You Suck: A Love Story

wrecked and read ghost stories from the German.”
    “That is so fucking cool,” Abby said, grabbing his arm and hugging his biceps like it was her newest, bestest friend. She started pulling him toward the door.
    “What about your friend?” Tommy said.
    “Oh, someone made a comment about his cape being gray when we first got here, so he went home to redye all of his blacks.”
    “Of course,” Tommy said, thinking, What the fuck?
    Out on the sidewalk, Abby said, “I suppose we need to find somewhere private.”
    “We do?”
    “So you can take me,” Abby said, stretching her neck to the side, looking more like a stringless marionette than ever.
    Tommy had no idea what to do. How did she know? Everyone in that club would have scored higher on the “are you a vampire?” test than he would. There needed to be a book, and this sort of thing needed to be in it. Should he deny it? Should he just get on with it? What was he going to tell Jody when she woke up next to the skinny marionette girl? He hadn’t really understood women when he was a normal, human guy, when it seemed that all you had to do was pretend that you didn’t want to have sex with them until they would have sex with you, but being a vampire added a whole new aspect to things. Was he supposed to conceal that he was a vampire and a dork? He used to read the articles in Cosmo to get some clue to the female psyche, and so he deferred to advice he’d read in an article entitled “Think He’s Just Pretending to Like You So You’ll Have Sex with Him? Try a Coffee Date.”
    “How ’bout I buy you a cup of coffee instead,” he said. “We can talk.”
    “It’s because I have small boobs, isn’t it?” Abby said, going into a very practiced pout.
    “Of course not.” Tommy smiled in a way he thought would be charming, mature, and reassuring. “Coffee won’t help that.”
    A s Jody pushed the bundle of clothes into the storm sewer, a silver cigarette case slid out of the jacket pocket onto the pavement. She reached for it and felt a light shock-no, that wasn’t it. It was a warmth that moved up her arm. She kicked the clothes into the opening and stood under the streetlight, turning the silver case in her hands. It had his name engraved on it. She couldn’t keep it, like she had the folding money from his pockets, but she couldn’t throw it away either. Something wouldn’t let her.
    She heard a buzz, like an angry insect, and looked up to see a neon “Open” sign flickering above a shop called Asher’s Secondhand. That was it. That’s where the cigarette case had to go. She owed it to James. After all, he’d given her everything, or at least everything he’d had left. She quickstepped across the street and into the shop.
    The owner was working the counter at the back by himself. A thin guy in his early thirties, with a look of pleasant confusion not unlike the one she’d first noticed on Tommy’s face. Normally, this guy would be prime minion material, or at least based on her minion recruitment of the past he would, except apparently, he was dead. Or at least not alive like most people. He had no life aura around him. No healthy pink glow, no crusty brown or gray corona of illness. Nothing. The only time she’d ever seen this
    before was with Elijah, the old vampire.
    The shopkeeper looked up and she smiled. He smiled back. She moved to the counter. While he tried not to stare at her cleavage, she looked more closely for some life aura. There was heat, or at least there appeared to be some heat coming off him.
    “Hi,” said the shopkeeper. “Can I help you?”
    “I found this,” she said, holding up the cigarette case. “I was in the neighborhood and something made me think that this belonged here.” She set the case down on the counter. How could he have no life aura?
    What the hell was he? “Touch me,” she said. She held out her hand to him.
    “Huh?” He seemed a little frightened at first, but he took her hand, then quickly let go.
    He was warm. “Then you’re not one of us?” But he wasn’t one of them either.
    “Us? What do you mean us?” He touched the cigarette case and she could tell that this was exactly why she had brought it here. It was supposed to be here. What ever part of James O’Mally had been left in that cigarette case had led her here. And this thin, confused-looking guy was supposed to have it. He took what was left of people all the time. It’s what he did. Jody felt some of the