The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

didn’t clear again for hours. It was just as well, really. All he needed was for word to get around that Josh Burnham claimed he’d been attacked—and then hired—by two female vampires from out of town.

Pretending he had found a new band to hang with after work, he told his parents he’d be coming home late some nights. Luckily he was too old to be grounded. His mom put up a fight, but she left hot food in the oven for him on his late nights anyway (which was particularly important now that he was suddenly this major blood donor).

His father, absorbed in updating a textbook he was coauthor of, said, “No drugs, that’s all I ask.”

Twice a week after hours, Josh let the vampires in through the loading doors, which were hidden from the street by the bulk of the building. In the windowless back room, they cleared space on the worktable Ivan used for fixing old furniture, and they went through whatever new stock had come in.

There was always new stuff. Business was booming. Ivan called it the “Antiques Roadshow effect”; that, and the stock market. People were desperate to put their money into solid objects, things that they thought would get more valuable no matter what.

That first week Odette bought: a tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder (fifteen dollars), bronze horse-head bookends (twenty-eight dollars), three colored-glass perfume atomizers (thirty dollars), a rooster-silhouette weather vane (twenty-five dollars), and a four-inch-high witch hugging a carved pumpkin, both in molded orange plastic (seven fifty).

“Your aunt,” Josh said, “has weird taste.”

Crystal shrugged (this was her favorite gesture). “Everything’s cheap here in flyover country. In real cities, the Quality will pay top dollar for the same stuff, sometimes just to keep some other collector from getting it.”

By “the Quality,” she meant vampires.

Josh worked up the nerve to ask Odette, “Who’s the pumpkin-toting witch for?”

“Some old fool I know in Seattle. We’re not all rich aesthetes, Josh, whatever you may have seen in the movies.”

“Aesthetes.” That’s how she talked. That was the kind of conversation they had, those nights that the vampires spent pawing through stacks of cartons and crates, flicking roaches aside (there were always roaches, even though Ivan had the whole place sprayed regularly) and deciding what Odette would buy the next day.

And they would each drink some of Josh’s blood.

This remained skin-crawlingly horrible, but once they laid the Eye on you, you just accepted whatever they did. Instead of wigging out over it, Josh turned to working obsessively on songs about mysterious night visitors and dangerous girlfriends, with Rasputina, Theatre of Tragedy, and Voltaire playing on his iPod.

Not that Crystal herself was girlfriend material. She was just a kid, like somebody’s little sister you’d ignore completely (if not for the blood-drinking thing). Anyway, she said she was celibate right now, trying to put an edge back on her appetite for when she took up sex again. True or not (who could tell, with a vampire?), this was way more than Josh wanted to know—which was, of course, exactly why she’d told him.

Generally, though, he felt strangely upbeat. Grim lyrics poured out of him, which made a kind of sense under the circumstances. Inspiration seemed a fair exchange for a little blood. He wasn’t satisfied with his work, but there were moments. Once in a while he took off on a thrill wave as his words fell together just right and he glimpsed the possibility that he could really do this—he could write songs for people to fly on.

“Wither my soul with your cold, dry lips

So I’ll have no tears to cry—”

The only thing was, he was so isolated. How could his songs get better without real musicians to work with? He was writing his own lines to other people’s tunes, a practice technique that could take him only so far.

He needed to get a move on, to make it to the next level. He was seventeen already! He had so much catching up to do. Nobody breaks out as an old singer-songwriter.

Odette’s profession was perfect: She was a masseuse. She used the Eye to draw customers to her place (a rental on Cardenas) so she never had to go out in the sunlight. Her clients came away feeling totally relaxed (as Josh knew from personal experience). Since that was the whole point of a massage, they recommended her to their friends. Odette apparently needed hardly any sleep; she kept evening hours for working people, rates on a sliding scale (why not? She could always take the difference in blood).

Crystal slept all day or else hung out at the Top of Your Game, an arcade where kids played out fantasy adventures (Odette called the Top “a casino for children”). At night, in Ivan’s office, Crystal browsed antiques sites on the computer for Odette.

He asked once if she missed gossiping and giggling with other girls in school.

“Eww! Do I look crazy? Who wants to be cooped up with a bunch of smelly, spotty, horny adolescents and the teachers who hate them, in a place built like a prison?”

“Is that what you’re thinking when you’re drinking my blood—about how spotty and smelly I am?” (Horny just didn’t come into that experience for Josh.)

“Oh,” she said, “let’s not go there.”

He decided to celebrate his new songwriting energy by getting rid of the pathetic jumble of projects from his arts center classes (the mobile made of hangers and beer tabs, a woodcut of crows fighting), which he had tucked out of sight in a tote bag on the floor of his closet. He might even make a few bucks by farming all this junk out for sale in the mall with whichever dealers were willing to display it. (As they said, “There’s a buyer for everything.”)

When he walked in, two cops were asking for Ivan at the register. Josh made a business of tucking the tote, with a sweatshirt stuffed in on top to keep everything from falling out, into one of the lockers by the front door, so he could listen.

They asked about a well-known local meth head who had come in the day before trying to sell some old coins.

“Stolen, right?” Ivan said.

They nodded, looking meaningfully around the nearby booths.

Ivan braced his thick hands on the glass countertop. “That’s why I never buy off the street—it’s always stolen goods. You won’t find any valuable jewelry for sale by any of my dealers, either; too easy to steal. That kind of thing just attracts thieves.

“So,” he said, relaxing now that he had declared himself totally honest, “did something happen after I kicked that kid out of here?”

“Read the papers,” one of the cops said.

The Journal reported that the kid had been found early that morning out by the old airport, with his throat slashed and the coins gone.

Josh, shivering, ducked into the corner reserved for books and DVDs. “Throat slashed” sounded suspiciously like “disguised vampire bite” to him. He calmed himself down with half an hour of looking at psychedelic sleeve art for old long-playing records.

Crystal showed up at midnight with a puffy, teary look and a bandage wrapped around one hand. He asked if she was okay, but she disappeared into the shadows of the nighttime mall without answering.

In the office, Odette explained in a pissed-off tone.

“A boy accosted us in your parking lot last night, trying to sell us some coins, or mug us, or both. I turned him away. Crystal was in one of her moods; she followed him. I’ve told her a thousand times, we do not drink people dry and then toss them aside like juiced oranges. It’s stupid.”

“She drained that kid?”

“She has a teenager’s appetite,” Odette said. “And poor impulse control.”

“She told me she’s seventy-five years old!”

Impatiently Odette swung the swivel chair around (with Crystal temporarily incapacitated, Odette had to find sites on the computer for herself, which made her cranky). “Years don’t come into it. Crystal isn’t alive the way you are, Josh. She doesn’t mature with time. The parts of her brain that hadn’t developed when she was turned never will. She’s between thirteen and fourteen forever, in her mind as well as her body.”