Chapter 6
“You have got to be shitting me,” says Heather. She dropped into Pete’s on her way home from work, after the happy hour crowd had thinned down. “You mean one of Liv’s screwy ideas was actually right on the money?”
“Yup,” I say with a nod. I pour her a generous glass of the house rosé, which I’m guessing she could use right about now. Since she arrived to check in on me and grabbed a seat at my end of the bar, I’ve been quietly filling her in on the latest… developments .
“Jesus,” she says under her breath. She picks up the wineglass and takes a big gulp while I stick the bottle back in the fridge. I notice that her hand is trembling slightly. “You know, if I hadn’t actually seen your…uh…”
“Magical, flaming, vampire-slaying sword?” I suggest with raised eyebrows.
“Yeah,” says Heather. “That.”
“I know,” I say, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t believe it either. I mean, even after the whole vampire-versus-slayer death match we had out back, I’m still having a hard time getting my head around it. But I’m telling you, it’s the absolute, honest-to-God, cross-my-heart truth.”
Heather takes another big swallow of her wine, and her gaze slides down to the other end of the bar. Nick’s end of the bar. Since he and I came in from the alleyway, we’ve been avoiding each other as best we can, considering we have to share the same space. And the same cash register. And the same beer taps. If working alongside Nick was annoying before, it’s now nearly unbearable. Luckily, the presence of the customers—the human customers—helps me keep a chain on my wrath.
But it also raises a question. A question that won’t stop nagging at me until I ask it out loud.
“Heather,” I say in a small voice, “do you think I’m still… human ?”
She turns back to me, surprised. “What?”
“If I’m a vampire slayer, does that mean I’m not human anymore?”
“Honey,” says Heather, “of course you’re still human. You’re still you .”
I frown. “I don’t know about that,” I say. “When I was fighting with Nick, it was like I wasn’t me. I was all weird instincts and homicidal rage.” I lean closer and lower my voice. “I tried to kill him, Heather. For real.”
“But you didn’t, babe,” she says. She reaches across the bar and gives my hand a quick, firm squeeze. And just like that, her trepidation is gone, and she’s back to being my unshakable, rock-solid, no-BS friend again. “And you won’t.”
“I was so angry though,” I tell her. An involuntary shudder runs through me at the thought.
It’s not as if I never get angry. But usually, I don’t express my anger. Not in the moment like that anyway. Instead, I suppress it. In Hollywood, it’s just the way it is, the way it has to be. I can’t go ballistic every time my agent doesn’t return my calls or every time a casting director says no. I need them more than they need me. So if I want my career to go anywhere, I have to suck it up, smile, and try to go along to get along.
Although, okay, suppressing my anger isn’t just a career thing. It’s also kind of a me thing.
“Anger is human,” says Heather. “It’s a normal human emotion.”
“I guess,” I say.
Except it’s not normal for me . I’ve always had trouble expressing my anger. Or expressing any strong emotions that could potentially stir up conflict. I guess you could say I’m a hopeless people pleaser. If I were a bus, my route would run straight up and down the path of least resistance.
But all that suppressed emotion doesn’t just evaporate. It has to go somewhere. So since high school, I’ve been channeling it into my acting. That’s really what drew me to the craft in the first place—well, that and growing up watching the Disney Channel, memorizing every episode of Wizards of Waverly Place , and wanting to be Selena Gomez. But childhood fantasies aside, being an actor gives me a way to release all the negative things I’m feeling, just in a positive way.
But what happened out back in the alley? That wasn’t acting. Nope. It was more like something was acting through me. And in retrospect, unleashing at Nick the way I did feels wrong.
Except it also feels kind of… good ?
Possibly a little too good.
Which is bad.
Isn’t it?
Uggghhh!
Okay, so maybe I am still human. Maybe this jumble of contradictory emotions I’ve got going on just reaffirms my humanity. Still, it’s like something inside me has been uncorked. And I’m not sure I can put the genie back in the bottle.
I’m not sure I even want to.
“But I’m still angry, you know?” I tell Heather. “I’m so angry at Nick right now. I mean, I’ve got this strange new body and these strange new powers and these strange new urges, and it turns out they’re all because of him. All because he was too freaking lazy to get all his facts straight before he went over to the undead side.”
“Well, it’s not all because of him.”
“What?” Now it’s my turn to look surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“Carrie,” says Heather, “face it. You’ve had a stick up your butt about Nick ever since he started working here.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
“It is true,” she says. “And it sounds like this happened because you two can’t play nice together, so you’re at least partly to blame. You could have tried to work out your differences.”
“There was never anything to work out,” I say with a shrug. “I just don’t like the guy.”
Heather peers down the bar again. “Well, I think you may be the only one,” she says with a toss of her head in Nick’s direction.
I turn, and I see what she means. Nick is basically holding court, chatting up a couple of young women drinking bottles of Corona Light. They seem to be hanging on his every word.
“Vampire, huh?” says Heather.
“Fangs and all,” I say.
I want to accuse him of using some kind of vampire magic on the women. But the fact is he’s always had an uncanny knack for charming the customers. Especially female customers. If I had even half his appeal, I swear I wouldn’t have to work as a bartender anymore. If I could command an audience like that, I’d be writing my freaking Oscar acceptance speech by now.
“So which one of them do you think he wants to fang ?” Heather asks, still watching Nick.
I shoot her a look. I don’t know if it’s the wine or what, but it seems to me that she’s gotten awfully comfortable awfully quick with this supernatural situation.
She looks back at me, all innocence. “What? That’s what vampires do, right? They use their fangs to bite people. And drink their blood.”
I guess they do. I haven’t exactly had time to consider all the gory little details.
Only now that I’m thinking about it, I start to think back to last night. I remember catching Nick with that brunette, necking by the restrooms. And I have to wonder…
Was he really necking with her? Or was he maybe just extremely interested in her neck? Was that really a hickey she tried to hide? Or was it some other kind of mark?
Was Nick actually… drinking on the job?
I shudder again.
“So now, in addition to the sexy musician thing,” continues Heather, “he’s also got the sexy vampire thing going on.” She sighs. “As if the guy needed any help in the sexy department.” She takes another sip of the rosé.
“No comment,” I say.
Heather grins. “Oh, come on,” she teases. “You wouldn’t let him bite you?”
I feel my slayer start to rise. “No,” I mutter. “No, I would not.”
“Whoa,” says Heather. “Down, girl.”
I realize my vision temporarily went scarlet.
I blink a couple of times. “I’m okay,” I assure her. “For now anyway. But Nick says there’s still more he needs to tell me. And honestly? I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.”
“You’ll be fine,” says Heather with a confidence I wish I had. “You know, you’re a lot stronger than you think you are. Even without all these new vampire-slaying muscles.”
My friend smiles kindly at me. After a beat, I smile back. Then, gradually, we both let our gazes drift back to Nick.
Heather catches his eye, and he grins and nods in recognition.
“Try not to kill him, huh?” she says to me as she gives him a little wave back. “Anyone with dimples that epic deserves immortal life.”
***
It’s my night to close up. Heather offers to stick around, but I know she has to be on set early the next morning, so I send her home. I tell her I’ll talk to her tomorrow, and I lock the door behind her.
Then it’s just me and Nick.
I start to stack the chairs on the tabletops so I can mop up, and for once, Nick actually stays and helps. We work together in silence for a bit, sticking to opposite sides of the room, circling each other but careful to always keep a couple of tables between us.
“It was nice to see Heather again,” says Nick tentatively, breaking our silence. “She’s good people.”
“She is,” I agree.
“So you told her?” he asks. He raises an eyebrow, the one with the piercing. “About…uh…”
“I told her what you told me,” I say. “And what happened between us in the alley. Is that a problem?”
Nick hesitates a moment, then shakes his head. “Probably not,” he says. “It’s not like she’s going to take the story public or anything, right?”
“Who would believe it if she did?”
“I don’t know,” says Nick. “People seem to believe a lot of bizarre things these days.”
He lifts another chair. One of the legs catches at the bottom of his T-shirt and hikes it up, briefly flashing a few inches of smooth, flat stomach before the tee drops back into place.
My body heat rises—with slayer anger, I’m sure. Not attraction. Nope. Definitely not attraction.
Tomato, to- mah -to , Liv would say. I can almost hear her singsong voice in my head.
Whatever.
“You said there was more I needed to know,” I say, trying to regain some self-possession. “And I have questions. Like, if I were to say to you, ‘What can I get you to drink?’ would you say beer? Or…uh… blood ?”
Nick shrugs those big shoulders of his. “Both,” he offers. “Either.”
“So you drink blood?” I ask.
“I’m a vampire.”
“I know, but—”
“Carrie,” he says. “I’m a vampire.”
I swallow. “Right.” I stack the last chair on my side of the room, and Nick does the same on his. “So that woman I saw you with last night—”
“Was a mistake,” he says, abruptly cutting me off.
“A mistake?” I ask. “A mistake how ?” My focus sharpens, my body goes rigid, and the smoldering within me is unquestionably slayer rage. No tomato, to- mah -to about it.
Nick sighs and walks over to his end of the bar. “Easy there, slayer,” he says, reading my reaction. “I promise you, the woman is still very much alive and well.”
I cross over to my end of the bar. “But you…uh… drank from her?” I ask. “You drank her blood?”
“Quentin and Zach sent her over,” he says.
“Quentin and Zach?”
“My bandmates,” he says. “We play music together. But as of this past weekend, we’re also literally a band of vampires.”
“So the guys in your band are vampires too,” I say, trying to keep the details organized.
“They turned me. Well, Zach turned me,” says Nick. “He turned Quentin too, but that was a really long time ago. The two of them have been a couple for over a hundred years.”
“So I guess vampires really are immortal?” I ask.
“Vampires never say die,” he says with a grin that coaxes those epic dimples out of hiding. “That is, assuming nothing kills us.”
Like me , I think.
So far, it sounds like the truth about vampires is lining right up with the fiction.
Nick starts stacking barstools from his end of the bar, and I start stacking from mine.
“So how exactly did Zach turn you?” I ask. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Actually, it was kind of cool,” he says. “We went down into the tunnels—”
“You mean the subway tunnels?” Although I’ve never used it, I know there’s a very limited subway system in LA. Nothing like the ones back east though.
Nick shakes his head. “No, there are actually all these abandoned service tunnels running underneath Los Angeles. I guess they were used for smuggling during Prohibition. And as passageways to the basements of the speakeasies.” He waves it off. “Anyway, Zach and Quentin and a few other vampire witnesses gathered together down there for the blood exchange—”
“Blood exchange?” I ask, interrupting.
“Zach drank from me, then I drank from Zach,” he explains. “That’s what initiated the change.”
I’m almost sorry I asked. I try to suppress my wince of revulsion.
To be honest, I’m not even good with scary movies. I actually turned down work as a background player on Liv’s zombie show because even though I know it’s all makeup and special effects, the idea of having to live in that world was just a little too intense for me. How on earth am I going to live in this world?
“Then it was pretty much lights-out for me,” Nick continues calmly, like he’s recounting the highlights of last night’s baseball game. “But when I woke up the next night, I was a vampire. And I signed”—he makes air quotes and lowers the pitch of his voice. “— The Book .”
“The Book?” I ask.
He nods. “It’s like this ancient book that all the vampires have to sign after they’re made. In their…uh… blood .”
My stomach roils a little at that. I can’t help it. An antique tome filled with countless centuries’ worth of bloody autographs? Gross.
“Arlo from the Vampire Council flew it in special from New York,” adds Nick. “In a private jet.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I say. I do my best to get a handle on my squeamishness. I’ve got to pay attention to this stuff after all. “The Vampire Council? What’s that?”
“Apparently,” says Nick, “it’s this governing body made up of the oldest vampires. The American chapter is headquartered in New York City. They kind of lay down the law for the rest of us.”
“You have laws ?” I ask.
“Not many. From what I understand, it’s kind of like Fight Club,” he says. “The first rule of Vampire Club is you don’t talk about Vampire Club.” He looks at me and raises his brow again. “So I’d really appreciate it if you and Heather could keep this on the down-low. Okay?”
I nod slowly. My mind, however, is racing. “So you woke up, you signed The Book , and then what?”
He smiles a little sheepishly. “Then we had a big party. With cake.”
I pause, taking a break from the stools while I digest this. On the plus side, I don’t feel queasy or repulsed anymore. But on the minus side, I’m starting to feel…well, not jealous exactly, but…jealous adjacent maybe? I mean, what in the actual hell? He gets some legally sanctioned, by-The-Book ceremony? With a reception? And cake? Meanwhile, I just wake up to the worst surprise party ever and almost set my apartment on fire.
“You okay?” asks Nick.
“Peachy,” I snap. But then I check my bitterness. I resume stacking barstools, and my mind circles back to what we were discussing before we took this conversational detour down into the tunnels. “And the woman?” I ask. “The one you drank from last night?”
Nick sighs, like he doesn’t want to go there. But then he grudgingly says, “Her name is Jess. She’s kind of a Dracula’s Army groupie.”
“Dracula’s Army?” I ask.
“That’s the name of our band,” he says with a smile. “It’s an inside joke.”
I don’t smile back. “Okay,” I say, knitting my brow. “So this woman. Jess. Is she a groupie because she likes the music? Or because she likes the…uh…uh…” I’m not sure how to phrase it, so I just gesture in the vicinity of my own neck.
“Both?” Nick offers again. “Either?”
“Huh,” I say, pondering this. I have to say, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone would enjoy being a vampire’s blood donor. Different strokes, I guess. And at least it confirms that things between them were consensual.
Nick and I keep on upending the barstools, working our way closer and closer to each other.
“Anyway,” says Nick, “she offered to feed me, and I accepted. Only I didn’t realize how…how… personal it would be.”
Suddenly, I recall the look of straight-up rapture that shone in the woman’s eyes while she was with Nick. And I feel…well, again, I’m not exactly sure how I feel. I’ve got a whole soup of emotions simmering inside me—some of them mine, some of them my slayer’s.
“I mean, I barely know Jess,” continues Nick. “And I’m not really interested in getting to know her any better. So even though she was totally on board, the casual intimacy of it all just didn’t sit right with me.” He shakes his head. “So I won’t be doing that again.”
Now my inner slayer feels a little confused. Cheated, in a way. This doesn’t sound like the bloodsucking human predator that my alter ego is so hell-bent on destroying.
And admittedly, I feel confused too. This definitely doesn’t sound like the emotionally shallow player that I’ve come to know and dislike. Given the way Nick flirts with the customers, I’ve always assumed that casual intimacy was totally up his alley.
“But you need human blood to survive, don’t you?” I ask him.
“Yes, but Zach has connections at a local blood bank,” he says. “So I’ll be fine. Thanks for the concern though,” he adds with a grin.
“My concern isn’t about you,” I grumble.
“Riiight,” he says. “You’re all about protecting humans from us big bad bloodsuckers.”
Finally, Nick and I meet in the middle. We pick up the last two stools and plunk them onto the bar in unison.
I turn to face him. Eye level with his broad chest, I can just make out the outline of what must be well-developed pecs beneath his Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. This close, I notice that the graphic on the tee shows the cover of the band’s debut, Appetite for Destruction . I wonder if that’s some kind of an inside joke too.
I also wonder what he looks like without the shirt.
When I realize I’ve been staring at his chest a little too long, I make my gaze rise up to meet his. “Your secret’s safe with me,” I say. “I won’t talk about Vampire Club. Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
“Actually, no,” he says. His dark eyes peer down at me with seriousness. “I still need to warn you about something.”