Hellforged

Page 6

“Pink squirrel.” Axel wrinkled his nose and moved down the bar.
“Hi,” the zombie greeted me, grinning. “I’m T.J.”
“You know, I would’ve guessed that.”
“You would?”
I nodded at his right hand, resting on the bar. A gold ring, emblazoned with a T and a J in blocky letters, gleamed on his finger.
“Oh, right.” He grinned again.
“I’m Vicky.” I put out my hand. T.J. shook it vigorously, the thick gold ring cutting into my palm.
“Great to meet you, Vicky,” he said, as Axel placed glasses on his tray. T.J. picked up the drink-laden tray and rushed to table five.
“Enthusiastic,” I noted.
Axel grunted. Wow, he must really be impressed. Good. I hoped T.J. would work out. Axel could use the help, and with T.J.’s friendliness, some of the customers who’d rather run out of the place screaming than approach Axel might stay long enough to order a second round.
Axel pointed his chin past my shoulder. “Here comes your roommate.”
I swiveled on my stool to see a petite, curvaceous vampire slink through the crowd toward the bar. She wore a skintight black minidress and thigh-high stiletto boots. Customers stood aside to let her through, and she left a trail of men with their tongues hanging out. Nobody does, or overdoes, “hot vampire chick” like Juliet.
She flipped back her long black hair and slid onto the stool beside me. “Don’t tell me you’re alone again,” she said.
I looked around, as if checking. “Nope. You’re here, too.”
“So’m I.” Coming up behind Juliet—or maybe staggering was a better description—was a norm who’d followed her through the crowd. His skin was pasty; purple half-moons shadowed his eyes. He wore a double-breasted suit, his tie was loose, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. Blood stained his collar. “Hey, pretty lady,” he said to Juliet.
Vampire junkie. Addicted to the mild narcotic in vampire saliva, a guy like this would bug vampires to feed from him until he passed out. He looked like he was already a couple of pints short.
“Not interested,” said Juliet.
“Aw, c’mon,” he breathed, leaning in close. Even from where I sat, I could smell the sourness of his breath.
Bam! Down came T.J.’s tray. “ ’ Scuse me, sir,” he said in his friendly voice. “We need to keep this part of the bar clear.” He picked up the junkie as easily as he’d have lifted a kitten and carried him to an empty seat on the other side of the room.
The junkie looked stunned, but he stayed put. T.J. zipped back to the bar, winked at Juliet, and grabbed his tray.
“Axel’s new waiter is pretty good,” I noted.
“You haven’t met him before?”
“I haven’t been here for a few days.”
“He’s already a favorite with the vampires. Mostly because he’s good at dealing with idiot blood bags.” She jerked her head back toward the junkie.
Axel set Juliet’s usual drink in front of her. She always ordered a Bloody Mary, because she liked to mess with norms’ heads, telling them it was made with real blood. Like all vampires, she could eat and drink anything she wanted, but she could only get nourishment from living human blood. She stirred her drink with the celery stalk.
“So why are you here alone?” she asked. “Where’s that scrumptious-looking human cop? I thought you said you were dating him.”
“No, I said we were going out to dinner.” Dating wasn’t a word that had much to do with my life—and it was definitely a word I didn’t want to think about right now. “Besides, Daniel works norm hours. Meeting me for a drink at five in the morning doesn’t fit his schedule.”
Juliet smiled, the tips of her fangs resting on her bottom lip. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Uh-oh. That sounded like Shakespeare, and I was not in the mood to play Juliet’s Shakespeare game. Juliet hated the Bard—with good reason, actually, but that was beside the point. You’d think after a few centuries she’d quit ragging on the guy.
“But you know,” she sighed dramatically, “the course of true love never did run smooth.”
She could keep this up all night. Shakespeare had written a gazillion lines about star-crossed love, and Juliet could quote them all. I, on the other hand, boasted a C-plus as my best-ever English grade. I’d been way more interested in demonology books than old, incomprehensible plays and poems. So I tried to turn the conversation back to her. “Looks like I’m not the only one without a date tonight.” She blinked at me. She wouldn’t answer unless I said it in Shakespeare. So I tried. “Where … uh, wherefore art, um, is—whatever—tonight’s Romeo?”
She pouted, like the game had been my idea and she was already bored with it. “No one looks appetizing tonight. Now you’ve made it worse, mentioning him.”
That surprised me. “Who, Romeo? Don’t tell me you’re getting all nostalgic about young love.”
“Hardly. What I miss are the days when you could drain a body dry and cast it aside.”
My roommate was the Juliet—as in Juliet Capulet, sweet-heart of Romeo Montague in fourteenth-century Verona. That’s why she hated Shakespeare; everyone knows his version of the story and, according to Juliet, he got it all wrong. The way Juliet told it, Friar Lawrence hadn’t given her a sleeping potion; he’d made her a vampire. Later, when she woke up in the family tomb, the grieving Romeo had been her first victim. One she’d drained dry and cast aside.
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I asked.
Juliet shook her head. She seemed in a strange mood tonight. “Let me try to explain what it’s like for me. Imagine you’re hungry, absolutely starving, and you go into a restaurant. All around you, people are eating delicious meals. Juicy steaks, delicious-smelling pasta, roast turkey …”
I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t eaten since before the MIT job. “You’re making me hungry.”
“Good. So at the restaurant, you start with an appetizer. Say you order scallops.”
My nose wrinkled. “I don’t like scallops.”
“All right, make it shrimp cocktail, then.”
“Actually, I’m not all that big on seafood.”
“Oh, for Hades’ sake. What would you order?”
“Um, nachos?” I picked up my bottle. “To go with my beer.”
She raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. “So that’s what you’re drinking. I wondered. All right, nachos. Fine. Now may I continue?”
I nodded graciously.
“So you order nachos. And the waiter brings you one. Just one. A tortilla chip with some cheese, a jot of salsa, and a single jalapeño. A dollop of sour cream, and another of guacamole. It looks delicious, and you’re hungry, so you eat it.”
“Then I tell the waiter to hurry up and bring the rest of my appetizer.”
She shook her head. “Then the waiter tells you that’s it. Pay up and get out. If you want more food, you’ll have to find another restaurant.”
Oh. Now I saw what she was getting at. Vampires were legally allowed to take one pint of blood per human per night. Getting greedy and sucking down more than a pint could lead to expulsion from Massachusetts and taking your chances in a state that was less enlightened about PA rights, a state like New Hampshire or Rhode Island, where unprovoked staking was legal. For Juliet—or any vampire—getting a full meal meant negotiating with several humans each and every night.
“It’s not that bad, is it? I mean, to use your own analogy, you’ve got the best restaurants in town begging you to stop in for a bite. On the house. You could have any human in this place.”
“I know.” Juliet turned on her bar stool, surveying the room. She turned back to the bar and sighed. “But when the hunger is deep, it’s hard to get a satisfying meal from a bite here and a bite there.”
I pondered that. Before I could reply, the vampire junkie was back, his eyes bloodshot and a little wild. “You’re interested. I know you are,” he said to Juliet, slurring his words. “I saw you looking at me.”
Wow. How could she resist a smooth line like that?
Juliet didn’t reply. I glanced around for T.J., but he wasn’t in sight. Instead, Axel appeared. “Looks like you’ve donated enough blood for one night. Go home and sleep it off.”
The norm didn’t even flick Axel a glance. “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the lady.”
Axel leaned across the bar, grabbed the norm’s tie, and stood, pulling the tie upward as he went. This forced the guy onto his toes and made him look up—way up—at Axel’s face.
“I’m talking to you. Out of my bar. Now.” Axel let go of the tie, shoving the norm backward. The guy stumbled, gaped up at the bartender again, then turned and fled through the front door.
“Junkie.” Axel’s voice held oceans of disgust.
Axel had reason to be concerned. The law saw the junkies as victims. It wasn’t illegal for a junkie to give more than a pint; instead, there was big trouble for any vampire who fed from a norm who’d already passed the limit. Vampires had to screen their donors carefully. And Axel could get closed down if illegal blood-taking happened in his bar.
I wondered how much blood a norm could lose before he was drained dry, as Juliet had put it. “What if there were no limits? Would you have killed that norm?”
“Probably not. Too anemic-looking. He’d be half a meal at most, so he wouldn’t satisfy that deep hunger.” Another sigh. “Mostly, I’m glad to be out of hiding. It’s a lot more fun to hunt by sitting here chatting up hot guys than it is to knock out some bum and drag him into an alley. But not everyone feels that way. The Old Ones—the really ancient ones, I mean—prefer to keep the old ways.”