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Night smothers the city as rain glides down the shoulders of my scuffed leather jacket. A gift from someone who won’t need it anymore. I sniff the air, gaze shifting to the stale dumpster in the rear of the alley. A rat stands upright, head at a tilt. It hisses and scurries off. I fight the urge to hiss back.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Probably Hannah Grace, tapping her foot by the big rig, checking her phone every five minutes like some overbearing mother. I take it most older siblings are like that, when no mother figure is around.
I flip open the phone.
Hannah Grace: Bodachi doesn’t want to wait any longer. We’ve a long road to Boston and it’s near midnight. Dine, don’t make a scene, and get back here. Early bird gets the worm, Alice Ann.
—What if the worm sleeps in?
Hannah Grace: ...
I close the phone with a sigh.
When will she realize we’re no longer slaves to time? What are we but nonchalant shadows in a world overrun with hurry?
My phone lights up, buzzes in my hand.
Hannah Grace: You okay? You’ve been off lately...
I stare at the text, thumbs hovering over the keys. I’d hold my breath if I had breath to hold, so instead I flip the phone shut.
My boots splash puddles as I make for downtown. The skyline blossoming with electric light in the night. I smile at the slow-burning embers in this sea of steel and concrete. The city’s vibrance insulting the natural order, just like me. The cars parked along the street never cease to amaze me. How the molds surrounding familiar logos shift and reaffirm themselves. Like us, in a world that’s changed so much in the last two hundred years. This world is new; it never sleeps.
I hear them before I see them, a line of them, standing in their Sunday best to do the devil’s work. A brute in a pinstripe suit, clipboard in hand, looms over the entrance to the chaos within. The deep pulse of the thumping bass reverberates from within the three-story club. White brick walls accented in broad black slants spiral down to the pavement, an attempt to be hip. Do humans say hip anymore?
I fall in line behind a pair of girls, blonde and brunette, wearing short dresses that cling to the curves of their haunches. The whirring headlights of passing traffic whiz by, kicking up mist when a car veers close to the curb.
“I can’t wait to get inside,” the brunette says, her fingers stretching the fabric of her dress over her thighs. “It’s so cold out here.”
The teeth above my teeth quiver, and my tongue glides over them as they descend in anticipation.
Pairs are harder, but more rewarding.
The blonde reaches into her hardly-qualifying-as-a-bag and removes an orange prescription bottle.
“Here, babe,” she says, plucking a pill from the container, extending it to the brunette with painted nails. “This will warm you up.”
“Sarah!” The brunette says, head whipping around as she recoils from the drug. “With all these people, are you insane?”
They laugh and slide the pills beneath their tongues. I doubt they know they’ve saved themselves. Blood tastes different when the host is under the influence. Alcohol is rampant, so you get used to it, but anything more tastes foul.
Their eyes meet mine.
“Want some, honey?” the blonde says, giggling, blue irises surrounding pinpoint pupils.
The drug taking effect.
She extends the bottle, the brunette smirks beside her.
I check my burner.
11:25 p.m.
Flipping it shut, I look her in the eye, my gaze an invitation she can’t resist.
Hook.
Traffic stills as I home in on her, and her breathing slows.
Line.
Her pupils enlarge.
Sinker.
“Are you sure you want to let me ahead of you? I mean, you’ve been waiting so long.”
Her mouth falls limp, eyes fully dilated now. She says, “Of course, yeah...go ahead.”
“Sarah, what the hell? We’ve been freezing here an hour.” The brunette glares at me. “Look bitch, we—”
Her mouth melts with my gaze, pupils dilating like the blonde’s.
I smile, say, “Walk into the street.”
She trembles, straightens. “Oh...sure, sure...”
She steps to the curb, clutching her bag, the red-yellow lines of downtown traffic in bloom.
Hannah Grace’s words echo in my mind.
Don’t make a scene...
I take her wrist, she jolts.
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “Thanks for letting me ahead of you.”
I nudge by them, continuing the Simon Says dance. Manipulating my way through the hoard of suits, dresses, and flamboyant scents these humans lather themselves in, my nostrils burning.
“What do you mean you’re at capacity?” a young man in a sports jacket says, hair-gel dripping to his collar, hands on his hips.
The bouncer, a tall dark glass of seriously, don’t fuck with me, towers a full head over the man, or rather, boy.
“I mean what I mean,” the bouncer says. The boy rears to say something else, but the giant points to the street.
“Beat it.”
The boy does so.
The giant glances at his clipboard and then to me. He sighs, and I know why.
I look young, about two weeks into twenty-one. So being carded is in the cards for me until the sun explodes or the drinking age is lowered. My money’s on the sun.
“I’m gonna need some ID, miss.” His eyes graze mine, too quick to capture.
I hand him a crumpled coupon from the inner pocket of my leather jacket.
“Ma’am, this isn’t—”
“I was raised by two left-handed hags.”
He looks at me, brow raised, and his expression goes slack, pupils dilating like those of the girls before. He’s no moron though, and his mind pulls away. My eyes widen, and it’s then the mental hooks extend, burrowing deep into his psyche.
“How, old...are you...?”
“Old enough, big guy. You’re a credit to your species.”
“Okay...enjoy your evening.” He extends the coupon back to me.
“Keep it,” I say, and he nods, opening the metallic door. I pass through, fingertips massaging my throbbing temples. Once you have their eyes, they’re malleable, susceptible to influence.
***
The bass rattles my bones. The room is dark, though I can’t remember true dark. Piles of people sway to the music, stamping their feet, grinding beneath the rays of green and yellow strobe lights. There’s a sexual energy here, and the air swells with alcohol and sweat.
My mind wanders to the jazz clubs of the 1930s, now that was music. Not this “march to the beat, everything’s all right” white noise. But hey, can’t have everything now, can you?
I shoulder my way through the sheep and lean on the bar, which doubles as an island in the center of the club. The hole of the donut. I smile at the barman, a thin man with his hair buzzed at his temples and wearing a suit vest. I order a whiskey. A spherical ice cube bobs in the amber poison, and I slide the barman a ten-dollar bill. Some professions garner a kind of default respect with me, and bartender is one of them.
On stage, a pair thrust their fists upward and the crowd does the same. The music stops. The lights die. The masses cheer in the silence. The beat drops again. Spotlights float along the crowd in a strobe of renewed chaos. The bar trembles with electronic music, and the manufactured sound travels through the soles of my boots.
I check my phone.
11:40 p.m.
Hannah Grace: Update?
—Looking over the menu.
Hannah Grace: It’s not a sit down kinda night, more drive-thru. Bodachi’s on my ass.
—Won’t be long.
Hannah Grace: Uh huh...
Bodachi will give me hell if I’m not back soon, and for good reason. He doesn’t have an affinity for sitting still given his cargo. Given, what we are. I give humans a lot of shit, but alongside the barman, Bodachi has my utmost respect. Few of us have the luxury of traveling in daylight, and it’s people like Bodachi who make it happen for us. Make it so my sister and I aren’t confined to the sewers or metros of some lone city. We get to explore, and Bodachi is our conductor, our family. Despite his mortality.
I close the phone and bring the whiskey to my lips. Bodachi says whiskey burns because it’s cleansing the soul of wretchedness. I try to imagine how that feels, a redemptive flame wiping away all misdeeds, mistakes...malformations, like me.
I’m elsewhere.
Far from the relentless booming of the digitized bass.
Hannah Grace and I in the field of dandelions outside our farmhouse.
Ma tends the garden, and Pa plows the fields with an ancient donkey whose name I can’t remember. I hear them speaking, and though I can’t make out the words, I smile.
The wind and sun on my face.
Warmth.
Light.
Hannah Grace looks to me, smiling as well. The definition of safety. Contentedness.
It’s funny really, how what was comfortable can turn on you. Can become the very thing capable of killing you in a world where you’re all but untouchable.
The ice shifts in my whiskey, and my eyes glide over the ocean-esque mass of human beings. A body of alcohol-laden water, its surface a thousand swaying hands shining purple-white-green in accordance with the heartbeat of the bass.
Pulse-pulse.
A quintet of university boys, raising shots at the bar. All smiles, collars popped.
Pulse-pulse.
A triangle of girls, sipping on done-up drinks of purple and blue, hands and glasses pulled inward, swaying to the music.
Pulse-pulse.
I close my eyes, lost in the mingle of heartbeats.
Pulse-pulse.
Sweat.
Pulse-pulse.
Heavy breathing.
Pulse-prey.
Prey-prey.
Preypreypreypreypreypreypre—
Saliva lines the corners of my lips.
Composure, Alice Ann. Composure.
The music rises, and I scan the sea for stragglers, for the sick calves wandering too far from the others.
A girl wearing male genitalia as a hat. The ribbon across her white dress reads: Bride to Be.
A man, lifted by two others, suit covered in vomit, holds his hand out to one of the bouncers, a rhinoceros of a man, who’s pointing at the door.
Sick, yes. Alone, no.
My stomach growls and I lean forward. My fangs lowering with the barman’s approach.
Shit.
“Fine over here, doll?”
“I’m good.”
“Well, let me know if—”
I don’t hear the rest.
On the outskirts of the crowd, a couple are in disagreement. Her head is in her hands, and when he places his own on her shoulder, she knocks it aside. He looks to the musicians on stage, begins nodding with the music. Head shifting to the woman, who’s weeping in her hands. I sip my whiskey, taking in the nightlife theater.
The man points to the bar, says something, and when she looks up at him, he goes in for a kiss. She knocks him away, arms flailing. I can’t read her lips, but she spits flame before walking off. My eyes follow her as she flashes her neon bracelet to the bouncer standing at a door bathed in green, then yellow, then green. He opens the door, and she passes through.
I smile.
The man sits at the bar opposite me. His brown hair tussled and laden with sweat, eyes bloodshot, drunk. His collar is ruffled, the hint of spilled alcohol running down his shirt. Breathing heavily. Neon bracelet on his wrist.
I run a hand through my hair, settle my stone-set gaze on him. He’s drumming his fingers on the bar, stops when he notices me. My eyes pull him in a moment, and then leave him stranded, chin in his hands. Stupid look on his stupid face. I don’t need him slipping into a trance across the bar and getting wheeled out on a stretcher. He circles the bar, and the old part of me, the naïve part, wonders if he’ll mind that I smell like the wooden pallets and plastic wrap of Bodachi’s big rig, but the thought dies with the remembrance that I am new, I am dead, and I am alive. I am, and I am not.
He sits next to me and waves over a confused bartender, who holds a shot in each hand.
“So,” he begins, glancing to where he and the woman once were. “I got these for someone else, but that’s not going so well.”
My stomach groans, and I feel his eyes all over me. My nails dig into the granite bar, fangs clenched.
He reeks of vodka.
I turn away, sip my whiskey.
His hand finds the small of my back, and my teeth clench, fangs bared.
“What do you say? Wanna—”
I turn to him, finding his eyes. “Your bracelet. What’s it for?”
He’s drooling, though I’m not sure whether it’s from libido, hypnosis, or both.
“V.I.P....re-entry...meet DJs after—”
“Give it to me.”
He slides it off, extends it my way.
I down the whiskey and rise to my feet.
“Why don’t you have those shots yourself?” I say, sliding my empty glass to the inner side of the bar. “And a double shot of whiskey every ten minutes until the barman refuses to serve you.”
“All...all right,” he says, or rather moans. I wave down the barman and slide him a one-hundred-dollar bill.
“Whatever he wants,” I say, nodding to the man downing back-to-back shots. “He’s my brother, and I’m his ride home. He thinks he can out-drink me, but I’m ex-military, baby.”
The barman laughs, and I wink, making my way to the metallic door beaming—yellow green yellow green.
The rhinoceros bouncer, formidable beard making up for the shine of his shaved head, stares down at me. He points to a neon bracelet on his wrist, his expression stone. I flash my own and curl a finger toward him. He bends low and I stare into his pale blues, watching his pupils grow. I bring my mouth to his neck, just below the ear, fists clenched to restrain myself from draining him then and there.
“No one in or out of this door unless they’re with me.”
I step away, and he’s nodding. Mouth hanging open like some thirsty dog.
The door wrenches open with a squeal.
***
Mist swells in the alley when my boots hit the glistening pavement. I lift my nose to trace her scent, stop at the click-click-clicking of nearby heels. She’s pacing, phone to her ear. Her other hand wiping tears from her face, mascara running in lines.
“I know, Mom. It’s hard, but I’m fine.”
Her fingers comb through her brown hair, lifting and letting it fall as she’s blinded by tears.
“I know, I love you too...I’m fine, really.” She lowers the phone and the screen fades to black. She stumbles, arms outstretched, clearly drunk, and slumps down to the curb. The iPhone click-clacking on the cement beneath her.
I glance at the rooftop above us.
Dinner with a view.
I’m a few feet away when she looks up at me, tears filling her eyes. And yet, she’s calm, as if expecting someone all along. She chuckles, sighs.
“You know those ads on social media? The really click-baity ones?”
I gauge the weight of the rusted fire escape protruding from the bricks above us, wondering if it will manage our combined weight.
My eyes find hers a moment, but she breaks away. Seems the iPhone is the superior hypnotist here.
“Kendall pumps her own gas and more ways celebs are just like us!” she says, arms in stilted movement, like some animatronic mascot at some touristy carnival. “It’s bullshit, all of it...like, how you can lie to your family when they ask if you’re okay. Like, what I’m doing tonight, at some club I can’t even stand...”
You okay? You’ve been off lately...
I lower myself to the curb beside her.
The hell am I doing?
“And what is that exactly? What you’re up to tonight.”
Her chin slips from her hand before she speaks.
“Oh, you know, randomly messaged one of my matches for a drink. No strings, just booze and a quick lay, to not think for a goddamn second.”
I resist asking what a match is. Humans of today are strange.
The bluest moon looms over us, and my stomach wrenches. “Thinking is like life, some insatiable hunger you’ll never quite satisfy.”
She chuckles, runs a hand through her hair. The neon wristband catching in her brunette-locks.
“My brother preached something similar, that nothing matters. And you know what? He killed himself a year ago tonight, but for someone who thinks nothing matters, well, that’s the only logical choice, right?”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’ve had a hell of a year without him. My studies are slipping, I’m late more and more to my job. I don’t know, it’s just, if nothing matters, if nothing really matters, then being alive is the biggest loophole in the universe and we should take advantage of it. That’s what I should’ve told him, what I would’ve told him if he’d called that night. He sat alone in his apartment, feeling that regardless of nothing mattering he was a failure. That he’d let everyone down. Why leave a note at all, Michael, if nothing matters?”
That word...alive.
Of a life once had, in the sunlight. Something beyond sleeping between stacks of pallets and animal feed. Something beyond driving cross-country with a sister I’ve known two lifetimes but can’t talk to about these longings. Of wanting to feel the sun, hell, even see it just one more time, fully aware of the consequences. A warm bath, a warm hearth, a warm anything at all. If only there were another way to find it—warmth—that holiest of life’s luxuries. Somewhere other than the crimson blood of a fresh kill.
She hasn’t stopped speaking. The intoxicated don’t need much prodding.
“...you can sit and whine about your life, but most things you have a say in.” She wipes her tears away. “I think the key is just doing something about it, and I know that, but I didn’t have a say in my brother’s death. And people just expect you to get on with it. People, with their white teeth and car payments. Their nice, spotless, garage-kept lives.”
“I lost my parents,” I say, surprising myself. “Seems like another life.”
She inhales, stares. “I—I’m sorry. I had no idea how to react at my brother’s funeral. I just stared at the shell that was, wasn’t, and used to be Michael. He looked more peaceful than he’d been in his entire life. How did they pass? If you don’t mind me asking?”
“Illness.”
The lie is automatic.
I see the old Virginian farmhouse now, I think it was 1830—no, 31.
“Someone’s outside,” Ma said as Pa got in from putting the donkey away. Such a sweet soul, our mother. The epitome of Southern Belle, like you’d find illustrated in some mass-produced textbook. Ma opened the door to someone I couldn’t quite see, saying, “Well, of course you can come in, dear. It’s frozen out. What kind of question is— “
It was fast. Crawling along the walls, mouth unhinged, fangs bared.
When I woke, it was dark—dark, but the candle still burning on Hannah Grace and I’s bedside table. I sat up in bed, staring down at my parents—drained husks of who they once were. Blood everywhere, detailing where they were thrown and dragged along the walls in dark, broad strokes and strewn along the hardwood floor, like the hush of an abandoned church post-black sabbath.
My once-gray nightgown coated in crimson; a dried river of flaked blood running from my neck to my paler-than-usual skin.
Hannah Grace and I faced one another, knees pulled in, like how we used to talk by candlelight after bath and supper. She stared at me, mouthing my name. Her skin was pale, like my own, concern in her eyes, glowing in the darkness. She turned to our bedroom window, the glass and wood bent and shattered outward, where the stranger Ma invited in must have escaped. She tiptoed over our slain parents, as if not to disturb them, and got into bed with me.
I take it most older siblings are like that, when no mother figure is around.
We sat there three days with them, crawling beneath our beds when the sun rose as if by instinct. Its light leaving us exhausted, geriatric, and debilitated as it looked down on us. The yelps of coyotes filling the cracks of the passing days. The risen moon coaxing them in from the Virginian hills when darkness fell. We sat there starving, until one night we dragged Ma and Pa’s mangled bodies to the dandelions behind the farmhouse. And when the coyotes came scrounging around, picking at their dead flesh, we found out what we were. Fast, dangerous, feral...things of unholy legend.
“I don’t think we’re equipped to deal with something so permanent.” She glances up from her phone. “I mean, what do you do when you’re staring at death like that?”
“Don’t blink,” I say, as if the answer had been chambered for a millennium. “If you don’t use your pain to press forward, you give it fuel to override you.”
“But it gives him life,” she says, staring at the white bricks of the nightclub. “He’s still with me, in a way, when I ache thinking of him.”
I’m not sure I’m capable of crying, given what I am, but I think I come close.
“I don’t know, maybe life’s a song full of more downs than ups, and we just tap our feet until we die. I’m Julia, by the way,” she says with a smile, the lines of blackened mascara dry now.
“Alice Ann.”
We shake hands, somewhat awkwardly after all that.
“You mentioned a sister?”
“Hannah Grace.” I sigh, elbows on my knees, chin in my hands. “We used to lie in an ocean of dandelions when we were little, while Pa plowed the field and Ma hung the clothes to dry in the middle of summer. Trying to match our breathing. Trying to synchronize the rhythm of our hearts. Seems stupid now, but then? Let’s just say I haven’t felt as alive as I did back then.”
“That doesn’t sound stupid at all.”
“Just seems like a dream...too good to have been true.”
Her mouth opens, closes again. She turns to me, says, “Wanna get out of here? I think I’m gonna head home, put on a movie or something. I’m sure my date’s long gone. We’ve been out here awhile.”
I see Hannah Grace in her denim jacket, clutching her phone, pacing the length of the big rig, Bodachi yelling inaudible curses at me from the outskirts of the city.
He’s gonna kill me.
“I think I’ll stay awhile,” I say, rising to my feet.
A hand on my arm.
I turn and she extends a receipt, a number scrawled across it in pink lipstick.
“This is me, if you ever wanna talk. Nice meeting you, Alice Ann.”
“You as well.”
“No, really. Thank you.” She’s crying again. “Thank you.”
I stare at the glistening pavement, take the receipt from her.
“It doesn’t stay so dark and dreary,” I lie. “And I know you know that, but sometimes, it’s nice to hear it from someone else.”
She smiles, as her phone flashes her driver’s ETA: 3 minutes.
“You’re one of the good ones,” she says, and I almost believe her.
A gray Civic pulls up to the rear entrance of the club, and it’s then I’m aware of the bass still exploding behind us.
She opens the rear passenger door, spins around, smiles, and forms a phone with her pinkie and thumb. Mouths: Call me.
The door closes, and the sedan sputters off.
Interesting night.
I beat on the club’s back door, and the rhinoceros cracks it ajar.
“You can’t come in this—”
I flash him my band.
“Miss, you have to re-enter from the fro—”
I meet his eyes.
“Open, says me.”
He does. Of course he does.
***
At the bar, Julia’s match has his head in his hands. Hair more disheveled than ever, the crowd still a churning ocean of multicolored lights. The pounding bass a metronome.
The barman walks over, pouring red syrup into a tall glass filled with orange liquid.
“Your brother’s done. I should’ve kicked him out a while ago.”
“I appreciate that, I really do. Maybe next year, buddy.” I clap my arm around his shoulder and pause, address the bartender again. “What’s that you’re making?”
“Tequila Sunrise,” he says, replacing the smaller bottle beneath the bar.
Of course it is.
“Can I get one for the road?”
He raises a brow.
“Sorry, bad phrasing.”
He sighs, but the twenty I slide him seems to change his mind.
He fills a tall glass with ice, and I surveil the crowd. Smiles all around. Carefree sheep in carefree skins living carefree lives. But no, perhaps that’s not it at all. Maybe this is just them instinctively crawling beneath their beds as dawn brightens a dark sky.
The drink is served in a tall glass, red syrup trickling down through the orange like blood. My stomach groans, and a sharp pain shoots through me. I need to leave before this becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet.
I bring the drink to my lips and decide that I don’t like the taste of the sun. I’m happy with my life, if it can be called that.
Yes, my life.
I replace the cocktail and laugh in that breathy way I did when I was alive. You know, alive alive, and throw another ten on the bar. The barman nods, and I rise with my not-brother, who struggles on wobbly legs.
“Come on, James,” I say, pulling the first name my mind hands me. “Time to go, loser.”
My phone buzzes.
Shitshitshit.
Seven texts and a voicemail.
Hannah Grace: Seriously, Alice Ann, what the fuck?
—Sorrysorrysorry getting a box. Bringing you some.
Hannah Grace: Bodachi is pissed.
—I’m sure.
Hannah Grace: Just get back ASAP, you know how he gets.
—Hannah?
Hannah Grace: Uh, yeah?
—I love you. I’m glad I didn’t wake up alone that night in Virginia.
Hannah Grace: Love you too. Get home...weirdo.
***
I smile as we leave, the match’s and my boots sloshing through the puddles left from the day’s earlier rains. My thoughts of the sun, daylight, and warmth left rotting in that thrumming maelstrom.
I wait until we’re in the dark of the alley before slinging the sedated sheep over my shoulder, climbing the slick bricks of the nearest brownstone. Clambering for the only warmth I’ll ever need.