How Not to Vampire - Season 2

9. The Curse of Interesting Times

Protip for Vampires #200: being a psycho killer is purely optional.

If this was a movie, we would do a smash cut to me and Claude bursting into my apartment and picking up the conversation at an oddly convenient spot that also made it seem like we hadn't been driving in the same car for the past fifteen minutes. It wouldn't matter that we were both bursting to fill each other in on everything that had happened to us. After all, I'd been having my own hilarious adventures while Claude was off being the big damn hero in his own action movie of a life.

Since we're not doing that, we're just going to pick up from where we left off: driving into the night at questionable speeds in the Escalade that was currently masquerading as Claude's car. I say that because I had yet to see Claude with the same car twice and had long ago stopped asking if the car he was driving was indeed "his" car. As an international professional thief in high-demand, Claude had an evolved opinion about the fluidity of ownership.

"First of all, holy shit: what a night!" exclaimed Claude, the aforementioned professional thief, actually breaking his cool to grin excitedly. It was a familiar sight, a reminder that this was my friend of twenty years, the one guy who always had my back no matter how much I fucked up.

"I don't think I can do this vampire thing," I blurted out and then shook my hands rapidly, trying to shake off the twitchy feeling that the ebbing adrenaline rush had left me with. "Sacudiendo el mal," as my mom would call it. Shaking off the bad vibes. My damn heart was still racing, but that might have been due to the feeling that I had narrowly escaped what is professionally termed as "murder by Beatrice". "Fuck!" I added for emphasis.

"What do you mean 'can't do this'? Last I checked you were in all the way. I watched you kill a dude tonight, dude!"

"That was revenge," I scowled, and there was that unease again gnawing at my gut: that complete lack of guilt on my part. I'd always thought that I would be an emotional disaster if I ever had to actually kill someone, but with Sebastien, there was no emotion at all, only a feeling of vindication, and that freaked me out more than me actually freaking out. "That motherfucker had it coming," I muttered, and looked away from Claude, not wanting to see the look of judgment in his eyes.

"To repeat an earlier theme: holy shit," Claude murmured.

I tried to shake it off again.. "It doesn't matter anyway: Sebastien is a vampire." I thought about it for a second. "Was a vampire. Is... Fuck it: dude gets to come back in a couple of days and he will probably be a complete asshole about it too. So it's not like I actually killed a real person."

"Are you hearing yourself? Are you listening to the words coming out of your mouth?"

"Yes, I am, and that's one of the reasons I don't think I can do this. It's not all capes and castles and nubile young women with questionable judgement about strange men biting them on the neck. Vampiring is hard."

"Little late for that now," Claude murmured.

"I don't think I even get a castle." I shook my head, suddenly exhausted. "This has been the longest day of my life, dude. I'm fucking done right now. I want nothing more than to pass the fuck out, hide under the covers and stay there for a week. I don't want to think about being thrown off roofs by scary vampire chicks, and I especially don't want to know about any crusty six-thousand year old vampires trying to get into my fucking head, because fuck that shit. Bob is out." I paused and grabbed Claude's cellphone from the center console, held it out in front of me at arm's reach and dropped it.

The phone clattered on the dash, and Claude raised his eyebrow at me. "What the hell was that?" he asked, and then his brain caught up to him, part of that shared experience where we both know what the other is thinking. "Was that you dropping the mic?"