An Unattractive Vampire (11 page)

With this decided, everything else fell into place. A long black skirt that was slit on either side, up to her thighs so her long, silky legs slipped out of them. Full-length black sleeves gave her a bit more coverage and warmth. A collar fit snugly around her neck for a bit of class, without covering her décolletage. After this, it was just a matter of applying jewelry and caking on eyeliner.

Amanda looked at herself in the mirror. With the exception of her hair, she was the very image of a Goth goddess. For a moment, she considered putting on a black-bob wig. It would definitely have helped her status among the hard core, for whom blond hair was decidedly too mainstream. However, when it came to everyone else, blondes still held more sway, so she went without.

All that was missing were her knee-high, high-heel boots. Unfortunately, these were not in her bedroom. The last time she’d worn them, she had immediately taken them off. Which meant they were in the hallway closet. Downstairs. Where her brother was.

This was the part of her life that Amanda had the most trouble with: trying to balance her long-term, vampire-based goals while maintaining enough authority to keep her brother in line. Covering up as best she could, which wasn’t very much at all, she tiptoed her way to the stairs.

She crept down the three-hundred-plus-year-old creaky staircase, wincing at each prolonged squeak and groan of the wood. At the bottom, she poked her head around the corner to see if her brother was there. He wasn’t. Breathing more easily, she opened the closet and rummaged. It had only been a month since her last outing, and yet, as per the law of hallway closets, what she was looking for had managed to wind up in the back underneath fallen jackets, old shoes, and sports equipment she couldn’t remember ever buying. Upon extricating her somewhat squished leather footwear, she sat on the third step, worked her feet into them, and zipped them up. Standing carefully, Amanda straightened her skirt and turned to get her purse.

Simon was sitting on the fourth step, waiting for her. How he had managed to get there without making a sound was beyond Amanda.

“Hey . . . Simon,” she said awkwardly. She felt like a teenager again.

“You’re going out,” said Simon, balancing between making a statement and asking a question.

“Yeah,” she replied meekly. She tried desperately to cover her cleavage with her arms. Thanks to her choice of corset, though, there was an awful lot of cleavage. “I’m taking Yulric to meet the other vampires.”

“Remember your mace,” he advised, standing to walk up the stairs.

Trying to regain her adult authority, she changed the subject. “Are you going to be all right here by yourself?”

“I have Sun Tzu to keep me company,” he said. He held up a leather-bound book too large for a boy in Batman pajamas.

“Only three chapters and then to bed, understand?” she called after him.

She waited until she heard his door close before climbing the stairs herself to snag her purse and a warm cape. She then awaited her failed plan B to come up from the cellar so they could go see her failed plan A.

• •

Yulric never liked going into situations blind. That was the easiest way to die. Knowledge was power, and, in this brave new world, he was sorely lacking. He may have been outclassed by those who knew how to play music from a bar on their arm or extract notes of scrip from mechanical devices, but ancient knowledge still applied.

Hence, the dead cat.

Dissecting the feline he had purloined from across the street, he began to examine its entrails. A cat was not best for this type of work, but the area livestock was sorely lacking. According to the location of its liver, tonight would not go well. A bulge in its stomach, the remnants of a good meal, meant he would get his answers. One sickly lung was blackened and deflated, the other pink and filled with air, Yulric chose not to interpret that. The intestines spilled out first, which indicated a long journey was imminent.

What truly vexed him was the heart. For the greater part of the population, this lump of biologically vital muscle tissue was something about which to sing songs, read poems, and eat little candies with phrases on them. For Yulric, it represented his desire, not just for the coming meeting but for all things to come. In a very limited way, the heart was him. If it had been shriveled or blackened or covered in tumors, he might have been worried. But it was healthy and boisterous and strong: a very good sign.

Except that it was on the wrong side of the body.

“Are you almost ready?” called a voice from upstairs.

“A moment, if you please,” he shouted back. He dug a small hole in the already broken concrete floor and threw the cat in. Not the typical disposal method for a sacrificial animal, but he’d been forbidden already from building a fire, and even in ancient times, people got funny about eating cats.

He covered the small hole and then jumped into the large hole that had once been his resting place. Contrary to popular belief, vampires are not very sentimental. When your very existence inevitably results in mobs with torches, it becomes difficult to collect priceless works of art and fine Italian furniture. Even before his original death, Yulric had learned not to get too attached to anything you couldn’t fit into a small bag.

That being said, he liked to be prepared. Clawing his way through the dirt, handfuls at a time, he slowly moved deeper and deeper into the ground. Finally, his nails scraped against the wooden lid of a small chest. At one point, it had been finely ornate with delicate carvings and brilliant colors, though that was before it had been buried in dirt for three centuries. If the Austrian carpenter who’d crafted it could see what’d become of his work, he would have killed Yulric. Which was why Yulric had slit his throat before taking possession of the damn pretty box.

Yulric opened it without a second thought. Locks were for mortals and insecure giants; no one stole from a vampire. The contents of the chest found their way into the folds of his robe. Yulric took a moment to consider the state of the box and the likelihood that the boy would be rooting around the cellar after he left. With a smile, he left the box out where it was sure to be found.

Belying the giddiness he felt, he slowly made his way upstairs to face his destiny.

• •

“Are you ready?” Amanda asked as the vampire strolled into the kitchen. The sight of her seemed to give him pause, and she could feel his eyes sweeping across her body in a disapproving, oddly parental way. He muttered something under his breath that sounded like “never be free of these Puritans.”

“What?” she asked, certain she had misheard him.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I am ready.”

They made their way through the hallway to the front of the house.

“Simon, we’re leaving!” Amanda called upstairs.

“Okay,” called a voice that sounded busy.

“Stay out of the basement, boy!” shouted the vampire.

There was a long pause before Simon finally answered, “Okay.”

Once the two had gone outside, Amanda rounded on the vampire. “What was that about?”

Yulric grinned. “There is a rather tarnished old box that I would like restored.”

“Huh,” she replied with a smirk. “You’re learning.”

Amanda made it as far as the car before—

“What are you doing?” cried a voice from behind her. She turned to find the vampire frozen on the stoop, face aghast, as if he wasn’t sure whether to run or ravage. Amanda let out the kind of sigh that only saints and people with children make, for only they know the secret of turning oxygen into patience.

“The vampires are not in Shepherd’s Crook, present company excepted. Shepherd’s Crook is a boring, small town, and no self-respecting vampire would ever set foot here, present company excepted. So we need to go to New York City or New Amsterdam or whatever they called it in your day. And to get there, we need to drive.”

“I am not getting into that infernal machine,” he proclaimed. “It can’t hit you while you are inside it,” she assured him.

“So say you,” he replied, having lost all ability for reasonable thought.

“It is a carriage,” she explained. “A horseless carriage. A means to transport people from one place to another. It does not have a mind of its own. It is not out to get you. It will not ignite or implode in on itself just because you’re inside.”

The vampire looked at her as if he didn’t believe a word she was saying, and so she continued. “I
am
getting inside. Where the controls are. And you, the person annoying me, will be outside where the controls aren’t. And then who knows what might happen.”

Angrily, the vampire moved to the passenger side of the car. After she gave him a pointed look, he opened the door and, with a few starts and hisses, got inside, moving toward the middle of the seat, away from the door, which he eyed warily.

Between the corset, the skirt, and the boots, it took Amanda a moment to negotiate her way inside. After she had, she instructed, “Seat belts.”

The vampire turned to the strip of fabric hanging off his shoulder. Amanda knew he had learned from the television what they were, so he could not play ignorant this time.

“I have no need for a life saving restraint,” he argued.

She was ready for this fight, as well. “If you don’t put it on, the police might pull us over and make inquiries.”

“Then I will change their minds,” he said impatiently.

“Can you also change the mind of the video cameras that will be recording you? Or the people who will be watching those videos?”

It was a bluff. Amanda had talked to her brother on the subject and was pretty sure this vampire wouldn’t show up on video. Still, Yulric didn’t know that and neither Linske was about to tell him. And so, with some trepidation, he reached out, took the clip attached to the fabric, stretched it across his body, and inserted it into the device meant to receive it.

“Well, here we go,” she said. And away they went, the girl and the vampire.

Driving with the vampire turned out to be a lot like driving with a dog. Or a small child. Or a small dog with fingers. As soon as she hit the freeway and they started going faster than Yulric had ever seen anything go, his fear of the car was apparently overcome by awe and curiosity. He watched as they zoomed by the outside world, often choosing to pick objects in the distance and follow them with his head until they had passed. This eventually caused him to lean on the window controls, which Amanda had foolishly forgotten to lock. So, up and down went the window. Then, out of the window went hands, followed by arms, and finally a head. All the while, questions were being asked. “How fast are we going now?” was said with the same annoying frequency as “Have we arrived yet?” or the panicked shouts of “Watch out!” and “No, no, no!” when she weaved the car through traffic.

Amanda had never really understood the theory of relativity. When they had explained it in school, it had gone over her head, and when Simon tried to show her two years ago, it had been during the
Phantom
season finale, so she wasn’t really listening. Now, though, she looked on at people passing in their cars, also headed for New York, and finally understood. For those passengers, this trip would only take a few hours. For Amanda, it would be so much longer.

Yulric had been to cities. To say he’d lived in any would be both literally and metaphorically incorrect. It’s hard to live in a place you intend to flee in six months. But he had stayed in dozens, maybe even hundreds of cities, and what he lacked in time spent, he made up for in the quality of the cities themselves. Any college student or ardent world traveler wishes he had the résumé that Yulric could boast.
²⁷

He had also lived long enough to understand that change and growth were inevitable. In his years, small farming villages filled with serfs had turned to towns filled with merchants and craftsmen, on their way to becoming cities filled with serfs again. Castles and walls had become largely irrelevant fortifications allowing for the outward expansion of dwellings and brothels.
²⁸
What ancient artifices weren’t torn down ended up mixing with modern structures, like cathedrals or palaces.

Cities grew. This was the way of things. Unless there was a war or a plague or a mysterious stranger, in which case, a city might crumble, dwindle, or disappear/explode/sink into the sea. But barring any of these occurrences, cities grew, and one need only have looked at Shepherd’s Crook to see this fact in motion. Three hundred years ago, it was a small collection of farmhouses around a church, barely worth calling a village. Today, from what Yulric had seen whizzing by, it took up nearly as much land as Paris or London had in his day. However, Yulric’s understanding of population growth did not prepare him for the contemporary city.

“Is that a building?” he asked after they’d barely passed beyond what Amanda called the suburbs and into the city proper.

Amanda glanced at where he was looking. “That? That’s nothing. An apartment complex probably.”

Yulric looked at her aghast. He’d besieged towers in castles smaller than this building. And those had been filled with noble lords and soldiers aplenty. These . . . these were for
regular
people.

Amanda could not help but smile at the vampire’s childlike amazement. “Wait until you see the real skyscrapers.” Thirty minutes later, however, Yulric was still waiting.

“Should we not be moving?” he groaned.

“I take it they didn’t have traffic back in the 1600s?” said Amanda. She inched the car forward slightly, then stopped.

“What is the point of this hideous monstrosity if it does not go fast?” he protested.

“We’ll get there when we get there, all right?” Amanda replied, although he thought she was secretly agreeing with his sentiment.

Yulric looked out the passenger window and pointed. “Why do we not take the empty road?”

“That isn’t a road. It’s a sidewalk,” she told him.

“There are no cars on it,” Yulric pointed out.

“That’s because it’s for people,” explained Amanda.