“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make
a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…”
? John Milton
“Hey, mister?”
It was long after sunset. Damon Salvatore sat in a back booth of the most seedy and disreputable joint in all of Pine Grove, which was the most seedy and disreputable village to be found near Dyer, the little town that embraced Dalcrest College. He was reading the Dyer County Herald.
“Mister?”
Damon dipped his newspaper and looked over the top of his Ray Ban sunglasses at a young woman—a girl—a sort of moppet. She had dark olive skin and unnaturally brilliant scarlet hair in heavy, helter-skelter curls. You could mistake her for maybe sixteen if you fell for her round, ingenuous blue eyes or missed her ability to seem shorter and slighter than she actually was.
She brought to mind someone he cared about, who was genuinely small and fragile and had soft strawberry curls and a heart-shaped face. On the strength of that resemblance, he spoke to her.
“Yeah?”
The girl of sixteen, going on twenty-two, going on ageless, put her head on one side endearingly.
“Hey. Do you like to play pool, mister?”
“Nope.” Damon retreated back behind the Herald. He was scanning the obituaries column—it was his way of keeping score.
There was a stainless steel hipflask on the rather sticky table, monogramed DS. Damon opened this and took a sip of dark, satiny Black Magic wine. Ah. Good year.
Bad week, though: no mention of cause of death, no mention, no mention in the obituaries. A murder, but not one of his, since it had happened the night before last and he could vividly recall not killing anyone then. A young woman, too. Weird that there was nothing about the murder in the headlines, but then this was werewolf country, which was why Damon was keeping score in the first place.
Aha! “After a brief illness”—but definitely one of his. He vividly recalled the three heavy, hairy bodies striking him from three directions at a few days ago in the Dyer woods. He also remembered the recoil in his arm as he drove a silver-edged switchblade into the largest wolf’s brindled chest while two-inch-long fangs gnashed together just beyond his nose. Plus, he recognized the thirty-something face of the human that had appeared when the werewolf collapsed dead in the obit.
So “a brief illness” now encompassed death by a silver blade, he mused.
Something stirred at the bottom of his newspaper.
“Mister?”
It was the moppet again, peeking upward.
“I just thought,” she said artlessly, twinkling her baby blue eyes, “that since you were sitting back here by the pool tables all alone, you might want to teach me something. My name is Kenzy.” She smiled like sugared sunshine.
“Really,” Damon murmured, noting with disappointment that she was neither a vampire nor a ’wolf on the prowl for meat. He couldn’t teach the little hustler a proper lesson. But maybe . . .
“Okay, let’s play!” he said, flashing a very brief—if dazzling— smile in the gir
l’s direction. With Kenzy following him, skipping, if he didn’t miss his guess, he went to gather a cue stick and a cheap plastic drinking cup. An empty cup. And, from his front jeans pocket, a quarter.
He picked a table and put the quarter and the cup on the side rail less than an inch apart. Instead of racking up the balls that Kenzy was gathering, he took three, and then three more from her.
“Pay attention. There will be a pop quiz afterward,” he told her briefly, as he deposited the six balls in the center of the table in a sort of butterfly shape. Without a pause, he casually dropped the cue ball in front of him, bent over and struck it sharply with the stick. It shot toward the colored balls, hit the middle two with a most satisfactory clunk and sent them flying in six directions, one to each of the six pockets of the table. The cue ball came back toward him, much diminished in speed. Damon tapped it from behind and it bounced up onto the quarter, then hopped into the plastic glass as if drawn there by magic.
“And you,” he said solemnly to Kenzy, who was staring with a glazed expression at the empty table, “can keep this shiny bright quarter for your very own!”
He turned back toward his dim booth and had almost reached the Herald when he heard the belly laugh.
The “moppet” was uncoiling, standing up straight. Her wide, innocent eyes were transforming into a shrewd, direct gaze. Something had apparently been unsnapped because suddenly she had soft curves on top.
Moreover, as she continued to chuckle, the fullness of her lips made her look broadminded and good-humored.
“I was gonna tell you what you could do with your shiny bright quarter, but I just couldn’t keep it together,” she confided. “Damn; and I thought you were one of those stuck-up college kids. I hustle them all the time.”
“Me, a college student?” Damon crossed his black jacketed arms over his chest and looked at Kenzy through the Ray Bans, frowning. He was seriously annoyed for the first time that night.
“You were reading a newspaper!”