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To understand why Wolfe was sitting on a ridge overlooking the house where he had lived for years instead of sitting inside smoking a joint and drinking beers with Eric, the Harris boys and the rest, you had to understand about Stephanie.
Stephanie wasn’t his girlfriend, not really. Sure, they’d dated on and off again in high school. She’d been his first kiss, when he was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half. Back then she had a few inches of height on him, which he quickly regained and overtook once he hit his freshman year. She’d taught him how to smoke, and he’d been the one who provided the booze (a bottle of Grey Goose, filched from his parent’s liquor cabinet, mixed with Hansen’s Diet Root beer) the first time she ever got drunk. By sophomore year, he’d introduced Stephane to Eric (Wolfe refused to call Eric Steel Fang. He couldn’t even think that name without rolling his eyes), Charles, and the Harris boys.
By junior year, she was one of them, as much as anyone else. Friday nights when Wolfe would drive his pickup out to the desert to drink and shoot off guns or fireworks if anyone had any and look at the stars and talk about what they were gonna do when they graduated, Stephanie would ride in the front with him, and when they lay in the back as the temperature dropped enough to need the sleeping bags, more often than not, she’d be right next to him, sharing her warmth.
She wasn’t his girlfriend, not really, but she was his friend. Sure, they’d hooked up a few times, when they’d both had too much to drink, and then the next day they’d admit it was a mistake and go back to being just friends. She wasn’t the kind of girl his parents really thought much of. Her family had lived around Red Rock for a long time, in one of those sun-bleached prefabs with the low chain-link fence to keep the dogs in, threaded through with plastic straps and pinwheels and banners with brightly colored quail and hummingbirds on it with sayings like “Love” or “Home.” Her mom had worked for the school system for years, something in the superintendent’s office. Her dad had been on disability as long as Wolfe had known him, a friendly and more often than not drunk presence eternally camped in front of the television. He’d found her home a foreign place, and maybe she felt the same way about his house.
“Your house has rooms that don’t do anything except hold furniture that you only have because you have the room for it,” she said, and he couldn’t admit she wasn’t right. But when they were together, it seemed like they came from the same place in every way that mattered. Stephanie and Eric, and the Harris boys, and him, all hanging out together. Other people came and went, like Brenda, but the five of them were pretty regular. When he thought about those days of his senior year, it was always the five of them who stuck in his mind.
“What are you gonna do after graduation?” they’d ask, lying in the back of his truck staring up at the sky, as if trying to bounce ideas off each other and come up with a plan of their own.
“Maybe get a job at Fidesun or whatever’s moving in that big complex down off Arroyo drive,” she said.
“I’m thinking about joining the Marines,” Jay Harris said, taking a drag.
“Really?” she asked, reaching for the joint.
He exhaled. “Maybe. Gotta lay off the weed a while though. I’m pretty sure they make you take a piss test.”
“Yeah,” she said.
And they fell silent, listening to the music coming from the cab of his truck. In Eric’s truck, Eric and Keith Harris were having the same kind of conversation, along with Brenda and a girl who moved away before the end of the year.
“Maybe I’ll go to college,” Stephanie said. “Mom thinks I should get a teaching degree.”
“You like teaching?” Wolfe had asked, turning over to look at her.
Stephanie shrugged. “I don’t like the idea of working for Walmart forever.”
No one asked Wolfe what he would do, of course. It was a given that he would go to college, and he did. It was assumed that he would at least apply to Dad’s alma matter, and he did. And he did get in, despite lackluster grades and SAT scores, on account of Dad’s generous donations and a special word with the admissions board.
He’d lasted less than a year. The first semester he’d failed most of his classes, and the second semester he stopped showing up in favor of partying and sleeping late and hitting on hot co-eds who seemed to find his complete disregard for academics alluring, though not a single one of them so much as liked his social media posts after he took the “academic probation” as a hint and simply dropped out. He was happier out of college.
His parents were less happy. He’d derailed their plan for his life. And what was he going to do now? Sit around and smoke pot all day? That wasn’t why we set up this trust fund, son, you were supposed to make something of yourself.
He told them he wanted to start a business, and that got them off his back for a while, but selling supplements never really took off. Then he heard about real estate investing, and decided to try that for a while, but he got burned pretty bad. Things might have continued like this, but at that point, his parents moved and decided that they were going to hire him as a caretaker for “Wolfe Ranch” as they liked to call it.
He’d gone back to sitting around and smoking pot all day, which was a pretty great way to use a trust fund, if you asked him.
And then Raoul had happened, not just to him, but to a whole bunch of people. Raoul was like a random outbreak of vampirism. Eric was first. Then Wolfe. Their stories weren’t that different. Some guy attacked them, turned them into vampires, said if they were still alive in six months, he’d find them again. Only Raoul never found them. Some vampire hunter got to him. Wolfe had heard about another guy they knew from high school which Raoul had got too, only the guy died for some reason, and Brenda said she heard he tried to cure himself by going out into the sunlight. Another guy had been staked by a group of these vampire hunters who met at the bowling alley, but it wasn’t any one he and Eric and Brenda knew. They had found the group though, and decided it was fun to chase them down. It was only fair, right?
Those were pretty fun times, hunting vampire hunters. By then Brenda had been turned. Eventually the Harris brothers asked to be made into vampires too, and they had a regular Lost Boys thing happening at Wolfe Ranch. When they all got too hungry, they’d go hunting and find someone to eat. That would last for a few weeks until the hunger got too bad again. They were always careful to pick people who wouldn’t get missed, the kind of people who never called the cops no matter what.
Mercedes had never liked being a part of it, but she had never really been a part of their group, so they let her go when she stopped hanging around. Eric sometimes talked about “taking care of” her, but it was one thing to kill people when you were so hungry you couldn’t help yourself, and another thing to hunt someone down who was one of your kind, even if she didn’t like being a vampire. He didn’t think Eric was serious, anyway. He was just talking tough.
But it wasn’t the same as it had been, before graduation.
“Sometimes I wish I’d never said yes,” Keith Harris said once. “I mean, it’s great to be a vampire, but, you know, I think about what might have been.”
“Yeah, it’s not for everyone,” Wolfe agreed, feeling guilty, even though it had been Eric who turned Keith. Wolfe liked being a vampire. He liked being able to see in the dark, to run faster than he ever had, to have strength his human self only dreamed of. And when you chased someone down, caught them and sank your teeth into their flesh, drinking their blood—it was almost like sex.
The day Crispin showed up, he and Eric had spent most of the day playing video games, just hanging out, every day like the summer vacation after graduation, except that it never ended. It had been daytime, though it was hard to tell. The days and nights kind of ran in one on another. The living room, like all the other rooms in the house, had all the interior windows covered over so that no light came in. Except for the constant hunger, it had been a pretty good life. They still went hunting, but if you didn’t kill the person you ate, there was a lot of screaming and flailing. And if you did kill the person, well, that had its own risks. People were starting to notice. Posters went up around town with pictures of some of their meals on them. Even the most worthless losers seemed to have family and friends who started asking awkward questions. Not to mention all the times the police came to the door to “just to ask a few questions.”
Jay Harris got a wistful look when they were watching television and that ad came on recruiting people for the Marines. One more thing he’d never do. Stephanie had come over once or twice, but it wasn’t the same anymore. She’d been promoted at Walmart and had to be up early, whereas their nights often didn’t even start until ten p.m. Then Brenda had stopped hanging around, and that wasn’t surprising either, because she’d grown tired of the bachelor house lifestyle and had moved in with a bunch of girls she knew.
And then Crispin had showed up and made it fun again. Wolfe and Eric still looked as though they just graduated high school, but Crispin looked even younger, like he was just a couple of years out of puberty, maybe seventeen at the most. He had a British accent, very pale skin and blue eyes. He was all elbows and knees and protruding joints as if he hadn’t quite grown into his body. They hadn’t seen him before, but there had been a lot of people that Raoul had made.
They hunted together. Keith and Jay didn’t like Crispin much. They thought Crispin was, quote, “a sick fuck.” Jay was totally opposed to Crispin’s idea about the people in the mine, and Keith pretty much did whatever his brother wanted. Wolfe wasn’t surprised when the Harris boys up and left one day. Wolfe wasn’t sure what happened, but people grew apart sometimes.
Crispin had some dope ideas. He was the one who bought the plane, and the one who knew how to fly it. Eric had freaked out at first when Crispin said what the plane was for, but he’d warmed to the idea. As Wolfe said, it did make sense if you thought about it. They were running out of vampire hunters to kill. Crispin talked about vampires he used to know and stuff they used to do, making it sound like he was older than any of them, and maybe he was. Unlike the Harris brothers, Crispin always seemed to have enough money to do what he wanted. Unlike Brenda, he didn’t flinch when it came time to kill someone. Unlike Mercedes, he didn’t hate being a vampire.
It might have been fine, but then Stephanie had come back into Wolfe’s life.
“Hey, can I come crash at your place for a while?” she’d said. “My sister’s boyfriend got her pregnant and she needs a place to stay so my parents want to give her my room.”
“Sure,” he’d said. And he’d meant it.
She’d slipped into their life as if she’d always been there. It wasn’t like Wolfe Ranch didn’t have enough rooms. He’d walk into the kitchen and find her making herself a peanut butter sandwich to take to work. He’d wake up in the evening and hear her showering. The two of them would sit in the kitchen downstairs, swiveling back and forth on the bar stools and she’d tell them stories about the people at work, who was sleeping with whom, who got fired, who was hoping to get promoted, just like she used to when they were still in high school. She was like a little dose of normal into what had become a really weird life.
“What are you doing with your life here?” she’d asked him quietly one night. It was four in the morning, and she was getting dressed for work, slipping hoops into her earlobes. “What ever happened to college? Weren’t you going to be a doctor someday?”
“That was before I became a vampire,” he said. “You want to join us?”
Stephanie sighed and shook her head. She’d been wearing the same clothes she’d worn in high school, and they still fit well, though they didn’t look as good with her uniform vest over them, and the lines on her face made her appear as if she was closer to forty than twenty. “I’m working sixty hours a week, and my parents really need the money I bring in. My mom’s arthritis medicine costs half my paycheck and insurance won’t cover it any more. Plus, there’s my sister and her baby. How could I support them if I couldn’t go outside during the day?”
“Night shift?”
“The night shift starts and ends when it’s still light out sometimes. And that’s only if you can get those shifts. You don’t always get to pick,” Stephanie said. “They schedule you when they schedule you, and if you can’t get someone to cover your shift, you get fired.”
“I never thought of that,” Wolfe said. There were times when their lives were so different that he wondered how they had gone to the same high school, how it was that they lived just a few miles from each other. They might has well have been a different species.
He’d summed up their conversation to Eric and Crispin. They got it. They understood. She didn’t want to be a vampire? They were cool with it.
And then one day he’d come home from a Costco run and found Stephanie dead on the couch.
“Hey, guess who’s gonna be a vampire,” Eric said, not turning away from the video game he was playing. “Crispin bit her.”
“Dude, seriously?” he’d shouted at Crispin, and then at Eric, “What the hell, man? We talked about this!”
“Oh, did we?” Crispin asked in fake innocence. “Because I don’t see why she’s here if she’s not a meal and she’s not one of our kind. You’re not the only one who gets to make vampires.”
“She’s my friend!” Wolfe said. “And she didn’t want to turn! What the hell are her parents gonna say?”
“If they complain, I can take care of them,” Crispin said.
That’s when he punched Crispin. And Crispin had punched back. And then they were fighting for real. And maybe Wolfe shouldn’t have gone for his gun. But Stephanie’s mom had always been so nice to him, and her dad wasn’t a bad guy, even if he did sit on the couch all day and tell stupid jokes. But this was Stephanie. He’d known her half his life. She was his oldest friend. Who the hell was this foreign prick to even make a joke about killing Stephanie’s parents? This was Stephanie!
Back in high school, he wouldn’t have ever pulled a gun on his friend, even as a joke. His dad had drilled gun safety into him from when he was a small child. He’d get scolded if he even pointed a toy gun at people. But gun safety was for people who couldn’t survive a gunshot wound. Gun safety wasn’t for people who turned his friends into vampires against their will. He’d grabbed the first gun he found, a .357 handgun his dad had given him for his eighteenth birthday, and he’d pointed it at Crispin. “You don’t get to decide who stays in my house.”
“Let’s not be hasty, Wolfe,” Crispin said, in his ridiculous accent, and he put his hand over the end of the gun as if it would stop a bullet. Crispin, with his bulging eyes and protruding Adam’s apple, like the guy cast as the dorky nerd who got picked on. “I’m certain you don’t want to do that.”
“Oh yeah? Maybe I do,” he said, enjoying having that backstabbing asshole on the other end of a gun.
“You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m in charge.” Crispin went from dorky to ice cold. “You don’t tell me what to do. I tell you the way things are going to be.”
That’s when Wolfe pulled the trigger.
The bullet went right through Crispin’s hand and into his chest. He got a second shot off, but it missed the guy completely, because Crispin’s eyes went from cold to positively snake-like, and he bared his fangs as he ripped the gun from Wolfe’s hand. The next thing he knew, Crispin had unloaded the rest of the clip into Wolfe.
“Be cool, man, be cool,” Eric was saying, pulling Crispin away.
Wolfe had slumped on the ground, feeling the carpet squelch with his own blood. He felt the bullet holes in his front, and then reached around behind himself and felt the giant exit wounds, already closing over as his vampiric body healed itself.
Wolfe got to his feet. Thanks to Crispin and his plane, they had plenty of blood these days, so he healed quickly. He’d gotten in his truck and gone for a drive.
He thought Crispin would apologize when he came back. They’d be mad for a while, and then they’d get over it. He was still pissed off about Crispin turning Stephanie, but no one had asked Wolfe if he wanted to become a vampire either. She’d get over it. Crispin would apologize, and when Stephanie rose, they’d teach her how to hunt, and everything would be fine again.
But when he came back, he couldn’t enter the property. He couldn’t even get as far as the driveway. He tried different entrances, but it was like an invisible border that he couldn’t even drive across. He’d get close and then slam on the brake, as unable to keep going as if he were driving towards a brick wall. It was the weirdest thing.
That first dawn, he’d had to take his sleeping bag and head out to a cave he knew of to find a safe place to spend the day. He came back at dusk, but still couldn’t get in. He’d gone from surprised, to angry, to indignant, to resigned. Eric wouldn’t even answer his texts.
Kicked out of his own house.
He was so angry; he was tempted to call his parents. But his parents had never approved of Eric, or of Brenda, or of anyone else in the house. A bad crowd, they’d called them. If he called them and explained he got kicked out of his own house, there would be more questions that he didn’t want to answer.
And then he remembered the old adage, “don’t get mad, get even.”
Eric and Crispin weren’t the only game in town. There was that other guy, El Patron, and that tall hardass who had kicked the shit out of him that one time a few years ago the night they drained Wayne. He’d wondered how to find them, but they found him first.
Sure, he’d surrender. Sure, he’d been thinking about joining them anyway. Oh, hello Brenda. Of course, she’d vouch for him, wouldn’t she? Yeah, I’ll call you “Sire” if you’re gonna insist. Sure. Sure, cool man. But there’s something I want you to do for me.
Turns out El Patron really liked the idea of helping him get his house back.