Page 68 of Only Fangs

“No. It sounded soon, but not immediate.”

“OK. I’ll do some digging.”

“Me too.” I echo her tone of conviction.

“You will do no such thing.” She reaches out a hand, curling it tightly around my forearm.

I almost step backwards at the force of her words. “Why not?”

“Because you are a human pretending to be a vampire and you will do nothing to draw attention to yourself. Nothing.” She spits a little on the final word. “Promise me.”

“I… I… promise,” I manage to stutter, my words catching in my throat partly from fear and partly from the fact that the fierce look in her eye is making me feel a little funny.

“Good.” She releases her grip on my arm and I rub it absentmindedly. “Did I hurt you?”

“Oh, no,” I reply. I don’t want to admit that I was just touching the spot where she’d touched me. Even in my own head that sounds like lunacy.

We decide to head back to the main room to hang around and see what people might say when they think they are among friends.

Half an hour later and I’m bored out of my mind, listening to ancient vampires bitching and moaning about the state of today’s youth. Some of these “youth” transpire to be over a century old, which I suppose is young if you’re immortal.

“What would you do?” I ask Ari. “If you had all this money?”

“And all this wisdom accumulated over the centuries,” she adds. “I’d at least try to do something good with it.”

“Me too. Just think of the problems these guys could solve. But instead they’re obsessed with marrying their children to their distant cousins and eating the same canapés while they sip the same wine with the same people they’ve socialised with since the dawn of time.”

“They do invest in companies though,” she adds. “I mean, I’m totally in agreement with the sentiment, but some of these guys are trying to do something.”

“Aren’t they just trying to make more money so they have something to gloat about with their stuffy friends?”

“I thought you were the relentlessly positive one,” she says with a wry smile. “What’s happened to golden retriever Brody?”

I shrug. It’s not easy to stay positive in the face of all this bullshit.

Chapter 35

Ari

It isn’t that I don’t believe what Brody overheard. It’s that I do believe it and I don’t want him to freak out. I’ll have to do some digging, find out what is really happening here. It must be a small splinter group who engage in this most illicit of sports. It would be far too big a scandal if anyone found out. Especially if there was even a hint of this leaked to the press. Vampires have a bad enough reputation as it is, this would smash the fragile truce my species has made with the humans to smithereens.

Andrei, for all his terrible views and history of doing especially onerous shit, does have one redeeming quality; he’s opposed to the hunt mentality which has plagued our kind for centuries. There’s no need for us to hunt. For food we have Sanguis which is actually more thirst quenching than human blood, and for pleasure – if bloodletting is the kind of thing you’re in to – there are hordes of willing humans who will line up and beg you to take a little sip. Hell, if you just like the thrill of the hunt itself, try that fake scent hunting. Or just take up fell running. Whatever takes your fancy. Only those vampires who are sadists would hunt humans.

I’m still mulling things over when I spot a familiar face in the crowd. He’s tall, especially by vampire standards, with a shock of very dark curls. Teddy Johnson is younger than me by about five decades, but he used to hang with me and Kitty Marion and the others when he was barely out of his teenage years, with his smooth waxy newbie face and an absolute conviction in what is right and wrong. I wouldn’t put him amongst this group of traditionalists.

Teddy raises his hand in greeting when he sees me watching him. He’s talking to an older woman, one who looks like she’s almost seventy. I do the mental maths. That isn’t possible, there are no vampires older than five hundred. Unless… Is it possible she’s one of the Twelve? The first vampire, the one who made a pact with the devil and cursed my species, turned twelve people. People who had been alive and became vampires. They are the parents of all the others, the Adams and Eves of my kind.

Teddy appears at my elbow. “Long time no see, Ms Haywood.”

“Hey Teddy. It’s been a while. This is Brody. Brody this is Teddy, he’s an old friend.”

“Pleasure,” Teddy says and tips his head in greeting. There is no attempt at a hand shake and I sigh inwardly in relief.

“Was that...?” I motion towards the old woman who is now talking to Mrs Gallagher, a wizened old hand stroking her cheek.

“Marjorie? Yep.”

“Wow.” I don’t know what else to say.