So You Used to Be Human - Book 3 (Original Version)

Chapter 5: The Price

My phone had gone off in my hand while I was frantically trying to find Harry's number.

"So how bad is it?"

"Pretty fucking bad you fucking asshole. On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably be about one hundred percent fucked if I hadn't managed to lock myself in here. You cunt-wipe."

"What do you mean by 'in here'? Where is 'in here'?"

"Panic room slash vault. That's what those idiots wanted me to break into. It's pretty well stocked too. If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow, I'd be sitting pretty for month... Fuckwad."

"Really?"

"Yes. You son of a bitch."

"Are you going to swear at me with every sentence? You're gonna run out of curses."

"I'll switch languages. I can swear at you in at least three languages you know... you motherfucker."

Claude was spectacularly pissed at me, and I couldn't blame him. I was pissed at myself as well for having reacted like that, but to be honest, I had fooled myself, actually fooled myself into thinking that I wasn't as scared of Beatrice as I was. When it had come down to fight or flight, the fight had gone to hide in a corner.

"She has two eyeballs right? If she does, then that means she's going through a sane phase."

"You date the most fucked up chicks dude. I just want you to know that. Chingado."

"It important dude. She does this thing where on her bad days, I mean like her really, really fucked up days, where she takes a knife and fucking cuts her eyeball out until it's just a fucking socket."

Stunned silence from Claude. Who could blame him? I'd left this part of the story out when I filled him in on Beatrice, so he thought where was only dealing with the normal kind of crazy. He hadn't counted on vampire crazy.

"She does that because it takes longer to heal, and while it's healing she says it's like God talking to her."

"Fuck," Claude said, letting it all sink in. Then it really sank in. "Fuck! Dude... fuck!" All I could do was nod mutely on the phone, sorry I hadn't fully explained the situation, but just talking about it made me realize just what a miserable piece of shit I had been and I didn't want to go back to feeling like that ever again.

I had stopped running, after about four blocks, once I was convinced that Beatrice wasn't hot on my ass, about to tear me to pieces or pin me against a handy wall with her over-sized knives. The only things behind me were a few homeless people wandering aimlessly, one of whom had asked for spare change as I had run by. Apparently people running for their lives wasn't anything out of the ordinary for him; if someone was going to kill them, he'd better get money out of them while they were still alive. He had looked hopefully at me, jingling his cup as a reminder of the change and hopefully to make me forget that he has called me a "cheap motherfucker" for not stopping to give him change. The street beyond him is mercifully clear of Beatrice.

She wasn't about to kill me, and that was a problem, because if she wasn't chasing after me, that meant that Claude was about to be in deep shit of the Beatrice kind. Never mind Nick and Nora In fact, fuck Nora and Nick. They had brought Beatrice onto themselves, and Nora had fucked with my head using that stupid pheromone, so she and Nick deserved whatever they got, but Claude was another matter entirely. He was my friend, and I was leaving him, and it was wrong.

He could take care of himself, right?

Fuck! I'd stopped in my tracks then, searching for any sign of Beatrice while I fumbled for my cellphone, fully aware that the people in the McDonalds were gawking at me, snickering in their supposed comfortable superiority of not knowing that their biggest sin this evening would be the fact that they were only human.