Paranormal Bromance (Kitty Norville 12.50)

She stood to greet us. “Hi, I’m Clarissa Carter, thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me. Good to see you again, Jack.”

We sat and regarded her across the table.

“This is my friend, Sam,” he said, and I waved. I tried to catch her gaze, just to size her up rather than pull a whammy on her. Just to see if I could, if I needed to. She managed to not meet my gaze. She looked at my collar, at my hand when she shook it, at her notebook, at her phone when she moved it out of the way. She was very careful not to look right at either of us, which seemed kind of weird for a reporter who was supposed to be engaging with her interview subjects.

It meant that she knew vampires. She’d worked with vampires before and knew not to look in their eyes. Interesting.

“Can I get you something?” she asked.

“No,” Jack said. “We don’t eat.”

“And I guess things haven’t gone far enough that they’re putting blood on the menu yet, right?” She had a very sunny smile.

We just looked at her. I didn’t think blood would ever show up on any menus. It was one of those “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” items.

She was human, mortal. Her heartbeat was healthy. She’d make a good meal. She was wearing maybe too much perfume, something spicy. I could avoid taking it in by just not breathing. I didn’t need to breathe anymore, unless I wanted to say something.

“Thank you for talking with me. I’m hoping we can have a couple of meetings like this, so we can really get to know each other. I want to do a thorough profile, since you aren’t what most people think of when they think of vampires. Not exactly Dracula types.”

That sunny smile was starting to look condescending. I looked at Jack; he mouthed the word “shlub” at me.

“To be totally honest,” I said, “I haven’t really been around long enough for me to even think of myself as a vampire. I mean, I could still go to my twenty year high school reunion and people would think I just took good care of myself.”

“He’s got one of those faces,” Jack said. “Baby faces, you know?”

Oh, Jack. How I love you.

“Is this a technical thing?” she asked. She was making notes, just a few words. I tried to surreptitiously read them without cranking my head around. Her writing was illegible. She might have been doodling. “That really being a vampire—the powers, the senses, whatever—doesn’t kick in until after you’ve lived a certain length of time?”

Jack said, “Oh, I don’t know, for some of us it kicks in right away. Like a duck to water, you know?” The way Jack explained it to the rest of us, he had to embrace being a vampire or go crazy. Before he’d been turned he’d been doing well—managing a record store, managing for a couple of local bands, dating a girlfriend he was crazy for. They’d even been talking kids. He’d loved his life… and he’d cut absolutely all ties with it after being turned. His old friends, the girlfriend he’d loved, they all thought he was dead. He said it was better that way, and moving forward he was going to be everything a vampire was supposed to be to make up for it.

“Some of us take awhile to adapt,” I said. “Being nocturnal isn’t as fun as it sounds.”

“You miss daylight?” she asked.

“I miss skiing,” I said. “Kind of hard to justify all that effort for just a couple of hours of night skiing.”

She stared, because she had evidently never considered such a thing as skiing vampires. No one ever did.

“Right… can you talk to me a little bit about Families? As I understand it, in most major cities the vampires are organized in to Families. What’s the Denver Family like? There’s a Master here, isn’t there? I think I’ve heard about him…” She flipped back through her notebook, a move that had an air of artifice. “Ricardo?” She glanced up expectantly.

“Yeah,” Jack said. His foot had started bouncing under the table. “Rick. He’s an okay guy.”

“For a vampire?”

I said, “He’s an okay guy for anyone.”

“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “And how many vampires are in Denver’s Family?”

Jack started to say something, but I elbowed him under the table. “I don’t actually know. We don’t really have a lot of contact with the Family. We keep to ourselves, you know?”

“So you’re saying the Denver Family isn’t very centralized, for the most part?”

“I’m not sure I even know what that means,” I said.

Jack shrugged. “It’s like, we don’t bother anyone, no one bothers us, right?”

“And what if someone did bother you?” she asked.