Suck It Up and Die (6 page)

He scooted down another street, taking the back way into the place he still called home: the St. Giles Group Home for Boys.

He took the stairs up to his room. He wanted to change his wrinkled probie shirt for a newly ironed one. If he had to march at the front of the parade he wanted to send a message:
I’m a cadet at the fire academy first, a vampire second
. He also needed to write his Out Day card for Portia and wrap the gift that went with it.

As he finished wrapping the present, he looked out the
window overlooking the street. It swarmed with people gathering for the start of the parade at the spot where Morning, more than a year before, had first outed himself as a vampire. The throng was the hodgepodge he had expected: a mashup of Leaguers, goths, wannabes, news crews, and vampire fans who liked dressing up as their favorite characters from books and movies. He saw a dozen Edwards and Bellas. The only Edward and Bella he knew were the two pet turtles that lived at St. Giles. They had been named by the Mallozzi twins, who had won the naming contest when they pointed out that turtles were as slow, ponderous, and boring as the “real” Edward and Bella.

As he scanned the VIPs mingling around the stoop, the only surprise was who he
didn’t
see. Portia was there, but not her mother. Penny Dredful had been made an honorary Leaguer for her PR work while introducing Morning to the world, as had her daughter, Portia, for her film on Morning. But the most mysterious no-show was the Leaguer of Leaguers: Luther Birnam.

A familiar knock pulled Morning to the door. “Come in.”

Sister Flora bustled into the room. She ran St. Giles along with a few other nuns and was the closest thing Morning had ever had to a mother. It was Sister Flora who had discovered the baby, whom she named Morning McCobb, in a shopping basket left on the stoop of St. Giles. It was Sister Flora who felt responsible for Morning being turned into a vampire when she sent him to a host family on Staten Island for a Thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, one of the Loner vampires who still practiced the old ways turned the host family into his own Thanksgiving feast and chomped into Morning for dessert. Fortunately, the Loner
vampire, Ikor DeThanatos, was so bloated with blood he burped, had a case of backwash, and his saliva, carrying the vampire virus, was injected back into Morning’s neck, infecting him and giving him a new lease on life as a vampire.

“What a thrilling day!” Sister Flora proclaimed. “It’s put a bee in my wimple!” Morning started to remind her that she no longer wore a nun’s hat, but she clapped her hands together. “Are you excited about your parade?”

“It’s your parade too,” he said, reminding her of her Leaguer status; in fact, she’d been a vampire for more than a hundred years.

“Yes, I know, but this day never would have come to pass if it weren’t for you.”

“Mr. Birnam had a lot more to do with it than me. By the way, where is he?”

Flora’s face dropped, then she jacked it back up. “He wrote a wonderful message on the website.” She moved to his desktop computer. “Have you seen it? It’s so inspiring!”

“Sister, he’s not coming, is he?”

“No, but I’m sure whatever’s come up is important.”

Morning threw his hands in the air. “What could be more important than the first anniversary of American Out Day? I mean, he’s the one who came up with a Vampire Pride Parade, and now he’s turning it into the Vampire
Hide
Parade.”

Flora chuckled. “Very clever.” She took his hand and pulled him to the edge of the bed. “Now, listen to me. I don’t know why he’s not coming. Maybe he’s trying to make a point to Rachel and Penny about that TV show of theirs.” Flora was a solid backer of the boycott against
The Shadow
.

“He missed my GED graduation ceremony,” Morning said. “And the ceremonial first day at the fire academy. We haven’t seen him for almost two months.”

Flora’s brow knitted. “I’m worried about him too. But it’s unwise to question the wisdom of someone who’s been taking the world in for nearly eight centuries. Whatever it is, I’m sure he’s got his reasons.” She reached for something. “Now, what’s that doing there?” Off of Morning’s bedpost she plucked a leather cord with a wooden pendant hanging on it. “If there’s any day you should be wearing your good-luck charm, it’s today.”

Morning didn’t resist her putting the necklace over his head. The cookie of wood was made from bristlecone pine, with a blue Maltese cross painted on it. The points of the stubby cross displayed four red letters:
FDNY
. It was not just a gift from Birnam when Morning had first been outed; the sight of the pendant with its Maltese cross had pulled Morning from the forbidden well of bloodlust and stopped him from drinking Portia to the last drop. He tucked the wooden disk under his shirt.

Flora patted him on the shoulder. “The parade’s going to start without you.”

“Would that be the end of the world?”

She gave him a warm smile. “It would be for the beautiful young lady waiting to march with you.”

He jumped up. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about Portia. Of course, that’s why he was marching in the parade. That’s why he was doing
everything
!

As Morning and Sister Flora passed through the building’s entranceway, she cautioned him not to be surprised by something outside. The night before, the historical plaque on the front of St. Giles that cited Morning’s first public CD from human form to mist had been vandalized. Sister Flora told him the mischief had been minor and was being taken care of.

When they moved out onto the elevated stoop, the waiting crowd greeted Morning with a thunderous cheer. Putting on a smile and waving to the crowd, he stole a look at the plaque mounted on the brickwork behind him. It was covered in horse manure. Stranger still, beetles swarmed over the manure.

Flora raised her voice over the noise. “Dung beetles.”

Morning spotted a double column of beetles scuttling along a brick ledge. Each beetle leaving the dung-covered plaque rolled away a tiny ball of manure.

Two beetles dropped off the ledge and exploded into the human forms of young Leaguers, one of each gender. They were sheathed in Epidex, the spandexlike material Leaguers had invented to prevent CDing vampires from popping back into human form and being mistaken for streakers. Their appearance was greeted with cheers and applause.

“Hey, Morning,” the guy Leaguer said, giving the crowd a fist pump. “We’re on a break.”

“Don’t worry,” the girl added, hooking a thumb back at the plaque. “We’ll have it cleaned up in no time.”

Morning looked puzzled. “Why turn into beetles when a person with a rag could clean it in a minute?”

The girl grinned. “We’re making a statement.”

“What’s that?” Morning asked. “How to turn a one-man job into the bug version of community service?”

The guy jerked his head toward the street. “She can explain it better.”

Morning turned to see a cameraman plowing through the mosh, shooting as he came. In his wake were a TV reporter and Rachel Capilarus. The crowd burst into celebration. Morning turned to see why. The two Leaguers had CDed back to dung beetles and now climbed the wall toward the plaque.

“Get the shot?” the reporter asked his cameraman. The cameraman gave a thumbs-up as he pushed in for a close-up of the beetles scurrying up the brick.

The reporter was the blond and smarmy Drake Sanders of Hound TV. Drake was the news-scooper who had shot Morning’s coming-out CD on the stoop thirteen months before. There was no way Drake was going to miss the first Vampire Pride Parade. Drake and the cameraman swung
around, making room as Rachel Capilarus joined Morning and Sister Flora at the top of the stoop. The throng greeted her with whistles and chants of “Rachel! Rachel!”

Before turning to her fans, Rachel gave Morning a once-over. “Like the uniform, so handsome!” She spun in a corkscrew of silk and taffeta. Her dress, a riot of pastels, looked like several Indian saris had been shredded and reassembled. She wore a matching, tattered headband; her neck was a jewelry rack of a peace sign, a rosary, a Star of David, an Islamic crescent, and the Hindi “Om” symbol. Morning wouldn’t have been surprised if a stone from the Temple of Apollo had suddenly popped out of her bejeweled cleavage. Rachel answered the crowd’s adulation with a two-armed wave, rattling her dizzying array of bracelets.

Drake Sanders turned on his mike. “So, Ms. Capilarus, what’s with the dung beetles?”

She flashed an innocent smile. “Okay, sure, Mr. B says we should only CD when lives are at stake—” She fluttered a hand. “Wait! Pun so
not
intended!” She took a breathy breath as the crowd laughed. “I just think if a little bug magic can make the world a less poopy place, shouldn’t we be marines and be all that we can be?”

The crowd bellowed an answer. “Yeah!”

“But Rachel,” Drake said, “doesn’t this kind of activity alienate people who are still afraid of vampires, whether you’re law-abiding Leaguers or not?”

She tossed a hand back at the beetles. “Show me someone who’s scared of a few dung beetles and I’ll show you someone who’s scared of someone stealing their shit.”

The crowd broke into laughter and applause. Morning smiled. It was the one hope he still held out for Rachel. As
hard as she had worked on her makeover, once in a while, she let loose with a zinger that was straight from the quiver of the old warrior princess.

Rachel pretended not to get the joke. “I mean, if someone’s gonna throw a hate crime at us, maybe we should throw something back. Like a CD of a different color.”

Drake looked confused. “A CD of a different color?”

“Yeah, instead of ‘CD’ being ‘cell differentiation,’ today we’re calling it
civil disobediate
.”

After taking a moment to translate “disobediate,” the crowd cheered. Then Rachel gestured at the busy beetles. “The point is—and then we really gotta march—is that these little worker bugs aren’t
causing
a problem, they’re
solving
one. And that’s all vampires wanna do for the human race. Hey!” she exclaimed, hopscotching to a new thought. “Why do they call it the ‘human race’? ’Cause we’re all in the same
race
to do good, to make the world a better place! That’s why we’re race-marching today!” She waggled her arms like a floppy puppet. “And a race-march waits for no one, not even Mr. B! Let’s do it!”

She flowed down the steps as Drake and his cameraman hustled behind her. The mass of cheering paraders, whipped into a frenzy, surged after her like a bursting dam. Morning and Sister Flora hung back on the stoop as Portia squeezed out of the human flood and climbed up to join them.

Portia had changed since breakfast and now wore loose-fitting cargo pants and an untucked button-down. It was one of the things Morning loved about her: the bigger the occasion, the more she dressed down. Right behind her, holding up a camcorder, was a hunky teenager in a pec-hugging tee.

“Hey, Sister Flora,” Portia said, gesturing at her friend. “This is Cody, my cinematographer.”

Cody’s Jake Gyllenhaal eyes rose from behind the camcorder as he flashed a charming smile. “Hiya, Sister.”

Morning shot him a scornful look. Besides his ongoing jealousy of Cody’s swimmer’s body, Morning envied the man-hours Cody got to spend with Portia. Not only did they both attend LaGuardia Arts, they had teamed up on the same senior film project, Portia’s next doc. “I thought you were gonna walk with me, not shoot,” Morning said to her.

“Don’t worry,” Portia assured him, “we can do both. I’m gonna march, do a little directing on the side, and Cody’s gonna do all the shooting. But here’s the problem.”

Cody dodged around his camera and finished her thought as he got a shot of himself and Portia. “We don’t know what kinda doc we’re making yet. Is it about a couple of high school movie geeks and vampire groupies hangin’ in the wings of the Leaguer rights struggle, like a vampire version of
Almost Famous
?” He swung back behind the camera and framed Morning and Portia. “Is it a tragic portrait of chronology-crossed lovers—she’s aging, he’s not!—like
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
with fangs?” He turned the camcorder on the paraders streaming by. “What we wanna make is a Ken Burns–worthy doc on the vampire rights movement called
Fangs on the Prize
—not easy when you’re shooting on a high school budget.”

“Cody keeps forgetting we have something more valuable than a megabudget,” Portia said as she took Morning’s arm. “Inside access.” Her eyes darted to Morning’s neck, and the leather cord above his T-shirt collar. “Speaking of ‘inside’ ”—she fingered the cord and lifted
the wooden pendant from under his shirt—“pride parades are all about not just wearin’ it, but flauntin’ it.”

Morning’s only resistance was an eye roll.

She patted the wood disk. “Now you’re ready to march.”

Cody turned the camera back on himself as he offered his muscled arm to Sister Flora. “What do ya say, Sister? I hate to march alone.”

Flora took his arm with a laugh. “Absolutely, but it seems we’ve missed the front of the parade.”