one had woken up twice in the middle of the night, and the second time, I nearly drank him dry myself for interrupting my bath. While Rose went to deal with her breakfast, Ida began pacing the length of the living room, the scent of black cherries wafting behind her.
“This is why I can’t stand it when she brings her kills home,” Ida said. “Here’s what happened last night: Rose thought we should go talk to Elton, so we could prove to you that we’d taken all alternative measures.”
I lifted my chin. No way was she going to pin whatever went down on me. “I didn’t ask you to do that. I already told you I’d think about it.”
“I know, but Rose has a soft heart, and she wanted to ease any lingering guilt you might have about Elton. Anyway, long story short, he now knows you’re with us, and he said if we interfered in his relationship with Parker Kerr, he’d make us pay. Since we intend to do exactly that, I guess we’ll be paying or whatever.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around this hard and heartless version of Elton she described. He’d been no peach to live with those last few years, but he hadn’t been cruel. Though he had been known to throw some epic tantrums when he didn’t get his way. Like that time he locked me out of our rental cabin after I’d led his coven into revolting against a move to Alaska. His blood always ran colder than most.
