American Vampire (11 page)

He shrugged. “I’m not very nice.”

She was starting to catch on. Jessa could see it. She also knew what Becky was like when she felt insulted or rejected. Her self-confidence was mostly fake, and once she couldn’t fake it anymore her lack of self-esteem and her nasty temper became a volatile mix.

Becky laughed, a halting, disbelieving sound, and said, “The way you act, I’d think you don’t like me much.”

“Because I don’t,” Graf said with a weary sigh. “Just because I didn’t want you to get eaten by a monster doesn’t mean that I want to be BFFs, okay?”

Almost faster than Jessa could see, Becky grabbed one of the mason jars from the table, and threw the contents of it in Graf’s face. He blinked, then clapped his hands over his eyes, swearing.

“You don’t get to talk to me like that!” Becky shouted, listing on her feet as she stood.

“Chad, get your buddy’s wife out of here,” June called calmly over the laughter of the remaining patrons.

“That’s bullllschlit!” Becky slurred.

June flicked her long, brown braid over her shoulder and put up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Them’s the rules, and you know it. Break a rule, get thrown out.”

Chad Brown stood up from his seat and, with a weary groan, said, “Come on, Becks, let’s get you home.”

Jessa didn’t see whether Becky put up a fight or not. She ran behind the bar, grabbed one of June’s bar towels, and wet it under the faucet. She didn’t know whether Graf was faking being in pain to keep from blowing his cover, but moonshine in the eyes couldn’t be a good feeling.

“Here.” She tried to move his hands, but he batted hers away. “Oh, stop it, you big baby.”

He dropped his hands. His eyes were puffy and red, which he probably couldn’t fake. She dabbed at his face with the towel and made a sympathetic hiss along with him as she pried the lid of one eye open.

“Why didn’t you duck or something?” she asked quietly, casting a quick glance to the other tables. They still laughed and jostled one another, retelling the tale of the most recent time Becky embarrassed herself. They weren’t interested in the cleanup.

Graf eyed them, too. “Because she was too quick.”

That was bull. She’d seen how fast he moved. He was certainly committed to appearing human. “Well, if you’re lucky, you won’t go blind.”

“Oh, good.” He watched her through bloodshot eyes as she wiped the rest of the alcohol off his face. “Are you being nice to me? Dare I ask, nurturing?”

She made a face. “I guess I am. Probably because we’re in a bar full of assholes, and you seem less ob noxious by comparison.”

“Except for June,” he said with a nod toward the bar.

“Well, yeah. Except for June.”

They spent the rest of their wait mostly in silence. Jessa wasn’t a big fan of small talk, and Graf seemed incapable of making any effort toward it. It wasn’t a fully comfortable silence, but it was at least a mutually agreed upon one.

Folks started trickling in about an hour later, with their items for trade. The rules of the auction were simple, and everyone knew them, so when it kicked off, it went quick and neat. Jessa was pretty happy with most of the trades she got.

“Hey, I can make pasta out of that,” she’d said excitedly when Graf’s leather jacket went for a sack of flour. “God, I haven’t had pasta in so long.”

“Doesn’t it get cold here in the winter?” he’d
grumbled, but he’d been easy enough to ignore. In fact, he’d been remarkably easygoing.

“Bar needs fresh music,” she’d said, admiring her newly acquired MP3 player, and Jessa was glad. The same old CDs on the jukebox were wearing on her nerves.

After the auction was finished and Jessa’s sense of prolonged death by starvation had eased, she relaxed. Even had a second drink. All while Graf sat, quiet for one blessed moment, watching her.

“What?” she finally asked, too aware of his scrutiny.

He leaned on the table, elbow propped up, chin on his hand. “You’re like a different person.”

“I’m a little drunk.” She took another swallow from her cup. “You’d better get a drink, or they’ll get suspicious.”

“Not if you stop saying things like ‘they’ll get suspicious.’ Now they probably wonder what they should be suspicious of.” He pried the glass from her fingers. “You won’t fit in that wagon, so we better leave while you can still walk.”

“Yes, I can still walk,” she insisted, before remembering that he hadn’t asked her a question.

As he led her toward the door, his hand at the small of her back—people would talk about that—the other pulling the wagon loaded down with sup
plies, Chad staggered in. His hat was missing, and his shirt was torn.

“It almost got me!” he shouted, his lips trembling. “It almost got me!”

T
he scent of blood was all over the guy who’d burst through the door.

Graf’s first instinct was, of course, to eat him. His second instinct was to cower and cover his eyes. Like the smell would disappear if he couldn’t see it? Didn’t make any sense. The coppery tang would invade his nostrils no matter what he did, forcing the part of him that was more monster than man into hunger overdrive. Oh, who was he kidding? He was always more monster than man.

“Sick at the sight of blood?” June’s arms were folded across her chest, and she was smiling at Graf during her good-natured teasing. But her eyes weren’t smiling. They were accusing.

There was no way she could possibly know. Humans weren’t that smart. They believed what they were taught to believe, that there was no such thing
as monsters, that vampires were bogeymen for nightmares and Halloween.

Occasionally, though, he ran into a human who did know. Someone who probably didn’t guess “vampire!” right away, but knew something was up. They could tell that something wasn’t right about the way he moved, or the way he looked. June was one of those people.

“Come on, we should get you home,” he said, putting his hand on Jessa’s arm without turning away from June. Finally, he broke her suspicious gaze. He swallowed, unnerved. He wasn’t used to being intimidated. He was used to being the one doing the intimidating.

“Are you crazy? Chad is hurt.” Jessa pulled away to join the people crowded around the injured human.

“I sh-shot It,” Chad stammered, his pale face turning from one pair of concerned eyes to another. “It came after me.”

“How’d you get away, son?”

Graf couldn’t tell who’d asked the question. It was the grizzled, honest country voice that could have come out of any of these farmer types.

Someone helped Chad pull his shirt over his head, revealing a long, jagged slash down his ribs. The scent of his blood grew inescapable, and Graf took a deep breath, hoping he looked like he was trying to keep from tossing his cookies all over the floor, rather than savoring the smell. The smell of blood
affected him the way the smell of apple pie had when he’d been human.

At the sight of the wound, a couple of the women gasped. It looked worse than it was, Graf could tell from his vantage point. Long, but not deep. Nothing like what the monster had done to him. If the thing had wanted to kill Chad, it would have been able to, easily. What kind of a monster picked and chose who to kill amid its rampages?

“It’s just a scratch,” Chad said quickly when some one recommended stitches. “I caught myself when I crawled under the barbed wire around Stapp’s old pigpen.”

“You ran that thing onto my property?” someone, Stapp, most likely, shouted.

Chad shook his head. “It wasn’t chasing me. I was taking a shortcut.”

“Best you all get home while It’s still hurting,” June called to silence the chaos. “Chad, you be able to make it?”

He nodded, still white as a sheet. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Lost my gun, though. Dropped it running.”

“Take mine,” Jessa volunteered. “I’ve got—”

Graf held his breath. It would be fitting for her to let his secret out in some stupid way, like this. It never came out all big and dramatic. It would be one slip of the tongue and then it was all torches and pitchforks.

Luckily, she wasn’t too drunk to remember herself. “Because I’ve got a shorter walk.”

Graf let out the breath he’d been holding. “Yeah, and there’s two of us. I could just throw her to It and keep running, so I’ll be fine.”

His joke fell on unappreciative ears. Fifty pairs of hillbilly eyes glared at him with disbelieving hostility. Like he’d taken a piss on Elvis’s grave.

“Shut up, Graf,” June commanded from behind the bar, in the same way a friend would kindly advise another friend to shut up. He wasn’t sure if he should be touched at her simple, country-folk acceptance or if it was a cover for the fact she’d figured out he wasn’t exactly what he was supposed to be. “Jessa, best you leave your loot here, so you don’t have to abandon it to a quick getaway.”

“Yeah, now that she knows It’s out and about, Jessa’ll run into it for sure,” a woman’s voice snapped, and there were a few unkind chuckles.

“Thanks, June,” Jessa said quietly, tugging the little red wagon behind the bar.

Graf picked up the shotgun and handed it over to Chad, who took it gratefully and promised, “I’ll return it tomorrow.”

“See you then,” Graf said, trying and sensing that he had failed to sound hometown and welcomey. Fuck it, he tried; that was all they could really expect from him. He could lure normally intelligent people to
their deaths just by flashing a smile, but hillbillies seemed to be immune to his charm.

The crowd cleared quickly. Graf and Jessa were the last to leave the bar, partly because Jessa wanted to make sure June was okay.

“What are we going to do if she’s not?” Graf had grumbled, juggling the sack of flour Jessa had insisted had to be carried home right now rather than in the morning.

Graf had a feeling her reluctance to leave had more to do with the food packed into the little red wagon than concern for the bartender. Not that he could blame her. If that wagon had been full of blood, they would have had to pry his fingers off it to get him to leave it behind.

After they’d walked down the road and were surrounded by nothing but crickets and darkness, he asked her about it.

“Look,” she said with a heavy sigh. “When you’re so used to doing with nothing, it’s hard to let go of what little you have. Even if you know for sure it’s going to still be there in the morning.”

“And you’re sure it will be there?” He wouldn’t have left his last bag of blood in that place, if the townspeople were vampires. Lucky for him, it wasn’t his dilemma.

She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I know some of the people down there aren’t totally honest. There have been some feuds, some disputes in town. But no one
would dare mess with June. If people lost their one avenue of sociality and commerce, well, I reckon they’d go crazy.”

“You reckon, huh?” He laughed. “I’m sorry. I just feel like I’ve fallen into a Tennessee Williams play. Not that you’d even know who that was.”

“I know who Tennessee Williams is,” she said, her brow furrowing. “
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
It was a movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.”

“Very good.” He didn’t bother to cover up his surprise.

“I’m not some inbred yokel. We did have TV here, you know. Some of us even had sa-TEE-lite.” She adopted an exaggerated country accent. “Yes, sir-ree, we got us one of them thar talking picture boxes, hyuck hyuck.”

“Point taken,” he muttered.

“No, I don’t think it was. Did you know I went to college?” She waited for him to respond and let him stammer helplessly for a few seconds before she cut him off. “No, you don’t know that, because you just assumed I’m uneducated because I live in farm country.”

“Okay, fair enough, I made a stupid assumption.” Though he couldn’t picture Jessa at college, he had to ask. “What was your major?”

She shrugged. “Mathematics. I wanted to be a high school teacher.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for the type who’d
want to teach. I thought you’d have planned on being a veterinarian.” He’d prided himself on being a good judge of people, but every now and then he found someone who surprised him.

“There you go, making assumptions again.” She sniffed and cocked her head to the side, like she was indicating the bar they’d just left, though it was far out of sight. “So, pretty good haul.”

“Yeah, I’ll remember that in the winter, when all the food is gone and I’m freezing to death because you sold off my jacket.” As if summoned by his words, a wintry chill crept up his spine.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, sounding pretty darn unconcerned, in Graf’s opinion. “I have some of my dad’s old Carhartts in the basement.”

“Oh, good. I’ll look like an ice road trucker.” By this time next year, he’d probably be chewing on hay stalks and saying “reckon,” just like Jessa.

A year. He would stake himself if he was stuck in this town for a year.

“Do vampires even get cold?” she challenged, still not seeming at all guilty about giving away all of his personal effects. “You’re dead, right?”

“That’s not the point—” he began, and his words abruptly cut off when she grabbed the hand swinging casually at his side and lifted it up to examine it. Drunkenly, she leaned over their clasped fingers, bringing his hand perilously close to her neck.

“See, you’re cold right now. So how does the cold
bother you?” She dropped his hand and started walking again.

It took Graf a second to recover. Something was definitely wrong with him. After Chad had wandered into the bar, bleeding like the main course, that one little touch from Jessa should have pushed him over the edge. And Lord, how he wanted to go over that edge and drink her dry, but he couldn’t.

He was starting to trust his captor. He had Stockholm syndrome.

“Yeah,” he said quickly, hoping his stunned silence hadn’t lasted too long. “I’m room temperature. But I can still get cold. I’ve still got blood moving around in here. If I go into a walk-in freezer, I’m not going to drop to that temperature.”

“Huh.” She walked the walk of a happy drunk, sprawling steps slapping the pavement with her whole foot at one time as she looked up at the stars. Then she stopped, her face creased in concern. “Wait, then wouldn’t you get really hot in normal temperatures?”

“Yeah, but you get used to it. Like living in the desert,” he answered. “Keep walking.”

She obeyed his order, but her frown remained as they crossed the paved road to the dirt one that would lead to her house. “So, why did you have a leather jacket with you? In July?”

He smirked. “Because leather is sexy.”

“Ugh,” she groaned in disgust. “Can you still get a hard-on? I mean, if you’re dead.”

“Whoa—‘ugh’ to leather, but you’re worried about my
dick?
” He smirked, she blushed, and they both fell silent.

They approached the house, the sickly green glow of the mercury light like a toxic candle in a dark window. Graf had to admit, he liked the isolation of the place. Usually, he preferred someplace busy, lots of people, lots of cars. Since the people in Penance weren’t that great it didn’t bother him to have some distance. Same thing with the cars, since there apparently weren’t any.

He stopped at the end of Jessa’s driveway, jolted by the realization that there weren’t any cars there, either.

“What the fuck?” He pushed the sack of flour into her arms and charged up the lawn. Futile, obviously. The car wouldn’t be hiding. If it wasn’t where he’d parked it, it was gone.

“Your car,” Jessa said slowly and drunkenly. “It’s, like, not here.”

“Really? Thanks for pointing that out!” He punctuated his sentence by kicking a cloud of gravel across the driveway. There wasn’t even anything good to kick in this town.

Jessa stumbled up to stand beside him. “Where did it go?”

“That’s a great question.” He sniffed the air, as
though telltale exhaust would linger there. If it did, what good would that do him? Confirm that someone had driven the car away, rather than pushed it?

“Well, it couldn’t have gone far.” Jessa trudged toward the porch. “We can find it in the morning.”

He opened his mouth to argue, then realized that she was right. Whoever took the car could drive it all night, but they weren’t going to leave Penance.

“It stings, though, just leaving her out there on the road, all by herself,” he said as he followed Jessa through the door.

She startled at his sudden presence. “Jesus, don’t do that!” She set the sack of flour on the coffee table and folded her arms over her chest. “Why do you guys do that?”

He shrugged. “I guess because we forget we freak humans out if we move too fast? Or we just don’t care?”

“Not that.” She rolled her eyes, like he should have been able to follow her shifting conversation topics as well as she did. “Call their cars ‘she.’ Cars aren’t feminine.”

“First of all, it’s not just a car. It’s a 1974 De Tomaso Pantera L. And I don’t know why men call cars ‘she.’ It’s not like I’ve ever done a sociological study of the phenomenon.” He peeked out the window, half hoping he’d had some kind of hallucination and the Pantera would be sitting in the driveway. Lonely and undriven, but still there.

“That’s a stupid answer. You have to have some kind of idea.” She flopped on the couch and clicked on one of the end table lamps.

Graf couldn’t decide if Jessa was more annoying drunk, or less. She said anything she felt like saying now, but she hadn’t really been restrained and polite before, either. She was less hostile. Maybe that didn’t have anything to do with the alcohol. Maybe she was just too tired to be a bitch.

“Do you think it’s because you don’t have a woman in your life, so you make your car into your girlfriend?” she mused, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “That’s pathetic.”

“Hey, I pull my share of tail, okay?” Not that he could remember recently. He’d been an eat-and-run kind of guy as of late.

“Ugh. You’re disgusting.” She let out a long sigh and reached up to play with her ponytail. Her brown hair lay against her neck, dotted with a thin sheen of sweat like dew on grass. Her pulse beat beneath her skin, nice and slow and relaxed, flexing a visible point on her throat.

Graf’s gums ached, and his fangs lengthened. She seemed drunk enough. Maybe she wouldn’t notice a quick bite. Hell, maybe she would be into it. Some of them were.

Her eyes snapped open. “Did you hear that?”

Over the sound of her blood teasing him into a feeding frenzy? No. But he waited for a moment
more, and the sound came again, a thunk, then a scrape, and the tarp wall in the kitchen rustled. “Stay here,” he ordered.

The kitchen was still dark, though the mercury light glowed through the blue plastic. A shadow moved behind the sheet, where the kitchen door used to be. A human shadow. At least it wasn’t the monster again.

“What’s going on?” Jessa asked from the kitchen doorway.

Graf cursed. “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the living room?”