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4
Irving
During the day that followed the matchmaking event, Irving found he could think of one thing and one thing only: Sage.
“What does it mean when a woman comprises the entirety of one’s mind?” he asked the corpse he’d just recently positioned on a stainless steel preparation table. Being that the individual was deceased, Irving got no response.
As he proceeded with the embalming process, Irving revisited his interaction with Sage, painstakingly questioning everything he’d done. Had he freaked her out with his obsessive ways?
I shouldn’t have adjusted her earring,he realized.If only it hadn’t been so horribly crooked.
The overanalyzations cluttered his mind until he felt as though they would burst through his skull and scatter about the embalming room.
“I can’t cope with these confounded compulsions!” he cried to the corpse. To most, it would seem macabre to share one’s thoughts with a dead person, but for Irving, it was soothing. Nobody listened better than a decedent. “If only I could find a way of resisting the urge to give into my anxious routines,” he continued. “Why must I insist on flicking every switch at least three times before I leave it be?”
Because if you don’t, you’ll hear those foreboding knocks and Aiken will meet his horrible doom once more.It was the voice in his head that answered. Irving pushed it aside, instead deciding to focus his mental energy on the embalming he was performing.
His efforts were to no avail. This time the thoughts that troubled him pertained to Sage’s husband, Mark. She’d told him he’d filled out the application forms without her knowledge.
“What sort of monstrous man pawns off his wife to a vampire?” Irving questioned. The more he thought about it, the more it angered him. Sage was an impeccable woman. She was warm, understanding, and beautiful. How could a man want anything more? Horrible realizations began flooding Irving’s mind. What if Mark had been trying to rid himself of Sage because he was screwing another woman behind her back? Or, maybe he was one of those sick pigs who liked to watch women making love to vampires.
Pervs like that see vampires the same way they see their wives: as nothing more than pretty machines,Irving fumed.I’d eat them all if they didn’t taste so foul.
Having left the flask of blood in the pocket of his jacket, which was currently hanging on a hook in his office, Irving found himself beginning to feel the relentless tug of hunger. The flask was the perfect method of disguise for his daily supply of blood. Over the course of the thousands of years he’d spent living with a constant craving for blood, Irving found that frequent small doses of the substance throughout the day would keep him from going mad from starvation. His long years of living with the vampire curse had caused him to grow accustomed to the hunger. He now found he only needed to feed about once a day to remain satiated. In the event he neglected to feed, the hunger would consume him, making him irritable and causing his vampire features to become more prominent.
“DAMN YOU, MARK!” he shrieked.
His fingertips began to tingle as his nails turned to talons. He gnashed his teeth as they grew to a size his mouth could not contain. With one vicious, yet precise movement, Irving incised the neck of the dead man with his scalpel quality claws.
In order to embalm a decedent, the blood had to be drained to make room for the embalming solution. Irving knew the dead man’s blood would not satiate his hunger. Even so, it was the thought of the blood flowing that appealed to him.
After raising the jugular vein, Irving eagerly cut into it. The door of the embalming room flew open just as he was in the midst of coaxing the stagnant blood from the corpse using a pair of spring forceps.
“Looking for this, brother of mine?” Irving spun around to find Cameron waving a flask smugly before him. “You really need to remember to feed regularly,” he added. “The only way an experienced vampire like yourself could be this bothered by hunger is if you’ve been neglecting your feeding routine.” In a second, Irving had the flask in his hands. Upon draining it with gusto, he felt his animosity dissipate. Blood was like a drug for vampires. Without it, the withdrawal would turn them into unintelligible gluttons. He breathed a sigh of relief. Cameron chuckled. “I bet that feels better. Aren’t I such a good brother?”
Irving removed his gloves and responded to his brother bluntly. “What do you want, Cameron? I’m busy.” When he noticed the document Cameron was holding he felt a sense of dread. The scores from the Fang Club matchmaking event were in, and Irving rarely did well. “I don’t want to see it!” he blurted. The next thing he knew he was hanging from the ceiling.
“Aw, look at you hanging from the ceiling,” Cameron cooed. “You really are a poor creature. It’s a good thing I brought you your flask. Had I not, I may have found you attempting to nourish yourself with the sludge in that corpse’s body. These dead humans are filled with nasty-tasting diseases, and you know they do nothing to satisfy the craving. I still have nightmares about the first time I drank the blood of a diabetes patient. Ugh! The sweetness was sickly.”
“Shut up!” Irving declared. Ever since the rise in vampire phlebotomists, Cameron had become quite the blood snob. He pranced around flashing his precious vials of AB like a bombastic blood-sucking peacock. In reality, he was just a plain old cock.
“Blake tells me he managed to get his hands on an I.V. bag of A negative. That’ll be a nice change for us, don’t you think?” As usual, Cameron was yammering on even after being told to silence himself. “Anyway, I came here bearing good news. For the first time in… well, ever, you received the highest score of the night.”
“What?” Irving couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He climbed down from the ceiling in the hopes that his brother wasn’t pulling some kind of cruel prank on him. Cameron handed him the questionnaire.
“You were the only vampire to get a perfect score,” he stated. “It’s a pity she opted out. She would have made an excellent companion for you.”
Irving gasped when he saw Sage’s name written on the document. “It’s her!” he exclaimed. His hope soared upon reading her comments. According to her, he was a good listener and pleasant to talk to. Not only that, he scored a five on the humanity scale. “I don’t believe this,” he said in shock. “No one has ever rated me this high.”
“Blake and I were skeptical at first. But, upon comparing the handwriting to your own, we found that it had to be legitimate,” Cameron remarked.
“You think I would forge these results?” Irving glared at his brother in annoyance. Just how pathetic and desperate did his brothers think he was?
Cameron shrugged. “Others have done it before,” he explained. “I must admit, I’m a tad jealous of you. Usually I’m the one to top the ranks. Of course, I came in a close second. We practically tied, really.”
Irving studied the paper. On it was Sage’s personal information. Both her address and phone number had been provided. “I must see her at once!” he declared. “Do me a favor and finish this embalming for me,” he said to Cameron, shoving the bloodied smock in his face.
“Now wait just a minute, brother,” Cameron called after him. “You can’t just go gallivanting into her home uninvited. Besides, she cancelled her involvement with the Fang Club. Though, I must admit it’s odd that she rated you so highly.”
