The Vampiric Housewife (27 page)

    
“We’ve got some errands to run before we leave town. We stick together,” he told them.

    
They piled into his little car, Harry practically having to sit on his sister’s lap. The children were quiet. Their eyes were red from lack of sleep and concern for their father, though John seemed to be the only sullen one. Ethan could see a lot of his father in the boy, physically and otherwise. He and the boy were going to butt heads, there would be no getting around it. The girl was in her own world, eyes glazed over as she stared out the window into the budding night. Harry was alert, quietly taking in everything around him from the emotions radiating from his family to the sights and sounds of the city. Ethan particularly felt the boy’s eyes on him.

    
The first stop was to obtain ID’s. He had made a call last night to a vampire who had been forging documents for nearly two hundred years. His work was flawless. Normally he would have ordered multiple ID’s for each of them. Ethan traveled under many different aliases. But just the complete identity of four people would have forced Johnson to work through the day.

    
“This was a lotta work, man. You owe me,” Johnson, a squatty fellow, told him.

    
Ethan handed him a roll of cash, triple what he usually would have paid. “No, I don’t.”

    
When he came back out of Johnson’s brick building, he tossed them each their new identities.

    
“How did you get pictures of us?” Valerie asked looking at her new Minnesota driver’s license, along with her new passport, social security card, birth certificate, debit card, and credit card. They would not use the plastic, but it would establish a long credit history for them.

    
“We have a file on you that included your pictures. I had to give you new names. Venjamin will be checking flight records and manifests to find you.”

    
“Hey, this says I’m a girl!” Harry protested. “And I’m eleven and a half. Not nine.”

    
“You don’t look eleven. And it’ll be better to pass you along as a girl. All you have to do is put a barrette in your hair.” The boy was small and his voice hadn’t broken yet. He should be able to pull off nine year old Jenny LaPierre without a problem. Valerie was now Jenny LaPierre’s mother, Anne LaPierre.

    
Harry grabbed Amelia’s license. “Who are you?” he asked. Amelia had become Lauren LaPierre, sixteen instead of fifteen. She had her own driver’s license. It was not a flattering picture but that wouldn’t matter except maybe to Amelia. But she made no protest.

    
“Why are they LaPierres and I’m Jason Rogers?” John demanded.

    
“You’re not traveling with them. Anne is traveling with her two daughters. You’re traveling with me.”

    
“I’m not pretending to be your son. No way.”

    
“Fine. Then you’re my nephew.”

    
“This is bullshit. It’s never going to work,” John mumbled.

    
Ethan ignored him. He understood that this was hard for the kid, but he had no patience for teenage angst.

    
The next stop was the laundry mat. Everyone in the car gave him a strange look but no one questioned him. As he crossed the street and walked into the laundry mat, Harry twisted around in the backseat so he could watch him. The laundry mat was the quickest and easiest way to obtain clothing in a pinch. There was a woman loading a washing machine, a teenage kid with an ipod and his nose in a book, and a couple of old ladies gossiping. About six dryers were going. He was thankful for people stupid enough to leave their clothing unattended in public places. He grabbed an abandoned laundry basket and emptied the dryers that looked like they might have the appropriate clothing. No one gave him a second glance.

    
“You guys stand out in your dated clothes. Pick out something that fits you. Preferably jeans and a T-shirt.”

    
“You stole these!” Valerie exclaimed.

    
“Yes. We don’t exactly have time for a shopping spree.”

    
Valerie eyed him but began sorting through the basket occasionally tossing an article of clothing into the backseat.

    
“When are we going to get something to eat?” Harry asked popping his head up front.

    
“That’s our next stop,” Ethan said. For a moment Harry got excited. Maybe someone was
finally
going to teach him how to hunt humans. He sorely missed human blood. It was all he had dreamed of last night. But then Ethan pulled up to a market and Harry’s heart sank. Ethan bought them steaks and tossed the bag into their laps.

    
“Eat up. This is all you’ll get for tonight.” He also tossed a package of cheap pink barrettes to Harry. “For you.”

    
“Thanks,” Harry said with a roll of the eyes. He seemed to have accepted his role as a girl though. Two seconds later his head was back up in the front seat. “You want some?” he asked offering Ethan some meat, his mouth full.

    
“No. I’m good,” he said without looking back.

    
“Harry, sit back. It’s not safe,” Valerie scolded.

    
Meat would give Ethan little satisfaction. He could suck nutrition out of it, but he required more from his food than just nutrients. How Charlie and all those other made-vampires lived in Sangre Valley eating meat and drinking cold blood was beyond him. If he was going to drink animal blood, the animal had to at least be alive.

    
Their last stop was the airport. Ethan parked the car in long term parking and forced them to use the car as a dressing room. As Harry waited for his mother and sister to emerge from the vehicle in their new outfits, he decided to talk with Ethan who fascinated him to no end. “You’re smart,” he told the vampire.

    
“Thanks,” he said a tad bit annoyed. Something inside of him wanted to like Harry though. Ethan was coming to realize that the differences between living and dead vampires were more than just how they were created. Living vampires weren’t driven in the way made-vampires were by their hunger and desire for blood. Most vampires he knew, himself included, thought about blood the way human men thought about sex. Dead vampires were selfish, lonely creatures by nature. How could they not be when their life ambition was to murder? Living vampires—or at least the Murrays—weren’t anything like that. Except for Harry. He had the charisma and charm and sociopathic behavior of a made-vampire which wouldn’t have bothered Ethan except that he was a born-vampire—and a mere child.

    
“I could learn a lot from you. Would you teach me to hunt?”

    
“Your mother said no humans, remember?”

    
He smiled. “She’ll get over that. She always does. But she doesn’t have to know.”

    
“But she will know. I bet you’re a natural anyway,” Ethan told him. It was the truth. He would bet that this eleven year old kid was a natural killer.

    
His smile widened. “What if I can get her to say it’s okay? Then would you teach me?”

    
“We’ll see.”

    
“Thanks Ethan.”

    
Valerie and Amelia emerged from the car. Ethan consciously kept a still face. Valerie was breathtaking—if he had breath to take. There was nothing left of her that said 1950’s housewife. Her jeans hugged her hips and stretched down her endlessly long legs framing her round buttock. She didn’t seem comfortable in their tightness, but she would have to get use to that. It was the modern style. The white blouse she wore was a size too large for her obscuring the slenderness of her torso and all but drowning out her breasts, but it still looked bright and clean as it accented her delicate collar bones and long neck. He was entranced by the slope of that neck and how it disappeared into the collar. It invoked two separate hungers inside of him. Her reddish brown hair fell a couple inches past her chin in slight, causal waves. She wore no makeup and was in no need of it. Her natural beauty was radiant all alone. As stunning as her violet eyes were, they were going to cause a problem. They would call too much attention to all of them. He reached into the car and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. He placed them on her face knowing that he was closer to her than he should be. He could feel his hungers fighting to be released. All three children were watching him.

    
“We have to hide your eyes. Humans don’t have violet eyes. You’ll have to pretend you have a migraine and that the light hurts your eyes. Can you do that?”

   
“Yes.” She touched the sunglasses. He wished he could see past those dark lenses.

    
“When we go through security, they’re going to make you take them off. Do it, but squint so they can’t get a good look at your eyes, okay?”

    
She nodded.

    
He forced himself to move on to his inspection of Amelia. By the time he had met her, she had already mastered the typical teenage hair style. Her long, dark locks looked natural in her messy ponytail. Her jeans may have been in need of a belt, but baggy as they were, it was still a vast improvement over the poodle skirt. Her Ozz-fest T-shirt pulled against her breasts, but she looked like an all American teenager—just one on the darker, more insecure side.

    
John changed into faded blue jeans with holes in the knees. Ethan could tell that the holes annoyed him. He also wore a white and blue baseball shirt which would have been perfect except he put his varsity jacket over it.

    
“Take off the jacket.”

    
“No,” he said defiantly.

    
“Do you want to advertise to Venjamin that you and your family were at the airport? Sangre Valley doesn’t exist. You can’t wear a varsity jacket to a school that’s make believe. Take it off,” he growled staring the boy down. John glared back at him determined to win, but it didn’t take long for him to lose his nerve, break the intense gaze, and take the jacket off. “You can keep it. You just can’t wear it,” he told the kid.

    
Harry had transformed into Jenny. He wore jeans and a long sleeved, white shirt under a bright pink T-shirt with a sparkly heart on the chest. He had even clipped two pink barrettes into his moppish hair. He shared the violet eyes of his mother, but he was kid so Ethan hoped people would pay less attention to him.

    
“Good,” he told Harry in approval.

    
Ethan pulled the green suitcase from the car and packed their old clothes in it along with John’s jacket. When he came across Amelia’s blood stained dress, he had an idea.

    
“Where are we going?” Amelia asked.

    
“The Virgin Islands, St. Thomas to be exact. It’s still American soil so we won’t have to go through customs. When we go through security, they’re going to ask you to empty your pockets and take off your shoes and anything metal and set them in a tray. Do it. They might ask you questions, make small talk. Where are you going? How old are you? Where do you go to school? So this is your story. Valerie, Amelia, Harry, you are Anne, Lauren, and Jenny LaPierre. You are meeting your husband. He’s in St. Thomas on business. He’s a business man. You’re a housewife. You home school your two girls.” He turned to Amelia. “What’s your name?”

    
“Lauren LaPierre.”

    
“How old are you?”

    
“Sixteen.”

    
“Where do you go to school?”

    
“I’m home schooled.”

    
His eyes turned to Harry. “What’s your name?”