An Unattractive Vampire (13 page)

Amanda caught the vampire’s eye.
If you thought I would leave unprepared to deal with you, then you are a fool. Now, put him down.

Outmaneuvered yet again, Yulric vowed to pay more attention to what was between Amanda’s legs in the future.

“Very well. You have made me see the error of my ways,” the vampire apologized as he lowered the man to his feet.

“Good,” said the bouncer, putting a packet of salt back in his pocket as he sat back on his stool. And that was that. No “Be on your way.” No “Hit the road.” Nothing. Apparently, Yulric was within his rights to stand there, just so long as he did not try to cross the rope.

Amanda gave him a condescending smile.

“I’ll try to bring someone out,” she told him before entering the club. Yulric got the impression she had known this would happen.

With very little stimulus coming from either wall, door, or guard, the vampire’s attention was drawn to the air. More specifically, he noticed the steam rising from under the ground, the cool breeze that blew it into pleasing patterns, and openings high above, through which both steam and breeze passed into the building beyond.

“So, where are the vampyrs?”

Amanda spun around to face the hideous ancient vampire.

“You? How?” she sputtered, before moving from shock to suspicion. “What did you do?”

Yulric pointed up. “Windows.”

“You can’t be here,” she hissed quickly, ushering him to a deserted, dark hallway. “You saw the bouncer’s reaction,” she said. “You’ll never pass for a vampire in a vampire club.”

He gave a nod to the leg where Amanda was hiding her cross. “Like you, I came prepared.” From within the folds of his robes, he produced a golden mask, its features neutral but handsome. He placed it over his face and raised his hood. “Better?”

She wanted to say no. She really did. But the cape-check boy was wearing almost the exact same outfit.
³¹

“Fine,” she said angrily, “let’s go.”

He offered her his cold, bony hand, which she reluctantly took, and like that, they stepped into the club proper.

Yulric Bile had experienced many sounds in his one thousand years of unlife. He had accompanied raging hordes of bellowing Saxon warriors. He had experienced a three-banshee wail. He had been present at the birth of mouthless abominations whose pitiless cries drove men to insanity. None of that even came close to the earsplitting cacophony that assaulted his supernatural hearing within the club.

The racket, which Amanda insisted on calling music, came in two varieties Yulric dubbed
screech-screech
and
thump-thump
. The former consisted solely of loud, shrill scratches. There were no notes or discernible patterns, just a continuous din. After some time, Yulric realized that, contained within the screeching, was a voice, though he could not make out what it was saying because it, too, was screeching.
Thump-thump
was a teeth-rattling rhythm, which caused the body to move against its will. Sometimes this resulted in dancing, other times heart arrhythmia. Yulric was sure some form of mind control was involved.

Amanda led the ancient vampire around the outer edges of the black-clad mass of bumping, grinding, jumping, and writhing humanity. Most of the women were dressed similarly to Amanda, in a style she affectionately called “Transylvanian Ambassador to the Moulin Rouge,”
³²
though few could pull it off as well. The men, many with identical hair, jewelry, and makeup to the women’s, had no set style and ranged from overdressed to hardly dressed. Shirts were optional. Sometimes, pants were optional. Giant leather boots with hundreds of straps and buckles, it seemed, were not optional.

“Shocked?” Amanda asked when she caught him scanning the crowd.

The vampire turned and looked down at his guide. “Should I be?” They were as far as they could get from where the “music” emanated, and still, he had to yell to make himself heard.

“Just thought you might find this uncomfortable,” she prodded. “Indecent, maybe?”

Typical Puritan,
thought Yulric. He tapped his mask. “I have been to Venice.”

Amanda was visibly disappointed.

“How many of these know the truth?” asked the vampire.

“Some,” Amanda answered. “The real members of the vampire community, the staff, the ones who provide blood, a few others. The rest are just Goth posers who like to play dress-up.”

“And how can you tell which are the poseurs?” he posed.

“They wear black,” she said.

Through his mask, Yulric gave her a look of deepest loathing and then turned back to the crowd, which he found just as repugnant. “Enough of the rabble. Where are the—”

“The coven elders?” she said, finishing the thought that had stalled on his lips. Yulric rolled his eyes. The idea of a group of vampires still seemed unnatural to him, which, considering he was unnatural himself, was saying something.

“Yes, them.” He still couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “Where are they?”

“For that, you’ll need to talk to Tony,” she said nodding toward the stairs.

Standing in front of a metal staircase to the right of the dancers stood Tony, the other bouncer. With the exception of his shirt and African descent, he was nearly indistinguishable from Bruno. Same short haircut. Same emotionless face. Same dark sunglasses worn inappropriately in dark places. The same obstacle. And Yulric hadn’t really mastered the last one.

“I can’t help you this time,” Amanda told him. “I’ve been trying to get him to let me up for months.”

Amanda’s arms moved to her lower back, which consequently made her chest more prominent.
Another eunuch
, Yulric thought.

“I don’t suppose he can be bribed?” the vampire asked, before adding unnecessarily, “With money?”

Amanda held up a wad of paper that passed for currency in the modern world. “Nope.” She tucked the bills back between her breasts.

“I will think of something,” said the vampire.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” replied Amanda. She started to walk away.

“What will you do?” he inquired.

“Why do you care?” she shot back.

“I will need a way back before sunrise,” he said.

“I’ll meet you outside,” she said. “Two hours?”

“Why not four?”

“That’ll have us driving home after dawn,” she advised.

“I can ride in the luggage space,” he said.

Amanda smiled at the thought of stuffing the vampire into the trunk of her car. “Well then, four hours it is. Good luck.” And with that Amanda disappeared into the throng.

The vampire’s attention turned to Tony the guard. After a moment’s thought, he puffed himself up to an impressive posture and stalked his way over to the stairs. When he reached this stoic sentinel, he bowed low and opened his arms in supplication. “I humbly beg an audience with the”—he gritted his teeth—“elders.”

There was a long uncomfortable pause. Without rising, Yulric glanced up. The guard was employing that age-old technique of ignoring him.

“May I take that as a no?” he said.

The guard inhaled. Yulric understood that to mean

“correct.”

The vampire tried to remain humble and polite. “Perhaps you could ask if they would see me?”

Tony the guard exhaled. This meant “perhaps it was time you were moving along.”

From within his robe, Yulric pulled out the other thing he’d taken from the box. He untied its drawstring. “I don’t suppose I could bribe you into granting me an audience?” He let the handful of rubies and emeralds sift through his fingers back into the small pouch.

The man’s breath said nothing. It went in. It went out.

Yulric, frustrated at being thwarted by weak, easily killable mortals, bowed slightly to the guard and turned, not to leave, but to gather momentum for slamming the guard’s head through the cement floor.

“Wait.”

Yulric paused. This was not a translation of breath. This was an actual word spoken by an actual voice. He looked back. Tony had lowered his sunglasses slightly, revealing a sliver of eye.

“You got any diamonds?” asked the guard with a twinkle. It was a twinkle Yulric had seen before from a besotted Austrian duke. Apparently, there was a soon-to-be Mrs. Guard. Yulric removed a diamond the width of a fingernail and dropped it into the palm of the man’s hand. Tony held it up to the light, peering into its many facets. Satisfied, he pocketed it. “Follow me.”

The second level of the club was far more vampiric. Here, tables and booths were arranged around the floor occupied by fanged clientele. Some of the vampires acted with the same animal lust as the revelers below, mouths and tongues intertwined, fangs lightly plucking at skin. Others were somewhat more dignified, dressed in their top hats and lacy cuffs, drinking very red wine from ornate goblets. A few raised their glasses in salute as they passed. There were also pairs of vampires rubbing against each other in almost catlike motions. Yulric stopped to observe one such display.

“Psychic vampires,” explained Tony.

“Ah,” said Yulric, pretending to agree. He may have only recently learned the word
psychic
, but he knew from experience that feeding off life energies should have left quivering, unhinged wretches in its wake.

At the center of the congregation was a circle of highbacked chairs, each intricately carved with arcane symbols and Gothic iconography. Some of it Yulric recognized, some he did not, and the rest he knew only from tattoos he’d seen on the rabble below. There were thirteen chairs total, and while he could make out only a few of their occupants, he spied enough dangling arms on armrests to be sure that all were filled.

Tony approached an elder. After a whispered conversation, he nodded at Yulric.

Everything that had happened since he had woken up all those weeks ago had been leading up to this. All that energy, all that frustration, all that humiliation, all ending with this meeting. If he’d been breathing, he would have breathed heavily. If his heart had been beating, it would have pounded in his chest. As much as a vampire could have butterflies, he did. This was it. Finally, he would have his answers. Finally, he would show the world a true vampire. Yulric stepped into the circle and bowed.

“Arise,” said the elder in front of him.

“You wish to speak with us?” said the elder behind him.

“Yes, I . . .” He halted. For the first time, Yulric got a good look at them. There were six men and seven women. Each seemed to represent a type of vampire Yulric had seen coming in, the Goth, the lacy-cuffs, the psychic. A handful were in shape, the majority were very,
very
average, with guts or hips bulging with the fat that comes with middle age. One was so large he could barely fit in his chair. Clothing, jewelry, and skin were littered with ankhs, pentagrams, elder signs, and other symbols of varying occult significance. All in all, they were a most eclectic group. They really had only a single thing in common.

They were all mortal.

Yulric searched the elders for some sign of immortality. You could always tell, in the way someone moved or smelled or, in Yulric’s case, looked. But here, there was nothing. No spark, no odor, nothing beyond veneer fangs and dyed hair. The vampire elders were a middle-aged social group.

“Excuse me,” he said with a bow and retreated from the circle. He found his way back to Tony.

The bouncer raised a confused eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”

“Could you take me to the
other
vampyr elders?” requested Yulric.

For a second, it seemed like the guard didn’t know what he was talking about. A moment later, though, he nodded. “Follow me.”

Yulric trailed him, away from the vampire elders, past the other mortals playing pretend, and back down the metal staircase.

“Over there,” Tony said.

Yulric found himself staring at the swarm of writhing bodies Amanda had melted into. With a growl of disgust, he slithered his way into the tangled mass, working his way through the cracks between bodies, searching for some sign of undeath. The celebrants didn’t seem to notice his passage, with one exception.

Amanda froze as a familiar, cold sensation spread across her back. She turned to find Yulric trying to squeeze by without being dry humped.

“How did it go with the elders?” she shouted. Yulric did not respond. “What? What happened?”

Yulric leaned down, his masked face unnervingly close to her ear. His mouth moved. He was shouting. Still, Amanda could just barely make out the word
mortals
.

“What?” she exclaimed in surprise. “You’re kidding me! I’ve spent months trying to get up to see them. Ugh.” She was kicking herself for being so stupid. Or that might have been the leg of the woman behind her.

Meanwhile, Yulric levitated slightly in the air and scanned the monochromatic crowd. A moment later, he was bowling people over, no longer bothering to hide his strength. Amanda followed in his wake.

In a clearing closest to the stage, Amanda and Yulric found them: five vampires—three men and a pair of women—dancing together. All could best be described by Yulric as
svelte
and by Amanda as
anorexic
. Two of the men were well muscled, with lean, strong arms and rippling stomachs. The third’s physique was covered by a shirt, but he was likely just as well muscled and rippling as the others. The women were not quite as uniform. One wore a black tank top with black skintight jeans, while the other wore a black strapless blouse with a black skintight skirt. One was a brunette, the other a blonde. One was extremely thin but pleasingly curvaceous around the hips and bust, and the other was extremely thin but pleasingly curvaceous around the bust and hips. Very different, indeed.

All of them sparkled.

He shouted something. She leaned in, failing to hear him over the music. He shouted again and motioned.

“Body glitter,” explained Amanda, after a game of charades.

The booming speakers didn’t seem to present the same problem for him. Yulric turned his hand palm up.
And that is?

Amanda paused to figure out how best to simplify
glitter
. Eventually, she decided upon “Makeup.” She turned back to the dancing vampires. One of the shirtless ones had noticed her and was giving her a once-over.