Post by Threnn on Jan 18, 2007 17:14:16 GMT -5
(Be warned - this was the start of a Nano project, so I know the second half of it is too much backstory. But, I like the first part. >.>)
The kid was nearly out of breath when he skidded to a stop at the register. "Where do you keep your books on vampires?"
Chaz snickered from somewhere in the travel section. Even as she shot him a mental frown, Val had to fight to keep her own face straight. "Fiction or non-fiction?"
"Non, please. Do you... Do you have any that say how you can tell if someone is one?"
Chaz turned his laughter into a violent coughing fit. The sound now came from the vicinity of Pets and Nature. He must be making his way up here to get a good look. "Up that aisle, just past the astrology books on the left. We have a ton on vampires."
"Thanks." The kid took off in the direction she'd pointed, nearly crashing into Chaz, who had apparently decided to take the scenic route back to the register. Chaz gave the kid a once-over as their paths crossed, then continued his slow saunter to the front of the store.
"Roommate?" he said softly as he deposited an armload of books on the counter and began pretending to look them up.
"Girlfriend," said Val.
"Five bucks?"
"Yep."
"What makes you say it's his girlfriend?" Chaz swept a lock of pale blond hair out of his eyes and turned around to peer at the kid.
"Eyeliner. You wear it to impress a girl, not your new roommate."
"No way. I didn't see any." The kid didn't look the eyeliner type; it usually didn't go with pressed khakis and a collared shirt.
"Trust me, it's there."
Chaz shrugged and returned to punching numbers on the keyboard. On his third run through the stack, the kid returned to the register. Val heard her employee's muttered curse as he caught sight of the kohl inexpertly ringing the kid's eyes.
"This one, please," said the kid. "And I'm sorry if you were trying to close. This was just important."
Chaz turned around and slid to sit on the counter. "Didn't you see the sign, kid?" He pointed at the owl painted on the picture window. "'Night Owl Books, open till three.' Hope you're not studying to become a detective. Or a doctor. Imagine the things you'll miss on an x-ray."
The kid blushed, and Val decided to put him out of his misery. "Chaz is just bitter because someday you kids'll be making six figures, and I'll still be paying him as close to minimum wage as I can get away with. For the rest of his natural life. Don't mind him."
Chaz wasn't quite so eager to let the kid off the hook. "So, you think the girl you like might be a vampire, huh?"
It shouldn't have been possible to blush any deeper, but the kid went from pale crimson to scarlet. "Um," he said.
"Tell you what. I'll save you ten bucks. She wear a lot of black?"
"Um, yes."
"Burns incense and/or smokes clove cigarettes?"
"Um, yes. To the cloves." The kid rolled his eyes toward Val pleadingly, but she knew better than to try to stop Chaz when he was defanging a wannabe vampire.
"Listens to Bauhaus and The Cure, and other bands who probably broke up before you two were born?"
"Yeah."
Chaz hopped off his perch and ambled closer, so he could lean in and drop his voice. "Son, does your dream girl write really, really bad poetry? Especially stuff with angels and blood and graves as the central imagery?"
The kid blinked, torn between acknowledging this last and his instinctual loyalty toward the girl. He went for a non-committal lifting of the shoulders.
"Yep. Not a vampire," said Chaz with a firm nod. "She starts drinking blood, you tell her that shit'll make her sick. The human stomach can't digest more than a few drops."
"Uh. Oh. Yeah, I guess it is kind of silly, isn't it? Thanks anyway," he added to Val, and sped out the door. Dating the Paranormal remained behind on the counter like an accusation.
"Huh. Girlfriend. You were right," said Chaz, and dug into his pockets for the money. "Five bucks, we said?"
"Fifteen."
"What?"
"Your little speech just lost us a sale. Oh, and add that book to your shelving pile, while you're at it."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and forked over the cash. "But I was right, wasn't I? The lady-friend's not a bloodsucker."
He retreated quickly down the aisle when she brandished the stapler at him menacingly.
In a locked box beneath the register, Val kept a petty cash fund. Most of the money in there - which primarily went toward coffee and pastries when the 11:30 munchies hit - came from bets she'd won from Chaz. Night Owl Books was just outside the college campus. There would always be one or two students coming in at the start of each semester absolutely conviced their roommates or love interests were some kind of otherworldly creature - vampires, werewolves, demons. Some of them were kids who'd lived sheltered childhoods where every one of their peers was just like themselves. Others were just normal kids who'd fallen for a very good angsty act. Yet, on very rare occasions - only once in the time Chaz had been working for her, in fact - one of the kids would be spot on.
That's why, after the students had left with their purchases (or in this case, empty-handed), Chaz would turn to her and ask the question: were they right? He asked because he knew Val's secret. She could smell the supernatural on these kids the same way you might smell the traces of a girl's perfume on her boyfriend's jacket.
Valerie McTeague was a vampire.
---
Val had opened Night Owl books ten years ago, when the desire to settle down and make an effort at feigning humanity got to be too overwhelming. She'd been bitten when she was twenty-five, in mid-eighties, and spent her first several years as a bloodsucker criss-crossing the country while she figured out the ways others of her kind survived.
Some of them lived as derelicts, sleeping in dark places during the day and preying on homeless humans when night fell. Most others, however, lived as close to normal lives as they could. Oh, there were the blood cultists down in New Orleans and in some parts of San Francisco, but you could find a small gathering of those in almost any major city. Find the place where the self-described outcasts tended to flock, and there was almost guaranteed to be a vamp basking in his or her station as Lord of the Misfits. Val supposed it was easy enough for them - those kids would eventually grow out of their obsessions with dark things, grow up, put on suits and live respectable lives. And there would always be new outsiders scrambling to take their places. The Blood Cultists rarely ever had to worry that someone would notice their strange inability to age - their flocks changed too quickly.
Then there were the ancient ones, the vampires who had lived for thousands and thousands of years, amassing incredible wealth and surrounding themselves in their luxuries. They lived in expansive mansions, filled with pretty things of both the animate and inanimate varieties. Val had visited one or two of them in her travels; her kind was always curious to meet other blood-kin. She'd attended extravagant parties and rubbed elbows with the vampiric elite.
She found them terribly boring. Archaic, outdated, clinging to their memories of nobility, even though, she was fairly certain, at least one or two of them had been peasants in their living days, not lords and ladies as they claimed.
Then there were the rest. The vast majority of citizens of the vampire world would and could, quite easily, pass for human. So many jobs offered evening hours nowadays, or the ability to work from home, that it was almost too easy to go about unnoticed by the normals. As long as you didn't get caught drinking blood, no one need ever know your dark little secret. If it weren't for vampires' ability to pick up others' scents, Val would have skipped right past the two people who had, in the intervening years, become her closest friends.
At a twenty-four hour grocery store in Denver, her fingers had brushed against the bag boy's as he handed over the peanut butter and soda she'd purchased for the next leg of her drive. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed; he tilted his head curiously and sniffed. Instinctively, Val had done the same.
Vampires - no matter how clean they kept themselves, no matter what perfumes or colognes they tried to mask it with - always, always smelled of dust and blood and fresh-turned earth to others of their kind.
That night, with the kid who couldn't be more than sixteen staring at her, she remembered the same smell on the one who had turned her. When they'd met in the bar, he'd smelled only of some designer fragrance and second-hand smoke. Val had been drunk, and lonely, just coming out of a winter where she'd sworn to "rebuild" herself and "discover the true Val."
Fat lot of good that had done. Spring was coming, and she was the same old Valerie she'd always been - only instead of being perpetually exasperated at Jason, she was missing him terribly and wondering if maybe they should make another go of it.
She'd been such easy prey.
Erich ("with a 'ch', lovely") was the bartender. He was tall and lean and lush. He told her he'd skipped college and taken bartending classes just after high school. He told her she was not only the prettiest looking woman who'd sat in that stool in over a month, but also the saddest - and aren't sad, pretty women something bartenders see at least three times a night?
They were the kind of words she'd have laughed at, if delivered in a sit-com. If one of her friends had fallen for those lines, Val would have rolled her eyes and shaken her head. But the way he looked at her was so...raw, so hungry, and his words sliced through her to some primal part of her brain. Thinking back on it, he could have quoted stock figures at her and she'd have gone home with him. Inciting lust was something that came naturally to vampires.
Still, it shamed her to think how simply her will had bent to his desires. They'd gone to his apartment, where heavy velvet curtains draped the windows, and he'd fallen upon her. After the sex, she noticed how his smell had changed, how it had become earthy.
Then she'd felt the hunger, and he sat up in the moonlight and explained what he'd done. He'd sat facing away from her, legs dangling over the side of the bed like he was ashamed.
Maybe he was. They'd stayed together a month, long enough for him to teach her what he knew, and then she'd left him.
The kid was nearly out of breath when he skidded to a stop at the register. "Where do you keep your books on vampires?"
Chaz snickered from somewhere in the travel section. Even as she shot him a mental frown, Val had to fight to keep her own face straight. "Fiction or non-fiction?"
"Non, please. Do you... Do you have any that say how you can tell if someone is one?"
Chaz turned his laughter into a violent coughing fit. The sound now came from the vicinity of Pets and Nature. He must be making his way up here to get a good look. "Up that aisle, just past the astrology books on the left. We have a ton on vampires."
"Thanks." The kid took off in the direction she'd pointed, nearly crashing into Chaz, who had apparently decided to take the scenic route back to the register. Chaz gave the kid a once-over as their paths crossed, then continued his slow saunter to the front of the store.
"Roommate?" he said softly as he deposited an armload of books on the counter and began pretending to look them up.
"Girlfriend," said Val.
"Five bucks?"
"Yep."
"What makes you say it's his girlfriend?" Chaz swept a lock of pale blond hair out of his eyes and turned around to peer at the kid.
"Eyeliner. You wear it to impress a girl, not your new roommate."
"No way. I didn't see any." The kid didn't look the eyeliner type; it usually didn't go with pressed khakis and a collared shirt.
"Trust me, it's there."
Chaz shrugged and returned to punching numbers on the keyboard. On his third run through the stack, the kid returned to the register. Val heard her employee's muttered curse as he caught sight of the kohl inexpertly ringing the kid's eyes.
"This one, please," said the kid. "And I'm sorry if you were trying to close. This was just important."
Chaz turned around and slid to sit on the counter. "Didn't you see the sign, kid?" He pointed at the owl painted on the picture window. "'Night Owl Books, open till three.' Hope you're not studying to become a detective. Or a doctor. Imagine the things you'll miss on an x-ray."
The kid blushed, and Val decided to put him out of his misery. "Chaz is just bitter because someday you kids'll be making six figures, and I'll still be paying him as close to minimum wage as I can get away with. For the rest of his natural life. Don't mind him."
Chaz wasn't quite so eager to let the kid off the hook. "So, you think the girl you like might be a vampire, huh?"
It shouldn't have been possible to blush any deeper, but the kid went from pale crimson to scarlet. "Um," he said.
"Tell you what. I'll save you ten bucks. She wear a lot of black?"
"Um, yes."
"Burns incense and/or smokes clove cigarettes?"
"Um, yes. To the cloves." The kid rolled his eyes toward Val pleadingly, but she knew better than to try to stop Chaz when he was defanging a wannabe vampire.
"Listens to Bauhaus and The Cure, and other bands who probably broke up before you two were born?"
"Yeah."
Chaz hopped off his perch and ambled closer, so he could lean in and drop his voice. "Son, does your dream girl write really, really bad poetry? Especially stuff with angels and blood and graves as the central imagery?"
The kid blinked, torn between acknowledging this last and his instinctual loyalty toward the girl. He went for a non-committal lifting of the shoulders.
"Yep. Not a vampire," said Chaz with a firm nod. "She starts drinking blood, you tell her that shit'll make her sick. The human stomach can't digest more than a few drops."
"Uh. Oh. Yeah, I guess it is kind of silly, isn't it? Thanks anyway," he added to Val, and sped out the door. Dating the Paranormal remained behind on the counter like an accusation.
"Huh. Girlfriend. You were right," said Chaz, and dug into his pockets for the money. "Five bucks, we said?"
"Fifteen."
"What?"
"Your little speech just lost us a sale. Oh, and add that book to your shelving pile, while you're at it."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and forked over the cash. "But I was right, wasn't I? The lady-friend's not a bloodsucker."
He retreated quickly down the aisle when she brandished the stapler at him menacingly.
In a locked box beneath the register, Val kept a petty cash fund. Most of the money in there - which primarily went toward coffee and pastries when the 11:30 munchies hit - came from bets she'd won from Chaz. Night Owl Books was just outside the college campus. There would always be one or two students coming in at the start of each semester absolutely conviced their roommates or love interests were some kind of otherworldly creature - vampires, werewolves, demons. Some of them were kids who'd lived sheltered childhoods where every one of their peers was just like themselves. Others were just normal kids who'd fallen for a very good angsty act. Yet, on very rare occasions - only once in the time Chaz had been working for her, in fact - one of the kids would be spot on.
That's why, after the students had left with their purchases (or in this case, empty-handed), Chaz would turn to her and ask the question: were they right? He asked because he knew Val's secret. She could smell the supernatural on these kids the same way you might smell the traces of a girl's perfume on her boyfriend's jacket.
Valerie McTeague was a vampire.
---
Val had opened Night Owl books ten years ago, when the desire to settle down and make an effort at feigning humanity got to be too overwhelming. She'd been bitten when she was twenty-five, in mid-eighties, and spent her first several years as a bloodsucker criss-crossing the country while she figured out the ways others of her kind survived.
Some of them lived as derelicts, sleeping in dark places during the day and preying on homeless humans when night fell. Most others, however, lived as close to normal lives as they could. Oh, there were the blood cultists down in New Orleans and in some parts of San Francisco, but you could find a small gathering of those in almost any major city. Find the place where the self-described outcasts tended to flock, and there was almost guaranteed to be a vamp basking in his or her station as Lord of the Misfits. Val supposed it was easy enough for them - those kids would eventually grow out of their obsessions with dark things, grow up, put on suits and live respectable lives. And there would always be new outsiders scrambling to take their places. The Blood Cultists rarely ever had to worry that someone would notice their strange inability to age - their flocks changed too quickly.
Then there were the ancient ones, the vampires who had lived for thousands and thousands of years, amassing incredible wealth and surrounding themselves in their luxuries. They lived in expansive mansions, filled with pretty things of both the animate and inanimate varieties. Val had visited one or two of them in her travels; her kind was always curious to meet other blood-kin. She'd attended extravagant parties and rubbed elbows with the vampiric elite.
She found them terribly boring. Archaic, outdated, clinging to their memories of nobility, even though, she was fairly certain, at least one or two of them had been peasants in their living days, not lords and ladies as they claimed.
Then there were the rest. The vast majority of citizens of the vampire world would and could, quite easily, pass for human. So many jobs offered evening hours nowadays, or the ability to work from home, that it was almost too easy to go about unnoticed by the normals. As long as you didn't get caught drinking blood, no one need ever know your dark little secret. If it weren't for vampires' ability to pick up others' scents, Val would have skipped right past the two people who had, in the intervening years, become her closest friends.
At a twenty-four hour grocery store in Denver, her fingers had brushed against the bag boy's as he handed over the peanut butter and soda she'd purchased for the next leg of her drive. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed; he tilted his head curiously and sniffed. Instinctively, Val had done the same.
Vampires - no matter how clean they kept themselves, no matter what perfumes or colognes they tried to mask it with - always, always smelled of dust and blood and fresh-turned earth to others of their kind.
That night, with the kid who couldn't be more than sixteen staring at her, she remembered the same smell on the one who had turned her. When they'd met in the bar, he'd smelled only of some designer fragrance and second-hand smoke. Val had been drunk, and lonely, just coming out of a winter where she'd sworn to "rebuild" herself and "discover the true Val."
Fat lot of good that had done. Spring was coming, and she was the same old Valerie she'd always been - only instead of being perpetually exasperated at Jason, she was missing him terribly and wondering if maybe they should make another go of it.
She'd been such easy prey.
Erich ("with a 'ch', lovely") was the bartender. He was tall and lean and lush. He told her he'd skipped college and taken bartending classes just after high school. He told her she was not only the prettiest looking woman who'd sat in that stool in over a month, but also the saddest - and aren't sad, pretty women something bartenders see at least three times a night?
They were the kind of words she'd have laughed at, if delivered in a sit-com. If one of her friends had fallen for those lines, Val would have rolled her eyes and shaken her head. But the way he looked at her was so...raw, so hungry, and his words sliced through her to some primal part of her brain. Thinking back on it, he could have quoted stock figures at her and she'd have gone home with him. Inciting lust was something that came naturally to vampires.
Still, it shamed her to think how simply her will had bent to his desires. They'd gone to his apartment, where heavy velvet curtains draped the windows, and he'd fallen upon her. After the sex, she noticed how his smell had changed, how it had become earthy.
Then she'd felt the hunger, and he sat up in the moonlight and explained what he'd done. He'd sat facing away from her, legs dangling over the side of the bed like he was ashamed.
Maybe he was. They'd stayed together a month, long enough for him to teach her what he knew, and then she'd left him.