The Vegan Vamp Read online

  Shaw’s lips pressed together in quiet amusement, but Jeremy perked up. “Oh, really,” he said and leaned forward. “So you’ve talked to the quiet barista and know about her history?”

  I sighed. “She offered,” I said. She’d offered a lot more than I was willing to tell them. And while, yes, she was cute, she was also too perky. Too upbeat. Especially for a barista. Anyone who served coffee should fully understand that the regulars, the people who truly needed it, didn’t want to talk about anything, until at least half a cup was consumed. Usually more.

  On the days she was working, I tried to make coffee at the house and take it in a travel mug, just so I wouldn’t have to hear her rambling chatter at six a.m. “If you haven’t already noticed,” I said to Jeremy, “she talks a lot.”

  Jeremy speared me with a glance. “She talks a lot. To you,” he said. “Why won’t you go over there and chat her up? Maybe ask her out?”

  Shaw gave me a sympathetic glance. “He doesn’t want to, Jeremy.”

  “You are aware that we are talking like old hens?” I grumbled. “I’m not interested in coffee girl. Nor am I interested in anyone right now.” I leaned forward, trying not to eye Shaw and Jeremy’s coffee with jealousy. “What I am interested in is that storm brewing overhead. What do you think is the cause of it?”

  And with that my love life, or lack thereof, was pushed to the side.

  Having friends who were just as passionate about conspiracy theories as I was usually allowed me to steer them away from any personal topics.

  Later that night, I wished the same could be said for my sister. She was like a dog with a bone when it came to getting into my personal business.

  “She has a great personality,” my sister said.

  All of us at the dinner table groaned loudly. My brother, Bronze, interjected. “That’s what all the girls say when their friend looks like three-day-old roadkill!”

  My sister’s blue eyes blazed in her pale face. “Take that back, jerk!” she shouted just before she lunged across the table and tried to choke him.

  Bronze jerked back, a wide grin on his face and stuck his tongue out at Moira. “It’s true,” he said and sniggered as her face went beet red.

  Bronze wasn’t wrong. I knew this out of personal experience after Moira once set me up with a “studious blonde with a heart of gold.” I showed up to the diner and there was a woman there who looked like Moaning Myrtle, complete with the smell of a toilet around her. I managed to tolerate the smell for a while and was even impressed with her wit, but when she cracked open a beer and drank it down in less than ten seconds (followed by a belch worthy of a contest win), I claimed I had explosive diarrhea and hauled ass out of the place as fast as my legs could carry me.

  I’d never let Moira set me up on a single date since, though she claims that the woman’s hygiene was the result of a bad spa experience and nothing that couldn’t be overlooked.

  I begged to differ.

  Copper, my other brother with a more unfortunate name than mine and Bronze, stayed silent, content to shovel biscuits into his mouth with all the speed and couth of a t-rex on methamphetamines. He’d heard this all before. At least three times a year, my sister would harp on one of us to get married and start popping out werewolf babies.

  My other brothers weren’t as resistant to it as I was, though. Copper, unbeknownst to everyone else, had a pretty little lady on the outskirts of town. She was an herbalist, though if she was non-human I didn’t know about it yet, and content to sell her wares outside of a little shop right next door to her home. I’d heard wonderful things about her offerings, and she was also pretty easy on the eyes. The only reason I knew about it is I had to go into his car to get something out of it and a business card in the cupholder caught my eye. Immediately suspicious (and shamelessly nosy), I followed him discreetly the next time he’d made some lame excuse to get away from us. He pulled right up to the front of the healer’s house, got out of his car, and scooped her right up into his arms as soon as she stepped out the door. Shocked, I had to really concentrate on not sending my car straight into the woods. Copper wasn’t one for affection but the light-haired, pretty little woods witch had apparently gotten under his skin.

  I smiled all the way home and kept his secret. It had been four months and he still hadn't said a word to anyone. Good on him.

  I turned my attention back to my well-meaning sister. “I appreciate it, but I’m not interested right now. I have too many other things going on to worry about dating.”

  The eye roll my sister gave me was epic. “Oh really?” she drawled. “Do you mean busy as in that weird ass group of friends you have over at the skeptic society? What do you guys even do all day? Sit around and think up the weirdest shit possible, then try to make it into history?”

  I counted to five in my head as I tried not to snap at my sister. Granted, I took a lot of crap from the people in this town because of my beliefs, but there was something going on around here that couldn’t fit neatly into a box. “Moira,” I countered, “have you seen the sky lately?”

  Something flashed in her eyes. Everyone had seen the sky lately. “The weather channel here says it’s just a strange meteorological pattern that should pass on by within a week or so.”

  “Have you ever seen a storm system hang on for this long?” I asked. It had been two months since the storm above us swirled overhead. For the most part it had been calm, but there had been rumors flying around since the first night. Some very odd things were dropping from the strange swirling pattern right above our heads.

  Bronze spoke up. “Guys, stop. Can we just enjoy our dinner?” Usually it was with our parents, but they’d been out of town on vacation for the past week. Now that we were all adults, they’d been gone more and more, gallivanting around the world. I missed them, but it was nice to have two fewer people harping on me to settle down.

  A wicked glint sparked in my sister’s eyes and I sat up a little straighter. I never liked that look. It meant she knew something I didn’t and since it was directed at me, it usually meant whatever it was had the potential to make my life miserable.

  “I had a chat with Mom and Dad a couple of days ago,” she said.

  “Good for you,” I said, my drawl the perfect combination of derision and boredom. “Are they enjoying squandering all of our inheritances?”

  Bronze snorted at that one. We joked with our parents about it, but we were long-lived creatures. Any werewolf who didn’t have a contingency plan for funds had gone terribly wrong somewhere in their lives. Our parents could stay gone until they died and we’d still have enough to live on for eternity. As long as we kept investing just a little bit, it would always come back to us.

  “Funny,” she said, though the wicked glint didn’t diminish in her eyes. “They met someone there. A powerful werewolf clan.” She paused, the little demon, to let the ramifications of that sink into my skull.

  Bronze sucked in an inhale and let out a strangled cough/laugh. “Bro, you’re so screwed.”

  Moira turned her laser beam eyes onto him. “You aren’t safe either, little bro.”

  Bronze sat up at that and narrowed his eyes at her. “The hell I’m not.”

  She shrugged. “Tell that to Mom and Dad. You are all grown now and need to take a mate.” She pointed at me. “Especially you, Sterling. You’re the oldest.”

  “I’m only 25,” I growled.

  “Old enough for matrimony and procreation,” Moira said, a sweet smile on her evil face. “If you don’t have a wife within the next six months, Mom and Dad plan to enter into a betrothal agreement with an Italian clan.”

  My fork clattered to my plate. “We are not living in the 1800’s!” I shouted.

  “I don’t think it matters, brother. Betrothals are still done in clans today. They want you married and they want it soon.” Moira’s lips twisted in sympathy. “There are a lot of nice girls here,” she said.

  I shook my head and stood. “Yeah, well why don�
��t you marry one of them?”

  Moira reared back as if I had slapped her. Perhaps I had. I was the only one who knew of Moira’s proclivities. Our parents, traditionalists at heart, would be appalled to know that Moira had no intention of bearing any werewolf children. The women within the family clans weren’t pressured as much to marry, simply because it was extraordinarily difficult to both sire a child and carry one to term. Research finally told us it was the male wolf who determined pregnancy and whether or not a child could be carried to term. The women were unfortunately just vessels. On one hand, this took a lot of the pressure off of the women. On the other, it was a bit of a sexist way to exist.

  I had yet to have any testing done on my “virility” as my parents preferred to call it. I wasn’t even sure I would submit to it when asked. The whole thing smacked of privacy invasion.

  Bronze looked at me, then at Moira, a thoughtful crinkle forming on his brow.

  We had no way to salvage this, so I left the table. Moira could live her life any way she wanted to, though I hated that she was smug about me being forced to marry. You would think someone with a secret like hers would be less inclined to gloat. I suspected she was secure in the fact I wouldn’t betray her. But tonight I’d came very close to it.

  I rubbed the back of my neck as I made my way down the long hall and into my former childhood bedroom. I lived in an apartment downtown, but we all tended to stay here when our dinners were scheduled because, nine times out of ten, we stayed up way too late.

  The room still bore the scratch marks on the wall from my first shift and I knew that behind the poster of Green Day was a hole in the wall, put there after my break-up with Patty Marshall, my first serious girlfriend. Serious as in she was the first one who ever let me put my tongue in her mouth. And the first one I’d ever gotten to second base with. She broke up with me over Tommy Harris, a foul-mouthed kid with fists the size of ham hocks. Apparently Tommy Harris had gotten a lot farther with Patty than just second base.

  I snickered to myself as I picked my small duffel up from the floor and rummaged through it for a pair of flannel pajamas pants. The nights were cool here and my parents didn’t believe in splurging on heat. We were werewolves, they’d always say, we couldn’t feel the cold. That wasn’t quite true, though it did affect us a lot less than humans.

  I slipped off my shoes and pulled off my sweater, leaving the white t-shirt on underneath. Sliding off my jeans, I put on the pajama pants and sat down on the edge of the bed. Moira hadn’t gotten too far in her gloating, but she didn’t have to. I couldn’t believe Mom and Dad were planning a marriage for me with a foreign clan I’d never even been exposed to. This had the potential to be a disaster.

  But it was even worse for me to try to find someone willing to put up with me. I was 25 years old now. I guess everyone could change, but the problem was - I didn’t really want to. If I wanted to believe the Earth was flat or that aliens existed in Roswell and were being held in an underground lair by the government, I should be allowed to think that and not be judged. But every single woman I’d dated had been completely weirded out by some of my beliefs. So much so one of them brought me to the Midnight Cove Sanitorium and tried to have me committed against my will.

  I didn’t even know we had a sanitorium here.

  I flopped back against my pillows and laughed out loud as soon as I saw the glow in the dark stars still on my ceiling after a weird space phase I’d gone through during my teens. I clapped my hands twice to shut off the lights and let out a soft sigh as the soft neon glow illuminated the solar system above me.

  All these years later. Still cool.

  And I didn’t care who judged me about it.

  Three

  Maron

  I’m proud of my perfect penmanship. Every letter perfect; every grammar mark exactly where it should be. It was one thing I could control about my life and control it, I did. But today was of the utmost importance. Today I was writing a letter to Portia, the owner of the Deadication Dating Agency. She was also the owner of the town, but today I was addressing her as the woman who had the potential to find me a suitable match - one who wouldn’t care that I ate salad instead of red blood cells. I thought maybe a match for me was pretty far off, especially within the vamp world. I was a pariah… at least with the few people who did know about it. They loved me, I knew, but they definitely didn’t understand me. Sometimes I didn’t even understand myself, but what I did know was that I was not responsible for what happened to me. Or, according to my parents, what didn’t happen to me.

  My friend and our conversation had wormed its way into my head. My clock was ticking. Albeit slowly because I was immortal, but still a tick here and there. Now that it was in my brain, I couldn’t get it out. So, I told Portia everything. Pouring my heart out on the page, I lamented the fact that I had never dated and certainly had never loved anyone. When I’d come close, his parents found out my little secret and put the kibosh on any warm and fuzzies we had for each other. The next time I saw him, he pretended like he’d never even met me. We moved soon afterward. I’d taken the remnants of my broken heart, put them quietly into a metaphorical box, and never spoke of it again. Until today. Poor Portia.

  The letter went on and on and on until even I was tired of talking about myself. But I really wanted her to understand. No. I needed her to understand. I included a picture I’d printed out of myself, drinking a green smoothie and waving at the camera. Nary a blood spot to be found.

  I also explained the kind of man I wanted to settle down with, even though I figured I didn’t have a lot of room to be choosy. I wanted him to be blond with light brown eyes. I specifically chose the words “the color of burnt brandy” just so she would understand the kind of brown I wanted. I wanted him to be sensitive, and I also thought he should enjoy long walks in well lit forestry. I enjoyed nature, but I also enjoyed not getting mugged and not stepping on potential squishy things. I wanted him to have no aversion to cooking, but I would also prefer he knew how to cook. I wanted someone unafraid of cleaning up a mess and who liked to read Jane Eyre. I would also prefer someone who wrote poetry, but that wasn’t a dealbreaker.

  After reading over my letter and ensuring I was satisfied with both my clarity and the contents of it, I signed Maron Archer with a little flourish on the last R in my name, folded it carefully, and sealed it inside a heavy parchment envelope. I addressed it to the dating agency with Portia’s name at the top, but I planned to hand deliver it to her box just to make sure the postal service didn’t lose it. This could potentially be one of the most important letters I’d ever written. If I was lucky, Portia would read it and get right to work on my dream man.

  I snorted at my positivity. With the way my life was going, the first option was like a unicorn showing up on my doorstep ready to whisk me to Narnia.

  If I was unlucky, Portia, or her assistant, (because I highly doubted she read her own letters), would chuck it in the trash and I’d be back to square one. Grabbing my keys and purse, I whisked myself out the door, only stopping to glance up at the sky. I frowned at the dark grey of it. A storm had been swirling over the top of us for close to two months now. The weatherman said it was nothing to worry about, but something in my gut told me it definitely was. No storm hung around for that long or kept the same, strange swirling pattern.

  I’d heard the rumors, same as everyone else here. The first night of the storm, all kinds of strange beasties had fallen out of the sky. Where they had gone was anyone’s guess. As people were wont to do, as soon as there was no real evidence of the weirdness, they went right back to their lives and pretended like nothing was happening. I’d kind of done the same thing, but I couldn’t push it quite to the back of my mind yet. Something was up with this storm and from the way it looked, it couldn’t be anything good.

  I clicked the unlock button to my old beat-up Ford Ranger. I called her Elvira because she had a wicked sense of humor and liked to break down in the rain. Granted, we didn’t
get much rain around here, but Elvira could always sense it coming. Plus she was black as the night sky and had odd blood red leather seats. It was the perfect truck for a vampire, so I felt a little sorry that Elvira had gotten stuck with me, the least vampiric of all the vampires.

  I patted her on the hood as I got closer, opened the door, and slid in.

  My parents were appalled when I rolled up with this thing after I’d argued with them for weeks about the appropriate car for an Archer. That was me, an Archer, but one who didn’t quite fit in with the Archer family. We were of an old, mysterious, vampire bloodline and, if we knew what was good for us, we usually drove either a silver Mercedes or a sleek black Beemer. Not a Ford Ranger better suited for Halloween than real life.

  But I liked the old beat up truck and she sometimes liked me. I adjusted my seating position and turned the vehicle on. She rumbled to life like a contented cat. I smiled. Today was going to be a good day.

  The Deadication Dating Agency was a stark reminder of who owned this town and who pulled the strings in people’s daily lives. I, for one, got kind of aggravated that someone had that much power over things, but I was willing to squash it down for the sake of true love. It was the one thing that really bothered me since we moved here. This place wasn’t the most democratic I’d ever seen. There were no elections and I’d never been involved in any of the decision making process for the town because I, nor anyone else here, had ever been invited to participate. It wasn’t that I thought Portia was doing anything shady, it’s just I didn’t believe one single person should have all that power.

  I pulled into the parking lot, turned off Elvira, and grabbed the envelope sitting on the seat beside me. Taking a deep breath, I got out and headed over to the large box marked “Community Correspondence”. I wasn’t sure how many people used this thing, but the size of the box was large enough to give me pause. It looked like one of those post office drop off boxes you rolled through while driving your car. Were there that many lonely people in this town?