An Untenable Situation Who: Derek, John What: Discussing Derek's Predicament and Vampire Existential Stuff When: Night, Present Where: John's Residence, Las Vegas Warnings: Language
Derek wasn’t exactly sure who would want to intercept his texts or who even had the ability to, but he had read somewhere at some point that the FBI could, and ever since then had been paranoid about the prospect. Maybe he should ask Annie about that. He was glad that John seemed to understand. The vampire had gone to the Rabbit Hole and retrieved his message, though not before having a quick drink. His bruised face was completely ignored in the establishment, which suited him fine.
The other vampire had included a time and his home address in the message. Derek wrote it down the old fashioned way and used a fake account to hail an Uber that dropped him off a few blocks away. The subterfuge was actually a little fun, he thought to himself as he walked down the darkened street. Kind of dramatic. He found John’s door on the first floor and pressed the tip of his index finger against the buzzer, and looked around appreciatively as he waited. It was a nice place.
The door opened on John as close to casual as he got: jeans and a v-neck sweater. He gave the younger vampire a lookover and tried to remember the last time he got a shiner like that. Two years ago, Los Angeles. A student slammed the brakes and sent him through the windshield of her car. It was a complicated story...
“You look like shit, mate. Come on.” He held the door for Derek and locked it behind him. John turned off the podcast that had been distracting him from his actual work. “Do you want something to drink? You’re welcome to anything in the fridge.”
“Really?” Derek couldn’t help but grin. “I think it gives me character.” He hadn’t spent a long time imagining what John’s place would look like, but he thought it suited the other vampire nicely. “I just pounded one at the Rabbit Hole.” He glanced sideways at the other man before clarifying, “Beer. Not...you know.”
The phrasing earned a short laugh. “Believe me. I’m not one to judge either way.” John got a mug out of a cabinet and poured a coffee from a warm pot on the countertop. There was a second mug in case Derek was a coffee drinker. The caffeine did next to nothing for him unless he drank the strongest he could find, and a lot of it, but he had figured out years ago that it made him seem normal, from the temperature of his hands and mouth to the aesthetic of it, and then he came to like it.
John sat in an armchair near the couch.
Derek followed John’s lead and sat on the couch. He knew what he wanted to say, but now that he was there, he was unsure of how to say it. “I got caught off guard by a hunter,” he said finally. He sighed, tugged roughly at one of the strings on his hoodie. “Actually, I let him in my fucking house.”
He looked at John, clearly chagrined. “The stranded motorist routine. I’ve used the stranded motorist routine on people.”
“I’ve pretended to help a stranded motorist,” John mused, gazing at a spot across from him. “It’s so cliche, it’s almost embarrassing when you do it. But I’ve never let a hunter in my house.” He found his eyes ticking to the front of Derek’s shirt. There was a first time for everything. He hoped hunting their own kind wasn’t the newest craze in vampire cultural norms.
“I take it you two didn’t get on well.” John drank some of the rich smelling coffee and set the mug on the low table.
“Have I ever done that?” Derek tried to remember, but unfortunately most of his past victims were a blur of bloodlust and bad decision making.
“That would be an understatement,” he answered dryly. “To put it bluntly, I killed him. I was thinking about doing that thing we talked about before, you know, just drinking a little? But then he threatened to hurt people I cared about and I just...lost myself.”
John nodded. “Well… I think that’s a fair turn of phrase. There’s losing your temper — snapping a neck, killing someone with their own weapon — and there’s losing who you are. From what you said at the bar, that happens to you when you bite.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands. “Or losing who you want to be.” The two weren’t always compatible.
Derek considered that, realizing John was right. It all seemed to come back to how it all started, no matter how hard he tried to get away from it. His left hand opened and closed a few times unconsciously as he thought about it. “I’ve done the anger thing. It wasn’t about feeding or being hungry.” He spoke slowly, each word deliberate. “But when the teeth come out, it’s different. I guess that’s why it was always important to me to separate the people I cared about from prey. I would never think of biting my friends, even when I fed from people.”
His eyes dropped to the mug of coffee. “What was it like for you, when you were first turned?”
“Oh, I was pathetic!” John admitted. “I was obsessed with blood. It was all I could think about: what it smelled like, how it tasted, the way it pumped out of the vein, the weight of a body on my arm. I could go on and on. I also hated it. I felt trapped.” He looked at the palms of his hands and rubbed them together. “I was never angry. My sister turned me and I understood why she did it; we were inseparable. But she was shallow. If she’d been born in this century, she’d be an influencer on Instagram. There are some personalities, like mine, and maybe yours, that take to vampirism like oil takes to water, in the beginning.”
That was surprising. He thought of his own sister and shuddered inwardly at the idea of being attached to her for all time. But then again, they weren’t that close. There were too many years between them, their personalities too different. She had always looked at Derek with confusion, as if wondering how he could possibly be related to her by blood.
“Obsessed is a good word.” He paused, then asked tentatively, “Is she still around?”
“Somewhere,” John said. He shrugged. The mug was collected and he took another sip of the hot drink to stay silent. He was terrible at being vague. He always ended up telling the rest. Celia was pinned down by a stake while he figured out whether it was a good idea to let her up again. Derek didn’t need that information. “Who are you when the teeth come out?”
Somewhere was better than nowhere, he supposed. He shifted on the couch, trying to wrap his head around that question. At least it was easier to talk there than at the Rabbit Hole, with Katherine, Mo, and Ro present. “I don’t know,” Derek answered honestly. “I guess...every bad thing everyone always told me I was.”
John cringed. “Sorry. I was imagining what I would be like under those circumstances. At your age, the court of public opinion would’ve turned me into an immortal lush and a pauper with a lack of aspiration and a raging case of venereal disease.” That was bleak. “So, now that you know what they said about me, tell me what they say about you. Who are you when the teeth come out?” he repeated.
That was somewhat reassuring. From first glance, John was pretty classy. He had a nice home, nice clothes. And he could write poems. It was like peeking into a world of possibility. “Wait, I think I have a better answer. But it’s to a slightly different question.” Derek sat up straighter, thinking. “When I chose victims, they could have been like...alternate universe versions of me.”
He stared at a spot past John’s head. As he spoke, Derek could almost feel himself going back there. “I swear I could feel all that promise and potential drain out of them along with the blood. I think I fed on that, more than anything. Why should they get what I couldn’t have? And there’s the power, too. Over life and death. I had it, they didn’t. All the potential in the world couldn’t change that.”
“So it’s envy? No, I guess resentment might be a better word.” John waited to see if Derek would correct him. “If so, it makes sense why you say you could never bite your friends. You probably wouldn’t be friends with anyone you thought of that way.”
Derek blinked, and he met John’s eye with a look of realization. “Oh,” he said. “I guess not.” That hadn’t even occurred to him, at least not on a conscious level. There was another question that materialized suddenly. “Have you ever turned anyone?”
John shook his head. “I’d never push that idea.” He turned the ceramic cup in his fingers. “It’s a strange existence. I suppose if someone asked me to, I’d consider it, but I’d have to know there was nothing else for them in life that they wanted to do. And I’d want some reasonable assurance that they weren’t nuts.” He gave Derek a rueful smile. “I think I have been at various times, but the indulgence of living forever is that you have time to crawl back out of the hole, no matter how many times you stumble into it.” He lifted his eyebrows, thinking about his mistakes, and finished the drink.
“I offered to do it, once,” Derek admitted. “I mean, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but it can’t be that difficult, right?” He stood up, antsy, not used to sitting still so long while completely sober. The younger vampire’s eyes traveled over the titles on a bookshelf.
“My friend’s mom,” he explained. “She was dying. She refused.”
“What you said is probably what most humans think when they take up parenting. But there’s always a way to foul things up.” John watched Derek explore. “What do you want out of it? Being a vampire.” He got up and went to the adjoining kitchen to pour the remaining drops out of the mug and set it neatly in the dishwasher.
He tilted his head to read the title on a book spine, a volume of poetry. “You can want something out of being a vampire?” Derek turned toward John, a smile on his face. “I don’t know.” He walked over to the kitchen. It was very neat. He always seemed to forget to be neat.
“Back at the Rabbit Hole, I said that I loved love. Sometimes that’s hard to admit. But I definitely don’t understand it.”
“Neither do I.” John leaned his elbows on the counter. “Physiological reactions, sure, but what makes someone more than tolerable? What makes them feel necessary? And all the people who don’t believe in souls, or think that love is just a way to trick us into propagating the species, didn’t have vampires in mind. I think we love deeper. Our lives aren’t a race against a series of clocks.”
He looked at Derek, who had an unusual combination of features and energy, somehow both man and child, sorrow and joy.
“You know, up until now, I’ve gotten some pretty bad advice on how to be a vampire,” Derek confided to John. “Some of it coming from people who have never even been one. For example, my parents know, and my mom asked me if I’ve tried not being a vampire. Which I guess technically I have tried.” He stood across from the other man, expression shifting back to contemplative.
John laughed. “That sounds like a coming out talk. I think it would help to get insight from people with actual experience. Longevity would be a good thing. But I don’t think you have to have the same perspective about all parts of it. You can take different bits from everyone you meet. That Katherine woman probably knows how to get out of a jam.” He admired the fighting spirit; he’d just never had it. Or maybe he never learned to develop it because he had mesmerism on his side, and it was one hell of an advantage for avoiding fights. “Is there anything I can help with?”
Derek chuckled lightly. He supposed that was an accurate analogy. “Actually, yeah. It was kind of cliche. They didn’t believe me at first, and then they had a hard time accepting it. Hey, they should make a melodramatic TV movie about me.” He leaned against the counter, his bare arms showing, the sleeves of his hoodie bunched up at the elbows.
“This helps,” he told John, the ghost of a smile on his face. “Just talking to someone who’s been through it. And is apparently doing pretty well for himself.”
“Well.” The more seasoned vampire lifted one shoulder in response. “I’m fortunate. I’ve always loved literature, so I never tire of it. I’ve always enjoyed meeting new people, so when it’s time to move on, there’s that. I’ve always loved women — and I suppose men, to some extent, but not nearly as much — and there is no world without women. As long as the world delivers the things that mean the most to me, it takes the edge off how desperately I want the other thing.”
John made a face. “Which is why you won’t find me living in a small town, or spending much time with only my thoughts for company.” He straightened up from the counter. “Be careful though. Those of us with a fondness for life… the human kind… often find ourselves in untenable situations.”
“Untenable.” Derek laughed and looked down at his hands. “Maybe that’s my mistake. I recently relocated to a place called Searchlight, I rent a trailer from my friend there. Everyone kinda knows each other. Or the parts people show, anyway.” He had kind of become an incidental citizen of Clark county, and it seemed like too much hassle and too much uncertainty to try to make somewhere else his home now. Maybe in a few decades, if he lasted that long.
“About this hunter situation. You ever experience anything like that before?”
“Yes. London in the 1890s. Hunters were better dressed then.” John crossed his arms. “You should try to think of who knows you and your patterns. I don’t mean friends, I mean acquaintances. They’re the weak link. Hunters will scout butcher shops, blood banks, and bars. They’ll make small talk with clerks and neighbors. They’ll rub elbows with police who work the nightshift. Anything to dig up information.”
Derek stared at John for a moment, a look of horror slowly dawning on his face. He talked to everybody. And more people than were probably reasonable knew that he was a vampire. “Shit,” he said shortly. “I don’t know how long this guy had been following me, or if he even told anyone else that he was. He didn’t seem, you know…”
The vampire leaned in a little, as if someone else might have been listening. “All there. I was going to leave him in the desert and call someone later to get him, but he kept running his mouth, and I got angry, and that’s when I…” Derek trailed off and gestured vaguely in the direction of his teeth.
John didn’t like the look on Derek’s face. The problem with cities like this was that they seemed friendly to their type, and maybe they were, but there was always the chance of outsiders arriving. This was a good reminder not to be so comfortable. He wouldn’t tell Moira she had a point. John cleared his throat. “If you hid the body well, that may work in your favor. If your hunter wasn’t in possession of all his faculties, he may have been an outsider, or it might not be unusual for him to disappear now and then. What did you do with his phone? Did you look through his car?”
He began ticking off things on his fingers. It helped him organize his thoughts, which could often live in his head as a swirl, like those lottery ball things on TV. “He had a cheap phone, it looked like a burner. He either deleted his text history, or didn’t text at all. But he had voice notes about following me, which I erased. I took the SIM out and tossed both out of the window in separate places. And I left my own phone at home.”
Derek paused to let that sink in before continuing. “His car had weapons in it, which I left. I took off the plates and parked it in the city with the keys in it. Hopefully someone found it and took it to a chop shop. As for the body...well, I don’t think anyone is going to be finding that.”
“This isn’t your first foray into covering up a murder.” John smiled. “Most vampires just leave their victims in the gutter. Or the back of a cinema. It sounds as if you’ve done all you can. Have you decided if you’re staying in Searchlight or leaving until things settle down?”
“I guess I am good at some things,” Derek conceded, though his mind was of course on his friends, all the people a hunter might question first. Guiltily, he imagined Ronnie folding easily under scrutiny. “I’m kind of torn,” the younger vampire explained. “If I leave, could that look suspicious? I’m there all the time now. On the other hand, am I overthinking it?”
He broke into a self-deprecating smile. “The former is probably closer to the reality. So, yeah, that’s a really long way of saying ‘I don’t know’.”
“Does looking guilty matter if it keeps a hunter from knowing exactly where to find you?” John didn’t think there was a great answer to the predicament Derek had; it was the nature of knowing so little about who knocked on his door. “If you stay, prepare yourself. They won’t all travel alone. Think of who you know and what they can do to protect you.” Calm as he sounded, now John wanted a stiffer drink. He took out two glasses and poured from a bottle. It went down with a burn. “You’ll find a way to repay the favor.”
Derek assumed the second glass was for him and downed whatever was inside it, not particularly caring what. The warmth was welcome, and it seemed stabilizing. He could see why people would drink it all the time. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he promised John, and he would. Whatever decision he ended up making, it would be carefully considered, not like his usual impulsive M.O. He set the glass down on the counter and licked his lips, nodding to himself. “Thanks for the company.”
“Any time.” John walked back into the living room. “I haven’t spent much time with other vampires in Las Vegas. In Los Angeles, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one. It was similar in New York. There you were, creeping after your evening meal, only to realize they were as dead as you. Or you got there only for someone to jump out of the shadows and call dibs.”
He wondered if he should text Shelly about the hunters. That way, if he disappeared off the face of the earth she wouldn’t take it personally.
“Huh,” he replied, thinking about how it was sort of rare to socialize with his kind. He knew some ran in nests, but that sounded like a waking nightmare. “I haven’t been to LA since I was turned,” Derek remarked. “I’m from Northern California, originally. And I’ve never really been anywhere else.”
He was definitely less worldly than a lot of his compatriots, he was well aware of that. “Maybe I should start traveling.” Derek smiled softly.
“You’ve got nothing but time.” John collapsed onto his couch. “You might as well have a hobby. Sap the world for everything it has to offer, and try to put something back into it so you won’t look like an ass.”
He chuckled at the blunt wording, then scratched the back of his neck, and checked the time displayed on John’s oven. Derek wandered over by the couch, but didn’t sit. “Like I said, I appreciate you making the time. I mean, I know we have a lot of it, but…” He grinned and shrugged. “I’m probably going to head out, figure out what the hell I’m going to do.”
“Right.” John put his hands on his legs and stood up. “Good luck with that. When all this blows over, I’ll be around for the next existential crisis. Who knows, it might be mine.” John opened the door for Derek to see him on his way and, frankly, to make sure no one was lurking nearby with a hatchet. “The coast seems to be clear.”
“I would be honored if you called on me for an existential crisis. It would be interesting to see one from the other side.” He nodded to John in what he hoped conveyed a certain unsaid solidarity and ducked out of the door, his hands in his hoodie pockets. Maybe Derek would walk for a bit to get his thoughts in order. Maybe he would check out the t-shirt stand to make sure a hunter wasn’t drilling his bored 17 year old co-worker for details.