Authors: Jennifer Armintrout
She jumped off the stool and contemplated diving out the hole in the wall and running to Jack Tilly’s across the field. Strangely, her fear of Graf the vampire was overcome by her annoyance at Graf the ob noxious man, and she decided instead to march out to the front porch and face him. She waited until he sheepishly emerged from the car to say, “You’re back.”
“Happy to see me?” He put his hands in his front pockets as he walked up the lawn. “You were right. I’m not heartless enough to leave all you people trapped here. I came back to make it right.”
“You came back because you couldn’t leave,” she responded flatly. “I suppose you think you’re just going to come back in here and make yourself at home in my basement?”
“I was hoping you’d let me stay in a bedroom,
actually, but yeah.” He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
She shook her head slowly. “Not a chance in hell.”
He looked seriously surprised at that. “Why not?”
It was so absurd that she had to laugh. “Because you’re a vampire!”
“So? You saw what’ll happen to me if I go out in the sun! I need a place to stay.” This was a side to him that she’d seen before. The calculating, wheedling, look-how-pathetic-and-in-need-I-am side that disappeared the second he got what he wanted.
It had been hard to deny him the first time. This time, it was easier. “You were going to eat me.”
“I’m a vampire!” He threw up his hands. “It’s what we do!”
“I’m not going to let a mass murderer into my house just because it’s what you do!” She looked up at the sky. “You’ve got the whole night ahead of you. Go out and find some other dumb sucker to take you in.”
“Fine, then some other dumb sucker can have my stuff,” he said, backing up.
She didn’t want to, but she had to ask. It was almost a sick curiosity. The unbelievable gall of him, to come back here, after everything he’d said to her, after he’d admitted to wanting to kill her. She had to
know what stupid thing would pop out of his mouth next. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I met Becky out on the road tonight, and she said that my stuff, like my cigarettes and my jacket, were things people wanted to get their hands on.” He turned away slowly. “But I guess if you don’t want it…”
She did want it, damn it. “Becky is a moron. No one is going to want your flimsy jacket.”
He turned back. “When have you seen my most excellent jacket?”
She didn’t meet his eyes. “When you picked me up the other night. I saw it in your car.”
“You were snooping. When you were planning on siphoning my gas, you snooped,” he accused. “Did you take anything out of my car?”
She lifted her chin and looked down at him, like he was a really gross bug she wouldn’t stoop to viewing. “No! I’m not a thief like you.”
“I’m not a thief. I’m a vampire.” He held out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”
“No.” She gestured to the door. “Come inside and we’ll talk. Lock up your car, though. If Becky knows where you’re staying and what you have, you won’t have it for long.”
He followed her into the house, not heeding her warning. “She didn’t have much nice to say about you, either.”
“I’ll bet she didn’t.” Jessa went to the kitchen junk
drawer and pushed aside screwdrivers, rubber bands, one of Dad’s old watches, to retrieve a pen and a small legal pad. “Sit down. We’re going to make a contract.”
“A contract?” He looked at her doubtfully.
“A lease agreement, then.” She dragged one of the stools to the opposite side of the island. “Sit. Get comfy. I have a feeling this is going to take a long time.”
“Fine.” He leaned on the counter on his elbows.
“First condition,” she said, drawing a number one on the paper and circling it. “There is going to be absolutely no eating me.”
“I couldn’t now, anyway,” he grumbled. “Too many people know I’m here. If you disappeared, it would look suspicious.”
“That’s very comforting.” She rolled her eyes as she wrote it down. “But I’ve seen you fight. Maybe you could take them all down if need be. So, second, you have to give me all your stuff of value, so that I can trade it as needed.”
“And what do I get?” he asked, putting out his hand to stop her from scribbling down rule number two.
When his hand touched hers, it was ice-cold. She jerked her fingers away. “You get to not roast alive, and I keep your secret so that the town doesn’t do to you what they wish they could do to It.”
“Fair enough,” he said after a moment. “But you
know, I’m going to need to eat something. So I think condition number three should be that I’ll obey your first two conditions as long as you find a way to feed me.”
She scrawled his demand down with a shaking hand. “I hope you like chicken blood.”
“No, none for me, thanks. I want the real stuff. And I know there are some people in town you don’t care for.” He raised an eyebrow. “Derek? Becky? The jerks down at June’s Place?”
She slammed the pencil down on the counter. “No. I won’t help you murder innocent people, even if they are jerks.”
“I’m not talking about murder. I’m saying, you know, maybe get a guy back here, get him drunk, and I’ll have a little while he’s passed out.” He sounded almost ashamed of the idea. “Look, I’m more than happy to feed off a willing donor, but I don’t think I’m going to find one of those around here. Unless you want to do it?”
“Uh, God, no!” Not that it looked all that bad in the movies. Against every rational thought in her head, she imagined Graf holding her to his chest, bending his mouth to her throat as she moaned in ecstasy like a soft-core porn actress. She closed her eyes and slapped her hands on the counter to bring herself back to reality. “Fine. We’ll see what we can do. I know at least one guy in town who can’t hold
his liquor, but that doesn’t stop him from drinking it.”
“Condition number four,” Graf continued. “I want a bedroom. A real bedroom, one of the ones upstairs. And I don’t want to be locked in.”
Her heart pounded in her chest. Of course, she’d seen how strong he was when he was battling the monster. And fast. Even if she locked him in the basement, that was no guarantee that he wouldn’t get out and hurt her. Letting him sleep on the same floor seemed like she was inviting disaster with open arms, though.
Not to mention, the only two rooms besides hers were Mom and Dad’s…and Jonathan’s. “You couldn’t sleep up there. There are windows.”
“I can cover them. Let’s be honest, I’m going to be stuck here for a while, right?”
She began to write it down, then paused. “What are we talking about, exactly? I mean, in terms of the stuff you have?”
“Do we have a deal, or not?” He stood, as if to go. “If not, I’ve got to go see a man about a horse.”
Wouldn’t everyone just love that? The new guy in town, and Jessa turned him out, turned down a fair trade. It would be plenty of ammunition to make her seem even crazier.
Jessa quickly filled in line number four, and stuck her hand out, meeting Graf’s cold one. “We
have a deal. You can have the first room on the left upstairs.”
“Your parents’ old room, right?” Why did he say it like that, like he knew she was avoiding talking about it? Didn’t he know things would be so much easier if she just ignored the past?
“I won’t mess anything up, or throw anything out,” he continued. “I’ll just cover the windows and rumple the sheets.”
She stood speechless. He had admitted to wanting to kill her, had asked her to help him steal blood from people, and he’d been incredibly rude to her since they’d met. Now, he was worried about her sentimental attachment to her parents’ bedroom? “Get your shit together, and we’ll walk down to June’s Place.”
“Why not just take the car?” he asked. “They’ve all seen it, when I drove Becky down there.”
“You drove Becky to June’s Place?” Why did that make her strangely unsettled?
“Yeah. I don’t know what she’s doing down there, in her condition, but that’s where she wanted to go.” He paused. “I really didn’t like her.”
“Welcome to the club.” She sighed and rubbed her suddenly pounding temples.
T
he walk to June’s Place was more pleasant than the one they’d taken before. Jessa wondered if she had subconsciously realized something was wrong with Graf before, and if that had made her nervous. But she was probably giving her intuition too much credit.
The night might have been more pleasant because Graf was in a better mood. It wouldn’t be hard to top any of the moods he’d been in, but at least he wasn’t giving snotty answers to her questions. And she had a lot of them.
“So, sunlight is a no, garlic isn’t a big deal, you can’t turn into a bat, but you’re really strong and fast?” She ticked the points off on her fingers and struggled to keep the satchel under her arm.
Graf took the bag of his stuff from her and slung
it over his shoulder. “You got it. Also, shockingly few of us are from Transylvania.”
He was teasing her. That was a nice change from sarcasm. It was as if their knock-down, drag-out fight had been cathartic, and now they could be at least civil to each other. Like one usually was with new roommates. “Well, pardon me. All I have to go on here are the movies.”
“That’s how it is for most people. Not that I tell a lot of humans.” He smiled, and she could see his teeth in the dark. No fangs.
“So, ‘human.’ Do you consider yourself not a human?” Wrapping her mind around the vampire experience was weird, but not as uncomfortable as she had anticipated when she’d first begun interrogating him.
“I was human, once.” He said it like the thought made him uneasy. Like admitting that he’d been a drug user, or an alcoholic. “And then I met Sophia.”
“And Sophia is, what, your girlfriend?” Jessa imagined the vampire brides in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
all exposed breasts and writhing body parts, and got strangely jealous. It wasn’t like he was going to get out of this town and see her again, right?
No, that wasn’t the point. She tried again. It wasn’t like she cared if he had some exotic bride of the damned waiting at home for him, right? Much better.
He laughed. “No, no. Sophia is the vampire who made me.”
“So, she’s like, what, a mom to you?” God, she hoped all that incestuous vampire stuff from Anne Rice’s books wasn’t true. Because it would be gross, not because he was cute.
“No, not exactly.” He paused, the only sound their feet falling on the broken asphalt. “It’s more like she’s my mentor. I definitely do not have mother-son feelings for her. But I can’t imagine ever being good enough or hip enough to be anything to her. So, I just sit back in awe and worship from afar.”
“From afar, but you were going to a party at her house?” Jessa raised one skeptical eyebrow. “That sounds like more, or less, than ‘afar’ to me.”
“Well, metaphorically speaking. It’s not like we’ve never gotten physical or anything—”
Vampire sex was probably all hot and dangerous and wild and animalistic and… “Don’t need to hear about that!”
“But,” he continued, “I would never dream that we could be emotionally close. She’s been alive since the Italian Renaissance. She was a model for Titian, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Jessa said quietly.
Graf didn’t seem to care that she didn’t know, be cause he didn’t bother to explain it. “There’s no way that I could ever possess the depth of experience she
has. So, I study her, spend time around her, and learn how to be a better vampire.”
“A better vampire.” Was there such a thing? “She teaches you how to kill more people?”
He shrugged guiltily, which was more of an answer to her question than he knew. “She blends in really well. She appears human, and it’s little tricks, like accidentally knocking over a glass or faking a headache—things you learn by watching, not just hearing about them. When I was new, that kind of knowledge saved my ass more than once.”
“And when were you new, exactly?” She almost didn’t want to know how old he was. “Like, are you two hundred years old, or did you become a vampire last week?”
“I was turned in 1967.” He switched the gun to his other shoulder. “It was funny, actually. One minute I’m living in Detroit, working in research and development at Uniroyal Tire, and the next I’m a vampire, traveling all over the world with this beautiful, sexy vampire who has people—I mean, vampires and humans both—fawning over her. Buying her presents, a villa in Spain, cars—anything she wanted, she could get by crooking her little finger.”
“She sounds amazing.” Jessa’s voice held a note of wistfulness that she couldn’t hide. Growing up in a small town, she’d had typical dreams of leaving and having the glamorous life he described. Minus the vampire part. Though her mother had done her best
to impart feminist wisdom to her daughter, Jessa still had guilty daydreams about being able to get anything she wanted from a man just by being beautiful and sexy.
They walked in silence a few minutes, Graf no doubt reminiscing about his flashy vampire friends and their fleets of private jets they had sex all over. “So, what about you? Have any big plans that this whole ‘trapped like rats’ thing squashed?”
He couldn’t have put it more bluntly if he’d tried. This was the guy she had to get used to. Insensitive, rude, snobbish. And no wonder, if he thought the only value a person could have was what they could get other people to give to them. She’d be damned if she would share her private thoughts with him, now. “No.”
“Oh, come on. You had to have some desire to rise above the simple lives of all of these peasants.” He chuckled at his own joke. “There’s one of you in every town.”
“Well, we can’t all be Sophia,” she snapped.
He stopped walking. “Hey, don’t be like that. It’s a compliment. It means that I don’t think you’re on the same level as all these yahoos.”
She stopped, too, and turned. “These yahoos are the people I’ve been living through hell with for the past five years. What makes you think I think I’m any better than them?”
“You aren’t. But you’re more interesting.” He
didn’t sound apologetic, or even like he’d realized he’d insulted her. “Something about their eyes. I didn’t notice it until I met Becky, but there’s this kind of dead-fish stare looking back at you with these people.”
“That’s fine,” she said, stomping forward. But she couldn’t help but feel validated by his assessment. She’d always secretly dreamed that, one day, she’d be more than anyone in this town could dream of being. But it was one thing to hear someone else disparage the people around her, and another thing entirely if she did it herself. Graf hadn’t earned the right to hate any of them. “Keep up. You’re the one with the superpowers.”
“And you’re turning your back to me. That means you must trust me,” he said cheerfully, suddenly at her side, though she hadn’t heard him move.
It unnerved her, this reminder of what he was, and what he was capable of. “You’re a vampire. If you wanted to kill me, even my gun wouldn’t be able to stop you, but remind me to pick it up at June’s tonight.”
“True. I could just drag you into the tall grass over there and tear your throat out with my teeth.”
It didn’t seem like he was trying to rattle her on purpose. The fact that he was saying this stuff accidentally made it worse. “Yup, I reckon you could.”
“But I won’t. Because I’m a man of my word.” He
sounded awfully proud of himself. Like he deserved some kind of trophy for not killing her.
They walked in silence the rest of the way to June’s Place, but in the parking lot, she stopped him. “When we get inside, we’ve got to get permission from June to hold an auction tonight. Then, we announce it. Anyone who’s interested has two hours to round up what they want to trade, and to spread the word to their neighbors. Then they all convene back here, and hopefully we make some good trades.”
“So, what, we just wait around here all night?” He didn’t sound so cocky now. “Are we going to get back before sunup?”
Now it was her turn to shrug and act like his death was no big deal. “I don’t know. We might.”
“Well, I’m cutting out of here with enough time to get to shelter, whether you’re done bartering or not.” He nodded to the little red wagon she pulled. “And you can bring home as much as you can carry in that.”
“We won’t be able to bring everything home tonight.” She hoped. “Some people will drop stuff off tomorrow.”
He scoffed. “God, eBay is so much faster.”
June’s Place was busy tonight. Good, they needed it to be busy. Or, rather, she did. Jessa had no idea how she was going to feed her boarder, but she knew she had to get supplies for herself. She’d worry about him later. Maybe he’d shrivel up like a mummy she
could just prop up in the corner, then chicken blood wouldn’t sound so bad to him.
“Uh-oh, here comes trouble,” June called, a wide smile on her face.
Jessa waded through the cluster of tables to the bar, where she stepped up on the tarnished brass rail and leaned over to speak with June more privately. “You up for an auction tonight?”
“Probably a good night for it.” There was a weary note to her voice as she continued. “Yeah, we can do that.”
Jessa turned to Graf. “Give me a boost.”
He complied, putting his hands around her waist and lifting her up to sit on the bar. She climbed to her feet, wobbled a little, and he caught her hand in his.
“Don’t fall,” he warned, naturally, as if he hadn’t just talked calmly about murdering her on the walk over. She snatched her hand back.
“Listen up, everybody,” June called, though most of the patrons had turned to see what crazy Jessa was doing standing on the bar in the first place.
Jessa took a deep breath. “This is my friend, Graf. He’s new in town.”
A murmur went around the room, the confirmation of the rumors most people had already heard and repeated to their neighbors.
June whistled to get their attention, and the bar
fell silent. Jessa continued. “He’s brought some stuff with him, and he’s looking to trade.”
“How’d he get here?” someone shouted.
June hollered over the sudden surge of raised voices. “He don’t know. If he don’t know, how would she?”
“Get out of here!” another patron yelled.
This was not going the way she had planned. People were suspicious. Why shouldn’t they be? But their fear and anger were making this an unstable situation, and there were no established rules for dealing with it.
To Jessa’s surprise, Graf hopped up on the bar next to her and called, “Hey!”
The crowd silenced, though they still looked like they’d rather kill him than listen to him. Graf looked around the room, body tense as though he realized this was a mistake, but when he spoke, he sounded confident. “I’m not here to cause any trouble. In fact, I’d rather not be here at all. For some reason, whatever keeps you guys trapped here chose to trap me, too. I would appreciate it if you would all just give me the benefit of the doubt. If I got in, there must be some way to get out, right?”
There was another uproar from the bar patrons, and Jessa held her breath. Getting out was something they never talked about. It was a sort of unwritten rule; no one had ever discussed it, but everyone knew to hold their peace where leaving Penance was
concerned. Maybe it was the last thread that kept them all from unraveling, but they had to cling to whatever would keep them sane.
“Hey, hey!” June called over the noise, her usually good-natured tone giving way to something harsher and less patient. “Now, they come down here to trade with you. Either you want to, or you don’t, but I’m not keeping this bar open all damned night while you make up your minds.”
The people fell silent.
“That’s what I thought.” June nodded toward Jessa and Graf. “Now get off my bar. Everyone’s got two hours to get their shit together. We ain’t waiting for any of you, so get back quick as you can.”
“And spread the word,” Jessa called, over the sound of scraping chairs and scooting tables. “Let everybody know.”
“If I were them, I wouldn’t,” Graf said, hopping down and offering Jessa his hand. “I would want as few people to show up as possible, so I could get a better deal.”
“That’s the difference between you and us, then,” June said, wiping the place where Graf’s sneakers had been. “We don’t just look out for number one.”
Yes, we do,
Jessa replied to herself, not that she would tell him that. She let Graf help her down and got away from him as fast as possible.
They took a table that had been abandoned. Only a few bodies remained, people who either didn’t have
anything to trade or didn’t care to go to the trouble of participating, anyway.
Jessa groaned inwardly when she realized that one of those bodies was Becky. It helped a little to see Graf having the same reaction, a look of mingled horror and disgust that deepened as he realized Becky had gotten up from her table and was presently staggering in their direction.
Becky had never been a subtle person. She was clear as a pane of window glass when she was drunk, which she definitely was. She gripped the hem of her denim skirt at crotch level and yanked it down, her ankles crossing as she stumbled forward. “There’s my friend,” she called, laughing up a puff of smoke.
Graf looked distinctly uncomfortable. Good. For all the hell he’d put Jessa through for the past couple of days, he could have this little slice of hell for himself. “Uh-oh, looks like you’re friends now.”
He puffed out a breath and said, long and pinched, “Yeah.”
Becky pulled out a chair next to Graf and fixed on Jessa with narrowed eyes. “I went out to the service station. It doesn’t look like anything happened out there.”
“It’s completely torn down,” Graf said, calm and even.
“It probably just fell down,” Becky said with a roll of her eyes. She leaned closer to Graf. “What are you doing later?”
“Not getting shot by your redneck husband.” Graf pushed his chair back and leaned away from her. “You might want to ease up on the shine, if you don’t want your baby born with cirrhosis.”
Better to let white trash nature take its course, Jessa thought, and instantly heard her mother’s voice admonishing her for wishing Becky ill.
Becky, translating Graf’s statement into a joke the way drunks were prone to do, slapped his arm. “You’re not being very nice!”