out from the crowd and wave with a frightening amount of enthusiasm. Johanna and Izzy, he thinks as his stomach knots. If Izzy’s feeling confident enough to dance in public with her girlfriend, this place isn’t a vamp hangout. It’s a gay bar.
“Well, Akira-san?” Jack yells in his ear just as the music switches to an operatic trance track; he grins so hard Steve wants nothing more than to punch his face in. “What are you waiting for? Isn’t this going to be too fucking easy?”
He has a sound system, he tells himself, with his name on it.
He’s also not going to be the first person to wimp out on a dare, is he? Phil looked like an idiot with his snorkel, but he still tried, even though someone’s going to engrave that episode on his tombstone. Johanna risked boredom and limbs in the graveyard, and she never looked like backing out, not even once it started raining hard enough to risk hypothermia. What is a night spent with a vampire of the not-female persuasion compared to feral zombies, really?
Only a thousand times harder, and Jack, who fucking noticed when Steve started hiding in the school library at lunch to avoid open spaces and the feral zombies they might contain, who fucking went straight to Steve’s parents and told them just why they needed to take their son to a psychologist, bloody well fucking knows it is!
Do you want to blow my cock, Steve? I bet you do. I bet you want it.
If this shit is irrelevant, so irrelevant he didn’t mention it to Mum or his psychologist, should it stop him from doing this dare?
“Only you country bogans think this is a challenge,” Steve says as he surveys the room. His voice doesn’t shake too much. He should be proud of that. “I’m just trying to see who’ll be the best target. Couples ... nah, couples will blow your tiny redneck minds.” He glances at the back of a lone vampire, wearing a neat striped shirt and dark jeans, sitting at the end of the bar. “Might try him first. Right. Uh. Going in.”
His two best friends break out into snickers as Steve takes a slow, reluctant step towards the vampire.
As long as Chichi and Greg and fucking Adam Swanston never hear about this, it’s all good.
It has to be, right?
2: Vampire
He lingers longer than he should with Johanna and Izzy, who wish him a happy birthday and admire his new watch, but the grins both women wear tell Steve that they too know just why he’s here, and there’s only so much of the grinning he can take—especially when Johanna’s grin softens into something resembling concern, and why the fuck should she be worried about him? They don’t try and stop him as he heads to the bar—Izzy pulls Johanna back onto the floor and tries to waltz to a trance beat—and Steve sighs as he sits down and waves Sophie over. The presence of non-vampiric immortals as well as human leeches means that Sophie has non-bloody offerings behind the bar; her broad smile suggests that Jack has planned this little dare for some time. Surely he’s not already the laughing stock of half the town?
“Neat Smirnoff?” he says, knowing that Sophie will understand the long-standing Port Carmila zombie-hunter code: water poured into a shot glass from an old Smirnoff bottle, just for those times when one doesn’t want to look like one is avoiding alcohol because of one’s antidepressant prescription or an unwillingness to be jumped while tipsy.
Of course, everyone in Port Carmila knows that the vast majority of people drinking vodka shots are stone-cold sober, but there are times when it’s inconvenient, awkward or annoying to explain why he’s not drinking—like when he wants to hook up with a stranger and clearly isn’t the designated driver.
It’s also nice to pretend to be normal, even if everyone who also isn’t normal is fully aware of just how abnormal they all are.
Sophie slides a shot glass—a cheap plastic cup, probably to avoid injury in a room of vampires—across the bar and laughs at the complaints from a breather three seats down when Steve pays her a dollar. “Hunters’ discount,” she says. “How many zombies you killed, Kel?”
The breather grumbles but doesn’t answer; Sophie ignores him.
Steve takes a sip. One thing easier than Sydney, at least, where he had to resort to name-dropping his medication and his psychiatrist to get people to stop dragging him to the bar and insisting he’ll have more fun if he drinks. One thing, but that doesn’t come close to outweighing the rest of it: how the hell is he supposed to pull this off? If everyone knows about this, how can he live failure down? Worse, how can he live success down? In Sydney it’ll be easy to brush off as an experiment, but here? Here, in Port Carmila, the town where nobody ever forgets anything?
In Sydney nobody much cares who one fucks, as long as one has something meaningful to say on the ethics involved in journalism or why tabloid headlines are inevitably awful. In Sydney nobody would have ever thought him gay just because he has an affinity for hair gel.
It’s not as though he doesn’t plan on moving to Melbourne or Sydney once he’s finished his degree. He’ll save petrol money by not coming home between semesters, if he can get a job. It’s totally workable, and nobody will think he’s avoiding Port Carmila, everyone who lives there and the guy he’ll screw tonight, if he makes it sound reasonable enough. It’s not as though there are huge opportunities for journalists here, unless he wants to report on zombie escapes, feral killings and the exorcism failure at Council Hall for the umpteenth time. Hard news, like wars and international trade relations, are less important than Aggie Skipton’s infamous pigs, and even the locals moan over the local rag. Why shouldn’t he leave?
He’ll do it, he’ll get his stereo and he’ll go back to school. Easy.
Steve downs half the glass before turning to look at the vampire sitting beside him.
He too stares down the bar; Steve follows his set gaze to see the green-glowing fae—Steve knows his handle, Ares, although he knows enough of fae to know that’s not his real name—and his legion of swooning admirers. All of them are good-looking and most of them tourists, although Steve recognises a vampire who works as a Council roadie, a zombie from the ED and—fuck!
He blinks, rubs his eyes, stares, but it takes Steve a moment to believe it.
Yes, that’s Adam Swanston, just with longer hair and lipstick, trying to sneak his hand on the fae’s kneecap. Swanston stares up at Ares with adoring eyes; Swanston is dressed in jeans so tight Steve’s crotch aches, not in a good way, just watching him. Fuck!
Swanston, who fucking called Steve a fag for the time he spotted Steve ducking into the girls’ toilets with a tube of hair gel in Year Eleven because it’s so apparently gay to not want hair dangling in one’s eyes and need a clean mirror to accomplish that? Who spent the year after that calling Steve a cocksucker and a girl, always making sure to be surrounded by the Port Carmila High footy team? Who sat behind Steve in General Maths whispering to anyone who’d listen that Steve had been spotted staring at a Year Seven boy “known” to be gay? Swanston, here, clearly intent on being the fuck-toy of a fae?
Steve got most of his high-school girlfriends, in fact, because he can stand in front of the mirror and discuss styling product, hair dye and the best brands of sanitary pads for mopping up blood spills, and as long as he obeyed the unspoken rule about not being a perv, none of the girls had a problem with it—which made no difference to Swanston.
“That fucking cocksucking shit—” He stops as he realises that might not be the best thing to say, given the location; the vampire turns his head to give Steve a surprised, eyebrow-raised look. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that—Swanston called me a fag and a cocksucker for most of Year Twelve, and now he’s all but fucking blowing a fucking fae? I could fucking slag him!”
Not that he ever will, of course, but the thought is more than a little tempting.
Still, it’s something of a revenge to see Swanston looking with full adoration up at a fae, utterly rapt in the princeling’s glamour. It’s one thing to see tourists caught in Ares’s allure, but locals should know better than to even think about it, never mind be seen in public making absolute f
ucking idiots of themselves over a fae. Of course, one doesn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter, but that’s why one never goes near a fae to begin with!
Sophie gives Steve a long, pointed sort of a glance; he supposes she’s wondering whether or not she forgives him for the hair-dipping. “Swanston’s been coming here ever since we opened,” she says finally as she leans against the bar. “Ares is pretty, though. It’s a shame he never goes to the Broken Post.”
“Gorgeous? If you like jellyfish for brains. I’ve never met a faerie yet who could do anything more than glow and look pretty.” The vampire folds his arms, looking indignant. “I was doing ... that, once.” He tips his head in the direction of the admirers, cringing as if at his own stupidity, but he doesn’t blush. “Sure, Ares is the most gorgeous thing with a heartbeat, but he doesn’t have anything to say besides ‘Yes, I know’ and ‘Buy me a drink’. Plus his idea of sex involved him and … well, a mirror.” The vampire raises both eyebrows. “I’ll, uh, leave it to you to guess what he wanted with the mirror.”
For some reason, it’s not hard to imagine a vampire holding a full-length mirror while a naked, gorgeous faerie reclines on a bed, complete with silk sheets and some fancy embroidered quilt cover; the ridiculousness of the image has Steve