10.

Teenagers fall in love like leaves fall in the autumn: quick to the ground, quick to die.  When my parents decided to move to Boise halfway through my freshman year in high school, to say I was “bummed” would be an understatement.  I was devastated.  I had developed so many crushes on so many freshman, sophomore, junior and senior boys back in Eugene that I thought it would never end, like so many golden leaves dying off a single tree.  Except that these leaves were being raked and put in garbage bag, thrown away or turned into mulch, before I ever had a chance to dive into them.

Boise was small, full of trees (well, compared to the desert that surrounded it, at least), and didn’t smell very bad, but nevertheless I was in a funk, annoyed with my parents, annoyed by the city, annoyed by the stupid people who lived there and seemed to be about ten years behind the times when it came to fashion.  A bunch of Mormons lived there, supposedly, though I couldn’t find one for the first four months of my existence in the City of Trees.  I spent my entire first semester alone, unwanted and unnoticed by anyone in school.  I got straight As, garnered affection from my teachers and counselor (someone must’ve noticed my depression), but that didn’t matter because I had no friends, no one to hang out with after school was over.  I invariably went home and played with our cats, or read books, or dawdled on the internet, whichever seemed appealing at the time.

And then, in January, following Christmas break, I met Samuel.

A strapping lad even at sixteen, Samuel was simultaneously very boring and very exciting.  He was on the football team, a halfback if I remember correctly, tall, broad-shouldered, handsome.  And yet he was also on the fencing squad, and spent more time in the library than any other football player or fencer.  Read science fiction.  Flirted with attractive women.  Went to popular parties, drank a lot, stumbled home, that sort of thing.  But at the same time, was one of the first to raise his hand in class (we had one together, French), was always kind to his teachers and fellow students.

He defied typical jock stereotypes and redefined them.  When other football players would cause a ruckus, Sam would be the first to chastise them.  He would also challenge them to a duel, which made my fifteen-year-old heart melt into a puddle on the floor.

On the first day of French, I sat in the front of the class and Samuel sat right next to me.  I made no attempt to communicate with him, but he said Hello and gave me a quick, nice-to-meet-you smile, which started the fire that eventually warmed my icy cold heart.  Every day in French class following that was a day where I spent as much time trying to catch a glance at Sam as I did learning.

In March, a week before Spring Break, was the Homecoming Dance.  Having not attended the Valentine’s Day Dance (instead sitting in my room the entire night, bawling my eyes out), I had made no plans to go to the Homecoming Dance.  I was getting used to the idea of not knowing anyone in this town, at this school, or anywhere in the general vicinity.  I joined the chess club for two weeks before soundly beating everyone in the group, including the founder, Mr. Johnson, the physics teacher, and then promptly retiring.  I made no friends there.

So it came as quite a surprise to me when Samuel approached me on a Friday, a week after the Valentine’s Dance, and asked me to the Homecoming Dance.  My jaw dropped, just like it did in Central Park as I caught his face again in the moonlight.

Everyone at this point in time knew that Samuel was dating our tennis star, Penny Ackerman, who had gone to state in the spring and ended up taking second place there.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching tennis matches.  I suppose it was the innate Englishness of it, the rules, the funny terms, the hypnosis induced by watching a small neon yellow ball fly back and forth, back and forth.  I had rooted for Penny all during her climb up regionals and then through to state.  When she won second place, I may have shed a tear that she didn’t get first.  I won’t deny it.

Penny and Sam had been dating for six months – an eternity in the realm of high school.  To all of us they were the perfect couple; the football star and the tennis star, like a match made in Heaven.

Naturally, when Sam asked me to the dance, my first reaction was, “Why?”

“Why?” he repeated, and for the first time I saw through the jock façade and saw Samuel, a boy, standing there, obviously hurt about something.  I knew no gossip.  I paid no attention to anything anyone said here.  Most of the student body meant nothing to me.

I immediately recognized my lack of knowledge on the matter – I felt like Adam and Eve, biting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and suddenly noticing, and feeling ashamed by, their own nakedness.  I felt my cheeks blush.  I tried to hide behind my own hair, but it looked more like I was eating my own hair, and I felt even stupider.

“I’m ... sorry,” I said meekly.  “I don’t know ... anything...”

Samuel looked at me, really looked at me, like he was reading a book.  We kept eye contact for what seemed like ages.  Then he smiled, and the ice shield around my heart cracked a little more.

“We broke up,” Sam said matter-of-factly.

“I ... figured,” I replied, immediately furious with my dumb response.

Sam shuffled his feet a bit.  I noticed that there were a few people milling about, watching us.  Suddenly thrust into popularity, I thought.  Don’t know if I like that.

“I thought we could go as friends,” Sam said, and I felt a stomach punch to my gut.  “I mean,” he continued, as though sensing my disappointment at not immediately becoming his next girlfriend, “it’s just that ... we broke up after the Valentine’s Dance, and ... it’s pretty soon, you know...”

All I could do was nod.  I understood, and I commended him on his strikingly mature reaction to the matter.  But I also really wanted to make out with him.

In the end I agreed, and the school was abuzz with news of Samuel’s new “girlfriend,” and I suddenly had every woman’s eye gazing at me like I was the Antichrist.  I went from not being known to being the center of attention.  Every part of me, every bit of clothing I wore, was being scrutinized.

I went home and bawled my eyes out that night.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Samuel and I began to talk.  During class mostly, and sometimes in French (which really turned me on, though no one would know of this), we started to talk about our hobbies, and found out that we had a lot more in common than we thought.  And then one day, Sam came over to my house, about a week ago before the dance, and met my parents and sat on my couch and basically bawled like a baby because he missed Penny and was in love with her and wanted her back so bad.  And I realized that I truly was his “friend,” not his love interest at all.  My parents weren’t worried about this jock in my house, not after they saw his wet, puffy eyes and his shaking hands.  After he left, my mother said, “Is he okay?”

I shook my head.  “No, he’s not.”

The next day at lunch some popular girls sat next to me and started asking me all these questions about Sam, really dirty questions about if he was good in bed and all that.  I had gone to health class but the whole “sex” thing still didn’t make any sense to me, so I was just filled with the general anger of being poked and prodded by stupid, bitchy girls ... and I snapped, and said that Sam didn’t have sex with me, that he cried about Penny and then went home.

There was this hush, and then stifled laughter, and then the girls were gone – and by next period, everyone in the school knew.  I didn’t know what to do: suddenly I was part of gossip.  I felt terrible, having made Sam look like a crybaby, and I wanted to apologize and explain myself, but he wasn’t in French class that day.  Wasn’t in school that day, apparently.

The story, by the end of the day, was that he had gotten back together with Penny and that they had sex in the backseat of his car.  She apparently had heard of Sam’s crybaby moment and thought it was endearing.  How people figured this out, I’ll never know.  But my heart was crushed, the icy shield around it renewed, and it was a Friday, too, so I wouldn’t be able to talk to him for the whole weekend, and every single possible scenario would run through my head again and again until it made my body hurt.  I went home and bawled.

On Monday I was an emotional wreck.  I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, my hair was ratty from staying in bed all weekend, I didn’t really shower or put on any makeup.  It was my first heartbreak and I hadn’t even dated anyone.

I walked into French class and Samuel was sitting there, and everyone was looking at him, and he was staring straight ahead at the whiteboard.  He somehow sensed my entrance because he turned his head, looked at me, and rose from his seat.  Before I could say anything we were in the hallway.  I could hear classmates gasping as the door closed behind us.

He had me roughly by the arm, and I yelped a little bit in surprise.  He pulled me to the lockers across the hall from our classroom, spun me around, lightly pressed me against the lockers, and – kissed me.  Long, wet, inexperienced, and utterly lovely, we kissed, and he knew more than I did, gently sucking on my upper lip, taking my head gently with his left hand, fingers getting tangled in my hair.  In hindsight, that moment felt eerily similar to the moment I was first bitten by my future sire: it was, in essence, rapturous.

When he pulled away, I noticed that everyone in the hallway, teachers included, was watching us.  A girl had dropped her books.  Another punk looking guy was making masturbating motions with his hand.  A nearby teacher hauled him off to the principal.  And back, behind them all, stood a visibly shocked, annoyed, stupefied Penny Ackerman, her two best friends beside her.

I wished I hadn’t ruined the moment by not staring into Sam’s eyes, but this was high school, and high school was, by default, a bastardized form of 17^th century royal etiquette: dress nice, gossip, and look to see who is looking at you.

Samuel helped me by gently nudging my chin with his forefinger.  He smiled, and I gulped.  He went in for another kiss and I said, “I haven’t showered.”  My inner monologue was smacking me.

“I didn’t notice,” he said.

“We’ll ... be late for French.”

“Français peut attendre,” he said, and if there were still icy pieces of shield around my heart at this point, they sublimated into steam as my heart was set on fire.  I didn’t even know how to fuck a boy, and yet I wanted Samuel so bad.

We ended up going to French anyway (because we were kids and the vice principal was yelling at us for displaying affection), and I was giggly and he was stoic and manly and everything was sexy for the rest of the day.

My mother took me to a very nice department store and bought me a very nice dress for Homecoming.  Our football team won that Friday, and the dance was on Saturday, so Samuel was very pleased, and I was very pleased, and we slow danced with my head in the nook of his neck, him insisting to dance like “real dancers do,” one hand against my shoulder blade, the other in my hand, slowly swaying to the music.

Samuel and I started dating that night (we had “the talk”), and Penny was out of his mind.  We got along swimmingly as my grades steadily dropped throughout the rest of high school.  It wasn’t his fault.  I was getting bored with school.  My parents enrolled me in some gifted and talented classes, but they weren’t gifted or talented enough.  They made us do stupid things like build houses out of index cards and solve ridiculous riddles like “A plane crashes on the US/Canadian border.  Where do they bury the survivors?” and talk about our feelings and other nonsense.

Sam and I first had sex (both virgins – the Penny story was a lie) at Prom.  He was a year older, and they had a junior-senior prom, and so I went and thought I was pretty awesome.  It was in the backseat of his car, and it was awkward and kind of painful, but it was also very fun and exhilarating.  For the record, he wore a condom.  He’s not an idiot.

We dated for three years, Sam taking a year off after graduating to work and save money for college.  Then I graduated and we started looking for an apartment together.  And then, in August, he disappeared.  Right out of the pale blue sky.  We sent out search parties, his parents were devastated.  And he never showed up.  Until tonight, dueling with me under the trees in Central Park.

++

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Delia says.

“You’re a ... vampire?” I say.  The shock hasn’t worn off.  We’ve probably stood here for fifteen minutes as the memories of being high school sweethearts flood in like someone took a sledgehammer to an aquarium.  The fight around us has intensified, as more from each side continues to cascade into the park.  It’s like 17^th century warfare in the park, a show of strength from both sides.

“You’re a werewolf,” she replies.  “Or an apprentice.”

I shake my head.  “Werewolf.”

“Does that explain where you’ve been?”

She, of course, means my absence post graduation.

“Yes,” I say, “and no.”

“Obtuse motherfucker,” she spits, and before I can react she’s dueling again.  Her epee flicks up toward my nose.  I counter by swinging my rapier counter clockwise, hitting her epee from the top and knocking it back to pointing at the ground, where I like it.  She growls at me, lunges not with her sword but with her body.  I’m not prepared for this, and we go tumbling to the ground, rolling down a slight incline towards a pond where a bunch of werewolves have grouped together, somehow keeping vampires from getting into the water as they patch their wounds.  The vamps stand at the edge, looking bored.

When we finish rolling she’s on top of me, fangs bared, wanting to chomp down on my neck but unable to because of the liberal amount of garlic salve I have applied to my neck and shoulders.  She could bite my face but it wouldn’t be as effective, and plus it’s just bad vampire etiquette.

I push with my left hand, knocking her away and onto her back.  Leaping to my feet, I survey the scene – me, a bunch of vampires, and ... slowly shambling people in the background.

I hear a scream.  The wolves look up in time to see a young vampire get shredded by zombies, tearing into her flesh like it was butter.  More screams.  The wolves in the pond jump out and run past me.  The vamps scatter.  Suddenly there are two, no, three hundred ... no, five hundred zombies, young, fresh zombies, running on fresh legs, fast and hungry, surrounding us.  As I scan the scene, I find that they’re all over, attacking vamps and wolves alike, police cars being upturned and various policemen already zombified.

Delia is on her feet.  I hear her mutter, “They know...” which is nice and cryptic.  We are quickly being enclosed in a wide circle.  She turns to me.

Sheathing my rapier, I run up to her, grab her by the waist, and jump.

I’ve only done this once before, back in the War – werewolves can leap up to ten feet in the air, and up to fifty feet forward if they get a good running start (this is why we don’t participate in the Olympics) – though I’ve not done it with someone in my arms.  Wolves call it “zombie hopping,” and essentially all it is is jumping over zombies and landing on them, running on them as though they were the ground itself.  Sometimes if you’re lucky you can run across them, but most of the time is spent falling on them, reorganizing, and then jumping again.

Now we’re being corralled, and all I can think of is to z hop.  So I do.

Delia screams her lungs out as I bound into the air and land right on the head of a skateboarder looking zombie kid, cracking it with a disgusting noise and coming down right in the middle of a bunch of zs.  In the air, however, I noticed that the crowd was thinning, and with another leap I find myself back on the grass, with a few zombies ahead of me.  I set Delia down and she immediately produces a longsword from the sheath on her back.  Impressive.  She dives into the zs, hacking and slashing, heads flying everywhere.

I push aside the remaining zombies and in a moment we are clear, on the street, surrounded by upturned cars and the bodies of policemen, vampires, and werewolves.  It looks like a massacre.

Delia turns to me.  “What the hell was that?”

“Zombie hopping,” I reply.  “It’s a thing.  We do.  Sometimes.”

The zombies are slowly lurching around, attempting to chase after us.  The fast ones are in the middle of the circle, though, and are clawing their way through the slow ones, looking like a very disturbing game of red rover.

We run to the nearest car that hasn’t been flipped over – a fairly new Honda, unlocked, and with the keys still inside and the engine running.  A man lies in the passenger seat, slumped over, blood congealing from the bite wound on his neck.  In a couple of hours he will wake up a vampire, or he will be obliterated by the sunrise, whichever comes first.

Delia throws him out of the car and we hop in.  “Lucky,” she says.

“Whoever was driving didn’t want to drive anymore,” I say.

“At least they were nice enough to put the car in park.”

I hit the gas, speeding through wreckage, the shocks bumping with each dead body we run over.  The scene is amazing: zombies are everywhere, in tightly packed groups, wandering, attacking, shambling ... the usual things zombies do.  There must be a thousand of them, easy.  I haven’t seen this many shamblers since the climax of the War.  But there is no fear of an oncoming war.  This is more of a tactical strike by Jason, who must’ve heard the news about him...

And then, something I’ve never seen – a police car, hurtling through the air, smashes into a series of cars about twenty feet ahead of us, at an intersection.  Bits of glass and metal fly everywhere.  I slam on the brakes.  Delia screams.

To the right, where the car came from, a second car, civilian this time, somehow begins to rise into the air.  It’s back end is masked by a large building, a bank or something, but the front, headlights still on, is definitely hovering a good six feet in the air.  “What the fuck is that,” Delia says, sounding like she’s hyperventilating.

The car tilts back slightly, and then launches through the night sky, as though propelled by rocket fuel, sailing over the first car toss and getting tangled up in the trees of Central Park.  The boughs bend and twist and crack and finally the car gets the best of them and crashes into the ground.  Somehow the horn is pressed, making a loud blaring sound that is instantly annoying.

I start to unbuckle my seat belt, but quickly put it back on when a pack of ten or so zombie dogs rush onto the scene.  Delia screams, starts pawing at the door, the seat, the glove compartment.  She’s had a fear of dogs since she was a toddler, when a pit bull ran around a corner as she was walking to school and attacked her.  So this is a familiar sight.

The dogs quickly surround our car, some hopping on the hood and barking with such ferocity that their saliva and blood splatter against the windshield.  At the same time, behind the building ahead of us comes a loud, low roar, kind of like a lion but more ... human.  Delia screams again, and whimpers, eyes wide, backing herself against the seat, terrified of the dogs and of the roar in the background.  I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little terrified at this point as well.

I put the car in reverse, twisting my body to see through the back windshield, and start navigating through the cars I just drove through.  The dogs on the hood jostle a bit but remain there, barking and scratching at the front windshield.  I have to remember to turn the steering wheel the other way.  After a couple of winding turns I make it to the next intersection.  I twist back around, shifting into drive just as I see a zombie step into view from behind the building.

Tall, impossibly muscular, wearing a black fedora and a skeleton’s grin, with odd tubes and metallic joints popping out of his skin and bone, stands the zombie called Macaroni.

And that’s when I know we’re fucked.

9.

[this chapter is really short -- i was getting serious writer's block and just had to pound through it to get to the event that i wanted.  in the future i will edit it and make it better!]

The instant the sun disappears behind the buildings, I’m up, out of bed and the cold-yet-satisfying arms of Misha, my new vampire/mistress, and into the shower, where I wash and laboriously brush and floss my fangs until they are sparkling clean.  Tonight’s wardrobe is black, form fitting but loose enough to move around in, and with many straps to hold knives and swords.  Tonight is a fight night.

Jason and the zombie fortress is a long term goal.  Tonight we’re hunting werewolves.

++

Oscar has beefed up security on the safehouse, and has placed the clans in the area “under alert” of suspicious vamp activity.  He and I are driving into the city, where it has been reported that several vamps have been causing a bit of havoc.  We both immediately assume it’s some crazy Rohrsach extremists attacking humans.  A call has been made for all voluntary shapeshifters (as in, werewolves who can become werewolves when they want) to get in there too.

“This will probably be front page news tomorrow,” Oscar says as we head into the city.

++

When we get out of the car is when we realize we’ve been ambushed.

The scene is Central Park.  I count twenty werewolves on the street, heading into the park.  There is already a ruckus going on deep in the park ... you can hear the fighting from this far away.  There are a couple of actual wolves heading into the melee, teeth bared, eyes wide.  I am reminded of those fateful nights, moon in bloom, my clothes ripping off of my body, snout extending, fur growing, howling in pain and ecstasy at the same time.  The transformation is sometimes the greatest part.

I suddenly have a craving for raw meat as we rush into the scene.  Werewolves and vamps, despite our mutual hatred, share one code of ethics – no firearms.  No guns, no bombs, only the ancient weapons our ancestors fought with for thousands of years.  At my side is a rapier – I was a fencer in high school and college.  Oscar wields an enormous broadsword, strapped to his back.  Around our waists are belts of stakes and holy water.

I have never been in a turf war before and it’s exhilarating.  In Idaho you’re lucky if you see any vamps or wolves within the entire state (well, the wolves are in the mountains, but they are quiet and keep to themselves, like I did).  And when I was enlisted I fought primarily against zombies in the War.  But this ... this is rivalry personified.

Our blades were doused with holy water before we arrived.  We wear special garlic ointment on our bodies to disparage bites.  They have blades covered in silver, and wolfsbane on their belts.

The New York Police Department sits idly by, totally afraid to intervene.

The hunt is on.

++

Swords clang and clatter, people scream, uber-wolves scurry into the virtual forest of Central Park.  For some reason it’s entirely too warm out here, as though the fight is causing the entire area to heat up.  The trees move by the sheer movement of opponents.

Oscar and I dip behind a long row of bushes.  Oscar is getting ready for his transformation to uber-wolf, and thus is completely ignoring me and settling into some ritual chanting to help calm him down.  So I take off, on the outskirts of two major skirmishes.  The first, to my left, is a full on brawl between several vampires and werewolves, clawing and scratching and attempting to bite.  A couple of persons – I can’t tell if they’re vamp or wolf – lie on the ground, some panting, others clearly dead.

To the right is a more formal swordfight between a tall, elegant looking vamp and a tall, elegant looking werewolf, both darting in and out, in perfect fencing form, along a small paved pathway as chaos erupts all around them.  Their technique is impeccable, and as they jab and parry, you can see the admiration for each other in their faces.  Two star-cross’d fencers, apparently.

I dash into the midst of things, quickly stabbing an oncoming vamp, his body suddenly consumed by fire from the inside as my holy water-blessed sword makes contact with his undead heart.  The ground is littered with ashes and bone chunks from previous vamps who have been killed in similar ways.

I strike down two other vamps, both with rapid slashing moves from my rapier, before finding myself in the middle of the action.  Swords, maces, someone shooting arrows – it’s like dropping into a medieval film all of a sudden.  Except in this film, in the distance, are the anachronistic police, shouting in their megaphones for us to stop what we’re doing.

++

My blade of choice is the medieval longsword.  I would consider myself a swiper, rather than a stabber.  Most vampires prefer this arrangement since it’s easy to kill a werewolf with a quick swipe of a silver-plated longsword, and not as easy to stab him with a fencing type sword.  There are traditionalists, mostly thousand year old vamps, who prefer the thrill of an actual duel, but not very many werewolves, let alone humans, know how to duel these days anyway.

Currently I am in a tree, watching the momentum, deciding the right time to leap in and make my presence known.  Truthfully, I could kill half of these werewolves in a matter of minutes – my training has prepared me for such an event – but tonight is a hunt in the classic English style: more style than substance.  Some wolves are brawling with vampires, while others take a more elegant route, bringing sabres and foils with which to fence.  More duelers than I thought, apparently.  But very little killing.  Just a show of strength, of numbers, of how we get things done.

This fight was mainly Everett’s idea, as a way to determine the strength of the wolf clans in the City before we made our way to Jason’s compound.  News travels fast in a world powered by the information superhighway, and we knew our info about Jason’s potential mortality would be leaked to every knowledgeable source in the country, if not in the world.

I think the wolves understand this too, though some, eager for a quick vampire kill, now lay dead on the grass in Central Park.  Others, on the fringes, look wholly unsure of what to do, this probably being their first turf war.

The longsword is sheathed on my back, and to my sides are two swords – on the left, an epee, given to me by my swordsmaster in Hunter training, used in many a duel, mostly with other vampires more than werewolves, and on the right, a dirk, a couple of inches longer than a traditional dagger, given to me by Everett following my ascension into vampirehood.  I also have a series of throwing knives strapped to my thighs.  They’re more for look than anything else.

Standing in this tree, surveying the scene, trying to find a werewolf who has such an affinity with fencing as I do, I finally lay eyes  on one, tall, around my age, his face and body covered in shadows from the trees, but his hand clutching a rapier – an excellent dueling weapon.  He is one of the wolves unsure of himself, standing outside the bout.  Farther away, Oscar Ritter, famed werewolf and cultural icon, transforms into his wolf form, complete with ritual tearing of clothes, pain, agony, howling and, eventually, a big furry beast that launches himself into the middle of a brawl to my right.  He grabs a young vampire by the throat, hurling him towards a tree – an action that will likely hurt the vamp, but not kill him.  Oscar knows this is a show off too, and he must love it.

Staring at this young man, I feel a sense of familiarity wash over me, as though I’ve seen him before.  It happens; werewolves all give off the same stench, but his movements, his gait ... it reeks of something familiar.

Oh well.

Unsheathing my epee, leaping from the tree with a grace only I can attest to (me, modest? Hardly), I expect to land lightly on the ground in front of him – and yet do not.  It’s dark down here, much darker than up in the tree where I could see the waxing moonlight and the lights from hundreds of buildings in the vicinity.  Perhaps I misjudged my landing ... I spin around, instinctively raising my epee – and it clangs in contact with this wolf’s rapier, which is pointing right between my eyes, a few inches away.  The man, shrouded in darkness, stands a few feet away.  I grin, as broad as the first time Misha and I really kissed.

“You’re a tricky one,” I say.  He says nothing.

Which makes me grin harder.

++

She says, “You’re a tricky one,” and at that point I’m entirely certain it’s Delia.  My heart beats out of its chest.  I can feel sudden perspiration on my skin, being licked by a soft breeze from the north.  A lump in my throat.  I know it’s been a long time, but...

Delia steps back, standing in a strange fencing position.  It takes me a moment before I recognize her strong, flat-footed stance: she must’ve been trained as a mensur, or an academic fencer.  Which means she spent time in Germany, or Switzerland, or—

She advances, thrusting her epee quickly at my head.  I dodge just in time, bringing my rapier down and moving my body out of the way.  Then a quick flurry of strikes, me light on my feet, her solid and unmoving.  She exudes control, but in just two minutes of dueling I have found her weaknesses, and manage to get her off her solid stance, backing her up with a couple of quick ripostes that startle and confuse her.  She hasn’t been fencing as long as I have.

When she smiled so wickedly, I saw the fangs ... I had heard stories, unwarranted until now.  And she doesn’t recognize me, or can’t see me in the darkness.  I can see her, eyesight heightened with lycanthropy.  When she does recognize me, will she stop fighting, or will she fight harder?

I thrust inside low, toward her right leg, causing her to jerk her knees backward and parry by swinging the epee clockwise and down.  She narrowly misses getting stuck in the leg.  She looks up at me after the thrust, says, “You’re good,” in a breathy tone that indicates that she’s getting tired.  A placebo effect, of course – no vampires get “tired” – which means she’s only been a vampire for a few years.  She seems to notice this as soon as I do, taking a step back and putting a hand on her chest.  Her breath disappears, and soon she is back in en garde position.

We duel for quite a while, me pretending to be slightly worse than I truly am, so as to prolong the battle and make Delia not look as bad.  Around us the fight continues, thought it has become more of a grand wrestling match at this point.  I catch a glimpse of Oscar, in wolf form, grappling with a large, tough looking vampire.  I see what looks like a broad smile on Oscar’s face, like a smile of pride, or of enjoying the moment.  It’s not so loud, and the cops are all but gone from the scene.  It’s become a pissing contest at this point.

After a few parries, a few lunges, and even a semi-successful prise de fer which almost knocks the rapier out of my hand, I finally manage to push Delia back to the edge of the park and nearly onto the street.  The trees are gone, and she is flailing wildly, and I am gracefully parrying, pushing her back against a row of bushes.  Then, she makes an frustrated mistake, lunging so hard at me that I neatly step aside, and she goes tumbling onto the grass.

She stands, pissed, brushing off grass and dirt, turns, sees me with the moonlight and city light against my face – and her jaw drops.

++

Oh my God.  It’s Samuel.  My first love.

8.

The house in Jersey is pretty fantastic.  A two story in the hills, four bedrooms, three baths, a huge kitchen, and right now it’s five o’clock (somewhere) and I’m dozing off in a bubble bath with a bottle of Crown Royal half-empty on the floor and the soothing sounds of Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” on an iPod dock right above my head.  I think everyone deserves a bubble bath sometimes, even a rugged werewolf like myself.

People ask me why I drink so much.  A lot of people, my parents included, think I’m an alcoholic.  I’ve been through two interventions and one stint in rehab when I was 24.  But all of these people are middle class blue collar workers who have never ran wild through the woods on a full moon, or found himself naked and alone the next morning, wondering where the hell his clothes went.  They’ve never been surrounded by two hundred brainhungry zombies grabbing at your flesh and hair.  They’ve never shot in a crowd of civilians.  Never took a bullet for another man.  Never killed another man.  Never had to spend years of meditation and personal journeys alone in order to channel their natural energies so that they could be able to focus during their shapeshifting, becoming one with their werewolf form instead of forgetting it entirely.

I drink because it quells a lot of voices in my head.

And maybe I drink too much because there are too many voices.

++

“You’re drunk,” Kacey says.  Me, wrapped in a towel, hair still wet and clinging to my face.  I’m holding the bottle of Crown in my hand.

“How did you guess?” I ask, raising he bottle like a toast.

“Put it away.”

I walk past her, into my room, where I close the door to a sliver and start changing.  “Kacey, no offense, dear, but I need this,” I say, slipping into a new pair of jeans, fresh out of the laundry and warm against my skin.  “I had a really bad night, and a long day, and I just want to pass out.”

“You could pass out without drinking,” Kacey replies.

I fling the door open.  Fresh white t-shirt, clean jeans – I feel like a new man.  “No, Kac, I couldn’t.  That’s the problem.”

Downstairs Eddie is watching some children’s show where the characters are all loud and as obnoxious as possible.  And parents wonder why their children grow up with ADD.  Across from him, sitting in an uncomfortable looking chair, is Irving Davis, the man spoken of earlier in the zombie raid.  He’s a small muscular guy with a buzz cut and an earpiece connected directly to the Clan’s central network.  He is also watching this absurd television show, and gives Kacey and me a brief nod as we walk past, before returning his gaze to the TV.

In the kitchen, Kacey grabs my arm, spins me around on the faux-granite floor.  She reaches out to take the Crown Royal bottle from me, but I jerk my arm back, holding it out of her reach.

“Give it to me,” she says.  I shake my head, stumbling backward until my back hits the enormous stainless steel fridge door.  Kacey wrestles with me, ultimately getting her leg involved, twisting it up with my legs and knocking me to the floor with one quick motion.  The bottle of Crown flies into the air, and lands with a loud crash against the faux-granite.  Davis is in the room immediately, weapon drawn, eyes alert.  He sees us and lowers his gun.

“Everything alright?” he says.

“Yes,” Kacey says.  “Just dealing with my retarded brother.”

“I’m not retarded,” I say.  Davis logs this one in as “sibling quibble” and goes back to his kid shows.

“You’re cleaning this mess up,” she says.

“I am not,” I say.

“Yes, you are,” she says.

“No, I’m not,” I say.

Kacey heaves a sigh so loud it pierces my eardrum.  “Samuel James Lawrence, we are not eight years old.  Clean up your own goddamn booze.”  The cut in her voice means business.  She storms out of the room and I’m lying on the floor, a broken bottle of Crown a few feet away.  Briefly, a thought passes in my head: Should I lick it up off of the floor?  Maybe get a straw and – oh boy.  I put my hand over my eyes.  I refuse to turn into my father, I refuse to turn into my father, I refuse...

Kacey returns with a towel.  She plops it onto my face.  “Here,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, muffled by the towel.

“Don’t apologize.”

Sitting up, I start crawling over to the mess.  “I know why you’re mad,” I say.  “I know this is the kinda shit Dad would pull—“

And suddenly she’s right in front of me, her face in my face, her breath hot and slightly minty.  The tip of her nose touches mine.  “Don’t you ever,” she says, “talk about that man in front of me again.  You understand?”

Rebelliously, I say, “I’ve heard that before—“

She slaps me across the face.  Hard, and with enough force that it knocks her onto her ass – and, unfortunately, onto the broken glass.  She yelps and sits up.  I try standing but my legs refuse to work accordingly.  Kacey is twisting around like a dog trying to bite its own tail, attempting to get a glance at how bad the scene is on her butt.  I can see it, though: a big ol’ shard of glass jabbed in to her right buttcheek.  She’s wearing flowy yoga pants, too, so there was virtually no protection.

“If you were wearing jeans that would not have happened,” I say.

Kacey looks at me and starts laughing.  “Would you just pull the fucking glass out of my ass,” she says, laughing harder.

“You made a rhyme!” I say.

++

Having a deadbeat, alcoholic father is so cliché these days.  It’s like every other family has one.  Ours was no different.  Beat our mother, got in trouble with the cops more than I can remember.  Eventually went to jail, and was stabbed twenty-five times by a mentally unstable neo-Nazi with a shiv made out of a plastic spoon he carefully whittled to a point.  The stab wounds didn’t kill him outright, but the shit that the guy smeared on the tip of the shiv gave him such bad infection that it, plus shock and loss of blood, keeled him over.

When asked about how to handle the funeral, Mom said, “Burn him and toss him.”

I was sixteen when this happened.  Kacey was twelve.  I think it hit her a lot harder than it did me.  Though, I was already running with the wrong crowd at the time, a crowd that would eventually get me involved with the werewolf clan that would save my life.

++

It’s later in the day.  I’m sober and annoyed, Kacey is forcing me to drink water, and we’re in a car on the way to a meeting with Oscar and the heads of some regional clans, to discuss what we’re going to do for the next week.  Obviously Eddie is our top priority, and he is sitting with me in the back seat, playing video games on some new-fangled game machine that fits in his back pocket.  I don’t follow those kind of trends, and frankly, I don’t want to.  Atari was enough for me.

Regardless, however, I am still staring at the tiny guy on the screen as he runs around, grabs coins, shoots monsters that look more like things I would eat, and generally causes havoc wherever he goes.  Eddie’s thumbs are like lightning on the controls, rapidly pressing buttons and moving the character around the virtual world where he is doomed to do the same thing over and over and over.

At some point this little guy is killed and the words “GAME OVER” appear on the screen.  Eddie gives a labored sigh and plops the machine onto his lap, tilting his head back, apparently trying to control his frustration or something.  It’s amusing.  I look down at the screen again and then notice Eddie’s hands.  He’s a pretty tan kid, having gone on a lot of hiking excursions with Kacey or myself.  We even let him start walking on his own about six months ago, but that was when we learned how important he was, and had to keep him locked up in houses on the east coast.

Eddie’s hands are facing palm up, and I can see his thin forearms.  There are small marks on his right forearm.  I take a closer look, half-expecting them to be a birthmark I had never seen before.  But upon closer inspection they are definitely not birthmarks.  If anything, they look like teeth marks.

“Eddie,” I say, taking his arm and raising it my eye level.  “What are these marks on your arm?”

“Got bit,” Eddie says, which immediately makes Kacey turn around to look at us.  Davis, who is driving the car, glances through the rear view mirror.

“Who bit you, Eddie?”  I ask.

Eddie frowns as he is forced to relive a memory he would rather not.  He says, “A zombie.”

“What?” says Kacey, and she starts climbing over the seat.

“Hold on,” I say, putting my arm out to stop her.  “These don’t look like zombie bites at all.  There’s no infection, no congealing of the blood stream, no purple of black veins.  Are you sure a zombie bit you, Eddie?”

He nods.  “Yesterday when we were in the pile.”

I run my finger over the teeth marks.  There are small lines of scarring, normal for a severe bite, but there is no sign that it was from a zombie.  And Eddie has shown no symptoms of being bit.  No convulsions, no slurring of speech, lethargy...

“Kacey,” I say, “call Oscar.  Tell him to get a blood test ready at the meeting.”

“Do you think...?” Kacey starts.

“I think one of two things right now, and one of those things is miraculous.  Call Oscar.”

A half an hour later we’re on the twelfth floor of an office building in the middle of Manhattan, amongst the clan leaders of half a dozen of the largest clans in the New England area.  Eddie is in another room with a doctor who was summoned quickly and paid generously for her time.  Oscar is pacing quietly, one hand stroking his facial hair, the other propped underneath his arm.  He doesn’t look worried, just ... curious.

The doctor enters, clutching a small vial of blood.  Behind her is Kacey, who is clutching a frightened Eddie, bright blue gauze wrapped around his elbow, tears running down his face, hiccupping, and just looking miserable.  Everyone turns to the doctor.

“I’ll send it to the lab with the highest priority,” she says of the vial of blood, “but that’ll still take 48 hours.  Initial diagnosis is that he wasn’t bitten by a zombie or a vampire or anything like that, but ...”

“But what, doctor?” says Oscar.

“The teeth marks on his arm are ... irregular.  There are deeper indentations in some parts than others.  Not like vampire fangs, but more like ... well, it’s like the teeth were broken and jagged before the bite.”

“What does that mean?” says Kacey.

“It means he was bitten by a zombie,” I say, walking up to Kacey, ruffling Eddie’s light brown hair.  “Probably one who had his teeth busted by a baseball bat prior to the bite.”

The doctor says, “But there is no infection, not even trivial bacterial infections from lack of hygiene.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” I say.  “Eddie couldn’t get even the most basic of bacterial infections.  I’ve never seen him with a cold in my life.”  I turn to Kacey.  “Has he ever had a cold?  Flu?  Fever?”

“No,” says Kacey, and I can tell she’s on the same wavelength with me.

“What is your point, Sam?” says Oscar.

“My point is that Eddie is immune to zombie bites.”

A hush settles over the room as this sinks in.  This news doesn’t surprise me; I’m more surprised that it surprises everyone else.  We already know that Eddie is special, and while most of us don’t know exactly why he’s special, this could very well be one of the reasons.  Immunity to zombie bites may mean immunity to vampire bites, which, if it’s true, means that Eddie is a big threat to both the zombie and vampire community.  It also means he is a potential threat to the werewolf community, if he is immune to werewolf bites.

But he also could be a huge asset in the destruction of any other community, were Eddie to eventually align himself with ... someone.

Oscar takes control of the situation, as always.  “We all know how special Edward already is, so this news should not come as a shock.  Of course, we will wait for the blood results to come in before we make any official announcements.  You are free to go, doctor.”

We all wait for the doctor to make her exit before continuing – or starting, rather – the meeting.  Oscar takes his seat at the head of the table.  Kacey, Eddie and I are bunched up at the other end, feeling a little awkward and small compared to the “big” clan leaders.

The next hour consists of two parts: one, a general “state of the werewolf” address by Oscar, and two, a new significant bit of information – that Jason Philips, the head of the zombie hive, can be killed.

7.

I wake up with the worst headache in existence.  My temples are throbbing.  My head feels light, my eyes dark.  The television is on, and the anchorwoman on the news is talking about the Rohrsachs again.  I look down.  Misha is curled up like a cat against my outstretched leg, her light brown hair cascading over my black fishnets.  She notices me stir, looks up.  “Hi,” she says.

“I’m starving,” I reply.

Ten minutes later we’re downtown, assessing the nightlife on a Sunday night.  Fortunately, New York City is teeming with young disillusioned hipster kids who want nothing more than to honor their Sabbath by binge drinking and making out in alleyways.  The night is full of the sounds of hooting and hollering, the smell of garbage and urine and expensive vanilla perfume.  The streets are slick with a recent shower.  And Misha and I look marvelous.  She has borrowed most of my clothes and is a tan goth beauty, bright red lipstick, black torn fishnets, a white boy’s dress shirt and a black vest.  A jaunty cap.  Only one night in and she’s already becoming a sexy vampire.  And it’s not even Halloween yet.

Prior to leaving, I checked my cell for any calls.  None so far, but I did manage to wake up right as the sun set.  That’s how thirsty I am.

This particular street near my apartment is full of angry post-teenage men, brooding and painting canvases with mud and frustration.  What they’re frustrated about, I don’t know.  They have the symbol for vampire enclave emblazoned on their suitable-hidden door, inset a foot or so from the brick wall, surrounded by shadows and dumpsters and pipes and greasy windows.  I figure the best way to break Misha in would be to parade her through a bunch of wannabe vampires.  Easy prey.

The instant we round the corner into the alley, we are bombarded by servants.

Okay, humans in all their wisdom like things in classes, or castes, or what have you, and these classes essentially dictate how much of a pussy the human is.  For example, the lowest class is Servant.  Servants serve, obviously.  They don’t want to be vampires, they just want to help vampires.  Don’t ask me why.  They’re mostly fat, lazy, acne’d men who spend their entire day surfing the internet for porn, and find it incredibly “awesome” to wait on us vampires at night.  We put up with it because, well, we can, and because it’s nice to be served.  (Plus no self-respecting vampire would ever stoop this low.)

A step higher are Apprenti.  Apprenti are waiting to become vampires, and were lucky enough to be chosen to be a part of a vampire family.  They basically do our dirty work for us in the day time.  There are some pretty high ranking apprenti in Europe, and some in the US as well, though they choose to remain anonymous, and for good reason.

As the servants bark questions at us (“What can we do for you?”, “Would you like some fresh blood?”, “Can I take your coat?”) I say to Misha, “The next highest, I suppose, are Familiars.  It’s kind of hard to describe their purpose.  They are vampire pets, but they’re also henchmen, in a way.  They will never become vampires, but swear a sacred oath (so to speak) to their vampire lord.  Every ancient vampire has a familiar, and ninety-five percent of all familiars are mentally deranged in some way, usually because of their lord.  Renfield was a familiar.  Are you familiar with Renfield?”

Misha shakes her head.

“He was a loonie in a mental asylum, totally under Dracula’s spell.  He wasn’t much of a familiar, and Dracula ended up killing him, but he took the oath, and so it was.”  Meeting eyes with the least pudgy of the servants, I gesture to the door.  “Gentlemen.”

They nearly break each other trying to open the door first.  Dull-eyed apprenti in black smocks have been watching us the entire time.  I cast my eyes on one, wink at him.  He doesn’t respond.  Good boy.

The slow methodical thud of techno music blasts out of the enclave as soon as the door opens.  Red and purple lights gush out onto the floor.  The servants look at Misha and me like a gaggle of googly-eyed dogs, tongues wagging, wetting themselves in excitement.  I brush past them with a flick of my hand, the other wrapped in Misha’s, pulling her with me.

Inside, the club is smoky and dark and vibrant.  Colors swirl, people gyrate, drinks are poured.  Enclaves are special because they are joint human-vampire clubs, like speakeasys in the 1930s.  Vampires are welcome with the knowledge that no human will be bitten within the enclave, and that a blood bar will be readily available.  Naturally, fresh blood tastes so much better than the bagged stuff, but we can deal with it.

After letting Misha get a view of the place (“I love it,” she mouths to me), we head to the bar, where I flash the Teresini tattoo on my left shoulder.  He nods and looks at Misha.  I point to myself and make two “fangs” with my index and middle finger pointing down – the international bartender sign for “newbie” – and point to Misha.  He nods again.  I give him another symbol – two fingers for two shots, and then one finger gesturing up.  He pours two shots of blood and hands them to us, making his own hand gesture – eight dollars.

I give him the cash and then hand one of the shots to Misha.  She mouths, “Is this blood?”  I nod.  She smiles, and already I can see her fangs growing in.  Oh, I remember what it was like to be a newly sired vampire.  The agony of thirst, the ecstasy of drinking, the love of being undead.

We clink our shot glasses together.  “A toast!” I shout, barely audible.  “To our future!”

“Our future!” shouts Misha.

We drink.  A look of satisfaction on Misha’s face.  My headache instantly gone.  The world is good again.

I order two more rounds.

++

After the enclave closes is when the fun starts.  Suddenly vampire and human are spilled out onto the street, some drunk, others still thirsty.  We talk now that the music is gone, we complain about sore feet, we flirt, and Misha and I look for someone to take back home.  Naturally it isn’t hard: two young attractive ladies who want to take a man back to their apartment for a “little fun”?  Like shooting fish in a barrel.  Plus we’re already drunk from authentic bloody mary’s (not the ones your mom used to make, trust me), so what’s a little more blood alcohol content?

His name is Steven.  Mid twenties, tall, blond hair, exquisitely chiseled features.  Misha is looking at him with puppy dog eyes and I feel somewhat ... jealous?  Is that what this is?  The pang in my chest that refuses to settle, like a hungry dog trapped in a kennel?

Steven looked like a good choice but that was before Misha entered the picture.  Now I’m suddenly feeling a bit lost and depressed.  I’d rather go home and sleep.  It’s only starting to enter the fall, which means the nights are short and the sun will be up by six am.  We’ve had enough blood for the night, I keep assuring myself.  We could sleep and feel fine the next night.

“Where do you guys live?” Steven says in some macho bravado tone of voice that I don’t care to listen to.  Misha swoons a little bit, says “Just down the street.”

“We are not guys,” I say curtly.  I grab Misha’s hand.  “Come on, let’s go.”

“I thought we were gonna bring him home?” Misha says dejectedly.

“We were but I got cold feet.”  To him: “No offense.”

“None taken,” he says, but he’s looking at me like I’m the most horrendous bitch he’s ever met.  Whatever, he doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground.  Which is where he’ll be if he tries to mess with us.

“Dee, what are you doing...?” Misha slurs as I pull her out of the alley.

“That guy was a creep.  We didn’t want him.”

“No, you didn’t want him,” says Misha.  She rips her arm out of my grip.  “What is your problem?  Is this what you’re like when you’re totally drunk?”

“Okay, first off, I’m not totally drunk—“My cell phone starts buzzing.  “Hold on, I’ve got to take this.”

“Excuse me?” says Misha.  She tries to grab the phone out of my hand.  I slap her hand.  She screeches like a banshee and storms off.

Jesus.  Women sometimes.

“Angel here,” I say.  Angel is a semi-sarcastic codename Everett gave me a year ago.

“We need you at headquarters,” says a sultry English man’s voice on the other end.  “Fifteen minutes.”

“Make it thirty?” I ask.

“No negotiations,” and he hangs up.  Everett is such a stoic fellow.

I walk, or stumble, rather, back to the apartment.  Misha is waiting for me by the outside entrance.  She narrows her eyes at me, giving me a tempestuous look that really accentuates her cheekbones.  I’m in love again.  Her hip thrust out, arms crossed, high heeled toe tapping to an imaginary, yet angry, beat.  Short skirt rubbing against fishnets...

“Baby, I gotta go,” I say when I reach her.  Her fury is palpable.

“Why?” she says, almost hurt.

“I got a call from the Big Boys.  I’ve got something important to do.”

“You’re gonna leave me here alone again?”

Her lip pouts a little bit and I have to do everything I can to not pounce on it.  Goddamn you, Everett St. Clair.  Goddamn you.

“I have to.  If I don’t follow what the Big Boys say then I get in trouble, and you wouldn’t like it if I got in trouble.”  We’re close now, and I’ve got my hand around her waist, my thumb lightly touching the crest of her hipbone.  I can tell she likes it cause her eyes close for a moment and her head leans back slightly.  “Here, I’ll take you upstairs, okay?”

“Okay,” Misha whispers.

We hold hands and caress and fondle and do other inappropriate things on our way up to my apartment on the third floor, opting for the quiet security of the elevator for our body searching rather than the clumsy echoing staircase.  When the bell dings and the doors open we feign innocence and walk quietly to my door.  I unlock it and we both go in.

Misha immediately presses me against the door, knocking the air that I don’t need out of me.  Her lips taste slightly of honey.  She tries to unzip my skirt and I have to push her back.

“Sorry, honey, I can’t continue,” I say, zipping my skirt back up.

Misha’s sad puppy dog eyes tug at my heart, so I give her a long, aching hug and a bit of a butt squeeze, which makes her yelp and bite her bottom lip.  Then a quick tender kiss and a hand on her cheek and I’m off, out into the night once again.  There’s only a couple of hours until dawn, so I wonder what they’ve got planned for me and the gang.  I hope we get someplace to sleep for the day, at least.

++

Headquarters is an elaborate basement under an old abandoned building on some industrial street in New Jersey, surrounded by old steel mills and factories and all sorts of other ugly American enterprises.  In darkness it all looms like forgotten civilizations, broken windows and falling bricks strewn across concrete and gravel.

I enter the building and walk, echo-enhanced, to the large elevator at the other end of this enormous room.  It used to be a factory that made some kind of clothes; you can tell because there are fabric swatches still on the ground, and moths flying everywhere and probably bats trying to eat those moths.  Every once and a while you’ll hear something more like a stray dog or cat, or some animals fighting, and in this giant room it echoes like crazy, which can be a little startling.

Yes, vampires can get startled.  New ones can, at least.  The old vamps are sometimes a stiff as starched clothing.  I’ve met Dracula before, briefly, and when he took my hand it was like holding onto a piece of parchment.  The guy has no sense of humor.  I can only imagine what Cain is like.

The elevator descends with a metallic clunk and the mechanical whirr of counterweights being moved with hydraulics.  I descend four floors into the ground, and as I do the quiet silence of the outside is replaced with a new sound – the hum of electricity.  By the time the elevator hits the fourth basement, the hum is loud enough that I fear I might get shocked as I touch the gate.  I never do.  But the fear is there.

I pull the gate aside and walk to a steel door, the entrance to our headquarters.  I say my name, Delia MacArthur Teresini, and my rank, Special Ops Hunter, into a small microphone.  A laser scans my retina.  A red light turns green, and a loud thunk echoes up the elevator shaft as the lock disengages.  I open the door and proceed forward.

Headquarters is brightly lit by annoying fluorescent tubes and garishly decorated.  A long corridor extends into a small room where a heavily-armed receptionist asks me to repeat the codeword for this week.  I say, “Lionheart” and she takes her finger off the trigger, but still points the gun at me.  There are two directions to go now, left and right.  Left heads into the server rooms where a large cadre of apprenti sits at computers, typing and typing and programming until their eyes bleed.  They are all enormously fat and wear thick rimmed glasses and sweat and eat horrible human snack foods and would most definitely be servants if they didn’t possess such a keen savant-level of knowledge about computers.  Some are working on vampire security measures, but most are just updating the eons long list of vampire geneology – from Cain onward, taking it out of yellowed books and parchments and papyrus and stone tablets taken from the library of Alexandria before it was destroyed.  It’s no secret that vampires possess more ancient paraphernalia than humans do, and the humans have been envious for centuries.

To the right is where I’m heading.  A narrow hallway curves to the left into a large, oblong room that Everett calls the Situation Room, but we all like to call the Shit Room – cause it’s where shit happens.  Currently it is staffed to the gills, as vampires and apprenti alike go over various computer terminals and tall panes of glass with some kind of fiber optic ... thing inside them, that makes them project images on them and also allows you to touch them to access information.  I’m no technophile so I don’t know how it works.  A human gave it to us, that’s all I know.

Everett – tall, slender, Oxfordian Everett stands at one of these consoles, rapidly pressing letters on a keyboard that has popped up on the screen.  Above it is a window showing what he is typing, and to the left of that is a video screen of a vampire most likely from the west coast.  Everett is speaking to the vampire as he types.

At a table near him are my Special Ops friends, Greg, Lucie, and the ever-jealous Stacey.  They spot me, and wave, except for Stacey, who flicks her hair.

“I’m here!” I say sarcastically, taking a seat and crossing my legs.  “Where’s my prize?”

Stacey sticks her tongue out at me.  Greg laughs, and Lucie is texting on her phone.  Lucie is the only vampire I know who is fully immersed in technology.  I think she has a blog or something. Or a website.  Something like that.

Everett hears me and hits a button on the screen that sends everything he was doing away.  The pane of glass is now just a pane of glass.  He steps out from behind it and walks over to me.

“Good to see you, Delia,” he says, and I am suddenly flooded with memories.

This happens every time I see Everett, which isn’t as often as you’d think.  Everett was my second love.

++

It was cold, and I was wearing gray tights and a denim skirt, and a scarf that was more for fashion than for function.  Standing at Piccadilly Circus, enjoying the touristyness of it all, the bright lights, the neon signs, the Japanese men taking photographs of everything in sight.  I was twenty, I was in London, and I had been living in a hostel for three weeks.

++

My life after high school graduation was sub par: Boise, it seems, was full of ambition with nothing actually happening.  I enrolled at Boise State with poor high school grades and a poor SAT score, and they accepted me, which made me feel even worse, so I refused to go.  The shouting match with my parents was epic, and resulted in me getting kicked out, thrown to the street with just a backpack full of belongings.  It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, to be cliché.

For a year I lived with a friend, and worked my ass off at a menial job with okay pay.  My friend was working at a much better job with a salary, so she was kind enough to let me stay rent free with her for a year, before I came home one night and found her fucking my boyfriend at the time.  On the coffee table.  And there was a dildo of mine laying on the ground beside them.  I packed up and left immediately after that.

I used the money I saved to buy a decent used car and traveled across the country, eventually stopping at New York.  I spent a terrible eight months working for a modeling agency that I was entirely not good enough for.  I lived in my car a lot.  Ate food out of dumpsters, which wasn’t such a bad thing once I found a local group of freegans who always ate food out of dumpsters.  I had a good two months with them, but lost interest after I got drunk one night, slept with one of them, and woke up with syphilis.

My life story sounds terrible, I know, but you’d be surprised at how many people get syphilis these days.

I had thought about getting in my car and driving across the country again when one day I was walking down the street and I found an envelope lying in the gutter.  The envelope was filled with money.  At the time I was very anti-money, anti-capitalism and I desperately wished to give it back to whomever it belonged, but then I read the note stuffed inside.  Written in pink lipstick, it said:

“my lying cheating FUCK of a husband gave me this money to save our marriage.  if you find it, it’s yours.  congratz.”

There was two-thousand dollars inside.

I decided to use the money to move to London.

++

My first glimpse of Everett was him, shirtless, walking past me in the morning at the hostel, heading to the shower room to shower.  He was thin but not muscular, like a runner.  A small tuft of dark hair matted his chest.  His face long and triangular, ending in a pointed chin and a wicked smile.  He wore small spectacles and his hair was always, always perfect.  Even out of the shower.

He spotted me watching him as he walked by, and winked.  And that was it.  It wasn’t sexual, it wasn’t tacky – it was as though we were sharing an intimate, yet slightly humorous moment.  I wasn’t sure what that moment was, but I wanted to know.  Soon.

++

“Thank you all for coming,” says Everett in his crisp British accent.  “I know it’s early, but I wanted to make sure you got this information from us and not over the phone.”

He slides dossiers to us.  As we open and read them, he continues.  “We’re at a critical moment now.  Intelligence has done some calculations on zombie movements and we fear a large uprising is happening.  Jason’s forces are dwindling, so he is using some kind of supernatural ability and raising corpses from the ground—“

Everett says this calmly, as though everyone knew this, but in reality there has never been a zombie raised from the ground before.  Ever.  All zombies come from fresh humans who are bit and infected.  Naturally this raises immediate suspicion on our parts.  So Greg says,

“Impossible.”

“I know, Greg, it sounds impossible—“

“It is impossible,” Greg says.  “That’s ... that’s borderline magic, Everett.  That’s necromancy.  Jason is not a mage, he’s a zombie.”

“I know,” says Everett.  “We’re looking into it.  But we have accounts across the states and Canada of zombies coming out of the earth.  And ... skeletons, too.”

Greg huffs.  Stacey laughs out loud.  Lucie is staring at Everett with wide eyes.  I say, “Skeletons?”

“This is fucking Dungeons and Dragons shit, Everett,” Greg spits.

Everett puts his hands on the table, leans into us.  His face is grim, as though he’s been laughed at all night.  “I know it sounds ridiculous, Gregory.  All I’m saying is that there are reports and have been reports for the past two weeks of all sorts of animated dead wandering the countryside.  Farmers shooting walking skeletons who stumble into their cornfields, cats and dogs being mutilated by stiff, lumbering zombies with strangely untouched skin – as though they’ve been embalmed.  Now,” he stands again, and starts pacing, “we’ve all been aware of Jason’s danger to society for decades now, and the prophecies of his arrival have been circulating for centuries.  But the truth is that, whether or not these incidents are real, they pose a threat.  Jason is an immediate danger now, and we’re going to take him out.”

By “we”, Everett obviously means me, Greg, Lucie and Stacey.

“We’re going to ‘take out’ Jason?” says Lucie.  “It can’t be done.  His lair is impenetrable.”

“And disgusting,” Stacey amends.

“We’ve got recon working on that right now,” says Everett.  “We’re starting initial strikes tomorrow night, surgical strikes to try and thin the horde out there.  You guys will be activated in one week.”

Greg slams his fist on the table, visibly furious.  “Are you kidding me?  You want us – four of us – to walk in and kill Jason?  What about the Foster reports?”

“We’ve got new information—“

“Oh, he can be killed now?  Is that what you’re saying?”

Greg can get a little hot tempered sometimes.  It’s pretty amusing, considering how short and stocky he is.

“I’m saying he can be hurt,” says Everett, with a tone in his voice that he doesn’t use very often, a tone that shuts Greg up and reminds me of fights we used to have, long ago.  “If you’ll let me explain,” Everett continues.  “We recently sent a team up to the Rocky mountains in Montana in search of whatever artifact Jason got his abilities from.  We think we found it two days ago.  In the middle of the woods they found a small clearing, perfectly circular, and in the middle of the clearing was a white altar.  It was pristine; not a scratch or stain or bird droppings.  Nothing.”

Everett walks over to the pane of glass and touches it.  A menu appears, and he quickly presses buttons until a picture of the altar appears on screen.  It is simple, a circular pedestal, not unlike the altars used in ancient Greece, where they sacrificed goats to appease the gods.  It seems almost shiny, however, as though coated with a paint gloss.

Turning back to us, Everett says, “Our team took photos of the altar and sent them to intelligence, and we’ve come up with some ideas.  Primary is the idea that this altar works as a sort of “Picture of Dorian Gray”: it is pristine because Jason is so horribly zombified, and the more he decays, the more perfect the altar becomes.  This theory arose after one of the team members struck the altar with a chisel.”

Everett presses a part of the glass and the picture changes to a closeup of a hand, two fingers pinched around a small fleck of stone from the altar.  It, unlike the rest of the altar, is gray and brittle looking.

“A piece broke off and immediately became old and weathered.  Shortly after taking this picture it crumbled entirely in his hand.  We didn’t think much of it at the time, but then we received photos from a vampire named Uriah who managed to get into Jason’s inner sanctum before being ambushed by his human lackeys.”

A third picture: Jason, the zombie leader, body and face blurred not by camera motion, but by some kind of distortion in the film or digitization (this is how every picture of Jason turns out), chained to the wall of his lair, as two enormous zombie beast men stand beside him on each side, and several cannibals hunch over dead bodies strewn on the ground.  It is dimly lit save for a few torches.  I’ve seen a couple of pictures of Jason’s inner sanctum before, and each one scares the shit out of me.

“Jason is distorted, obviously,” Everett says, “but if you’ll notice—“

“His finger isn’t,” I say.

“Nicely caught,” says Everett.

Indeed, all of Jason is distorted in the picture except for his right pinky finger, which seems to shine compared to the brown-purple blob that is what Jason looks like on camera.

“Picture of Dorian Gray,” says Greg.  “Son of a bitch.”

“Exactly,” says Everett, “except this one works opposite.  If we destroy the altar, we think that Jason will revert to being mortal.”

“So why haven’t we done it yet?” says Stacey, who has finally become alert.  I think she just wants to smash something.

“Two reasons,” Everett replies.  “First, we don’t know what actually will happen when the altar is smashed.  And really we won’t know until we do it, which brings up the second reason – we don’t know how the zombies and cannibals will respond when Jason turns human.  They may still ally with him, or they may tear him to bits.  We can only assume, and we do.  A lot.”

Everett looks at his watch, which makes us all glance at the clock.  It’s an hour to sunrise.  “I’ll make this quick,” he says.  “We want you in there when we destroy the altar.  We want Jason human.”  He hesitates.  “And we want him alive.”

“WHAT?” the four of us say simultaneously.

6.

Two hours later, an insidiously annoying ringtone blares into my ear.  Startled, I practically jump out of bed, grab my cell phone – and see that Eddie is not on the bed.  My heart drops like a stone.

A quick glance around the room shows that he’s not in the room.  I get up, head to the bathroom.  The door’s wide open, he’s not there.  I rush to the short balcony on the other side of the room.  The sliding glass door isn’t open, and when I open it, he’s not outside.

“Eddie?” I call.  No answer.

I check under the beds.  Nothing.  The closet is also empty.  My mouth has become very dry.

Entering the hallway outside our room, I quickly check both sides.  So far, nothing but housekeeping knocking on doors.  I rush to the one closest to me, an older Hispanic woman with lots of life experience etched into her facial features.  “Excuse me,” I say, “have you seen a small boy around here?  Five years old?  Brown hair, brown eyes?”

She thinks for a moment.  “No, señor,” she says, seemingly a little afraid to speak any further, not out of fear of me, but more of the English language.  I forgive her and run down the hallway, checking doors, seeing if he’s hiding in any of the rooms housekeeping is cleaning.  My heart is eager to rip itself out of my chest, and my senses are heightened even past their already superhuman ability.  I feel like I can see through walls.  I smell the lotion the housekeeping staff is wearing.  I sense every grain of dirt on the floor with my bare feet.  But none of these gets me any closer to Eddie.

My brain spins with thoughts of what happened to him.  Are humans involved in this somehow?  Did the vamps send their apprenti to come snatch him away from right under my nose?  Or was it another clan?  Whatever it is, it’s starting to burrow a deep pit in my stomach.

I pass by a small room with the ice machine, heading to the door outside – and stop.  Take a few steps back.  Look into the room.

Standing in front of a soda vending machine, dollar bill in hand, is Eddie.  He is trying desperately to get the dollar bill into the slot, but just can’t reach it.  If I weren’t so worried sick I’d take a picture, it’s so cute.  He notices me, lowers his hand, and says, “Hi Sam!”

I run up to him, give him a big bear hug, lifting him into the air.  “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” I say.  “We have got to establish some rules here, buddy!  What are you doing?”

“I wanna soda pop,” he says.

“I notice that.  Let me help.”

I angle myself so that he can easily slide the dollar bill into the machine.  “What kind of soda do you want?” I ask.

Eddie puts a finger to his lips, as though thinking intensely.  I love it when kids emulate adults.

He points to the orange soda button towards the bottom.  “I want or’nge!” he happily proclaims.

“Orange, huh?”  I say.  “You sure?”

He nods intently.  So I lower him down to the button and he pushes it.  The soda machine clicks and whirrs, as internal devices snatch the soda from its podlike status, sending it through what I can only assume are a series of tubes into the collection crevasse at the bottom.  I set Eddie on the ground.  He eagerly grabs the soda.

Kneeling beside him, I say, “Hey, Eddie, I need you to do me a favor.  Can you do me a favor?”

He responds by shoving the soda can in my face.  “Open!”

I narrow my eyes at him.  “What do you say?”

He lowers his face, instantly ashamed.  “Pleeeeeeese?”

“That’s better.”  I take the orange soda and pop the top, handing it back to him.  He slurps the drink, holding it with both hands.  What was tiny in my hand is massive in his.

“Eddie, will you do me a favor?” I repeat.  He nods and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

“I need you to stay by me at all times, okay?  I don’t want you to ever be out of my sight.  Do you understand?”

He nods.

“What do I want you to do, Eddie?”

He stops, stutters, then thinks, not as though he hasn’t listened, but because his developing brain is struggling to figure out how to say what I just said.  “You want to see me,” is what he finally says.  I smile.

“Close enough.”

++

Driving carefully but quickly, we make it back into the City just in time for rush hour traffic.  We’re somewhere in Manhattan and I’m getting nervous.  I’m not originally from NYC.  I was born and raised in the deserts of Idaho, so big cities kind of freak me out.  I call the safehouse and ask for someone to pick us up.

I park the motorcycle in an alleyway so as to not alert people that I may be a vampire.  I realize this is ludicrous, since vamps only come out at night, but humans can easily get frightened of anything.  Eddie and I walk to a nearby deli, where we order food, him a grilled cheese sandwich and me as sub with as much meat stuffed into it as possible.  We sit outside at a table and listen to the roar of the city.

About thirty minutes later a black car approaches.  The two front doors open at once and I immediately see Kacey.  She runs to Eddie and gives him a huge hug.  They both start crying.  I stand, putting my arms on Kacey’s shoulders.  “I told you he’d be okay.”

She turns, kisses me on the cheek.  “I’m glad you’re okay too, Sammy.”

The driver of the car is Oscar Ritter, the chieftain of the Manhattan werewolf clan, and general liaison to all werewolf clans in the New York City area.  Somewhat of a legend to wolves and humans, Oscar is one of the few werewolves that has a place on the city council, as well as a strong voice in city politics.  He is a proud werewolf and is old enough (not certain, he estimates roughly 250 years old) to be able to control his shapeshifting specifically.  In other words, when he wants to be a werewolf, he becomes one.  Such power requires many nights of meditation and a “gift to the full moon,” as he puts it.  Few werewolves know what this gift is, and those who do refuse to tell the rest of us.

Oscar comes to me and wraps me in a great bear hug, lifting me off the ground slightly.  One of my favorite things about Oscar is that he likes to be in the center of the action.  If something is happening in the NYC area and it’s affecting werewolves, chances are he will be there, right in the middle of the action.

“Good to see you again, Samuel,” Oscar says, in that broad, booming voice of his, tinged slightly with a German accent his mother left him over two hundred years ago.  “I am glad that you have made it safely.”

“I thank you, Oscar,” I reply, my tone a little more formal than usual.  I’ve only met Oscar three times prior to right now, and while he is a congenial man, he is also a large figure, both literally and figuratively.  He is, in essence, a werewolf celebrity.  In the New York Post his nickname is “Wolf Man,” like the old Bela Lugosi movie.  When he sits at city council meetings he sometimes towers over the other councilmen, and his shoulders are as wide as they come.

Oscar ushers us back into the car, which he insists on driving, despite his huge frame barely fitting in the driver’s seat.  Kacey and Eddie take the back seat, and I hop in the passenger, almost shoulder to shoulder with Oscar, who begins the long, traffic-ridden drive to Eddie’s city safehouse.

“What news do you have?” I ask.

“The neighborhood in which the attack occurred has been combed over,” Oscar says.  “The citizens have been interrogated.  There are no zombies there.”

I probably shouldn’t be as surprised as I am.  “No zombies?!  That’s impossible; there were three hundred of them lying in a pile in the middle of the street!  They couldn’t have gotten rid of that many bodies so quickly.”

“They could very well have,” Oscar corrects, “and something tells me that they have also instructed the neighbors to keep quiet about the whole mess.  We won’t know until we interrogate them tonight.  Well, not we, but human ambassadors.  We are looking at this as an attack on the werewolf community in particular.”

“Because of Patrick?”  I ask.

“Because of a lot of things, Patrick being one of them.  Eddie being another, though he, nor your sister, are werewolves, they are still family in the clans and will be treated as such.”

We start a long drive over a bridge.  It looks familiar, and then I realize it’s the same bridge I just drove on.  We’re going back to New Jersey, which is in the opposite direction of Eddie’s safehouse.

“Where are we going?”

“Skyroad has been compromised,” says Kacey.  “We’re going to another house.”

“What happened,” I say, slowly becoming unsurprised about all the ridiculous shit that is going on.

“Can we..?” Kacey says to Oscar.  Oscar nods.

“The car has been thoroughly investigated.  You’re fine.”

“There were zombies at Skyroad,” says Kacey.  I adjust my position so that I can better look at her.  “Around 08:00, the place was just overrun.  We barely made it out.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this over the phone?” I say.

“We were in a bit of turmoil, bad stuff was going down, we were on the move, and I just wanted my son back,” says Kacey, her voice quivering a bit.  “That’s why.  Plus I knew you two needed your rest and I didn’t want to scare you anymore.  It was a bit of luck that got us out.  Davis was on watch but he had gone inside to go take a piss or something and plus we hadn’t had any problems for the past two weeks.  It was very quiet.  Well, it’s eight in the morning and everyone’s exhausted, worried sick about you and Eddie, and Davis wasn’t thinking straight so he walks off, leaves the front door unlocked ... and that’s when they arrived.  Not just one or two of them, like it was some random attack.  There were at least fifty of them, young ones, rushing through the door, breaking through windows.  So we were unlucky there.  We didn’t lose anyone, thank god.  Davis flushed the toilet and an arm broke through the doorway, he says, grabbing at him.  His first move is to hit the alarm and his second move is hacking at the arm until it’s on the ground.”

Little Eddie’s fast asleep.  Kacey is running her fingers through his hair.  I can smell that she is calmer now than she was before.  Something about the lack of sweat, or the cooling of sweat, combined with indescribable pheromones that most humans actually can smell but don’t act upon as much as they should.

“Kycinzki is awake before I am,” Kacey continues, “rousing me out of bed, breaking the window completely out, hoisting me over his shoulder before I even have a chance to ask what’s going on.  Not that I have to.  I can hear the groans of the zombies downstairs and outside.  Pounding on the door.  A couple of gunshots.  I think Davis screams at some point, but like I said he came out okay.

“James unrolls the emergency rope ladder and starts climbing down the side of the house – with me still on his shoulder.  I’m too terrified to respond.  And once we’re on the ground we see the extent of everything.  Zombies everywhere.  It’s more like two hundred at this point.  And they’re fresh and they’re excited because they’re being whipped by a bunch of smarties.  I swear I saw Macaroni in there.”

“No way,” says Oscar, who must’ve just heard this.

“I saw his face, I think.  I know, it’s crazy, but they were coming in droves and they had a purpose.  Anyway, we’re on the ground and there’s a bunch of z’s around us, with no visible means of escape.  So how do we get out?  Well, apparently while we were defending ourselves, a small zombie brigade ... troop ... whatever, had started attacking nearby houses.  It was starting to become chaos, real Z War kind of stuff, and you could already hear the apaches in the distance.  A couple of z’s manage to break into this guy’s car – as he was driving it.  I don’t know, he must’ve panicked or something, slowed down, but they broke the glass and grabbed the guy.  Ripped him right out of the car.  Like, half of him, I mean.  The top half.  Really gross.  So then the bottom half is dead and his foot falls all the way on the gas pedal, screaming off the road – and plows right into the zombies in front of us.  I kid you not.  This all happens in, like, seconds.  It’s one thing and then the other, you know?”

I love Kacey when she starts telling a story.  Very animated, loves to move her hands.  And if you watch her eyes you can see her reliving the event in her mind.

We are officially Stuck in rush hour traffic.  Oscar makes liberal use of the horn.

“Right after that happens,” says Kacey, “Davis comes barreling through the ground level back door, z’s hot on his tail.  He opens the door and manages to jump out of the way just as the runaway car smashes into the house about ten feet away from us.  Zombie blood and gore splatters everywhere.  If Davis were two seconds late he would’ve been creamed.”

“It’s all in the timing,” I say.

Kacey has a sly grin.  “I guess.  So now there’s a big gaping hole in front of us and we scramble through it, find someone who isn’t scared shitless, and get a ride out of town.”  She eases back into her chair, fingers still in Eddie’s tangled brown hair, her breath slowing as the memory eases itself out of her immediate mind.

“Jesus,” I say.  “And Manhattan’s okay?”

“The Lower East Side is in lockdown right now,” Oscar says, his broad booming voice filling the car, “but all of the z’s have been eliminated.  We have spent most of the morning removing the corpses until we got the call that a new house in Jersey had been set up.  It’s really very gorgeous, much nicer than the old house.”

The sun is starting its long winding down period.  In three hours or so we’ll have darkness on what I can only assume will be one hell of a night.  The cars are thinning on the highway, and Oscar has started to speed up.  Soon we’re cruising, well on our way to wherever this house is.

“Oscar,” I say, “when the vamps got Patrick, they ... they ripped him apart and grabbed something.  Do you know what it is?”

Oscar shakes his head.  “I know nothing about that.  All I know is that I’ve got calls left and right from vamp spokespeople and clan leaders and even some really weird “zombieists”, all asking for retribution ... as though I’m the man to deliver it.  A memorial fund for Patrick has already been set up; there are werewolves at a vigil in Central Park.   Plenty of police there, of course.  And we’ve already got reports coming in of potential werewolf attacks around the city.  Most humans still believe that werewolves only come out during the full moon, so we’ve been trying to keep them thinking that, despite the fact that it’s not true.”

We’re driving in the country now, past the lights of the city.  The sun is nearing the horizon.  I feel my eyes start to get heavy.  It’s funny how quickly sleep catches up to you when there is no adrenaline coursing through your blood.  Like it’s waiting in the shadows for when everything’s okay, so that it can return and lull you back into its calm, comforting arms.  Kacey must feel the same way, because her head is against the window, her eyes falling shut, then flipping open quickly.  This repeats a few times.

“So,” I say, after a moment of silence.  “What’s going on.”

Oscar chuckles warmly.  “You’ve got me.”

5.

My cell phone is the thing that wakes me up.  Buzzing at the side of my hip, it knocks me back into consciousness.  Groggy, I pull myself up to sitting position.  The first thing I notice is the enormous pile of half-charred zombie bodies in front of me.  The second thing I notice is my enormous headache.  And the third thing I notice is that one of our motorcycles is missing.  Goddammit.  They escaped after all.

I reach down, grab my cell phone and flip it open.  It’s Misha.  By this point she’s most likely starving and confused and wondering how the hell to find someone and bite them.  I push the ignore button.  She’ll have to wait.

Besides, the time on the phone’s front says it’s an hour until sunlight, and the last place I want to be when day comes is not in my own comfy bed.

I slowly walk over to my kinsmen, legs rubbery, mouth strangely drier than usual.  They are still unconscious, and it takes a while to rouse them up.

As he wakes, Greg says, “What the hell just happened?”

“Not sure,” I say.  “I think the kid was involved, though.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” says Greg, and he slowly stands up and stretches his limbs.

Stacey and Lucie wake up shortly after, Stacey swearing up a storm because her napalm gun broke (I think she still has some pent up anger about us), Lucie just frustrated because she lost her target.  Lucie’s one of those people – dedicated toward one goal and one goal only, and if she doesn’t get it, she mopes around for a week.  Fortunately children don’t just dissipate into the air (unless they’re vampires), so she may curse under her breath, but the game is still out there.

“So now what do we do?”  Stacey asks, walking to the motorcycles.  “We’re short a bike, we’ve got nothing to show HQ.  Daylight is in an hour.  I’m fucking thirsty, and someone broke my goddamn napalm.”

“I think you broke your napalm when you fell on it, Stacey,” I say, picking up the random pieces of her broken napalm.

“Fuck you,” she delightfully replies.

“We’ve got blue on the horizon,” Greg curtly reminds us.  We all glance over at the beginnings of the dawn, which is apparently coming faster than any of us thought.  Typical weathermen for you; think they know when the sun will rise, but they’re never right.

“Stacey, you ride with Greg,” I say as I start walking to my bike.  The one that was stolen was Stacey’s, and she doesn’t look happy about it either.

“I don’t want to ride with Greg!  Where’s my fucking bike?”

“The werewolf and the kid stole it, dumbass,” says Kacie, usually reserved but seemingly impatient tonight.  She grabs her helmet from the bike’s seat.  “You’re a twig, Greg won’t notice at all.”

“She’s right, I won’t notice,” says Greg as he fits the helmet onto his head.

My hip vibrates again.  Misha must be in agony.  I hope she hasn’t run off.

“I don’t have a fucking helmet!” Stacey cries, and her voice has just the right amount of childlike color to it that it instantly makes the three of us laugh, which only pisses Stacey off more.  “Don’t fucking laugh at me!  What if we crash?  What if Greg skids the bike or something and my head goes crashing into the ground?  Do you not think about these things?”  She’s looking directly at me with this last line.

“I think about them all the time, sweetie.  Now get on the bike.”

Stacey swears under her breath as she gets behind Greg on his motorcycle.  Kacie has flipped open her cell phone and is making a very important call to the cleanup crew of human apprenti who will be cleaning this mess up.  Good thing it’s in vampire territory – humans would have a lot more explaining to do about this than we do.  The fire is out, the smell of burnt flesh is fading.  The sky is lightening.  We take off.

++

When I open the door to my apartment, Misha is curled up in the fetal position next to the door.  I can’t tell if she’s in torpor or if she’s just lost her mind.  Her eyes are closed, and judging from the faint scratch marks on the walls and door, I can tell she was aching to get out.  I gingerly step over her nubile body and head to the windows, sliding the heavy dark curtains over the pane before sunlight breaks.  My body aches and I’m exhausted.  I remove my leather jacket and my belt with various anti-zombie and werewolf weaponry attached.

My eyes move back to Misha.  She is draped in a white slip, the spaghetti straps dangling at her arms.  Her head rests heavily on the floor.  She looks lost, even in sleep.

Despite my extreme desire to sleep, I crouch down, crawling to her.  When I am close I can feel her breath on my skin.  Involuntary habits are hard to break.  A vampire’s breath is stale and cold.  It’ll take her a few years for her body to fully adjust.  I know mine hasn’t yet.

I crawl over her body, until I’m somewhat behind her.  Wrapping my arm under her head for support, I gently lift her up into my arms, her head resting against my chest.  She is cold.  The wounds from my fangs are healing quickly.  Blood still stains her skin, though her slip is clean – she put it on after the bite.

I take a deep breath – then laugh immediately.  Habits really are hard to break.  Bracing for the pain, I bear my teeth, roll up my sleeve and bite into my wrist.  Just a small bite, don’t want my life fluids gushing out.  Then I place the open wound on Misha’s lips.  She, already roused by the smell of fresh blood, suckles on the wound instantly, and all tension in her body ceases to be.  The sucking is sloppy at first, but then it’s gentle and soothing.  Misha mewls like a kitten, and I smile.

Making a vampire is easy.  You just find someone you want to feed off of and bite them.  Three things happen after that – most of the time, they turn into vampires.  Occasionally they die, mostly when you’re starving and you suck all the blood right out of them.  And some don’t become vampires.  They just lose some blood and wake up the next morning like nothing happened except a minor flesh wound.  No one really knows why this is.  Most of the people in that third category are snatched up by the human government for testing.  Most never come back.

So making a vampire is easy.  But siring a vampire ... that take work.  And sacrifice.  Diligence.  Loyalty.

My sire was a six-hundred year old Native American man from the plains of the Midwest.  He was also my third true love.  His blood tastes like the sweetest agave nectar.

Misha’s sire will be a former 26-year-old, current 3-year-old vampire who still forgets to not breathe.

 I hope my blood tastes as good.

++

“Where are you now?”

I glance up at the flickering neon sign.  “The Sunshine Inn.  In a town called Avery.  Listen, Eddie and I are exhausted.  It’s been a long night.  We’re both fine, we didn’t get bitten by anything.  We just need sleep.”

“Sam, I want to see my son,” says Kacey, her voice quivering.

“You’ll see him.  I swear to you, we’re going to take a nap and then I’ll be on my way.  We’re on a motorcycle and I’m beat.  If my eyes glaze over while I’m driving we could be hamburger on the freeway.  Just trust me, okay?  We got out alive, and it’s daylight, so there won’t be any vamps following us.  Or zombies, I hope.”

I hope is right.  Someone had to tell those z’s where we were going.  The smarties may have some kind of loose hive mind with Jason, but they don’t all have that, do they?  Jason is the central hub of a large conduit of “smart” zombies, who in turn control the unnatural mass of “dumb” zombies as best they can.  This means if there is a mole, then Jason knows who it is.

“You really think there’s someone on the inside?” Kacey asks, as if reading my thoughts.

“I don’t know.  How else would z’s get there?  And vamps?  They were both looking for Eddie, and ... and for whatever was inside Patrick.”

There is a brief silence, and suddenly I feel like Kacey knows more about this.  “What was inside Patrick?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“You’re lying,” I press.

“Whether or not I’m lying is irrelevant right now,” she says, “because I’m not going to discuss politics while my son is not within my sight.”

“He’s sleeping, Kac, do you want me to wake him?”

“No,” she concedes.

“He’s snoring?  Do you want to hear him snore?”

She chuckles.  A pause.  Then,

“Maybe.”

I walk over to Eddie’s bedside, sitting on the bed opposite him.  I hold the phone to his face.  His snoring is light and childlike.  I can hear Kacey burst into tears on the other end, and I quickly pull the phone away, so that her sobbing doesn’t wake up Eddie.

“You see?” I say.

“Thank you,” she replies, in between sobs.

“Now I hate to be a party pooper but I’m going to sleep.  I’ll call you in a couple of hours, guaranteed.  If I’m still out of it by then I’ll sleep more, but I should be okay.  Okay?”

“Okay,” says Kacey.  “Thank you.”

“No problem.  I’m just sorry I couldn’t get him to a safehouse sooner.”

We say goodbye and I hang up, quickly punching in a time two hours from now when my phone’s alarm will wake me up so that I can give a status update to Kacey.  She was, in fact, worried sick, as was everyone else in our clan.  They were minutes away from issuing an Amber Alert when I called, thinking that if Eddie or me or Patrick hadn’t shown up by daylight that we were probably kidnapped by vampires.  Which would’ve been the case had we not been swamped by zombies.

Throwing my shoes off, I lay on top of the covers, still in my clothes which smell of sweat and zombie stink.  Eddie’s snoring has faded, leaving me to my own thoughts, which suddenly cascade into being like a flash flood.  Where did the zombies come from?  Where did the vampires come from?  And why two different sets of vampires?  The first set were likely Rohrsachs, and the second were confirmed Teresinis ... those two families are always fighting for turf, but never for objects – or people.  The Rohrsachs are a notoriously Luddite family – no phones, no computer, nothing.  Once they are vampires they rely solely on their vamp abilities to make it in the world.  If there were castles in America they would surely live in them.

Teresinis, on the other hand, are slightly more technologically inclined.  Obviously if they were riding motorcycles instead of turning into bats or cats or whatever it is they want to become.  So they both have nothing in common when it comes to items.  Why, then, did those vamps rip into Patrick to get that pendant?  Why didn’t they just come after Eddie?  Apparently everyone knows about Eddie now except me, and that’s a little frustrating.

I look at Eddie.  Just what is your deal, kid?

And that’s the last thing I remember before I fall asleep.

4.

“STACEY!” I shout over the roar of liquid fire.  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

I can’t hear her reply but I can hear her maniacal laughter.  The bitch hates zombies, what can you do.  Of course, what we came here for is in the middle of those zombies, and napalm might make it difficult to extract them when every single z is on fire, but Stacey is an impulse girl, and I love her for it.

Greg and Lucie have begun hacking through the zombies with their various sword-like implements.  Greg is a nerd and has a katana and a wakizashi , though his skills with the blades are impressive.  Zombie limbs go flying as he burrows in.  Lucie has a special sharpened spade, which she wields with skill.  They are both trained in making pathways through zombies.

Stacey, on the other hand, is good at setting things on fire.

Me, I’m tasked with finding a way to get the kid out of the middle of it all.  I tossed the night vision goggles in there because I know I’m going to have to give the werewolf some help until he can get free.  Then I’ll get the kid and the wolf can go to hell for all I care.  Though at this point, with the sheer amount of fire in the vicinity, it’s not hard to see at all.  What a waste.

I start by carving my own path through the zombies with the two beat up machetes I love so dearly.  They were given to me by my father – my actual father, not my sire – with the explicit instructions to “fucking slaughter any zombie you see. “  I was ten at the time, and I’ve taken those words to heart ever since.

The problem with zombies that are on fire is that they don’t really care.  Instead of flailing about like any normal person would, zombies just keep right on chugging along, forcing you to adjust to their fiery asses.  So with each successful decapitation comes the threat of catching my skirt on fire, and that’s something that I do not want to happen.  I spent good money on this skirt.

A few minutes in, the zombies are falling like dominoes, and yet there are still too many of them.  I catch a glimpse of the kid and the wolf in the middle.  He’s doing a good job of keeping them at bay, despite being relatively unarmed.  The kid is on the ground, unconscious.  I would be too if I were in his tiny Converses.

The wolf briefly meets gaze with me.  He narrows his eyes, a look of surprise and confusion on his face.  Then he is tackled by a tall zombie wearing a tuxedo.  Suddenly I am swarmed by them myself.  And they’re actually grabbing at me.  What the hell is this?  Zombies don’t do this to vampires.  We’re undead, they don’t want to eat us.  Why are they being so grabby?

A particularly loathsome de-fleshed zombie behind me manages to stick a hand in a place it’s not supposed to go.  I spin around, taking his head off with one quick swipe of my machete.  I’ve never had a zombie cop a feel before.  I assume his hand was very cold, though I can’t, and don’t want to, feel the sensation.

About a third of the zombies are on fire now, and Lucie and Greg are literally crawling on a small hill of corpses.  A few vampires living in the houses on the street have come out to watch the action.  The cowards.  How about grabbing a butcher knife or a gun and coming out to help?  It’s not like you have a kid or a dog to save.

There are still about a hundred z’s left, and the inner circle has completely collapsed upon the wolf and the kid.  I’d put our chances at saving them very slim.  Werewolves can be feisty little shits, but with a few dozen of the undead pressing on top of you, it’s kind of hard to, you know, move your arms to defend yourself.

Stacey has run out of napalm.  She switches to her favorite implement of melee destruction – a big fat mace.  You know, the sticks with the spiked iron balls on the top?  Yeah.  She has one, about three feet long with a big fat ball at the top, and a bunch of little spikes and two longer spikes at opposite ends, and one super long spike at the very top.  She’s incredibly adept at using it, and in a matter of seconds can fell half a dozen zombies just by swinging the thing in a big sideways arc.  The big spikes stab into the z head and she can use the “flat” part to push other z’s out of the way, for better positioning.  It’s a beautiful weapon.

Can you tell that we used to date?

We’re all a couple minutes into random hacking and slashing when, from the middle of the zombie pile, we hear the most bone-chilling scream ... no, roar that I’ve ever heard.  It sounds like it’s coming straight out of the fires of Hell itself.  Then, there is a big white burst of light and a sonic boom, which knocks all of us unconscious, including the zombies.

++

I feel someone nudge at my shoulder.  My eyes open slowly, and I am covered in zombies.  I shriek instinctively, but quickly calm when I realize they’re all dead.  Turning my head, I see Eddie lying supine, his cheek pressed against the bloated belly of what appears to be some former acrobat or trapeze artist or something.  He’s staring at me, his face more mature now than I’ve ever seen it.  Kids shouldn’t have to go through this kind of trauma at such an early age.  It’s forcing him to grow up.

I feel a pang of guilt rip through my chest.  This is all my fault.  We should’ve gone through the hills, we shouldn’t have gone through vamp territory.  I should’ve gotten permission from the Teresini’s, gotten an escort.  I didn’t account for zombies in vamp territory but you should always account for zombies in any location.

Plus I was drunk most of the time.  A poor way to start any excursion.

“Are you okay, Eddie?” I say.

He nods.

“Did any of them bite you?”

He shakes his head.  Then he says, “I stopped them.”

“You what?”

“I stopped them.”  He starts looking at the fallen zombies around us.

“Um ... okay.”

The next ten minutes are spent jostling around the zombie pile, looking for a good spot for me to use my slightly superhuman strength to push our way out.  I finally find a brittle spot amidst the pile and force a hole open.  Wriggling out, I take Eddie’s hand and pull him out as well.  We survey the scene.

Nearly three-hundred zombies lie in an enormous pile in the middle of the street.  Some of them are on fire, creating a stench ten times worse than normal zombie stink.  It’s still pitch black save for the fire, and I have no idea where my night vision goggles went.  I can see the houses in the distance.  Vamps are staring at the scene through their windows, looking at me in particular.  Guess they didn’t expect anyone to come out alive, did they?

Now, as to how I got those night vision goggles in the first place, and why napalm was being thrown everywhere, and how all these zombies suddenly died without being decapitated or having something burrowed into their brains ... these are all questions that I would love to answer in the comfort of my home, sipping a scotch and reading a newspaper.

I pick up Eddie and carefully step down the pile of bodies.  It’s feels satisfying to touch solid concrete again.  Less fleshy.

Some of these zombies look less like zombies and more like ... wait a minute.  The answer to my earlier questions is revealed when I spot a young looking vampire lying unconscious on the street.  She’s out cold.  I’d check for vital signs but vamps don’t have any.  But I can tell she’s a new vamp because her chest is still moving – still breathing, even though she doesn’t need it.  Some involuntary habits are hard to break.

Beyond her are a couple of other vamps in similar clothing, with all types of cutting devices around them.  I count four total.  One of them threw the night vision goggles to me.  But which one?  And why did they decide to be so philanthropic to a werewolf?

Glancing at Eddie, I think the answer is pretty clear.  And suddenly I start wondering if he really did stop all these zombies.  All I remember before being knocked unconscious was an ear-splitting howl, coming from ... very close to me.

“Eddie,” I say.  “When you say you ‘stopped’ the zombies, what exactly do you mean?”

Eddie thinks about it for a second.  “I fell asleep, and then I was mad, and I stopped them.”

“Why were you mad?”

“Because there were zombies and we were stuck.”

“And then you ... stopped them?”

Eddie nods.

Kneeling beside him, I put a hand on his shoulder.  “How, Eddie?  How did you stop them?”

Eddie looks at me with his big brown eyes and simply shrugs.  He doesn’t know.  And why should he.  He’s just a kid after all.  Since when do five-year-olds know anything?

There is no sound save for the fire slowly burbling out on a small pile of zombie corpses just a few feet away.  The smoke rising smells of burnt flesh, and I bet if I looked hard enough into it I could see the faces of the damned.  But I’m too tired and freaked out to indulge in such pleasantries.

Ahead of us on the street are the vehicles the vamps used to get here: four crotch rocket motorcycles, seemingly “tricked out” as the kids say, for added acceleration and top speed.  They look downright illegal.  And stamped on the side is the Teresini family logo: a capital T that is actually two snakes, the vertical one biting the horizontal one, blood dripping down its long scaly body.  Pretty badass if you ask me.

I pick up Eddie and walk over to the motorcycles.  They’re all still on, engines idling like cats ready to pounce.  “Have you ever been on a motorcycle, Eddie?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“They’re pretty fun.  Here,” I hand him a helmet lying on the street, “wear this.”

The helmet is entirely too big for him but it’ll work for now.  I set him on the back of the bike, quickly teaching him what to hold on to.  He seems frightened by less frightened than he was when we were nearly eaten by zombies, so I think this will be okay.  After making sure he’s secure, I hoist myself onto the bike, and with a quick heel to the kickstand, we’re off, gliding through the fog that permeates this vamp territory, getting as far away from what happened as possible.  The wind whipping through my hair is a welcome change to the heat and groaning.  My lungs fill with fresh air, exhaling the last of the smoke, the zombie breath, and my fear.

Eddie is the centerpiece of all of this now.  Under orders to transfer him securely to a safehouse in upstate New York, we found ourselves caught anyway, deep in a neighborhood we should not have been in.  Now Patrick’s dead, and whatever was in his body was stolen.  It must’ve been important if it was surgically placed inside him.  Now the vamps have it.  Something tells me those vamps weren’t Teresini’s either.  Vamps don’t usually pull the mist stunt in their hometown.  They were probably Rohrsach, which means we might be on the verge of yet another vampire turf war.

In minutes the fog lifts and we’re back on a regular street.  The sight of headlights from cars on the highway is a welcome relief.  Now I just have to find a safe place to settle and call the chieftain.  Kacey must be worried sick.  Oscar will be too, if Eddie is as special as the smartie said he was.

As I merge onto the highway my mind reels with questions.  Zombies knew we were going to be in that neighborhood.  So did those vamps.  The car was either sabotaged or there were charges on the ground ... it’s impossible to know, but everything seems to point to a mole on the inside.  Oscar must hear this.  If there are any clans defecting to vamps or z’s it could be devastating to all of us.  Talk about taking decades of civility and peace and shattering them in an instant.

We pass a sign for a township and, more importantly, a truck stop with a 24 hour restaurant.  My stomach throatily sings its love for food and I take the exit, turning into a small town called Avery.  I park the bike at the front of the stop and help Eddie off and out of his helmet.

“Are you hungry, Eddie?” I ask.

He nods voraciously.

3.

Eddie and I have been walking for what seems like an hour, in near pitch black darkness, surrounded by fog and large looming trees on either side.  I’ve already exhausted one flare, but managed to use it to light a torch, wrapping a piece of my shirt around a thick tree branch and dousing it in the rest of the bourbon in my flask.  It won’t thwart vamps, but it will light our way, which is more important at this point.  Even if the fog does go away, it’ll still be dark.

Having sobered up quickly, I’ve decided that I’m more worried about zombies than vamps right now.  Vamps come and go but z’s truly are everywhere.  They come out of the woodwork.  It’s only a matter of time before we see one, and god I hope it’s a smartie.

“There are two types of zombies,” I say to Eddie, continuing my train of thought into speech.  “The smart ones are direct disciples of this Jason guy.  They can talk and still have some brain function.  I don’t know why, or how they get chosen.  The rest are dumb, mindless, shambling zombies who just want to eat your brains.”

“Why?” says Eddie.

“I have no clue.  It seems like if there is a God, He wants to punish us from multiple angles.”

I glance down at my cell phone, which I’ve had in my hand ever since we started walking.  Four hours until daylight and still no bars.  Kacey is probably worried sick by now.  I know I would be.  Eddie seems okay but I know he’s totally freaked out.  It’s like a Halloween gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Sometimes I forget that the general populace doesn’t really know about us.  Werewolves, or vamps, or zombies, etc.  I mean, we’re out there, the news reports on us, we have websites and Twitter accounts, documentaries and ebooks, but no one knows exactly what’s going on.  Humans don’t really think about the fact that vampires suck their blood, or zombies just eat them, or that werewolves hunt and kill for years until they develop the ability to restrain themselves.

I hear a rustling in the trees ahead of us, half a mile or so.  Something is moving, or barricading.  I motion for Eddie to stop.  Start smelling the air.  It’s still the same, dense rain air that I’ve been smelling for a while, mixed with earth and trees and a faint smell of smoke, leading me to believe that this is probably a neighborhood.  I wouldn’t dare go into any of those buildings.

“There’s something ahead,” I say quietly to Eddie.  “I want you to stay behind me.  Okay?”

Eddie nods, his eyes wide with fear.

We get about a hundred feet further when I catch it – the thick whiff of zombie stench.  If it’s disgusting to a human, imagine how much it reeks to a werewolf, who has ten times the smell power.  Really knocks you back.

Right now it’s not so bad, which means there aren’t a lot of them around.  Maybe ten, tops.  I turn around, kneel beside Eddie.  “Hey, man,” I say.  “Listen.  You’re a tough kid, you know that?  Did you know you were a tough kid?”

Eddie shakes his head.

“Well you are.  And in a couple of minutes some more bad guys are going to show up and I’m going to have to make sure they don’t get you, okay?  So here’s what I need you to do.  I need you to put your fear aside for a moment and be alert.  Does that make sense?”  Eddie shakes his head again.  “Okay.”  I take a deep breath.  The stench is getting closer.  “Zombies are coming, and they want to get you.  You don’t want that to happen.  That’s the last thing you want to happen.  So you have to make sure they don’t get you.  Can you do that?”

Eddie thinks for a second, then nods.

“Good!  Good.  I am going to do everything in my power to make sure those zombies don’t get anywhere near you, but if one slips by me, I need you to stay sharp.  If they grab you then you’re a goner.  Does that make sense?”

Eddie nods.

“Good.”

I can hear them groaning in the distance.  And some are grunting.  The grunters are the smart ones.  Two, maybe three tops.  I’ve underestimated the total number – maybe more like 20 or 30.

This is going to suck.

I pat my jacket and my belt in search of suitable weapons.  I still have the pistol with the silver bullets.  That will come in handy.  I also have my stake and the flare gun, but I don’t want to use that against zombies.  And I have the torch.  Smart zombies are afraid of fire but dumb ones aren’t.  And really neither of them should be because it doesn’t hurt them that much.

There is literally nothing on this road.  Just us and the street, and two sidewalks at either side, with trees lining them.  Beyond, I assume, fences and houses and vampires.  Vampires hate zombies.  I wonder why zombies are even here?  The vamps would’ve driven them out or just killed them at this point at night.  What the hell is going on around here?

(day two)

Eddie’s nose is wrinkled up.  He can smell them coming now, too.  The fierce stink of decomposing bodies.

The first one shuffles into view.  An old woman, her stomach distended from the mass of human flesh and meat stuffed inside.  Her head sits awkwardly on her shoulders.  It looks as if someone smashed a baseball bat against her neck a couple of times.  And behind her, a teenager, missing most of his teeth, his skateboarder clothes nearly ripped to shreds.  These are old z’s.

A third and a fourth enter, and I reach into my pocket for the pistol.  My training falls into one general category: accuracy.  A stake through the heart, a bullet through the brain.  That’s what it all boils down to.

The first shot fells the grandma, the second knocks the teenager down.  I should conserve my ammo.  Glancing around, I see nothing I can use for close combat.  I’m cursing myself for not bringing a spade or a machete or something.

I can hear Eddie sobbing behind me.  “Stay close,” I say.  “We’ll get through this.”

And that’s when the rest of the zombies come into view.

++

I decide to engage in a little foreplay with this one.  Sex is practically a taboo in the vampire world, especially for men, since it utilizes more blood than we’re willing to lose.  My male friends accuse us women, again, of having it easy; no need for an erection, no need for blood use, right?  Wrong.  We still flush.  Blood still pumps.  Memories of long ago encounters still make full use of the nerves in our bodies.  To be honest, sex is one of the most fun things a vampire can do.  Because, despite the electrifying sensation I get from biting a victim, it’s still not the same as a good old fuck.

Her name is Misha.  A beautiful girl, shapely and not horribly thin, large breasts, large green eyes.  For her I utilized the “playfully antagonizing” technique that seems to work for men all the time.  The more I teased her, the more she fell into the trap.  It was easy.  I should write a book.

Living in a world where vampires are widely known can be tough.  A lot of people don’t have them in their town, but in the big city they’re everywhere.  We have plenty of familiars, and most of them sign up on an online mailing list.  Technology is so wickedly wonderful.  We, of course, are illegal, and our activities are monitored closely by the government.  In Europe they have a system set up to distribute blood to vampires in exchange for public acknowledgement.  In other words, if you tell the government you’re a vampire, they will supply you with blood.  It’s a nice compromise, but never as fun as a fresh bite.  Here in America, however, they continue to be backward and dangerous, and the three vampire families rule the coasts like mafiosos.

Misha really liked being kissed behind the ear.  She purred with pleasure as my black lipstick covered lips lightly caressed the tiny hairs on her neck.  I felt the shivers down her spine.

“I’ve never done this before,” she said, her voice trembling with anticipation, chest heaving as she swallowed deep breaths.

“I know,” I whispered.

My phone rang.  Misha pulled me closer, told me to forget it, but she didn’t know about vampires.  We don’t have cell phones.  Except some of us do.

So now I’m in the bathroom as Misha waits patiently, talking to Everett.  He sounds pointed and nerdy, as always.

“What is it?”

“We’ve got a situation in Mountain Spring.”

“How bad?”

“Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news—“

“How. Bad.”

Everett swallows.  I could always tell he was intimidated by me.  “The good news is that we’ve got the talisman.  The bad news is that there are a couple hundred z’s wandering down a well-populated vampire suburb.”

“Oh, Jesus.  Who knows?”

“Just you and the kinsmen in Mountain Spring, who are terrified to leave their houses.”

I growl a little bit.  Vampires can be so stupid sometimes.  Zombies don’t want anything to do with vampires.  They just want humans.  “Why are they afraid?  They’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“That’s what we originally said, but they swear they’ve seen z’s attacking kinsmen. But that’s—“

“They’re lying.  They just want attention.”

“That’s not everything.  There’s a werewolf in there too.  He was in the car with the one who had the talisman.”

“So?  It’s nearly a new moon, we’ve nothing to worry about.”

“He has a child.”

“Again, so what?”

“We need that child alive, and unharmed.”

There’s a knock at the bathroom door.  Misha calls, “Dee?  Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” I shout back.  “Just ... consoling a girlfriend.”

“Oh,” Misha says.  She sounds unhappy.  Sorry, babe.

Everett says, “We need you there as soon as possible.”

“Everett, honey, I’ve got lunch in the other room.”

“Then grab a quick bite and get over here.  The team is waiting.”

“You said I was the only one who knew!”

“I was lying.  Get to HQ, now.”

And the phone is dead.  I flip it shut and tuck it in my back pocket.  Decisions, decisions.  Coming out of the bathroom, I see Misha laying on the bed, stripped naked, her fine, tanned skin laying in wait for me.  A lot of vitamin E went into that skin, I can tell.  I feel my body tingle a little bit, partially from the sensuality of the moment, and partially because it’s like looking at a big pork roast before a meal.  And I’m starving.

“Everything okay?” Misha says, her bright shiny red lipstick glimmering in the faint atmospheric glow of my apartment.  She has her hands above her head, hands clasped together, her body curved slightly, like a long feminine S.

“Everything’s fine,” I reply, stuttering.  I can’t believe I’m so taken aback by her beauty.  Usually, with women, it’s come in, bite, be done with it, but Misha is something else.

I like her.  I like her a lot.

I crawl onto the bed, my black nylons sliding across the bed spread.  Misha’s mouth parts a little bit, her eyes widening, pupils dilating.  Her cheeks flush.  I brush my lips beside her ear and she purrs like a kitten.

“Do you like me” I whisper.

She nods slowly, eyes fixated.

“Good,” I say.

I sink my teeth into her neck.  She screams at first, and then the scream turns into a moan of ecstasy.  I always forget that the victim loves the bite as much as I do.  I don’t blame them.  It is quite nice.

++

I did a stupid thing and used all the ammo.  I panicked, started shooting, and downed ten z’s, but there are more than ten z’s out there.  There’s more like a hundred.  Maybe two hundred.  I chucked the gun away, grabbed Eddie and started running in the other direction.  Luck, at the moment, has spared me, as there are no fast z’s chasing me.  The fast ones are the worst.  A mob is a terrifying thing, but to watch two or three fresh zombies, limbs still somewhat intact, rush at you is beyond terror.  It’s instinct.  When they come, you run, no questions asked.

My only objective is to get to the car.  My clan oath forbids me to fraternize with any vamps, no matter how dire the situation, so going into any of the possible houses on either side of the street is verboten.  If there are even houses there.  The fog refuses to lift, and at some point seems even thicker than before.  I can barely see my hand in front of my face.  The torch is dim, running on its last fumes.  Eddie looks sick.  I feel sick.  All I want to do is save this child, and the only way I can think about doing it is to get to that car and maybe try to fix it.  Easier said than done.

Even with the added benefits to being a werewolf – increased senses, slightly increased endurance and strength (as a human) – my legs still fight fatigue, and I try to block out the increasing ache that comes from my quad muscles and hamstrings.  If only it was a full moon, I could go twice as fast, lift ten times as much ... but for now I’ll have to rely on my human abilities.

We must’ve walked for an hour ... the car isn’t anywhere in sight.  The groaning of the zombies has all but disappeared, but there is no car.  I can’t even see the trees.  No light except the dim torch.  After a few minutes of running, I slow down, not to catch my breath, but because I have no idea where the hell I am.

The groans return.  But from a different place?  I stop, hold my breath for a moment to listen.  I can’t tell where it’s coming from.  I can’t tell where anything is coming from.  My heart is pounding out of my chest, I’m getting a weird sense of vertigo from the fog ... I haven’t been this scared of zombies in a long, long time.  They may pass by vampires (or used to, at least, until now), but they’ll eat a werewolf as much as a human.  Just as long as you’re alive, I suppose.

The groans are getting louder, and it sounds like they’re coming from all angles.  And now, something above all of that – the sound of smart z’s grunting to each other, communicating.  Like sheep dogs gathering the flock, they’re rounding up the wandering z’s and pushing them to our location.  Maybe.  Maybe they’re just pushing them down the street.

I glance at my right hand, suddenly aware of the cold there.  The torch is dead.  I fling into the darkness and am not surprised when it does not hit the ground.  The zombies are here, and we can’t see a thing.

So, time for plan B.

Reaching back, my hand grabs the sunlight flare gun tucked in my belt.  I check it to make sure it’s loaded, and then raise it high into the air.  The gun fires, and a bright flare rockets into the sky.  It hovers for a moment, then explodes into an even brighter flame.  They’re not called sunlight flares for nothing – the light is so intense it’s as if night has turned into day.

And all around us are zombies.  Roughly in a circle, about fifty feet away, shambling and groaning, pus-filled and broken, dragging legs and gaping mouths, tattered clothes and stomachs bloated.  Yes, definitely have not seen this kind of z action for a long time.

Eddie looks as though he’s going to shit his pants.  If he hasn’t already.

The heat from the flare pushes back the thick fog, and I can finally see the neighborhood.  Quiet street with trees on each side, and small, comfy looking houses surrounded by thick black barred gates.  A typical vamp neighborhood, the houses are either Victorian style of Tudor, or a mix of both.  A few techno savvy vamps have satellite dishes on their roofs, but most are bathed in darkness, especially now.  No vamp wants to stare directly at a sunlight flare.  It would burn.  A lot.

Scattered in between the dumb, unaware z’s are a few smarties ... I can tell because their gaze is more direct, their mouths aren’t gaping open, and their clothes are presentable.  They might be our only way out of this mess.

I find one particular smarty, a younger, fatter woman whose clothes look almost brand new.  “Hey.  You,” I say to her.  “You can understand me, right?”

“Uuuuggghh,” she replies.

“Can you speak?”

Her eyes slowly turn upward and to the right.  She’s thinking.  Depending on what caste she’s in, this may take a while.  A couple of seconds later, her eyes roll back to me.  “I ... speak,” she says, her voice hoarse and croaky.

“Why are you here?” I ask, slowly, enunciating each word.

“We ... want ...” she hesitates.  Her arm raises up, seems to point to me, only lower.

“Chiiiiild,” she says.  She’s pointing at Eddie, who, at acknowledgement of his existence, screams and latches onto my leg.

“It’s okay, Eddie, I’m going to get you out of this,” I say, stroking his hair.

So.  This is the reason we took the fast route through vamp territory instead of the longer, winding, scenic route.  I knew Eddie was special but I didn’t know he was that special.  If zombies want him, something must be going on because zombies don’t want anything.  Except to munch on brains, of course.

“Why do you want him?” I ask the portly smarty.

“Ss ... special,” she replies.

“Yes, I get that.  Why is he special?”

“Mmmmnnnn...” she starts, and I can tell I’m already over her head.  Even if she knew why, it would be impossible to get it out ofher.  And now the zombies are only twenty feet away.  I’m desperate.  So I’ll try something desperate.

“Eddie,” I whisper.  “You’re not going to like this, but trust me, it’ll be okay.”

Twisting around, I grab Eddie firmly by the collar and lift him up.  He starts screaming.  Then, with my free hand I snatch the stake from my belt and point the end of it at Eddie’s throat.  He starts screaming harder.

“You come any closer and I’ll run this right through his neck!”

The fat smarty looks at my quizzically.  I spin around, showing the other zombies and surveying their proximity to me.  They’re all nearing to about ten feet.  I spin back to the fat one.  She has a look of surprise.  Then, her mouth opens slowly, thin trails of saliva dripping across her maw.  From the back of her throat comes the most guttural, disturbing moan I’ve ever heard.  Her cheeks ripple slightly as she moans, and suddenly all of the zombies stop moving in one motion, as though trained to do so.  The shuffling stops.  The smarties stare at me with wide eyes.  For a moment there is silence.

I lower Eddie, stake still pointed at his neck.  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I whisper to him.  “Just go with me here.”  But he doesn’t understand and he’s crying so hard he’s starting to dry heave.  As much as I feel like an asshole, I have to put it aside, for his survival is more important than the contents of his stomach right now.

To the fat smarty, I say, “I want out of here.  Now.”

She stares blankly at me.  And then, from behind, a softer, more intelligent voice says, “You are lying.”

I spin around.  A tall, freshly killed zombie stands before me, decked out in a tuxedo stained with his own blood.  His eyes aren’t nearly as bloodshot as normal.  He has a deformed grin on his face, his teeth yellow and gnarled from snacking on bone.  “You are lying,” he says.  “You will not harm the boy.”

“You don’t think so?”  I say.  I grab Eddie roughly, shove him in front of this smarty.  “Why is he so important to you?”

“The Master wants him.”

The Master is Jason Phillips, the so-called first zombie.  The story I told Eddie in the car was accurate for Jason’s sake, but in truth he is likely not the first zombie in existence.  But he may be the first intelligent zombie.

“Why does the Master want him.”

The zombie smiles again.  “You ask too many questions, wolf.  Give us the boy.”

There is a flicker above us.  I glance upward.  The flare is dying.  We’ve got a minute, tops.

“If you take one more step I’ll stake him,” I say.

The zombie steps forward.  I stumble back a step.  This bluff is not going to work.  The light flickers again, dims significantly.  It’s more like torchlight out here now.

And then something hard and plastic smacks me in the back of the head.  I look down at the ground.  It’s a pair of goggles.

A pair of night vision goggles.

Looking up, I can’t see anything.  No one in the trees.  No one beyond the throng of zombies.  Nothing.

If this is divine luck, then praise be the gods.  I reach down and snatch the goggles just as the light gives out entirely.

Eddie faints.  And then, napalm.

2.

This anchorwoman’s voice is quite unappealing.  It’s like the squeal of tires mixed with running your nails down a chalkboard.  Thank Cain they don’t have chalkboards anymore.  She says,

“—while the governor of New York is not sure of the implications of this arrangement, the mayor of New York City is confident that the new leader will help solidify relations between humans and vampires.  We have with us Dr. Charles Gordon, a professor at ...”

Charles Gordon.  A lot of humans feel that since vampires once were human, that they can understand us with any amount of accuracy.  And this miserable sack of blood thinks he’s the best at it.  Charles Gordon looks like a very large man hit him with a very flat pan.  His nose is crooked to the left, his eyes are too far apart.  He is a beautiful case study in the disgusting asymmetry that is the human race.  And why, why would any self-respecting human put his face on the television?  It’s like watching a bipedal train wreck.  If I weren’t so drunk off sherry I would be doing something more worthwhile right now.

“... Good evening, Dr. Gordon.”

“Good evening, Melissa.”

“What is your take on the current situation?”

“Well, Melissa, it’s obviously extremely significant.  Not once in recorded history has a human been the head of a vampire cabal, and even if we assumed that a human did become the leader of a cabal, we would never believe it to be the size of the Rohrsach family in New York City.  The implications of such an event are staggering...”

The half-empty glass of sherry flies through the air, smashing against the pock-marked, panfaced Charles Gordon and setting the scene for the rest of my evening.  Nothing like the babbling of the human race to ruin a vampire’s night.  Since when were the Rohrsachs so powerful?  Since when do they get national attention?  And just because they have a new, human leader?  It’s sacrilege (if vampire activities could be sacrilege...), and it’s stupid, and it just goes to show how naïve humans are.

Slowly, I raise myself up from the couch, and head to the kitchen.  I may be drunk, and I may be pissed, but I refuse to have a dirty apartment.  A dishrag and a bottle of glass cleaner will make short work of the mess I made.  In moments the spill is cleaned, and Dr. Gordon’s face is removed from my presence as I switch the TV off.  For a moment I think about settling back on the couch for another drink, but a different thirst takes over, deep in my gut.  I go to the closet, grab my coat, and head out into the chilly evening for someone to drink.

++

The city is freezing, but it doesn’t matter to me.  I feel no cold.  The sensation is much like the tingling sensation humans get when they cut off the blood supply to an appendage, except more on the outside than the inside.  I wear the coat for effect.

My male friends are jealous of how easy it is for a woman vampire to feed.  I hear this more times than I care to think about.  They’re practically livid about it.  All I have to do, they say, is go to a bar, find a man, seduce him, and feed in the comfort of my own bedroom.  And it’s true.  It is quite easy.  But it also makes a girl ... picky.  The challenge now becomes how to find a worthy male, a human that has nice, thick blood, not a man who pops aspirin every other minute, which is more often the case with these Wall Street businessmen.  You would be surprised ... well, perhaps not, at the amount of other things in people’s blood when you feed.  This, I say, is my disadvantage to going to a bar, finding a man, and seducing him.  They always have alcohol or some other drug in their veins.  The worst is heroin.  I make sure my victims don’t have track marks anymore.  Cocaine is bad, too.  I don’t like to be high.  I prefer the natural high that comes from feeding on fresh, untainted blood ... but in today’s society, that’s nearly impossible.

One of the most successful underground vampire newsgroups has thousands of stories of the different things that have been in the blood they fed upon.  We just call them “side effects”; a colloquialism adopted from the human’s increased use of over-the-counter and prescription drugs.  When we feed on those who have taken prescription drugs, we end up getting the side effects.  I, once, fed on a man outside a post office (typical set and seduce) who was a little bit older than I would have liked, and his blood was full of some Phenobarbital, a drug I was unused to before then.  It knocked me out for the rest of the night, leaving me very, very hungry the next night, when I woke up.

If I could ask my victims to take a blood test, I would.  But those take too long.

Around the corner and down a couple of blocks is my usual hangout: Freddy’s Deli, one of those food stands that lines what would otherwise be an abandoned lot.  They make apparently delicious turkey clubs and meatballs and whatever.  Next to them is a Thai stand and a Mexican stand.  The sole proprietor, Freddy, either assumes I’m a professional whore or just a whore, cause all he sees me do is arrive, find a guy, and pretend that I want to fuck him.  Tonight, I assume, will be no different.

I arrive just in time for the drunkards who just got out of the bar.  I’m not worried about biting a drunk guy now, as I am already a little tipsy from the sherry.  Plus it’s a Saturday night; why not get a little drunk, right?

Party like the humans party!

There is a throng of well dressed men and women who reek of beer and onions standing a few feet away.  The women look like they should be freezing in this weather, with what they are wearing.  The men are all in long topcoats or peacoats.  They munch drunkenly on loaded hot dogs and various sandwiches, making small talk, flirting, and generally being douchebags.

Freddy has two young “apprentice” workers with him, Luke and Johnny.  Luke’s about eighteen, Johnny’s sixteen.  They are both vampires, though Freddy doesn’t know this yet.  Luke was at a Teresini meeting the night after his first bite; the wounds were still visible on his neck.  Johnny is Luke’s brother, and just wanted to follow suit, I guess.  Siblings usually become vampires together, for all sorts of different reasons, like bullying, or subversion, or just because they’re in the same room together and one sibling bites the other out of sheer hunger.

Luke and Johnny both give me a knowing nod as I approach.  Generally I don’t pick out one human to be my victim.  Both men and women are equally able to make a poor decision when piss drunk.  Men just want to get laid, and women want to experiment.  Either is fine with me.  I decide to base my decision tonight on the sharpest dressed of the group, which, on this occasion, happens to be a woman.  White overcoat, striking red shimmering spaghetti strap dress underneath, ample cleavage, gorgeous green eyes and tanned, well-kept skin.  Hair pulled back into one of those pompadour ponytails.  Shoes I think I will steal once I have bitten her.  They look horribly painful to wear, but they’re beautiful.

I sidle up next to the group she is in, as though waiting in line for food.  I give her a knowing look.  I don’t look half bad myself; all black, black hair, pale skin – I’ll be honest, I look like the typical modern gothic vampire.  I’ve got the wristbands.  I’ve got the black lipstick.  I chose to become a vampire and fell in love with a vampire who ended up being a total bastard.  Later I found out that all male vampires are bastards, but that’s another story.  Regardless of my gothic look, I’m still shapely and attractive.  Plus, all vampires possess a je ne sais quoi that makes them irresistible to humans.  I think it’s the way we smell.

“Cold night,” this girl says, acknowledging my lack of warm clothes.

“I’m always cold,” I reply.  She smiles, not warmly, but friendly.

“You wouldn’t be if you wore some more clothing,” she says.

“And you wouldn’t be ugly if you wore more makeup,” I say.  “What do you want to eat?”

1.

Eddie, my five-year-old nephew, stares at me with a sucker in his mouth.  And I’m drunk.  So I say:

“Okay, first there were vampires.  Vampires were the first of the three.  Got it?  And the first vampire was ... any guesses?”  No answer.  “Cain.  Cain was the first vampire.  You know Cain and Abel?”

Eddie pops the sucker out of his mouth.  A long string of sticky drool follows.  I look away.

“Cain and Abel were the sons of Adam and Eve.  Okay?  They were brothers.  And one day Cain killed Abel.”

“Why?” says Eddie.

“I don’t know why.  But he did.  And God was angry at Cain for doing that, and so God gave Cain the mark of the beast.  For a long time nobody knew what the mark of the beast was.  But now we know.  It was vampirism.  God made Cain immortal – to think about what he had done, I guess – but also gave his immortality a catch; a constant thirst for blood.  So Cain went out and drank some poor sap’s blood and that poor sap became a vampire.  And then that guy drank some other blood, and that guy became a vampire, and so on, and so on.”

Eddie spoke with the sucker in his mouth.  “Scho are you a vampire?”

“No, I’m a werewolf.  We’re enemies.”

“Why?”  More drool.  I wish that kid would acknowledge the drool.

“Because.  It’s a long story.  But we are.  That’s not what I was going to talk about next, though.  I’m going to talk about zombies.”

“My Mom said--!” Eddie starts, and then he stops in that cute-but-annoying way five year olds talk, all stops and starts as their brains learn how to negotiate synapses.  “My mom said that, that you weren’t a werewolf, that you were, um, just a guy.”

“I am just a guy,” I say.  “Except for two times a month, I’m just a guy.”

“And then...?” Eddie says, sounding more ominous than he had intended.

“And then I’m a werewolf.”

“Is Mommy scared of you?”

“No, of course not.  Your mother is scared of no one.  No werewolf, no vampire, no zombie.  Are you scared of me, Eddie?”

Eddie looks me over like he’s about to whore me out on the street.  He pops the sucker out of his mouth.  “I’m not scared of you.”

“Good,” I say, smiling.  “You shouldn’t be.”

The car takes a wide right onto a street I’ve never seen before.  The sides of the road are lined with trees, and the fog, which wasn’t so thick just a few streets before, is now almost unbearable.  Patrick, the driver, grumbles some obscenity, and I feel the chill down my spine.  We’re in vampire country.  I glance at Eddie.  He seems unfazed by the change in scenery.  God, I wish I was a kid again.

I take another swig from the flask in my coat.  “Zombies.  Did I tell you about zombies yet?”

Eddie shakes his head.

“Well, this one’s kind of a long story.  About, I dunno, thirty, forty years ago, a kid named Jason Phillips went up into the hills of Montana and found some kind of artifact.  No one’s sure what the artifact was, though most people think it was an altar to some god, because, well, gods always play into this sort of thing.  Jason went to the altar expecting immortality, and he was given it, when the altar turned him into a zombie.  He raced down the hillside as the affliction...” Eddie gives me a confused look.  “The, uh, disease – the bad stuff spread over his body.  At the bottom of the hill is this town, Lyduck or something like that.  He gets to the bottom of the hill and collapses.  Everyone comes over to find out what’s wrong.  Jason looks dead.  One of the doctors gets in real close, and then, BAM!”

I say this a bit too explosively and Eddie – and Patrick a little bit – startle.  “Sorry,” I say.  “Jason wakes up and bites the doctor.  And the rest is history.”

“Uh, Sam?” Patrick says.  “Why are you telling a kid all this stuff?”

“They’ve got to learn it sometime.  Keep driving.”

Patrick continues down the fog-steeped, tree-lined street.  The good thing about vampires is that you always know where they live.

I hear a crack to my left.  I look down.  Eddie has bitten into his sucker.  Apparently there is gum inside, and Eddie finds that a bit confusing.  He pulls it out of his mouth, glances at it, appraises it, if you will.  Then plops it back into his mouth and chews happily.

“You want to learn any more, Eddie?” I say.

“No,” he says, shaking his head and munching on his gum.

“You don’t even want to hear about werewolves?”

“Oh yeah!  Werewolls!”

“Yeah, come on, you must know what you’re growing up into—“

No time to finish that sentence, as the car’s engine suddenly rattles and dies.  Kaput.  A cloud of black smoke rises from the front of the car.  Patrick shouts a very loud expletive and twists his head around to me.  “Smells fishy,” he says.

“Be careful, then,” I reply.

He grumbles again and reaches down, pops the hood with a switch by his feet, then gets out.  Eddie and I watch him walk to the front of the car, grab the hood and lift it up.  Then I see a shimmer in the fog, and right then I know we’re fucked.

The shimmer flicks swiftly in the direction of Patrick.  I hear him exhale harshly and his body flies away and to the right.  It hits the ground and the vamp is not shimmering anymore – it’s real and it’s sucking on Patrick’s neck.  Patrick squeals as the vamp nearly rips his head off trying to get at his blood.

Vampires swear that werewolf blood tastes a thousand times better than human blood.  I wouldn’t know whether to agree or disagree, but at least I know Patrick won’t be turned into one of those bloodthirsty freaks.  Werewolves don’t turn into vamps.  Ever.

And then there’s a second one, at Patrick’s feet, licking the pool of blood on the concrete and biting at the back of his knees, looking for a thick artery.

And then a third.  And a fourth.

“Eddie,” I say, “we gotta get out of here.”

Wholly unsure of what to do, deep in the middle of vamp territory, I sincerely think about just running for it, but in this fog they could be anywhere, invisible and waiting.  But sitting in the car doesn’t seem like a good idea either.  I have my stake.  I have some holy water.  I have ... a sunlight flare gun in the glove compartment!

Eddie looks scared as shit, and fat globs of tears start rolling down his face.  He looks up at me imploringly.  I put a finger to my lips.  “You stay quiet,” I say.  “I’ve got to get something from the glove compartment.”

Putting a hand on the neck rest of the passenger seat, I slide my way up, as quiet as I can.  The vamps are still preoccupied with Patrick’s blood.  I’m starting to believe that our blood tastes better than human blood; I’ve never seen so many vamps around one body before.  I can’t tell if they know that we’re in the car or not.  Assuming that they do, I reach over and lock the doors from the driver’s seat.  That noise is enough to alert the hyper-sensitive vamp ears, but they don’t even turn around.

I pop open the glove compartment.  Insurance ... free tire rotation paper ... new fuses ... flare gun!  It’s silver (but not really silver) body shines its presence.  I pick it up, quickly make sure it’s loaded, grab a couple of extra flares, and slide back into the back seat.

As I slide back I notice something peculiar: the vamps are tearing Patrick apart.  Vamps don’t ever do that.  But here they are, ripping his torso open, flinging his insides outside for no apparent reason.  Only a zombie would do something like that.  It’s almost like they’re looking for something.

One of the vampires shouts in excitement.  His voice is muffled inside the car but he lifts his arm up in victory.  In his hand is something gold.  It looks like a necklace or a medallion or something.  The other vamps immediately cease with their search.  They all stand up.  Turn.  And look directly into the car, at me and Eddie.

At this point Eddie can’t hold it anymore.  He squeals, loud and into my ear, and starts crying with a renewed fervor.  I’m regretting telling him about vampires right about now.

“Stay here,” I say.  Then I look him directly in the eyes.  “Two seconds, I promise.”  And then I’m out of the car.

There are four visible vampires and two invisible ones.  I can smell their presence.  Two of the visible ones immediately  charge me, one leaping over the entire car to get at me.  He is easily dispatched as I stake him on his way downward.  In the same instance I pop one of the water bombs off of my belt and chuck it in the air, towards where I think the invisible vamps are (yes, they stink that bad).  The holy water explodes in midair, and then becomes a fire as it consumes one of the vamps.

The second charging vamp circles around the car and raises a small pistol.  No fair, I think, and duck just as the first shot is fired.  The second water bomb flies right into this guy’s face, and he drops the pistol and claws at his face in agony.  I race over and grab the pistol.  I can feel the silver bullets inside, and they cause me to shudder a bit.

The other two vamps back up slowly.  One of them has whatever they grabbed out of Patrick’s body.  The other one, a young neophyte girl, just looks scared.  I start to advance on them when I feel two big arms wrap around my body.  Shit, I forgot about the other invizavamp!

Before the fucker can bite me I smack him with the back of my head.  A lot of my brethren have died doing that, as they struck the vamp’s teeth and basically were bitten right there.  But sometimes you’re desperate.  This one connects with the bridge of his nose with a satisfying crack.  He is instantly visible, and I spin around and sink the stake in his heart.  I turn around to face the other two vamps, but they are gone, and so is there scent, which has changed into the scent of a bat.  Dirty bastards.

I go to open the back door to the car but it’s locked.  So I bend down, face to the window.  “Eddie,” I say, “everything is okay.  I got rid of the vamps – the, vampires.  Unlock the door please.”

Eddie, shaking and hiccupping from crying so much, shakes his head vigorously.

“Come on, buddy.  You know I’m not going to let anyone hurt you, okay?  I promise that.  But we have to get out of here.  I need you to come with me.”

Eddie, hands shaking, reaches up and unlocks the door.  I open it and take him into my arms, smoothing his hair with my free hand.  “It’s alright, little guy.  We’ll get back home, I promise.”  I wipe away the tornado of tears and snot that has caked poor Eddie’s face.  “You don’t know that I’ve fought a lot of vampires before, do you?”

Eddie shakes his head.

“I’m good at it.  You don’t need to worry.”

I reach into the holster on my belt and pull out my cell phone.  No signal, naturally.  Vamps hate cell phones for some reason.  I put it back on my belt and survey the scene.  The air smells clean, no vamps, no z’s, nothing.  Just dense fog and a lot of trees lining the sides of the street.  I can’t even tell if this is a neighborhood or what.  If there are houses, they are submerged in mist.

“Eddie, do you want me to carry you or do you want to walk?”

“Carry me,” says Eddie.

“Okay, I’ll carry you for a while.  But even werewolves arms get tired.  And if any vampires come I’m gonna have to put you down really quick.  Understand?”

Eddie nods his head.

“Good.”

And with that, we start walking.