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They stole the food, it’s true, but not to eat.
Vampires, see, vampires don’t eat. It doesn’t mean they’re not hungry.
***
The cave was starting to feel like home, and that was worrying David. Not like he needed more things to worry about.
But as a cloud of succulent pork steam rose from the open Chinese food containers he reveled in the delicate moment, the six of them hunched and laughing over fried rice, something bright red, fried and sticky, along with moo shu pork. Moo shu pork had been Star’s favorite, back when she ate it. David knew that much at least.
David sat a little ways apart. The rice was growing cold and heavy in the firelight, slipping from between his chopsticks, falling grain by grain, back into the box.
The conversation died quietly and with dignity. Star guided Laddie over to their bower, a bed and couch pushed up together between the rock teeth, where a stack of books sat waiting and ready.
“He’s a vampire, Star,” he’d told her. “He’ll never grow up, he’ll never die, and he’ll never go to high school.”
She’d stared at him with those black quarry eyes, stung and disbelieving. “It doesn’t mean he’s not listening, David. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s missing, everything he could be if--”
Another of their long and famous pauses, while the wind whipped past them, carrying its own secrets. If memory served, they’d been just passing the Veterans Memorial, headed toward downtown with all its lights and laughter and the smell of roasting coffee beans on the wind. Another joy that meant nothing to a vampire.
“If he wasn’t a vampire,” David finished for her. “If I hadn’t made him a vampire.”
Star had stopped at the light, waiting for the green man to appear, biting her lip and abiding the law while David, hating himself and all the things he wasn’t saying, walked calmly out into traffic, soothed by the squealing brakes and resonant horns.
***
Back in the cave, the party was winding up for the night.
With Star and Laddie’s civilized influence missing, the other three let their hair down and, retiring to their own corner of the cave, talk quickly turned dirty, hot and feral. David rose and kicked a forlorn scrap of pepper towards the waiting ocean. He gave them twenty minutes, max, then, with MSG and cheap rice wine running through their dormant veins (ignoring for a minute that rice wine was more a Japanese thing) one of them would grow bold and lean too close in to one of the others. Lips would brush, fangs barely hidden, and the third would watch with ill-concealed impatience. David had done a lot of terrible things in his short, brutish life, but turning those three he counted as a success. Three successes. So perfectly matched, after all. Their likes, their wants, their appetites...all were well met and fed, and David knew, if he stayed, he’d only be an outsider, a voyeur, to their trinity, the slick warming of cold flesh by firelight, the soft, sweet cries of youth captured and distilled, a paeon to hormones he was sure the three of them had long since forgotten.
But David didn’t stay. Instead, rising and forgoing wings, he began the long slow climb to the surface.
***
He’d felt the Emerson brothers under his skin as soon as they’d arrived, as soon as that ridiculous Jeep their mother drove crested the last hill of 101 before the city limits, out where the ice plants grew thick and stiff and defiant under the hot flash sun. Sometimes he wondered about Santa Carla, wondered if it was possible for a place to get in your blood, or, if you had none (hungry vampire walking, he thought, the aphorism about Chinese food needed an edit for the undead) if it just sat in your bones, cold like mist, implacable like the hunger.
Because as much as he wanted to deny it, David knew he must feed.
He slipped into line behind a young couple waiting for the House of Horrors. They bickered and he tuned them out, feeling justified as his thoughts turned again to Michael Emerson and his younger brother, Sam.
It wasn’t always like this. Santa Carla was a beachpunk town, a pretty but cruel pit-stop along the long gray ribbon of highway that ran alongside the ocean, and David had gotten good at tuning out the ebb and flow of its wastrel masses. But the Emersons...now there was something worth taking note.
Michael, square-jawed and roughly sandpapered with an appealing layer of stubble. But something more: a provider, a stand-up kind of guy. David snickered to himself as he watched his prey settle in their carriage, the safety bar coming down across their laps, holding them tight into the fiberglass shell. Another car swung along the tracks after it, empty and waiting. David settled against the hard seat, feeling only mildly guilty he was going out feeding without the others. Michael, he was...solid, David thought. Hard-bought and difficult to reach. His wild dark curls receding up the highway, toward the hills, Michael had stayed in David’s mind, all the echoes of his mother and his brother bouncing off the cold hard front of something-- like a monument, David decided, bouncing off the cold hard front of a monument or a monolith, something permanent and unmoveable, a marker only hinting at what lay beneath.
The car disappeared through a bloody, rictus grin, painted wooden hands poised to pounce. Canned laughter rose up around him, a pretense of darkness. David closed his eyes and got ready.
***
The dying night, then danger: sunrise, and the cool, weak rays that could kill them all.
David returned to the cave, blood-heavy, doped and woozy to curl up in his own niche. Sated, he slept.
***
It happened the next night, of course.
Michael, down on the boardwalk trailing after Star, Star, Star. Michael’s little brother trailed after him, face open and pained with confusion -- this new town should be theirs, David read, his and Mikey’s. It wasn’t fair some strange chick stealing him like this!
David frowned, trying out the name on his tongue. Mikey. Join us, Mikey, he thought. Join our family, be one with us. Sit with me and laugh as Laddie learns all the words so much larger than him. Smile indulgently and shake your head as you learn the truth about Marco, Dwayne and Paul. Touch my arm and give me the signal, Mikey, and we’ll take to the skies. I’ll give you everything; I’ll follow you around like a dog at your heels, I’ll feed you and protect you and fight who you say fight. I’ll spill blood for you, Michael.
For you, Mikey.
David walked in their shadows a while, his and hers, knowing all the while that Star could hear him, smell him -- feel him. He walked a while and then, as the mood took him, floated along the boardwalk behind them, thrilling to the Log Jam screams, feeling the rusting whine of the tram overhead singing in his sleeping nerves.
He looked back often, she not half as much. Sam, Michael’s brother, stuck to the shadows as if he’d been born to them. Clever kid, David thought. He picked up his pace, aiming to head Star off before the Needful Things booth. Obligingly, she pulled in toward its aseptic light, Michael like a moth in the wake of her light.
David felt the younger Emerson like an itch he couldn’t scratch, poised and needing between his shoulder-blades, panting. He forced his focus down and inwards, and, as the cloying sounds of “It’s A Wonderful World” began again, stepped forward, into the light.