3. Scotty
Scotty
MERDE, WHAT A COWARD
“Idon’t mean to interrupt,” I say, and narrowly evade a pool of suspicious goo by sliding past it. “I can tell you’re deep in thought about something. But, uh, where are you taking me, exactly?”
“Home,” Juliette says, and quickens her pace toward it.
We approach a small alcove hidden away in one of the corners, and it’s here I see the source of the light.
Dozens of candles sit on the ground and on top of crates here, dripping wax all over the place.
But that’s not all; there are a few paintings on easels, sitting beside a tiny cot with a burgundy wool blanket and a few other small belongings.
Pictures. Books. Tchotchkes. It would almost be cozy if it weren’t for the fact that piss and shit water was only a few meters away.
I notice words painted on the bricks above the entrance to the alcove. Le Salon de Juliette, it reads. I point up at it and grin. “Oh, cute. Did you do that?”
Juliette hurries over to her cot and checks underneath the blankets like a squirrel checking to make sure her nuts are still buried.
She’s not going to answer me, so I’m just going to have to figure shit out on my own, I guess.
I walk around the small space, nearly bumping my head on the ceiling a few times.
Almost knock over a couple candles, too.
Juliette sighs and shoots me a scowl. “Prudente,” she admonishes.
I may not understand much French, but I understood her loud and clear.
I nod, then sit down in front of one of the stacks of paintings and rifle through it without waiting for an invitation.
Juliette doesn’t say anything as I flip through the stack of papers.
Watercolor paintings of different French cities seem to be the trend in this stack.
There’s a painting of the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Louvre.
All touristy spots I’ve never visited. I’ve traveled a fair bit, but never there.
And we’re hundreds of miles away from France, so I’m not even sure what she’s doing out here in Mystilla.
But there’s one I don’t recognize. I hold up the painting and tap it.
“Basilique du Sacré-C?ur de Montmartre,” Juliette fires off quickly. I have no idea what she just said, but I nod anyway.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
Juliette sits back on her heels and … is that a small curve of her lips I see? I stare at her face for a long, long while. So long that Juliette swallows thickly and mutters, “T-Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I say, then put the stack of artwork down. “So, you’re a real painter. An artist.”
She nods from across the room. “Yes.”
I snort and lean back against a crate, trying to get comfortable. Yeah, fat luck there. “I can’t even draw stick figures.”
Juliette shakes her head slowly.
“Yeah, I know. Every artist hears that, right?” I ask. She merely answers with a soft tutting sound. That’s probably a yes, then.
Down here, there aren’t any sounds save for a slow dripping in the distance.
Occasionally, the candles hiss, but that’s about it.
Complete and total silence. It’s enough to drive a man mad.
As a professional lowlife and metalhead, I’m used to noise.
Lots of it. Heavy bass that makes my bones vibrate and my skull throb.
The screams of a crowd going absolutely ballistic for the music.
I tilt my head as I watch Juliette busy herself with a crochet project she’s pulled out from underneath her blankets. So that’s what she was looking for, I guess.
“What are you making?” I ask.
Juliette flicks her gaze up at mine and shrugs. “Mittens.”
Gloves, huh? My gaze narrows as I stare at the oddly shaped black yarn.
“Oh, baby girl … if you’re trying to make a pair of gloves, I think you’re going about it wrong.
Gloves have fingers, right?” I point at her project and let out a small laugh.
But Juliette sends me a look that says she’s about to stab me in the jugular with her knitting needles.
“Sorry,” I mutter. “I just like to joke around. It’s not serious.”
“Mittens. They’re different from gloves. They don’t have fingers, imbecile.”
I cross my arms in front of my chest and snort. “I’m pretty sure they do, but do you, I guess,” I say with a grin.
Juliette isn’t smiling back. She just stares at me with that cold, crimson stare of hers.
If looks could kill, as they say. I’m not usually into bald women.
Typically, I find long black hair super hot.
I love goth girls as much as the next person, but …
there’s something there, beneath the death and decay that almost seems … kind of pretty about Juliette.
Whatever, it’s probably the Stockholm Syndrome already setting in. I’m not used to sitting still for more than ten minutes at a time, so this has been a pretty painful experience.
“You know, I always thought the Nosferatu were supposed to be evil,” I say. “You know how, according to the stories, they ransacked countless villages and cities and murdered everything and everyone in a super metal gore fest?”
The stories make for some pretty sick movies, not gonna lie.
And the special effects nowadays are so good that it actually looks like someone’s getting hacked in half on the screen.
So cool. But Juliette doesn’t act like a Nosferatu should.
Doesn’t look like a depraved monster with uncontrollable bloodlust.
If anything, she’s been a pretty gracious host. I pull my knees into my chest as we fall into silence again. Then she starts humming. It’s a melody I don’t recognize, which is surprising considering I know a lot about music. She knits and hums, and I find myself smiling while I listen.
“That’s pretty. What is it?” I ask.
She looks up at me and shrugs again. “’Non, je ne regrette rien.’”
“Oh,” I say, as though what she said totally made sense. It didn’t. I’m at a loss, here, as far as our next steps are concerned. I guess I could always just … leave. But then what? Get staked by the Helsings? I might need to be here for a couple of days, at most.
“Thank you for saving my life,” I say.
She looks up from her knitting and nods. “You’re welcome.”
I’m about to say something else when my stomach rumbles.
Loudly. Embarrassed, I clap my hands over my gut and laugh nervously.
When I was alive, I suffered from generalized anxiety disorder and unfortunately that followed me all the way into undeath, stomach pains and all.
Could be worse. I once knew a guy who was turned that retained his IBS into undeath.
Our existence could be such a joke sometimes.
“Shit. Uh, sorry. Guess I forgot to eat before I had to make a daring escape,” I say, smiling.
Unsurprisingly, Juliette doesn’t smile or acknowledge my joke. Instead, she puts her knitting down and stands up. Then she grabs a threadbare black hoodie from her cot and throws it on. She pulls the hood over her head and makes her way out of the “salon.”
I catch myself from grinning ear to ear at the sight of her, because the hoodie is enormous on her. Cute. Focus, Scotty. Focus. You can admire the cute pixie girl later.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Hunting,” she says.
Yeah, no. There’s no way I’m getting a woman to hunt for me. I’ve never been one of those macho-types, but even I have my limits, and allowing this teensy wisp of a woman to get me my dinner is one of them. I rise to my feet and hurry through the tunnels to catch up with her.
“Hey,” I call to her, but she doesn’t look back at me. She continues walking at a fast clip, and I struggle to keep up while also watching where I step. “Hey. Juliette. Stop. Don’t … don’t do this. I’m fine. I can wait.”
Juliette approaches the rusty metal ladder on the far side of the wall and places her foot on the lowest rung.
“Stay here. I won’t be long,” she says calmly.
But something about this doesn’t feel right.
What if she’s seen? What if the Helsings get her?
I’ll have no way of knowing. I grab on to her elbow as she ascends the ladder, and she turns to bare her fangs at me.
“Yeah. You’re very scary. Big, bad Juliette. I get it,” I deadpan. “But let me come with you, at the very least. I can help.”
Juliette stares at me like I just suggested we go out for karaoke. Which, honestly, might help this girl loosen up. I wonder what her go-to song would be.
“It’s too dangerous,” she says. “Leave it to me.”
“Yeah, our entire existence is dangerous, sweetheart,” I say. She bares her fangs at me again, only this time she adds a convincing hiss that makes me take a step back. “Seriously, Juli. I’m coming with you whether you like it or not.”
Juliette makes a strange, garbled little sound that’s almost … cute. And then she blinks. “Juli?”
I nod and grab onto the ladder to pull myself up behind her. “Yeah. Juli. That’s what I’m calling you. You can call me Scott or Scotty, whatever you prefer. Or dumbass. That works, too, and I respond to it.”
Juliette lets out another strangled sound, and it’s then that I realize she’s flustered. I made this big, bad Nosferatu flustered. Pride swells in my chest. I did that. Me. And here my mom said I’d never be popular with the ladies. Take that, Mom! You were wrong twice in one day!
A few moments pass, and Juli doesn’t move. It’s like she’s frozen in place.
I pat her heel. “Juli. Juli? You okay up there? Are we going, or…?”
Juliette flinches and looks straight up toward the manhole cover. “Y-Yes. Sorry.”
We continue our way up the ladder and crawl out like a couple of Ninja Turtles, and I quickly look around to make sure the coast is clear. We’re in the middle of a dead-ass street in front of a few Chinese restaurants. Not a soul in sight. Good.
I rub the back of my head and say, “Okay, I’ll be Michelangelo and you can be…
” I look Juliette up and down. She stares at me blankly.
“Yeah, I think you’re more of a Donatello or a Raphael.
I mean, I could totally see you as a Raphael, but you don’t really snark at me so much as just …
loom menacingly.” I snap my fingers and point at her.
This earns me a deep frown from her. “Fuck it, you’re right.
You’re definitely more of a Master Splinter type. ”
Juliette puts a hand on her hip and rolls her eyes. “What are you talking about? You’re so stupid, you know that, right?”
I frown when I realize this poor girl’s never seen the Ninja Turtles before. Oh, crap. Has she even seen television before? Considering she skulks about wearing a ginormous hoodie, riding boots, and lives in the sewers, I’m going to guess … no. Probably not.
That won’t do. I know a lot of vampires prefer to live in the past, usually around the time they were turned. Our kind has trouble moving forward. It’s as though our first deaths are a fixed point in time and every moment after doesn’t count.
Screw that noise. I’m going to live, dammit.
As we make our way down the street, I slide my hands into my pockets and skip alongside her like a puppy. “Soooo … you wanna catch a movie after this little excursion of ours?”
No answer. She stares straight ahead, then sniffs the air. I stop and do the same. Yeah, no. I don’t know why I did that. That was totally pointless.
“What is it, girl? Did Timmy fall in the well again?” I tease, but Juliette gives me one of her signature glares.
Okay, yeah, she doesn’t understand pop culture references, so I don’t know why I keep trying.
That one was positively ancient, too, at least seventy years old.
I figured she’d at least know that one. “No, but seriously. What’s wrong? ”
“They’re close,” she mutters, then takes a sharp turn around the corner of a boarded-up restaurant.
I follow behind her, trying my best to slink away with her as she sticks close to the shadows.
Luckily, my leather jacket obfuscates me well enough anyway, so I don’t need to worry about standing out.
Some vamps actually wear Day-Glo when they go out—a decision I’ll never understand, because it’s ugly as sin even under the best conditions.
The stereotype that vampires are terrible dressers is spot on most of the time.
We stop abruptly behind a truck parked next to a couple of trash cans. A fuzzy raccoon pops its cute little head out of the trash, clutching a half-eaten loaf of bread in its paws.
“Aww,” I say, and crouch down in front of the critter. “Juli, we can’t eat him. He’s just a little guy.”
Juli whirls around and presses her finger to her lips. “Shh! Be quiet for once, you … you andouille!”
I blink. “Andouille? Why are you calling me a sausage?”
There’s a loud bang! bang! bang! not too far from us, and we both jerk our heads up. Juliette shuffles over to one side of the truck to look around it, and I rush forward to put my arm around her like a shield.
“What are you doing?” she asks, her voice muffled against my jacket.
“I’m protecting you, of course. Isn’t it obvious?”
She pushes me away and grumbles. If this woman could be any animal in the world, she’d definitely be a cat. “Well, stop it. This is why I wanted to leave you behind. You’re only getting in my way.”
I’m pretty sure that’s the longest sentence she’s said to me since we met, and it was to tell me I was in her way.
Go figure. She pushes me away with strength I didn’t know she even had, and I fall back onto my ass, spraining my tailbone.
Okay, not really, but it sure felt like I did.
Juliette goes back to perch behind the truck like Batman while I decide to be a good boy for two seconds and hobble next to her and wait for her signal.
“There are three Helsings standing guard by that door,” she whispers.
“I can take care of the two of them easily. But I will need to lure the third away to kill him separately. You wait here, and do not get involved. Do you understand me?” She turns to look at me, and I feel something inside wither up and die.
Her eyes turn molten, ready to incinerate my ass should I step a toe out of line.
I gulp. “I-If there are Helsings here, maybe we shouldn’t be? You know, because they have crossbows,” I say, and rub the back of my neck again.
Juli rolls her eyes. “Merde, what a coward. It is fine. I do this every night.”
I heard a rumor once that the Helsings were constantly recruiting because their soldiers kept dying, and no one knew who or what the cause was. Most vamps I know can’t take on one, let alone three of them at a time. But if the legends about the Nosferatu are true, then…
“Stay. Put,” she says, pointing at the ground. “Here. I will return for you.”
Juliette pulls her hood down and races off into the darkness, leaving me behind.
She’s so quick I almost don’t notice she’s gone until I open my mouth to reply.
Now it all makes sense, how she’s lived for so long by herself.
Juliette is like darkness itself, blending into the shadows without a sound.