The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (27 page)

“Ah,” I said.

“Four years of college,” he said, breezy as all hell. “Then, after you graduate, we focus on getting you pregnant. The baby will be born, and then we’ll turn you. Unless you want to stay human long enough to nurse.”

“Um,” I said.

“Argyle says human-vampire offspring are incredibly rare, but not unheard of—it’s hard for a vampire to mate with a human without eating their partner, you see—and they tend to be like living people, but incredibly long-lived, with their rate of growth dramatically slowed in late adolescence. They’re generally granted some of the powers of their vampire parent without the need to feed exclusively on blood.

“You definitely want children then?”

He looked at me, surprised. “You don’t?”

We’d never discussed it. Because I was
seventeen
. But I could see by the surprise on his face that he’d just assumed we were absolutely simpatico on this issue, even though it had never once come up. He couldn’t know that I thought of pregnancy as a form of horrible parasitism. That having a human being
come out of me
was one of the most disgusting things I could imagine. That I wanted to be a beautiful perfect immortal vampire, not an immortal vampire with immortal stretch marks or an immortal c-section scar or an immortal stretched-out-vadge. Barf wretch shudder
puke
.

But fuck it. I could pretend to be baby-crazy for a few years, and take steps to make sure I didn’t catch pregnant when the time came.

We made it to the Scullen house, where Edwin did his super-speed thing and opened the door for me and helped me down. I’d been over a few times since the day Gretchen interrupted the game (though, fortunately, they hadn’t played any more hockey). I liked going over to their place, but there were drawbacks, like the fact that they never turned on the heat (being vampires and immune to the cold), and never had anything to eat or even drink except their weird-tasting well water from the tap. Rosemarie was always a total bitch, but she usually disappeared into her room within two minutes of me getting there and didn’t try to murder me again (that I noticed), so that was fine.

But, in true birthday party fashion, when I walked inside, they were all waiting, even Bitchmarie, and they shouted “Surprise!” A big banner with my name on it hung over the ondium Martenot. They even had a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting (just a small one, since no one else would be eating it—as Edwin said, “Vampires
can
eat human food, but then, you
could
eat used kitty litter, but why would you want to?” To which I replied, “You’re right, for me, it’s unused kitty litter exclusively, because I have standards.”

After they sang to me, which was
weird
, because vampires have eerie beautiful singing voices so it was like a choir of heavenly or possibly fallen angels singing “Happy birthday,” Ellen presented me with a knife. Not a cake knife, because why would they have one of those? but a big old butcher knife with a blade that almost twinkled with its sharpness. Edwin had told me once how they strung up deer and pigs and drained their blood to keep on ice and drink later, and I guessed this knife had sliced its share of animal arteries, but it was clean enough now. “Go ahead and cut the cake,” Ellen said.

I pressed the blade into the table, and they were all standing around me talking and laughing and teasing me about my age… and then someone bumped into me.

I didn’t know until later that it was Rosemarie, but yeah, it was Rosemarie. The knife slipped and sliced into the meaty part of my other hand, the one I was using to hold the cake plate steady. It was a fairly deep cut, and a bright gush of blood welled up. I hissed at the pain, and said, “Ouch, be careful,” snatching up a napkin to press against the wound.

I realized they’d all gone totally silent. I looked up, and all of them except for Argyle were staring fixedly at my rather profusely bleeding hand, and they’d
all
popped their fangs and started drooling.

“Everyone be calm!” Argyle shouted. “Resist, resist!”

But Garnett made a long low growl in his throat and launched himself at me.

Now, Edwin had gone all vampy too at the sight of my blood, but he had more self-control than his pseudo-brother, and he shouted and threw himself between us, knocking Garnett aside so hard he hit the ground and bounced. Argyle—grown immune to the call of blood through his years as a doctor, I guess—actually picked up a couch, threw it on top of Garnett, then jumped on the couch to hold it down. Meanwhile, Edwin grabbed me in his arms and carried me out of the house, running faster than I’d ever experienced before while I clutched my wounded hand.

He ran me all the way back to my house in minutes—my dress was ruined by the high-speed run—putting me down in the woods out back and then stepping ten feet away from me. He was pale, shaking, and looked terrified.

“Are you okay?” I said. The napkin was all crusted against the wound by drying blood, which stanched the flow, at least.

“Am
I
okay? Are
you
?”

“It’s only a flesh wound,” I said, trying to joke, but he didn’t seem to find it funny. “I can’t believe they reacted that way.”

“The blood,” he said. “The smell of it… you don’t understand… the whiff of good scotch to a bunch of alcoholics… a pile of white cocaine to a recovering addict…” He shook his head.

“Well, okay, but I mean… I’ve been over to your house when I was on my
period
before and nobody tried to eat me.”

He made a face. He was surprisingly squeamish about stuff like that—mortal bodily functions, I mean—but then, he didn’t even
poop
anymore, so it kind of made sense. “That’s not… pure blood. I mean, let’s say you like wine—that doesn’t mean you’d like wine liberally mixed with bits of shed uterine lining. But after you cut your hand, the blood that poured forth—that
was
pure, and the sight of it, combined with the smell, and you must remember, you smell
good
…” He sat down on a rock and held his face in his hands. “You could have died. Garnett could have killed you. Any of them could have.”

“But they didn’t,” I said. “Everything was fine.” I sat beside him and put my hand on his arm but he jerked away and stood up.

“What about next time, Bonnie? What if you fall down the stairs and split your lip? Any wound, however trivial, if it
bleeds
, it could…” He stood up. “This was a bad idea. I knew it from the first, but I wanted you so much, I tried to
will
it into being a good idea. But you’re human, Bonnie, and we are monsters, and I can’t protect you, certainly not for a few years until you’re absolutely sure you’re ready to be a vampire—”

“But I am sure! I’m sure now! Do it now, and I’ll have nothing to fear!”

“Bonnie,” he said, his voice full of anguish, “You’re so
young
.” He took a step back, even farther away from me. “This has to end. I’d rather have you live without me than die with me, Bonnie. And I’d rather go back to my hollow sham of a life than be responsible, even indirectly, for the end of yours.”

I stared. “Are you breaking
up
with me?”

“I’m sorry.” He reached into his pocket, took out some small object, set it on the rock, sighed, looked at me longingly, and then—poof. He ran, departing so quickly I almost didn’t see him leave.

“Edwin!” I shouted, and I know he could hear me, his hearing was amazing, but he didn’t come back. I felt dizzy, and short of breath, and like the world had turned upside down and been shaken very, very hard. That morning I’d been looking forward to marriage and vampire-dom in a few years, and now… now I was vampire
dumped
.

I looked at what he’d left on the rock. A little black box, square. I opened the lid.

A golden ring, set with the biggest diamond I’d ever seen in real life, sat nestled in the velvet folds.

“Son of a
bitch
!” I shouted. He’d been planning to propose. At my birthday party. The “big surprise” he’d mentioned hadn’t been the surprise party at all. Shit, shit,
shit
.

I ran to Marmon and drove to the Scullen house. The chains blocking the roads here and there were padlocked, and I didn’t have the key, but Marmon can roll through chains like I’d walk through spiderwebs, and before long, I was in their driveway.

But no one else was. All the cars were gone. They’d locked the door, but the locks in Lake Woebegotten in general are a joke, and I blew through the back door, which didn’t even have a deadbolt. Inside, the furniture was covered in dropcloths, and the closets were empty. They’d cleared out and
fast
. I found my birthday banner and the remains of my bloody cake inside a neatly tied-off garbage bag on the back porch.

I prowled all through the place, hoping for some hint of where they’d gone, but there was nothing… except a note, block-printed and unsigned, in Rosemarie’s room. It read, “Shame about you cutting your hand like that, you clumsy little skank. Someone as accident-prone as you shouldn’t be allowed around people like us. This is for your own good.” I crumpled the paper in my fist. I knew it was from Rosemarie. She’d planned this, known Edwin was going to propose to me, and rather than try to simply kill me again—probably because Edwin was onto that, after the hockey puck incident—she’d bumped into me, made me cut myself, knowing it would freak Edwin out. She’d probably been planting seeds in his mind about my vulnerability for weeks.

I sat on her unmade bed. They were
gone
, in the wind, and there was no way I’d find them again. I felt a wave of black ennui and despair wash over me, and in that cloud, I trudged out of the house.

I didn’t even have the energy to burn their house down in a fit of pique before I drove back home.

MOPED

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

I
was in a bad way for about three hours. Harry, who’d planned to have a special birthday dinner with me, instead found me sitting inside playing his zombie killing game, brutally mowing down hordes of the undead with a chainsaw. I wish it had been a vampire-killing game instead.

“Honey, are you okay?”

“Edwin dumped me,” I said dully.

He sat on the couch beside me. “What?”

“He broke up with me today, after the party.” I didn’t stop playing. My chainsaw ran out of gas so I picked up a golf club and started killing zombies with that instead. Not bloody enough. Damn it.

“Bonnie, I… I can’t believe that. He talked to me, a few days ago, and he told me, ah, well. Never mind.”

I paused the game, and quietly swore. “He asked your permission to marry me, didn’t he? Of course he did. He’s so old-fashioned.”

“He did,” Harry said, awkwardly putting his arm around me. “That he did. I told him I thought you were too young, and had only been seeing each other for a month, and he said he had in mind a long engagement, let you get through college first, make sure what you felt for one another was true, and I said that sounded all right to me. I mean, I’m not going to say what you can’t do, you’re eighteen, it’s your life. And anyway, he seemed like a fine boy from a fine family. Maybe he just got cold feet, Bonnie, it could be—”

“They’re gone,” I said. “The whole family packed up and left.”

Harry frowned. “Now I can’t believe
that
. They’re all gone?”

I nodded my head, and went back to playing the game, and if Harry said anything else, I didn’t hear it, and he went away for a while, and then came back, and said, “I called the hospital.”

I paused the game again. Waited.

“They said Dr. Scullen called, said there was a family emergency in Canada, they all had to leave, suddenly.”

“Right,” I said. “Sure. That sounds right.”

“So maybe that’s why Edwin, ah, ended things, then. He had family responsibilities, didn’t think it would be fair to you, to keep things going, when he had to leave?”

“I don’t really care why he did it,” I said, and almost threw the controller right at the TV—but I stopped myself at the last minute. Control, control, control. Don’t let anyone see the violence inside you, unless it’s the last thing they
ever
see. “I just care that he
did
. He dumped me on my birthday. He’s an
ass
.”

“Maybe you should call one of your girlfriends,” Harry said, in a tone of manly helplessness. “You know, talk it out.”

I gave him a cold look and stormed upstairs and locked myself in my room. I know you want to hear that I sobbed into my pillow, and listened to sad music for days on end, and stared disconsolately out the window, or maybe even spent several months in a sort of vague zombified half-life of automatic behavior… but I’m just not built for that. I was mostly pissed off and enraged—I don’t
like
it when people make my momentous life decisions for me—and I fumed and paced in my room, trying to think of ways to lure Edwin back, or, failing that, to find another path for myself, as I am a great believer in contingency plans.

And so, after a while, I called up a boy I knew.

POLAR BEAR CLUB

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

“N
ice of you to come visit me.” Joachim tossed a stone at the lake, and it skipped an astonishing fifteen times before sinking under the waves. “Dad told me you called a couple of times when I was, you know. Sick. Or whatever.”

“You never called me back. Something like that could hurt a girl’s feelings.” The Pres du Lac beach in October was a pretty bleak place, though the lake wasn’t frozen yet—just incredibly cold. I found myself looking around for splotches of blood or some other sign of Gretchen’s violent death here, but I saw nothing but rocks and dirt and pine needles. The world could absorb a lot of deaths before showing any sign of it, I thought. I sat on a driftwood log, and Joachim stood with his back to me. He’d always been a tall kid, but he was even taller now, at least six foot six, and his shoulders were broad, body rippling with muscles underneath the long-sleeved T-shirt he wore.

“Sorry, I’ve been going through a lot of changes, and you, ah… You were dating a wendigo. Sworn enemy of my people.”