Vampires Never Get Old, page 5
Silas waits until he’s sure I’m done talking, and then he smiles. “I knew you’d come around, Lukas. Nothing wrong with going easy on a man who’s had his fair share of troubles. Some people just need to ease into feeding.”
Feeding. I shiver despite myself. The way he says it makes it somehow more real. But I tell myself that Jason deserves it. He’s been cruel to me my whole life, would probably kill me if he had a chance, so maybe I’m just beating him to the punch. And if that means I get to stay with Silas, with the Boys …
Willis and Jasper stand up to reveal a body laid out on the counter.
I expect to see broad football shoulders. Annoying chestnut hair. Terrified blue eyes.
But instead I see dark roots, the glint of rhinestones, hazel eyes too wide.
“Neveah?”
I gasp, fall back a step as she whimpers, eyes pleading with me. Willis runs a hand through her hair like he’s petting a dog.
“Shhhh,” Silas says, holding me in place, his grip like a vice. “I thought you said you were ready.”
“Don’t hurt her,” I say, turning to him. I grasp at his shirt, begging. “I-I thought you meant Jason. Or the Toad Twins. Not—”
My breath catches in my throat.
Not the only person in town who actually tries to be nice to me, not Neveah with her community college and her trailer and her blue nails. Who let me drive her home. Who tried to help.
“We’re not going to hurt her, Lukas.” His voice is quiet. Firm. And for a minute, I have hope.
“You are.”
My stomach plummets. I shake my head no, horrified.
“If you want to join us, you have to share a meal.”
“I know! I’m here, aren’t I? At the diner.”
“That’s not the kind of meal we eat, brother,” Jasper says. I look over and he’s picking at his teeth, his fangs, with a long fingernail.
“Don’t you get it?” Dru cuts in harshly. “You either drink her blood and become one of us, or you get to be a blood donor, too. She’s a goner for sure, and you’re one bad decision away from becoming one. There’s no walking out of this.”
“Dru speaks the truth,” Jasper says, voice deep like the drum in that song. The song that started all this, when all I wanted was for someone to rescue me so I wouldn’t have to be alone.
I shake my head. “No, I can’t. She’s my friend. Anyone else.”
“You’d rather a stranger die for you?” Silas asks. “Better for it to be a friend. Cut your last ties. Then you’re really one of us.”
“I don’t … I don’t want this.” But it’s a lie. I want it. I want it so bad it’s making me shake. But Neveah’s eyes are on me and she’s crying, tears catching on her nose, pooling on the counter.
“You asked us to come,” Silas reminds me, hand warm on my back, breath soft in my ear. I feel his lips against my neck, just the slightest touch, but it sends heat through my body that almost brings me to my knees.
“He’s sweet on you, Silas,” Willis says with a knowing chuckle.
“What do you say, Lukas?” Silas asks. “We could feast, and then you and I could go somewhere private.” His hand tightens at my waist. “You won’t ever have to be alone again.”
It’s everything I want. Because I can’t go back to that house, to the well-meaning church casseroles and the empty rooms and the organized pill bottles and everything that the county assessor will be through next week to claim.
“I don’t want to be alone,” I whisper.
“You won’t be,” Silas says.
And then the jukebox kicks on and the fiddle is playing and that man is singing: “He’d the face of an angel but the heart of a demon…”
“Take what’s yours, Lukas,” he says, “and become one of us.”
I take a step forward.
“No!” Suddenly, Dru’s there, between us. He swings his baseball bat right at Silas, almost too fast for my eyes to follow. The bat connects with the side of Silas’s head, shattering into shards. Silas goes down.
“Run!” Dru shouts, and I take a hesitant two steps back to the door, my brain trying to make sense of what’s going on.
Jasper launches himself at Dru, but the redhead is ready, and he thrusts a shard of baseball bat forward, right into Jasper’s chest. Jasper crumbles to ash without making a sound.
“Run, you fool!” Dru shouts again, as Willis jumps onto his back and sinks vicious fangs into his neck. He screams as the blood runs, a river as red as his hair flooding across his throat.
Neveah’s on her feet. Whatever was keeping her pinned to the counter, fear or some kind of spell, seems to have broken when Jasper disintegrated. She grabs my hand and pulls me to the door. I stumble after her, eyes still on Willis as he rips out Dru’s throat. Dru collapses, eyes clouding over to nothing, head flopping like a broken doll’s.
I scream. Willis turns toward me, his face no longer that of a beautiful mad boy but of a monster. He takes a step toward us as Neveah unlocks the door and we stagger across the threshold and into the parking lot. Before he can follow, a hand stops him.
It’s Silas.
He’s lost his hat, and his hair is clotted with his own blood, but his face is whole. Whatever damage the bat did has already healed. He looks at me, eyes that swirl of oil-slick rainbow that I glimpsed before.
He says something to Willis, who throws back his head and roars, a sound that shakes the diner and rattles the windows in my car right behind me. But he doesn’t follow us. Neither does Silas. He just watches.
My hip bumps the fender of my car. I blink. I don’t remember crossing the parking lot. Neveah’s sobbing and shouting at me to give her the keys. I can hear the song on the jukebox, just a tinny wail of a fiddle leaking out the diner door.
And I realize that I don’t want to go. Leaving means leaving Silas. If I drive away now, I know I’ll never see him again.
“Neveah,” I whisper, but she doesn’t hear me over her own pleading. Louder, then. “Neveah!”
“What?!” she shouts back, breathless and terrified.
“I’m staying.” I turn to her, let her see me. My conviction. My want.
“I’m staying,” I repeat. “But you can go.”
I throw her my keys. She reaches for them but misses and they clatter to the ground. With a sob she scrambles to find them, and when she does, she wrenches open the car door and climbs into the driver’s seat. I hear the locks engage, and then the engine, and she tears out of the parking lot, barely giving me time to move out of her way.
As soon as she’s gone, I have second thoughts.
But I’m here, and Silas is there, just on the other side of the glass.
And I know what I have to do.
He waits for me to come to him.
I open the door, hands shaking. Dru’s body lies still at my feet and Willis is panting like an animal, eyes trained on me. But I stay steady on Silas, remembering what he told me.
“I want you to leave,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. It sounds pathetic to my own ears, and I clear my throat and try again. “I want you and your Boys to go.”
Silas tilts his head. The jukebox moves on to the next verse. And my heart breaks a little.
“Are you saying we’re not welcome here anymore?”
I nod, even though it hurts.
“Well.”
He bends to pick up his hat. Plants it firmly on his head.
“All you had to do was tell me so, Lukas.” He gestures to Willis, who reaches down and, with inhuman strength, slings Dru’s body up around his shoulders. Silas holds open the door and Willis goes through. Silas starts to follow, pauses to look back.
“But you owe me for Jasper,” he says, voice hard like it wasn’t before, “and I’ll have to collect one day.”
I watch them go. Watch until they fade into the darkness, until I’m sure there’s nothing in the parking lot, not even racoons. And then I collapse.
* * *
Landry finds me on the floor the next morning and lectures me about alcohol and drinking too much. But we both know I don’t drink, and she makes me a stack of pancakes and an oversized cup of coffee. Workers come to haul the old jukebox away by noon, and we don’t talk about it again. Neveah never comes back to the diner, and a few weeks later, Landry tells me that Neveah moved away, got into a four-year college somewhere. Jason and the Toad Twins wash up the next month, exsanguinated. Rumors circle for a while about some weird drugs that must be on the market, and their story even makes one of the prime-time mystery shows, the connection to the Finleys’ deaths too strange to ignore. The conspiracy podcasts go wild. They called it “Murder in Blood River,” and it causes a sensation for a while, but people have no idea. Not really.
Sometimes I hum that song, especially when I’m studying for my GED or getting the house ready for sale, but I never put my heart into it. I’ve decided to leave this shit town after all. Head to Dallas or Denver or something. Try to make my own way, see what happens.
I wonder if Silas will ever come to collect on Jasper’s death, like he said he would. I know all I have to do to find out is sing for him and mean it. But I won’t. Not for a while. Not until I’m ready. And while I wait, I’ll dream of a beautiful black-haired boy in a cowboy hat with oil slicks for eyes.
BITES & BLOOD Or Why Do Vampires Suck?
Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C. Parker
Let’s face it: Vampires are the mosquitos of the supernatural world. They lurk in dark places and move with unnatural stealth, and when you least expect it, they bite. Blood-sucking mythical creatures show up in stories from around the world, from the ancient Babylonian goddess Lamashtu, who consumed the blood and flesh of children, to Indian tales of shapeshifting rakshasas and half-bat, half-human vetala. So why do vampires drink blood? Simply put, blood is life. It is essential to the living … and to the dead. There’s a reason it’s called a “blood pact.” In the mundane world and the magical one, blood is everything. In Rebecca’s story, Lukas has to take part in an extreme blood ritual in order to become one of the Blood River Boys. The process involves choice but also violent sacrifice. In order to become a vampire, Lukas has to take something that doesn’t belong to him.
What would you sacrifice in order to live forever?
SENIOR YEAR SUCKS
Julie Murphy
Sweetwater, Texas, is best known for its energy-saving windmills along the I-20 corridor between Fort Worth and Odessa and for the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup, which is an entire event dedicated to measuring, weighing, milking, decapitating, and skinning snakes. We even have a Miss Snake Charmer Pageant, where each contestant does all the normal pageant things as well as decapitates a snake. Aunt Gemma says the roundup is unnecessarily brutal, but Mama says brutality is the only way to survive a place like Sweetwater. Our little town is more than meets the eye.
Besides rattlesnakes, the thing we should be most well-known for is the thing you’ll never know us for, and there’s one simple reason: the women of my family are really freaking great at our jobs. We’re basically like the people who save the world when the world doesn’t even know it’s in need of saving. Nuclear warfare. Assassinations. Hostile aliens from space. Someone out there is working in a fortified basement to save the world while the rest of us live in blissful ignorance, tapping away on our cellular devices.
The thing my family is so good at extinguishing that the great people of Sweetwater don’t even know they exist? Immortals. Leeches. Children of the night. Vampires.
Every year at the roundup, we get a handful of protestors shouting about animal abuse and rattlesnake extinction. That’s kind of a bummer if you think about it. Rattlesnakes are little beasties, sure, but it’s not like they’re crawling our streets by night, hunting for human prey, like some vampires I’ve met. Vampire extinction, however? Well, just like the title of Mama’s favorite song says, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” One vamp at a time.
My name is Jolene Crandall, and I’m the newest vampire slayer in Sweetwater, Texas. At the age of thirteen, I swore to protect this crusty little town with my life. Unless vampires miraculously go extinct. I might have given the rest of my life to the cause, but nothing in my pledge said I couldn’t join the cheerleading team. Watch out, Buffy.
“Ready? Okay!” I shout into my megaphone. “Hey! Hey! Mustangs! Spirit! Spirit! Spirit! Let’s hear it!”
Maybe it makes me a cliché, but there are few things I love more than cheering my ass off on a crisp November night beneath a starry Texas sky in some random town where this night, this moment is the most important thing to happen all week. The short, flippy skirts, crunching leaves beneath our feet, and nonstop movement to fend off the chill. It’s a frenetic energy I wish I could bottle as a reminder on all the days when the only thing I want is to leave this place and this life. Mama always says to truly love something, you gotta hate it a little bit too.
Behind me, my team falls into formation, and I leave my megaphone with my pom-poms as I backpedal to take my spot at the base of the pyramid. “Hey! Hey!” I shout again, the crowd joining in and the band sounding off as well.
I stand in a lunge as Karily, a petite white girl, steps onto my thick, dimpled thighs, one cheerleader after the other hoisting her higher and higher.
I’m what some people call meaty or fat. My body isn’t trim and slender like most people would expect of a slayer. I’m a stout white girl with round hips and thighs and little to no chest to speak of. I get my ass from Daddy and he gets his ass from his mama. I’m the kind of limber that makes a great pyramid base, and my roundhouse kick packs some serious heat. Turns out vampire slayers don’t need to be fat or skinny or any particular thing at all as long as they kick ass.
My squad repeats the cheer over and over again until Karily pops up into a toe touch and lands in a cradle. “Goooooo Mustangs!” we shout.
“And it looks like that’s the game, y’all,” says the announcer over the loudspeakers. “Another win for the Bulldogs at home.”
The whole crowd packed into the visitors’ stands in front of us begins to groan.
Beside me, Peach lets out a guttural sigh. “How is it that hard?” she yells at the football team. “How? We’re out here literally attempting death-defying midair stunts and y’all’s one job is to run a ball across a field. That’s it!”
Peach is my best friend—a short Korean girl with bleached-blond hair and a razor-sharp attitude. Last year she went to the roundup dressed as a bloodied snake and shouted about animal cruelty to anyone who would listen until the sheriff shooed her off the grounds. She’s the only one who knows my family is different. Just not how. I loop my arm over her shoulder. “At least we’re still the superior species on campus.”
She laughs. “Uh, yeah. No contest!”
Landry crosses his arms over the Mustang logo emblazoned across his red-and-white cheerleading uniform. “Uh, yeah. I like to think of the Sweetwater football team as our sideshow. Everyone knows these pom-poms are the real crowd-pleaser.” He smacks each of his butt cheeks in case there is any question which pom-poms he’s referring to.
Wade Thomas, a barrel-chested white guy, turns around from the football team’s bench. “You know we can hear you, right?” he says.
“Good,” says Peach. “All y’all need is a little more real talk and a little less of people blowing sunshine up your asses.”
Wade flexes his bicep and winks. “You kiss your mother with that mouth, Peach?”
“Anyone but you,” she pipes back.
The score on the board reads VISITOR: 11 HOME: 48. The only thing more depressing than that is watching Aunt Gemma try to make dinner out of whatever random leftovers we’ve accumulated from whatever takeout we’ve had throughout the week.
“That was a close one, boys!” someone yells from the crowd.
I roll my eyes. A close one? Why is everyone so concerned with giving boys like Wade gold stars for doing the bare minimum? You wanna know what was a real close one? That drifter vamp who almost made Wade her dinner last week when he was pulling a solo shift at his dad’s gas station. Big, strong Wade, who’s been riding the bench for the last two weeks but still has an ego the size of a tractor? Well, he had no idea how close he came to being just another sack of blood.
It didn’t matter that I saved Wade, though, because I didn’t kill the drifter and then three days later Aunt Gemma found three truck drivers in a ditch on the outskirts of town with their throats ripped out.
“Let’s load it up, y’all!” I call out to the rest of my team.
“Roger that, Cap,” Landry says, as a few girls from the opposing team whistle at him. Landry is hot. Not just hot for Middle of Nowhere, Texas, but real-life hot. He’s a six-foot-tall bisexual dreamboat with deep brown skin and tight and smooth cornrow braids. The whole world has eyes for him, but lately he’s only got eyes for Peach—if only she’d notice.
We all gather up our signs, pom-poms, and gym bags. On the bus, I pull on my sweatpants under my skirt and yank my hoodie over my head.
“Hey, Karily,” I shout into the dark bus. “Great job on that toe touch!”
“Yeah!” a few other people chime in.
“Thanks, y’all,” says her tiny freshman voice from the back of the bus.
Ms. Garza, our faculty sponsor, boards the bus last with a romance novel tucked under her arm. “All right, Ms. Rhodes,” she says to our bus driver. “Let’s get going.”
Ms. Garza settles into the front row with her reading light and book as we rumble down the road.
I sit with a bench to myself while Peach and Landry settle in across the aisle from me, the two of them huddled over Peach’s cell phone, watching their favorite beauty guru vlogger unload the details of her very messy and very public breakup.
I’ll never know what it feels like to not know that vampires exist and should be feared, but moments like this are the closest I come to the sweet relief of ignorance. In this bus, I’m not responsible for the lives of everyone in a ten-mile radius. In this bus, we’re speeding down the road faster than any vampire can move. I love the safety of this bus when we’re driving home late at night after another away game, and I can just let my guard down.
