Page 16 of Blood Lovers (American Vampires #1)

Tortured angst.

Syrsee and I get in her truck and as she drives us down the street to the hardware shop I find myself absently thinking about the church guy I met yesterday.

Was it yesterday?

“Hey, what day is this?”

“Fuck if I know,” Syrsee mumbles. Then she looks over at me, a little apologetic. “Sunday? You were out almost all of yesterday, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Really? Damn. I have no memory of that.”

Her smile is there, but weak. “You were pretty sick.”

“I’m feeling good now though. That aspirin must’ve done the trick.”

“Oh. Yeah. So you remember that, huh?”

I grimace. “They tasted like shit.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Like… what? Was I talking in my sleep, or something? Did I hallucinate and say weird shit?”

“No.” She smiles for real now, then pulls into an alley that dumps us out in a small parking lot behind the hardware store. “This is me.” She turns the engine off and we sit there for a moment, just looking at each other.

“Look, if you just want me to bail, I’ll do that.” I have to get this out because the first night it was clearly a sex thing. I mean, it was more, but… it was sex. And we both know that. Day two? I dunno. That went sideways. And now we’re on day three and I can tell she’s… not backing out because there’s nothing to back out from, but she’s starting to wonder what this is.

And so am I.

“Do you want to bail?” There’s no playful banter in her tone. And this is what’s different, I think. Somehow things have gone serious between us.

“No.”

“How come? I mean, I get it. You could ask me the same thing. But I asked first so… I call firsties.”

“You know what they say about firsties?” She can’t hide the giggle. So maybe I was just imagining things? Maybe she’s not trying to back out? “They come first.”

“They do. And… now you might be deflecting.”

“Why do I want to hang out with you? Aside from the fact that you’re the only woman in town that I know?”

“Aside from that.”

“You’re…” I’m about to say something throwaway. Something like ‘you’re pretty.’ Or ‘sexy.’ Or whatever. But that’s not it. So I take a moment to figure out what it is I feel when she’s near me.

She doesn’t push me. Just gives me this time. Even when the silence between us gets awkward. Finally, I say, “Did you ever see that movie Stand By Me ?”

Syrsee makes a face like she’s thinking. “No. I’ve heard of it. And the song, of course. But I’ve never seen it.”

“It’s good. You should watch it some time. But the reason I bring it up is because it’s about a group of kids. Childhood friends who go through some shit together. Real coming-of-age shit, ya know? And it’s being told by one of them later in life. And at the end he says something like… ‘You never have friends as an adult the way you did as a kid.’ Like they never quite live up.”

Syrsee’s face softens and she smiles a little. Agreeing with me, I think.

“And that’s just the feeling I get with you. Like we really do have those memories, ya know? From… from forever ago. Like we really could just sit down, drink some beer and eat pizza, and go back in time together. And it would be so great. Stand By Me kind of great.” I sigh, then shrug. “That probably doesn’t make sense.”

“Like we’ve been friends forever.”

“Yeah. Like that.”

“And… we went through some shit together. Foxholes.”

“What?”

She laughs. “It was a running joke between me and my best friend. When she wanted me to help her with something crazy—which was often—she would say, ‘Remember when I pulled you into that foxhole and saved your life, Syrsee? You would’ve died out there without me.’ Like we were in Nam together, ya know?”

I have to cover my mouth to stifle my laugh.

“I know.” She looks away, grinning so big I can see her smile reflected in the window. “It’s dumb.” She looks back at me. “But it’s like that, right? Like we’ve pulled each other into a foxhole and lived to talk about it.”

“Yeah. But it’s weird, ya know?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Anyway. You feel like my best friend when I was twelve. Which is kind of meaningful to me because I don’t remember anything from when I was twelve.”

She squints her eyes a little, playing these words back in her head. It’s a strange thing to say, and I expect her to ask questions about it—maybe even hope she asks me questions about it—but she doesn’t. She just stares at me and says, “I hope you feel better. It wasn’t a deep foxhole. Probably not deep enough. But I did pull you in.”

And that’s a weird thing to say too. But I don’t ask her questions either. I just say, “Sorry I got sick on you. But thank you for playing nurse. I feel pretty great now.”

“Do you want to come up while I shower?”

“Only if you want me to.”

“Yeah.” She smiles again. And this time it’s not forced, or thin, or wide. “Yeah, I do.” It’s just friendly.

We get out and go upstairs to her place. “Do you know,” she says as we walk inside, “that I have only been in this place for a total of six hours and the rest of my life here in White River has been spent with you?”

I follow her into the apartment, closing the door behind me, then look around. There’s one big room with a galley kitchen, a dinette table with three chairs, a flower-patterned sofa that looks like it might’ve been born around the same time as me, and a TV from the seventies that has an actual antenna on top of it. I let out a breath. “Wow, your place is much nicer than mine.”

She laughs. “I’m not sure that’s a compliment. Your place is a dump. And this place is… also a dump.”

“But a much more hygienic dump.”

“For sure.” She picks up a backpack, places it on the dinette table, and starts rifling through it, eventually pulling out a small stack of clean clothes and a towel.

“A backpack.” I didn’t really mean to say this out loud. But there it is.

“Yeah.” Syrsee sighs. “I travel light.”

“I guess you do.” I mumble this as I walk over to a record player sitting on an old-fashioned TV tray under a window, then bend down and start flipping through a stack of albums.

“I’ll be right out. I won’t take long.”

I look over at her and smile. “You take all the time you like, friend. I’ll be here.”

She pauses, smiling down at me. “I’m really glad you’re feeling better. But… if you feel sick again, tell me, OK? We’ll… rest. Until you feel better.”

“I’m fine. Go shower. I feel like I’m starving.” Which is weird.

She eyes me cautiously for a moment. “OK.” Then she disappears inside the bathroom and closes the door. A couple minutes later, the shower is going and I’m slipping Pink Floyd’s The Wall out of an album cover and placing it on the turntable. I eyeball the grooves in the vinyl and set the needle down on the last song.

The cheap, built-in speakers crackle as ‘Comfortably Numb’ begins to play.

I scoot back, leaning against the couch, and stretch my legs out, letting myself get lost in the music and the memories that come with it.

I went to this concert in 1980. In LA, no less. It was fucking amazing.

Syrsee wasn’t even born then. Wasn’t even a blink on the radar. And if I was still human, I would’ve been fifty-one.

In scion years I’m sixty-five but in human years I’m… ninety-three. Damn. I’m old. That’s a pretty big age gap. But I don’t feel old. In fact, I feel very young right at the moment. Very… satisfied, actually.

I close my eyes and let my mind wander. Not to the distant past because that’s pointless, but to yesterday morning when I was out hunting down breakfast for Syrsee.

The guy at the church. What was his name again? I open my eyes and blink. “Joshua.” I say it out loud.

We’re not going back to the food pantry for breakfast. It’s Sunday, which means there will be offers of church, and I would like to avoid those. I look around for a clock, find a digital readout on the stove, and realize it’s barely seven AM.

The bathroom door opens and Syrsee appears in a cloud of steam, all fresh, and smelling good, and looking dangerous in a pair of black tactical pants and a dark-gray long-sleeved thermal. She’s got her boots in hand as she walks across the hardwood floor, plopping down on the couch, close enough to me so that her knee bumps my shoulder.

I look up at her and smile. “You smell fucking delicious.”

“The landlord left some apple conditioner in there. I couldn’t help myself.”

I get up off the floor and sit down next to her, our first night together coming back to me in a rush.

Two days. I’ve known this woman two days and I feel like we’ve been soulmates for all eternity. Before I can stop myself, I reach for her, my hand slipping around her waist, my mouth diving for her neck. She tenses, like maybe she thinks it will tickle, but I kiss her gently, just below the ear. “Fucking. Delicious.” Then I pull back and smile.

“You do realize that there’s nothing to eat in this town.”

“Fuck this place. Post Falls is only about a hundred miles away.”

She laughs. Loud. “Well, it’s too far for us. I hate to break it to you, but the gas station is out of gas and I’ve only got sixty-seven—errr, probably sixty-six miles—left on the truck.”

I shrug. “I’ve got a truck too. It’s got a full tank. And when we get to Post Falls, we should just rent ourselves a little house and stay there. Never come back here, ever.”

She points to her backpack. “My shit is already packed.”

I lean in and I’m just about to kiss her when a knock at the door makes us both jump.

Syrsee looks at me. “Two guesses who that is.”

“The church people?”

“Hundred bucks.” She offers me her hand to make the bet.

But I just smirk at her and get up to grab the door.

Sure enough, it’s Joshua. “Uh, hey!” I say this brightly, like I’m not annoyed that the local do-gooder just prevented me from kissing the sexy girl on the couch. “What’s up?”

“Oh.” Joshua looks a little flustered. “Ryet. I wasn’t expecting you.” He peeks past me to find Syrsee. “There you are. I just wanted to check in on you. Emily, my wife, mentioned that you came in for medicine.” Then he eyeballs me, maybe a bit cautiously.

“Don’t worry. I’m totally better. Not contagious at all.”

“I’m glad to hear that. So.” He pauses to beam a smile. He’s something of a contradiction with his longish blond hair. A little bit rebel, but clean-cut and very church-y at the same time. “We have a huge town breakfast on Sundays. I wanted to make sure you knew about it. Just in case you’re hungry.”

Syrsee walks up behind me and gets so close, I can feel her breasts pressing into my back. I want to attack her for this move. Just throw her down on that couch and fuck the ever-loving shit out of her.

She leans her face up to my neck, resting her chin on my shoulder. “We are hungry. And we’d love to come. Right, Ryet?”

There goes my morning fuck. I force a smile. And is Joshua smirking at me? He is. “Would love to join you for breakfast, Joshy.”

The nickname almost makes him frown, but he’s good at this nice-guy shit, so he’s got it locked down before Syrsee even notices. “Great. Come on over.”

“We’re right behind you,” I say. “Meet ya over there in five.”

I close the door and Syrsee snickers, whispering, “You didn’t have to close the door in his face.”

I slip my hands around her waist and tug her up to me so her belly is pressing into my hips. “I was just about to jump you on that couch and the preacher shows up? What the fuck, ya know? Plus, we were moving out today. We need to go house-hunting in Post Falls.”

She pats my chest. “It’s two hours, tops. And two hundred miles there and back every day? That’s quite a commute.”

I make a face. Because I actually forgot that I work here and I need to renovate six cottages before May.

Syrsee snickers at my disappointment. “Pancakes help. Come on. Let’s go play nice with the church people so we can get free pancakes.”

I am a reluctant participant at the church breakfast at first. But after I see the spread they have I settle down a little, filling my plate with all kinds of human food that I’m not normally interested in. Today though—actually, since I met Syrsee—I’m famished.

I like the idea that Syrsee makes me more human, while at the same time, I feel like I can be myself too. It’s weird.

“You look like you’re thinking very hard about that bacon.”

I glance up from the food and find a pretty young blonde woman. And instantly, I know she is Joshua’s wife. I don’t know why it is. They’re not dressed alike, but they look alike in a couples sort of way.

I put two slices of bacon on my plate. “Nah. This bacon was just calling my name.”

“You’re Ryet, right? I’m Emily, Joshua’s wife.” She and I say those last two words at the same time. Which makes her smile grow into something more than just practiced welcoming. More like genuine delight. “Yes. How did you know?”

“Just a good guess.”

“Well, I’m glad to meet you. We knew that you moved into the cottages last month. And we saw you buying bathroom fixtures at the hardware store, so you’re fixing them up, right?”

I guess it’s been a while since I was so on a human’s radar, because her level of interest in me is annoying. Almost alarming.

There have been… oh, maybe three humans who have guessed that I am something more than just a single, late-twenties guy. So it’s been a really long time since someone was watching me so closely.

“Yeah.” I finally answer her. “I’m fixing them up. Did my own bathroom first.”

“Well, I can’t blame you for that. Those places are…”

“Disgusting?” Syrsee appears at my side holding her own plate filled with food.

“Yeah.” Emily laughs uncomfortably. And I’m not sure if it’s Syrsee who did that, or the fact that she had to admit my place is gross out loud. “Oh. How did the tea work?” Emily eyeballs me critically. “You do not seem sick.”

“What tea?”

But Syrsee takes over. “Oh, I didn’t end up using it. Turns out the aspirin was all he needed.”

I catch a flash of annoyance on Emily’s face in the form of a micro-crinkle in her brow. But it’s smoothed with a smile almost immediately, and another moment later she looks over her shoulder, pretends to acknowledge someone, and turns back to us apologetically. “Well, I have other welcoming duties. But I’ll see you two in church, right?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. Just turns, hand in the air, waving at a random someone in the crowd of locals.

Syrsee leans in to my ear. And God, that apple scent is kinda turning me on. “We’re not going to church, right?”

“Darling, we’re stuffing our faces, then we’re gonna go back to your place, and then I’m gonna—”

“Ryet!”

And guess who is right there ready to interrupt my fantasy. “Joshua. Nice to see you again.”

“Come over here. Let me introduce you—”

And… now I’m stuck. I spend the next hour carefully watching the clock to make sure we escape before noon, while being simultaneously introduced to every person in town.

Syrsee is dragged off only a minute or two into the greetings by Emily, because she has to meet all the females, and apparently one does this segregated by sex in the White River First Methodist crowd.

They are trying to make us stay for church. This becomes clear right around ten AM, and painfully obvious by eleven fifteen.

Syrsee interrupts Emily mid-sentence. “Well, thank you all for a lovely breakfast. But Ryet and I have work to do.” She beams a smile at me. “We’re going to pull up the carpet in his cottage today.” She pats my upper arm. “Aren’t we, honey?”

“You bet.” I beam my own smile back at her.

And before Emily, or Joshua, or anyone else in the town can talk us into church, we’re out of there.

Syrsee starts laughing as we walk back to her place. “Was I rude?”

“You were not. It was a trap, right?”

“Agreed. From now on, we can’t get our food at the pantry or eat the delicious Sunday breakfast.”

“Fuck.”

“I know. It was good.”

Syrsee hooks her arm in mine and we smile all the way down the street. But instead of diverting to the alley where the stairs to her apartment are, she leads me towards the front door of the hardware store.

“What are we doing?”

“Pulling up carpet, remember?”

“Oh.” I chuckle a little. “You were serious.”

Syrsee frowns and points to the door. “Well, shit. It’s closed.”

“Of course it’s closed. It’s Sunday and the entire town is in church.”

“Do you find that a little…”

“Culty?”

“Yeah.” She looks up at me, chuckling, her eyes dancing with delight. “That’s exactly the word I was looking for.”

I glance back down the road where the church is, then look back at her. “They’re weird, right? I’m not just being a dick because I don’t believe in religion?”

“It’s not you.” She hesitates, like she wants to say something more, and she does say more, but somehow, I just know it wasn’t what she was originally gonna say. “This whole town is weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No school.” She holds up a finger, ready to tick shit off a list. “No doctor. No grocery store. No…” She glances around town. “No bar, no bowling alley—”

“Bowling alley?”

“What else do people do in a town like this?”

My smile grows exponentially.

“There’s literally nothing here but a dubious gas station, a diner that’s never open, a hardware store, and a church filled with culty people. Why do we live here again?”

“We… we don’t.”

Syrsee and I just stare at each other. She blinks first. Then she’s laughing. “We don’t. So why are we still here? I get that you have a job, but there’s no law that says you have to live at your work, right?”

I look around. It’s pretty. I’ll give it that. But she’s right. This place is boring and the people are kind of unsettling. And while Paul did leave me in that room and insinuate that I was going to live there while I did his remodel job, he never specifically ordered me to do that. So I shrug. “Well. Maybe we should move.”

“Are you asking me to run away with you?”

I’m pretty sure she’s the one who came up with this idea, but if she wants me to make the next move, I will. “Yeah. I’m asking you to run away with me.”

Her eyes search mine, like she’s thinking very hard. “Did I ever ask you if you were a serial killer?”

“I’m thinking we decided you were the serial killer, remember?”

She taps her chin with a fingertip. “That’s right. We did decide that. So, you’re OK with running away with a serial killer?”

“I think I can take you.”

She guffaws. “Do you think that?” There’s a little twinkle in her eye. Like she really might be some kind of jujitsu expert.

I take a step and close the distance between us, placing my hands on her hips as she stares up at me with a whole lifetime of expectations in those green eyes of hers. “I’m not a serial killer.”

Which is technically a lie, but also the truth. I have killed plenty of people over the decades, but I’m not hunting them. Well, there is that missing witch, who I am hunting. But Paul never told me to kill her. He said to bring her in. So I’m thinking that telling Syrsee that I’m not a serial killer is just a little white lie and not a mortal sin.

“Oh, my God.” She’s shaking her head. “I would pay good money to know what you’re thinking right now.”

“What? Why?”

“Whatever internal conversation you were just having with yourself must’ve been good. You had a look of tortured angst.”

“Angst?” Now it’s my turn to guffaw.

“No. Not just angst. Tortured angst.”

“Anyway.” But I’m smiling so big. Where has this woman been all my life? She really does feel like my best friend from back when we were twelve. “So. We’re running away?”

“I’m so in.”

“Do you wanna get your shit?” I point to the second floor of the hardware store.

“I think I’ll leave it.”

“Hedging your bets already?”

“Nope. Fresh start.”

“Oh.” I nod because that makes sense. “Do you want to drive?”

“Nope. I’m leaving the truck too.”

“Really?”

She slowly nods her head up and down. “Really.”

Her tone has changed, this one word coming out low and almost whispered. Like this is not some joke to her, but something very real.

“OK.” My tone matches hers. Then I say it again. “OK. Let’s run away. I’m driving.”