Molly doesn’t hate what she is, exactly. Unlike some vampires who deliberately try to spend time with me, she doesn’t really want to be human—ugh, humans, am I right? She just doesn’t want to look like a teenager anymore, which is understandable. Seventeen was pretty much an adult in her own time, but in the twenty-first century, she couldn’t even buy a lottery ticket. So a few years ago, she offered me a deal, through Dashiell: in exchange for spending as much time around her as possible, I could have the spare bedroom in her house practically for free. Since my weird little ability doesn’t cost me anything, or even tire me out, I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal. Molly and I have sort of become friends, too, though sometimes I can’t believe she’s older than me, let alone older than, say, automobiles or World War I.
As she stepped into my radius, she did the little halting gasp that vampires always take when they’re around me—it’s the feeling of going from immortal back to mortal, and a vampire once told me it’s like waking up from a coma, only to find you have been beaten nearly to death. Molly’s skin lost its luminous glow, and she jerked as her heart restarted. She wiggled her jaw absentmindedly, poking her tongue at her teeth. Vampires don’t actually have fang fangs, but their canine teeth have evolved to be much sharper than a regular human’s. It has to feel weird to have your teeth get more and less pointy when I’m around. Then Molly went back to smiling beatifically at me, wringing her hands from a few feet away. Molly is a hugger—I know, who’s ever heard of a hugging vampire?—and though I have finally trained her not to touch me, she does tend to hover two feet away.
“While You Were Sleeping is on, and Peter Gallagher just fell on the tracks. Want to watch with me?”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.” Again, I thought. Molly’s favorite technological advancement is movies, and she’s been there for every step: from their birth through the spread of theaters, home video, then DVD, and now Blu-ray and 3-D. When they bring back Smell-o-Vision, she’ll be the first in line at Best Buy. She adores film, which is probably why she bought the West Hollywood house to begin with—supposedly, Marilyn Monroe once threw up in the downstairs bathroom during a party. I would have a lot more respect for this passion if her absolute favorite genre wasn’t romantic comedy.
“I’m just going to go up to my room, I think. Maybe read a little and go to bed. Are you working tonight?” I asked.
“Nah, I’m good,” she said happily. Molly doesn’t really have to work—I’ve learned that vampires always seem to have a mysterious source of income, the result of being alive long enough to acquire, say, gold doubloons or fist-sized jewels—but she has a low-key part-time job transcribing interviews and meeting notes online. At home, she can type at lightning speed, having no trouble finishing in moments what would take me an hour. But she likes to go to coffee shops and work in the middle of people.
I’m guessing this is also where she gets her victims, but she and I don’t really talk about that. Vampires need to feed anywhere from every night to every four or five days, depending on how active they are and how much they take. Older vampires, like Molly, have the practice and control to feed a little bit from a victim, then take their memory of the event away completely, which is called “pressing their minds.” Most of the time, the victims are left feeling a tad weak and fluttery, as if they’ve just made out with a stranger. No harm, no foul, right? The messing-with-memory thing gives me the creeps, and I am very grateful that Molly is old enough to control herself—and also that she could never feed from me personally.
“Okay!” Molly crossed the living room and pulled the blackout drapes, then settled herself in the easy chair on the back wall by the window. It’s the farthest seat from the TV, but after some experimentation, we had discovered that it was directly under my bedroom. Molly never misses a chance to age, especially this close to dawn. Vampires die when the sun comes up, but in my radius, Molly can stay up and finish her movie. Of course, that meant she’d die when I left the radius again to come downstairs, but we’re both used to lots of transitioning back and forth. It happens. I sometimes wonder what Molly’s ideal age is—twenty-two? twenty-eight? thirty-five?—but I haven’t got the guts to ask. Whenever she gets there, I’ll have nowhere to live.
I stripped off my work clothes, pulled on the ancient XL Chicago Bears jersey I inherited from my father, and crawled into bed. But the adrenaline hadn’t yet faded enough for me to sleep. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about my all-time worst crime scenes. Once, a witch had burned to death—I know, the irony—when a spell had gone wrong. There had been a dead child once, too; that had given me months of nightmares. But both times had been accidents, witch magic or vampire feeding gone too far. This was deliberate. It had looked like the battlefield in one of those medieval war movies. Barbaric. I pulled the blankets tighter. At this point, it takes quite a bit to rattle me, but that scene had done it. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come.
It took a long, long time.
Chapter 3
As he knelt in the clearing, Officer Jesse Cruz really wished he could just go back to a couple of weeks ago.
It had only been nine days since his promotion, to plainclothes office third grade, and there were times when he imagined he could still feel the starchy itch of his uniform collar, the poky little Officer Friendly pin he used to wear to all the schools. His first week at the new precinct had featured a lot of cracks about his looks and his Officer Friendly gig, and Jesse had been shy enough as a kid that he had never really learned how to make friends by teasing back. But his mother was an old-school Mexicana, convinced that the greatest troubles of the world could be fixed with food bribes, and apparently Jesse had inherited this viewpoint. At 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, he had been standing in a twenty-four-hour bakery picking out donuts for the rest of the night shift. He had felt awkward in his sport jacket, unable to shake the feeling that everyone in the bakery knew he was a cop. And being a cop buying donuts...Well, it’s embarrassing.