You Suck (3 page)

“Fangth,” Tommy said.

“Yes, I can see that,” Jody said.

“Why’d you jump? Do they look thupid?”

“You startled me, is all,” Jody said, looking away from him like he was an arc welder or a total eclipse and full eye contact might blind her. She waved him on. “Go, go, go. Be careful. Not too hard.”

“Right,” Tommy said. He grinned again and she shied away.

Tommy turned back, braced the cat, who seemed much less freaked by this process than the two vampires in the room, and bit.

“Thuppt, thuppt, ack!” Tommy stood up and started brushing at his tongue to remove cat hair. “Yuck!”

“Hold still,” Jody said, going to him and brushing the loose, damp cat hair away from his face. She went to the kitchen counter and came back with a glass of water and a paper towel, which she used to wipe at Tommy’s tongue.
“Just use the water to rinse. Don’t swallow it. You won’t be able to keep it down.”

“I’m not going to thwollow it, my mouf is full of cat hair.”

Once he had rinsed, Jody picked the last of the hairs from his mouth, and in doing so, she pricked one of her fingers on Tommy’s right fang.

“Ouch.” She pulled her finger away and put it in her mouth.

“Oh, jeez,” Tommy said. He pulled her finger out of her mouth and put it in his. His eyes rolled back in his head and he moaned through his nose.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Jody said. She grabbed his hand and bit into his forearm, attaching herself to him like a remora to a shark.

Tommy growled, flipped her around, and threw her facedown on the futon, his arm still in her mouth. She flipped her hair to the side and he sank his teeth into her neck. She screamed, but the shriek was muted, bubbling out on Tommy’s bloody forearm. Chet, the huge cat, hissed and bolted across the room, through the bedroom door, to wedge himself under the bed, as the sounds of straining leather, tearing denim, and screaming predators filled the loft.

The irony, that it sounded like a huge catfight, was completely lost on the huge cat.

K
apoc stuffing and chicken feathers lay in great, fluffy drifts across the room, along with the shreds of their clothing, the futon cover, pieces of a fuzzy, Muppet-skin rug, and the crushed remains of a couple of cheap-ass Pier 1 paper lanterns. Sparks crackled from the bare wires over the breakfast bar, where the pendulum light fixtures used to hang. The loft looked as if someone had thrown a hand grenade into the middle of a teddy-bear orgy and the only survivors had had their fur blown off.

“Well, that was different,” Jody said, still a little breathless. She was lying across the coffee table, looking out the window at a streetlight from an upside-down angle, naked except for one sleeve of her red leather jacket. She was smeared with blood from head to toe, and even as Tommy watched, the scratches and fang marks on her skin were healing over.

“If I’d known,” Tommy said, panting, “I’d have grown a foreskin a long time ago.” He lay across the room where she had thrown him, sprawled on a pile of books and kindling that had once been a bookshelf, also smeared with blood and covered in scratches—wearing only a sock.

As he pulled a pencil-sized splinter of bookcase out of his thigh, Tommy thought that he might have been a little hasty about yelling at Jody for turning him into a vampire. Although he couldn’t really remember much of it, he was pretty sure he’d just had the most amazing sex ever. Apparently what he had read about vampire sex being all about drinking the blood and nothing else—it was just another myth like the changing into a bat and the inability to cross running water.

“Did you know that was going to happen?” Tommy asked.

“I had no idea,” Jody said, still on the coffee table, and looking more to Tommy every minute like a murder victim, except that she was talking, and smiling. “I was going to make you buy me dinner and take me to a movie first.”

Tommy chucked the bloody bookcase splinter at her. “I don’t mean did you know we were going to do it, I mean did you know that it was going to be like that?”

“How would I know that?”

“I thought maybe the night you spent with the old vampire…”

Jody sat up. “I didn’t
do
him, Tommy, I just spent the
night with him trying to find out about how to be a vampire. And his name is Elijah.”

“Oh, so now you’re on a first-name basis.”

“Oh, for the love of God, Tommy, would you stop thinking? You’re taking what was an amazing experience and sucking all the life out of it.”

Tommy fidgeted on his pile of rubble and started to pout, but winced when he tried to push out his lower lip and it caught on his fangs. She was right. He’d always been like that, always overthinking, overanalyzing. “Sorry,” he said.

“You have to just be part of the world now,” Jody said softly. “You can’t put everything into categories, separate yourself from experience by putting words on it. Like the song says,
let it be
.”

“Sorry,” Tommy said again. He tried to push the thoughts out of his head, closed his eyes, and listened to his heartbeat, and Jody’s heartbeat coming from across the room.

“It’s okay,” Jody said. “Sex like that does sort of beg for a postmortem.”

Tommy smiled, his eyes still closed. “So to speak.”

Jody stood up and crossed the room to where he was sitting. She offered him her hand to help him up. “Careful, the back of your head is kind of stuck in the drywall.”

Tommy turned his head and heard plaster cracking. “I’m still starving.”

She pulled him to his feet. “I’m feeling a little drained myself.”

“My bad,” Tommy said. He could remember now, her
blood pulsing into him, at the same time that his was pulsing into her. He rubbed a place on his shoulder where the punctures from her fangs hadn’t quite healed yet.

She kissed the spot he was rubbing. “You’ll heal faster when you’ve had fresh blood.”

Tommy felt an ache, like a sudden cramp in his stomach. “I really need to eat.”

Jody led him into the bedroom, where Chet the huge cat was cowering in the corner, hiding unsuccessfully behind the wicker hamper.

“Wait,” Jody said. She padded back out into the great room and came back a few seconds later wearing what was left of her red leather jacket (really more of a vest now) and her pan ties, which she had to hold together on one side where they’d been torn off. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not comfortable being naked in front of strangers.”

Tommy nodded. “He’s not a stranger, Jody. He’s dinner.”

“Uh-huh,” Jody said, nodding and shaking her head at the same time, making her appear like a bloodstained, bobble-head doll. “You go. You’re new.”

“Me? Don’t you know some superanimal hypnotism to call him to you?”

“Nope. Go get him. I’ll wait.”

Tommy looked at her. On top of the blood that streaked and smeared her pale skin, there were gobs of futon stuffing stuck to her here and there, as well as white chicken feathers in her hair from one of the exploded cushions. He
had feathers and cat hair stuck to his chest and legs. “We’re going to have to shave him first, you know?”

Jody nodded, not looking away from the huge cat. “Maybe a shower first.”

“Good idea.” Tommy put his arm around her.

“But just washing. No sex!”

“Why, we already lost the cleaning deposit?”

“Those shower doors are glass.”

“Okay. But can I wash your—”

“No,” she said. She took his hand and dragged him into the bathroom.

I
t turned out that superhuman vampire strength came in handy when shaving a thirty-five-pound cat. After a couple of false starts, which had them chasing Chet the huge shaving-cream-covered cat around the loft, they discovered the value of duct tape as a grooming tool. Because of the tape, they weren’t able to shave his feet. When they were finished, Chet looked like a big-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots—the feline love child of Golem and Doddy the house elf.

“I’m not sure we needed to shave all of him,” Tommy said, sitting on the bed next to Jody as they considered the bound and shaven Chet on the floor before them. “He looks creepy.”

“Pretty creepy,” Jody said. “You’d better drink. Your
wounds aren’t healing.” All her scratches, bruises, and love bites were completely healed, and except for a fleck of shaving cream here and there in her hair, she was as good as new.

“How?” Tommy asked. “How do I know where to bite him?”

“Try the neck,” Jody said. “But sort of feel around for a vein with your tongue before you bite, and don’t bite hard.” She was trying to sound confident in her instructions, but she was in unexplored territory as much as he was. She was enjoying teaching Tommy about the particulars of vampirism, just as she enjoyed teaching him how to do grown-up human things like how to get the power and phone turned on in the loft—it made her feel sophisticated and in charge, and after a series of boyfriends for whom she had been little more than an accoutrement, whose lifestyles she had affected, from heavy-metal anarchists to financial-district yuppies, she liked being the pacesetter for a change. Still, when it came to teaching him about feeding on animals, she couldn’t have been winging it more if she really could turn into a bat. The only time she’d ever considered drinking animal blood was when Tommy had brought her two large, live snapping turtles from Chinatown. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to even try biting into the armored reptiles. Tommy had named them Scott and Zelda, which hadn’t helped. Now Zelda was functioning as a lawn ornament in Pacific Heights and Scott was encased in bronze and standing next to the old vampire in the great
room. The biker sculptors downstairs had bronzed them, which is what had given Tommy the idea to bronze Jody and the old vampire in the first place.

“Are you sure this is okay?” Tommy said, bending over Chet the huge shaved cat. “I mean, you said that we were only supposed to hunt the sick and the weak—the black auras. Chet’s aura is shiny and pink.”

“It’s different with animals.” She had no idea if it was different with animals. She’d eaten a moth once, whole—snatched it out of the air and downed it before she could think about it. She realized now that there were a lot more questions she should have asked Elijah when she had had the chance. “Besides, you’re not going to kill him.”

“Right,” Tommy said. He put his mouth on Chet’s kitty neck. “Like thith?”

Jody had to turn away to keep from laughing. “Yeah, that looks good.”

“He tathes like thaving cream.”

“Just go,” Jody said.

“’Kay.” Tommy bit and started to moan almost immediately. Not a moan of pleasure, but the moan of someone who has his tongue stuck on the ice-cube tray in the freezer. Chet seemed strangely calm, not even struggling against his kitty bonds. Maybe there was something to the vampire’s power over his victims, Jody thought.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Jody said.

Tommy shook his head while still feeding on the huge shaved cat.

“Tommy, let off. You need to leave some.”

“Nu-ih,” Tommy said.

“Stop sucking the huge cat, Tommy,” Jody said sternly. “I’m not kidding.” She
was
kidding, a little bit.

Tommy was breathing hard now, and a little color had come into his skin. Jody looked around for something to get his attention. She spotted a vase of flowers on the nightstand.

She pulled out the flowers and tossed the water on Tommy and the huge cat. He kept feeding. The cat shuddered but otherwise remained immobile.

“Okay, then,” Jody said. It was a heavy, stoneware vase, something Tommy had picked up to hold some apology flowers he’d brought her from the grocery store where he worked. He’d been good that way, sometimes bringing home apology flowers before he’d even done anything to apologize for. Really, you couldn’t ask for more than that from a guy—which is why Jody slowed to half speed as she brought the vase around in a wide arc that ended with it smacking Tommy in the forehead and knocking him back about six feet. Chet the huge shaved cat yowled. Miraculously, the vase did not break.

“Thanks,” Tommy said, wiping the blood from his mouth. There was a crescent-moon-shaped dent in his forehead that was rapidly filling in, healing.

“Sure,” Jody said, staring at the vase.
Great vase,
she thought. Elegant, fragile porcelain was all well and good for the collector’s case or the tea party, but for the girl who finds
herself in need of a vessel that can deliver a wallop, Jody was suddenly sold on the sturdy value of stoneware.

“Tastes like cat breath,” Tommy said, pointing to Chet. The punctures from Tommy’s fangs had already healed. “Is it supposed to?”

Jody shrugged. “What’s cat breath taste like?”

“Like tuna casserole left out in the sun for a week.” Being from the Midwest, Tommy thought everyone knew what tuna casserole tasted like. Having been born and raised in Carmel, California, Jody knew it only as something eaten by the extinct people on
Nick at Nite
.

“I think I’m going to pass,” Jody said. She was hungry, but not cat-breath hungry. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about feeding. She couldn’t very well try to live off Tommy anymore, and regardless of the rush and the sense that she was serving nature’s cause by taking only the weak and the sick, she didn’t like the idea of preying on humans—strangers anyway. She needed time to think, to figure out what their new life was going to be like. Things had been happening too quickly since Tommy and his friends had taken down the old vampire. She said, “We should get Chet back to his owner to night if we can. You don’t want to lose your driver’s license—we may need a valid ID to rent a new place.”

“A new place?”

“We have to move, Tommy. I told Inspectors Rivera and Cavuto that I would leave town. You don’t think they’ll check?” There had been two homicide detectives who had
followed the trail of bodies to the old vampire, and ultimately the discovery of Jody’s delicate condition. She’d promised them that she’d take the old vampire and leave town if they’d let her go.

“Oh yeah,” Tommy said. “That means I can’t go back to work at the Safeway either?”

He wasn’t stupid, she knew he wasn’t stupid, so why was he so slow to see the obvious? “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Jody said. “Since you’re going to pass out cold at sunrise, just the way I do.”

“Yeah, that’d be embarrassing,” Tommy said.

“Especially when sunlight hits you and you burst into flames.”

“Yeah, there’s got to be company policy against that.”

Jody screamed in frustration.

“Jeez, kidding,” Tommy said, cringing.

She sighed, realizing that he’d been goofing on her. “Get dressed, cat breath, we don’t want to run out of dark. We’re going to need some help.”

O
ut in the great room, the vampire Elijah Ben Sapir was trying to figure out exactly what was going on around him. He knew he had been constrained—bound inside a vessel, and whatever held him was immovable. He’d even turned to mist, which relieved his anxiety somewhat—there was an ethereal mind-set that accompanied the form, it took concentration to not let yourself just float off in a daze—but
the bronze shell was airtight. He could hear them talking, but their comments told him little except that his fledgling had betrayed him. He smiled to himself. What a foolishly human mistake to let hope triumph over reason. He should have known better.

It would be days before the hunger was on him again, and even then, without any movement, he could last indefinitely without blood. He could live a very, very long time constrained like this, he realized—it was his sanity that would suffer. He decided to stay in mist form—drift as in a dream at night, sleep like the dead during the day. This way, he would wait, and when the time came, and it would come (if nothing else, living for eight hundred years had taught him patience), he would make his move.