The Cuckoo’s Nest Invaded

It took a lot longer to get this second Vampire Daycare story out than expected.  Still, it’s done and ready for your Halloween enjoyment.  There will definitely be a future novel coming out of the stories about Cuckoo Michel.  It has already pretty much outlined itself out in my head in amazingly short time.  Sadly, it has to wait for me to finish work on the third Blackstone novel, which will be titled Masquerade of the Midnight Sun and which I will be working on for NaNoWriMo 2012.

Please note that the story, “A Cuckoo in the Nest“, should be read before this one.  Please give me your feedback, I really enjoy it and I would like to know what people think of the character of Michel.

Note: The story was re-edited and a new posting of it put on December 6, 2012.

I swear by all that is holy, I have never seen this show and never will…

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It was a case of being blindsided.  Michel was flipping through channels on the cable television on a Friday evening in October, trying to find something worth watching.  It was at times like this that he wondered how it was that America had won the culture war.  The nation had gone from Coca-Cola and Disneyworld to reality television and cartoons that were fashioned for people who had trouble scoring double digits on an IQ test.

For a centuries old vampire masquerading as an average teenager who had been “adopted” by his current family in the Omaha, Nebraska suburb, it was sad to see the fall of  a once impressive culture such as America’s.  As for the current situation in France, he preferred to pretend that nothing had happened in the country of his origin since De Gaulle had been elected president.

The doorbell rang and Michel set down the remote to go open the door.  “Aunt Wendy,” he said with a smile as he opened the door and saw his adoptive mother’s sister.  She smiled back warmly as he stepped aside and held the door open for her.  She was lugging the baby carrier in one hand as her daughter, Caroline, was getting the baby bag out of the car.  Little baby Hunter was in the carrier, looking drowsy and half asleep as Wendy climbed the stairs of the split level to the living room.

“Hey, Sis,” Michel’s mother called as she came out of her bedroom at the sound of the doorbell and Michel’s welcome.  “Oh, who’s that little handsome chap you have with you?”  The two sisters devolved into cooing and womanly banter over the baby.  Cousin Caroline hurried up the walk and through the door.

“Thanks, Michel,” Caroline said with an exhausted voice as she entered the house, she leaned over and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.  She had a purse over one shoulder and the baby bag over the other.  Gah, Michel thought, having a baby looks to be such a pain.

Michel took his time closing the door and heading back into the living room.  He made faces at the baby, but the child was too tired yet to make any response, though Hunter usually smiled and giggled at Michel’s aping.

“So, Michel, any plans for tonight?” his mother asked.  Here was Michel’s fatal mistake.  He was taken by surprise by the question, his attention focused on trying to get a response out of Hunter.  When a teenager, even one that is hundreds of years old, is taken unawares they find themselves answering truthfully whether they want to or not.

“Nope,” he said, sticking his tongue out at Hunter and wiggling his eyebrows. Then he realized that as soon as he had answered he had been doomed.  There was a look that passed between the three women before they focused on him again.  He swallowed slowly, waiting for the firing squad to discharge their rifles.

“Well, if you’re going to be home anyways…” his mother started.

“Would you mind watching Hunter for a few hours?” Caroline finished hurriedly, giving him her endearing smile.  The secret weapon had been loosed upon him and he felt his defenses breached, the walls of his teenage castles crumbling.

“Er…” Michel responded as he attempted to rally.

“Hunter really likes you, you know,” Caroline continued.  And at the corners of her eyes Michel could see the tiredness and exhaustion that a new mother suffered from.  Hunter was her first child and while she had been doing admirably as a new mother, he could guess that the responsibilities of parenthood were dragging on her.

“I’ve never really…”  Defenses down, artillery lost and the enemy host implacable, the only hope would be surrender or flight.  Flight would result in a shot in the back.

“You’re French and the French are supposed to be really good with children,” Aunt Wendy said, smirking.  He doubted she really believed what she said, but she was sugaring the trap.  And besides, he was a good Gallic French male.  They loved their children, yes, but it was still the job of the women to take care of them.  The men had more manly things to do, like hunting, fighting, drinking, whoring and killing Italians, Englishmen and each other out of boredom.

“It’ll just be for a few hours,” his mother said, deciding the matter with a smoothness that had been obtained from years of raising Michel’s adopted sisters and brother.  “Just don’t drop Hunter, put him in the dishwasher or let him eat anything that he shouldn’t.”

“And a feeding,” Caroline chimed in, adding her own auxiliary reserves to her aunt’s forces.  “He’ll go right to sleep after a bottle.”

He was trapped, the enemy forces ranged about him, his back to the wall and his own forces dead or driven into the wastes.

“Uhm, sure, yeah, not a problem,” he said, putting on a winning smile.  If all else failed, seek favorable terms of surrender.  “You ladies just going to dinner or doing some shopping, too?”

“Uh oh, what’s he going to ask for?” Aunt Wendy said, giving him a quick wink.

“Heh, a bottle of Bergerac?”

“Not even,” his mother replied, blowing out her cheeks in mock exasperation.  “Way too young.”

“But I am French!” he declaimed, giving a self-effacing shrug, trying to sum up all the mystique and haute couture of the French.  It’s easier said than done and Michel’s performance this night was not at its top form.

“And living in the States,” his mother replied.  “Sorry, hon, a glass of wine with dinner once in a great while, but other than that the legal age is still 21.  So no bottles of expensive French wine for babysitting.”

“Ice cream?” Caroline suggested.

“New hat?” Wendy suggested.  Michel made a face and gave a shake of his head.  Never let older women shop for your clothes or accessories.  But at least Aunt Wendy remembered the genetic sensitivities to the sun that he had invented to explain his aversion to sunlight.  That was nice of her.

“We’ll think of something,” his mother said with a decisive note in her voice.  “Let me go get my jacket.”

With that Caroline took up Hunter from the carrier and rocked him in her arms a bit as she launched into the instructions for him to follow, including feeding, napping, diaper changing, the whole spiel that made Michel’s adolescent brain spin.  Before he knew it, Hunter was in his arms and the baby was looking up at him with his big, blue, round eyes that seemed to assess him coolly.  Had Michel surrendered one battle only to find himself pulled into a worse campaign?

The women said their good-byes as they all but rushed out the door and pulled it firmly closed behind them.  Michel waved at them weakly as he still held Hunter in his arms, his body doing that minor jumping around that people who held babies found themselves doing whether they realized it or not.

Then he was alone with the baby in his arms and he looked down at Hunter again and saw the baby continuing to size him up.  Michel smiled nervously at his little cousin and the baby finally broke out into a smile, his toothless gums showing.

“There is just one major problem with this,” Michel muttered to himself as he made his way back to the couch and the remote control.  “I am really, really hungry.”  With that, Hunter giggled.

“Laugh it up, Poop Monster,” Michel shot back.  “Keep in mind, you are nothing more than a hors d’oeuvre.  Not like I could really tell Mom or the others that it is a bad idea to ask a hungry vampire to babysit.  Especially since they are not supposed to know that I am a vampire…”

Michel suddenly wished one of the girls, Dad, or even Eric was there with him.  Dad was out bowling with the league.  Shauna was out with friends who, like her, were home from out of state university for Fall Break.  She had taken a gap year break from schooling and done a backpacking trip across southeastern Asia.  Michel had talked her into taking a year off between finishing high school and going into college, though she really hadn’t needed much convincing.  She was determined to become a psychiatrist and that involved many years of college and medical school.  Taking some time off to see the Great Wall of China and a slew of serene Asian countrysides had seemed like a good idea to her.

Alyssa was out with her boyfriend, Scott Jockstrap.  Michel couldn’t stand the guy and had been tempted to make a snack out of him more than once, especially at times when the jerk was trying to bully him.  Alyssa liked to play dumb, but she was anything but and Michel would have bet that her IQ was at least twice that of her boyfriend.  She was just going for the beefy jocks for now while she was still young, being more horny than worried about a good marriage partner.

Eric was at a catechumen group.  Michel’s dragging his adopted brother into prayers and attending mass with him had resulted in Eric deciding to become Catholic, or at least give it a try.  While the family was mostly agnostic, Michel felt that he was having a positive effect on them.  At first Mom and Dad hadn’t been certain about Eric becoming Catholic.  Michel wasn’t sure what it was they feared the most about Catholicism, though the Church had not done itself any favors with the sex scandals of the past few decades.  Or maybe they feared he would go into seminary and not carry the family name on to the next generation.  Then again, there were those who just feared Christianity.  At any rate, Eric’s catechumen group was doing a bonfire and sleep over on this early October weekend for young converts.  Michel would have loved to join them but since he was considered much further advanced in his catechumen studies than Eric, who was a recent convert, it had been suggested that he not attend.  It was too bad, the group would have been fun to be with and would have also offered plenty of snacking opportunities for him.

“They hated it when I converted back to Catholicism,” Michel muttered to Hunter who was grabbing at Michel’s shirt.  “Jean-Pierre nearly ripped my head off.  Calixto had to intervene and he was not happy with me, either.”  Michel shrugged at the reminisces of his early years of being a vampire as he tickled the baby lightly.  Hunter gurgled and took Michel’s finger in his hand.

“I was born Catholic and besides, I didn’t really believe in Calvin’s predestination theology.  I cannot really say I wanted anything to do with the wars of religion, or the oppression of the Huguenots.”  Michel startled as the baby dragged Michel’s finger into his mouth and began gnawing with his toothless gums.

“Oh, funny,” Michel said, sticking his tongue out at Hunter.  “I am the vampire here, not you.  At least you cannot draw blood with those gums of yours.  Drawing blood would be really, really bad.”

As it was, things were going to be really bad as Michel felt his stomach knotting in hunger.  He had not fed on any of the family in the past few nights.  Like many teens, he simply lost his appetite for a short time and now that it was back, it was coming back with a vengeance.  He could feel his canines sliding slowing forward from his gums even as Hunter gnawed on his finger.

Becoming a vampire meant a person’s instincts and thought processes changed.  A vampire hungered, and it was not just a hunger for physical sustenance.  It was a hunger for life itself and only with time and practice could a vampire learn to control such yearnings that resulted in horror stories and dark folk tales that the Brothers Grimm had liked to write about.  Vampirism also brought a hunger for sexual intimacy, but that was a difficult subject for another time.

“So, let us see what is on TV,” Michel said, looking to distract his growling stomach.  A human baby really was little more than a snack, even for a teenage vampire who was shorter and thinner than normal, modern day teenagers.  Early 17^th century peasants didn’t grow as tall as modern day people did.  And having nearly died of starvation during the Siege of La Rochelle had helped to stunt his growth a bit more.  Lastly, being turned into a vampire meant that he could no longer grow physically.  It was one of the reasons he had to be like a cuckoo and find new nests to invade every few years.  In another year or two he would have to leave this family, wiping their memories of his existence from their minds.  He really didn’t want to have to leave; he liked his adoptive family, even “Body Slam” Shauna.

And there wasn’t anything worth watching on the television.  What was the Bruce Springsteen song, “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”?  It would have been nice if the Travel Channel had had something about France on, but the only thing they were showing was something regarding Chinese mummies found in cliff faces.  He had seen it before, but he left the television at that station.  It would provide background noise if nothing else.

Michel could smell Hunter, the scent of plastic diapers, clean baby flesh and baby oil.  “If olive oil is made from olives, what is baby oil made of?” went the joke.  He suddenly had an image of babies being put into a duck press, the kind used to make the Pressed Duck dish made famous by the restaurant La Tour D’Argent in Paris, and ‘baby oil’ coming out of the spout.  With his hunger, the baby oil quickly became baby’s blood and his entire body quivered as his canines slid forward once again, this time painfully fast.

Hunter was on his back on Michel’s lap and the baby kicked his legs even as he laid his head back over Michel’s knees to see the changing colors of the television screen.  Panting, Michel slid one hand under Hunter’s head and the other under the baby’s rump and lifted him up.  He set the baby on his back in the middle of the living room floor and fled to the bathroom.

“Cannot–, cannot–, must not eat him,” Michel growled to himself as he braced himself on the bathroom sink and hunched over, fighting both the need to pierce the baby’s flesh and suck him dry and the need to retch from revulsion of what he wanted to do to his little adoptive cousin.

A low growl issued from Michel’s throat that built into a sobbing wail.  “I do not think Caroline would appreciate an exsanguinated son when she gets back,” he said, laughing with a touch of the maniacal in his voice.  Oh, to be a normal human again, so that he could just snack on something from the fridge instead of the desire to snack on family members.

He wondered if any of the neighbors might have gone to bed early this Friday evening.  Not very likely.  And it was too early in the evening for him to be slinking around the neighborhood.

“If ever I wanted to have a Fuller Brush salesman to come by…” he moaned.  He turned on the water and caught some of the cold liquid into his cupped hands and splashed his face.  It didn’t really help.  When your body is perpetually at room temperature a splash of cold water doesn’t do as much for you.  “I do not suppose there is a homeless freak walking the streets of this neighborhood whom I could mug?”  Not very likely, this was an upper class neighborhood and vagrants were not looked upon favorably.

“Gotta do something,” he muttered to himself as he took the hand towel and daubed his face.  “They said a few hours, but you know they are going to be gone longer than that.  Rosary.”  He gave a wan smile as he tossed the towel back on its rack and raced out of the bathroom and down the steps to his basement bedroom.

The Church had made use of East European vampire folklore as part of its conversion tactics in those early days of Catholicism’s spread.  It was mostly folklore that said that vampires were cast away from the sight of God, cursed to walk the world in undeath and feeding off of the living.  True, most of the vampires outside of the Cuckoos that Michel had come across were not very Christian, but he had known plenty of living men and women who had had no desire to know the love of Christ.  And there was a good deal of truth to the old French folktales that intimated at unwanted children being left exposed in the woods by the starving peasantry.

He and his family had been besieged in La Rochelle because they deigned to love God in a way that did not comport to the beliefs of their sovereign.  Actually, if Louis XIII’s mother, Marie di Medici, hadn’t been such a narrow minded Catholic bitch surrounded by Italians in her court during Louis’s minority things probably would not have turned out so bad for the Protestants in France at the time.  Of course, Cardinal Richelieu had not helped matters any by being true to his clerical vows.

“Ascribe not to God the actions of men,” Michel muttered to himself as he snatched up his rosary from the bedside table.  He crossed himself and launched into the Apostle’s Creed as he made his way back upstairs.

“I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth.”  Hunter was looking disgruntled at having been left alone with nothing to play with.  “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”  Michel fished in the baby bag with is left hand and found some of the teething toys.  He put one into Hunter’s hands and spread the others around the baby.  “He was conceived of the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.”  Michel sat near to Hunter and continued through the Apostle’s Creed, then began on the three small beads of the rosary that came after the Apostle’s Creed, doing the Hail Mary prayers of Faith, Hope and Charity.

Michel had completed the rosary two full times before he felt his canines completely recede back into his gums and he was able to exercise his will upon his hunger.  Feeling exhausted mentally as well as physically, he collapsed onto his back, arms outstretched in cruciform as he stared at the ceiling.  Out of the corner of his left eye he saw that he had curled himself around Hunter’s playing, squirming form on the carpet of the living room.  Michel’s nose told him what Hunter had been up to while he had been praying the Rosary.

“Never choose a family that has very young children or babies Calixto said when he sent us out to be cuckoos,” Michel groaned, covering his eyes with the palm of his right hand.  “I did not realize that included the extended family as well, darn it.”

Something tugged his Rosary out of his left hand and he glanced over at Hunter, who was happily gnawing on the beads of his Rosary.  “Nooo,” Michel cried out softly.  “Those were blessed by Cardinal…” he had to stop to think which cardinal it had been who had blessed them.  To be honest, he had met quite a few cardinals over the past 400 years.  It was rather easy to make such a large acquaintance of the Princes of the Church, especially when Calixto’s coven of cuckoos had traveled through Italy and Rome.  There had always been good money to be made in Italy, especially if they could convince archbishops and cardinals to be their sponsors, keeping their Protestantism hush hush.  Calixto’s coven had served itself well by disguising itself as a performing troupe of comediennes and circus.  Yet another reason why the television was the bane of humanity for it kept people in their homes and kept them from going out and paying proper respects to performers and artists.

Sighing, Michel levered himself up and crawled over to the baby bag.  On the plus side, cloth diapers were mostly out of fashion in America, though some traditionalists still made use of them.  Wendy, thankfully, was not such a traditionalist.  Engaging in the cleaning and changing of his tiny cousin, Michel realized that there was something worse in the world than a vampire’s bodily wastes, that of a baby’s.  Fearing the toxicity of the poop bomb, he held the folded, soiled diaper at arm’s length and hurried to the trash cans outside, near the garage.

He paused and looked at his watch.  It was still too early to expect any of the neighbors to be asleep yet.  Despite that, he reached out with his enhanced senses and touched on the houses near to his own to see if he could detect whether anyone was asleep or near sleep.  Nothing, not even the older neighbors were going down for an early night.  Thumping his head on the hard plastic of the trash can a few times he groaned and turned to go back into the house.

Michel had let Hunter “air out” a bit while he disposed of the toxic diaper.  Getting a clean diaper he began the work of fitting it onto the baby.  He discovered that while Hunter had finished clearing his bowels, he had not finished emptying his bladder.  Michel sat back on his haunches and regarded his wet shirt and raised an eyebrow at the baby.  The little monster deigned to gurgle cheerfully around a mouth full of Michel’s rosary.

“Maybe I should drain a bit out of you,” Michel muttered as he cleaned the baby once more.  “That would take the cheek out of you.”  He finished securing the diaper with the sticky strips and retrieved the rosary from the baby.  When Hunter fussed at the loss of his new favorite toy Michel handed him a teething ring.  “I should not have left these with you in the first place.  I am just lucky you did not choke on them while I was outside getting rid of your poop bomb.”  With that he rose and went downstairs to change out of his wet shirt and find a clean one.

Hunter was fussing and kicking emphatically when Michel came back upstairs.  Evidently, with the clearance of his bowels, Hunter felt that he had room for some supper.  So did Michel, but his version of supper would have been a bit more final for the baby.  Taking up the bottle and dry formula from the baby bag he marched into the kitchen to prepare the baby his meal.

“It is not as if Confession is not bad enough, being a vampire trying to blend into the normal, human world,” Michel muttered to himself as he measured dry formula, ran the tap water to lukewarm and filled the bottle.  “Bless me Father, for I have sinned, I contemplated eating my baby cousin last night…  That ought to provoke an interesting response.”  He really, really should have insisted on being allowed to attend the catechumen trip with Eric.

He returned to the living room and gathered the baby into his arms.  Hunter was declining towards ill temper, so the sooner the nipple was in the baby’s mouth the better.  Thanks to various science channels and late nights of boredom, Michel knew how to properly bottle feed a baby.  The Travel Channel was no longer looking into the mysteries of Chinese mummies.  Instead, they were now in Peru, tracking down the mummies of the Incan rulers.  He wondered how long it would be before the usual shows on Dracula and Transylvania would be on.  Probably later in the night.  Never mind that Dracula wasn’t from Transylvania or that he had been definitely killed by his boyars at the end of his third reign.  If any of the Draculesti had been a good candidate for vampirism, it would have been Vlad’s older brother, Mircea, who had been buried alive after his eyes had been seared from their sockets.

“Lovely thoughts while feeding bébé,” Michel said to himself.  Hunter managed to down most of the bottle before he refused to take any more.  With baby blanket over his shoulder, Michel burped his cousin and went to work clowning to the infant.  He received a good response from Hunter as the baby smiled happily and cooed in response.  Then Michel made the mistake of bouncing the baby boy high into the air.  Babies aren’t that good at keeping food in their stomachs when turned upside down and Michel received a thin stream of warm formula to the face.

Spluttering, he crooked the baby into his left arm and wiped his face with the baby blanket as Hunter laughed and bounced in Michel’s hold.

“Little cousin, you are warm and vibrant and your heart pitter patters oh so fast as to be more enticing to my senses than the smell of charbroiling burgers at a Burger King is to a fat man.  I think it is about time you slept before I really do stretch my mouth around what little neck you have…”  He cradled Hunter and began to rock rhythmically on the couch.  The baby, naturally, resisted the attempt to rock him to sleep.  “Heh, you are not going to resist me for long, mon cher.”  With that, Michel softly began to sing the nursery rhymes he remembered in French.

“Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!
Din, dan, don. Din, dan, don.”

As he softly sang he forced his will upon the small baby’s mind.  The difference in thoughts between a baby and a full-grown adult was like the difference between a child’s finger painting and a Rembrandt masterpiece. Michel almost found himself lost as he tried to identify the thought patterns and determine how best to force the baby into sleep.

“Dors, enfant, dors.

Papa garde les moutons,

Maman, sur son poupon,

Agite la branche d’or,

Qui fait tomber sur les enfants

Des rêves de perles et diamants.

Dors, enfant

Dors, bébé, dors,

Car j’entends au dehors

Un mouton blanc, un mouton noir,

Qui disent : Enfant, enfant, bonsoir.”

Et si l’enfant ne veut dormir.

On verra bientôt accourir

Un noir ou blanc petit mouton,

Pour picorer le pied mignon

De mon joli petit poupon.”

Expressive, breathy yawns came from the baby as the final jerks of his limbs quivered his little body before he fell asleep.  Relief swept through Michel as he continued to gently rock the baby in his arms for a bit before laying the child onto another baby blanket on the floor.  Michel turned down the television before returning to the couch and laying himself out along its length.  His stomach started gurgling again and he put a hand over his midsection and groaned as he felt the hunger pangs that signaled the increasing need for him to feed.  His overactive imagination started playing with the words to Frère Jacques.  “Baby, young and tender.  Baby, young and tender.  Yum, yum, yum.  Yum, yum, yum.”  He turned himself into the back of the couch and smothered his face in the cushions.

Someone was pulling into the driveway.  Had Mom, Aunt Wendy and Cousin Caroline come back so soon?  Did they take pity on his plight and decide to return to relieve him so that he could go out and play in the early night?  Better yet, were they already drunk and would they be easily susceptible to mental influence so that he could nip a sip or two from each of them?  Well, the last part was desperate wishing, but that’s what made the world go around.

Then the he heard the voices and he moaned in consternation.  It was Alyssa and Jockstrap Scott.  He heard Alyssa’s footsteps coming up to the door, followed by Scott’s.  The car that they had arrived in was not leaving, but idled in the driveway.  So Alyssa was just here to get something (either the bag of weed at the back of her panty drawer or the condoms she kept hidden in the closet) and then leave again.

If she was going to use the bathroom or even take a shower Michel could easily overcome Scott and he would need some Viagra to get it up for her again.  But there would be no way he would have enough time to overcome Scott, feed and then heal the bite mark if they were just here to pick something up.  And Alyssa was a lot more strong-willed than Michel had initially given her credit for.  There had been a few nights when she had almost awakened while he fed despite his taking the precaution of putting her deeper into slumber.

Michel rolled off of the couch and padded to the top of the stairs overlooking the entry door of the split level house.  As Alyssa opened it, Michel put a finger to his lips and shushed them dramatically.  “I have baby Hunter here and he just went to sleep,” Michel stage whispered to his adopted sister.  Alyssa nodded her understanding and shushed Scott, who was pushing his way into the house behind her.

“Ah, what a good little French nanny you are,” Scott whispered loudly with a sneering smile.  Michel just returned a humoring smile to the dumb jock and went back into the living room.

“Hush,” Alyssa said as she hurried up the stairs and made her way down the hallway towards her room.  Michel was putting money on her going for the weed.  Scott ought to have at least the minimal good manners of buying his own condoms.

Michel sat tailor fashioned on the floor near to Hunter, feeling protective of the baby now that a stranger was in the house.  Okay, so Scott wasn’t a stranger and the jock would never actually do anything to harm a baby, but Michel was already hungry as hell and becoming territorial went along with it.

“Whatcha watchin’?” Scott whispered loudly as he waited for Alyssa to come out of her room.  If Michel weren’t here he assumed Scott would have followed her in.

“Corpse preservation,” Michel replied with an appraising look at Scott’s muscled form.

“Huh,” the jock responded.  He took in the image of Michel with Hunter nearby and sneered again.  “Yeah, you’d make a good housewife, you know.”

“Don’t try to bully him, Scott,” Alyssa said as she came back into the living room.  “He’s a pretty good savateur and put the last guy who tried to bully him in the hospital.  Mom and Dad had to get a lawyer and threaten to sue the school when they tried to expel him.”

“A saboteur?” Scott said, his voice a little louder than Michel would have liked.  But then, Michel imagined that the rusty wheels in Scott’s head were already turning faster than they were used to and the jock was more excited than usual.  Now that he thought about it, Michel could smell the pheromones that Alyssa was putting off.  Maybe she had retrieved the condoms after all.  There was definitely going to be sex going on between the teenagers shortly.

“Savateur,” Michel corrected as he yawned and stretched.  He wasn’t really sleepy, but he had noticed that yawning and stretching was a good way of annoying people who were annoying.  It was also a good way of showing a lack of concern that the threat of another posed.  “French kickboxing.”

Scott gave a chuckle.  “Right,” the jock said as he turned to put a possessive arm around Alyssa, utterly dismissing Michel and the idea of the French boy’s kickboxing prowess being a threat to him.

“Later, Michel,” Alyssa said with her stage whisper as she waved around Scott’s oversized frame.  Michel gave her a smile and waved back.

“Night, night, French nanny,” Scott called, throwing a nonchalant wave over his shoulder.  His voice was way too loud and Michel responded with a glower even as Alyssa elbowed him in the ribs and scolded him.  Alyssa then shot Michel and Hunter a worried look, but Michel just shook his head and rolled his eyes.

Michel had just enough time before the two got back into the idling car to work on Scott’s brain a little bit.  He skipped around the conscious thought centers and focused in on automotive responses.  Yeah, there was going to be sex yet this night between the two teens, but it was going to take a while before the brainless brute could get it up.  It was the small bits of revenge that kept one going, Michel thought.  Near him, Hunter heaved a sigh in his sleep and Michel found that he was back to climbing the walls as he made his way back to the couch and tried to block out the desire to suck the infant dry.  “Baby, young and tender.  Baby, young and tender.  Yum, yum, yum…” he moaned into the cushions at the back of the couch.

By the time Hunter woke again, fussing and hungry, Michel had curled into a fetal ball with his arms wrapped around his stomach and he was now gnawing lightly on the beads of his rosary.  His eyes were narrow and his face pinched as he continued to fight the hunger cravings that were wracking his body.

He couldn’t take it anymore.  The pain and overriding hunger was simply too much for him.  He had to at least draw a little blood from the fussing blob.  And if he lost control and drained the baby dry?  Well, hopefully, he would have enough time to pack and run before any of the rest of the family showed up and started screaming in horror and despair.

Michel crawled off of the couch, going onto all fours on the carpeted floor of the living room.  It was so easy to surrender to his inhuman hunger.  Just let it take control and drive you to stay alive, to feed as needed and move on to the next night.  It was just simple survival.

The rosary dropped from his mouth as he opened his jaws wide and let his lips curl back from his teeth and gums.  The upper canines of his mouth slid down, long enough to pierce through flesh and muscle to reach the life carrying arteries in a human.  He would hardly need them so long for this little, pudgy, squirming meal.

As he drew closer, Michel realized that he had let his concentration slip and he had stopped breathing.  It didn’t really matter; he wasn’t going to need to be breathing when he began to suckle on the baby.  Before him, Hunter kicked and flung his arms about, crying and agitated.

Michel’s form loomed over the baby and he prepared to strike.  But first he wanted to take in the delectable scent of the baby and the blood and flesh that made it such an enticing meal.  He inhaled — and stopped dead in his tracks.

“Again, Poop Monster?” he asked disgustedly as his nose wrinkled.

*          *          *

            The three women were loud and laughing as they opened the door and came in.  In the center of the living room floor they found Michel and Hunter, Michel’s form bowed low over the quiet baby.

Michel looked up as his adoptive mother crested the stairs and surveyed the scene.  Hunter was gnawing away contentedly on Michel’s rosary beads as the Gallic youth finished securing the sticky strips of the diaper.

“You owe me ten bucks, Wendy,” his mom said with a satisfied smile.

“Meh, he probably just heard us pull up and decided to make a quick change so he wouldn’t get called on it.”  Wendy gave a furtive wink to Michel even as she talked him down.

“I will have you know this is his second stink bomb since you three left,” Michel said as he picked up the baby in his arms and stood quickly.  Without conscious thought he was bouncing on the balls of his feet.  Babies invoked strange instincts in humans.  Michel was also jittery from hunger pangs as well.

“That’s my boy,” Caroline cooed as she smiled warmly and took Hunter from Michel.  The teen boy had to fight with Hunter to retrieve his rosary and the baby fussed and reached after them as Michel finally extricated them.  “No doing, you grinning drooler, these are mine,” Michel chided as he began wiping the beads on his shirt.

“You changed shirts?” he mother asked with a slight frown.  She was holding a cake box in her hand, the name of the city’s most famous cupcake shop blazoned across its top flap.

“Old Faithful erupted,” Michel grumbled as he stole the cake box from his mother and danced with them into the kitchen. There was a moment of silence from the living room and then the three women breaking out into laughter.

Michel opened the cake box and surveyed the collection of cupcakes within.  It still amazed him that people were able to build successful businesses out of selling sweets; such as cake shops, coffee shops, ice cream parlors, soda jerks and the old chocolate drink shops of London.  Wine shops and cafes, at least, he could understand.

The front door opened again and his oldest adopted sister came in, waving one last time to her ride.

“Shauna!” Michel crowed as he ran out of the kitchen and threw himself down the stairs and into her arms.

“Oof,” she replied as she caught him, stumbling back a single step.  Michel wrapped his legs around her and hugged her tight.  His mother, aunt and cousin had paused in their discussion in the living room and were watching the strange tableau.  “Okay, Goofball, what do you want?” Shauna all but growled in his ear.

“Will you tuck me into bed?” he asked plaintively.  “And tell me a story?”

“How about I just throw you down the stairs?” she replied, her eyes narrowing with meaning.

“They made me babysit all night and it was horrible,” Michel whined.

There was a long pause and then a chuckle from Shauna.  “When I had to babysit Eric it was bad enough.  Thank goodness we adopted you as a teenager.  Compared to how you are now, I can’t imagine what you would have been like as a little kid.”

Michel leaned back in her embrace and stuck his tongue out at her as she started down the steps to the basement.  Short of the bottom stair she threw him into the air and he landed barely on his feet on the hallway floor as she shooed him along.

“Was it really that bad?” she asked.

“Hunter?  No.  Alyssa and her jerk boyfriend stopping by, yes.”

“Gah, is she still seeing that dumbass?” Shauna asked, shaking her head.

“She is polishing his knob and toking,” Michel snickered.  He got slapped upside the head for that comment.

“Mind your tongue, li’l brother,” Shauna admonished.

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied, rubbing the back of his head.  “Anyway, I am just glad Mom and them are back.  Hunter likes leaving toxic waste behind.”

“Yup, typical boy,” Shauna said as she followed Michel into his bedroom.  “So next time you’ll make a fuss when the church group refuses to let you go along on an outing that Eric has been invited to?”

“Pretty much,” Michel said as he poured his rosary onto the bedside table.  The room grew quiet as he focused all of his mental energy on Shauna.  Alyssa was deceptively strong-willed, but there was nothing deceptive about Shauna’s strength of will.  She was extremely hard to control when she was awake.  He would have to feed quickly and the hunger pangs were making him antsy as it was.

She broke his control as he was licking away the wound on her neck, letting the natural healing abilities in his saliva do its work.  He could smell the alcohol on her breath, but it wasn’t a lot, just a night out with some of her local friends while home on Fall Break from college.

“What the hell…?!” she said as she came to the realization that he was licking her neck.

“I’m home,” Michel’s adopted father called as he came in the front door, carrying his bowling bag in one hand.

“Ow!” Michel howled from the depths of the basement.

“Shauna,” their father called down.  “Don’t kill him; we haven’t paid the life insurance premium yet.”

“So stop at bruised and battered?” she called back as the sound of Michel whimpering rose up the stairs.

“Sounds good!” their dad replied jovially as he looked up at the women in the living room and caught sight of Hunter.  “Well, who’s that handsome little fellow you have there, Wendy?”

“Help me…” came the whimper from Michel’s bedroom.  In his grandmother’s arms, Hunter gurgled in amusement.

A Cuckoo in the Nest

The Halloween season is upon us and it’s time for another installment of the Vampire Daycare short stories.  Since I started work on this story it has gone and grown like black mold and is insisting that it be allowed to become a book of its own in the future.  Well, it will have to wait in line for when I can get to it.  Never enough time for all the novel ideas I have already.  When I do get around to writing the novel, I’m toying with the name of A Circus of Cuckoos.  We’ll see what happens…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were two silhouettes, made of galvanized steel, of skateboarders guarding the entrance to the Roberts Skate Park.  The plaque read “RESPECT ONE ANOTHER In Memory of Mathew Kress and Tommy Craft”.  The two had been the ones to petition for the city to build the park.  Most of the users of the skate park didn’t know who these two were or why they were dead.  But then, the world was often a fleeting presence to the minds of those youths who immersed themselves in the skate culture.

Officially, the park, like all of the parks in Omaha, closed at 11:00 pm.  Unofficially, skaters were supposed to clear the area at sundown.  Naturally, there were often those who stayed well after sundown, often just hanging out after it became too dark to actually skate.  Then there were those who came late in the night in order to tag the cement snakes and half pipes with graffiti.  Occasionally, the city would have the graffiti removed, making good use of the old power washers that the Parks and Rec departments owned.

This summer was an exceptionally hot one.  During the daytime, especially the afternoon, no one wanted to skate for fear of melting or burning.  The young skaters, those few who dared to make use of the park during the heat of the summer, came after the evening was starting in and the sun was receding on the far western horizon across the expanse of the Great Plains.

Even then, most youths were opting to simply stay inside of air conditioned homes or hang out at chilled malls instead.  It took the dedicated ones to come out and practice their stunts.  For the most part, the police did not make much trouble for the youths who were making use of the parks in the evenings.  It had to be particularly late for the police officers to run skaters off.

This particular night it was late and the lone skater who still made use of the grind box and snake had the whole of the park to himself.  He was being studious in his practice, keeping in constant motion and retrying all of his tricks until he nailed them.  He wore fashionably ragged jeans, untied Nikes and ear buds that wound on their thin white cord back to his right pocket where his iPod was kept.

When the officer shone his car’s spotlight on him, the youth studiously ignored the light and its source.  His head bobbed slightly in time to the tempo coming from the music that he was listening to.  The moonlight had already made his pale, naked torso glow.  The glare of the spotlight made him ghostly pale when he passed through it while practicing the half pipe.

The light bar on the police car flashed once in hopes of getting his attention, but to no effect.  The voice of the officer crackled over the external speaker, again to no effect.  The officer shook his head in deep annoyance and got out of his car.  He just knew he was going to end up having to haul this kid out of the park and the kid was already throwing an attitude.  It didn’t take a genius to know that things were only going to get worse.

The officer made his way to the top of the half pipe.  If the kid was going to be smart ass, he was going to wait until the officer got to the top of the half pipe and then take off down the snake towards one of the bowls.  That would be when the kid was going to discover just how fast a fit officer could be, not all of the city’s men in uniform gorged on donuts.

Instead, the boy topped the half pipe near the officer, executed an axle spin and came to a halt, one foot hitting the ground while the other toed up the board, which he caught in his right hand.  The board was nothing shiny or new.  Splattered with an assortment of stickers and paint and decals though it was, it was well worn, the layers of wood showing along the edges and the wheels looking like they had been dragged down the interstate a few hundred miles.

The boy shook his mop of dark hair out of his eyes and looked at the officer with a mixture of patient expectation and quizzicalness.  He still wore his ear buds and the officer could clearly hear the beat of the music.  It wasn’t hip hop or rap, at least, but definitely a hard rock or heavy metal, he wasn’t sure which.  He motioned for the boy to pull out the ear buds.  After a moment, the boy tugged them down and returned his patient gaze to the officer.

“You look like a smart kid,” the officer said, sarcasm in his voice.  “How about you tell me what the closing time of the skate park is.”

The boy blinked at him once, then glanced toward the silhouettes at the entrance of the skate park.  He looked back at the officer, his gaze locking with the law enforcement agent, and shrugged his thin shoulders.

Yeah, a wise ass, the officer thought.  And giving me the mute treatment, which ain’t all bad.  At least he isn’t cussing up a storm, calling me a pig, not out loud, or being a sarcastic punk.

“Sundown,” the officer finally said, enunciating the word as though the boy were slow in the head.  “That was a while ago, buddy, and the city parks all closed half an hour ago.  Aren’t you supposed to be home in bed by now?”

The boy gave a cheeky smile at this.  His eyes were still locked with the officer’s own and the man was finding himself becoming slightly disconcerted with the varnished brown of those eyes, lighter and brighter in color than his own.

“Come on, it’s been a slow night.  I’ll give you a ride home.”  He motioned to the car, which was still running, the air conditioning cranked.  It was still plenty hot out in the mid-summer night and he was beginning to feel himself sweat through his undershirt.  That was the trouble with issue vests in the summertime.  They kept you hot, especially after you put on the uniform dress shirt over them.  Strangely enough, the kid wasn’t sporting even the slightest bit of sweat.  He should have been dripping with it by now with all of the skating he had been doing.

The boy gave a nod and slung up the skateboard under one arm and led the way for the officer back to the cruiser.

Easiest damn pickup I’ve had all week, the officer thought.  And even the more so as he was making the pickup out of the skate park.  The last one he had had to physically restrain before returning the punk to adolescent detention on outstanding warrants for assault and breaking and entering.  Still, he was being careful and keeping an eye on the skateboard under the boy’s arm, making sure he didn’t decide to swing it at him like a bat.  Adolescents were the most dangerous collars out there.  Most of the druggies were easier to deal with.  Still, this kid was remaining on good behavior.

The kid leaned against the back quarter panel of the car and waited for the officer to come and open the rear door behind the driver’s seat.  “At least it’s air conditioned in the car,” the officer said, making meaningless small talk.  The kid smiled at him and shook the hair from his eyes once again before locking eyes with him.

The officer closed the door on the empty rear seat before staggering in confusion and shaking his head.  There was no one else about.  Evidently the kid had decided to head home on his own.  Oh, well, as long as he didn’t get himself into trouble along the way it didn’t really matter.

The inside of his right bicep was feeling sore for some reason and he frowned as he massaged the arm through the fabric of the sleeve of his dress uniform before he turned to open the driver’s door.  He staggered momentarily, feeling lightheaded for some reason.  The heat must be getting to him worse than he had expected.  He leaned against the car for a bit as he took a few deep breaths before opening the driver’s door, getting in and reporting in to dispatch.  A few minutes later the next call for service came in and he drove off.

*          *          *

            A few days later and it was Friday evening with the sun doing its slow, orange descent behind the bluffs much of city was situated on.  The temperature had dropped back into the double digits, a veritable cold snap for the way this summer had been going.  The lack of rain throughout most of the growing season had removed all of the humidity from the air, making the dry heat more bearable than a typical Midwest summer with humidity and mosquitoes.

The skate park was still quite active this evening, it being Friday and cooler than it had been.  Shouts and catcalls were traded back and forth throughout the cement expanse of the park, interspersed by the occasional clapping or cheer for a particularly good trick.

From time to time a parent drove into the parking lot, honking a horn or calling out a name and a boy would wave to his friends before heading for the parking lot, either on his board or carrying it.

“Eric,” a middle aged male voice called from the crossover that he was driving.  A number of heads looked up, Eric being a common enough name.  A tow headed 13 year old in old jeans and a loose tee started jogging toward the parking lot.  A brown haired youth with bangs that fell into his eyes jogged along with him, carrying his own board.

“Hey, Dad,” Eric said as he came up to the driver’s door of the crossover.  “This is Michel.”  Eric inclined his head towards the dark haired boy with bright brown eyes.  Michel gave a winning smile in reply to Eric’s father.  The kind of smile that says, Yes, we want something and we’re going to act on our best behavior to get it, or until your back is turned, whichever comes first.

“Michel, huh?” Eric’s father said.  “French?”

         Michel bobbed his head in the affirmative.  “Born in France, but my parents moved back to the States when I was, like, three or something like that.”

Eric’s father nodded good naturedly before looking back to his son and raising an expectant eyebrow.

“Can Michel come over for a sleep over?” the boy blurted out.

Which was pretty much what Eric’s father had expected.  That, or a pizza run.  “Tonight?” he asked skeptically, letting his voice carry the gentle denial of the request.

The two looked at each other and some telepathic communication that adolescents were universally capable of seemed to occur.  “Tomorrow,” Eric blurted.

Eric’s father nodded patiently at the new date.  “Michel, do you have a number for your mother so that Eric’s mother can call her and clear things?”

“Uhm, just my dad, actually,” Michel said.

“Sorry,” Eric’s dad replied, grimacing at his mistake before opening the glove compartment and fishing out a pen and the back of an insurance card.  Michel rattled off the number and Eric’s father got it written down.  The boys gave their farewells, finishing with open palm slaps to each other’s hands and then a fist bump.  Eric’s father noted that the ritual was actually less complex than the one he had used at that age.

Eric and Michel gave each other final waves as the crossover backed out of its space and then left the parking lot.

“Thanks, Dad,” Eric said, smiling brightly while looking out the windshield of the vehicle.

“You two just meet?” Eric’s father asked.  “Don’t remember seeing him before.”

“I think we went to school together last year, just never had the same homerooms and whatnot.”

“Ah,” Eric’s father replied.  He had come from Small Town, America where the schools fought to stay open due to lack of students and funds.  The city schools, to him, were a complicated maze in comparison to what he had grown up with where one not only knew everyone in their own class, but most all of the school as well.  “Looked like a good kid.”  Eric tried to stifle his snicker in response.

“Well, I didn’t see any piercings, he wasn’t wearing a rainbow Mohawk, gutter stomper boots and he didn’t seem to have a bad attitude.  So far, that’s pretty much the criteria of a good kid these days.”

“Hey, Dad, I need to get a haircut—“

Eric’s father snorted and mussed his son’s hair.  “How about I just shave off most of your head for you and save the money?  Leave you with just a single forelock that I can use to grab hold of when you get in trouble.”

“Eep!” his son squeaked in teasing reply.

*          *          *

            Eric’s mother chatted amiably with the man on the other end of the phone, setting up the particulars of the sleep over and learning more about Michel and Michel’s family.

“No, Michel’s mother passed away when he was eleven,” the man said as he turned a lazy circle in the warehouse where he and Michel currently were.  Bright sunlight was pouring in through the windows that were set high in the eastern wall, dust motes dancing in the golden white light.

“Oh, thank you, that’s very kind of you.  It was breast cancer.  Michel took it well, his mother counseled both of us during the therapy up until she passed away.  It was pretty hard in the days after she was gone, but Michel came through it very well.”

From where he sat tailor fashion with his back against the east wall Michel rolled his eyes at the man who was speaking into the phone.  The boy was wrapped head to toe in blankets of deep purple, the dark color of the blankets soaking up the light in the warehouse.  He sat behind the fall of light and at a space in the wall that was bereft of a bank of windows.  Michel looked sickly as he peered out from huddle of blankets, reminiscent of a E.T. from the movie.  He would have called the way he was currently feeling as being like a bad case of influenza with achy joints and lethargy.  The heat of the warehouse was not helping at all and his inability to sweat was making it even worse.

The conversation continued for another ten minutes on the phone, the whole time the man continued his loose course of circle walking.  From time to time he laughed during his commiseration with Eric’s mother.  That was good, Michel though, laughter was good for the soul.

The man who was filling in for his father on the phone call was named Saul.  Saul was a grungy man with old, stained clothing and hair and beard that had grown out messily since the last time either was trimmed.  Michel had found him among the alcoholics, homeless, shiftless and hopeless that any city harbored.  Such people were easy to recruit for the things that Michel needed to be done.  It was not easy to be a 14 year old boy in the world.  Mostly because sooner or later authorities tried to interfere.

The call ended and Saul closed the cell phone and stepped towards Michel.  Michel had forced Saul to stop drinking, pushing him into cold turkey from the Wild Turkey.  The delirium tremens that Saul had gone through had not been too bad, Michel had seen worse.  Still, every time he forced an alcoholic to detox it was an annoyance to nurse them through the withdrawal symptoms.  He had managed to get his hands on some Valium and Ativan and fed them to the alcoholic to help him in the weaning from the bottle.

Saul held out the phone to Michel.  “How was I?” Saul asked, desperation for approval in his voice.

Michel raised his eyebrows as he regarded Saul.  “It was epic, pure Academy Awards work.  I’ll be sure to write in your nomination.”

“Don’t have to be sarcastic,” Saul replied, a touch of hurt in his voice.  “I stuck to the things you told me to.”

Michel nodded.  “True enough, good work.”

“So, are you going to be leaving then?” Saul asked cautiously, a waver of fear and excitement in his voice.

Michel nodded his reply.  “I’m going cuckoo,” the boy said.

“Like, flying over the cuckoo’s nest?” Saul asked, his brows furrowing in perplexity.

“No, not like the Ken Kesey novel.  I’m not going insane.  I’m doing like the bird, which practices brood parasitism.”  Saul merely blinked his continued perplexity.  “Old World species of the cuckoo lay their eggs in the nests of other birds.  The chick hatches early and kicks the other eggs or chicks out of the host bird’s nest.”

“So, should I go get us something to celebrate with?”  Saul said, dropping the subject to go back to his favorite pastime, drinking.  He had a “kid in the candy store” excitement in his voice that made Michel smirk slightly.

“If you can find me a bottle of Bergerac red…” Michel mused as he reached out and took not the phone, but Saul’s wrist.

Saul leaned forward, closer to the boy, his smile turning nervous.  “Bergerac?  Uhm, I was hoping you’d be happy with a Coppola.”

Michel snorted softly at the name of filmmaker and wine producer.  “Never mind, Saul,” he said softly, pulling the man closer to him.

Suddenly, Saul tried to pull away.  When he could not his jaw started to trembled and he fumbled his left hand into neck of his T-shirt and jerked out a crucifix, dangling it in the air before him.

Michel blinked at the man in perplexity.  Then he leaned forward, the blankets falling away from his head to reveal tousled brown hair.  He jerked back on his left hand, pulling Saul even closer to him.  The man gasped and then stood stock still in terror as Michel kissed the crucifix.  It was not made of silver or gold.  Had it been, Saul would have long ago pawned it.  It was fashioned from iron, coated with a lacquer that had been worn down from much handling over the years.

“I was baptized Catholic,” Michel whispered as he raised his bright, brown eyes and met Saul’s pale hazel eyes.  “Christened in a font of blessed olive oil imported all the way from southern Spain.  Mon père was so proud that he could afford the oil instead of simple water.  But then ma mère convinced him to convert to Calvinism and we had to leave Périgord and immigrated to La Rochelle.  It was such a beautiful city.  I’m sure many would disagree with me, but I loved the city.  Then Louis and Richelieu decided they wanted the city back.”  Michel sighed and looked away for a moment.

Saul jerked back hard on the boy’s grip, but again failed to break the slight youth’s hold.  With a bored expression, Michel looked back to him.  “Say it with me, Saul,” Michel whispered, giving the man a tender look.  “Our Father who art in heaven…”

Saul hesitated, his lower lip quivering.  But then he hung his head and groaned out, “Our Father who art in heaven.”

“Hallowed be thy name.”

“Hallowed be thy name,” Saul echoed and then their voices came out in time with each other.

“Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done

On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.”

            Then Michel added the doxology at the end of the prayer.

            “For thine is the kingdom,

            The power, and the glory,

            For ever and ever.”

            “For ever and ever and ever…” Saul echoed.

“Amen.”

Alcoholism has been attributed many causes over the years.  Deep down in the heart of the alcoholic, however, was a knot of self-hatred and despair.  It was created out of many origins, but it all spoke with a single intention, destruction.  More often than not, that message of destruction was aimed at the self, the slow annihilation of a person’s spirit and will.  Most who fell to the whisper did not realize that they were even hearing it as it spoke first and mostly to the subconscious.  Those who attained self-awareness were given the chance to free themselves from the poison influence.  So many embraced it, instead.

Michel took Saul into an embrace, pulling the man, who reeked of unwashed flesh and hair and sweat and fear, down to the floor.  In the minutes that followed, the knot of despair in the man’s heart unraveled and for the first time in so many years he felt at peace.  His eyes drooped as he looked upon the showers of liquid gold that poured through the windows, highlighting the dancing motes of dust in the air.

As Michel sat upright and began to pull the blankets around him again he muttered, “Salvator mundi, salva nos, qui per crucem et resurrectionem tuam liberasti nos…”

*             *             *

Eric found Michel at the Roberts Skate Park in the late afternoon and did a double take at Michel’s outfit.  The dark haired youth was done up in jeans, button down shirt with long sleeves, full cowboy boots and an honest to goodness Stetson on his head.  When he came up to Michel he reached for the Stetson so as to try it on his own head.  Michel quickly backpedaled and clamped a hand on top of the cowboy hat.

“Sorry,” Michel said bashfully as he saw the surprised look in Eric’s blue eyes.  “I’m really sensitive to sunlight and burn really, really easily.”

“Oh, sorry,” Eric said sheepishly, taking a step back from Michel.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t tell you earlier.  It’s why I usually came to the park in the evening when the sun is starting to set.  I’ll let you have at it later, betting you’ll look spiffy.”  He gave Eric a wink of reassurance.

The two killed time with skateboarding and hanging with other youths at the skate park.  Michel found that trying to trick in cowboy boots did not work all that well, taking a number of spills before retiring to talk with others and some of the girls who hung out at the skate park to look at the boys and those who also rode boards.

On more than one occasion Michel sat himself in the shadows cast by nearby trees in the park, looking exhausted and somewhat pained.  “You going to be okay?” Eric asked at one point as he joined Michel in the shade of some trees.

“Yeah,” Michel said, giving a wan smile that failed to light up what was becoming a pale face.  “Sucks, you know?  I actually like being outside, just hate having to connect with Nature in the dark.”

After a few moments, Eric gave a snigger as some dirty thoughts evidently ran through his early teenage mind.  After a bit, Michel joined him in sniggering and then the two laughed without actually sharing their thoughts in words.

As the rush hour ended in the city Eric’s father pulled into the parking lot of the skate park and the two boys sauntered over to it, Michel lugging a large satchel over one shoulder.

“What, no bolo tie?” Eric’s father asked as he took in Michel’s outfit.  Michel ducked his head and gave an embarrassed smile.

“Didn’t want to overdo it,” Michel said, which brought a chuckle from Eric’s dad.

As the boys clambered into the back seat Michel noted that the windows had come from the factory with enough tint to keep the worst of the late afternoon sun off of him.  He lifted the Stetson off of his head and plopped it onto Eric’s blond head.

“Yeehaw,” Eric crowed.  “What you think, Dad?”

“Pretty snazzy, but no trying to brand your sisters, okay?” Eric’s father replied as he looked at his son via the rearview mirror.

“Just hogtie them,” Michel said in a stage whisper.

“Oh, that could be promising,” Eric mused.

“Don’t give him ideas,” Eric’s father chided as he started the drive home.  “Yesterday he was wanting a mohawk.”

“Just a Mohawk cowboy…” Michel sang in imitation of “Rhinestone Cowboy” and the boys both degenerated into laughter.

Michel retrieved the Stetson as they pulled into the driveway of Eric’s home in sprawling West Omaha.  The house was large with a full yard and a smattering of trees that demarked the property lines.  Michel found himself smiling as he took in the property.  Nice and shaded with a house that included a full basement.  It looked to be much better than staying in an abandoned warehouse.

Michel hung back as they entered the house.  After Eric and his father had entered the house, Michel cleared his throat and the two looked back.  “My mother always said I should wait to be invited into a house…” he said bashfully.

Eric’s father chuckled and waved a beckoning hand.  “Come on in, Michel, it smells like dinner is almost ready and I wouldn’t want you to miss out.”

“Thank you,” Michel said with a deep nod before crossing the threshold of the house.  He put the Stetson back on Eric’s head before following Eric to his bedroom.

Eric pointed out his sisters’ rooms, using the appropriate derogatoriness expected from a younger brother.  Shauna was seventeen years of age and would be a senior in high school this coming Autumn.  Alissa was sixteen and a junior.  As for Eric and Michel, both of them would be freshmen this coming school year.  “Alissa’s pretty cool, but Shauna can be a real pain in the ass,” Eric whispered to him as they passed her room.

“Someone’s looking to be body slammed,” growled a female voice from within Shauna’s room.  The boys started and hurried past.

“And she can do it, too,” Eric whispered, using a voice not meant to be overheard.  “She’s like from Planet of the Apes or something.”  Michel’s eyes went wide in appropriate horror.

Dinner was oven roasted herbed chicken, mac and cheese bake (no boxed dinners here) and sautéed green beans, which were a lot better than typically boiled green beans.

“Wow, that looks and smell really good,” Michel said with an appreciative smile to Eric’s mother as they sat for dinner.

“Thank you, Michel,” Eric’s mother said with a nod of approval of his manners and discerning olfactory senses.  “Your father said you usually eat later than this, though?”

“Yeah, during the summer I sleep in late because of my sunlight sensitivity.  I’m usually more active at night than most people, at least when it’s warm out.”

“Sunlight sensitivity?” she queried as they waited on the girls to make it to the table.  “What causes that?”

“The doctors have never really nailed it down, but I suffer from actinic keratosis and polymorphous light eruption and they try to find things to treat the symptoms.  No idea what the cause is, though.”

“So what are those two things?  I’ve never heard of them before.”

“The docs tell me they’re autoimmune reactions of some kind that get triggered by sunlight.  That’s why I wore the long sleeves and hat today since I was going out earlier than usual.”

Eric’s mother nodded slowly, taking in the information.  “And I’m so sorry about your mother, Michel.  It must have been so hard to go through.”

“What was so hard to go through?” a girl asked as she entered the dining room and took a seat.  Her hair was not as light as Eric’s, but still blond and her eyes were a medium blue.  Michel found himself smiling at her.  She was rather cute, though Eric might disagree.  Maybe she wouldn’t mind dating a younger boy?

“Michel, my sister Alissa.  Alissa, this is Michel,” Eric said, making the introductions.

Alissa rose back to her feet and leaned over the table, extending her hand in greeting.  Michel rose as well and took her hand.  She had a rather firm handshake, more than what was usually expected of most girls.

“Michel’s mother passed away from breast cancer,” Eric’s mother said in a hushed voice as the two sat back down again.  Alissa paled and looked at Michel with wide eyes.

“Wow, that’s–, that’s really bad.  I’m sorry.”

Michel shook his head patiently.  “Mom was really conscious of easing both Dad and I through it.  She was really strong in spirit and she’s still with us.”  He tapped a finger to his chest, over his heart.  Alissa nodded slowly in understanding.

“That was really–, good of her,” Alissa said, nodding her sympathies.  “Still, I don’t know if I could handle it so well…” She looked over to her mother who smiled back to her before waving her off.

Eric’s father and Shauna both entered the dining room then.  Shauna didn’t look to be the most approachable person, but she lived up to her threat to be able to body slam the boys.  She wore sports pants and jacket, made of the slick fabric that could be noisy when walking.  Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail with an additional hairband.

“So this is your boyfriend?” Shauna asked Eric, nodding towards Michel.

“Boyfriend?” Eric replied, eyebrows growing high.

“Well, you’re kind of old for sleepovers, so I was wondering if this was a bromance sort of thing,” she said with a dead serious face.

The two boys looked at each, a bit stunned.  Then Michel decided to ham up the situation and threw his arms wide as he faced Eric.  “Eric,” he cooed.

“Michel,” Eric cooed back, catching onto the play quickly.  As the two were leaning towards each other for a hug, they heard Eric’s father clear his throat.

“No making out at the dinner table, okay?” he said as he took his chair.  After he had everyone’s attention he smirked.  “Let’s eat, I’m starving!”

Eric’s family descended upon the food on the table as Michel bowed his head and clasped his hands in his lap.  There was a moment of embarrassed silence as the family members regarded him, spoons, plates and bowls held in their hands.

Michel looked up quickly and gave another sheepish smile.  “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Eric’s father said.  “Now, care for some chicken?”

“A little bit, thank you,” Michel said as he accepted the plate of carved chicken.

Through the supper he took small amounts, falling back on his excuse of having had a late lunch.  He did his best to hide the fact that he chewed all of his food with a great deal of thoroughness.  So while he took much less food than the rest of the family it took him just as long to finish eating.  He was grateful that dessert was butterscotch pudding, which required no chewing.

Polite conversation occurred during and after the meal, Michel being peppered with questions including about France.  He admitted to the fact that while his family had moved back to Nebraska when he was three, his father still had to spend long stretches in Europe for the agriculture company that he worked for.  A lot of that time was spent in France and Michel often traveled with his father.  He finished with a recitation in French, along with a smattering of German, none of the which the family members seemed to understand.

“I’ll be bugging you for help when I do French class,” Eric promised.

“Fine, but you need to find me someone to bug for German class help,” Michel said.

Michel begged off of going outside after dinner and movie night started early after the girls cleared the table and cleaned up the supper dishes.  The three children traded off clean-up duties.  Eric had lucked out to have the night off when Michel came over.

They started with a superhero movie, replete with explosions and costumes.  Next was a different kind of superhero movie, The Three Musketeers, with Kiefer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen.

Popcorn was popped and doled out in bowls during the second movie but Michel begged off, citing being full from a late lunch and the supper.  In truth, for Michele popcorn felt like a clump of needles in his gut.

“So that’s why my dad never showed me that version,” Michel said as the credits rolled.  “Not sure there was much of anything from the book in that movie, though Tim Curry was pretty good.”

“What happened in the book?” Eric asked.  Michel looked at Eric in surprise at the boy’s ignorance but then recovered himself.

“In the book, Richelieu never disbanded the Musketeers.  He was a real jerk, but he was also loyal to the king and to France.  Also, much of the book was about the Musketeers preparing for the Siege of La Rochelle, with some side adventures occurring because of Milady DeWinter.”  Michel waved a hand in the air, trying to take in the scope of the book.  “You have to read it to appreciate it properly,” Michel finally said.

“What was La Rochelle?” Shauna asked from her place on the floor where she was lying on her side, head propped up on her left hand.

“It was a Huguenot city on the Bay of Biscay.  The Huguenots were Protestant Christians after the Reformation.  France wasn’t really big on allowing non-Catholics during the reign of Louis XIII, so he starved out the city.”

“Ugh,” Eric said in sympathy.  “That had to have been pretty bad.”

“There were some 27,000 souls in La Rochelle when the siege began,” Michel said in a low voice, his eyes distant.  “When the city surrendered there were only 5,000 left.”  That brought silence to the room for a bit as everyone took in the toll of lives.

“And the Musketeers helped to starve them out?” Eric asked, his voice belying disappointment in characters who were supposed to be heroes.

Michel nodded solemnly.  “It’s just a book,” he said.  “Dumas wrote it a long time after it actually happened.  In a way he was France’s Walt Disney of his day.”

“Come on, it’s dark now so let’s go get some air,” Eric said, jumping up from the couch and beckoning Michel to follow after.

One way or another the two found themselves with a pair of plastic play swords, a pair of old Burger King crowns and a great deal of improvised script in the vein of both Dumas and Shakespeare.  The heat of the neat was still oppressive and they doffed their shirts.  Eric was quickly sheened in sweat, yet he noticed that Michel did not have a bead of sweat on him.  Michel quirked an eyebrow at his new friend before smirking.

“Hello,” Michel spoke in a fake Catalan accent.  “My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die.”  Eric gave a mock squeak in reply and the two were off with Michel chasing the tow-headed youth about the yard, the two occasionally stopping to duel for a moment before continuing the chase on again.  Eventually, Eric threw an imaginary knife at Michel and Michel clutched at his abdomen in mock pain.  Eric came to taunt Michel before the youth rallied and cut down Eric’s Rugen character.  They then both collapsed to the warm grass, their Burger King crowns going askew.

“The sunlight really bothers you?” Eric asked after a bit as they both labored to get their breath back.

“Yeah,” Michel muttered.  “I’ll be breaking out in a rash before morning.  Itches like hell.”

“That has really got to suck,” Eric muttered as he stared up at the stars.  The moon was late in rising that night.

“Yeah, but I’m used to the night,” Michel said back.  “The colors are different, but it’s filled with its own beauty.”

“Still, it’s got to be lonely.”

“It can be,” Michel said.

There was mutual silence between them for a bit as they both regarded the stars that they could see through the light pollution of the city.  “I’m sorry about your mom,” Eric said, piercing the silence.

“It was a long time ago, but thank you,” Michel said.

“I don’t know what I’d—,” he didn’t get to finish his thoughts as Michel’s palm cupped his mouth, smothering out the words.  There was warmth in the hand, but the feeling was off.  No dampness from running or holding a plastic sword.

“Just be glad to have your mom and let her know you love her, no matter how unmanly it may seem,” Michel said before withdrawing his hand.  He turned onto his side, propping his head up on a hand.

“So, tell me,” Michel said with a confidential tone.  “What’s going to be the best way to get into your sister’s pants?”

“Oh, gawd!” Eric called out, bursting into giggles.  “Gross.”  Michel snorted laughter in response.  “Which one?” Eric finally asked, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye.

“Either one will do, but I kind of like Alissa.”

Eric’s body convulsed with laughter.  “I can’t see Shauna with anybody, ever, unless they’re some macho sports stud or something.”

“Did you hear that?” Michel said, suddenly looking about.

“Huh?” Eric said just before the spray of water from the garden hose caught them.  The two screeched with the sudden cold and leapt to their feet.  At the side of the house Shauna was holding the garden hose and using her thumb to direct and increase the force of the stream as she bore down on the two boys.

“I was just supposed to get you guys to come in, but I think you both need your dirty heads cleaned out first,” Shauna growled as she chased them with her chilling weapon.  “Maybe stick the hose in your ear and see what dribbles out.”

After a good bit of soaking and squeals from the adolescents Shauna finally relented with a growl as lights started to come on in neighboring houses.  “Go sit on the deck and dry out before coming inside.  Don’t want you tracking water on the carpet.”  With that, she stalked off.

“I think she likes you,” Eric mused as they collapsed into the lounge chairs on the deck.

“If that’s liking, I fear what hating would be like,” Michael mused as he unbuttoned his jeans and peeled them off, going down to his boxers.  “No way I’m gonna get dried off anytime soon with wet jeans on.”  He tossed them over the railing of the deck before reclining again.  Eric followed suit, his jeans joining Michel’s over the railing.  Behind them they heard the sliding doors go “snick” as the lock was engaged.  Michel started and looked towards the screen doors with true terror in his eyes.

“Oh, chill out,” Shauna said as she unlatched the door and slid it open an inch.  “I’ll set the alarm to come get you before sunrise.  I heard you say you’re sensitive to sunlight.  I’m not so mean as to let you fry.”  With that she shoved the door closed again and engaged the lock a secondtime.

Shauna’s actions didn’t really surprise Eric, but the stark terror pouring off of Michel did.  Just how bad was his sensitivity to the sunlight?  “She can be a bitch,” Eric finally said, “but she’ll keep her word.  She’ll let us back inside before the sun is up.”

“Okay,” Michel said with a tremulous voice and giving an impulsive nod of his head.  “Sorry, I’ve gotten burned pretty badly a few times in the past because of being accidently outside at the wrong time of day.”

“Of course, now I gotta pee,” Eric complained as he stood and went to the railing of the deck.

“Don’t get any one the jeans,” Michel teased.  Eric turned his head and stuck out his tongue, eliciting a giggle from Michel.  When he had finished and shook himself off he turned to find Michel kneeling beside his deck chair, head bowed and hands clasped before him.  Eric froze, feeling embarrassed and like an intruder on something private.

“Don’t do bedtime prayers?” Michel asked with a gentle smile as he looked up in response to the pregnant tension emanating from Eric.

“Er…” Eric started, not knowing what to say next.

Michel waved him over.  “It doesn’t hurt, I promise,” he said with a consoling voice.

Eric gave a self-effacing chuckle, but padded towards his friend, noticing for the first time how his figure seemed to be melting into the darkness as Shauna turned off her bedroom light, the last one that had been on in the house.  His parents and Alissa had already gone to bed.  Cautiously, he knelt before Eric.

“Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?” Michel asked.

“Uhm, sort of, I guess…”

“Just repeat after me,” Michel said, his voice soothing and reassuring.  “Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

Eric followed after Michel, repeating the words that his new friend spoke.  It was strange for him, his family never having been religious.  Michel’s words were soft and gentle, brushing over him with a soothing effect that was making him drowsy but feeling happy and at peace at the same time.

“Forever and ever.  Amen.”  They finished the last in unison, Eric’s voice trailing away as he passed into sleep.

Michel looked up at the tow-headed boy and regarded him.  He leaned forward and heard the slow inhalation and exhalation of breath.  Then he slowly put his head to Eric’s breast and heard the slow thumping of the heart, he also felt the warmth of life that radiated from the boy’s body, the temperature melding with the heat of the night.  He breathed in the smell of the living flesh of the boy and closed his eyes with regret.

He hadn’t expected to need to feed again this day after having drained Saul dry, giving the man a peaceful death that his previous addiction to alcoholism would not have allowed.  Still, after being out in the sun during the afternoon and now that Shauna had locked them outside, he would need to feed again in order to affect the changes that he would need to make.

Embracing Eric’s kneeling and still form he lowered his mouth towards Eric’s neck.  Michel’s canines slid down from within the gums of his mouth.  They were sharper than a normal human’s canines, part of the change that his remaking had caused.  With a bit of pressure they broke through the skin of the neck and into the artery that rested below the skin.  He suckled greedily on the pulses of blood that flooded his mouth with its coppery and salty tang.

He forced himself to take only a short meal of blood before pulling his mouth back.  There was a minor trickle of blood down the side of his friend’s throat before the tension of the flesh closed off the flow.  Michel lapped at the last few trickles, his saliva providing a healing balm to the wound.  In the morning Eric would have a sore neck, as if sleeping with a crick through the night.  The last puckering of the flesh could be passed off as a bug bite.

Michel took Eric’s hand and the boys rose to their feet, Eric sleepwalking to Michel’s silent command.  Michel saw that Eric was rested comfortably in his chair before taking his own chair and composing himself and focusing his mind.

This pic is one of the inspirations for the story.

Through the early hours of the morning Michel extended his thoughts and infiltrated those of Eric’s family.  He had been adopted after a distant family relation had died and left them named in the will to look after Michel.  Family pictures in the house that had been taken in the last year began to change as Michel concentrated; expending the energy he had taken from Saul and then Eric.  He was inserted as a smiling member of the family.

Michel wove memories for each of the family members, inserting himself into their recollections and impressions.  He gave them all bits and fragments of French language and slang that he knew and would have passed on to them over the past year.

Then he had to work outwards, towards the neighbors around the house.  They would wake with memories of the dark haired boy with brown eyes as bright as newly varnished wood.  The explanation would have made its rounds of the neighborhood of how the boy had come to the household after his mother died of breast cancer and his father had been killed in a car crash.  They would whisper that possibly his father had driven into the tree on purpose in a fit of despair after the loss of his wife, but it was never talked about in front of the boy or the other adolescents.

When Michel opened his eyes again, exhausted from the mental exertions, he was not breathing.  He had to consciously focus on breathing in order to mimic it.  Rising from his chair he padded off of the deck and into the tree line at the edge of the property.  The smell of his urination was rank as he voided from his body blood exhausted of oxygen and nutrients, beginning to ferment through lactic acidosis.  He kicked dirt over where his bloody spoor was darker than the rest of the night under the scant moonlight and starlight.  He would have to hold his stool until he could be let back into the house.  What was it Jean-Pierre had said?  “We piss balsamico  and shit boudin rouge.”  Boudin rouge was the French version of blood sausage.

Michel snorted at how vampirism had been romanticized in the past half century.  Where had that come from?  What was the strange desire of so many to make death into romance?  He was a corpse, one that preyed off of the living.  And in his case a corpse that had to mimic the cuckoo bird in order to survive.  Time and again he had had to infiltrate himself into families around the country after he had immigrated to the States from France with his fellow cuckoos shortly before what became known as the War Between the States.  They had lost a few brothers to that war.

His mother had died first, that was true.  But she had not died of breast cancer as he told his new family.  She had died of starvation and disease and his father had followed soon thereafter, refusing to eat the last, meager food that they had scavenged.  One by one the tens of thousands who died in the siege of La Rochelle succumbed to starvation and disease.  Michel had nearly done so as well, his eyes sunken and all the bones of his body sticking through his paper thin skin, threatening to tear through.  With the loss of body fat even sitting had been painful even as his mind sank further and further into a dissociative state.  Then Calixto had found him and gathered him with a number of the other starving youths of La Rochelle.  The man had fed them with his own tainted blood and with food that he had carefully hoarded in expectation of the fall of La Rochelle.  He returned them to something resembling humanity, separating them from the despair that stalked the streets of La Rochelle as Mayor Jean Guitton forced the city to hold out.

The surrender was unconditional and Calixto ushered his cuckoos out of the city along with the 300 families that the Catholics exiled from La Rochelle.  Since then, they had been wandering all of Europe and finally came to a young America on the verge of its own greatest self-inflicted wound.  Calixto had scattered them, fearing that keeping them in a single community, feeding on other humans, would draw too much attention.  Each was to insert his or her self, like a cuckoo’s egg, into a family and live with them for a time before their lack of aging became too apparent, then to move on.  Every few decades he called them back together again to renew the strange family ties that they shared.

Michel forced Eric to the side of the chair and wedged himself into the chair next to him, turning sideways and putting an arm across the boy’s chest, holding him close.  He had about two years to be with this family before Eric’s natural growth totally outstripped Michel’s own and it became apparent that there was something strange about Michel.  He was already a bit short for his age, a product of both his time and the malnourishment he had suffered in La Rochelle.

A cuckoo tricked its adoptive parents into feeding and caring for it, even as it kicked the other baby birds from the nest.  Michel was still desperate for the same kind of love and tenderness that any child craved, but he would not force out his new siblings for it.  And there was always the nagging question of how true the love of the cuckoo’s parents was as it was induced under false pretenses.  For now, he would enjoy what he could get and the cuckoo would protect the nest as best he could.

“Salvator mundi, salva nos, qui per crucem et resurrectionem tuam liberasti nos…” Michel whispered into the dark, saying the familiar Latin of the Roman Canon for the consecration of the wine of Communion.

Great Society

Rebekah Loper‘s First Annual All Hallow’s Eve contest has unleashed quite a few story ideas into my quixotic brain.  I already posted the previous vampire story, “A Child Speaks To Its Father”.  Now I have another vampire story to share with you.  I have a few more floating around in the soup that I call a brain and might put them together in the future.  I’m going to call this story series Vampire Daycare.  You’ll understand why after you’ve read this story

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Todd initiated the shut down on his desktop and rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the fatigue of the day suffuse him.  He glanced at his watch and winced.  It was late, really damn late.  The kind of late that allowed a person to make it home on the freeway with hardly any traffic.

He checked both his cell and his office phone.  There had been no messages from Peg.  That was both good and bad.  Good in the sense that he had not wanted to hear from her in the first place.  Bad as in his repeated late returns to the house were no longer a cause for concern.

Of course, the girls hadn’t called and left a message, either.  They would either be vegetating in front of the television, on the phone with their friends or online and doing Lord knew what.

Truth be told, Todd wasn’t looking forward to going home.  It was like sentencing oneself to Siberia on a nightly basis.  Peg had become cold as frozen fish lately and the girls had time for everything and everyone except their father.  It seemed as though he was little more than a puddle in the road for them to negotiate their way around.  The father/daughter closeness that had been there when they were prepubescent had long since disappeared.  He doubted they would understand how painful that loss was to him even if he tried to explain it to them.  And if he did, they would feel guilt-tripped and obligated.

As for Peg and himself, well, you could rent a dozen Hollywood movies and get the whole story in two hours or less.  It was that mid-life time period when everything goes to shit for no apparent reason other than being bored with each other.

Even as that period in their mutual lives was sneaking in on them the firm had finally seemed to truly recognize Todd’s abilities and contributions and handed him more responsibility and work.  He tried to think of it as a positive thing, and not that the non-sexy shit was simply being shoveled onto him.  Either way, he was making good money, he just wished he had the time to enjoy the money.  The way things were going, not spending it was doubtless a good thing.  He would probably have to spend it on a good divorce attorney in the future.  If not that, there would always be the college costs for the girls.  Heavens forefend if they supplemented any of their sex and booze adventures with a little work while studying general humanities.

“Geez, Todd, bitter much?” he asked himself as he caught his glaze in the dark computer monitor.  His eyes wandered to the pictures of the girls and of Peg on his desk.  Smiles and sunshine and something wonderful in those pictures.  Now–, now it was North Dakota in January.  He shuddered at the thought.  He wouldn’t wish that on most North Dakotans.

He quit the office in a hurry and said his goodnights to the few other people who were camping out in their small offices and the building cleaning crew who were watching soccer in the break room.  A few of them waved and he gave a quick wave back.  Then there were shouts as some field maneuver got them excited.  It was funny, the cleaning staff could be a lot friendlier than his own family at times.  Too bad he didn’t speak Spanish and he found it hard to tell one Guatemalan from another.  He didn’t dare say that out loud, though.

The car garage was lonely as he spiraled his way downwards.  The street was lonely as well with no one walking and hardly anyone driving.  Scanning, he could see where the parties for the young and hip were happening in the city and where they were not.  He found himself the pub where the clientele were more his own age, who were easier to understand and get along with.

Fish and chips, greasy and no tartar sauce or malt vinegar, at the bar, proper American sports on the television, lots of bullshit back and forth with the patrons, a bit of politics thrown in to keep things properly mixed up.  Guffaws, cheap shots and ribald humor warmed his way out the door as he waved back at the crowd and the staff.  The waitress that night was a college girl who had already seen too many tire treads laid down over her self.  She had that guarded look to her, but Todd was pretty sure that she understood that while most of the guys in the pub would love to fuck her brains out, they would also kill to keep her safe from another abusive boyfriend.

Todd would definitely have liked to fuck her brains out, more than once if at all possible.  There was something attractive about her, though she would never work any fashion show runways.  Her breasts and her face were unexceptional; her hair was a standard pony tail of straight brunette hair.  Her eyes, though, with their guarded expression and smoldering intensity hinted at a dangerous thrill.  The tongue on that girl, damn!  She could take the best from any of the boys at the bar and return fire that cut to the quick.  The really naughty part of Todd’s mind wondered what it would be like to have her tie him to a bed and make special use of her tongue and mouth…

Since he had more than a few drinks in him he decided he would do the “drive like Grandma” shuffle home.  All straight lines and no speeding.  To get to the freeway, he took the back streets, not wanting to get himself tangled in the downtown party crowds.  He gave a shudder as the late autumn cold bit through his jacket.  The drunkenness didn’t help matters.  Those first drinks made you feel warm and flushed, everything thereafter just cooled you off and sent you down.  That was why wandering drunks and blizzards did not go well together.

He stuck to the plan and crept along, always looking twice, maybe thrice, and pissing off the kids with their trust fund sports cars, who would roar around him, hooting and hollering at him.

“Yeah, well kids, you can afford to get that DUI while still young and not suffer too many consequences, so long as you don’t kill anybody doing it.  At my age, you don’t want to have the local PTA muttering about it at their meetings…”  He shook his head and put on a classic rock station.  He would have loved some Led Zeppelin or classic AC/DC, but there was none to be had.  Still, he let the music play.

The part of the city he found himself in on the way to the freeway ramp was suffused in red as the stop lights blinked their slow, patient eyes.  Red on, then off, red on, then off.  Another carload of young twentysomethings revved through the lights, squeals and cheers dimly rising from the car as it swept by Todd.  If only all of life consisted of such shallow challenges, speeding along an industrial street at night, betting that no one was going to be turning into your path from a side street.

“Just wait, kiddies, until that rosie glow fades and you find yourself with kids, mortgage and college loans to pay.  Then you gotta pay your kids’ college costs, too.  And you never know when the economy is going to take a dump on your face.  And you wonder why we older farts lose all our hair…”

The brilliant, blue-white halogens of his Nissan caught something down an alleyway, a touch of sky blue where there should only have been brick and cement.  Todd slowed a bit as he drove by and looked down the alley.  Two sets of human eyes regarded him back for a moment.  A man, probably no older than Todd, but his eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollow, a face radiating despair.  The child wrapped in the blue blanket regarded him with guarded eyes, expecting nothing from Todd and from the world.

Then Todd was past and he was shuddering and panting.  There was no ghost sitting next to him or a glimpse of the coming apocalypse, just the pathetic scrapings of humanity slapping him upside his head.  He sped up a little, suddenly desperate to get home.  In the back of his mind he found himself thinking with a cynical bite, So much for the Great Society…

*****

Todd couldn’t get to sleep that night.  The bed was large enough that he didn’t have to press up against Peg.  That was a relief.  On her side of the bed lay the Arctic and he didn’t wish to have his nuts freeze off just yet.

Grumbling silently, Todd turned onto his side and squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to force himself into sleep.  Instead, it just managed to wake Peg.

“What?” she asked, neither concern nor amusement in her voice.

“Just…stuff on my mind,” Todd mumbled.

“About work?” Peg asked quickly.

Oh, wants to make sure that I’ll be able to pay alimony, huh?  “No, saw a homeless father and his son on the way home tonight.  Hoping they’ll be okay.”

There was silence for a bit from Peg and Todd wondered if she had simply decided to go back to sleep.  “Well, I’m proud of you, Todd, that’s very caring of you.”

His eyes snapped wide open at this, hardly believing what he was hearing from her.

“So you going to be Mother Theresa for Halloween?” she said as a follow-up.

Todd had never wanted to hit a woman so badly in his life.  The Arctic chill descended once again, freezing him solid.

*****

The next day continued in the same course as the day previous, with Todd finding himself among the last to leave the office.  Passing the break room the Guatemalans waved to him as they watched a telenovela while waiting for the last of the firm’s employees to leave.

As the Nissan exited the garage, Foghat’s “Slow Ride” playing on the oldies station, he paused, considering his options.  Should he take the arterials to reach the freeway or go back through the warehouse and red light district?  He knew what waited for him in the red light district and it wasn’t prostitutes.  He shuddered a bit as he turned the wheel to the right and eased onto the street.

Tonight the city was quieter, more still than the previous night with fewer youths acting like hoodlums and fools.  Todd couldn’t help but think that maybe the city was holding its breath, waiting to see what he would do.

The district was bereft of human bodies, all of them seemingly hiding this night or knowing of a calamity to come and not wanting to be caught up in it.  Drab buildings and dark windows were illuminated at regular frequency by the flashing red lights.

The man and his son were not in the alley that he had spied them in the night before and he let loose a pent up breath that he had not known he had been holding.  If they were unseen then he did not have to feel the guilt, the uncertainty, the crystallization of all of the different stresses and pains that were swimming about in his breast, diffuse and directionless.

He came to the turn that would take him to the freeway ramp and there was the patch of sky blue, floating in the air.  Todd slammed the brakes at the first glimpse of it and would have plowed into the man and his son as the man stood on the edge of the corner.  But Todd corrected the car and stopped, the red light pulsing above him.  The man turned his sunken eyes towards Todd and regarded the Nissan and its driver with dispassion, almost like a lifeless mannequin.

The boy was held in the man’s arms, small arms loosely around the father’s shoulders, the blanket wrapping the child, hooding his head.  With the squeal of the tires the child lifted its head off of its father’s shoulder and twisted in the man’s arms to look towards Todd.

“Jesus!” Todd bleated as he saw the eyes of the boy.  There was nothing supernatural in those orbs, they looked as human as anything Todd had ever seen.  Iron Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name” began to play on the oldies station.

I’m waiting in my cold cell, when the bell begins to chime.

Reflecting on my past life and it doesn’t have much time…

Even the most normal of human eyes had the ability to convey the depths of a darkened soul so as to make men quail and pee their pants.

‘Cause at 5 o’clock they take me to the Gallows Pole,

The sands for me are running low…

No hope, no future, no tomorrow filled with park swings and laughter.  Little or no food, no bed to lay one’s head; no mac ‘n cheese for dinner or fish sticks dipped in ketchup.  No cartoons 24/7 and no video games to drown all the pain away.

Those eyes bored into Todd and laid him bare, took a critical look at his life up to that moment and then seemed to say to him, “You think that’s so bad?”

Todd swung the steering wheel wide to give the two as wide a berth as he could while still making his turn towards the freeway ramp.  He wanted away from them, from those eyes and their cold, shadowy depths.  The anemic looking man didn’t follow Todd’s passage but the child under its blue blanket hood did before settling his head back on his father’s shoulder.

*****

The clock declared it to be 1:00 a.m.  Once it would have been early to Todd when he was a college student, binging and card playing, video gaming and getting into the sorority bedrooms for the night.  Now he was a middle aged man and 1:00 a.m. was an unnatural time of the night to be awake.  Meat packer hours his father would have once said.  That was silly, most meat packing was done like any other job, during the daylight.  Yeah, there was the overnight shift, but big deal.

Peg was snoring lightly next to him, her back once again turned to him.  Even the girls in their bedrooms had probably turned off their laptops by now and clambered under the warm covers of their beds.

Todd was not just awake, he was too many coffees too late at night awake and he hadn’t had any coffee in the past twelve hours.  The eyes of the little boy were still boring through him, having burned themselves a nest in the depths of his mind.  There had not been any demands made of Todd by either one of those two, not even a pleading look.  Still, they had hooked him, heart and soul.  He heaved a quivering sigh, wanting to cry and not knowing why.

His mind began doing an inventory.  In the refrigerator downstairs were the remains of a roast, lunch meat, grapes, vegetables and orange juice.

What happened to him and Peg, dammit?  Was it something he did, or didn’t do?  He had never cheated on her, was she cheating on him?  Had the grind of work taken all the vibrancy out of him and now she was pleasing herself with a vibrator during the afternoons while he was at his desk and the girls were in school?

In the pantry were partial loaves of breads, buns, breakfast cereal, snack chips, juice containers that had not yet been put in the fridge for chilling as well as uncooked pasta and canned fruits and vegetables.

Had he neglected to show up at all the girls’ games and school functions?  As a kid he would have been embarrassed for his parents to be at all of his events.  It was good to have them there sometimes, but as a teenager he was desperately working on proving that he could do great (well, maybe not so great…) things on his own.  Was he not there to help the girls with homework and assignments?  Did they even have homework?

There were extra blankets in the hallway linen closet and towels in the basement storage closet.  Maybe even a pillow or two in one of them.  The girls’ outgrown jackets and winter coats might be around somewhere as well.  Peg didn’t throw things out and she didn’t give to Goodwill.

The funniest thing was that Todd would really like to get a dog.  He hadn’t had one since the early days of his marriage to Peg, before the girls had come along.  They had discussed having a puppy for the girls at one time but the idea had never really gone anywhere.  A dog, at least, might have unconditional love for Todd…

He slid out of bed and pulled out heavy sweats from his closet and a sweat shirt.  No socks, but he slipped on his old running shoes without any problems.  Then he was out of the bedroom and beginning his ransacking of the house.

It was nearly an hour before he had finished packing the grocery bags in the car.  He had been stealthier than he had imagined he would be and there was never a stirring from Peg or the girls.  He had been sneaky smart and left a note on the kitchen table stating that he had gone to the local all-night restaurant to work out some project ideas that were not letting him sleep.  Actually, it was rather silly, but he felt better for doing it.

It took time to get back downtown, even in the middle of the night, but it was still faster than if he had made the drive during daylight hours.  The occasional patrol car went by or sat on the shoulder of the freeway, waiting for the freaks to race by and be picked up by the cops.  Assuming the cops were actually awake in their warm vehicles.

At first he couldn’t find the man and the boy.  Had they found shelter in some building or even a mission house and he had wasted all this effort?  He would be a middle-aged fool for having done so, but he didn’t think he would give a shit.  If all else failed he would go to one of the shelter houses and drop off the items that they would be willing to take.  Fuck them if they asked what he was doing at 2:30 a.m. making a charity run.

As the radio began to play the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, Todd finally found them crouched in the corner formed by a dumpster pushed up against a wall.  Thankfully, this was not the restaurant district so the dumpster didn’t smell too bad.  Still, it was horrible to Todd to see the anemic looking man and his blue wrapped child sitting there in the cold, their breaths frosting in the air.

Todd parked at the end of the alley and got out of the car, filling each arm with a grocery bag.  He hurried down the alley towards the man and the boy, both of whom were staring at Todd with more than a touch of perplexity.  The boy was still hooded by his sky blue blanket and his eyes looked out from the emotionally closed face, but they weren’t as scary this time as they had been earlier in the night.

“Uhm…” Todd tried to say, then pausing and wondering what he should say to them.  He licked his lips and noticed that he was scuffing the ground with his running shoes.  What did you say in a situation like this?  “C-could you use some help?” he finally said, his voice just a little timid.

The man and boy continued to simply stare at him and Todd set the bags down on the pavement quickly.  “I’ve got food if you’re hungry, and, uhm, some extra blankets and there are a few old jackets that might fit your boy…”  By not looking at them he was finding it easier to speak.  Still, he really hoped that they would say something soon before he lost his nerve.

Then the man was setting his son aside, the boy still bundled up in his sky blue, and rose to his feet slowly, weakly.  The man, who was not only anemic looking but thin as a reed, shuffled over to Todd and laid a hand on his shoulder.  “Thank you,” the man whispered.  “It has been proving…difficult to care for my boy.”

Todd looked at the hand on his shoulder.  It was a dirty hand where the grime seemed to have caked itself into the creases on the man’s skin.  There was the expected dirt under the nails as well.  Like many who had lived on the streets or in dire circumstances for extended periods, the hand looked bronzed, though in truth it would be much paler if scrubbed clean.

What really got Todd’s attention, though, were all of the needle marks on the underside of the forearm, starting from the wrist and disappearing into the man’s shirt sleeve.

A junkie? Todd thought.  He was totally surprised by this.  He had expected that a man who was caring for a small child on the streets would have the sense not to become an addict.  It would explain the thinness and anemic look, though.  He was on a heroin diet.  The kind that got semi-cute, but pallor skinned, teens ad jobs with Calvin Klein once upon a time.

“Uhm, how is your boy?” Todd asked, not really sure what else to say to broach the sudden quiet.

The man had dug out a butterscotch pudding cup from the bag and ripped off the lid.  He slurped out as much of the pudding as he could, then began dipping his fingers into the cup and sucking the pudding off of the fingers.  Todd wondered how much of the grime was coming off of his fingers and going down the man’s throat.  But he didn’t say anything.  It wasn’t as though Todd had remembered to bring silverware or other utensils with him.

“He’s hungry,” the man finally said as he continued to scrape out the sides and bottoms of the pudding cup for every last bit.

“Well…” Todd started, “I’ve got some bread and lunchmeat and that kind of stuff if he’d like.”

“Thank you,” the man said.  “But that will not give him sustenance.  It will only make him sick.”

“Huh?” Todd said at first, without thinking.  “Does he have an eating disorder?”

The homeless man gave a good natured chuckle as he dug into to the shopping bag for the next portion of his feast.  “No, nothing like that.  I’m not sure you would believe me if I told you.”

That was an odd thing to say.  Todd looked back at the homeless man, eyebrows knitted and waiting for the next comment.  When it did not at first come Todd pushed ahead.  “Try me.”

The man regarded Todd for a long moment, sizing him up with his stare.  Then he undid the cuffs of his short and rolled back both the jacket sleeves and the shirt sleeves.  As more and more of his forearms were bared Todd gave an audible gasp.  Then he covered his mouth in embarrassment, but was unable to keep his eyes from going wide in horror.  Up the entire length of the man’s arms were tracks, some layered over previous ones.  The skin was a puckered moonscape and Todd wondered how a heroin addict like that was still alive, not to mention how his child was still alive.

“I am not a junkie, as you might think,” the man said slowly, raising his eyes to look at Todd resolutely.  “These are not needle tracks.  They are bite marks.”

Todd blinked, then shook his head.  He remembered one of his toddler daughters giving him a painful bite many years ago.  It looked nothing like this.  These were puncture wounds, not the front teeth of a child.  They were not shaped in the twin horseshoe shape of a typical bite mark.

“When the moon is both red and full even the dead may become heavy with child,” the homeless man was now saying in a voice that was both low and deep and horrible serious.

“What?” was all that Todd could manage to respond with.

The man pointed with his chin towards his son and Todd looked over at the boy, whose face was still impassive and set.  His brows had furrowed a bit again and the look in his eyes was starting to harden again into the frightening quality that Todd had witnessed earlier that night.

Then the boy pulled back his lips, not in a smile but more of a rictus grin, devoid of emotion.

Todd’s hand flew to his mouth and he took an involuntary step back as he looked at the cause of the man’s tracked arms.  “Im-impossible,” Todd breathed.  “Next, Christopher Lee is going to pop out and tear my head off or something.”

“She didn’t sparkle,” the man continued, now feeding himself bits of cold pot roast in a greedy, famished manner.  “But damn she was a looker and she took an interest in me that night.  She must have been in heat or something from the moon.  I passed out that night from blood loss.  She was gone in the morning and I had thought I had dreamed the whole thing.  Hell of a dream, I thought.  Then nine months later she was back and she wasn’t happy.  She shoved our son into my arms and disappeared again.  She wasn’t really the mothering type.  My means were limited then and they only got worse.”

He looked at Todd and there was a hard resolution in his eyes.  “But he’s my son and I love him,” he continued in a soft voice.  “I will do whatever I can for him.”

Despite the initial shock and fear that had washed over Todd, he took a step closer to the boy.  Now, more than ever, he knew that his little child, who looked so helpless in his swaddled blanket, could kill him.  When those eyes bore into him, they were holding Todd’s heart and the boy was deciding whether or not to squeeze.

Chest growing tight with the fear, Todd lowered himself to the ground just in front of the mound of blanket and child.  The child continued to watch him with those hard eyes, the rest of his body not moving or stirring.  Closer now, Todd could see the rust colored stains on the sky blue blanket, the grime and dirt, the dull sheen of body oil.  The smell was not all that good, either.  The man himself stank worse, but there was a lingering part of the man’s smell on the child.  Unwashed human, it said to Todd; but it still said human.

Todd held out his arms, not too wide and making sure not to create a menacing impression with his gesture.  The man was behind Todd and he was silent.  It had been foolish of him to allow the man to be at his back, out of Todd’s range of vision.  Who knew what he might do?  He could sap Todd in the back of the head and take off with the car or something.  But Todd wasn’t afraid of the man.  The man was not the dangerous one among the three of them, the small child who weighed less than Todd’s leg was.

The boy regarded him for a long moment as the chill air continued to swirl about them and the coldness was seeping up from the cement beneath Todd and numbing his legs and butt.  Steam formed from Todd’s nostrils when he breathed.  No such steam issued from the boy’s nose or mouth.  Then the boy rose with a fluid motion, still grasping the blanket about him, and stepped over to Todd.  He turned and sat himself down in Todd’s lap, putting his back to Todd’s chest, giving the stranger his trust.

Todd was pulling off the left sleeve of his jacket and then pulled up the left sleeve of his sweat shirt.  He proffered the exposed arm to the boy and waited.  For a long moment there was no movement, no sound, from either the homeless man or the boy.

Then the boy gripped Todd’s arm with his two small hands.  The hands were much stronger than Todd would have ever expected, despite knowing that this was a night of strangeness.  Then came the pressure of the double puncture bite that pressed against his flesh, which then broke through, shooting sharp pain up Todd’s arm.

The fangs were withdrawn and the boy started to suckle, greedy and strong, from Todd’s arm.  The pain continued like a dull fire, flowing out of his veins and through the flesh of his arm.  Todd brought the knuckles of his right hand to his mouth and bit down to keep from crying out.

Along with the burning pain was now the dull ache of the cold that was seeping into him from the pavement and the cold that was being left behind in place of his body heat as he felt his own warmth passing out of him, through flesh and shirt and jacket and straight into the boy.

A tear rolled down Todd’s face as he brought his right arm around the boy and held him close.  One would have easily thought the tear to be the product of the pain he was feeling as his face was screwed up and contorted with the torment of the experience.

The truth, though, was that he was happier than he had been in a long, long time.

A Child Speaks to Its Father

The following short story was written for Rebekah Loper’s First Annual All Hallow’s Eve Contest where participants were asked to write a vampire story between 1,000 and 5,000 words in length.  The second rule was “no sparking, no erotica”.  As far as I can tell, everyone was more than pleased with this rule!

Please feel free to comment!

Late summer, early autumn in a city and you can smell the air on a weekend night where people congregate and socialize.  From the restaurants comes the smell of sautéed onions, grilling meats, fried foods.  From the ethnic restaurants comes the smell of garlic and other things exotic, woven by the careful application of spices, herbs, sauces.  Under the tantalizing smell of foods one can often detect the smell of alcohol as the bars fill with young socializing adults; they imbibe, dance, throw pheromones, perfumes and cologne at each other, hook up and try to fill each other’s need for satisfaction and some fleeting fulfillment.

In the alleyways and destitute areas of the city live those on the margins, wrapped in the clothes that keep them warm, stinking of unwashed bodies, the rot of their teeth, the misery that holds them in its tight cloak.  Some have already begun lighting fires in barrels, though the weather has not yet turned particularly cold.

Then there is the underlying smell that most people filter out of their sensory perception.  Food that has been rotting in the trash cans, the dirt that sticks to the spill from drinks, the piss left on the brick walls of the alley, the shit left by the same two-legged species, the feces uncollected by dog walkers.  Small animals die and rot, their corpses becoming infested with flies.  From the rotted corpse rise the maggots, which transform into new flies that buzz away to investigate years of slime that has built up on the insides of dumpsters behind eating establishments.

A pair or young adults were staggering and laughing their way through an alleyway between banks, a parking garage nestled into the block as well.  The alley was more of an enclosed walkway, allowing easy access, particularly during the cold and blustery months of the year.  The derelicts of the city were not allowed to collapse here and be a nuisance, but it was not too unusual to find the occasional young pair of lovers stopping in an alcove for a bit.  From time to time a fight between youths would break out, but they would be quickly run off by others or police.

The young woman laughed in response to something that the male said and she tugged on his arm a bit.  He fell into the pull and pushed her, not roughly, up against a wall.  Within moments they were kissing as his hands moved downwards, tracing the line of her hips, and then cupping her buttocks.  His right hand moved upwards again, resting into the small of her back and helping to press her body into his own.

There was a whisper in the air, but neither of the lovers took notice of it, assuming it to be breeze moving through the narrow confines of the walkway or playing through the different open floors of the parking garage above.  There had been no one around when they began their passion and they were not expecting to be interrupted.

The woman’s eyes did not have time to widen with bewilderment as she saw the streak of golden red descend from above and crash into the back of the young man’s neck.  There was a wet, cracking sound and the horny male rocked a little on his feet before collapsing, like a marionette bereft of its strings, crumpling in on himself.

Even as the young woman was drawing in breath to scream the golden red thing streaked at her, seeming to be running on all fours along the surface of the wall itself.  Then there was pain in her throat and the breath choked in her throat.  She wobbled a bit as her eyes drooped and glazed, like someone in a drugged state.  Her legs were pulled out from under her, so that she fell hard onto her buttocks with her legs straight out in front of her.  There were moments when her fingers and lower legs twitched, but then they stilled even as her breath began to slow and shallow out.

She was still awake, though, processing the incoming information of sight, sound and smell.  Her sense of touch was starting to become a bit fuzzy and nothing in her body seemed to want to respond to her frantic attempts to move, to get up and run away from this spot, screaming for help.  Instead, she was caught in the claustrophobic confines of her own body.

She heard a sniffing near to her, as of a dog scenting her for the first time.  The sniffing continued and she swore that she could feel air brushing over her fingers in time with the sniffing smell.  Unlike with a dog or a cat, though, there was no warmth to the air that moved over her fingers, nor any moistness.

Then it came into her peripheral vision and she would have stiffened with a start had she the power to do so.  She would then have passed on to screaming were her throat and lungs at her beckoning.  The creature was no larger than a child of perhaps ten or eleven years of age and had much the same build.  The nose was slightly thicker than a normal child’s, and turned upward, as though to capture more air.  The ears of the creature were larger than a human’s, being higher on the head and formed into a rounded cup so as to capture more sound out of the air.

Its entire body was covered in short, golden red fur, extending from the crown of its head to its toes.  At first she would have thought the child thing was wearing a cape of some kind, but finally her mind was able to process that they were wings, like those of a bat, folded membranes that extended along strange arms.  The upper arm was unnaturally short for a human and the forearms unnaturally long.  From the wrists there was attached another appendage that folded tightly along the forearm and which supported the outer third of the wing membranes.

Adrenaline was pounding through her body now, giving her the feeling of shivers even though she couldn’t seem to move a single muscle by her own command.  Run, run, run! her brain screamed at her, but she could not get up, couldn’t even push against the bricks of the walkway or away from the concrete wall that she reclined against.

Then the creature was over her body, still snuffling with its upturned nose, moving down towards her crotch, then back upwards over her stomach, her breasts, up her neck and over her face.  She prayed that someone would come along and wake her from this nightmare, that her lover would rise buck up from the heap that he had collapsed into and save her from this strange, furry creature.  Then she saw its dark eyes, shaped like those of a human, yet with a shadowy depth that one would never see in the eyes of a true human.  The eyes narrowed as it breathed deeply of her scent, then they closed for a moment as it seemed to savor the smell.

When its eyes opened the long arms shot out and grabbed at the “V” of her blouse, taking cloth in its hands and ripping outwards, popping buttons and rending the fabric easily to expose her bra.  That was followed by a tugging at the bra that momentarily lifted her away from the wall.  A growl of annoyance rose from the creature as it was unable to rip open the bra.  Then it darted forward with its open mouth and bit at the bra.  Surprisingly, it easily broke under what must have been horribly sharp teeth and her breasts were bare in the autumn air, the light lick of chill air playing across her bared flesh, raising goose bumps, contracting her areola and hardening her nipples.

The creature climbed into her lap and wrapped its right arm around her left side, its left arm over her right shoulder, leaning into her at an incline as its face descended upon her left breast.  She dimly felt the puncturing of her flesh, much like the bite to her neck.  It turned its head and bit again, doing this twice more.  Then the creature wrapped its mouth over the nipple area of her breast and suckled.

The paralytic in the creature’s saliva was coursing through her system and a sense of suffocation was coming over her along with a sense of acute distress.  Her heart slowed, when under normal circumstances it should be beating a rapid staccato of terror.  Total hysteria raced up and down her spine, but there was no response from her body, not from a single muscle.

Then she felt the creature’s left hand at her right cheek, cupping her face.  It seemed like a perverse motion of gentleness, almost akin to love.  A single tear managed to fall from her left eye before the fuzzy darkness stole all the light from her.

*****

            When the warmth had seeped out of the woman’s body the child-sized creature stirred and rose from where it had curled itself into her lap.  Her left breast was a smear of blood, but the creature didn’t take any notice, merely ran its tongue over its own upper and lower lips to lick up the blood smeared on its own face.  It smelled something on the air that excited some residual sense deep within it.

After a bit the creature began to scale the wall, its delicate fingers finding the tiniest bumps and crevices to gain purchase with.  It scaled rapidly and was soon to the roof of the bank before disappearing into the neon-tinged night air.

*****

            The man sat with his back straight, legs folded into a full-lotus position.  The fingers of his hands were entwined, resting in his lap, palms open and forming a bowl shape.  His head was bent forward and his breathing regulated in meditation.

The man was dressed simply, but well with button down shirt and slacks, Italian leather shoes were set by his side.  The face of the man was squared and stern, pale but cragged with age and what many would consider to be wisdom.  The hair was cut short and professionally styled, black with the occasional white fleck.  Despite the obvious age of the man there had been no recession of his hairline nor thinning at the crown.

With neither sound nor movement, there was a silent power radiating from him; flavored with an undercurrent of driving rage.

Lying on the roof of the building before the man was a boy, possibly twelve years of age.  His hair was dark and a touch long, cut in a popular contemporary style that youth were wearing.  The first flares of puberty were evident with the minor elongation of his face and the starting definition of muscle and bone growth.  He was dressed in pajamas, feet bare.  His arms lay at his side and there were two trickles of blood running down the left side of his neck where the man had bitten him.

“I was not expecting you,” the man said in a low voice, not lifting his head, opening his eyes or making any other movement.

The child-sized creature froze.  It had been sneaking across the top of the roof, moving low on hands and feet, barely holding itself off of the roof.  It looked at the man and narrowed its eyes.  Then its lip curled into a silent growl.

“What did bring you here tonight?” the man asked.  He still hat not moved nor opened his eyes.  The creature still shied from him, its hackles having risen as it tried to determine the level of danger the current situation presented.

“Did you notice me upon the night air?  Did you feel some unconscious link with me and know that I was preparing to make myself a new son?”  Now the eyes opened and the man turned his gaze upon the creature, a slight smile playing at the man’s lips.

“You did not turn out to be a very appropriate heir for me.  I honestly do not know how you managed to be conceived.  Usually, we cannot procreate.  Yet, here you are.  Too bad your birth killed your mother.”  The last carried no sympathy but was loaded with sarcasm and sting.

Now a growl did issue from the creature as it turned itself a little more towards the man.

“Yet you survived your abandonment and exposure.  You definitely have proven your resilience.  Still, you are a horrible disappointment to me.  Some recessive gene from the ancient origins of our species must be in your makeup.  And the kindest thing I could think to call you would be severely autistic and developmentally disabled.  Not to mention horribly ugly and feral.”

The creature moved tentatively closer to the man, a quiver running through its body as it tried to contain its rage.

“Possibly you may enter my service still,” the man mused, a mocking tone to his voice and playing across his face.  “Once I have converted this boy here you may act as his guardian during his youth.  Since he has just entered puberty I must convert him from human to vampire slowly lest he be frozen in his growth before reaching adulthood.”

The creature looked at the boy, his gaze lingering over the child for a long time.  The boy was deep in unconsciousness, seeming to be sleeping peacefully.  Something that one might have called jealousy crossed over the creature’s face for a moment before looking back at the man.  Now the creature’s face was set, with eyes narrowed and smoldering.

The man smiled, revealing his fangs.

The creature gave an angry squeal and launched itself at the man who claimed to be his father.  Still in his full lotus position the man struck the creature out of the air, sending him hurtling back across the roof.  The creature came back to its hands and feet and galloped its way across the roof again, leaping over the child and launching itself at the man.

The vampire rolled backwards, loosing his feet and legs from the full lotus.  He came smoothly to his feet and caught the creature in his arms as it leapt at him.  The man had hoped to catch the child-sized creature by the throat, but caught him by the torso instead.  The two collapsed to the roof in a ball of fury, each swinging viciously at each other.

As the two brawled the creature raked the face of the man repeatedly, leaving behind deep gashes that oozed a dark, crimson ichor.  A living being would have bled a bright red, head wounds bleeding fast and free.  Not so with a vampire’s blood.  The vampire struck the creature hard enough to the left cheekbone to fracture the bone.  The creature reeled back for a moment, then came forward again with fists and claws, battering at the head and shoulders of the man.

The vampire responded by forming the fingers of his right hand into a knife point and forcing it through the membrane under the creature’s left arm.  The creature gave a pained squeal as the sensitive membrane ripped and tried to pull away from the man.  The man’s left hand had grasped the creature’s right hand and swung him in an arc, crashing the creature to the ground.

Before the creature could do more than clamber back its hands and feet, the man was there and striking downward, forcing his right fist into the creature’s skull, just behind the left ear.  The creature collapsed, the fight seemingly gone out of it.

The man gave a chuckle as he daubed a few fingers into the rips on his cheek.  “You know, as much as I want to destroy you right here and now, you are too valuable to be eradicated.  You will make a good guard for my new son.  I just need to break your will a bit.  A little blood exchange with my blood injected into you and breaking down your will should do the trick.”

The child-sized creature pushed itself up on its strangely shaped arms and then hands.  His body quivered, though the fight seemed to have gone out of it.  Instead, it quivered in disorientation and fatigue.  A whimper issued from its throat.

The man sighed.  “I do hope that in time you will learn to show me the proper respect due to a father.  Should you show your proper place then I will take you in.  I might even show you affection in time.  But you will have to prove yourself to me.”

He stepped closer and reached down to grasp the creature’s hair to haul it to its feet.  Before his hand could bury itself in its hair, the creature spun, leaping upwards at the same time.  Its left hand batted aside the man’s right hand, while its right hand formed a fist and crashed into the man’s face.  The creature continued its leftward movement, going into a handspring and bringing up its folded legs like a capoeira artist and kicking with all of its body’s strength into the vampire’s head.

The vampire reeled back, stunned from the blow.  The creature was on him in an instant, sweeping out the vampire’s legs and bringing him crashing onto his back.  With a roar of rage the creature brought its fist into the vampire’s head once, twice, thrice.  Each blow, fueled by hatred and rage would have been enough to fell most professional boxers.  The creature stopped once the vampire laid still and unconscious.

*****

            The vampire awoke slowly, weakly.  He barely had the strength to open his eyes.  Lifting his head was more than he could do.  He was spread eagled against a roof mounted air unit, the aluminum having been ripped apart and then wrapped around his forearms.  The forearms had been broken, making the arms inoperable.

His skin was alabaster and pale as the grave.  Clothes had been ripped off of him and his flesh shredded.  Oozing away from him was a pool of reddish black ichor, the lifesblood that he had stolen.  A vampire could survive exsanguination, but needed a new infusion of blood regain its strength.

He came to realize that he was face to the east and the sky was changing from black to sunrise rose.  Even as the panic rose in him he spied the creature, seated on the edge of the roof, its legs swinging absently in the air as it sang a tuneless song to itself.

“Free me…” the man gasped to the creature.  “Hurry, or we’ll both be destroyed…”

The creature merely continued its wordless and discordant song.

“I was wrong about you, I see that now,” the vampire said, his voice husky and weak, and tinged with desperation.  “You have proven yourself to me.  I would…be honored…to have you–as my son…”

The creature looked over its shoulder at the vampire and gave an impish grin before breaking out into an idiot’s laugh.  The sun continued its slow, inexorable rise.

“Bring me the boy.  I need…to drain him…” the vampire begged.  When the creature turned away and faced the coming sunrise again the vampire hung his head in exhaustion.  “There is…so much…for me to teach you…  So much…we can do…together…”

The creature began its singing again, as though it were calling up the sun out of the darkness and heralding the vampire’s doom.

“The sun…isn’t good…for you, either!” the vampire spat in desperation, trying to force sense into the creature.

The first rays crested the horizon and began to lick the skyline with its golden rays.  It was a new day, filled with the smells of morning and a waking city.  Soon the air would choke with engine exhaust and the rich smells of coffee brewed in homes and shops all across the city.  The smell of bread could already be detected as the morning ovens were fired and the scent of bacon was wafting upwards from eateries and homes now as well.

The creature rose to its feet and held out its arms and wings wide, embracing the new morning, still singing to it in an idiot’s pure, optimistic voice.  As the sunbeams touched him it brightened the color of the creature’s golden red fur, making it glisten and gleam.

“No…” the vampire gasped as he saw his only born son bask in the warmth and the glow of the sun.  “Not…possible…”

Then the sun was bathing him as well and his alabaster skin turned red, like a crawdad over a flame.  Then the red blackened as the vampire groaned in pain.  Blistering flared across his body, then the skin began to crack and smolder.

The shriek of pain and despair from the vampire was low and weak, drowned out now by the joyous laughter of the creature.  The laughter was throaty and ill-formed, but it was still a sound of joy.  “Buh…buh…” the creature said, struggling to form the sounds.  It waved at the vampire and spoke the sounds again, “buh…buh…”

As its father continued to burn and smolder under the glow of the sun the creature made its way over to the unconscious boy and laid itself next to him.  The creature wrapped arms and membrane wings around the boy and pulled him in close to his body.  The creature brought its head close to the boy and nuzzled his cheek.  Then the child-sized bat creature planted a kiss on the boy’s cheek and spoke again.  “Bruh…der…”