by Martha Woods
“I don’t think that’ll last very long,” Rachel sighed, reaching for her phone and bringing up the university Facebook page, “It’s still the top post.”
He didn’t have to look at her phone to know that she’d brought up he and Josh’s race, but he looked over anyway, wanting to see just how bad it was. As suspected, there he was racing along faster than any human could possibly be, easily beating the fastest runner in the team like he was going for an afternoon jog. Even if the bears had sent their most incompetent tracker there was no possible way that any one of them could miss that it was a shifter in that video, there was just no possible way that anyone could be that stupid.
“Well,” He said, scratching his forearm, “That’s not good.”
“No, I’d say it’s the exact opposite of that. If they haven’t managed to find you yet it’s not going to take them very long, but it sounds like the vampire knows that better than anyone. Do you think he’d be willing to help us?”
“Help us what? Run away from the shifters, fight for us?” Jamie shrugged, expecting to have more conviction when he’d started talking but soon realizing that there was really no answer that he could give. “Honestly I… have no idea, I didn’t really know that vampires were a thing either until one of them grabbed me and threw me off a roof, we don’t have a secret society where we all meet up and discuss hiding from the rest of humanity. Something like that would never work.”
Rachel sighed, groaning as she fell back into the bed and fisted her hands in her sheets. “Noooooo I would have so preferred it if you’d just said that he wouldn’t be willing to help us at all.”
“Why’s that?” He asked, before his eyes went wide in understanding, “You can’t possibly be serious.”
“Why not? It makes sense, and believe me I’m more annoyed by that than you are.” She sat up, fingers tapping along the covers like she was typing out a manuscript, wanting to get all that she had to say out of her system before she lost her nerve. “If he knows where the other shifters are then that means he knows how close they are to you, if he knows you then he’ll know that you’re not a threat to him, and if you’re not a threat to him you could maybe even end up being a help to him someday if he wanted. It would all work out pretty perfectly.”
“Perfectly,” He said, “Aside from the part where we have to go and find a live vampire and ask him if he’ll be willing to be a good neighbor, do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”
“I have a pretty decent idea, and that’s why I know that it’s still the best idea that either of us have for stopping this whole thing cold. Do you want to keep living or not?”
“I’m not sure how to explain that directly talking to a vampire isn’t the best way to ensure that you keep living, but I don’t think you’d listen anyway.” He pinched his nose between his fingers, understanding more and more why Orson had ended up the way he did if this was what he had to deal with when he was in charge. “I don’t have anything to lose, you know that by now, but do you actually want to go out and do something this stupid? I can’t control you, I can’t stop you from doing this, but can you actually think about if this is the right thing to do at least, please?”
“If this is the thing that I have to do to make sure that I still have my best friend around me a year from now, then I’m going to do it. Besides, if I die that means that I don’t have to bullshit another film essay about how everything is either phallic or a code for death, I’ve done that so many times by now that it’s not even funny.”
“Why don’t you write another subject then?”
“Because those always get the highest marks, duh.” Getting up and walking to her phone, on her desk where she’d thrown it when they’d walked in, she pulled it up and pressed the phone to her ear, tapping her foot as she waited for an answer. “Cliff? Yeah hi it’s Rachel, do you mind if I come by the diner tonight for a few minutes? I just wanted to look around the back, try and work out where Jamie fell and everything, it shouldn’t take that much time. You don’t mind? Oh that’s awesome, thank you so much Cliff, say hi to Janine for me ok?”
Jamie sighed, watching her pocket her phone with no small amount of dread and already anticipating what she was going to say. “You want to get going now don’t you? So that we can speak to the vampire for as long as we need to before he has to get out of the sun again.”
“And I don’t want to do it when I’ve been drinking, it’s never a good idea to talk to anyone when you’re drunk.”
He wanted to just lay back down on the bed, let himself go limp and heavy so that she couldn’t move him, but he knew that if he did that she was likely to walk out there by herself anyway and talk to that vampire face to face. What he didn’t know however was whether she’d actually survive that encounter the same way that he had, or if she’d be dragged up into the building and drained of all her blood, before being tossed away like he had. Of all the images that he’d had in his head, that was by far the most unpleasant one.
“Fine,” He sighed, shaking his head and pushing himself up onto his feet, “But I swear, the first sign of trouble we’re running. And if he grabs me you keep running, don’t try and fight him off.”
“I’ll try, but you’re the fast one, if you can’t outrun him then what hope would I have?”
An excellent point, but not one that he wanted to acknowledge at that time. There were far more pleasant things to do, none of which they were going to, so instead they settled for walking out those doors for the third time that day, heading out into what was now a pitch black night on the hunt for what was certainly more danger than a sane person would have rationally welcomed.
But they were rapidly coming to terms with the fact that while insane wasn’t how they could be credibly described, you would be hard pressed to define them as the opposite either.
“Cliff really said this was ok?” Jamie asked, “I don’t want him to get in trouble because we’re back here.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry,” She replied, pushing open the gate to the alleyway and shoving him through, letting it swing closed behind them. Here they were, walking into what could quite literally be the belly of the beast, eyes darting to every tiny object or rat they saw scurrying about in the dark, the sounds of garbage being scraped and discarded echoing from around the other side of the alleyway. It was proof enough to Jamie that he hadn’t been imagining the encounter, and the thought of confronting the creature that had been so easily able to toss him around like a ragdoll filled him with nothing short of absolute dread, even more so when the sound stopped as they walked around the corner, seeing that there was nothing except an empty trash can still rocking back and forth. Whoever had been digging through it had leapt away not a second before they turned the corner, and it was tempting to say that the vampire was in a non-confrontational mood before they heard that voice from behind them and froze completely.
“Why… are you… here?” The vampire asked, hissing out his question with a sharp tongued tone, “You didn’t learn?”
“I work here,” Rachel said, not able to help the tremble in her voice at the voice echoing in her ears, “I wanted to see where my friend got hurt, and now I can see exactly where it was.”
“You two… friends?” He asked, narrowed eyes flicking between Jamie and Rachel before it darted in front of them, too fast for them to see, only feel. “Why you here?”
“We…” She cleared her throat, taking a moment to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We want you to help us, to help him.”
It was clearly an ancient creature, its manner of speaking stilted and guttural, holding onto an accent that literally no country or culture in the world held onto. But even with advanced age and an incomprehensible amount of knowledge in its mind, it seemed that it was still absolutely possible to be utterly confused.
“What?”
Jamie couldn’t quite help the little gasp of laughter that he let out, so turned around by the sight of an ancient being so confused by
what he had to admit was a truly baffling request from someone who had every reason to be afraid of it, but unfortunately the being in question wasn’t one to appreciate being laughed at. The reason his laughter was little more than a gasp was because that was all he could get out before he was lifted up by his throat, Rachel’s yelp of protest cut off as she was grabbed too, the two of them kicking their feet in the air as the vampire held them aloft and looked at them with nothing short of pure rage in its blood red eyes.
“You laugh at me?” It asked him, hissing out a challenge to confirm that he was, knowing exactly what it could do to stop him laughing completely, but for now it was just holding them steady. The encounter, unpleasant as it had been so far, was still one of the most surprising things to happen in the last few years. There was still something to be valued in that.
“I wasn’t… laughing at you,” Jamie said, “I’m laughing at this whole… mess that we’re in. I didn’t know you existed before yesterday, barely believed you were real today, yet here I am trying to find a deal with you to save my life.”
“Your life?” The vampire asked, “Why would I save your life?”
“To be honest? I have no clue why you would.” Jamie looked over at Rachel, still holding on valiantly but suffering from the hand on her throat more than she wanted to say. “Let her down, kill me if you want but if you even think about hurting her I’ll kill you.”
Threats weren’t strange to the creature, you didn’t do what it did nightly without coming up against some resistance, but those were normal human beings with no sense of their own fragility. But this… what he had in his hands was a shifter, and one with quite a bit of blood on its hands if he was smelling correctly. There were just some scents that couldn’t be washed away no matter how hard you tried, and someone with blood on their hands was bound to stink forever.
A threat from someone like that, even to a creature as old as he was, was nothing to scoff at.
Rachel gasped as she was dropped to the ground, hands pressing against her throat and chest, fighting to get enough air into her lungs to be able to speak again, tell Jamie that antagonizing the vampire wasn’t going to do them any favors, but then she saw the look in his eyes. The open challenge to the one still holding him, the hand clenched around the wrist of the one holding him in place, the understanding on the face of the vampire in question. He’s said that he would kill him, and looking at the scene in front of her, she had every reason to believe that he was telling the truth.
He wouldn’t kill to save himself, but he would to save her life. She wasn’t stupid, she knew exactly what that meant, had suspected for a while, but the confirmation was not what she needed right now.
“Speak,” The vampire commanded, shaking Jamie in his grip.
“You were right when you said that you smelled other shifters, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t realize it, because I ran away from them years ago, and I hoped to never meet them again. But now they’ve come looking for me, and in doing so they invaded your territory.” He clenched his hand as hard as he could around the vampire’s wrist, smirking when he saw a faint flicker of pain on his face. “They’re not with me, they’re here to kill me. They’re my enemies, just like they’re your enemies. I figure that we can work something out to help us both.”
“Why not fight them?” The vampire asked, looking down at his hand, “You strong enough, could kill them easy.”
“I don’t want to,” He said, “I knew these people, and they knew me. I don’t want to have to fight them, I don’t want to have to kill them, I don’t want to be that person anymore. But you… you don’t care about them, you just care that they’ve come into your home, and that’s enough to earn them a beating I think.”
“Beating?” He asked, “Not kill?”
“Not if you can help it, just because they’re trying to kill me doesn’t mean I want to return the favor, I just want to be able to live again. Can you understand that?”
“Could do it anyway,” He said, narrowing his red eyes, “Could kill them anyway, kill you too. Why make deal in first place?”
“Because if you send them back broken but alive, there’s a chance that they’ll just leave you alone, rather than send more people to kill you, and with enough people, they will kill you. And if I’m alive, maybe I can talk to them, convince them to just… let everything go, then we all get to live happily ever after, how does that sound?”
Rachel had to admit, hearing him speak like this was… strange. So much confidence, even in the face of death, it wasn’t anything like the man that she’d known so far. It was a sobering thought that all he could be confident about was the matter of fighting and dying.
“Come on,” Jamie said, kicking in the vampire’s grip as it narrowed its eyes to points, “Let’s make a deal.”
Chapter 7
“Well that was a complete wash,” Rachel muttered, rubbing at her throat and resting along the side of the road, “What’s your plan now?”
“I don’t know,” Jamie said, tapping his fingers along the concrete and swallowing down the lump in his throat. He would have liked to say that he had some idea of what he was going to do, but truth be told he was more lost than ever. He wasn’t going to fight, even if he wanted to he knew that there was no way that he could actually bring himself to do so, not anymore, he’d been through too much and done too much to welcome that back into his life.
But this vampire, as insane as it might have been, was really the only thing that he could think of that could stop the storm that was coming, or at least give him a fighting chance of surviving the next few weeks. He didn’t want to die, that was the very simple truth, he wasn’t ready for his life to end when he felt like it was finally starting to begin, when he’d finally found some semblance of belonging after so long being alone.
But what could he possibly do? Was he just going to sit in the middle of the street waiting for them to come for him, maybe hold up a white flag and beg for them not to kill him on sight? The people that he knew were still driven by pride, and an intense belief that what they wanted was right, and that was without taking into account the wolves that were undoubtedly going to be right by their sides. With that combination, it was obvious, there was going to be no quarter given to him, no one would be telling the others to leave him be, that he was an uninvolved innocent in whatever had happened back in the forest.
They were going to take him, and they were going to kill him, whether quickly or slowly he couldn’t tell, and that was all there was to it. They wouldn’t care what he had done, how long he had been away, the things that he had done to survive in the time since, all that mattered was the fact that he was still Orson’s brother. How lucky for him that some people still valued familial relations.
But where would that put Rachel, or even Josh? What were they going to do to the people who were truly uninvolved in everything, who had only come to know him as the man that he’d been after leaving the clan? Would they just toss them aside like they didn’t matter so they could take him without a fight? Or would they decide that they were tainted by association too, and cut them down just to prove a point?
Jamie wanted to believe that his people wouldn’t do such a thing, but he was no fool, he still lay awake at night sometimes remembering the things that he’d seen the people that he’d grown up with do to their enemies, the things that he had partaken in to save what he saw as his home. Two innocents, an entire dorm even, wouldn’t mean much to them in the grand scheme of things, it was just a matter of who was in the way.
“Jamie?” Rachel asked, shuffling closer and taking his hand in hers, “Are you ok? You’ve been quiet for a while now.”
“I’m just… just thinking,” He said, squeezing his free hand into a fist and willing himself to stop shaking, “It’s all just hitting me I think, I was in shock before, and then I wanted to just enjoy everything but… but I don’t want to die…”
“Hey… hey it’s alright,” She whispered,
guiding his head down onto her shoulder and wrapping her arms around him, “We’ll think of something, you hear that? We’ll come up with a way to solve everything, I promise, you’re not going to die if I can help it.”
“Maybe… maybe it would be better if-”
“Don’t say if I walked away, just… don’t,” She ordered, “I’m not going anywhere, no matter what you tell me to do. I’m staying right by your side through everything, however that ends, and there’s nothing you can tell me to convince me otherwise, so that’s just something you’re going to have to deal with.”
Jamie laughed, the sound strange to his ears at that moment, but still something that lit up his chest with something he had been sorely missing. “What did I do to get the most stubborn best friend in the entire campus?”
“Probably something stupid, but I’m not really complaining, are you?”
“No,” He said, shaking his head and smiling into her shoulder, “I’m definitely not complaining.”
They sat there for a few minutes, not a sound passing between them other than their breathing and the wind, listening to the sounds of the rapidly encroaching darkness with a sense of dread and awe. There were certain things that you were never truly aware of until you were near the end, and for the both of them… they’d never truly realized just how empty the night could be when you were listening out for it. Strip away the cars, the hum of the streetlights, and what do you get? In some places you might get birds, maybe deer, the distant howling of dogs, but in this little part of town… there was nothing, not even the crack of a branch as a dog stepped on it.
It took some thinking before they realized that their failed business associate may have been the cause of such overwhelming nothingness, animals could usually sense when something was off after all, and a bloodthirsty predator like he was definitely seemed like something they would take a wide berth of. How long had he been in this part of town, they wondered, had he been here a year ago? Ten years ago? Had he been here before it had even been known as Florida, or had he just popped into existence out of nowhere? So many questions that swam through their minds only to die on the vine, there was no real point in wondering about them anyway. He was clearly not in the talking mood, he barely seemed able to talk anyway, so what was the use in thinking that he would answer their questions?
