And everything I was worried about seeing wasn’t there. It was just the same steady intelligent gaze I’d been curious about a month ago – with just a hint of compassion that bled into a smile. “And no one would ever believe me about this besides. Everyone assumes that vampires are always tops,” he said, grinning wickedly, and I grinned back.

  “Oh I can top. I’ve learned a lot of things since we were together last.”

  “I bet.” He pushed himself up. “So how long are you staying here?”

  “For as long as it’s safe.” He didn’t need to know there was someone after me.

  “Will you still be here tonight?”

  “I could be. Why?” Was it worth risking Tamo for?

  He rolled off the bed entirely and started picking through the clothing on the floor to find his own. “Because I want to know where I can find you again.”

  “Why?” I asked with feigned innocence.

  He picked up his shirt and gave me a coy grin. “Why do you think?”

  I was hoping he was thinking every dark and perverted thing I was thinking right then about him, as he kept getting dressed. I wanted to tell him to stay, but dawn was near. So instead I did the next best thing – the most dangerous thing I could have.

  “Here.” I fished in my pants pockets till I found my room key and offered it over to him.

  He hesitated, after seeing what it was. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” he said, folding it into his hand and putting it in his pocket. “Tonight? After sundown, I presume?”

  I sat up nakedly on the edge of the bed. “Yeah. But give me an hour to freshen up first, and maybe corral a housekeeper.”

  “Sounds good.” Paco gave me another private grin, then turned and walked triumphantly toward the door. I watched the way his ass swayed, until he closed the door behind him, and heard the lock snick shut.

  I got up, closed all the curtains, and flopped back onto the bed avoiding the wet spot I’d created. There was a new feeling inside me, all fractious and tickly – fear, mixed with hope.

  I’d find out if I made a bad decision later. But for now – for the first time in over a month -- I just didn’t feel alone.

  Eight

  And I didn’t find myself alone when I next woke. Paco was there, kicked back in a chair, heels up on the desk, flipping through my portfolio.

  I sat up in bed, cognizant of the way my hair fell in front of my face, and how I was naked while he was not. He looked over, saw me sitting, and almost jumped out of his own skin.

  “I’m sorry –“

  “What the fuck? I thought I told you to wait an hour.” I looked around the room, doing an inventory for other people, crosses, cameras.

  “I just –“ he put the portfolio down and looked abashed. “It just didn’t feel real. I thought maybe I’d come back here and you wouldn’t be here at all – or if you were, that what you’d told me yesterday was a lie, or some strange trick.”

  “Yeah, because pretending to be a vampire is what gets me all the guys.” I swung my legs out of bed and stood up.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “A little. And I still need to brush my teeth and shower.” I stalked into the bathroom and closed the door.

  What had I been thinking, giving my room card to him? I brushed my teeth and tongue, well aware of the irony that I couldn’t get to the teeth that most needed cleaning. If Paco had meant me harm – hell, if he’d been a rogue Catholic – I could’ve been killed. Or, unalived – I didn’t know what the word for killing something that was already dead was, heh. I spit the toothpaste into the sink, then cranked on the shower, stepping into the stream.

  But who could blame him for wanting to satisfy his curiosity? If our positions were reversed, would I have done anything different?

  There was a knock at the door. “Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I come in?”

  I leaned against the back wall of the shower, letting the water sheet down me. “Sure.”

  He opened up the door and then closed it behind himself, trapping the steam in. “I’m sorry.” His gaze roamed my body, barely hidden by fogged glass. I liked the weight of his attention, like I liked the weight of him, on me.

  “Not as sorry as you will be, if you don’t come in here,” I promised. “Right now.”

  His lips quirked, he kicked off his shoes, and then he took me at my word, stepping into the shower with me, clothes and all.

  His wrung and wet clothing hung over every vent in the room, while we lay nakedly in the bed with the heater cranked up, twined with each other, learning things now, not just body parts. I found out that Paco was an evening shift security guard, which explained how he could play so late with me, but that he wanted to be something more meaningful, like a cop or body guard, hence the Krav Maga. I wanted to make a silly joke about him guarding my body, then remembered Tamo and stifled it.

  “What did I look like?” I asked him, after bringing his fingertips to my lips to kiss. He traced the outline of my lips with a forefinger.

  “Like you were sleeping. Only your chest didn’t move. I didn’t touch you or anything, I was too frightened too.”

  “That was probably wise.”

  “It – it wasn’t gross though. If that’s what you were worried about.”

  I blew air through my lips like of course not, but I had been. To think of all the ways I’d been uniquely vulnerable to Paco these past two days – him seeing me dead had probably trumped them all.

  Paco kept my room key for the next three nights. I didn’t need it, I didn’t leave the room, all I needed was him. He delivered himself, an hour past sundown, and the things we did to one another until the edge of dawn – I had never felt so intimately known as a mortal human as I did by him, at the end of that week. On the fourth night, I stopped him as he reached for a condom.

  “We don’t need those anymore, Paco – vampires don’t have STIs.”

  He paused. We were both naked, he was kneeling on the bed, and I’d been luxuriously sucking his cock.

  “I just…don’t believe it.”

  “You saw me dead.”

  “I know. But when I’m with you – I don’t remember that anymore.”

  I wondered if that was some unknown mind-wiping vampiric skill on my part, or the work of pure emotion on his. I looked up at him from my lower position. “Do you want me to show you my teeth again?”

  “Not when you’re down there.” He reached down and made a show of pulling his cock away from me.

  “But you do believe me, right?” I asked, and kissed his much less tender knee.

  “I both do and don’t believe you. It’s hard.”

  “As hard as you?” I asked, reaching out to stroke him, and he purred. “I could always bite you,” I teased, but like so many other teases, revealing a hidden truth. I did want to bite him. Not to bleed him or hurt him – but in the same way that I’d eaten out Thea’s ass in the shower so long ago. Because I wanted to know him, utterly, completely. My fangs shifted at the thought of it, my ache for his blood becoming a full bodied throb. “Someday, Paco – I do want to bite you. But I want you to want it, too.”

  He looked down at me for a long second, his thoughts a mystery to me, then gently caught my head in his hands.

  “No biting during blow-jobs,” he said, and brought my mouth back to his cock.

  I sprawled on the bed after he left, the taste of his cum still thick in my mouth, replaying the hours that’d come before -- the way he’d pressed me here, the way I’d pushed him there, the whispers and the groans. This wasn’t life as I’d once known it – but it was good, and getting better.

  Then there was a knock outside my door. I stood and strode over, wondering if it was some neighbor come to ask us to keep it down – and saw Rosalie and Tamo standing outside. She knew it when I saw her through the peephole.

  My stomach instantly filled with acid -- what if they’d seen Paco in the hall?

  “Let us in, or we’ll break the door.”

  I reluctantly twisted the handle and then stepped back into a crouch at the bottleneck where the room went from hallway to bedroom. “What do you want?” I asked as Tamo stepped in, the scar I’d left on his forehead rough and jagged. She sighed and waved a hand in the air behind him.

  “This room is rather like your home now. Please allow me entrance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because otherwise I’ll make you and that would be in bad taste, would it not? Besides dawn’s coming, neither of us have particularly long.”

  “Come in,” I said warily, taking a few more steps back.

  “I take it you haven’t tried to go anywhere private then, hmmmm?” she said, looking around at the tangle of sheets Paco’d left behind. “No – I doubt you’ve left this room in a week. Usually, when creatures such as you and I enter private territory, we have to ask. It’s the old rules. Gives the prey a fighting chance.”

  I didn’t like hearing the word prey come from her mouth. It otherized the rest of humanity – Paco along with it.

  “I half expected to find Thea here – but what I scent is much more manly,” she purred the words and I swallowed in fear. “I knew I felt greatness in you, Jack – charisma, matched with a certain amount of moral adaptability. It’s why I can’t turn Tamo, no matter how much he might like – he’s as inflexible as they come, he’d leave a string of limbless corpses in his wake.”

  As she spoke, she stared at me with her dark bewitching eyes, words falling out of her perfectly red lips. I shook myself out from under her spell. “Why are you here?”

  “To congratulate you on not having killed anyone for sixty-three days. That’s more of an accomplishment than you know.” Her head tilted graciously to one side. “I keep my eyes on the papers and my ears on the ground. Has there been an uptick of indigent murders, drained bloodless in the night? Girls crumpled behind dumpsters with their legs behind their ears? No, and no.” She reached up for my chin with her hand and I grit my teeth as she cupped it. “You’ve learned to make your way in your new world nicely. Almost too much so.”

  Paco. What did she know about him? I knew I’d tell her anything – everything – if she asked me too with her voice.

  “I’m just here to make sure you’re not getting any ideas, Jack. The nights can be lonely, even for one such as I. For you?” She snorted with mirth and drew my chin down, forcing me to look at her. “If you try to make another vampire I will kill you – after I force you to kill him in the most gruesome way imaginable.” She let the threat hover, then grinned as if she’d just offered me candy. “So don’t get too comfortable here, okay?” she said, and patted my cheek before dropping her hand.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good. And now it’s bedtime – for both of us, hmmm?” she said, and sauntered back toward the door, then stopped and turned around. “You still remember what it’s like to be human, so you want to pretend to be one. That is a weakness, Jack, but don’t worry, it will fade.” She smiled at me like that was something to look forward to, then walked out.

  Tamo followed behind her – but not before casting me back a knowing look with a toothy grin. He knew where I slept now – and dawn was coming.

  Nine

  I raced to the windows -- I could feel dawn nearing, a pressure behind my eyes, like a headache mixed with a freight train – and I grabbed the phone to talk to the front desk as I started shoving my few belongings inside a pillowcase. I couldn’t get another room in this entire hotel, it was convention season, plus weekend, plus weddings alas and –

  “Where can you get me a room?” I shouted into the receiver, standing there, panting.

  A sister hotel. Three blocks down.

  “Tell them I’m coming – and the room has to be ready when I get there.”

  I hauled on clothes and tied two pillow cases worth of clothing to the handles of the wheeled luggage that held my guns and inks, and tossed a wad of twenties behind me for housekeeping before running down the hall.

  I could see myself inside the elevator – I looked like an indecisive hobo. No, a tweaking hobo, with the way I was pacing, hoping I could get to the next hotel before dawn. I sprang out of the elevator the instant it opened, and started running, my baggage rattling behind.

  The front desk sensed I was in a rush and found my mannerisms worrying – but between my willingness to pay the actual posted room rate in for a week in advance, and me using my whammy I got into a new room just in time. The curtains here didn’t seem as thick – so I grabbed all the bedding and locked myself in the bathroom, making a nest to sleep on in their oversized tub.

  I woke up to my cellphone buzzing at me. Paco – wondering where the hell I was. I blinked at his message in the dark.

  It wasn’t safe for him to be with me. Not when Rosalie could sic Tamo on me and ruin my life – what little remained of it – at any moment. I flipped my phone over, took off the back and battery, and lay in the darkness with my hunger.

  What was I, really? Enough light crept in underneath the room’s door and the bathroom’s door for my other-eyes to see my hands raised in front of me. They looked like human hands – but I knew I could use them to kill another human, almost without thinking. Rosalie was right -- I wanted to still be human, because I liked what I saw in Paco’s eyes when he looked at me. But how could I earn that look when I was using him to save me?

  Was it possible to save myself?

  The first night wasn’t so bad. Just like any night I’d spent with Paco – only without him.

  The second night my senses awakened. Even though I had decided not to feed, my body disagreed and began looking for opportunities. The bathroom I hid in was against the wall, and this room was near the elevators, so I could feel footsteps passing and hear conversations. The laugh of a woman, the crying of a child. The room above me ran the shower, I could hear his heavy steps on tile, while somewhere in the room behind me a woman ran a vibrator until she screamed.

  It didn’t matter how many blankets I hid under, how tightly my hands were pressed to my ears – there was so much life everywhere around me, except for in me – it was like life itself was begging me to take it. My stomach churned, eating itself up inside, curling me into a ball.

  On the third night I think I began to go insane. What’d started as a hyperawareness of my personal space had gone beyond that – it was like I could feel the entire tower, above and below, breathing. Waiting for me to do something. My stomach unwound enough for me to stand, so I did, coming out of the tub for the first time, hands clutching at the marble countertop in the dark.

  I – hurt. I hadn’t hurt ever since Rosalie had turned me, but now I felt fragile, like if I was brushed wrong I would snap. My stomach roiled, empty, needles of acid stabbing me inside – and not just in my stomach, but up and down my entire body, a thousand separate torturous pinpricks. I turned the light on and jerked away as it burned my eyes, then observed myself as I became accustomed to the light – my cheeks were sunken, my eyes sallow – I knew now I’d look dead if someone saw me in the daytime.

  But – I couldn’t let it – the hunger – win. I had to prove to myself that I was more than this. That I was in control. That whatever Rosalie had put inside hadn’t poisoned me eternally.

  Somehow I let it convince me that the only way to really prove that was to go out and face temptation.

  I made my way out onto the strip, grifting twenties – it was a little harder now, as I looked more dangerous, I suspected, with my hunched shoulders and needy eyes – and with the way that I looked at every human I interacted with like I might eat them. I found myself slinking in shadows more and more, I told myself to protect them from me – but I knew secretly part of me liked it. It was easier to watch for someone breaking from the herd in the dark.

  I sat down on a bench, knowing there was still probably a camera or two watching – I was in front of the Bellagio, and all of the Strip was likely televised via assorted CCTVs. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, only that each second longer I waited proved that I was in control of me. Not Rosalie. Never her again. I clenched my hands into fists at my side, frustrated anew and – hungry. Goddammit. Starving. Worse than when I quit smoking cigarettes, aching worse than after the football team had beaten me, unable to think of anything but –

  I heard a scream and a splash from behind me. I whirled, and saw everything like the moment was frozen. A mother on a nearby bridge with her hands out stretched, a camera falling from them into the water below – following her tumbling child.

  The hunger took over, and in an instant I was chest deep in frigid water, hoisting a wet toddler overhead by the straps of their denim overalls.

  “Oh my God!” the mother screamed from up above. Twenty people leaned over, holding out cell phones to film me. “Teddy! Is he all right?”

  His screaming said his lungs were fine – it had a tinge of terror, and the way he was twitching – and the way I was paying attention to that – the way I couldn’t stop paying attention to that -- if the water hadn’t been so cold as to shock me when I jumped in the people filming might’ve filmed something very, very different. I trudged to the edge of the artificial lake handing him up to strangers before pulling myself out.

  “Where did you even come from? You’re an angel!” Teddy’s mother shrieked, pulling me in for a Midwestern hug. “Thank you – thank you –“

  “You’re welcome,” I said, freeing myself from her as quickly as I could, slinking away.

  After that, I walked, trying not to see anyone around me. My wet clothes and shoes chafed, but that was nothing compared to the growing knowledge that I was going to do something bad tonight, whether I wanted to or not. There was no time to make myself look good and head out to a club, and I wouldn’t trust myself to fuck anyone in my current state. I didn’t want to fuck-kill anyone accidentally-on-purpose.