“He’s got one of those faces,” Jack said. “Baby faces, you know?”
Oh, Jack. How I love you.
“Is this a technical thing?” she asked. She was making notes, just a few words. I tried to surreptitiously read them without cranking my head around. Her writing was illegible. She might have been doodling. “That really being a vampire—the powers, the senses, whatever—doesn’t kick in until after you’ve lived a certain length of time?”
Jack said, “Oh, I don’t know, for some of us it kicks in right away. Like a duck to water, you know?” The way Jack explained it to the rest of us, he had to embrace being a vampire or go crazy. Before he’d been turned he’d been doing well—managing a record store, managing for a couple of local bands, dating a girlfriend he was crazy for. They’d even been talking kids. He’d loved his life… and he’d cut absolutely all ties with it after being turned. His old friends, the girlfriend he’d loved, they all thought he was dead. He said it was better that way, and moving forward he was going to be everything a vampire was supposed to be to make up for it.
“Some of us take awhile to adapt,” I said. “Being nocturnal isn’t as fun as it sounds.”
“You miss daylight?” she asked.
“I miss skiing,” I said. “Kind of hard to justify all that effort for just a couple of hours of night skiing.”
She stared, because she had evidently never considered such a thing as skiing vampires. No one ever did.
“Right… can you talk to me a little bit about Families? As I understand it, in most major cities the vampires are organized in to Families. What’s the Denver Family like? There’s a Master here, isn’t there? I think I’ve heard about him…” She flipped back through her notebook, a move that had an air of artifice. “Ricardo?” She glanced up expectantly.
“Yeah,” Jack said. His foot had started bouncing under the table. “Rick. He’s an okay guy.”
“For a vampire?”
I said, “He’s an okay guy for anyone.”
“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “And how many vampires are in Denver’s Family?”
Jack started to say something, but I elbowed him under the table. “I don’t actually know. We don’t really have a lot of contact with the Family. We keep to ourselves, you know?”
“So you’re saying the Denver Family isn’t very centralized, for the most part?”
“I’m not sure I even know what that means,” I said.
Jack shrugged. “It’s like, we don’t bother anyone, no one bothers us, right?”
“And what if someone did bother you?” she asked.
This didn’t feel like an interview; it felt like a test. “I guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it.”
“Anything else you can tell me about Rick? Do you know how old he is?”
Rick was old. Rumor had it he’d known Coronado and Doc Holliday and all kinds of people like that; that he’d been running around the American West before it even was the American West. Guy was a walking history book. I hadn’t had the guts yet to ask him about any of it. I was working up to it. Maybe in another decade I’d get the nerve.
“He’s pretty old,” Jack said noncommittally.
She glanced at her phone. It hadn’t made any noise, but she started gathering her things, shoving her notebook and phone into an oversized purse. She left a five on the table for her coffee.
“I’m really sorry, I have another appointment and I have to get going.”
“You always work late, I take it?” I asked.
“Part of the job,” she said, smiling, of course.
“Well, let us walk you out.”
We went outside to the chill night air, under the lights and noise of the city. We’d hardly paused when she was already marching off as she said her last farewells. “I’ve got your number, I’ll be in touch!” she called back.
She didn’t have a car in the parking lot, evidently. She walked west, deeper into downtown. Maybe she was staying at one of the hotels.
Jack said, “That was something.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
We started for home. It was six blocks before either of us said anything.
Jack spoke first. “I couldn’t catch her gaze. I couldn’t get her to look in my eyes.”
“You noticed that too?”
“So she knows vampires.”
“Then why is she interviewing us? There are a lot older, more experienced, more powerful, more interesting vampires than us.”
“Maybe it’s just like she said, we’re the common vampire on the street.”
I gave him a look.
“No, you’re right,” he said. “So what was all that really about?”
I thought for a minute, going over her questions with a slightly queasy feeling that we’d probably revealed too much about something. “She asked a lot of questions about the Family. About Rick.”
“She kind of acted like she knew about Rick.”
“Nobody knows about Rick,” I said. “He doesn’t go public.”
“Exactly,” Jack said.
“I suddenly want to know a whole lot more about Clarissa Carter.”
JACK ENDED UP going to the club again. That was fine, it was his thing. Back at home, half of the cardboard boxes had migrated to the kitchen counter, and there was a stack of vintage metal lunchboxes piled up along the living room wall. I looked them over and swore I’d had a couple of them when I was a kid.
I had intended on doing more Googling of Clarissa Carter. Instead, I logged on and looked for Ginny. I felt a ridiculous amount of glee when I discovered she was online, too. We put on headsets, and how crazy was it that hearing her voice made me smile?
“Hey, where’ve you been?” she asked.
“Had a meeting with a reporter.”
“For a gaming thing? I Googled you, by the way. Impressive.”
I blushed. I shouldn’t have been able to blush, I was a vampire and I didn’t have the blood to spare. All I did was write about games, and she was impressed? My heart didn’t beat but I was somehow sure I could feel it.
“Thanks. But no, actually. She said she’s doing some kind of article on vampires. Like, normal vampires, not the fancy powerful vampires. It was kind of weird, actually.”
“Normal vampires? Not two words I ever thought to hear together.”
“Come on, you met me. And Jack for that matter.”
“I don’t think Jack is normal.”
She had a point. I chuckled.
“But you said it was weird?”
“Yeah. Like, asking questions she already knew the answers to. Not asking much about us, but wanting to know stuff about the Family, other high-powered vampires in Denver. You know?”
“Like she was spying?”
“Exactly.”
It was probably nothing. She probably didn’t have any crazy ulterior motive. Maybe Jack was right, I’d been living in a basement for too long and needed to get out more.
I said, “You know, forget it. No more talking, let’s kill some zombies.”
“Roger that,” she replied.
And we did. For four hours. It was a blast.
While playing we had, like, actual conversations. It felt great. It felt human. I found out she was a paralegal who’d gone to CU Boulder and lived in Westminster but wanted to move closer to downtown because that was where she worked, and she had two sisters and a cat named George and she also liked to ski, and helpfully tried to think of ways to make a night skiing trip worthwhile, like sharing a condo and buying blackout curtains for the windows so no one would accidentally let in any sunlight. She made it all sound like a thing I could actually do. With her.
Finally, at something like two in the morning, she signed off because she had to work. I understood. So did I, but it was hard getting past the happy glow.
Aaron came out of his room after a stretch of quiet. “Who were you talking to?”
“Ginny,” I said, completely una
ble to keep the dreaminess out of my voice. “Her name is Ginny.”
“A girl?”
“Yes, a girl.”
“You can’t meet a girl. You can’t like a girl.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a vampire.”
“Jack does it all the time.”
“I don’t think what he does is exactly meeting girls.”
True enough. “I like her. We get along. She’s higher level than me on World of Warcraft.”
“But you’re a vampire.”
I knew what he was really saying, that I couldn’t exactly take her out on a real date, like out to dinner or something, and I couldn’t really meet her parents, and we couldn’t talk about getting married and the kids and the future because, basically, compared to me, she didn’t have one.
But I still liked her. Petulantly, I muttered, “So?”
“This can only end badly.”
“What? She’s just… she’s nice. It’s not like we’re soulmates or anything.“ Some people thought that vampires didn’t have souls.
Jack came in then, looking pensive, and Aaron rounded on him. “Did you know Sam’s been talking to this girl?”
Jack stared. “What, the reporter?”
“No, a girl!”
“Ginny?”
Aaron said, “How come everyone knows about Ginny but me?”
“You should come out with us so you can meet girls too,” Jack said with a grin.
“Jack, you can tell him it’ll never work out, right?”
“Of course it’ll never work out. Don’t worry, he’s just killing time.”
“Exactly,” Aaron said decisively before stalking back to his room.
It would never work. Right. Because she was alive, and I was dead.
One nice thing about being a vampire—no insomnia. Ever. Eventually, the sun came up, and I slept. I still dreamed, though. That was weird. I was supposed to be dead—undead. Brought back to life. Something. No one had done any research about the whole dead-or-not thing. Like done an fMRI on a sleeping vampire to see what really went on in their brains. All I knew was that I still dreamed. Usually about sunlight. About being outside. And being lost in a strange city or in a forest or in a cornfield, and the sun got brighter and brighter until I had to shut my eyes against it. But I had to keep moving, and there I was, stumbling around in the dark, wondering where I’d gone wrong.
If I were capable of insomnia, I might have lain awake thinking about Ginny. If I weren’t a vampire, I could handle this. I’d ask her to dinner, maybe a movie. I’d let things progress. Then maybe I’d ask her to come home with me, or let her ask me to go home with her. I was a grown man, this shouldn’t be hard.
But I got stuck at the “ask her to dinner,” part. Because my mouth started watering and I pictured that bright vein at her neck. “Ask her to dinner” didn’t mean the same thing that it used to. So why bother? Because we had a lot of fun tag-teaming on Left 4 Dead?
Relationships had been built on lesser things.
I didn’t even know why I was thinking about it. Things would never work out. I was a vampire. I didn’t want to hurt her.
The next night, I was back on the sofa. Ginny wasn’t able to log on tonight, so no tag teaming. I’d spend the night playtesting a bunch of pre-release games I’d been sent. Actual work. Vampires shouldn’t have to work.
The cardboard boxes around the place were arranged in a different pattern again, in their endless migration around the apartment. Boxes of toys, Lego playsets from the early nineties, Cabbage Patch knock-off dolls—super creepy. I hoped they didn’t stick around for long.
Jack came out of his room. “Guess who called?” he said, holding up his phone.
“Clarissa Carter,” I said, because he wouldn’t have announced it if it had been anyone else.
“Yeah. She asked more questions. And she wants another meeting. She asked if I could maybe get her a meeting with Rick.”
I hit pause on the game—it was boring anyway—and looked at him. “She just came out and asked for a meeting with him?”
“She wanted to know if I could set it up.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said maybe. I asked why.”
“And?”
“She just said she wants as much information as she can get.”
Well, how could you argue with that?
Aaron wandered out of his room. We didn’t have to be talking loudly for him to overhear. Vampire superhearing. “I don’t trust her.”
I pulled over my laptop, because maybe we missed something on that first search. This time, I Googled “Clarissa Carter” and “vampires” instead of just the name. Aaron and Jack came to watch over my shoulders.
“There, there,” Aaron said, jabbing his finger at the screen. “Look at that.”
“What? I don’t see it.”
“Mercedes Cook. Carter’s done six interviews with Cook in the last two years. Mercedes Cook is a vampire.”
“All that does is establish Carter as a reporter who’s interested in vampires, and we already knew that.”
“You don’t remember, do you?” Aaron said, clearly disappointed. “When Arturo bit it and Rick took over? It was when Mercedes Cook was in town. Cook was behind that. She started the war between Arturo and Rick because she thought Arturo would win and wanted to get rid of Rick. Weren’t you guys paying any attention?”
I thought I had been, and frankly I was surprised that Aaron had apparently been paying more attention. After all, this wasn’t eBay.
“This is why we don’t hang out with the Family, so we don’t have to pay attention,” Jack said.
“Well, there was something big going on, bigger than just whether or not Arturo or Rick was in charge. And now this Carter woman who has a connection to Cook is interested in Rick?” He shook his head.
So she was targeting Rick by going after the three junior vampires in the Family? How did that work?
“Maybe it’s time to call Rick with this?” I said.
Jack pursed his lips. He had a plan. He was going to go superhero. “Let me meet with her again. See if I can get any solid information out of her.”
We gave him unconvinced looks. “You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.
“It’ll be great.” He seemed excited about it, the poor bastard. The vampire hero. He grabbed his coat, shoved his phone in his pocket.
“Call if you need help,” I said after him, right before the door closed.
Aaron and I looked at each other. His expression was sour.
“It’s time to call Rick,” I said, and Aaron nodded.
I called, and he answered right away, which I hadn’t expected. Like he’d have more important things to do than to talk to one of his lowly minions who wasn’t even really a minion. Thumping music and a rush of voices and laughter filled the background, which meant he was probably at Psalm 23. I supposed I could have gone to talk to him in person. I was getting hungry again. Aaron and I would probably just order another pizza.
“Hi, Rick?” I answered his greeting. “This is Sam. I’m sorry to bother you…”
“No bother, Sam. How are you? How are the others doing?” Rick didn’t sound like an ancient vampire. He sounded like that benevolent boss at your first job, wry and sympathetic but not about to suffer fools. I’d heard stories of less fair Masters. Demanding, condescending, abusive. My life as a vampire maybe wasn’t perfect, but it could have been a whole lot worse. Having someone like Rick I could call when I needed help? It made a difference.
“We’re fine, we’re all okay. But something kind of weird has come up.”
I told him about Carter, how she approached Jack, the kind of information she was grilling us on, and her connection to Mercedes Cook.
“I don’t know much about Cook, but Aaron seems to think she’s bad news and you’d want to know,” I finished.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Definitely. Thanks for calling. Do let me k
now if you learn anything else.”
“Yeah, I will.”
“Any other problems?” he asked. Like some kind of camp counselor, like he knew there was something I wasn’t mentioning. I liked Rick, but I was more than a little in awe of him.
“Actually…” I didn’t even know how to start this. “There’s this girl…” I winced, because that sounded ridiculous. “I’ve met someone,” which didn’t sound much better, but I had to start somewhere. “I really like her, and if I were still mortal I’d know exactly what to do. But now, being what I am, it all seems pointless. I’m not going to be able to give her what she wants. We can’t… there’s no way we can be normal. It’s all just… wrong. But I like her.” Now I just sounded like I was whining.
“Does she know what you are?” Very calm, not at all judgmental.
“Yes. But I don’t think she understands what all it means.”
“Ah yes. That’s always this issue. You’ll have to tell her, then let her decide. And if she walks away you have to let her go.”
What he said made sense. I’d known it myself. This just put it out there. “Yeah, I know.”
“That’s the trouble with what we are,” he said gently. Sympathetically, like he’d been through all this before. Probably dozens of times, and I couldn’t even imagine that. I’d only been a vampire for fifteen years. I might as well still be twenty-five. “We can take what we want. You can make her want what you want. Some vampires would tell you it’s your right to use your abilities for that. But… I for one believe we can do better than that. I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.”
That was Rick. He wouldn’t tell you what to do, but he’d subtly give you this moral imperative not to disappoint him.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll work it out. Thank you.”
“Have a good night, Sam.”
And that was that.
Aaron was standing outside the door of his bedroom, arms crossed. “I like Rick,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to him.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He’s right about the girl, you should just walk away.”