Death is Only a Theoretical Concept (3 page)

He’ll do it,
he’ll get his stereo and he’ll go back to school. Easy.

Steve downs half
the glass before turning to look at the vampire sitting beside
him.

He too stares
down the bar; Steve follows his set gaze to see the green-glowing
fae—Steve knows his handle, Ares, although he knows enough of fae
to know that’s not his real name—and his legion of swooning
admirers. All of them are good-looking and most of them tourists,
although Steve recognises a vampire who works as a Council roadie,
a zombie from the ED and—fuck!

He blinks, rubs
his eyes, stares, but it takes Steve a moment to believe
it.

Yes, that’s Adam
Swanston, just with longer hair and lipstick, trying to sneak his
hand on the fae’s kneecap. Swanston stares up at Ares with adoring
eyes; Swanston is dressed in jeans so tight Steve’s crotch aches,
not in a good way, just watching him. Fuck!

Swanston, who
fucking called Steve a fag for the time he spotted Steve ducking
into the girls’ toilets with a tube of hair gel in Year Eleven
because it’s so apparently gay to not want hair dangling in one’s
eyes and need a clean mirror to accomplish that? Who spent the year
after that calling Steve a cocksucker and a girl, always making
sure to be surrounded by the Port Carmila High footy team? Who sat
behind Steve in General Maths whispering to anyone who’d listen
that Steve had been spotted staring at a Year Seven boy “known” to
be gay? Swanston, here, clearly intent on being the fuck-toy of a
fae?

Steve got most
of his high-school girlfriends, in fact, because he can stand in
front of the mirror and discuss styling product, hair dye and the
best brands of sanitary pads for mopping up blood spills, and as
long as he obeyed the unspoken rule about not being a perv, none of
the girls had a problem with it—which made no difference to
Swanston.

“
That fucking cocksucking
shit
—” He stops as he
realises that might not be the best thing to say, given the
location; the vampire turns his head to give Steve a surprised,
eyebrow-raised look. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that—Swanston
called me a fag and a cocksucker for most of Year Twelve, and now
he’s all but fucking blowing a fucking fae? I could fucking slag
him!”

Not that he ever
will, of course, but the thought is more than a little
tempting.

Still, it’s
something of a revenge to see Swanston looking with full adoration
up at a fae, utterly rapt in the princeling’s glamour. It’s one
thing to see tourists caught in Ares’s allure, but locals should
know better than to even think about it, never mind be seen in
public making absolute fucking idiots of themselves over a fae. Of
course, one doesn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter, but
that’s why one never goes near a fae to begin with!

Sophie gives
Steve a long, pointed sort of a glance; he supposes she’s wondering
whether or not she forgives him for the hair-dipping. “Swanston’s
been coming here ever since we opened,” she says finally as she
leans against the bar. “Ares is pretty, though. It’s a shame he
never goes to the Broken Post.”

“
Gorgeous? If you like jellyfish for brains. I’ve never met a
faerie yet who could do anything more than glow and look pretty.”
The vampire folds his arms, looking indignant. “I was doing ...
that, once.” He tips his head in the direction of the admirers,
cringing as if at his own stupidity, but he doesn’t blush. “Sure,
Ares is the most gorgeous thing with a heartbeat, but he doesn’t
have anything to say besides ‘Yes, I know’ and ‘Buy me a drink’.
Plus his idea of sex involved him and … well, a mirror.” The
vampire raises both eyebrows. “I’ll, uh, leave it to you to guess
what he wanted with the mirror.”

For some reason,
it’s not hard to imagine a vampire holding a full-length mirror
while a naked, gorgeous faerie reclines on a bed, complete with
silk sheets and some fancy embroidered quilt cover; the
ridiculousness of the image has Steve snorting. The faerie keep to
themselves unless they particularly want something, or someone, and
he’s never met one willing to give a human (or anyone else, for
that matter) the time of day on any equal footing.

Jack could have
had him try and seduce a fae; compared to that, a gay vampire looks
like nothing to sweat over. Right? At least Steve still knows just
how he feels about doing that without worrying that the adoration
is mostly just the allure?

He wonders what
the town has been saying about fucking Swanston. Does Sophie call
him a fucking fag? Does Swanston want to be drooling over a fae in
public? Is everyone mocking him the way they mocked Steve? Does he
just not care?

“
Please tell me you’re kidding,” he says, still snorting. A
little flattery, here, because he’s supposed to be a single dude
looking for another single dude, and hasn’t Steve already kind of
implied that he’s gay? Or at least that he’s the victim of
homophobia, anyway? “You look way too smart to fall for
that.”

Indeed, it’s not
even a lie. The vampire’s complexion is as grey as every other
white non-breather in the room, but he looks otherwise
non-remarkable in jeans and a striped dress shirt underneath a
black trenchcoat. His well-polished loafers shine in the strobe
light. No leather jackets, no protruding fangs, no piercings, no
lipstick. He looks like a businessman kicking back after a day’s
work, not a gothed-up greyskin out to gather tourist leeches and
revel in their underkingdom of darkness and despair, and while
Steve knows it’s mostly an act to lure in tourists, it’s a relief
to spot someone who doesn’t bother. He doesn’t even appear armed,
although the flashing lights make it harder to pick out the
tell-tale bulges and lines of a concealed weapon. Steve can almost
call him boring, but there’s something appealing in the cut of a
well-fitted shirt that isn’t flanno, pockets that don’t bulge with
fish lures and jeans that are so crisp Steve wonders if they’re
new. He smells good, too: sandalwood, not even a hint of fish or
seaweed.

A pretty boy,
sure, but he
is
pretty, with a clean-shaven face and a
slightly-lopsided smile.

The vampire
angles his head and looks at Steve in much the same considering
way. “I wish,” he says, the words rueful. “It’s the truth. I
didn’t—it never happened again, though. Fuck Stoker, I
swear.”

“
Makes emptying a F88 into a feral look like an easy dare,
then,” Steve says, thinking. Jack’s birthday is next month, and
while nobody has seriously discussed what dare they should offer
him, Steve now has an idea too good not to mention in front of him,
just to scare him a little. He won’t insist on it—best mates don’t
hand their mates over to the fae—but Jack deserves a little revenge
for this horrific dare.

“
Dare?”

“
Birthday dares,” he says, shooting Sophie a deliberate glare.
If she says anything about the date, she’s
so
undead and
dismembered. “One of them was for one of my friends to camp out in
the old graveyard overnight. You from around here?”

The vampire
shakes his head. “I moved down here last year.” He gestures towards
the gyrating vampires occupying the dance floor. “There’s so few of
us in the city, so you get shuffled between humans who—no
offense—stare at you oddly and then write protest letters to the
paper when zombies uproot their rose bushes trying to get at their
buried pet dog. Never mind it happens once a year,
perhaps.”

Steve can’t help
a snicker, imagining outraged gardeners expecting the coppers to
protect their gardens and Mum’s reaction to such a prospect, and
nods. Old Sian MacGillycuddy had an awesome old English-style
garden, and she protected every inch of it with the help of her
granddaughter, two glaives and a pair of matching wakizashi. She
didn’t ring the cop shop every time a feral popped over her back
fence!

True, he’s seen
one feral zombie on campus in two years—and one or two undead folk
in his classes, if any at all. If city folk don’t know what to do
with a carrier, how will they react to the actual
undead?

“
There was a job opening with the council for a town planner,
and Port Carmila doesn’t specify the requirement for employees to
have a heartbeat.” The vampire shrugs. “So here I am.”

“
Good job?”

“
Designing aquatic spaces in the CBD is a bit of a challenge.
We need to widen the canals so there’s space for four-lane swimming
channels and access to the market...”

Steve hasn’t
paused to consider how difficult it would be to plan all town
structures in order to accommodate several different species; he’s
just taken it for granted that someone will provide dark passages
for the photosensitive. “There’s going to be moaning if you have to
narrow the road.” He can just see the letters-to-the-editor now;
the thought is enough to make him shudder. He looks up, somewhat
discomfited to discover that he is being stared at again, and not
by Sophie, who’d drifted further down the bar to stare at the fae,
apparently bored by talk of town planning. The vampire, and while
Steve has certainly been hit on by men before, there’s a surprising
amount of interest in his gaze. “Okay, what? Too much hair gel?
Those fucks down the other end of the club who keep on pointing and
laughing at me? Ignore them. They’re idiots.”

“
Well, I was wondering about the hair gel,” the vampire
replies with a suitably straight face before breaking into a grin.
He has small, barely-noticeable fangs, and the thought occurs to
Steve that if he refuses to think about what it is he is going to
embark on, this might actually be the sort of vampire—sort of
man—he can pull it off with. In point of fact, it’s not the vampire
part that bothers him. “Actually, I was wondering why you’re here.
You don’t look like a leech or a faefapper, and guys into breather
guys usually hit the bars inland. Not that I wasn’t wondering about
that guy with the fishhooks, though.”

For a moment,
Steve doesn’t know what to say, and it’s not because he doesn’t
think his moves, honed on girls from here to Sydney, aren’t going
to work. Flirting with a guy can’t truly be much different, can it?
No: this vampire, he feels certain, is sitting at the bar cursing
Ares and his admirers because he isn’t looking for some flirtatious
one-night stand. He’d be out on the dance floor, getting his grind
on in the company of one or more people, otherwise. He’s actually
here to meet someone—someone real, long-term. Someone who isn’t a
straight guy on a dare.

There are
leeches aplenty, their make-up resembling corpsepaint, all looking
for someone to fuck them, bleed them, turn them—as if there’s some
kind of hot, attractive, erotic danger in an ambulant corpse.
Summer tourists: breathers come down from the city to spend a week
gawking at the Mer and the vampires ... and usually leave about the
time they met their first zombie. Tour boats above Mere Illara are
the town’s second-highest cause of income, after the fishing
trawlers, never mind the fact that there’s nothing to see but a few
well-paid merfolk smiling at the tourists and calling them obscene
names in Merish. Plenty of quick fucks abound, if one is fortunate
enough to be one of the “acceptable” undead; real dates, though,
might be somewhat harder to find.

Steve wonders,
if he survives death as one of the twenty percent, if he’ll sitting
at a bar hoping to find someone willing to look at an
often-not-all-that-hot zombie.

“
If
you were really after a vampire,” Steve says, quite truthfully,
“the last thing you’d do is dress up like a leech and have every
vampire in the room trying not to laugh at you.” He pauses. “Okay,
the hair gel was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

He nearly jerks
away and curses his ridiculous nerves when the vampire offers his
hand. For fuck’s sake, he’s not doing anything! Not even Swanston
has reason to think this conversation a flirtation, yet, so why is
he looking over at Ares and his harem out of fear that Swanston’s
looking?

“
Abe
Browning.”

Steve raises his
eyebrows, silently praying that Abe is not as old as his name
sounds—because that would be way too weird for him to handle, no
matter how young Abe looks. Late teens, early twenties? Younger
than he sounds. “Your mother was born in the 1700s?”

“
No,
but my great-great-great aunt was, and she talked my parents into
naming me after her father.” Abe rolls his eyes. “Everyone else was
being named ‘Adam’ or ‘Erin’ or ‘Shane’ when I was born. Not
Abraham.”

That sounds like
Steve can place his birthdate—it’s never polite to directly ask an
immortal’s date of birth, and the problem with most vampires is
that they were turned hundreds of years before most breathers had
even been born—somewhere in the 1980s. It’s stupid, he knows, but
he gives a huge sigh of relief: the bloodsucking doesn’t bother
him, but the thought of banging a dude old enough to be his
grandmother should be disturbing, shouldn’t it? Not that it seems
to bother Johanna… “If it makes you any feel any better,” he says,
“Sofu—my grandfather—still can’t figure out how to tune a radio.
He’s also controlling enough Chichi vowed that he wouldn’t return
to Ni—Japan until he was dead, and he doesn’t have the excuse of
being five hundred years old.” Telling himself that reluctance is
pointless, he takes the offered hand. “Steve Nakamura, and, no, I
probably shouldn’t have been named Akira or Hiro or ... something.
Don’t ask me to write my last name in kanji, either. I failed high
school Japanese.”