Paranormal Bromance (Kitty Norville 12.50)

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“You shouldn’t be. Jack mostly hits on girls who are sure, and I frankly find it a little weird. You know?”

She laughed. She had a really great laugh. I felt this powerful urge to reach for her, and I started salivating. Which wasn’t right. I pressed my lips into a tight smile. I did not under any circumstances want to start drooling. But seriously, she looked so good…

“I think I need to get back inside and check on Jenn and Anne. But we should, I don’t know, play together sometime. Xbox or Playstation?”

“Both,” I said, and gave her my screen name: CaptainHoboMan. She gave me hers: PrincessScruffy1. The latter-day version of trading phone numbers. Felt like a victory.

“Nice meeting you, Sam,” she said, waving as she went back inside. She looked awfully cute. I could feel the heat of her blood, even as she was moving away.

I was still drooling.

“Good job holding back,” Braun said. “I thought I was going to have to run an intervention there.” He was chuckling like he’d made a joke.

Yeah, he was an older vampire and I was the baby vampire. He didn’t have to rub it in. I could control myself and not rampage at the carotid artery of a pretty woman who stopped to talk to me. I was just fine.

“Good night, Braun.”

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket and marched off.

SO. I HAD this strange tickling sensation in my gut that Ginny was everything I’d ever wanted in a woman. The trouble was, these days, all I wanted was blood. I didn’t want to get laid anymore. I wanted to feed.

I was turned in 1996, when I was twenty-five, during a rampage that the local vampires still don’t like to talk about.

It takes more than just biting someone to make them a vampire. There’s a whole process. I got knocked on the back of the head as I was walking back to my downtown apartment after a midnight movie. Woke up three nights later in a closet in a parking garage, along with Jack and Aaron, who’d also been attacked and turned. It was the “lair” of a rogue vampire with delusions of grandeur attempting to start his own personal vampire army. I couldn’t help but think that if he’d succeeded in his plan, how very disappointed he would have been in the three of us.

The local Family of vampires caught the rogue and punished him—left him outside in sunlight, which was just exactly harsh enough, I thought. But they were left with us. The Family, run at the time by an okay guy named Arturo, offered to help us adapt to our new nocturnal lives. We could have stayed with him and others of his Family in his underground compound, worked for him, and he’d have looked after us and made sure we were fed. That sounded too much like moving back home, so the three of us found a basement apartment and decided to fend for ourselves. Arturo laid out the rules—no killing our food supply, no attempts to set up a rival vampire Family—and wished us well. That was years ago now, and we’ve been doing okay. Since then, a new guy had taken over from Arturo, Rick, and if anything Rick was even more laid back.

We didn’t much notice the local vampire politics. Seemed safer that way.

The truth of the matter is, Gen X-ers make terrible vampires. To be a good vampire—what most vampires think of as a good vampire—you have to be interested in power. You have to take the long view. Plan ahead, have a little ambition. Think about your place in the world and how to manipulate it. You have to want to manipulate it.

Me, I’m pretty happy playing another round of whatever my current game obsession is. I think about living forever and figure I can get really good at Xbox. It’s not that I don’t care about the big picture. I just don’t see why I should. You ask yourself, does the work equal the reward? And I have to tell you, the powerful vampires all look pretty stressed out for guys who are basically immortal.

I reviewed video games for living, writing for blogs and online magazines. I had a reputation, made decent money, and I didn’t have to leave the house. Which was important. I didn’t know how vampires made a living before the Internet. Maybe that was why the old ones always looked stressed out, like dragons guarding their horde.

I got home from the club and, thinking of Ginny and what it might possibly be like to invite someone here—not that I would, but maybe someday—and noticed what a dump we lived in. We didn’t do it on purpose. The apartment was actually pretty nice—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spacious living room with a comfy sofa and ridiculously big TV, and an okay kitchen. We never used the kitchen. We were a three-bachelor party pad. And nobody remembered to clean up after themselves.

A mountain of debris had somehow piled up after Jack and I left. Most of it was cardboard boxes and wads of packing paper.

“Aaron?” I called. “Aaron, you alive in there? So to speak?”

“I’m fine. Paying my rent here, stop nagging.”

I wasn’t nagging. I started to tell him, then realized that would make me a nag. “You think maybe you could take some of these boxes out to the recycle bin?”

Noises bumped from his room, like someone tripping over something or dropping books.

He called back, “Sam, if the place isn’t on fire, I can’t talk.”

“Okay, that’s fine. If you don’t want to take these out to recycling, can I do it?”

At that, he pounded out of his room and looked at me like I’d just offered to bleach all his clothes. He was a scrawny guy, not just white but pasty, with a mop of brown hair and an eternally startled expression. “No, I need them. For shipping.”

“All of them?” There must have been thirty cardboard boxes parked in the living room, piled around the front door, some of them collapsed, some of them not. Some of them were torn, stained, and disintegrating, obviously unusable. A stack of incoming boxes was piled next to Aaron’s room. I took the initiative and started at least nesting some of the boxes together, to clear space.

“I don’t know yet what sizes I need. I might need them all. I have five auctions finishing up right now—so yes, I need them.” That was why Aaron spent all his time in his room and why he always looked like a mole that’s been dragged out of his hole. He made his living flipping collectibles on eBay. I wouldn’t have believed there was an art to it until I saw him at work. He made a shockingly good living at it.