Vampires Never Get Old, page 13
The music is deeper, like a metallic heart that beats at a steady, rhythmic pace, and everyone here seems to have been waiting for me to show myself.
“We were getting worried,” Imogen says, standing from the love seat.
The girl in the neon bandeau dress has blood on her clothes. The older woman on the leash is slumped over at a strange angle, not moving, and even though Imogen is talking to me, all I can think is I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.
“Where is Brittany?” the guy with the mustache asks.
“How should I know?” I say, trying to sound much braver than I actually am.
I can feel the tension building as every vampire in this place turns toward me and I back up against the bar. There’s a soft groan and I turn to find the bartender slumped between two vampires, eyes rolled back as they drink from each wrist. I shut my eyes and let out a yelp.
“Where?” the boy with the wolfish grin asks. “It’ll be better for you to tell us.”
“Is that why you came?” I shout. “To yell at her?”
There is a consensus of shrugs and nods.
“You’re all horrible!” I say. “It’s her birthday.”
“Don’t you get it?” Imogen asks. “Brittany has no birthday. Brittany hasn’t aged for two hundred years. And I’m starting to think that neither will you.”
Imogen is behind me before I can blink. Her hand is cold around my neck. I reach for the hairspray in my pocket. She does not get to bite me. I take aim, shut my eyes, and press down hard. Imogen screams and shoves me hard against the bar.
The vampires closest to me begin to cough. Others get ready to lunge. Using the distraction, I scramble to my feet and climb on top of the bar. If I run across, over a dead body and two drunk vampires, and if no one manages to grab me, I can make it to the exit.
Shoot your shot.
I get ready to run. Pale hands grab at me, the steady bass of the music pulses against my eardrums, and I know in this moment there is no running. No breaking free. There are no more photos or yelling at my brother or advice from my dad or hearing my mother complain about how no one helps her with laundry, and if I live, I promise, I promise I will help her and do my chores and turn my A- into an A+.
A hand grips my ankle and I fall. I’m on my back, kicking and thrashing against a sea of hands and teeth.
Then it stops.
I sit up. The door is open. The music is gone. Between the mob of vampires and me is a girl with long, black hair. Her wine-dark lipstick is carefully drawn and her fangs are bared. I take a moment to note Brittany’s fitted frock coat, the dark gray leggings beneath that slip into black knee-high boots, and the surprising hint of pink blooming around her wrists.
“Surprise question mark?” I say, and for a moment I swear she wants to laugh.
Then her eyes shift and narrow, slicing across the room like a blade. A rough growl leaves her lips, “Mine.”
“You have no right—” Imogen starts.
“Defy me,” Brittany says. A few vampires move behind Brittany, cowing their heads. But the rest stay behind Imogen.
“I’ll do one better,” Imogen says, her moon-pale skin shimmering when it catches the faint light. She lifts her skirt and drags out a wicked-looking dagger.
“Cheap trick,” Brittany says, and then lunges.
The two women meet in a fury of fists and blocks, but, empty-handed, Brittany is at a disadvantage. I swing over the bar and search for something she can use as a weapon. I find a tiny knife for cutting lemons and a hammer.
“Brittany!” I throw the hammer, and she catches it without missing a beat, blocking a brutal jab of Imogen’s knife just in time. They fight as though they’re dancing, each movement as smooth and practiced as if the whole thing were choreographed. It’s so beautiful, I can’t look away.
“Grab the girl!” someone shouts.
“Oh, me,” I say, connecting the dots way too late. “I’m the girl.”
I climb back on top of the bar, searching frantically for a safe place to hide, but before I can do anything, Brittany leaps. With one hand, she grips the candelabra and swings. The ceiling groans in protest and I hear something snap as she strikes out with one foot to kick the vampire coming straight for me.
“Get out of here, Theo!” Brittany shouts as she lands.
“I can’t leave you!”
I can’t explain why I do it, but I run for Brittany instead of for my life.
I see the horror on her face before I know what’s happening. The ceiling shrieks above me as the candelabra comes crashing down, and a sharp pain pierces my neck.
* * *
THEO: what’s the best birthday gift you’ve ever gotten?
BRITTANY: i don’t celebrate.
THEO: if you did, tho, hypothetically. when were you born?
BRITTANY: hypothetically? i was born april 27th
* * *
BRITTANY
The candelabra presses against Theo’s neck, and I know before I pull it off her it that it has pierced her skin. I toss it aside as though it doesn’t weigh as much as it does. It clangs loudly as it lands, and Theo whimpers. I kneel at her side, gently lifting her head into my lap. There is a smear of red on her chin, and she looks up at me with tearful eyes.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she says with a humorless smile.
“Sorry I was late.” My voice is distorted, as though squeezed through a sieve. I press a hand to the wound on her neck, attempting to staunch the flow of blood, but this is a death wound. There is no time for anything but a swift goodbye.
Imogen stands near, her focus pooling around me like the blood beneath Theo’s neck and shoulders. But the room is still. Theo is not my kill but she is my catch. And vampires in my city always respect the catch.
Blood warms my lap. It spills onto the floor in a constant stream, pooling beneath Theo’s head in a way that reminds me of a scarlet flower. I focus on that and not on the dying, gasping girl in my arms.
“You’re actually a vampire,” Theo says, and in her eyes I see questions and theories and so much more than she’s able to say right now. She only has a few words left. She chooses two: “Make me.”
The not-hunger feeling crouched beneath my ribs returns. It expands and expands, ballooning painfully inside me. And, suddenly, I have a name for it: sorrow.
“I can’t,” I answer, knowing the eyes of my peers are upon me and this is a precarious moment. “Theo, I’m sorry. There are rules.”
“Remember that question you asked me? Forever ago,” Theo says, voice growing weak. “The answer is: you.”
How is it possible that a girl I’ve never met before in my life feels as close to me as my own sister? I cannot let her die. I cannot let this be her end.
I raise my eyes to the ring of vampires surrounding us and I growl, furious and feral and more certain than I’ve been about anything in my long life.
Then I lower my mouth to Theo’s neck, and I bite.
* * *
THEO: if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? don’t think just answer.
BRITTANY: the future.
THEO: that’s not a real answer.
BRITTANY: isn’t it?
* * *
THEOLINDA
I take the elevator from my floor to Brittany’s penthouse. After the accident, after I asked her to turn me, I discovered a lot of things. First of all, Imogen is a jerk, but that’s obvious to anyone with or without a pulse. It’s been four months, and I’m still dying. Turns out it’s a slow, pretty painful process. My body is shutting down and it’s a whole mess. But—I have an undead tutor. Even if she’s going to have to face a trial for turning me despite the baby vamp ban of 1987 and the whole undead civil war thing that’s apparently also my fault.
There are still things I need to figure out. How to convince my parents that night college classes are the thing for me. How to be around them without wanting to murder them. Kidding. Not really. It’s hard.
I didn’t think it would be easy. Some things will take years to figure out. For instance, how will I manage not casting a reflection? I guess I did want that vampire filter, but it’s a mixed blessing. I practice taking my photo in the mirrored reflection of this elevator. Maybe in two hundred years I’ll have to deal with aliens and they’ll have a cure for vampirism or a phone that puts Apple out of business.
I won’t hold my breath. Though I could if I wanted to.
The elevator lets me into Brittany’s penthouse. She has a movie theater in her apartment. She has everything she needs to never even leave the house.
But I remember the word she used to say to me. Lonely.
No more.
She hands me one of the glittery matching tumblers that I bought for us. I can’t really look at blood yet, even though I’ll have to get over it to survive.
“You know these movies won’t teach you anything,” she tells me, and hops onto the couch.
“I know, but literally the only vampire movies I’ve ever seen are the Tw—”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Shut up, it is perfect, okay. Per. Fect.” I plop beside her and take a sip. I’m starting to be able to taste minerals, diets. This person really liked sodium.
I miss popcorn. I miss butter. I miss sunlight. I miss so many things and I’ve only just started. My life ended. My new life has begun.
At least I won’t have to go about it alone. I have my Best Friend Forever, and that’s a promise made in blood.
THRALL Or “These Aren’t the Vampires You’re Looking For…”
Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C. Parker
There seem to be two kinds of vamps out there: those who lure their prey and those who chase them down. There is something downright terrifying about … well, all of them, but the idea that someone can convince you to willingly offer your neck for a quick bite is quite unsettling. Vampires are at the top of the food chain, and, like all predators, they have to learn how to hunt without depleting their food supply, which is … um … us? lol. Psychic powers seem to be how they manage this, and a gentle kind of mind control often shows up in vampire folklore, from Dracula to Sesame Street’s Count von Count (though, to be fair, he can only hypnotize you). But what it comes down to is some kind of influence. In this story, Zoraida and Natalie (oop, that’s us, your benevolent editrixes, hi!) use this vampire myth to let Theo and Brittany think about what kind of influence they have on the human and vampire worlds.
What kind of influence do you want to have on the world?
BESTIARY
Laura Ruby
It was day 212 of water rationing, and Lolo was acting like a bear. Or rather, wasn’t acting like a bear at all.
“Come on, Lo,” Jude said. “You have to eat something.” She stood inside Lolo’s enclosure in the Bezos Family Arctic Tundra exhibit, holding a chunk of hot-pink flesh in one gloved hand, a bucket of the same stuff at her booted feet. Lolo, draped like a wet rug over a boulder in the middle of a greenish, oily pool, emitted a long-suffering sigh. They’d been promised tankers of fresh water to bathe the animals, but so far, the tankers hadn’t arrived.
Jude’s sigh was as long-suffering as Lolo’s, her skin almost as ashen and dirt-streaked as Lolo’s fur. She stomped to the edge of the pool and waved the hunk of flesh over the algae blooms. “It’s salmon. You love salmon.”
It wasn’t salmon. Oh, the man who’d sold it to Jude at the docks claimed it was salmon—Wild! Fresh!—but the flesh was far too pink and rubbery. Possibly it was dyed shark meat. Or the remains of some twisted catfish the man had hauled out of the farthest reaches of Lake Michigan, away from the prying eyes of patrols. Whatever it was, it should have been enough to coax Lolo out of her sulk. If anything was going to coax her out of it.
“Listen, Lo, no one wants to see a skinny polar bear,” Jude said. “You’re going to make the children cry.”
Lolo yawned.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, what children?” All the zoo’s regulars—parents pushing double-wide strollers, teenagers taunting the animals and one another, couples too in love or in lust to notice they were sharing their first kiss in a miasma of hippo dung—were too busy boiling gutter water or waiting in line at the supermarket for the next shipment of bottled water.
The animals were thirsty. The people were thirsty. And that meant—
“Jude, what the hell are you doing?”
She didn’t have to turn around to know that scratchy, cranky voice. Diwata was the closest thing Jude had to a boss. At least, she was the only one left who dared to question Jude. The rest of the employees and the volunteers were too weirded out. They had reason to be, though not the reason they thought.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said.
“Like you’re trying to get yourself eaten by a polar bear.”
“Lolo doesn’t even want to eat her salmon.”
“Probably because that’s not salmon,” Diwata said.
Jude gave up on the “salmon,” dropped the hunk of overly pink flesh into the bucket with a plop. “Lolo’s depressed because her pool is dirty. We need fresh water.”
“Don’t we all?” said Diwata. She stood in the doorway at the back of the exhibit, her tanned, weather-beaten face cross-hatched with so many lines she looked like a map to everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Maybe it will rain,” Jude said. Diwata grunted. Overhead, the weak November sun had just cracked the horizon, scraping the sky a grumpy purple.
“Maybe it will rain for so long that we won’t need some jerk to turn on the water; we’ll have plenty of our own. For free.”
With an elbow, Diwata shoved the heavy door open wider. “And maybe rainbows will shoot out of my ass while we’re building an ark. Come here before Lolo decides to bite off your arms.”
Lolo snorted, tiny ears twitching in amusement. Lolo thought Diwata was hilarious.
“I brought you some coffee,” Diwata said.
Jude nudged the bucket with her foot. “This isn’t salmon and that isn’t coffee.”
“Well, it’s all I got,” said Diwata. “You want it or not?”
She didn’t, but this was Diwata. Jude left the bucket for Lolo just in case and trudged across the habitat. Diwata took a step back to let her through the door, then kicked it closed behind her.
“What did I tell you about climbing into exhibits with the predators?” Diwata said, handing her a soggy paper cup.
“I don’t know. Something about claws, something about teeth, blah blah blah.” For show, Jude took a sip of the coffee, winced. She used to love coffee, even the fake stuff. She used to love a lot of things.
The coffee cup had the name MOJO JOE printed on it. Next to that, someone had scrawled Jood.
Jesus.
“How much did this cost, Diwata? And what’s it made out of? Whipped jellyfish? Toxic slime?”
Diwata punched in the code to lock the door to Lolo’s exhibit, jabbing at the keypad harder than she needed to. “Don’t try to change the subject. One of these days you’re going to get hurt.”
Ha. “I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t understand how you’re so sure.”
Jude rarely told the truth, but she did now. “I talk to the animals, that’s how.”
Diwata waved at the cell phone sticking out of Jude’s front pocket. “That’s what happens when kids are raised by video games and Disney movies. Why do you carry around that old thing when the other kids have ports in their brains?”
Jude shrugged. She had no interest in the latest tech augments. And she didn’t need the phone. But her mother was somehow still paying for it for reasons that remained a mystery to Jude. Sometimes Jude liked to press the HOME button, liked to hear the phone say, “Ask me anything” and make random suggestions:
What is today’s date?
Google the War of 1812.
Will you get me a table for three tonight?
What are the symptoms of bird flu?
Will you find Brett?
Give me directions for home.
Jude said, “How do you know I don’t have ports in my brain? And who are you calling a kid?”
Diwata slurped from her own cup, smacked her lips. “You can’t be more than sixteen, so yeah, I’m calling you a kid, kid.”
Jude opened her mouth to lie or maybe blurt another truth, but Diwata was already marching through the tunnels behind the habitats, where many of the zoo’s inhabitants were still waiting for someone to release them to their outdoor spaces. Silently Jude greeted them, pressing cool fingertips to the glass. Hello, Jonas, Hello, Victor, hello, hello, hello. She knew their calls and their smells and their boredom, the beat of their hearts. And because many of the animals were ancient, she knew their aches and pains, too, felt them thrumming in her own body. A bad hip. A cracked hoof. Sore gums boiling with infection. Memories of a slow-moving herd in the desert, the blast of the gun that changed it all.
Over her shoulder, Diwata said, “It’s a school day. Why are you here?”
Diwata was also ancient but sneaky-fast, motoring along as if on wheels. Jude jogged to keep up. “I’m taking a gap year.”
“You do those after you graduate, not before.”
“If I went to school, who would help you with all the critters?”
Diwata grunted and kept marching. They’d been having this exchange ever since Diwata had taken Jude on as a part of the cleanup crew—just another pair of hands to sweep up after the stroller moms, just another drugged-out teenager who wouldn’t know honest work if it slapped her upside the head. And then came the morning after … well, the morning Diwata had found her curled up with the lionesses Olive and Nell, the three of them sleeping in a pile like kittens. Instead of calling the police, Diwata promoted her. And she’d protected Jude when management wanted to know why the hell some “goth-witch addict” was feeding the rhinos and the crocs by hand. Did the girl have a death wish? Did Diwata want them to get sued?
