Lock the Door Who: John, Moira What: A heated debate and drinks When: Night Where: A Las Vegas pub Rating/Warning: High for Mo’s language, some references to blood
The pub was off-strip, an establishment that catered more to locals than tourists. As such, the owners had done away with video gambling machines, the old Las Vegas cliches, in favor of dim lighting, vinyl banquette seating, high top tables, live music, and a kitchen full of bar food. The bathroom was unisex, a long room with multiple stalls and a spray air freshener in one corner that fired off the scent of tropical breeze seemingly at random.
One of the last stalls was occupied by two pairs of feet instead of one. Not the last stall, which was ADA-compliant. There was no reason to be an asshole about things.
John put a hand over Benjamin’s mouth. “Shh!” he hissed in the other man’s ear, then gave a tilt of his disheveled head. The sound of the vampire’s tongue clicking in his cheek reverberated in the quiet bathroom. “I thought we had an agreement about the amount of noise you were going to make if you wanted to get out of this alive.” Beyond the restroom door, a solo performer began to strum her guitar and launched into the last song in her set.
After a late night meeting with Roman, Mo had found out that she was being considered for partner and she’d been working tirelessly to come up with a presentation to the other partner at the firm. She was tired, exhausted and just really needed a fucking drink. She liked the dive bars around town, the seedy pubs, the places where she could be far away from the circus of the strip.
“Gin and tonic.” she muttered to the bartender as she scanned the room. There were a few artistic types as well as the bro-dogs that always tended to dominate the pub environment. In a mirror across the room she saw her lipstick had smeared in the mirror.
“Fuck me.”
The bathroom mirror would suffice to fix it before she made even more of a fool of herself. A smell was apparent in the air of the restroom as she made her way inside, grabbing a paper towel to wipe off the remnants of her lipstick. Why was that smell so familiar. Suddenly it occurred to her and she turned around to see two sets of legs in the bathroom stall.
Her fangs descended as she shouted. “What the fuck?!”
John disengaged from the man’s throat. A dribble of blood ran from the corner of his mouth, sloppier than he cared to be with a meal. He licked at the excess and gave the closed door of the stall an irritated moment of consideration. His first impression -- the one that made most sense -- was that the woman on the other side of it was a prude, or homophobic. “Would you mind carrying on with whatever business brought you in here, and we’ll do the same?” he called, the typical politeness of his voice carrying an edge, because the interruption had grated on his nerves.
Benjamin, for his part, kept silent, eyes wide over the expanse of John’s left hand.
“Sorry about this,” John muttered, going for a second latch.
The audacity of a vampire feeding in a very public place made her skin crawl and even worse was the blasé attitude by said vampire was just adding fuel to the fire. “You are absolutely disgusting. Is he even conscious in there? I swear I will call someone in here to remove your undead ass.” Mo could care less who was in there together but the potent scent was fucking with her and she wasn’t about to wait to take a piss while some amateur struggled to hide a corpse.
“It’s people like you that make vampires look bad.” She said and gave a kick to the stall door before she headed back into the bar. This prick wasn’t even apologetic about it, and Mo was going to have to get the hell out of here before anyone saw the aftermath. The last thing she needed was hunters sniffing around her.
A minute later, the bathroom door opened and a very disgruntled man exited, holding a wad of folded paper towels up to his neck. He did not stop to settle a tab or collect a winter coat, simply stomped past the bar stools and server station, then shouldered his way past the crowd gathered round the acoustic guitarist. Through the windows, Benjamin could be seen hailing an Uber on the sidewalk.
John cleaned up his face and curly hair at a sink, righted his shirt collar, and returned to his spot at the bar. The last sip of his scotch was still sitting there on a napkin. “I’ll have another,” he told the bartender. While he waited, he swiveled on his barstool and searched for the source of that god-awful, too-many-cigarettes voice. “You,” he concluded, pointing a finger at a short redhead. It had to be her. The air around her smelled like butcher’s blood. “Have just frightened away one of my regulars.” He nodded at the arrival of his second drink, then raised his hands in sarcastic applause in the other vampire’s direction.
Mo watched as a man, presumably the human, embarrassingly tottering off and out of the establishment, soon to be followed by an angry looking man. What else was new? She’d been dealing with angry men her whole life and she wasn’t about to back down to this one. It didn’t take long for him to recognize her and his words were met with a scoff.
“Well your regular should have been somewhere private with you like any good whore knows.” Who had the audacity to be so public about feeding on people. She couldn’t have possibly been the first person to walk in on that.
More than anything, Mo was jealous. She never learned self control when it came to draining and the days of leaving a string of bodies behind her was over.
John’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Who are you to judge that man’s fetishes or what makes a ‘good whore’?” he asked, leaning an elbow on the bar in practiced fashion. Before the bartender could get away, the vampire signaled him one more time. “This one will have whatever the patriarchy’s drinking these days. Perhaps a Bud Lite.” He went into the pocket of his sport coat and took out a cell phone, taking a moment to send a brief text. It was tragic to think that a woman who’d accused him of giving the undead a bad name was now tossing around that sort of loaded language, but in nearly two-hundred years people had never ceased to surprise him, and what were vampires if not incredibly thirsty, pompous people.
“Gin and Tonic.” She screamed at the bartender before he had a chance to put his hand on the bud light tap. If she were ever to drink beer it would be Guiness, a nod to her Irish roots. He didn’t know anything about him and all she’d garnered from him was that he was sloppy. Hunters were everywhere and feeding out in the open like that was a sure way to get beheaded.
“Listen chump, I’m not interested in what you’re doing with innocent people. I’ve been there, trust me. What I can’t stand for is seeing someone carelessly flaunt our most disliked aspects. Have you seen an angry mob before? It’s not pretty.” Thank god she wasn’t around during the witch trials. She’d have been endlessly tortured and killed like so many innocent women.
It seemed silly when she really thought about it, to insist on discretion so that they could continue to live in harmony. She’d been fighting for gay rights since she could remember, the right to be open and free but this wasn’t the time for vampires. There was far more work to be done.
“The only one drawing attention is you,” he reminded her, the small glass in his hand raising towards his lips. “Shouting, kicking doors. Had you minded your business, we could have conducted our arrangement with no one the wiser. But you chose to ride in on your…” John gave her a once-over, “Very low horse and object to it, not on the grounds that he might die, but that it might happen in public and disrupt our lifestyle. You certainly gave no thought to rescuing him. So pardon me if I’m not swayed by your logic.” He took a sip of his drink. “And it’s John. Not chump.”
Her drink arrived. He passed it into the empty space next to him.
She scoffed at this and began to laugh hysterically at him, holding her belly as the hilarity of it hit her hard. “You don’t have a single fucking clue as to who I am, John.” She replied, leaning over him to grab the drink from the other side of him.
Once it was in hand she drank a large gulp and slammed it on the bar in front of her. Why oh why were these kinds of assholes always drawn to her. She made her peace, he was the only one prolonging this. “I smash the patriarchy for breakfast so don’t you lecture me about what I care about.” In a manner of speaking at least, by defending the little guy.
“And my name is Mo, not you just in case you actually gave a shit.”
John frowned at the intrusion into his personal space and leaned away. “How poetic.” He waited until she’d swallowed the alcohol to take his eyes off her. Coppery hair, shrill persona, a vague hint of an accent dulled by years in the United States. Who did she remind him of? It came back to him with a fury: Aoife! It was 1941 and they were in Belfast after running together for a tumultuous seven months of World War II. When the blitz started, they’d hunkered down under a shelter made of galvanized iron during a German air raid. As the bombers roared overhead, John considered taking his chances under the open sky rather than spend another minute listening to Aoife ramble on and on. If this was how it ended, so be it. He’d lived long enough.
He snapped himself back to the present.
This was not her. This was Mo.
“Are you suggesting you’re strictly livestock?” he asked. John took another pull of his drink.
This did cause a genuine laugh from him before she took another sip of her drink. Placing it down she looked up at him under her curly red bangs. “Domestic, let’s call it population control.” God knew there were plenty of cats left in this world to feed her and plenty of others for eternity. She offered him a wide smile before returning her gaze back to the tumbling ice cubes in her glass.
“The point is that I was like them…” she nodded her head behind her to signify ‘people’. “...and I still am that person, so I don’t do people.” Sometimes when she closed her eyes it was like she was living Serine’s beheading in her dreams.
“If you hadn’t heard, there’s more than one type of overpopulation on the planet.” John gave her a merry wink. When he wasn’t busy defending himself from saviours of vampiric reputations, he could get along well with most anyone and was possessed of a pleasant temperament, so long as he didn’t allow himself to edge too far towards introspection. The well ran too deep. “Besides, I’m quite careful about whom I kill.” He tipped his head, reconsidering. “Unless I’m drunk.”
He took up a paper coaster and studied the logo of the pub.
“Where would you suggest I,” he looked up as a customer wandered too close into their sphere of conversation in order to grab a menu, “Make my withdrawals?”
She rolled her eyes at his comment about overpopulation. The world was far from being overpopulated, it had plenty of room to spread if needed. “Well I’m glad you’re so comfortable with careful murders. You know... bad people are just good people with problems.” She replied with a cheeky smirk. She was pretty sure she didn’t like this John character but he wasn’t the worst person she’d encountered.
She was a lawyer after all.
“I don’t know John, there are plenty of cats and rabbits everywhere. Why not one of those?” She preferred the felines but rabbits did the trick when she couldn’t find one.
“So there’s no issue with the consumption of that sort of animal. Just the ones possessing...” John raised his eyebrows at her, as if waiting for the hammer to drop. “A soul? Human consciousness? Relatable character flaws?” His lips twisted in good-natured disagreement. “I can’t say I share your point of view. Though I have drunk from my share of rats in desperate times. I have to say, the worst thing I’ve bitten for survival was a skunk. That… was a terrible week.”
Mo laughed, recalling her own accounts of desperation. “I worked on a farm in Jersey back in the 80’s and you could say livestock was the easiest prey. Chickens were the easiest to catch. Not what I would have imagined when I was having the meat next to green beans and mashed potatoes. The feathers get everything absolutely filthy.” The Irish accent had all but gone, replaced by the dialect of the New Jersey region but after she began to feel a little buzzed her ‘r’s got harder.
“Listen Johnny boy, you’re alright and I don’t care if you have some kind of kink, maybe just lock the door next time? Use a bit of subtlety if you don’t mind.” It had been a long time since she’d been truly friendly with another vampire but truth be told, it felt nice to talk to someone about it.
He pictured Mo chasing after a flock of chickens, severing the heads and capturing their undead bodies as they waddled about, spurting blood in all directions. It probably wasn’t as comical as all that, but he let his imagination run wild.
“I’ll consider it,” he said, “But just to be clear,” John gestured to the rear of the building with his glass, “What you saw in that restroom was no fetish of mine. I can’t have you ruining my reputation with that sort of talk.” He gave the idea of the rendezvous over a public toilet an exaggerated shiver. “Ah! You see, that should have been the argument againt it, Mo. It’s much more persuasive.” He smiled into the last swallow of his drink.
Raised eyebrows were met when he mentioned clientele. Mo had clientele too but not in that sort of capacity. “What exactly is it you do? People pay you to feed off of them?” She asked in a whisper, a triumph feat for Mo considering her natural volume was set at max.
Serine had told her stories of different vampires she’d met across the world. Renaissance Italian painters, Victorian Parisian Socialites. The stories were fascinating but Mo had yet to meet any such characters. Serine and her tended to stay away from others during their years. 30 some years later and she came up in her mind just as often.
“Now there’s an idea!” John smiled. “I’m sure there is a market for that sort of thing here, and the reverse of it, but no. I’m a writer and I teach Literature at the university. That young man was a graduate teaching assistant in the Biology department. He found out what I was by accident. When he stopped screaming, he grew fascinated with the scientific particulars of it, which should have been the end of things, but... we all have our vices. Mine is blood. His is apparently near-death experiences.”
He shook his head at the bartender, declining a fresh glass for himself. “What about you? What do you do?”
She should have guessed, she’d slept with one of her Professors in law school but she didn’t ask Mo to suck her blood. “I’m a lawyer so I guess you could say I’m a blood-sucker in more ways than one.” She chuckled at her own joke. “I’m actually a civil rights attorney but you know, anytime I mention I’m a lawyer that’s all anyone ever hears.” While she still felt some disgust over his sloppy eating habits, Mo found herself enjoying another vampire's company for the first time in 30 some odd years.
“How long you been kicking around?” She meant to ask when he was turned but the words didn’t come out the way she had hoped. She swirled the ice in her glass and pontificated all the scenarios. Maybe he was younger than her or much older. It wasn’t as if he was prancing around dressed in anachronistic clothing.
John had his chin on the palm of his hand, a bit of slump to his shoulders as he listened. “A civil rights attorney. Hmph. Equality and all that.” It was better than chasing ambulances. Mo was the second lawyer he’d accidentally struck up a conversation with in the city, though Roman was a lot more pleasant about it. He straightened up to answer her question. “Born in London, 1853. Turned in 1889 by my charming but capricious elder sister, whom I knew was dead because I’d seen her corpse but the pieces didn’t quite click until she had her fangs in my me.” He gestured at his neck. “What’s curious is she went left.” He shook his head and brought himself back to Mo. “Shall I guess what year you were made? Nineteen seventy...four,” he said, “Using your hair as a guide. It’s very Stevie Nicks on tambourine.”
She raised her brows at his comment. Sure she’d kicked around in the 70’s but fashion was cyclical. “I’ll have you know that this haircut is very in style right now.” She remarked before finishing off her drink. A jiggle of his glass to the bartender and he began to pour another for her.
“And you’re wrong. Born 1934, I was actually turned in 69.” She sighed as she recalled her own sire, the woman of her dreams whose relentless murder got her killed and nearly Mo too. “Guess you could say I was a sucker for Lebanese women. Didn’t stand a chance against that.”
She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if she had stayed human.
“And her for red headed ones,” he surmised. “Well, I can’t fault you there. I’ve followed my share of beautiful women into perilous situations.” John raised one of his prominent, black eyebrows. “It’s not such a bad way to die, the first or the second time.”
He thought about the women he’d known over the long years of his life and the ones he’d met more recently. “I met one here. The last time I saw her, I remember thinking there was a quality to her that was...” He trailed off, momentarily at a loss for how to describe her. “To paraphrase Shakespeare, which I am loath to do, she was as inconstant as the moon, in all the best ways. Ephemeral! That’s a far better word for her. Every look, every smile, only existing for a moment before it became something else entirely. You could stare at her for a thousand hours and never grow bored.”
Shelly had gone quiet after he told her his secret. With the exception of dropping off the novela about a famous vampiress, he had respected her silence. Their friendship, or whatever one was to call the connection they’d forged, either was or wasn’t meant to continue. John was in a good enough place to take it in stride.
As the bartender poured Mo her next round, John signaled completion of his and paid the tab when it was proffered, cash being swept from his wallet and deposited into the leather folder with a healthy but not ostentatious tip. He considered paying for the first of Mo’s as well, given he’d flagged the server over in the beginning, but given her comment about smashing the patriarchy before breakfast he wasn’t certain it would be a welcome gesture. He tucked his wallet away.
“Well. Mo.” John dropped his hands in his lap. “We started off on the wrong foot but it ended up alright. As many vampires as there are in the city, I don’t find myself running into one often, and rarer still one who can hold a conversation. Until next time?”
She listened to him intently about this woman but love language was never her forte and she’d try in vain to describe Serine in that way but it would never be quite as poetic. To be truthful it would be almost hilarious to watch. She could win over a jury with just her words but social interactions were another monster entirely.
Before he had a chance to leave she dug into her bag to find one of her business cards. “Alright then John but..” she handed him the small white paper with her cell number, name and title. “...if you find yourself in need of some legal advice, call me.” She’d charge an exorbitant fee obviously but she didn’t just give out her information like that willy nilly. There were far too many weirdos in the world who could abuse that information. She prayed to god that he wasn’t one of those.
She offered him a wink. “And lock the bathroom door the next time.” Attention solely back on her drink, Mo realized it was probably about time to eat.
John took the card and read it as he turned to leave. He passed a hand over his jaw in good humor. At the last moment, he turned back to Mo with a smile. “Thank you, Mo. Tell Roman that John Abbott said hello.” The card went into his wallet for safe keeping.