My Blood Approves (27 page)

“
Why don’t you have a job?”
I asked.

“
Cause I don’t really need
to work. Whenever I find something that interests me, I do it, but
we have plenty of money. Ezra and Peter don’t even have to work.
But Ezra thinks that since we’re going to live forever, we might as
well be prepared for it,” he shrugged, then looked over at me.
“Why? Does it bother you that I don’t work?”

“
No, I’m just curious about
all the machinations of your life,” I said.

We reached his house, and he drove up into
the driveway. Turning off the car, he grinned wickedly.

“
Well, you know pretty much
everything about my life.” He got out of the car, preparing to
escape with that total fabrication of an answer.

“
I know hardly anything
about your life!” I scoffed, hurrying out after him.

“
I’m a vampire and I drive
too fast and I’m awesome on the Xbox.” He spread his arms
expansively, as if that explained it all. “That’s all you really
need to know about me.”

“
I hardly think that’s
true.” I raised an eyebrow at him, causing him to laugh, but he
just shook his head and went into the house.

Matilda was already waiting at the door for
him. He just gave her a quick scratch and kept on walking, so she
followed at his heels.

“
Mae, I’m back!” Jack
announced, going into the kitchen.

“
I’m just doing some
laundry!” Mae shouted from down the hall by her bedroom.

“
I hate it when you guys
are mundane.” I wrinkled my nose. “Vampires are supposed to be big
and powerful and sexy and dangerous.”

“
And buy a new outfit
everyday?” Jack crouched down so he could give Matilda the
attention she was dying for, and I leaned back against the counter.
“That doesn’t really seem practical.”

“
Exactly! Vampires aren’t
supposed to be practical! You’re supernatural beings with magical
powers! You don’t do laundry or play video games! You jump off
cliffs and have sex with really attractive women!”

“
I get it,” Jack laughed.
“I had this notion about what a vampire should be, but it was all
based on glamorized Hollywood ideals. Nothing could be sexy and
cool all the time, especially not something that’s immortal. Do you
know how exhausting and expensive it would be to wear designer
gowns and crowned jewels everyday for six hundred years?

“
And what would be the
point? Who would I be trying to impress? I’m a damn vampire! I’m
not gonna put on black eyeliner and grow my hair long just so some
stupid humans think I’m sexy. They think I am anyway.” He winked
exaggeratedly at me, so I laughed and started walking
away.

“
Where are these alleged
millions of movies anyway?” I headed towards the living room, even
though I hadn’t seen a single movie in there.

“
Most of them are in my
room.” He stopped me at the stairs and nodded up to his room. “This
might surprise you, but I’m the movie buff in the family. Well, Mae
is a little bit, but she only likes things with Ginger Rogers and
Cary Grant.” He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes, she really does act
like she’s eighty-years-old.”

“
I heard that!” Mae was
walking towards us with a laundry basket overflowing with clothes,
and she thrust them at Jack. “These are yours, by the way. You had
a pair of tan Dickies that were covered in blood and I couldn’t get
it out.”

“
That must be from when I
went to the club.” He sifted through the basket of clothes
absently, but my eyes widened.

It was one thing to know that he drank
blood. It was a different thing entirely to know that he’d ruined
clothes by drinking blood from a human being.

“
Sometimes Jack goes down
to the vampire club on Hennepin Ave.” Mae had noticed the shocked
look on my face, so she tried to explain. “A lot of the girls down
there are donors, and the ones that aren’t don’t mind. But
sometimes when you hit an artery, things can get a little
messy.”

“
But if you hit an artery,
don’t they die?” I must’ve continued looking freaked out, because
Jack started getting frustrated. He shifted the basket to his other
arm and shook his head.

“
Our saliva has chemicals
in it. Like mosquitoes and vampire bats have anesthetic in theirs.
We have that, plus more to make the wound heal fast. The marks are
usually completely gone within an hour or two of the bite.” He grew
bored with the conversation, so he turned and jogged up the stairs.
“Come on, Alice, if you want a say in what we watch.”

“
I’d go
with him, or he’s liable to make you watch
The Lost Boys
,” Mae warned
me.

“
Hey, it’s a good movie!”
Jack shouted, and I was inclined to agree.

Just the same, I’d rather watch something a
little less blood sucking. The whole point of the night was to not
think about all the weird stuff going on.

I hurried up the stairs after him and fought
the urge to go into Peter’s room. Even standing in the hall, I
could smell that tangy, sweet aroma that Peter left behind, but I
quickly pushed it out of mind before my heart would beat all
funny.

“
I’m just gonna put these
away real quick,” Jack informed me when I came into his room. “I
wouldn’t want my vampire image to be spoiled by wrinkled
clothes.”

The door was open to his massive walk-in
closet, and he had started hanging up some of his shirts. I walked
over to peer inside, and I wasn’t surprised to find that his
wardrobe consisted almost entirely of tee shirts, Dickies, and
various shades of Converse.

“
You have a billion
dollars, and you have the wardrobe of a
twelve-year-old.”

“
Yeah, well, I have the
emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old too, so-” He stuck his
tongue out at me and then went back to hanging up his
clothes.

“
You showed me.” I rolled
my eyes and went over to flop down on his over-stuffed
bed.

It was completely unmade, but it had to be
the most comfortable thing I had ever laid on. The sheets were
probably Egyptian with a ten million thread count. Not that I knew
what any of that meant, but I know it made things more comfortable
for some reason. My sheets came from Target, though, and I slept
just fine on them.

“
I’m glad you like my bed.”
He had finished hanging his things up and walked out into his room.
“I would’ve made it if I’d known you’d be rolling around in
it.”

“
I’m not rolling around,” I
muttered, but I sat up so I wouldn’t be tempted to.

I looked around his room. There were a few
posters on his dark blue walls (one of which was a tour poster from
the Cure playing at First Ave on July 12, 1984, and I wondered if
he had actually been there). Underneath his massive flat screen TV,
there was lots of gaming equipment strewn about a slick black
entertainment center, but I didn’t see any movies.

“
So did you just make up
the stuff about the movies?”

“
Oh, no, check this out.”
Jack picked up a remote control off the entertainment center and
hit a button. The entire wall to the left of the TV slid back, like
a pocket door, and revealed a gigantic shelving unit overflowing
with DVD’s. “That’s cool, right? This was Mae’s idea, because she
said having all the movies out in the open was ‘tacky.’”

“
But Peter has tons of
books out in his room,” I said.

“
Right?” Jack shook his
head and walked over to inspect his movie collection. “Books are
‘sophisticated.’ It’s what I get for living with people who were
born before television. They just don’t understand this modern
age.”

“
Yeah, you have a rough
life,” I mocked.

“
Hey, my favorite pair of
shorts just got thrown away!” He looked back at me, pretending to
be heartbroken. “It’s been a pretty sad day all around.”

“
About that…” I wanted to
segue into asking him more questions about the club, even though I
wasn’t sure if I should.

“
I didn’t kill her, if
that’s what you’re thinking,” Jack explained quickly. “Most
vampires don’t kill people. It would make eating impossible. If we
killed every time we ate, the vampire population in Minneapolis
alone would kill at least a thousand people a week. We’d eat
ourselves into starvation in less than a decade.”

“
I didn’t think you’d
killed her, but that’s good to know.” A shiver ran down my spine
anyway.

In order for a thousand vampires to eat, a
thousand people had to be bitten each week. Even if some of them
lived on blood banks, the way Jack and Mae mostly did, that was
still impossible to fathom.

“
How could all those people
be bitten? Why aren’t they talking about it?” I asked.

“
Very few know they’re
bitten.” He wouldn’t looked at me, and he shifted his weight
uncomfortably. “We don’t go around blood raping them or anything.
They just think they’re on dates. Lots of vampires – not me – but
lots have ‘girlfriends’ or ‘boyfriends,’ but really, it’s like…
having a cow, so you don’t have to buy milk.”

I gasped and instantly thought of Jane. She
went home with all sorts of guys, and most of them were attractive
and kinda creepy. She could easily have been a vampire’s cow, more
than once.

“
But how do they not
know?”

“
Well, they just think…” He
rubbed his forehead and sighed. “They just think that they’re with
really good lovers. It feels really good. So if you incorporate it
with sex, especially with drunk or high people, they have no clue.
And it doesn’t really hurt them. You’re a little weak and woozy,
but otherwise okay.”

“
So that girl that you
bit…” I felt strangely jealous. Knowing that Jack was with a girl,
that he’d fed on someone made my stomach twist. “Did you have sex
with her?”

“
No,” Jack said, but he
turned away from me and looked ashamed. My heart sped up, and he
tilted his head, so I knew he heard it. “But we did… stuff. The
stuff doesn’t matter, though. I know guys say that, but for us it’s
really true. It was just a way to get what I wanted.”

“
Because for you, it’s not
the sex. It’s the blood that’s intimate and… erotic.” When I said
that, he realized he’d actually made things worse and grimaced. “So
what’s it like?”

“
It’s like drinking blood,”
he sighed.

He rubbed his eyes, and I could feel how
nervous this made him. The topic upset me, and he knew it. Just
thinking about drinking her blood made him thirsty. On top of that,
he could hear the quickening of my pulse.

“
It’s hard to explain.
You’ll understand when you’re a vampire,” he said
finally.

“
What is it like for her
then? What’s it like for a human to be bitten?” I moved so I was
sitting on my knees, leaning more towards him. His hunger filled
the room like a fog, permeating through me.

“
I don’t know.” Swallowing
hard, he glanced over at me and almost instantly looked
away.

“
Did she enjoy
it?”

The thought of her, some faceless girl,
being with Jack in a way that I never had made me ill. Maybe that’s
why I did what I was doing. I wanted to know, in some twisted way,
but I also didn’t think it was fair that she go to feel something
with him that I couldn’t.

“
Yeah. I mean, I guess she
did. I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair and gave
me a pained look. “Why do you wanna know? What are you trying to
find out?”

“
What would I feel?” My
voice had gone low and soft, sounding strangely seductive,
especially for me. I don’t know if I’d done it on purpose really,
or if it was just that I could feel everything that Jack felt, and
it was playing with my mind. “If you bit me right now. Would it
hurt?”

“
For a second.” Licking his
lips, he kept his eyes locked on me, and his breathing got heavier.
“But then there’s the most wonderful sensation you’ve ever felt. It
radiates from the bite like a warm heat and your heart speeds up so
fast, it should hurt, but it doesn’t. Your senses go into a frenzy,
but it all feels amazing…” He trailed off and swallowed
hard.

“
What would you feel?” I
asked, and the corner of his mouth turned up just
slightly.

“
It’s like that, only
better. Nothing else can even compare.”

His eyes touched on the hunger that I had
seen in Peter’s eyes when he wanted to bite me, and I knew thinking
about Peter was a bad idea, but I did it anyway.

Jack had a sharp intake of breath, and he
noticed the changes, the way my pulse got louder and faster, and
some special scent that was supposed to drive him wild.

I’d been biting my lip, trying to control my
own feelings of desire, and then I felt a sharp pain in my bottom
lip. I can’t say whether or not I did it on purpose, but Jack
noticed instantly. His pupils dilated and he exhaled shakily.

I had bitten my lip hard enough to draw
blood. It wasn’t very much, but any amount would be enough to send
Jack over the edge at this point.

- 18 -

He rushed towards me so quickly I didn’t see
him move. His face just suddenly appeared directly in front of
mine, his blue eyes staring straight into me. They were completely
ravenous, but there was something more behind them than lust. A
burning agony in them came from his poorly repressed affection for
me.