“Binky,” I said. “For Crissakes, Binky.”

And then he was on me.

I never went back to school after that. Somehow I couldn’t see trying to fit in with a bunch of people whose blood I wanted to suck. After what must have happened downstairs at my house, they probably wouldn’t have been real glad to see me, anyway.

Binky didn’t go back, either, now that he had a “friend” to keep him company. That just goes to show what can happen if you let somebody sit with you at lunch. They start thinking you like them, and then they turn you into a vampire.

Binky says he and the other vampire never did get friendly. Binky had found him out at the old house, where he’d moved after having a close call with some Van Helsing type in the Boston area. He’d told Binky that he was trying to kick the bloodsucking habit, but Binky had pleaded to be turned into a vampire. I blame all those nutty magazines that Binky read. Anyway the guy finally gave in.

“Nobody liked me anyway,” Binky said. “I’m still not with the in-crowd, but at least this way I get to live forever, or at least until somebody stakes me. So do you.”

If you could call it living. It wasn’t anything I wanted to thank him for.

“Too bad the Master had to leave town,” Binky said. “You would have liked him.”

As if I could ever like anybody called “the Master.” If there was ever a phony name, that was it. I’d rather be called Carleton than “the Master.” I’d have liked him about as much as I liked living in that broken-down old house, which is where Binky and I had gone after we left the party by the back door. I never knew much about what happened in my own house that night, and never tried to find out. I guess I didn’t want to know. You probably think that’s hard-hearted of me, since my sister was there and all, but she wasn’t my sister anymore, not now that I’d been changed.

“I don’t think he made any of them into vampires,” Binky said. “He thinks it would be a bad idea to have too many of us around, and he prefers just to drink the blood.”

I said I thought he was trying to break the goddam habit.

“He was,” Binky said. “But living on mice and rabbits and stuff like that got pretty boring after a while, I guess.”

Come to think of it, it was getting pretty boring to me, too. I mean, they were all right if you couldn’t get anything else, but before long I was going to have to go for something bigger and more substantial. More nourishing.

“Even blood from a mouse beats that cafeteria chili, though, right?” Binky said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it does, at that.”

All that was a long time ago. For the last few years Binky and I have been hanging out (a little more vampire humor there) under a bridge in Austin, Texas. When you’re surrounded by thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats, nobody’s going to notice you, not if you’re a bat, too, even if you’re a lot bigger than they are. Being bigger works out fine, since they don’t try to push us around.

It’s a pretty boring way to have to spend your time, though, to tell you the truth. Like I said at the beginning, being a vampire’s not all capes and fangs and ripping times. When the highlight of your day is flying out from under a bridge and seeing how many tourists’ mouths you can crap into before they get wise and shut their mouths, you can be pretty sure you’re not living the high life.

It’s actually even worse than that. Bats have parasites. Maybe you didn’t know that. Fleas, mites, ticks. They can be pretty irritating sometimes. I don’t know how living on me affects them. I don’t even care. All I know is that they make me itch.

I think about the old days now and then, and sometimes around her birthday I wonder if Kate survived her party, and if she did, whether she got married to one of her phony friends and had a bunch of kids who were just as phony as their parents. And I wonder if she ever thought about any of those crummy movies she used to like so much. They were pretty much to blame for the whole thing, after all.

“It’s nearly sundown,” Binky squeaked.

The children of the night, such music they make. You probably couldn’t understand Binky even if you heard him, but I could.

“Time to give the tourists a thrill,” he said. “I’ll bet I can hit more open mouths this evening than you can!”

“Sure, Binky,” I said.

“Some fun!” he said.

“Sure, Binky,” I said. “Some fun.”

There’s nothing like being a teenage vampire. I should know. I’ve been one for forty-five years now, so I figured it was time to let the world know.

Maybe somebody will make a movie.

Twilight

Kelley Armstrong

Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Women of the Otherworld paranormal suspense series. A former computer programmer, she’s now escaped her corporate cubicle, but she puts her old skills to work on her website at www.KelleyArmstrong.com.

Another life taken. Another year to live.

That is the bargain that rules our existence. We feed off blood, but for three hundred and sixty-four days a year, it is merely that: feeding. Yet on that last day—or sometime before the anniversary of our rebirth as vampires—we must drain the lifeblood of one person. Fail and we begin the rapid descent into death.

As I sipped white wine on the outdoor patio, I watched the steady stream of passersby. Although there was a chill in the air—late autumn coming fast and sharp—the patio was crowded, no one willing to surrender the dream of summer quite yet. Leaves fluttering onto the tables were lauded as decorations. The scent of a distant wood fire was willfully mistaken for candles. The sun, almost gone despite the still early hour, only added romance to the meal. All embellishments to the night, not signs of impending winter.

I sipped my wine and watched night fall. At the next table, a lone businessman eyed me. He was the sort of man I often had the misfortune to attract: middle-aged and prosperous, laboring under the delusion that success and wealth were such irresistible lures that he could allow his waistband and jowls to thicken unchecked.

Under other circumstances, I might have returned the attention, let him lead me to some tawdry motel, then taken my dinner. He would survive, of course, waking weakened, blaming it on too much wine. A meal without guilt. Any man who took such a chance with a stranger—particularly when he bore a wedding band—deserved an occasional bout of morning-after discomfort.

He did not, however, deserve to serve as my annual kill. I can justify many things, but not that. Yet I found myself toying with the idea more than I should have, prodded by a niggling voice that told me I was already late.

I stared at the glow over the horizon. The sun had set on the anniversary of my rebirth, and I hadn’t taken a life. Yet there was no need for panic. I would hardly explode into dust at midnight. I would weaken as I began the descent into death, but I could avoid that simply by fulfilling my bargain tonight.

I measured the darkness, deemed it enough for hunting, then laid a twenty on the table and left.

A bell tolled ten. Two hours left. I chastised myself for being so dramatic. I loathe vampires given to theatrics—those who have read too many horror novels and labor under the delusion that that’s how they’re supposed to behave. I despise any sign of it in myself and yet, under the circumstances, perhaps it could be forgiven.

In all the years that came before this, I had never reached this date without fulfilling my obligation. I had chosen this vampiric life and would not risk losing it through carelessness.

Only once had I ever neared my rebirth day, and then only due to circumstances beyond my control. It had been 1867…or perhaps 1869. I’d been hunting for my annual victim when I’d found myself tossed into a Hungarian prison. I hadn’t been caught at my kill—I’d never made so amateurish a mistake even when I’d been an amateur.