American Vampire (9 page)

“Point taken.” He was able to close his eyes again, so he did, to appear defeated and tired. She walked to the kitchen, and he gave her just enough time to reach the spot where the back door had been before calling after her. “After I kill you, though, who’s to stop me from killing someone else? Someone like Derek?”

She came back. He knew she would.

“So, here’s the plan.” He got to his feet, painfully, the skin sliding off his toes inside his shoes. “You and me, we’re going to have a little chat. We’re going to figure out how you can help me, and how I can help you, and how we’re going to get out of this mess.”

“Why would I want to talk to you? You’re a disgusting…thing.” She spat the word out as though it were the most bitter insult she’d ever tasted.

“You haven’t even thanked me for fixing your kitchen.” He put a hand on the back of the couch to steady himself as he walked toward her. “Or saving you from the monster.”

“Which you probably summoned,” she insisted.

“Summoned?” What the hell was this,
Dungeons and Dragons?
“No, I don’t know how to ‘summon’ anything. If I did, I could have gotten him to leave a
lot easier. You don’t seem to remember that I got torn up real bad distracting that thing from killing you.”

“Yeah, but you could have been doing that to make yourself look good.” She didn’t sound as certain now of his involvement with the beast. “It could have been part of your plan, if you knew you weren’t going to get hurt or anything.”

“I did get hurt,” he pointed out again. “What you’re saying is that I somehow captured this town, which has absolutely nothing interesting in it, full of people I don’t know and probably won’t like, five years ago. During that five-year span, I was never once seen, but I decided to show up spontaneously just the other night for some reason. I control the creature, but I let it kick my ass, and I send it out to kill townspeople, who would be my food source if they weren’t ripped apart by a monster. That make a lot of sense to you?”

“Everyone says that once it draws blood, it gives up. It kept fighting you,” she accused.

He sighed, feeling more and more tired of the argument. “I guess I’m just likeable.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So, what, you’re here because of a coincidence?”

“That’s all I can figure.” A thought occurred to him, one that made him a little sick. “Maybe it’s because I’m a vampire. Maybe that’s why I was able to stop here.”

“Then why can’t you leave?” She probably didn’t
believe his innocence yet, but at least she was done with her line of absurd accusations. “If being a vampire got you in, how come it hasn’t got you out?”

“It just might!” If he hadn’t just had a painful reminder of what the sun could do to him, he would have bolted out the door right away to check.

Jessa scoffed at him. “You think you can leave.”

He nodded. “I think so. I’m going to try again as soon as the sun goes down.”

“Well.” She looked him over, burns and all, and her face screwed up like she couldn’t tell if she hoped he would succeed or hoped he would fail. “If you’re right, I look forward to never seeing you again.”

“You and me both,” he snarled.

N
ightfall could not come fast enough. Jessa gave Graf a wide berth. She was still afraid of him. Probably because when she’d all but ordered him to let her lock him in the basement again, he’d threatened to kill her, again. Now, he really had to get out of there.

“Getting dark,” she called from the kitchen, where she cleaned the dishes. “You can go at any time.”

He pushed aside the curtain over the front window and leaned back cautiously. His burns might have healed, but he got a new respect for the light every time he disrespected it. “You’re not going to miss me?”

She turned and tossed her dishrag into the sink. “No. Because I assume you’ll be coming back.”

“What, you don’t think I can make it?” He made a face at her and peered out the window again. The
sun just had to sink behind the tree line, and he would make a run for the car.

“You didn’t make it before. On some miracle chance that you do get out, you’ll come back to help us all get out. And bring supplies.” Her hands were on her hips. She was dead serious.

Graf forced down a laugh. “Yeah, that’s going to happen.”

“I’m not joking.” She stalked into the living room, her jaw clenched. She hissed through her teeth, “If you do get out, you will help us.”

“I’m going to do exactly shit for you. I’m going to get in that car, put my foot to the floor, and roll into D.C. before sunup. Then, I’m going to party like the world is ending tomorrow and forget all about this hellhole.” Maybe it was the fact that he kept taunting Jessa with his surety that he would be leaving, but he was actually starting to believe it himself.

“No, you won’t.” She shook her head. “No one could be that heartless.”

“I could. I’m a vampire.” He flicked the curtain aside. “What do you know? Time for my exit.”

She followed him onto the porch and stopped at the top step as he opened the trunk. He pulled a bag of blood from the cooler there—not cold, but pleasantly warm now—and bit off the corner with his back teeth. “I guess I should say it’s been a pleasure, but, you know. It hasn’t.”

“I hope you die in a car wreck,” she spat.

Graf chuckled to himself as he slipped behind the wheel and started the engine, gulping down the blood like it was the last he would ever taste. He was never so happy to see something in his rearview mirror as Jessa and her stupid house.

He remembered the turns he’d taken to get there like something out of a nightmare, and soon he was on the same damned highway that had trapped him, passing the same damned gas station. This time, he kept his eye on the odometer, and punched the accelerator. If a DeLorean could travel through time going eighty-eight miles an hour, a Pantera could break out of this prison town at one-twenty. He shot past a figure on the side of the road and pumped his fist. He was actually going to make it! Ten miles, fifteen.

A deer—the same goddamned deer!—lunged from the cornfield, and he hit his breaks, swerving to avoid it. The car fishtailed, then did a one-eighty in the center of the road. And there, in the edge of the glow of his headlights where it shouldn’t be, was the ruined shape of the busted-down gas station.

Graf launched himself from the car and took off after the deer, whose hind end bobbed merrily over the stalks of corn as it ran. Deer were fast, but vampires were faster, and he was on the creature in five seconds. He pinned it by the neck and tore its throat with his teeth, spilling the animal’s blood all over the broken stalks around them. When it stopped
struggling, its eyes frozen open in death, he let it go and punched it in the head.

“Fuck you, deer.” He nudged the body aside with his toe and pushed his hair back with both his hands. Then, he stood, straightened his clothes, and came up with a new list.

There was no way Jessa would let him back into her house. He hadn’t just burned that bridge. He’d gone full
River Kwai
on it. And he wasn’t going to feed off the deer he’d just killed. He spat to clear his mouth of the taste. It would be like drinking piss out of a jug of spoiled milk.

He trudged up the bank of the ditch and back to the road. His car waited patiently, like a horse in a cowboy movie. He patted the hood and got back inside. He should have just leaned out the door and punched the accelerator, running over his own head. He would rather do that than go back to that harpy and her house of decorating horrors.

“Hey!” someone called, and he looked up to see a rail-thin woman in a pair of denim cutoffs and a too-tight shirt that read C
LASSY
in pink cursive across the chest.

Does it rain white trash in this town?
He motioned
to her, and she strolled boldly to the passenger side and got in. She took one look at his bloodied shirt and paled. “What happened to you?”

“I hit a deer.” It was kind of true.

“Your car doesn’t look like you hit a deer,” she said doubtfully. “There’s not a scratch on it.”

“Well, there’s a lot of lead on this car. Real durable,” he lied.

She bought it, but didn’t bother to ask if the blood was his or not. “You’re the new guy, huh?”

“Word travels fast.” He frowned as she pulled a joint from her pocket and lit it. “You mind not smoking in here? Pot, I mean?”

“I don’t have anything else to smoke,” she said, slipping her lighter into the V-neck of her shirt. If she’d had much cleavage there, it might have been a sexy move. “Do you?”

He nodded toward his jacket. “In the pocket.”

She kept her eyes on him as she pulled the garment up from the floor. “Leather. Nice.”

“Well, that’s why I bought it.” God, could she be any more obvious? If he weren’t trapped in this town, and if she wouldn’t be missed, he would have opened her up two minutes ago.

On second thought, maybe she wouldn’t be missed. “What’s your name?”

“Becky.” She closed her eyes as she sniffed the open cigarette box.

“Becky?” He chuckled. This was his lucky night.
If he got any luckier, he’d trip down some stairs and break his neck. “Derek’s Becky?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah, I bet you’ve heard all about me. Staying out there with the wicked witch.”

“No love lost there, huh?” No wonder. Not many women would be thrilled if their husbands were still sniffing around old girlfriends. But something about Becky didn’t exactly inspire his sympathy. Maybe it was the fact that she was sending out “I’m easy” signals like Morse code. Jessa couldn’t be the only one with a bad reputation in town.

“What, she didn’t tell you all the stuff she’s said about me over the years?” She slowly pulled one cigarette from the pack. “You know what? I don’t even want to talk about it. I haven’t had a real cigarette in five years, and I’m going to enjoy this one.”

As much as he would have loved to sit in his car all night while this gem of a woman talked shit about her enemies and smoked all of his cigarettes, Graf cleared his throat and asked, “So, is there somewhere I can drop you off, Becky?”

She moaned as she exhaled, a look of pure rapture on her face as the smoke drifted in perfect rings from her mouth. “Yeah,” she answered, coming to her senses. “You can drop me at June’s Place.”

“June’s Place is in the opposite direction,” he pointed out. “What were you doing way over here?”

She shrugged, taking another long draw off the cigarette. “I wanted to see the service station.”

“At the risk of getting killed by It?” He pulled cautiously away, a sick feeling in his stomach. He’d thought he’d been so close. He’d thought he’d been free. Now, he headed straight back into the very hell he’d sought to escape.

“I had to see if she was lying,” Becky said with a snort. “She says all kinds of crazy shit for Derek’s attention. She’s the only person in town who’s been attacked by It more than once. It leaves everyone else alone, if they survive getting attacked.”

He nodded, pretending to be sympathetic. As annoying as Jessa was, he’d take three of her to one Becky any day. “So, she’s lied before about the thing attacking her?”

“She claimed it got some chickens not too far back, but for all I know she could have killed those chickens herself. And everyone just fawned all over her for it. But folks are starting to come to their senses now.” She tipped the ash off the end of her cigarette out the window. “People in town don’t have patience for drama anymore. She needs to keep her head down.”

“You’ve been attacked by It, then?” He tried to catch her expression when he asked, but the threat of demonic deer rushing in front of the car kept him facing forward.

She blew out a long stream of smoke. “Nah.”

“So, you risked your life coming out here, then? Just to prove Jessa wrong? If no one believes her,
anyway, what’s the point?” He had his own idea about why she was out there, on the edge of town. He had a feeling she wasn’t the only one to do it.

“I was testing,” she admitted, almost daring him to call her out on her earlier lie. “Every now and then, I test.”

He’d been there a day, and he’d already tested the barrier keeping him there. “Has anyone ever gotten out before?”

She took another draw off the cigarette. “There’s some controversy there.” Now that she had him hooked, she took her time, exhaling loud and long. “There’s one guy who got out. At least, I think he did. About a month after we all got stuck here, he got in his car and just drove off with the last of his gas. Some people think he escaped, but others think he drove into a field and killed himself.” She took another midstory smoke break, then added gravely, “But if he did, wouldn’t we have found the car by now?”

She carefully stubbed the cigarette out, leaving half unburned. “I’m going to save this for later.”

“Don’t tell anyone where you got them,” he warned. He didn’t need to get jumped by a bunch of hillbilly muggers who thought he had pockets full of goodies.

“Suit yourself.” She tucked the stub of the cigarette behind her ear. “But you could get a lot in trade for
those. Everybody is kinda wondering when you’re going to come back to town and start trading.”

He pulled into the parking lot of June’s Place. Several faces, drawn by the sound of the engine and the crunch of tires on gravel, crowded at the window. His eyes flicked from them, back to Becky. “You better get in there, before they come shake this thing down for parts.”

She laughed. It was a phlegmy laugh that turned into a cough. “Thanks for the ride. Hope I’ll be seeing you.”

He leaned across her to open the door. What the hell, give the married lady a thrill. She got out and crossed through the headlight beams in front of the car, a smirk on her face. She thought she’d seduced him. She thought she’d stolen something from her enemy. What sick, vicious creatures women were.

“Hey,” he called to her through the car window. “You say people want to trade? You think somebody would trade me for lodging?”

“I don’t know who has room,” she replied, clearly disappointed that he hadn’t called her back for some thing more intimate. “And they don’t like getting beat up.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” He wasn’t, really, but it was good manners to apologize for trouncing someone’s husband.

She smiled. “The way Derek tells it, he should
be apologizing to you. But he’s an asshole when he’s drunk.”

And pretty much every other time, too, Graf thought. “Well, I’ll try to keep my fists off him.”

“Good,” she said with a pout. “He’s my baby’s daddy. I need him to stay around for a long time.” She patted her stomach, and flounced through the door of the bar.

Graf shook his head and pulled out of the parking lot.

The house was oddly quiet once Graf had left. That didn’t stop Jessa from jumping at every slight noise. She sat on a stool at the kitchen island, glass of water in her hands, staring at the steady drip from the faucet. The knowledge of what her houseguest had been, what he had planned on doing… She forced a shiver away. It had been hard to accept the existence of the monster that kept Penance captive. Now that it was part of reality, it wasn’t as difficult to accept that another monster might be here. But there was a difference between a monster being out there, and a monster being in her house.

This week, there had been two.

She shot a nervous glance to the plastic-covered hole in the kitchen wall. Before, her house had been a fortress. She’d never had any actual illusions that its walls could keep her physically safe. But it had kept her from cracking up. Now, the wound to the
house was a wound to her security. The presence of a vampire within her sanctuary made it unclean, and, worse, uncertain.

The reminders were all over the house. The closed curtains in the living room, which bore stripes of fading and dust from hanging too long in one position because her mother had never closed them, and Jessa had never thought to, either. The ruined towel on her bedroom floor. The blood and dirt in the bathroom. She’d gone to shower and, standing under the spray, had seen the gouges his broad fingers had made in the jar of soap. Everything had been tainted by the presence of a monster, and now that he had left, he seemed more present than before.

The problem was not knowing what he was doing. Had he actually managed to leave Penance? Good riddance. But what if he returned? What if he rounded up his vampire pals and came back to finish off the whole town? What if he was already busy decimating the whole town, by himself?

What if he came back and got her? No one would ever know what had happened. Even fewer would care. But they deserved to know, didn’t they? So they could protect themselves?

She could go down to June’s Place and tell them all about what had happened, but only a handful would believe her. June might, but she wouldn’t press the issue with those that didn’t. She had a business to run, a town to run, really. The town council wouldn’t
believe her, and they thought they ran everything. Thanks to Becky’s rumor-mongering and Derek’s insistence that she was crazy, it would just look like Jessa crying wolf again. Jessa: trying to get attention again.

She should have given Graf a list of people to eat before he left. She snorted at the thought, but her amusement was cut short by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. It was a strange sound after five years without it, and she knew it could only be one person. One vampire.