Page 26 of Nosfer-Meet You

TAKE THE SOCKS, LEAVE THE GUITAR

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 1995

“Dude, I’ve been trying to call you all night. Why weren’t you at home?” Marcus opens the door to my fridge in search of a bottle of O-Positive only to find the shelves completely bare. He sneers, his face illuminated by the sickly glow, then slams the door shut. The kitchen is basically two counters and a fridge exactly five feet away from the sofa, and the bedroom is smaller than a closet. Okay, so my apartment is basically a shoebox in Hell’s Kitchen, but at least I don’t have to share it with anyone.

“Had a gig,” I say from my spot on the ratty sofa while I pluck out a few notes on my acoustic guitar. “I told you that. Somethin’ like twenty times, even. And yet you didn’t show your ugly face. Why is that?” I tilt my head at him and grin, showing my fangs.

His dark hair falls in his eyes. He’s looking paler than usual. He always looks like shit, but tonight’s worse. According to Elias, our leader, Marcus used to be quite the dapper guy back in the day. Finely tailored coats, polished boots. The works. But since the eighties, the guy’s fallen on some hard times.

Now he’s been into the whole “grunge” look. Ripped jeans. Messy hair he’s tried to bleach like Kurt Cobain, but he can never get it right, so it just looks weird. Baggy sweatshirts from Goodwill.

I point my chin at him. “When’s the last time you fed?”

Marcus shrugs. “Last night. But Viv just broke up with me, so … ended up feeding on some junkie. Bad idea, obviously.” He hops up to sit on my kitchen counter.

I place my guitar down in my lap and let out a deep sigh. “Seriously? Again? You need to stop dating girls who don’t even like you,” I say. “Good riddance. Find an actual vampire to sleep with next time.”

Marcus grumbles. Yeah, yeah. I know. He’s sick of me getting on his ass about dating humans. But what’s the point in getting romantically involved with someone who has the lifespan of a mosquito?

“But her blood was exquisite, Scotty. If you only tasted her. Like the finest vintage,” he says, kissing his fingers.

I roll my eyes. It’s like this every time. Marcus gets a new girlfriend, feeds from her every chance he gets, and then the girl decides she’d rather go be with a lawyer or a doctor or someone else who can give her an actual future.

My apartment door swings open a second time, another irritating reminder that I really need to fix those fucking locks. Most of the fine folks in this apartment building are other vampires, so it’s pretty much just one big nest … but still. I don’t want my coven barging in here whenever they want. A man’s got to have his sanctuary.

“I see I’m not going to get any rest tonight,” I say as Ava stalks into the living room, clad in her black combat boots. She’s decked out in a black mini skirt and camisole top with a plaid shirt wrapped around her torso. Her hair, which is normally blacker than the void, is now bleached blond and tucked underneath a knit hat.

“Come on, losers. There’s a feeding frenzy down at the docks,” she announces like she didn’t just knock my door off its hinges. I stare at her. Marcus does the same. Then he hops off the counter and makes his way toward the door.

I pick up my guitar and strum out a flat chord. “Seriously? How about no, Ava? Feeding frenzies always end up bad, and you know it.”

Ava stomps her feet like a child while Marcus lingers in the doorway. “But I’m hungry and I need a treat. Jason dumped me,” she says, pouting her dark lips at me. No matter how much time has passed, Ava will never stop trying to get me to sleep with her. She’s sweet and fun but absolutely not my type. And besides, I have another hard rule I follow: No sleeping with coven. Ever. They’re family, not sustenance. Of any kind. That also means no feeding from each other, either, like some of the other weirdo covens do. They’re freaky, those vamps, and after feeding on each other for eons they started turning into literal monsters. No, thank you.

Marcus lingers over Ava’s shoulder and nips at her earlobe. “Aw, twins! I just got dumped, too!”

She spins around and hits him in his chest, and he stumbles back, pretending to be hurt. “Not the same. Vivienne breaks up with you every time she gets her period. Probably because she’s afraid you’ll bleed her dry.”

These two may be family, but they’re also disgusting. You’d be forgiven for thinking they were fourteen and not, like, fourteen hundred years old.

My brows pinch together. “Hey. Viv knows what you are?”

The two of them howl and cackle in the hallway like a pair of hyenas.

“H-Hey! Answer the question, Marcus!” I call out. But they continue to laugh and pretend they don’t hear me.

“Let’s dip, Scotty,” Ava finally yells from the hallway. “Harriett is waiting for us.”

Harriett. Now there’s one way to get me to go down to a feeding frenzy at the docks, and that’s by mentioning my little sister’s name. If she’s down there, then that’s where I want to be, too. After what happened at the last frenzy, I need to make sure she gets back to the nest safely. I put my guitar down and jump off the couch to join them.

“Fine,” I say, and slam the door shut behind me. Good thing I don’t have anything worth stealing. Last time thieves raided the place, they took a pair of socks but left my damn guitar. Go figure.

By the time we get to the docks, most of the vamps have gorged themselves on the best of the lot. Homeless folks drained dry litter the area, their corpses mere decorations at this point. Like discarded plastic flamingos strewn across a sad little lawn. I hate this. I told the coven that I wouldn’t do frenzies anymore. I’m happy to bum some blood bags from my source at the hospital and eat the subway rats when shit gets dire. But this? This is depraved. The work of actual monsters.

“But we are monsters,” Ava says, rolling her eyes as she saunters past me. “Get used to it, baby bat.”

Right. Ava’s a mind reader. I always forget about that. Me? No cool powers besides enthralling humans. Every baby vamp is afforded that particular talent so they can feed. But Ava’s ancient and unapologetically vampiric in every sense of the word. Doesn’t only eat the homeless—she’s killed police officers on patrol. Teenagers necking in the park after dark. She has absolutely no scruples, that one. Some would say she’s evil, the work of the Devil himself, but she’s evil in the same way a great white shark is.

Marcus prefers monogamous feeding. Likes dating women to have access to their veins whenever he wants, and it’s worked well for the past few hundred years. When he locks eyes with a woman by one of the trashcan fires, her face smeared with blood from a recent kill, I know we won’t see him for the rest of the week. He makes a beeline over to her, a feral grin plastered on his face.