I glared at him. “And what the hell do you know about it?”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “You feel like ordering pizza?”
Yeah, that sounded like a good idea.
The boost of energy from the pizza delivery made me more jumpy, not less. Time to shoot up some virtual bad guys. When I logged on, I was surprised to find Ginny’s icon lit up.
“Hey, I thought you were going to be out all night,” I said on the headset.
She sounded amused. “The bridal shower got to be more than I could stand. They were about to start making wedding veils out of toilet paper when I left. I thought you might be logged in, and I was right.”
“What are we playing tonight?”
“How about something completely different. What have you got?”
“Borderlands?”
“Let’s do it.”
I felt better in seconds. Shooting bad guys with a good player at your side—even if you occasionally screwed up and shot each other instead—always made me feel better.
“So, you hear anything else from that reporter?” she asked.
“Yeah, actually. Jack’s out meeting with her again now.” In fact, it had been a few hours. I wondered if I needed to start worrying. “We’re pretty sure she’s not writing an article about the everyday vampire on the street.”
“Yeah? Then what’s she doing?”
“She’s either angling for an interview with someone more important than we are because she has the mistaken notion that we have some kind of influence, or she’s some kind of anti-vampire nutjob who’s going to try to infiltrate the Denver vampire Family and destroy us all.” Or, and worse, she was part of a rival vampire gang with designs on the Denver Family. That was what the Cook angle suggested. I was starting to freak myself out. “Or maybe I’ve been playing too many conspiracy-filled video games.”
“Are you worried?”
“Yeah, I guess I am. But I really don’t know what else we can do until she tries something or we get some clue as to what she’s really up to.”
“You want me to check her out?”
My brain skipped a beat at that, making me miss a shot I should have gotten. I hit pause. “How’re you going to do that?”
“It’s part of my job to dig up dirt on people. Find out where she’s staying, see who else she’s talking to.”
“Supernatural dirt, even?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“Ginny, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. I want to help.”
“But—” I sighed, took another breath, and tried again. “This isn’t your problem. I don’t want you to get in trouble. Or get hurt.”
“Yeah? Really? That’s sweet.”
“Well. I like you.”
“And not just because I’m O positive?”
“Are you? I didn’t know that. We can’t tell that, you know. It’s got more to do with, well. Hormones. It tastes different if you’re happy, stressed out, excited. You know.” It was only because I’d eaten tonight that I was able to blush.
“Huh,” she said thoughtfully.
Panic mode. I’d scared her off. Freaked her out by bringing up blood. Oh wait, she was the one who brought up blood. “I mean, I like you for more than your blood.” Wait, back up. “I mean, I haven’t even seen your blood.”
“Do you want to?” Her tone was very neutral. I couldn’t tell if she was offering or offended.
“No,” I said, after another deep breath. I was having trouble keeping enough air in my lungs to talk. Funny, before becoming a vampire I never realized how important breathing was to talking. “I don’t want to hurt you. I like you because I… like you.” This was really hard. Why was this so hard? I was supposed to have supernatural powers.
“Well. I like you to. Whether or not you’re a vampire.”
That was sufficiently… vague. I decided not to push. I could have talked a lot more. I really wanted to ask her how she really truly felt about the vampire thing—was she one of Jack’s groupies or was this an “in spite of” situation? But I needed to let it go. Just for now.
This was really hard.
“Um. I think my game just kicked me out,” I said.
“Yup, that’s what my screen’s showing.”
“You want to start over?”
It was nice, how easily we slipped back into that comfortable space. I sat back and enjoyed it. We played until well past midnight, when she had to bow out. She had to get up for work tomorrow and needed sleep. She was very sweet about it.
I had all the rest of the hours until dawn to sit up, alone.
JACK FINALLY CAME back from his meeting with Carter.
“Well?” I asked, setting aside my laptop. I’d been writing a new article.
He stopped, thought a second, and said, “Sam—you ever think there’s more to this? That we’re not… that we shouldn’t bury ourselves in a hole in the ground like this. You ever think about fifty years from now and wonder if we’re just going to be doing the same damn thing, ordering pizza and killing time?”
“Killing time. Isn’t that what you said about Ginny?”
“Who? Oh—wow, you really like her. You haven’t stopped talking about her.”
I didn’t say anything. He’d basically said it all. Any life I might have had before becoming a vampire wasn’t worth thinking about. It’s entirely possible I’d have spent the last fifteen years playing games and writing articles and wouldn’t be living any different. Then again, maybe not. I did wonder sometimes what my kids would have looked like. But there was no guarantee I’d ever have had any. I couldn’t say I’d lost something that might never have existed—and that was the whole future, right there.
He came around the sofa and made to slouch down; I scooted over to give him room. “Carter asked all kinds of questions like if I’m happy or not and if being a vampire was everything I thought it would be—”
“Had you even thought about being a vampire before actually being one?”
“No, why would I? And I’m thinking, of course I’m unhappy, but I’m not going to admit it to her.” He got this distant look in his eyes. Probably thinking of everything he’d lost, which was more than any of us had. I asked him once why he didn’t just end it. It would be easy—walk outside at dawn, and poof. He said that would be too easy. That it would be letting entropy win, and he didn’t want entropy to win. Then he laughed and went back to this guy, the Kiefer Sutherland wannabe.
I said, “Jack, are you okay? Clearly you’re not, but—can I help?”
He patted my shoulder. “Just keep on keeping on, man. I’ll be okay.” He looked tired. Not just hungry, pallid from lack of blood. Actually tired. I wondered if I ought to lock him in his room to keep him from doing something foolish come dawn.
“So, Ginny. You talk to her tonight?” Jack asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah, some.”
“I didn’t mean that. About just killing time.”
I snorted. A waste of breath, really. “No, you’re right. I mean, how serious can it possibly ever get? But I think Aaron may be afraid that I’m going to run off with her and leave him alone with you.”
Aaron, who must have been listening, stormed out of his room. “No, that isn’t it at all, if both of you ran off I would finally have some peace and quiet around here.” He crossed his arms, and he really did look serious. “I’m just worried about you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I can’t get hurt, Aaron,” I said wryly. “I’m a vampire.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jack got this very serious look on his face, so serious it swung around into goofy.
“What?” I shot back.
“I hate to say it, but I think Aaron’s right. You can still get your heart broken.”
“Guys, my heart is not going to get broken.”
Aaron just couldn’t stop. “Not to mention you’re almost old enough to be her father!”
“I am no
t!” But only by a couple of years… “We’re not supposed to be talking about me, we were talking about you and what you found out about Carter.”
“Nothing, I didn’t find anything.” He marched off to his room.
“Jack?” I called after him. “Do I need to worry about you?”
“I’m fine! Everything’s fine!” he called back.
Aaron just stood there, staring at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”
I almost spouted off an “I’m fine,” just like Jack, but the words stuck.
Ginny and I didn’t have to get serious. We could just have fun. Used to be, having fun meant going out. Movies, dinner, amusement parks. Hell, back in college I’d taken girls to the zoo for dates. Then we’d go to my place or her place, have sex, go on like that for awhile until something came up, like the end of the semester or her moving to Wichita for a job or…
I was still thinking like a twenty-five year old. I was forty. I had to keep reminding myself I was forty. I should be married with kids by now. I should have a mortgage and a 401k. Except I was a vampire now, and everything had changed. An eternity of sitting on my sofa playing video games and calling out for pizza under false pretenses stretched before me. And to think there were people who actually wanted to be vampires?
“I think I need a hobby,” I said, and Aaron went away with a huff.
The following night, a Friday, I logged on and didn’t hear from Ginny. Which meant that something terrible had happened to her. Probably not. I realized I didn’t have her phone number—just her online handle. She wasn’t online. I had another game to demo, but my brain kept skipping off it.
I knocked on Jack’s bedroom door to make sure he was okay. There was no answer. I knocked on Aaron’s door. “Aaron? You seen Jack tonight?”
“I think he went out right at sunset.”
“You think?”
The door opened. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. He’s probably just grabbing a bite at the club.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
We stared at each other a minute. There was nothing we could do. He went back to eBay and I went back to the sofa. I resisted an urge to check the front porch for a pile of ash.
That night, I did something I’d never done before. I listened to The Midnight Hour.
I usually had better things to do than listen to talk radio. I’d known about The Midnight Hour since it started. The host—that celebrity werewolf named Kitty, for real and not even joking—started the show at one of the local alt radio stations. I’d learned about it right away, one of these “Hey, have you heard,” rumors. I figured it’d last six months and then vanish. Or something terrible would happen to Kitty because, hey, she was a werewolf and they were kind of violent. More violent than vampires, even.
Six months later and the show was syndicated, which just showed you what I know. That was part of what blew all this out into the open, that led to me being able to go to a nightclub and tell someone I was a vampire and not have them laugh in my face.
The show started with theme music: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” which was either incredibly silly or absolutely inspired.
“Good evening, true believers, I am Kitty Norville and this is The Midnight Hour. Step into my parlor, let’s have a chat or three.” She had a fast patter, a radio DJ enthusiasm to her bright voice. She definitely sounded like a Kitty; not so much like a werewolf. But then I tried to keep clear of the local werewolves. I’d met maybe two, and that was years ago. They were surly, suspicious, and kind of even looked like wolves, with broad shoulders and bushy eyebrows. I couldn’t picture what she must have looked like.
“Tonight, the recurring topic, the one everyone always seems to want to talk about, no matter how much we talk about it or how many times I say the same thing: vampires. Why people don’t want to talk about werewolves as much, I don’t know, they never seem to get as much attention, even though werewolves are so much more interesting as far as I’m concerned. I may be biased. My sound guy is making signs at me that yes, I am biased. Oh well. That’s what I get paid for. All right then: I want to hear from you, I want your calls. Are you dating a vampire and not sure what happens next? Are you a vampire and you’re thinking this has all gotten a lot more complicated than it really should be? I want to hear from you.”
What were the odds? My first time listening to the show, and it was like she was talking to me. With a morbid fascination, I listened. What kind of problems did other vampires have?
“Hello, first call of the night and you’re on the air.”
The caller was a woman who sounded young, but who really knew? “Oh, hi Kitty. Wow, thanks so much for taking my call. Anyway, I was wondering, how many vampires do you think sign up for online dating? Because I’d really love to meet a vampire, but I don’t even know where to start. So I was thinking of just putting it out there in my profile, you know?”
Kitty didn’t even hesitate. “A little advice for you: I wouldn’t go around advertising that you want to meet a vampire. Especially don’t if you’re looking to actually hook up with one. As I understand it, it’s kind of a turn off. It’s the crazy factor—you’re a bloodsucker, and here’s someone throwing herself at you to get her blood sucked. You gotta wonder if there’s something going on, you know? And I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
Jack notwithstanding. I wondered how I could get these two together.
“I don’t care about the blood sucking part, vampires are just so hot!”
Kitty sighed. “I can always tell the ones who’ve never met a vampire. Sure, they’re hot if you like donating blood.”
“It can’t all be about the blood, can it?” She sounded so sad.
“All right, I’ll take pity. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You have to get yourself to a pretty good-sized city. There has to be enough population to actually support the local vampires, it’s a predator-prey ratio thing. Then find the hottest, sexiest nightclub you can. One with a lot of dark corners so you can’t really tell what’s going on. And then make yourself as appetizing as you possibly can.”
The caller sounded doubtful. “That sounds so… cliché.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Next caller, Petros from Miami, what’ve you got for me?”
Petros—he had to be a vampire. No way he wasn’t a vampire with a name like that.
“Well, Kitty, I’m a vampire, and I’ll get to my question in a minute but I have to argue with you about that call—not all vampires go to nightclubs looking for fresh meat. That advice was really quite misguided.”
“So what, should I have gone ahead and told her to put up a dating profile, so that a bunch of vampire wannabe fakers can take advantage of her? Because I guarantee that’s what would happen.”
“Well then maybe if there was some kind of online dating specifically for supernaturals. Does such a thing exist?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find, and trust me I do a lot of searching online for weird stuff. If there is one it’s probably pretty darned secret. Why—you thinking of starting one?”
There was an idea—but the liability on that kind of thing had to be through the roof.
“No, of course not, it just sounds so crass.”
“Did you have a question or am I hanging up on you now?”
“I—I think I’ve forgotten my question.”
“Then it must not have been important. Call back when you remember. Moving on now…”
She moved the show along at a fast clip, taking four calls before the first break, returning with a rambling commentary on the latest vampire soap opera TV show, speculating about celebrities who might be secret vampires, and so on. Really, this sounded like any other talk radio advice show. Just the content was different. I had no idea what that meant.
Well, partly, it made me feel better. Like this was all normal somehow. Or could be made to seem normal. As snarky and punchy as she sounded, she also seemed really e
asy to talk to. Which was why her show had been going on for years, and why people kept calling.
If I really wanted to talk to her I could probably just find her. Ask Rick for an introduction. And did I want to talk to her? Hadn’t I already hashed over this enough? But the radio show was safely anonymous. I could do it. I could call.
I had a sudden horrifying thought: what if Ginny listened to the show?
What the hell. I called. I mostly expected to get a busy signal and told myself that if I got a busy signal I’d take it as a sign and hang up. But I didn’t. I got a screener who asked me to hold a minute. I supposed I could have hung up then, but once again I didn’t. What was happening to me?
“Hi, thanks for waiting,” the screener said when he came back on. “Can you tell me your name, hometown, and what you want to talk about?”
I wasn’t even sure I could say what I wanted to talk about. I really just… wanted to talk. “Um, yeah. Sam from Denver. I’m a vampire. I guess you probably hear this all the time, but I’ve met this woman and suddenly realize I have no idea how a relationship with someone who’s mortal would even work.”
“Well, you’ve called the right place.” The guy sounded bored when he answered, which told me that yes, he’d heard this one before. “Hold on and I’ll put you in the queue. There’s no guarantee Kitty will take your call. You’ll need to turn your radio down.” He put me on hold, and the show came in through the phone line.
Kitty wasn’t going to take my call, I was pretty sure. I wanted to giggle. I mean, who did this kind of thing? I kept listening.
“Hi, Kitty.” This was a woman talking, no-nonsense and brusque. “So, I’m a vampire. And I have to know—how do I convince people that I’m not some sultry man-eating sex kitten? For some reason everyone who finds out I’m a vampire expects me to be a sultry sex kitten. Even other vampires!”
“This is where the stereotype thing backfires,” she said, sounding as sympathetic as she had yet. “This is the same thing as thinking all vampires are hot. Can I ask a couple of questions? Do you have a job? Are you with a Family? How often are you actually running into this attitude?”