DeVante's Coven (7 page)

However entertaining Daniel found these particular television shows, he soon balked at even turning on the damn TV.

In fact, he turned it off now. What a waste of life, death, whatever, he thought. Just an absolute waste of time. He needed to do something. What to do, what to do, at ten o’clock on a Monday night. He had no idea. If he were still a mortal boy living in Duluth, what would he do if he were bored?

Call someone. Go out with the gang, drop a little acid, and laugh until his sides ached or his mind floated away. Connect, even if the guys were straight, even if he had to hide who he really was. It was mostly better than being alone.

He wanted to go looking for Reed… but he was biding his time on that one.

Who could he call back home? Johnny J, Marcus? He didn’t know what he would say or even why he would want to call them. They were never really all that close.

But his older sister... geez, he thunked himself in the head for being dense—his sister lived and worked in San Francisco. It was a local call. He almost felt like he shouldn’t call her now because it hadn’t occurred to him to call her before. After all, he’d been living right here for a couple of months already. He sighed. He had no idea where he’d written her number. It should be okay to call her, shouldn’t it? She wasn’t an asshole to him the last time he’d called—actually, she’d been pretty supportive.
Watch out for the ‘Rents, Dad’s a jerk for marrying Autumn so soon after Mom’s death; you’re better off being kicked out of the house; can you stand it that first Dad robbed the cradle marrying Autumn, and now they have a baby to put in it? Make me vomit.
And so on and so forth.

He grinned at the memory. He and Cynthia had sixteen years between them and had never been close when he was growing up, but maybe they could be close now.

He grabbed the phone book out of a drawer beneath the phone, and looked her up. Except he didn’t find a residential listing for her. Damn. She worked with some lawyers, B-something. Shit. She’d told him the name of the firm, he knew she did, Bernstein? Bernhardt? He flipped to lawyers in the yellow pages. And laughed out loud. There were pages and pages of full-page ads for hundreds of firms. Well, he wasn’t going to call them randomly and ask for her. Actually, he probably couldn’t—they’d be closed.

Well, shit. So he’d have to come up with the right firm and then hope they had one of those totally aggravating voice mail systems with a directory.

He started flipping the pages, and there it was. Berhnquist, Bruckner, and McCulloch. He must be supposed to call. Too weird.

Even weirder was that a real live woman answered the phone instead of a voice mail system. Daniel asked for Cynthia. “Hold on a minute,” the woman said. “She’s here, but she’s working on a project and I don’t think she’s taking calls. Who should I say is calling?”

“I didn’t! I swear, Cyn, somebody took her but it wasn’t me. And, yeah, he had me arrested. Talk about ungrateful. But that was a long time ago, now. Like years.”

“I know. I just haven’t heard from you. And I know you didn’t kidnap her. That’s absurd. You don’t have to swear anything to me. I know what they’re like. You’re right, they’re assholes. So... tell me what’s up with you—you didn’t say much last time. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Roderick, oh, he’s this amazing guy who, like, stalked me back home. I ran away with him, you know, to make all our dreams come true.” Daniel paused for a minute, then let his voice drop almost to a whisper. “Cyn, he’s the first guy I ever met who’s like me.”

“So, when did you know?”

“What do you mean, when did I know he was... he was...”

“No, when did you know
you
were?”

“When I met him. I didn’t have a name for it.”

“Oh, come on, you should have. Look at what I do.”

She tried to save the world from HIV and AIDS, or at least make sure those who got it were able to keep their health insurance. Daniel had known that. And he’d known that a lot of people who died of AIDS in the eighties and nineties were gay. “Yeah, but, those aren’t
real
people, I mean, not to me. Not in Minnesota. You know what I mean. I always knew I wasn’t like other boys, though. Always. As far back as I can remember, my fifth birthday, even. Dad watching a baseball game that afternoon while Mom ran the party. After everyone went home Dad running out to Wal-Mart to buy a T-ball set and grinning from ear to ear, me hating it, hating it, even at five. So terrified I’d miss the fucking ball and wipe the smile off his face.”

“Daniel, not liking sports has nothing to do with it.”

“I bet it can have. The sound of power tools—sends a shiver up my spine like nails on a chalkboard. And you know, I was never curious about what boys had that girls didn’t in their pants. Never. By sixth grade all the other boys knew. I didn’t even care.

“So I guess I always knew something wasn’t right for me. But I didn’t know what it was until I met Roderick. He showed me what it was.”

“So, tell me about him, what’s he like? What does he do?”

Daniel sighed. “Twenty-five, long shiny brown hair, brown eyes. Playful. Sometimes moody.” He thought about how Roderick just up and left, how he’d kicked Daniel out of his head when he tried to find him, to talk to him. “Unpredictable. Lives on a trust fund, or something. I don’t know all the details.”

He laughed. “Hang on, I don’t have it memorized.” He hadn’t even thought about it. He’d seen it, somewhere... ah, there it was, taped to the wall above the phone. Smart. He read it off to her. “But Cyn—you have to call pretty late. We tend to stay up all night and sleep all day around here.”

“You just said he’s twenty-five, Daniel. What you’re telling me isn’t making me feel any better. Sounds like he acts more your age than his own. Does he have sex with you?”

Daniel blushed. He couldn’t talk about this with his
sister
. “That’s none of your business.”

“You’re right. It isn’t. And you just told me the answer. Please, please tell me you know how to be safe? Kids your age don’t think AIDS is real, but take it from me, it’s still out there and people are still dying. I’m serious, Daniel. I want you to convince yourself that if you have sex with a man without a condom, even once, even if you love him, you will die. That’s how important it is.”

Daniel so wanted out of this conversation. “We’re safe, all right? Hey, look, I gotta go,” he said, and hung up. Sighed. Lecture central.

He felt a lot better, though. Maybe he would venture out and look for Reed.

He let his mind go blank and reached out for the taste of Reed, the touch… letting his desire lead his senses until he could see Reed in his mind, sipping coffee and talking to a beautiful woman with long dark hair.

“Gotcha,” he said softly, and headed outside.

***

Roderick led the boy into the crowd waiting for the Treasure Island ship to sink. It was winter in Las Vegas but still warm, still a million visitors in town.

“Pick someone,” he said to Anthony.

The boy’s head swung from side to side. He pointed to two blonde girls sitting on a bench a hundred yards away. They looked about his age and just as street-wise. One had very short hair, the other very long in school-girl braids. “I’ve seen them around, they’re not tourists.” He stared at them.

Roderick was about to say something about feeding when Anthony crooked a finger in the air and said, very softly, “Come here, Sweetie. That’s it. Come here.”

The girl with the braids was staring back at him. She rose and approached, weaving in and out of bystanders. The other girl watched for a second then called out in a strident, unpleasant voice, “Hey Candy, where ya goin’?”

The girl with the braids didn’t even look back at her friend. She had eyes only for Anthony.

Wow, Roderick thought. This kid had a knack for being a vampire. He shouldn’t just ‘know’ how to do shit. Roderick was supposed to teach him. Roderick was supposed to be in control. Damn. What was happening here?

The girl with the braids, the one called Candy, walked right up to the new vampire and greeted him, not with words, but with a sensual, knowing kiss. A kiss with tongue.

The other girl appeared in front of Roderick. She smiled at him and actually purred as she said, “Hi, Stranger. You looking for a little action tonight?” Even the purr was grating to the ears. Roderick looked around. They were standing in the middle of the crowd. He grasped the girl by the wrist and pulled her off to the side, using a shadow for cover.

Her voice was annoying, but the taste of her blood was as sweet as her friend’s name. He was blood-starved from turning the boy and the hunger urged him into long deep swallows. What he wanted most was to press his fingers through her rib cage, pull out her blood-saturated heart, and chew on it like bubble-gum. But her sweet young blood smoothed the frenzy and he kept control. He let her corpse slide to the ground intact.

Holy Mavis, he breathed, was he ever going to stop screwing this up? He spun around and looked for Anthony. The girl with the braids was staggering with zig-zag steps away from the boy. He was watching her go, a goofy grin on his face. To Roderick’s horror Anthony lifted an arm and wiped his shirtsleeve across his mouth. Roderick could clearly see the bright red stain.

“You idiot! What are you doing? You’re supposed to wait for me to teach you things!”

The boy turned to him, goofy grin still plastered across his face. “That was the coolest thing!”

Roderick was so tense he thought he might jump up and down and have a temper tantrum right there. “You idiot! Hide your sleeve. Get that shirt off! Find a garbage can or something.” Fortunately no one had noticed them yet.

Anthony looked down at his shirt. Looked at Roderick. The expression on his face was so dumbfounded it would have been comical in a different time and place. “What are you so excited about?”

“Your sleeve! Your sleeve.” Roderick forced himself to be calm. He was acting paranoid. More like his own Master every day. He counted to five. Ten would take too long.

“Look at your sleeve, Boy. You must never do that again. When the girl is found dead there must never be any evidence to connect you to the body. Particularly blood on your clothing. Don’t you know anything about forensics?” He tugged at the shirt. Tony let his arms slide out of the sleeves, and Roderick rolled it into a ball.

The boy gave him that stupid look again. “Forensics? No, I don’t read much. But... the girl was fine. Didn’t you see her dance away? What do you think I did to her? Wait a minute!” He looked around Roderick, peered into the shadows. “What did you do? Is that the other girl on the ground? What did you do?”

Roderick sighed. “I fed. What did you do with yours?” He hustled the boy down the street, away from that particular crowd, the girl he’d left on the ground.

“We danced for a bit.” His eyes glazed over. “Mmmm. I tasted her. She tasted me. We danced in a way I have never danced before. I think we shifted the universe.”

“Oh gag me. You fed. I can’t imagine how you fed so little that she walked away, especially your first time out, but that’s what it was. Nothing earth-shaking, believe me. You’re not supposed to feed them back. Gad, I can just see it, all sorts of little stupid Anthony-vampires running around.” He froze at his own words.

“I prefer to be called Tony,” said the boy.

Stupid little Anthony-vampires. Very possible. As a high-pitched scream rose from somewhere behind them, Roderick suddenly knew that he needed to take this boy to DeVante. He couldn’t handle this alone...
Oh Mavis, what have I done?

Chapter 7



How to lie to your best friend

“Always,” she said, and growled. “The Perfect Pair are still thrilled to have a lesbian daughter. They only mentioned therapy once tonight. Oh, and her dad made some comment that I’m not butch enough to be a dyke.”