Chapter 5
Peter Fenton
“How did it happen, Peter?”
Took her long enough to ask. I figured she never really wanted to accept it, that her Peter Fenton was a vampire, something she’d been programmed to hate.
And don’t I love it, that most of the time she still looks at me like I’m not exactly a monster?
But there’s a divide, wide as a highway, between what happened and what I could tell her happened, and it stretches just as long, too, and there’s not exactly a starting point.
Just gotta pick an on-ramp. The closest one?
It was deep into winter after the shine of Christmas had worn off, and all that was left was that depressing chill that seeped all the way into your bone marrow.
I was on Roadrunner Drive, a few doors down from Fallon’s, and she hadn’t been around for the past week, not that I really talked to her anymore.
Each icy inhalation crystallized the liquid pain in my chest, and just when I was thinking I might die out there, a man in a suit turned the corner.
Man dressed in a suit on Roadrunner after midnight should have been enough to send a shiver up my spine, if I hadn’t been such a reckless idiot.
From afar, I’d have bet ten dollars he was an old guy, but when he approached, he had a face like someone ten years older than me at most. He stopped two feet in front of me, sizing me up for a fight, and I was always prepared for one, too, if it came to it.
I usually never intended to give anyone a reason to throw the first punch, but my mouth always had ideas of its own.
My old man was always so damn eager to use me as a punching bag, and the older and bigger I got, the more he felt it was justified, beating me like a dirty rug.
And I’d learned to take it, and for so long I’d swallowed the insults like they were truths, those painful shots at my toughness and masculinity, and I’d tried to be tough enough to take it until I snapped around age 16 and became a monster worse than he’d feared.
It was almost funny what he was afraid of, though.
Black nail polish, eyeliner, blue hair, shitty tattoos, a few piercings, and I’d rip the hems off my t-shirts so they were cropped enough to show off an inch or two of my scrawny little hips.
The look and the attitude made me popular with a certain segment of girls, ironically, and unpopular with a segment of the boys, unsurprisingly, but it got me a good amount of practice at fighting and fucking for a kid my age.
And the last time my old man ever slapped me and called me a faggot, I licked my lips around the delicious word and bragged that it still meant I got laid more than his sorry old ass, and that was what did it, what got me kicked out of the house for good. It was kinda funny, right?
“How you doing, man?” I said to the Suit on Roadrunner. “Cold one, huh? Might even snow.”
That was enough to set him off. Couldn’t blame the guy, he was hardly the first person I’d annoyed with my general presence.
He lunged at me faster than I could get my fists up, and I’d have cracked my skull on the sidewalk if it hadn’t been for my feet managing to keep enough balance to stumble back into the wall.
The signal hadn’t even had time to zip up to my brain, no time even for a thought to form, but I had the sharp awareness that he’d stabbed me in the neck, and this was a real fight for keeps.
Oso was barking his head off, telling the suited-up bastard off, but I was just happy my silly mutt hadn’t jumped into the fray. Didn’t want him getting hurt.
I was dying, but it wasn’t my life that flashed before my eyes exactly.
It was the future. It was the scene of Fallon coming home in the morning and finding my dead body in front of her door, and I couldn’t do that to her.
So I fought. I’d never been good at much, but I could fight.
I snarled like I was an animal, an angry one at that, and my blood was cold running down my neck and shoulder.
My fists were popping the guy, a satisfying drum solo that didn’t affect him in the slightest. I couldn’t even get him to budge, and there was a curious glint to his red eyes, and looking back, it was obvious I was fighting a vampire, but in the moment, I wasn’t even thinking.
And fuck, Fallon. Every day since I made the mistake of introducing her to Derrick Hope, I’d been locked in a prison of regret.
She’d never warmed up to the shitbag friends I’d taken her around, so when Fallon and Derrick barreled towards one another, pulled by my black hole orbit, the two best people I knew who were destined to meet, I had the sad, selfish hope that she wouldn’t care for him, either, that it would just be me.
But they were good, and I was bad, though not bad enough to do what I wanted and claim her for myself.
I may have been a drug-addicted petty criminal, but when it came to Fallon, I was something different, something better. That still wasn’t enough.
I was in a fist fight with a vampire, and I was the culmination of millions of years of evolution, the purest essence of life, a distilled and thoughtless will to live fueled by instinct alone.
I’d always figured I was promised an early death, but when it walked up to me on Roadrunner Drive wearing a handsome face and an expensive suit, it turned out that I fought against it with everything I had.
Death in this case was a man named Santos Reyes, and he was going to kill me, no hard feelings about it, but no one in all his four hundred years had fought so hard against it like I had, so I’d earned something in his eyes. A second chance. A new life.
I punched him until my fists were bloody as my neck, and his evil, impressed laugh was the start of a new song.
His choice now, all ominous in a minor key.
The starting note, fangs biting deeper into the flesh of my neck, and even through searing pain, a detached fascination floating above my mind was surprised it sounded like the crunch of a chilled, juicy apple.
One of those shiny red ones that look better than they taste.
Then it was my jagged breaths that weren’t really doing anything, and my voice didn’t even work, but Oso was still talking shit for me, good boy, and the drum beats of my fists and feet were fading, and then all of it went black with a dull whoosh, like the trap door opened below me, dropping me to Hell.
My death wasn’t even peaceful enough to go out dreaming of her face like I thought I would.
I woke up a few days later, somewhere quiet I didn’t recognize, wrapped in two layers of plastic tarp, rolled up and tucked in like a burrito.
It was cold, and I was dried out and crunchy with flakes of old blood that had gotten everywhere, and the crinkle of plastic was enough to make my ears ring as I escaped my odd cocoon.
Was I such a fuck up that I couldn’t even die right?
As my stomach clenched like an angry fist and I dry heaved with my hands planted in desert sand that bit back, I knew that humans weren’t meant to remember their own deaths.
My mind was ripping itself apart, and if I shook my head the right way, it would come out of my mouth, like coins from the slit of a piggy bank, like candy from a busted slit in a pi?ata.
My teeth could have cracked from how tight my jaw was clenched to keep it all in.
I was dead, but alive enough to know it.
Everyone who lived in New Mexico, everyone who lived in Cibola, everyone knew about vampires.
Creature of the night that I was, worthless human living below the crust of society, fiend that I was, I’d even met one or two, though they were old ones that were chill.
Young ones like me, though, they were supposed to be wild.
They were supposed to be mindless killers.
Animals. And maybe I was already enough of those things that I was able to superglue the pieces of my brain back together, pick myself off the ground, and come up with a plan to get rid of that ache in my stomach.
It had to be a good sign that on the short list of thoughts, the top one was finding my dog Oso, and the second was cleaning the blood off my favorite coat.
My only coat. There was some dark voice now in my head telling me to do what was done to me, to find the first human I could and get my fangs — my fangs, I tongued them, pressed them with my fingertip and flinched when I pricked blood, because damn, they were sharp — and drink their blood.
It was a craving like I’d only ever had for greasy fast food after coming off a binge, where my tongue cried for hot, salty fries like my life depended on it.
And it was sick, because there was one neck that was already an obsession of mine, one I wanted to bury my face into, one I hadn’t kissed in months, and it was all my own fault, and thoughts of Fallon’s pretty sunshine face made cool tears spill down my cheeks.
I didn’t want to hurt Fallon. I didn’t want to kill anybody.
I was bad, and hell, I’d even killed before, not that I’d ever told Fallon that, not that I ever would. But the strength that was humming like a melody through my muscles made me feel like I could finally be enough. For her. I’d died and come back a new person, after all.