An Unattractive Vampire (33 page)

Vermillion took two notes out of the pocket of his sleeveless trench coat. One was tearstained and, to his acute vampire senses, reeked of loneliness and despair. It was addressed
To Rusty
in a hand he vaguely recalled belonging to that fat girl he’d known in his old life. She must have slipped it into his pocket as he’d passed her at the club. He didn’t even bother crumpling it as he threw it away.

The second note was an invitation he’d received in the mail. Pink ink on pink paper in a clear, looping penmanship, which undoubtedly belonged to a woman, had lured him away from his usual haunts with an enclosed picture and plenty of
x
’s and
o
’s. It was all topped off with a light mist of Chanel, which promised rather than requested a very pleasurable evening.

Vermillion inspected his shirtless torso in the moonlight. Bulging pecs and well-lined abs glowed impressively as he flexed them, though he could not help but rub a little more glitter lotion on, just to be sure. Then, in a graceful, athletic motion, he leapt up onto the second-story balcony and passed through the open glass doors.

He was slightly disappointed that the blonde he’d come to see was not lying in wait for him, half-naked beneath the satin sheets of the bed. However, once he spied the trail of pink rose petals leading out of the bedroom, he got over it. He followed them down to the first floor, through the living room and kitchen, and toward the basement, where he could tell they were joined by a multitude of white, scented candles. With one last check of hair and breath, he slowly and sensually descended into the cellar.

“What the . . . ? Who are you?” Vermillion cried in surprise when he reached the bottom.

“Simon,” replied the little boy, pointing a crossbow at his sparkling chest.

Above Vermillion, the door slammed shut. A pair of steady footsteps followed his own path down the stairs. A pale corpse of a man appeared on the landing, an ancient battle-ax in his hand.

“Shall we begin?” Simon proposed.

As he approached the now-panicking Vermillion, a cruel, broken-toothed smile spread across Yulric Bile’s face. In a world where vampires were heroes, he had finally found a way to be a monster again.

First and foremost, I need to thank my parents again for all their love and support, despite my continued insistence on impossible careers with no financial stability.

Thank you to the two women who were waiting in line ahead of me and discussing this thing called
Twilight
. You don’t know who you are, and I sure as hell don’t know who you are, but you started this.

Thank you to all those who read drafts and gave notes along the way: Clayton, Scott, Lindsey, and David. You monsters made me cut out so many jokes in the name of making this “better.” I hope you’re happy.

This book was destined to languish in the dreaded “writer’s drawer” until that glorious day Tom and Veronica came on my iPod and told me the
Sword and Laser
was holding a book contest. So thank you both; this is your fault as well.

Thanks go out to my coworker Nicole for saying, “Yeah, you should enter that contest.”

Thanks again to my friend Lindsey for saying, “No, she’s right. Enter that contest, already.”

Thank you, Adam, for being the first person with authority who showed actual enthusiasm about this project. You made me consider that I might actually have a chance.

Thank you, Inkshares, for (a) holding this contest, (b) putting out my book, and (c) existing.

Thank you, Avalon, for being my guide to the mysterious world of publishing.

Thank you to the team at Girl Friday Productions: Devon for keeping me in the loop and on schedule; my developmental editor, Lindsay, for challenging me to try little things like world building and “making sense”; my copyeditor, Jerri Gallagher, for having to contend with my love of commas and the adverbial clause; and all the others who spent their precious time on this earth working on a silly book about vampires.

Thank you to anyone I’m forgetting to thank. I’m sure there are many of you, and I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me.

Finally, thank you, everyone who bought this book, both during the Inkshares contest and after. Without you, this would not exist. I hope you enjoyed it. If not, well, I’m sure there’s something good on TV.

Photo © 2015 Sebastian Orr Photography

Jim McDoniel is a writer of weird, funny things. A graduate of Minneapolis’s Brave New Workshop and Chicago’s Second City conservatory programs, he has spent several years writing mad science and molepeople for the sci-fi audio drama
Our Fair City
. This is his first novel.

1
. Making the evening of one twelve-year-old boy who’d gotten up for a glass of water.

2
. Thirty.

3
. Puritan men weren’t the only ones who gleaned curves and bulges.

4
. Until, of course, you try to kill them; then, they prove themselves to be very much alive, and you prove yourself to be not so much so anymore.

5
. Yulric had once known a vampire who was repelled by the smell of peppermint. She would also stop to count any mustard seeds she came across. She had problems.

6
. It’s not.

7
. Historians outside Shepherd’s Crook call it a “skirmish” or, more often, a “something happened.”

8
. Though he had looked rather angry after trying. During the postséance orgy, he was overheard muttering to himself, “Show him I’m not a Puritan.”

9
. Locals started calling the house cursed again.

10
. The Shepherd’s Crook Historical Society is still having fits.

11
. The microwave. Another challenging conversation, and as Yulric didn’t yet understand what could and could not be put inside, he wasn’t allowed to touch.

12
. And well she should, since she was.

13
. You know, that one. The one that isn’t that other one.

14
. Especially from the vampire named Legosi. Though, those could also have been werewolf signs. He was definitely something, though.

15
. St. Jerome of Aquitaine. Jerome the Devout, though no one called him that. References in the letters of his fellow knights are believed to be the first usages of the word
douche
.

16
. Calling it a beard would be generous.

17
. Muggers tended not to see the distinction between purse and pouch.

18
. In another universe, another Rusty would learn that lesson on this trip when an ill-timed smile in the direction of the waitress was met with a face full of mace.

19
. Pop.

20
. Pop.

21
. One might wonder, if neither yarn nor needles nor cabinets nor arms nor legs were real, why you would put things away rather than just wish them out of existence. The simple answer is that going through the motions gives you something to do.

22
. . . with her girlfriend . . in the shower.

23
. That’s breath heaving, not hurl heaving. And that’s vomit hurl, not caber-toss hurl.

24
. Contrary to what TV would have you believe, hospitals are not the breeding grounds of steamy affairs and sultry trysts between young, attractive medical professionals. Young, attractive people generally don’t go into medicine, they go into acting. That way, they can play young, attractive medical professionals who have lots of steamy, sultry sex, without bothering with the years of study and risk of blood-borne pathogens. Those that do go into medicine tend to be not so young by the end and would rather get on with the business of stitching up gashes and performing triple bypasses than tongue each other in storerooms.

25
. It took a lot of nerve to show up at a vampire club in something other than black.

26
. The other being a Renaissance fair.

27
. Not that he did. Boasting was beneath him. At most, he might marvel at an old legend about a dark foreigner who entered Madrid and brought a terrible plague in his wake. When you told him, “No record of the stranger survives to this day,” he would merely smile.

28
. Sometimes called theaters.

29
. See
Dig at Your Own Risk: Prehuman Cities and the Archaeologists Who Went Mad
by Professor Tobias Thibnee.

30
. For good reason.

31
. Vampire clubs, Renaissance fairs, and nineteenth-century opera houses are the only places you are likely to find a cape check.

32
. Yulric had no idea what this meant.

33
. Or so he’d been told. The truth was, he was made leader because he was the median height and fit best in the middle when posed.

34
. The words were a gibberish interpretation of how Yulric actually swore. Amanda translated it as comparing the car to the intimate relations of goats.

35
. “For our inquiries, of course.”

36
. Which she declined by telling the man in question to go “ride” himself.

37
. Or rather what were currently known as sirens. He had heard real sirens before, and the two sounds were nothing alike.

38
. Not that one. The other one.

39
. A new word for monster Yulric had learned from television.

40
. The same general rule also applies to Russians, though for different reasons. Instead of finding yourself in some daft misadventure involving a thousand-pound bet and a fiddle-playing goat, someone else finds you in the morning with a note reading
Good-bye, cruel world
pinned to your chest.

41
. Of porcupines.

42
. St. Hadrian of Toulouse (1178–1212?) was a hermitic monk who lived outside Toulouse. When a great army from the Almohad dynasty began invading the Christian kingdoms of Spain, Hadrian was sent by God to delay their forces long enough for the Christian armies to stop arguing with one another and defend themselves. And so Hadrian walked from Toulouse, France, to the snow-covered peaks of the Sierra Morena mountain range where, through a series of miracles, one of which involved a rabid donkey, he managed to delay the attacking forces. There are no records on how he eventually met his end; however, when the Christian army eventually got around to fighting their enemy, they found in the Caliph’s abandoned tent the still-frozen, now-severed feet of Hadrian of Toulouse. An important part of St. Hadrian’s legend was that he ventured into the mountains specifically without shoes or
staff
. That is why he is the patron saint of hikers, podiatrists, and frostbitten toes.

43
. He had been reading about the Vikings at the time. Incidentally, he had also created a pillage-prevention defense kit for the house. Their parents had thought it was cute, cardboard-pole arms and all.

44
. He was still trying to catch lightning in jars.

45
. But not really. Phones did not actually ring so much as play music: in this case a
screech-screech
song whose lyrics were unsurprisingly unintelligible.

46
. Except in banks. Those, like him, were necessary evils.

47
. Yulric did not get the reference.

48
. Don’t ask.

49
. Ironically, people who could not get into vampire clubs were far more likely to believe in real vampires than those who could.

50
. or
pulchritudinUS
.

51
. Not that one. The other one.

52
. And Yulric would know, having been carted back to China as a curiosity for the Khan’s collection.

53
. Originally he’d offered the top to his new female acquaintance. “Are you sure this isn’t a bra?” she had asked, throwing it back at him.

54
. Not that Yulric would know, but he’d heard it described from people who could actually enter a chapel. Then he’d killed them.

55
. When asked how he had created an explosive when local Authorities were on the lookout for someone doing exactly that, Simon shrugged and said, “Nobody expects an American to make a bomb in Iraq.”

56
. Elsewhere in the world, a very happy sea sponge was born.

57
. A gift to Simon from some very excited Tibetan lamas.

58
. Translation: douche bags.

59
. Not Gillian Anderson, the actress, but the actual fictional character Dana Scully. This had been when she was in high school. Mostly.

60
. A group of vampires is actually called an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

61
. And he would know.

62
. The area police received several reports of a green Martian female hopping around the area. Units were immediately dispatched for some drug busts.

63
. Especially in the case of Tezcatlipoca. Having both the head of a jaguar and quite a few feathers, there was no way of telling what was under that loincloth.

64
. In fiction.

65
. Vampires, as previously noted, deep down, really do not like one another very much.