Asil’s First Date Unappreciated Gifts #4
Asil shook his head. “Blood and gore.”
“Well,” said Kelly, evidently believing Asil’s teasingly solemn tone rather than his words, “we are going to a vampire ball, after all.” He contemplated traffic for a moment.
“I think this will be my last one. Grad school means I don’t have much time to play anymore anyway, and…
the group has changed from when I joined it.
I guess growing up means you have to quit playing games, making stuff up, and dressing in costume. ”
“Nonsense,” said Asil, relaxing a little as his beast stood down. “I love to dress in costume.”
Kelly laughed. “But you’re not much older than I am.”
“I am older than I look.” Asil changed the subject before Kelly chose to pursue that one. “Since this is a ball, there will be dancing?”
“Yes. Starts with a tango, ends with a waltz, and everything else is in between.” Kelly said it like a tagline.
“And do you tango?” It was his favorite dance. Asil had never tangoed with another man before, but at his age, new experiences were to be savored.
“Fourteen years of ballet with classes in ballroom dancing, historical dancing, tap, and jazz along the way.” Kelly grinned at him.
“I told my parents that I was gay when I was sixteen. I’m pretty sure, now, that they already knew.
Back then I was scared of what they would do.
My dad said, ‘So that’s why you took all those dance classes.
’ My mom pretended to hit him. It wasn’t quite the response I’d been expecting—I was hoping for more drama. Looking back on it, I am grateful.”
“Can you follow?” Asil would not follow another in a dance or anything else. If Kelly were not willing to cede the role to him, they would not dance—which would be too bad because Asil was a very good dancer.
“Lead, follow, shadow,” Kelly said. “I can do it all. You really are willing to dance with me? In Missoula, Montana, where you might get beaten up for it? You aren’t like any straight guy I’ve ever met.”
“I am like no one you have ever met,” said Asil with assurance.
Kelly laughed, though Asil was serious. But he didn’t mind if Kelly didn’t understand that it was true. It was enough that Asil did.
The ball was being held in an event center just outside of town.
There were people dressed as zombies directing in the parking lot.
Asil understood the people who dressed up like zombies even less than the people who dressed up like vampires.
By reputation if not in truth, vampires were powerful, brooding, beautiful—rather like Asil really was.
Zombies were unattractive dead things with bits and pieces falling off.
The few he’d met also smelled like rotting flesh.
He parked the car and escorted Kelly to the entrance. Just inside was a pseudo vampire in the suit of a nineteenth-century barrister collecting tickets and taking stage names and affiliations.
“Kelly Lieberman and Asil Moreno.” Asil handed him the tickets.
“Vampires?” asked the man.
“Yes,” said Kelly. “Missoula chapter.”
“Kelly is a vampire,” answered Asil. “I am a werewolf. Marrok pack.”
Beside him Kelly went still. Vampires, every human knew, were safely fictitious, but werewolves were real. Asil often wondered how mortals believed both of those “facts” at the same time. But it was certainly safer for everyone that they did.
The pseudo vampire at the door looked up at Asil with a hostility that appeared real but Asil’s nose told him was entirely faked.
“Monsters are supposed to be in costume,” the doorman said sharply—to Kelly. “Where are his tail and ears?”
“Vampires don’t like werewolves—the ones in our game are supposed to be pets or slaves. So for obvious reasons, the werewolves mostly game separately,” Kelly informed Asil in a rushed undertone. “We’re supposed to give each other a hard time when we interact.”
Asil showed his teeth to the ticket taker. “Once you see my ears and tail, it is too late for you.”
The vampire grinned in a very unvampire-like way. “Nice threat. Cool Spanish accent, too. I’ll put you down as a mixed-race couple, then. Vampire and werewolf. That’ll be good for some terrific role-playing later on.”
The room was decorated in keeping with the vampire theme—lots of reds and blacks, with fog machines in the corners pumping out fog and fog-machine stink. They had arrived a half hour before the dancing was scheduled to start, but there were a lot of people in the room already.
“Why not vampire?” asked Kelly in a low voice. “When did you decide to go werewolf to a vampire ball?”
He didn’t, quite, ask if Asil were a real werewolf.
“Drinking blood is revolting,” Asil told him absently.
If he’d been paying attention, he would have admitted what he was, but he was an old wolf who never walked into a room without knowing who and what was in it. Therefore, he responded to Kelly’s question by instinct—and Asil had spent a fair few centuries hiding what he was.
He looked for enemies—to be sure, most of his enemies were no more. But there were still a few fae—and newly, a whole clan of witches—who would love to see him dead. And vampires, though he did not think there would be any of those here.
If he had known about a werewolf ball, where humans were pretending to be werewolves, Asil would have been driven to attend out of curiosity. And, perhaps, vanity. But he was not a vampire.
A vampire ball was the last place a real vampire would be.
They tried very hard to stay out of the public view.
If people knew they were real—like the werewolves and fae were real—the vampires would be hunted into extinction.
Asil would not grieve over the loss, but there would be a lot of bloodshed on all sides before it happened.
With the vile fog machines spewing their noxious fumes, his nose was unlikely to be much help. His eyes told him that the room was filled with young women and men who were, more or less, of an age with his date. He saw no familiar faces, just children pretending to be monsters.
“Kelly!”
Asil turned to see a woman in authentic Elizabethan dress bearing down upon them. She was tall and large boned without being heavy in the least—but that was the second thing anyone would notice about her. The first thing was the magnificent cascade of hair that was every shade of gold and red.
He frowned suspiciously. The hair was familiar.
“This is the friend who made my costume,” Kelly said, his voice warm. He raised his voice and called, “Hey, Meg. You finished the dress in time. Congratulations. You look fantastic.”
“I’ve been trying to call you—” Meg caught sight of Asil and came to an abrupt stop. She hesitated a breath and then finished approaching them.
“Excuse us, please,” she muttered at Asil as she grabbed Kelly’s arm and yanked him away.
Asil stood at ease and listened, unrepentantly, to the conversation taking place twenty feet away.
“I told you not to go,” Meg all but wailed. “I told you it was dangerous.”
“It’s fine,” Kelly said, sounding puzzled. “He’s been pretty cool about it, even if he’s not gay. He didn’t like being set up by Trace—but said the best way out was to not give Trace what he wanted. We came here, we’ll party, and then he’ll go on his way.”
He sounded a little wistful when he spoke that last sentence.
“Look,” she said in a whisper so intense Asil was pretty sure he’d have heard her even if he weren’t a werewolf. “My uncle Tag called me tonight. I’ve been trying and trying to get you to pick up your phone.”
Tag.
“I knew I’d seen that hair before,” said Asil to himself, not at all perturbed.
“Your uncle the werewolf,” Kelly said. “You’re going to tell me that he—that my date—is a werewolf.”
Ah, Asil had wondered if that exchange at the front door had been enough of a hint for the clever young man to connect some dots. From Kelly’s lack of surprise, Asil had been right.
“Yes,” she said intensely.
“Well,” said Kelly. “That’s a thing, isn’t it.”
“He’s dangerous, Kelly.”
Kelly gave half a laugh. “He certainly could be—and I thought that before I knew he was a werewolf. When I walked into the restaurant and saw him sitting as though he was a Saracen warlord, I thought I was dead meat. But he listened to my explanation and fed me.” Then he gave a choked laugh.
“He told Andy, who is manning the door right now, that he was a werewolf. I wonder what Andy would have done if he knew Asil was serious.”
“Kelly, pay attention.”
“I am,” he said patiently. “I don’t think Asil being a werewolf changes anything. We are going to dance until the ball is over, and then we’ll both return to our lives.”
“You don’t understand,” she said flatly.
“I was pretty upset when I heard what Trace did to you. When Uncle Tag called me a few days ago, I told him about it. He called me tonight to tell me that he knew the guy they set you up with. Because someone decided that this guy needed to get out more—and to tease him, they signed him up on a whole bunch of dating sites. A werewolf. They signed a werewolf up on a vampire dating site because they thought it was funny. You were apparently the only candidate within a five-hundred-mile radius. They did all the initial emailing and then presented it to him as a fait accompli.”
“I thought he was too good-looking to be using a dating site,” Kelly muttered.
“You aren’t getting it,” she said. “Look, you’ve met my uncle, right? You think on this. My uncle considers Asil very dangerous. My uncle is afraid of Asil.”
Meg’s Uncle Tag was a Gaelic berserker who stood well over six feet and was built exactly as anyone would imagine a berserker would be built. Asil’s physique was that of a swordsman—not that these modern children knew what one of those looked like. Like a dancer, maybe. A gymnast.
Asil saw in Kelly’s face the emotions of one who imagined what kind of fighter Asil must be to make someone like Tag fear him. Yes, Asil thought with satisfaction, I am beautiful and deadly.