“I don’t know,” she said. “I saw this one movie about a week ago, that had this horde of vampires that?—”
“Kids,” I said. “Can we stay on topic?”
“What is the topic?” Allie asked, which raised a very good point. I’d lost the thread of the conversation myself.
“Him,” I said, going back to the only thing I was sure of. “We’re trying to get to know our new friend, Jared.”
Jared held his hands up, as if in surrender. “I’ve told you everything you’ve asked, and I’ll tell you anything else you think of, but do you mind losing the stake? I’d just feel more comfortable chatting with you if I didn’t think I was going to be impaled any second.”
I nodded, since that seemed more than reasonable, and we ended up around the kitchen table, just like we had originally planned.
“So you don’t eat? Or you can’t eat? Because these cinnamon rolls are really good,” Allie said, pointing at the rolls that only Eddie had been enjoying.
“I can eat. I just don’t eat much. It slows me down. Makes me sluggish.” He looked between me and Allie. “So there you go. A tip for catching a vampire. Feed him a heavy meal.”
I bent my head, and smiled. Yeah, this kid was growing on me.Kid.Wasn’t that something? The guy had close to a century on me, and I still thought of him as a teenager.
“Tell us how you were turned,” I said, as Allie used a spatula to get the cinnamon rolls out of the pan and put one on each of our four plates.
“What I said before about my family was true. They were all killed by demons. But I got away. I thought I was safe, but it turns out I was dying. One of the demons had attacked me, and I’d caught my leg on a nail. Sliced me straight down the calf, and ripped open an artery, I guess. All I know is there was blood everywhere.” He bends over and tugs up his jeans, revealing a long jagged scar on his calf.
“So a vampire turned you?” Allie asked. “A vampire saved your life. What do they call that? A sire?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t have a sire. I’m a free agent.”
“Free agent?”
“In the vampire world, you’re beholden to the one who turns you, even if you don’t want to be. You go against a vampire who turns you, even if they’re doing shit you don’t agree with, and it gets bad. It’s a clique-ish world. A little bit like high school, I guess.”
“But you don’t have a sire? How’s that work?”
I picked at my cinnamon roll, proud of the way that Allie was pushing him, asking all the right questions.
“A demon staked him. I ended up killing the demon. I didn’t even know how then. It was just dumb luck. I didn’t know what I was either. I just thought I was sick from the loss of blood or something. But I passed out, and I woke up craving blood.”
“You drank blood? I thought you said?—”
“I told you, I didn’t know anything. The craving is still there. It’s there all the freaking time. So yeah, I drank. There was somebody in my town. A guy who’d come around to steal things. I caught him. I drank from him. I drank more than I should have, and I killed him. And I didn’t like it. I don’t like?—”
“What?” I asked.
“Being out of control,” he said. “That’s what the blood does to you. It steals control.”
“Did you turn that guy? The one who stole things? Did just drinking from him turn him or has Hollywood got that part right about the whole sharing and sucking and back and forth thing?”
“No, they mostly got that right. The demon lives in the blood, so taking their blood doesn’t do it, making them drink from you, that makes it happen.”
“Can you walk on holy ground? You were at Mass this morning.”
“Yeah, sure. Right now, anyway. Like I said, things change as you get older. I met one vampire who was over a thousand years old. He’s not insane. He’s limited how much blood he drinks, but he can’t go out in the sun and he can’t go into a church, and holy water burns the shit out of him. But he mostly feeds on animals, and he’s not a whack job.”
He looked between me and Allie. “There’s a lot of whack jobs out there.”
He looked down for a moment and I held up my hand before Allie could ask another question, because I was certain that he was debating whether or not to tell us something.
After a moment, he proved me right. “The vamp who turned me,” he said softly, “he was dressed like a priest. Had the clerical collar and everything, you know? I still don’t get that. I don’t get how he could have been a priest.”
“Well he must have been faking it,” Allie said.
