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“...and if you could fire Todd for me on Monday, that’d be great.”
Terry’s jaw clenched, but she made the note without complaint. Even if she didn’t like her job, she liked being employed.
“Yes, sir.”
You coward, she thought, as loudly as she could. David Thorn never did the dirty work if he could avoid it. Terry suspected it was because it was too much like facing consequences for his actions.
“Oh, and I am going to need you to come by tomorrow morning. I know it’s your day off, but this is really important and it just…can’t…”
Terry, fingers white knuckled on her pen, glanced up at her boss. He was standing stock still, staring wide eyed down the row of cubicles. Terry leaned in just enough to see around the pillar.
A man was standing at the other end of the room. He was handsome, dressed sharply in a black suit and blue waistcoat, his curly brown hair falling just so across his forehead. But something about him was…wrong. There was a strange pallor under his skin, and his brown eyes burned behind the innocuous round glasses.
He held out a hand, palm up.
“Come here,” he said. Terry’s legs twitched, like a muscle spasm as you were falling asleep, but she managed to stay put.
Thorn did not. He took a jerky step forward. Sweat beaded on his forehead, jaw clenched tight. The strange man smiled–a sweet, boyish smile that made the hair in Terry’s neck stand on end.
“Don’t be afraid.” His voice seemed to echo slightly, the faintest whisper underneath his words, almost inaudible. Thorn’s face smoothed out, going slack and heavy-lidded, and he stopped struggling. He crossed the room without resistance.
This time Terry felt no secondary tingle of whatever he’d done to Thorn. It was terror and nothing else that held her in place, no morbid fascination, no sick desire to see her arrogant shitweasel of a boss have something horrible happen to him.
Definitely, absolutely, only a little bit of the other stuff.
Thorn now stood before the intruder, who reached up and brushed his fingers along Thorn’s jaw. Thorn leaned down, and for a moment Terry thought they were going to kiss.
The man opened his mouth, the fluorescent light flashed on a pair of fangs, and then they were buried in Thorn’s neck. Brown eyes turned silver, rimmed in black.
Terry was instantly, violently, blindingly in love. She would follow this man to death and beyond, offer up her blood, her life, her soul, and ask nothing in return.
It passed quickly, like acid reflux.
It left behind a good deal of embarrassment, but also fascination. Vampires were real. And they were Bela Lugosi, Anne Rice real, sexy and humanoid and hypnotic. She should have been terrified. She should have started screaming. Instead, she imagined herself in something red and flowing; overpowering rich, selfish bastards like Thorn with nothing more than her eyes and her words, reducing them to so much chattel.
Terry stepped out from behind the cubical, notebook tucked under her arm, hands folded demurely in front of her. The vampire held up a finger for her to wait. Terry waited. And waited. The vampire rolled his eyes and waved at the almost-certainly-a-corpse-by-now, the gesture of awkward irritation at something you know is going to take a long enough time to inconvenience the other party but there’s nothing you can do to speed it up.
Terry wandered down the hall, averting her eyes so she wouldn’t seem to be staring impatiently. She stopped a few feet away, a distance she hoped was both polite and out of easy grabbing range.
At last the vampire dropped the corpse and sighed.
“Sorry,” he said. “He had really low blood pressure.”
His voice surprised her. She’d been expecting him to sound formal and old-fashioned, even stiff, but without the hypnotic suggestions he sounded like…a regular guy.
His mouth was smeared with blood. Terry picked up a box of tissues from a nearby desk and proffered it. He took one.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“Normally this is the part where I hypnotize you into forgetting, but normally this is also the part where you’re screaming.”
“I’m not scared,” Terry said. She glanced at her former boss. He had been very handsome, if you didn’t know his personality. “I don’t think I’m your type.”
The vampire chuckled, dabbing at his mouth, and didn’t argue.
“So I’m between jobs, because you killed my boss,” Terry said as casually as she could, as if her entire future wasn’t hanging in the balance. “I don’t suppose you’re in the market for a personal assistant.”
The vampire’s eyebrows shot up.
“I’m organized, punctual, work well in high-stress, fast-paced environments, and I type 130 words per minute.” Trying not to sound desperate, she added “I have excellent references.”
“I’m not looking for an assistant,” he said, and her heart dropped. Then he tilted his head, thoughtfully. “But I might be looking for a familiar.”
“Which is…?”
“Pretty much the same,” the vampire admitted. “Plus a few extra responsibilities. Also, you don’t get paid. But you get a place to stay, utilities included, and at the end of your service, I will turn you into a vampire.”
YES.
Terry didn’t say it out loud, because the practical Terry had heard ‘don’t get paid’, and also had a lot of experience repressing the romantic and slightly deranged Terry who was beginning to claw her way out of the depths.
“What kind of extra responsibilities?”
“Cleaning, household management, sourcing victims, and corpse disposal.” He said it in a matter-of-fact way that was more disturbing than any ominous euphemism could have been. Well, when she– if she became a vampire, she’d be doing the same thing. They lived by murder. It’d be a good way to see if she had the stomach to do it herself.
“How long would I be a familiar for?”
“Depends on how good you are,” Guillermo said. “You have to earn it.”
Terry did a few mental calculations. She had a good amount in her savings, and if she wasn’t paying exorbitant New York rent..
Terry had been a weird kid. Too loud and too awkward, too interested in the wrong things, too much . She’d spent a very long time and a lot of effort making herself normal, and she had gotten very good at it.
Vampires didn’t have to be normal. Vampires were supposed to be weird. If people made fun of her she could eat them, or use her vampire powers (she assumed she would get some) to crush them into dust.
“Deal.”
The vampire grinned.
“Welcome aboard. Your first job is to get rid of that .” He pointed at her former boss. “I already cut the security feed on my way in, which would also be part of your job, going forward.”
There was an incinerator in the basement, scheduled to run tomorrow night. If she stuffed him all the way in the back, buried him under enough trash, he wouldn’t be found until he was nothing but bones, if that.
“Yes, Mr…”
“Guillermo de la Cruz,” the vampire said. “but you can call me ‘Master’.”
“I can what.”