well not much, but it felt very weird at first. Then his lips closed softly over my skin, and I got the shivers all over, and it didn’t feel weird at all. Not even the buzzing in my ears, or the waves of dizziness.
“Stop,” I said, after I’d counted to twenty. And he did. Instantly. Without any question.
Michael covered the wound with his thumb and pressed. His eyes faded back to blue, normal and real and human. He licked his lips, making sure every spot of blood was gone, and then said, “It’ll stop bleeding in about a minute.” Then, in a totally different tone, “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Why?” I felt a little weak at the knees, and I wasn’t at all sure it was due to a sudden drop in blood pressure. “Why wouldn’t I? With you?”
He put his arms around me and kissed me. That was a whole different kind of hunger, one I understood way better. Michael backed me up against the car and kissed me like it was the last night on earth, like the sun and stars would burn down before he’d let me go.
The only thing that slowed us down was Shane saying, very clearly, “I am driving off and leaving you here, I swear to God. You’re embarrassing me.”
Michael pulled back just enough that our lips were touching, but not pressed together, and sighed. There was so much in that sound, all his longing and his fear and his need and his frustration. “Sorry,” he said.
I smiled. “For what?”
He was still holding his thumb over the wound on my wrist. “This,” he said, and pressed just a little harder before letting go. It didn’t bleed.
I purred lightly, and nipped at his mouth. “I’m Catwoman,” I reminded him. “And it’s just a scratch.”
Michael opened the car door for me, and handed me in like a lady.
Like
He got in, shut the door, and slapped the back of Shane’s seat. “Home, driver.”
Shane sent him a one-fingered salute. Next to him, Claire gave me a completely nonethereal grin and snuggled in close to him as he drove.
Miranda said, dreamily, “One of us is going to be a vampire.”
“One of us already is,” I pointed out. Michael put his arm around me.
“Oh,” she said, and sighed. “Right.”
Except that Miranda never got a thing like that wrong.
Hey,” Michael said, and squeezed my shoulders lightly. “Tomorrow’s tomorrow. Okay?”
I agreed. “And tonight’s tonight.” I put Miranda and her wild prophesies out of mind. “And that’s good enough for me.”
Wet Teeth
by Cecil Castellucci
WET TEETH.
That was always the part of biting someone that Miles didn’t like. Sometimes, skin got on the teeth, too, and when he rolled his tongue around his incisors, it felt like little pieces of gravel. Some of his kind would say that the skin is a delicacy.
Not Miles.
Miles only fed on the homeless, people that society didn’t care about, which is why he liked the park. There was a water fountain by the entrance. He headed for it so that he could rinse the neck flesh, stringy veins, and clotted blood out of his mouth.
That’s when he saw her for the first time. She was sitting on a bench under a lamppost, wearing a raincoat and a scarf that covered her head in an old-fashioned way that felt so familiar to him. She had rhinestone-encrusted cat-eye glasses on and she was looking up, maybe at the stars, maybe at the moon, maybe at the shoes strung up over the telephone wires.
As he watched her, Miles put his lips to the water fountain and began to swish water around in his mouth and then spit it out. His mouth was still filled with leftover blood and skin. It ran down the drain. He watched the water as it went from bright red to pink. He kept swishing till it ran clear.
When he got up the girl was no longer looking up at the sky, but straight at him.
She waved.
Not knowing what to do, Miles waved back.
He headed out of the park and down the street and back toward his squat three towns over.
The girl had so unnerved him that even when he was long out of her sight and on an empty stretch of highway, he still hadn’t been able to transform, which was a drag because it meant that he had to walk all the way back to his lair instead of fly.
Miles had a rule to never feed anywhere near his house, so it was a long walk. By the time he got home, the sky was just beginning lighten as dawn approached. He had been a little bit worried about having to find a place to wait the day out.
By the time he had unwound enough to lie down, it was well into the morning.
All day he lay in his bed thinking about the girl.
He wondered why she was sitting there alone in the middle of the night near a park that was notorious for muggings and killings. It was because of that reputation that it was such an excellent feeding ground for the vampires in the area.
It was best not to be seen in the same place too soon after a kill, and he didn’t need to feed for another few days. But he was fixated on the girl.
Once the sun set, he wondered if he should go back.
Usually, he wouldn’t. But there was something about the girl that tugged at him. He hadn’t felt compelled to act out of the ordinary since he’d been turned.
As soon as night fell, Miles transformed and flew to the park. He hung himself upside down on the lamppost next to the bench the girl had been sitting on and waited.
She arrived at 3 a.m.
With his sonar, he could see her approaching. He could sense her heart beating, her graceful walk, and the large object that she carried with her in her arms.
He was sure that she was human. There was nothing about her smell that suggested otherwise. She approached the bench and climbed onto it. Then she looked around. Seemingly satisfied that she was alone, she then pulled herself up onto the back of the bench and held herself steady by grabbing onto the lamppost.
She had to stretch as she took the object she had placed on the seat and began to attach it to the curly part of the lamppost. She was intensely concentrated. Miles could tell that she was happy and nervous at the same time by the way that her pulse quickened and then steadied, and by the smell that she excreted. It had the smell of hard work, not of fear.
The girl was so close, and yet, she was so fixed on her task that she did not notice him, in his bat form, hanging there. So he was comforted by the fact that he was not the reason why she lost her balance.
Miles could sense that her foot slipped before she did, and so he changed back to human form and grabbed her on her way down to prevent her from coming to any kind of injury.
They both fell to the ground gracefully. His arms were around her waist and they were crouched close together. His mouth was near her neck, and he could feel her rapid pulse. It was so close to him. So inviting.
He pulled away before he was tempted to do something that came naturally but that he consciously didn’t want to do.
They both stood up at the same time.
“You’re naked,” she said.
Not, “where did you come from.” Not a bloodcurdling scream because her neck, so close to him, had brought out his fangs. Not, “thank you.”
Just, “You’re naked.”
That was the trouble with transformation. If you went from bat to human, you didn’t have any clothes on. Miles got embarrassed, which surprised him.
