Page 17 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Nine

Grizelda the Terrible

No Admittance Under Any Circumstances!!!

To my relief, Peter picked up driving surprisingly quickly. After a few false starts, he merged onto the frontage road only slightly slower than the speed of traffic.

By the time we got to Interstate 80, you’d never have guessed he’d been so nervous about driving less than twenty minutes earlier.

His taste in music, though, was appalling.

“I want to renegotiate our terms,” I moaned about three minutes into Peter’s first musical pick. “Morrissey? Seriously?”

“What’s wrong with Morrissey?” Peter asked, all innocence. Of course he would pick music that was the exact opposite of the Spice Girls in every way. He was fighting a smile, though.

Maybe he was only doing this to get under my skin.

“I’ve solved the mystery of your identity,” I announced. “You were an emo teenager in the 1980s.”

His lips twitched. “Perhaps,” he said. “Don’t you think his voice is lovely?”

“Sure,” I admitted. “But his lyrics deal with death and existential angst. Bit of a downer.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he mused. “But I like it.”

The landscape changed dramatically the minute we crossed into Nevada. Pine forests gave way to high desert plateaus so abruptly I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened here millennia ago to create such a stark and immediate change in the land.

Traffic was sparse once we made it east of Reno.

Whatever residual anxiety Peter had had about driving seemed to melt away once we had the freeway to ourselves.

Using more magic at that rest stop than I typically did in a day had me feeling relaxed, and I closed my eyes, letting the vibrations of the car lull me into something close to sleep.

When I opened my eyes again it was dark outside, and the car had stopped moving. Peter was frowning beside me, his gaze going back and forth between the journal open on his lap and the building in front of us.

“We’re here,” he said, sounding more resigned than pleased.

I looked up at the building, and my mouth fell open.

“ Big Earl’s Singing Chicken Emporium: The Second-Largest Collection of Singing Animatronic Chickens in the World ,” I read off the sign mounted on the restaurant’s roof. Though from the look of disbelief on Peter’s face, it was clear he’d already read it.

Then again, he couldn’t have missed it. The sign was nearly as big as the restaurant itself and flashed so brightly it hurt to look directly at it.

“You’ve been here before?” I couldn’t believe it. While Big Earl’s looked like the exact brand of camp Reginald and I had gravitated towards back in the day, the thought of Peter—a man who found the Spice Girls unbearable—ever having been here was breaking my brain.

“It’s in my journal,” Peter confirmed. “So I assume so. Gods only know why.”

“Maybe you used to be into wacky tourist traps,” I mused. “Maybe you loved them.”

He didn’t dignify that with a response.

As we walked towards the entrance, we passed a cluster of enormous, seven-foot-tall statues of grinning googly-eyed chickens that reminded me of a Bizarro World Stonehenge. Children climbed on and around them, shrieking happily as their grinning parents took pictures.

“Pose with one of these,” I teased, poking Peter in the side. “It might jog your memory.”

He shot me a look that was so withering I nearly burst out laughing.

A massive indoor gift shop was the first thing to greet us when we walked in, its sign proclaiming that one could purchase any chicken souvenir your little heart can dream of inside.

All I could see over the throngs of shoppers, though, was a wall of bright yellow hats with bills shaped like beaks and googly chicken eyes attached to the front.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a good hat,” I said. “Do we have time to go shopping?”

Peter pointedly guided me past the shop by the elbow, fingers digging in slightly. “No.”

I wanted to argue that there was always time for gift shops, but the stony look on Peter’s face told me it would be pointless.

This place’s focus was clearly more on being a cheesy tourist destination than a proper restaurant, but I hoped it actually served food, too.

I hadn’t eaten since we’d pulled through a fast-food restaurant near Sacramento half a day ago, and I was starving.

My stomach was rumbling by the time we made it to the host stand, and I could’ve murdered for a chicken sandwich.

When the host saw Peter, all the color drained from his face.

“It’s you,” he breathed. The young man’s horrified expression was wildly incongruous with what he was wearing: one of the chicken hats from the gift shop, a white T-shirt that said Cluck Cluck Cluck!

in bright yellow lettering, and yellow-and-white-checked pants held up with bright yellow suspenders.

But his terror seemed no less genuine for his absurd uniform.

His hands were clenched into tight fists at his sides, his teeth buried so deeply into his bottom lip I was worried he’d draw blood.

Peter seemed at a complete loss. He turned to me, as if I might know what to do.

But I had no idea.

“We don’t want any trouble,” the host said. His voice shook. “Please.”

“Neither do we,” Peter said, holding up his hands palms-forward in a placating gesture. “We just want dinner.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Now the young man looked ready to pass out from fear.

“Just…just take what you want and leave.” His eyes were wide. Frantic. “I won’t breathe a word to anyone that you were here. Just—”

He ran out the front door without finishing that thought, nearly barreling over a family of four as he went.

Something here was very off.

“Do you think he might have mistaken you for someone else?” I asked dubiously.

I glanced around to see whether anyone had noticed what had just happened.

Fortunately, other than the people the guy had nearly trampled in his haste to get away, almost everyone else in the waiting area was either glued to their phones or occupied with their gift shop purchases. No one was paying us any mind.

“I doubt he was mistaken,” Peter said, darkly. “As soon as we walked in, I knew I’d been here before. It’s familiar. All of this.” He gestured vaguely to our surroundings. “I just can’t remember why I was here.”

Another host soon appeared at the check-in counter, a young woman wearing a dress that would fit right in at an Oktoberfest beer garden. If, of course, Oktoberfest servers wore bright yellow dresses and chicken hats.

“Have you been helped?” she asked brightly, as though her coworker hadn’t just literally fled. She wore a name tag shaped like a chicken that declared her name to be Veronica in bright red letters.

“Not yet,” I said. I turned to Peter. “Let’s eat since we’re here.”

“You want to spend time here?” Peter asked, stunned. “On purpose?”

“I thought we’d have dinner.” And then, remembering who I was talking to, amended, “Or at least that I’d have dinner. What did you think we’d be doing here?”

“Walk in. Ask some questions. Leave.” He said this like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“You’re no fun.”

“I suspect you’re not the first person to tell me this.”

I turned to Veronica, who’d been watching our conversation like a tennis match. “Table for two, please,” I said.

Veronica consulted a tablet at the host stand. “Do you have a reservation?”

“Why would we sign up in advance to eat at a place like this?” Peter asked.

I glared at him. But Veronica laughed as though she got that kind of thing all the time.

“Looks like we just had a cancellation,” she said, plucking two chicken-shaped menus from the host stand. “Follow me.”

I turned to Peter again, who looked like he was about to face a firing squad.

“It’ll be fun,” I said, grinning at him. On impulse, I poked him in the stomach. His abdominal muscles clenched at my touch. Damn, they were solid. “Live a little.”

He rubbed at the spot where I’d touched him, a strange look on his face. “I can’t live at all,” he grumbled.

But despite his protests, when I started walking in the direction Veronica was taking us, Peter followed close behind.

Even I had to admit the animatronic chickens kind of sucked at singing.

By the time our server brought our order—a basket of chicken tenders and fries for me, a Diet Coke for Peter—we’d sat through a horrendous cover of Bad Moon Rising in which all the words had been replaced by aggressively enthusiastic clucking.

Every time another chicken burst into song, Peter glared at the thing as though it had personally murdered his entire family.

It was cute, really, how annoyed he was by this silly place.

He was cute.

As much as I wished I could deny it.

“So,” I said, eyes on my plate as I pushed the last of my fries through a puddle of ketchup.

I tried to ignore how much Peter’s pouty lower lip jutted out when he was especially irritated.

How bitable it looked. It was difficult, though.

The urge to wind him up, to tease him, was nearly irresistible.

“Now that we’ve been here a little while, any memories triggered? ”

“I remember these fucking chickens.”

I snorted. “They’d be hard to forget.”

The corners of his lips twitched into an almost-smile. The first sign of amusement he’d shown since we’d gotten here. “True.”

“Anything besides the chickens?” I prompted. “Like, why you were here the last time?”

He fiddled with his straw as he considered. “I remember being…angry when I was here. No, not angry.” He shook his head, grappling for the right words. “ Aggressive. I don’t remember anything else.”

“Aggressive?” That could explain why the host had freaked out when he’d seen him.

Peter blew out a long breath, then scrubbed a hand over his face. “There was someone here I wanted to intimidate. I don’t remember who, but…”