Teeth: Vampire Tales

Oh, he thought. Oh.

This was it — this was what he should have been doing all along — not drawing comics or struggling with song lyrics, but crafting this kind of mind-blowing interplay of colors, shapes, and textures. This was his true art, his breakout talent.

So why couldn’t he picture it as a finished piece? He stretched his eyes wide open, squinted them almost shut, but he could only see it right there in front of him exactly as it was, abandoned and incomplete. His mind, flat and gray and quiet, offered nothing, except for a faint but rising tremor of dread.

Because although he couldn’t describe the stark look on Odette’s face in clever lyrics anymore, he understood it perfectly now — from the inside. It was the expression of someone staring into an endless future of absolute sterility, unable to produce one single creation of originality, beauty, or inspiration ever again.

If Josh wanted all that back — originality, inspiration, and beauty, only everything he had ever really wanted — he would have to get it the same way that Odette, or any of the Quality, got it.

He would have to begin collecting.

The List of Definite Endings by KAARON WARREN

Sometimes partying felt like punishment. Claudia hated large groups of people, vampires included. They had secret jokes she didn’t get, and the conversation always moved too fast for her.

She liked to be with one person, or two. Talking about life and the future. About the past. She met people who’d seen history being made and were alive to talk about it. This was interesting to her. Not empty nights of dancing, laughing, feasting, sex. Perhaps she was too earnest, that was the problem. The rest of them were without care or thought. She wished she could be that way, but there was too much left of her soft mortal self.

Her boyfriend, Joel, waved his hand in front of her face. “Aren’t you hungry? Let’s go feast.” He poked her. “Stop dreaming. Let’s go party. The night’s coming in and you’re sitting around like you don’t wanna get fed.”

She felt a deep gnawing in her stomach. “Yes, I’m hungry. Of course I’m hungry. But I don’t feel like eating in a group.”

Joel rolled his eyes. “You bore me. Do you realize that? Bored bored bored.”

“Well, I’m bored with all this, too. Don’t you get sick of it? The relentlessness? Don’t you get tired of always being nineteen? Don’t you want to know what it’s like to be thirty? Forty?”

Claudia had been turned in 1942, three weeks before her final high school exams, something she’d always regretted. She’d studied hard, really hard, and she knew her stuff. She could write an essay on each of Henry VIII’s wives, and on child mortality rates around the world, and on the voting systems of almost any country you could name. They didn’t talk about the war in class. Their teachers said the facts changed too quickly and that they would have to wait and see. If the Germans won, then the history books would all have to be changed. Everybody knew that.

She was the first girl in her family to make it that far, one of only five girls finishing high school. Most of her friends were working in the shops, and some had even signed up as nurses, out saving the lives of brave soldiers. Finding brave, damaged husbands. Some days Claudia envied this ordinary life, others she knew she was due much more.

Her family was wealthy, always had been. It was because of shoes; people always needed shoes. Her father traveled a lot with the family shoe business, though Claudia knew there was more to it than that. He came back exhausted from his sales trips, often injured. Always his fingers covered with cuts and splinters, his eyes bruised. Scratches on his arms. While she studied, her mother fed her in a constant, perfectly timed stream of healthy and unhealthy snacks. Claudia knew the rest of the family went without so that she would have enough food to study on. A rare and beautiful apple. Thick slices of bread with butter and raspberry jam. Sometimes a piece of cake, if the neighbors pooled their resources. Claudia knew she did better than most.

Once her mother cooked a roast chicken and she put garlic all over it. Buttery garlic sauce to pour over the meat and the potatoes, fat slices of bread on the side.

This was the food she remembered now, when she thought about her past life. She hadn’t tasted garlic for close to seventy years, not in vegetable form, although sometimes the blood she drank was flavored with it. She liked that.

Early on she’d tried dead blood. It made her sick and weak for days. Most vampires don’t like to be around dead bodies. The smell turns them off — the waste of all that good, warm blood gone cold.

It was worth a try, though. Her vampire friends (all moved on, traveling the world) thought she was crazy, and any vampire she’d told since did as well. But every time she killed someone living, the memory of her parents lessened. She could almost feel it; a memory breaking loose and being dissolved by the foreign blood in her veins. She didn’t want to forget her parents, killed by the same vampires who’d turned her. She’d begged those monsters to turn her parents as well. Not kill them.

“We don’t want any old vampires,” they’d told Claudia. “No old rules, no tired old vampires. You need to be young to be one of us.” Claudia thought of her dad and the thousand cuts inflicted on him by the vampires. A father’s secret life as a vampire hunter come back to haunt him. He was almost dead when they dragged Claudia in and turned her in front of him. The last thing he saw was his daughter’s vampire eyes.

So all she had left of her parents was the memories of them, and when she could do it with no one watching, she drank the dead blood and put up with the weakness and nausea, for the sake of keeping memory.

Joel jumped onto the couch and backflipped off it, narrowly missing the coffee table. “Can a forty-year-old do that? You can’t seriously want to get old.”

“I don’t want to get old. But I do get tired of this stuff. This life. I’ve been doing it for seventy years. If they’d waited till I was twenty-one, at least. Twenty-one is a much easier age than nineteen. I could have found real jobs.”

“Twenty-one is old,” Joel said. “Who wants to be old? You might as well be, though. You’re sad and boring. Both things.” He walked away, as so many did. She’d see him around, but they were done with a relationship.

She knew that human boys were like that as well, sudden in their decisions, uncaring about softening the blow. But they grew up, became men. Learned how to care, be thoughtful. She’d watched it in Ken; seen him learn to love his wife, Sonia, and his children. All of them cared about one another and many other things.

She’d first met Ken fifty years earlier. She was out hunting with a group (she’d been a vampire twenty years, and the group constantly changed but essentially stayed the same), and they’d targeted a young, juicy man, sitting alone in a bar. Stools on either side of him empty, but the rest of the room full.

“You go,” one of the gang had insisted to Claudia. “You haven’t pulled one for a while.” Claudia hated this, the seduction of a victim. She hated the way they all fed off the same veins, the same blood. But she knew she had to join in or they might tear her apart.

She’d sat down by the lonely man. He’d looked around, as if surprised. “Is it okay if I sit here?” she’d asked.

He’d nodded. Speechless, she thought, at the idea that someone was talking to him. She felt terrible pity for him, glad his life was almost over.

She ordered a Coca-Cola; she didn’t want the barman asking for ID. Even in the ’60s they didn’t like letting minors get drunk.

“Seems quiet tonight,” she said. She was really bad at this. “You meeting anyone?” She had to find out if anyone would miss him for a while.

“No. No. Just came out because the apartment gets too quiet sometimes. So what’s your name? I’m Ken.”

“Claudia.” She didn’t want to know his name. “So you live alone?”

He didn’t answer.