Min's Vampire (35 page)

“
He’d kill me,” Gabriel
groused. “Then he would probably execute you. Mingling of the
species is against vampire sovereign law. Not even he could change
that edict.”

“
Coward!” she spat, her
expression menacing.

“
If there was a way,”
Gabriel said, “you know I would do anything to be with
you.”

Delia’s eyes snapped open wide and
then sparkled as a smile flashed across her face.

“
What?” He asked
cautiously.

Her gaze flitted away from him,
darting here and there as she seemed to be chasing a tantalizing
thought. She raised her hand; fingers outstretched, and then
clasped them shut as if she’d seized a thought out of thin air. “I
have an idea.”

Gabriel stared at her for a few beats.
“And would you like to share this idea?”

Delia’s gaze darted back to him,
brimming with excitement. “No… not yet.” She turned and strode away
from him, looking back at him over her shoulder as she came to the
edge of the scaffolding. “But soon…”

She stepped off the ledge and
disappeared out of sight. Gabriel groaned and gritted his teeth and
looked up in exasperation. He hated when she did that. He was
certain she would land on her feet, unscathed, but he hated when
she willfully tossed herself from such heights.

“
Show off!”

Chapter 2

THE ALARM bleated a call
that could easily wake the dead. Lucy rolled over and squinted at
the clock. She’d managed to sleep through twenty minutes of its
racket, yet didn’t feel a bit rested. What she did feel was sore
and old. She pulled herself up in bed and turned the evil alarm
clock off instead of punching it, hard—
the
damned thing had cost her twenty-three ninety-five, plus
tax.
She looked around at what had been her
bedroom for the last six months and once again felt
poor.

Sore and old and poor...
life was good.

It was a room in her Gram’s house,
actually the room her mother had grown up in. It had one little
window, which she had forgotten to draw the curtains on, so now the
afternoon sun was making the generic white walls glow like halogen
floodlights. Her private bathroom had been bigger than this
room.

She kicked off the covers
and stumbled over a pair of black Dr. Scholl’s sneakers, and then
walked gingerly on her always aching feet to
the Smallest Closet in the World!

Of course, she was reminded, as she
opened its door to the half-dozen mix-and-match Wal-Mart sales rack
outfits that comprised her entire wardrobe, that she really didn’t
need the space.

When the FBI and the IRS had returned
to Lucy’s family’s house three days after they’d taken her father
into custody, it hadn’t been to tell them why they’d taken
him—though they’d found out at the arraignment that he was charged
with money laundering, tax evasion, extortion and, on a horrifying
side note, immigrant slave labor trafficking.

No, they came for the house, the cars
(including her red Mustang) and then went room by room and took
anything of value. In her case she lost absolutely everything.
Every piece of jewelry, cell phone, and every item of clothing and
pair of shoes—even her damn socks had been designer label. She got
off with the tank-top/sweatpants ensemble she’d been wearing only
because she was trying to work off some of her worry on the
treadmill in the home gym.

They also froze all of her father’s
assets, so all her mother left with was three hundred dollars in
cash, no mode of transportation, and a suitcase of clothes that
were deemed to have no value.

On the other hand, Lucy’s brother Seth
left the house with almost everything he owned, including some of
his video games.

She stood out on the sidewalk in front
of their five-hundred-thousand-dollar Spanish villa style house
with her mother and brother, waiting for the taxicab an agent had
taken pity on them and called.

Her mother, Lila, had had two choices
as she’d stood there waiting for the taxi. They could have probably
afforded to stay in a fleabag hotel overnight, and then they’d be
flat broke in the morning. Or, they could take a cab to the bus
station and buy three tickets to her grandmother’s place in Four
Corners—a tiny town about an hour east of their home in San
Bernardino.

Standing in her bedroom in
Four Corners, California, she took in the blue and yellow uniform
that hung in her closet (replete with a tacky sun visor emblazoned
with
The Golden Arches
) and was reminded again that she worked at
McDonald’s.

Her father had rolled over on his law
partners, to secure a ten-year prison sentence served in a
minimum-security facility. But that deal hadn’t included Uncle Sam
returning any of her father’s assets to the family, so her mother
was now a cocktail waitress in nearby Barstow, and Lucy had to take
the bus just to get to work every day.

That alone had been an all too
humbling experience, and the only thing she clung to now was the
hope that one day she’d be able to buy herself a used piece-of-shit
car. That way she could drive herself to McDonald’s for the next
ten to twenty years.

Dreams of marrying a multimillionaire
or going to a good college had gone up in smoke months ago when
she’d first taken the bus to work, had missed her stop, then had
scrubbed a public toilet as her initiation into the fast food
service industry. She had felt that her life had gone down that
toilet the instant she’d flushed it.

And now, as she pulled her uniform on
(amazingly Gram always seemed to be able to get the grease stains,
and most importantly, the smell of McDonald’s out of her uniform),
her heart sank and shrank in her chest.

Today was her eighteenth
birthday.

Happy
Birthday!!!

As she pulled her still long, yet not
nearly as radiant, hair back in a tight ponytail, she considered
for the hundredth time just calling off. But truthfully she had
nothing else to do, and no one to do it with. She had no friends to
go out with. She’d gone from teen queen to a complete nobody in her
new high school—the new girl with a mean chip on her shoulder and
discount clothes on her back. Her mother was working her usual
Saturday night shift, and her grandmother was busy at a church bake
sale. So calling off would mean being completely alone on her
birthday.

And anyway, she had already seen the
ugly truth: her life was pretty much over, and working on her
birthday was just one more thing she’d have to get used
to.

She trudged downstairs and poured
herself a cup of coffee from the pot her grandmother had made fresh
before she’d gone out. She was tempted to just drink it black.
There would be no more apropos symbolic gesture for the turn her
life had taken. But the mere thought of coffee without cream and
sugar made her want to gag. So she made her coffee just as she
always did—some milk and three sugars—and stood leaning against the
worn metal and Formica kitchen counter, taking in the tattered yet
spotless old kitchen, and the lonely silence of the house. Even her
loser brother had friends in Four Corners, and he was staying the
night with one of them as she sipped her coffee.

Another thing she’d lost that he
hadn’t.

~*~

The bus ride from San Bernardino to
Four Corners had only been the first of many trips she had taken on
a bus. Though all buses looked alike, they certainly didn’t smell
alike. Some smelled of feet and body odor. Some smelled of
industrial strength air freshener (the driver’s halfhearted attempt
at masking the stench. But that usually just made the bus smell
like lilac scented gym socks).

But there was one driver—her name was
Shirley—who actually kept her bus spotless, and Lucy always took a
seat close to the front on the days she’d catch her bus.

Shirley talked to anyone and everyone,
her curiosity seemingly boundless. The best part for Lucy, though,
was that Shirley would just let you sit there in silence as she
happily drove and chatted up others. Yet somehow she made you feel
as if you were in on the conversation.

Today Lucy caught Shirley’s bus and
she happily took her usual seat, fading into the scenery as Shirley
told a rather old man with a wrinkled radish for a nose that her
petunias were shriveling on the vine. “It’s just not natural,” she
continued, pushing a large frizzy strand of her red hair out of her
eyes. “I water them three times a week. I even have one of those
Miracle-Gro attachment doohickeys.”

Mr. Radish Nose scratched his
ginormous red nose and then asked, “Are they in direct
sunlight?”

“
Well, of course they are!”
Shirley smiled. “I read the packet the seeds came in.”

“
Well, that’s true for out
east. But for the climate out here the sun’s just too harsh. And
though pretty and hearty, those things fare better in the shade in
these parts.”

Shirley made a little humph noise, and
then straightened her shoulders. “Makes sense.” She smiled into her
rearview mirror at Mr. Radish Nose. “I’m off in two days, so I’ll
go ahead and transplant them to the other side of the house.
There’s a good shady spot right beneath my kitchen
window.”

Mr. Radish Nose nodded his head in
agreement.

Lucy smiled and caught Shirley’s
bright green eyes looking at her. “Gotta work on your birthday,
huh?”

Lucy’s jaw dropped and she shook her
head. “How did you...?”

Shirley smiled knowingly as she
smoothed her dark red hair back again into the little flip she’d
styled it into. “When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you
can just tell. And the look on your face invariably means it’s your
birthday, and you have to work.”

“
You’re amazing. You should
be on TV.”

Shirley gave a honking laugh. “I’d
sure as blazes be better at it than that god awful Dr Phil.” She
shook her shoulders with a chill. Lucy knew what would come next.
“And that Oprah’s gotta know there’s a studio apartment waiting for
her in hell for exposing the world to that lunatic.”

Shirley hated Dr. Phil with every
ounce of her rather substantial, curvy body.

She pulled the bus over and said,
“This is your stop, birthday girl.” And sure enough, as Lucy got
out of her seat, waved goodbye to Shirley and then half tripped
down the three little steps of the bus, there she stood under the
Golden Arches.

She sighed. “Now my birthday is
complete.”

~*~

McDonald’s was bombarded with
customers, and not the usual Saturday night crowd. This was pure
chaos and mayhem, and at first Lucy was glad for it. The busier it
was, the faster the time would fly by. But her assignment tonight
(the grill) had her stuck over a hundred patties of scorched meat,
and her hands and arms got burnt by the overly sizzling
grease.

When it’s really busy, management will
turn up the heat on the grill—to hell with corporate’s rules and
regulations for the cooking of their prized beef patties.
Management just wanted the burgers done and out the door with the
customer.

End of story.

About an hour into this hot, smelly
mess of special meat, she was coated with sweat and grease, and she
had all sorts of tiny red welts all over her arms.

“
Lucy!” Greg, her night
shift manager yelled, though he was standing right beside
her.

She looked up at him
unenthusiastically—she no longer jumped in surprise at his
all-too-often sudden outbursts. “Yeah, Greg?”

Greg was on the cusp of turning
thirty, his hair was starting to recede, and he always looked like
he was constipated. “Go to the cooler and get two containers of the
Special Sauce...” He plucked the spatula from her hand. “I’ll watch
the grill.”

“
Okay.” She turned and
started to walk away when Greg hollered again.

“
Grab a bag of sandwich
lettuce too.”

She nodded her head and waved that
she’d heard him, but she didn’t bother to look back at him. She
stayed close to the wall as she navigated further back into the
bowels of the fast food restaurant. Twenty-three workers ran around
like computer animated chickens with their heads chopped off, with
no rhyme or reason, and just barely missed running right into each
other.

She yanked open the cooler door,
almost getting bowled over by an acne pocked kid named Gibson, and
then slipped into the cool, clammy embrace of the walk-in cooler.
If it wasn’t for the smell—an overtaxed refrigeration unit, fresh
and rotting vegetables and fruits, the grease that coated every
square inch of the store, and of course the mildew of refrigeration
moistened cardboard boxes—she would enjoy the temperature
dip.

Plus the unit itself made a white
noise that blocked out all other noises. So it was kind of
peaceful.

She stood there for a lovely moment
and let the cold envelope her—and forgot that she was this Lucy
now, and let a flash of her old life, the old radiant and amazing
Lucy, warm her. She tried not to take a breath. This lasted for
exactly ten seconds, and then she had to take one. That alone
snapped her back to reality, and she started to move toward the
shelves she needed to pull stock from.