So I Might Be a Vampire - Book 1 (Original Version)

72: Days Like These

Okay, flashback's over. You now know everything about my fucked up life, or at least as much as I'm willing to admit to.

So yeah, that's me, the bastard Bob, the same guy I was telling you about earlier who hangs out at your local dive and somehow always manages to leave with whatever chick you happen to be checking out. However, you never get too suspicious about me, since you will see that girl again sometime, so it wasn't like I'm some psycho killer, right?

See, there's a reason Harry has the rules and that his vampires actually follow them. There are people just like you out there watching for people just like me, some of them actively looking for us. You just happen to be looking at us in exactly the wrong way.

I had a whole series of awkward conversations about my new adopted lifestyle, the first one being with Claude, but that was a conversation that had been a long time coming, especially with him being gone for so long and me being left to my own devices.

"Are you killing people?"

"What? Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Let me ask again just so we're on the same page. Have you killed anyone?"

"Hell no! What the hell do you think I am anyway?"

Claude looked me deep in the eye and nodded. He pulled back from me and sat in the chair at the side of the bed, still carefully watching me. His pulling away was a relief, since he had been right in my face yelling at me and I was desperately conscious that my morning breath tasted like it was about to be condemned by the UN as a weapon of gross destruction. My teeth were feeling all mossy and I knew for sure I hadn't brushed in at least a day, and I could taste it, that rank garbage taste that was a combination of everything I'd eaten over the past forty-eight hours.

"Did you just get back into town?" I asked Claude. "You're three weeks late. I started thinking that you were dead."

Claude grimaced. "What's my number one rule?"

"Don't drink anything from the top shelf?"

"That's a good rule, but that's not rule number one anymore. Rule number one is now 'never work with Russians', a rule which I thought I was following, but somebody pulled a bait and switch on me, and now of course the Russians want me dead, because that's the way these motherfuckers do business."

"Is this going to be a thing now? The Russians?" I asked.

"Only for as long as they're trying to kill me," Claude said, and stood up. "Come on, I grabbed us some McDonald's breakfast sandwiches."

"What time is it anyway?"

"Time to figure out what the hell is going on with you," Claude sighed.

As he walked away from me, I noticed a small detail, something I had never seen with Claude before. There was a bulge at the back of his waist and he was compensating his body movements ever so slightly, the way someone does when they're wearing a gun.

I chased after Claude, jumping into my jeans, glad that I hadn't gone to bed naked like I usually do. I had been going to bed naked more often over the past three weeks and it had become kind of a default state.

"Since when do you carry a gun?" Something occurred to me. "Is that because of me?"

Claude scoffed and rolled his eyes. He tossed me a yellow paper wrapped sandwich from the counter and I caught it easily enough.

"I scoff at the implication that you could hurt me. This is me scoffing." He scoffed and I pretended to be impressed. "Dude, haven't you been following the conversation? We have a Russian problem. Now sit and fill me in on everything that's been going on with you. Starting with what the hell happened with Jaime."