Blood Candy (3 page)

Candy tapped the waitress on the shoulder as
she walked away. “Can I use your phone?”

When the waitress turned, Candy got a good
look at her deplorable state. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face
sagging, and her mousy brown hair jutted out in all directions from
beneath a visor. She looked like a woman who didn’t care about her
miserable existence anymore.

“The phone?” the waitress said, looking the
younger woman up and down. One of her brows went up when she saw
the high cut on Candy’s dress, and then the other when she saw
breasts nearly popping out of the top. “Five dollars to use the
phone.”

“Five dollars? That’s ridiculous!”

The waitress shrugged and continued on her
way. Candy turned to see Jimmy and Tinch jerk their heads away from
her. She sighed and went over to their table.

“Can I borrow five dollars?”

“Borrow?” said Tinch. “When would you pay it
back?”

Candy looked at Jimmy who shrugged and said,
“I don’t have five dollars.”

“You have to be kidding me. You two assholes
dragged me out here!”

“Assholes?” Tinch said. “Do me a favor and try
your hardest to remember what happened a few hours ago. Remember
that guy you left the bar with? You know the one, he was about to
do bad things to you until I came along. You may want to be more
vigilant in which strangers you take a midnight stroll with through
the woods.”

Candy felt the band aids on her neck again. A
slow realization she already knew at least in some small part
settled over her. This Tinch guy had saved her from. . . . No, he
was only a weird, British dweeb.

“Calm down, Tinch.” Jimmy turned his brown
eyes to Candy. “Why don’t you join us and we can figure everything
out?”

Tinch snorted.

“What?” Jimmy said.

Tinch looked at Candy; at the revealing nature
of her dress, her blonde hair, the red lipstick, and all of the
eyeliner. He shook his head.

“Whatever.” Jimmy rolled his eyes.

Candy ignored the insinuation of why Jimmy was
so interested in her and she reluctantly approached the side of the
booth where the younger man was sitting. “Scoot over,” she
said.

Surprised, Jimmy made room. His face flushed
as she pushed in next to him. Candy put her bag on the table and
waved her wallet in front of Tinch.

“Where’s my money?”

Tinch narrowed his eyes. “How should I
know?”

“God! That was all of the graduation money I
had left.”

“Listen, little lady.” Tinch focused his hard,
cold eyes on her. “Missing money is the least of your concerns. Do
you have any idea who you left that bar with? I’m guessing you do
now.”

“No, actually I don’t.”

“You’re probably better off that
way.”

“He wasn’t a vampire,” Candy said rather
unconvincingly.

“Believe what you want.”

Candy turned to Jimmy. He tried to play off
his attempts to get a peep down the top of her dress, though he
otherwise seemed as serious as Tinch.

“Vampires aren’t real,” she said, even as the
skin beneath the band aids on her neck itched.

“It looked real when he was sucking on your
neck,” Tinch said.

Candy remembered Rupert’s embrace. She
remembered the pain that had lanced down through her neck and the
fire from everywhere else in her body. She blushed, remembering how
good it felt. But he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t done anything
other than. . . .

He bit me!

Candy recalled the odd way she had been
attracted to him even though she could now clearly remember how
unattractive and off-putting he had actually been. It didn’t make
sense. Everything about him was repulsive. Something connected in
her mind.

“Oh my God,” she said. “His accent was
terrible.”

“Yup.” Tinch nodded his head. “No guy can pick
up a girl with an accent like that. It sounds like a bear having
its way with a goat. Only a vampire can pull the wool over a
woman’s eyes like that.”

Candy got up and headed to the bathroom. Jimmy
asked where she was going, but her mind was racing and she didn’t
pay any attention. She stood in front of a grimy mirror and took a
hard look at herself. Her fingers touched the bandages on her
neck.

She thought she might be sick if she looked
beneath.

“Vampires,” she mumbled to herself.

She peeled off the end of all three band aids.
Slowly, one at a time, revealing two red punctures. She dropped her
head. It couldn’t be. When she touched a finger to the wound, her
breath caught in her chest as a spark of pleasure ignited within
her.

“What the . . . ?”

She never considered herself smart, but she
wasn’t stupid. The math written in her reflection on the mirror was
simple enough: Two puncture wounds plus one poorly dressed loser
plus her strange behavior equals . . .

“Vampires are real.”

Chapter Three

Candy tore into her second plate of scrambled
eggs, hash browns and sausages. It tasted terrible, but she was
positively ravenous. Bitter coffee washed it all down, a taste she
had never really became accustomed to but needed now.

Tinch attributed her appetite to the blood she
had lost. She was still silently berating herself for what she had
done at the bar. Every time she thought about it she remembered the
bite more than anything else, and that damned bite felt good.
Thinking about it made her uncomfortable, considering her current
company.

“So, are you two like a father-son vampire
hunting team or something?” she said.

Tinch pulled his dark eyes away from his plate
to look up at her. “No, on both counts.”

Candy glanced at each of them. She still
wasn’t sure she believed this nonsense about Rupert being a
vampire, but it didn’t add up any other way. It didn’t make sense
that she left the bar with such a loser.

“So what’s your deal?” Candy said when neither
of them offered up any information. “What are you if not vampire
hunters?”

“Never mind that,” Tinch said. “I happened to
be in the right place at the right time. Consider yourself
extremely lucky.”

Jimmy had been quiet for the most part since
Candy returned from the bathroom. It was obvious she turned him on;
the signs were everywhere, most noticeably the fidgeting he did to
get a better position to look at her. Too bad he was so shy; he was
cute in a skinny, boy-becoming-man kind of way. She figured with
some time and hard work she could take the shy boy out of him and
turn him into something a woman might want, but those kinds of
projects were a waste of time and only ever worked in
movies.

Tinch picked up the tab, throwing a twenty
onto the table and a five for the tip. He eyed Candy for a moment
and then he gave Jimmy a worried glance.

“It’s nearly five in the morning,” he said,
looking like he was running on coffee fumes. “We need to get home,
Jimmy.”

Candy didn’t know what to say. She felt out of
place, unwanted by at least one of them, but the last thing she
wanted was to go home. Jimmy gave her a comforting
smile.

“Where do you live?” he asked her. At Tinch’s
clear look of displeasure, he sighed and went on, “What do you
expect her to do, Tinch? She needs to get home.”

“I don’t know,” Tinch said with a touch of
both regret and sympathy. “I’ve never had to do this
before.”

“You actually have. Just never with . . .”
Jimmy cleared his throat as if he was saying something he
shouldn’t. “You may as well get used to it with the way vampires
are running around our territory.” He turned his brown eyes to
Candy. “Sorry. We should have probably just taken you to a police
station or something.”

Tinch shook his head and grumbled at the
younger man’s lack of wisdom. “That’s the last thing we want to do.
Exposure to people in any way brings nothing but trouble. Let’s
just get her home.”

Candy fidgeted with her thumbs. Home was the
last place she wanted to be and not only because she was scared out
of her mind thinking vampires were real, but because she didn’t
want to return to her mundane life in small-town
nowhere.

“I don’t think I should go home,” she said.
“Not after what I’ve seen—”

Tinch shook his head again. “You need to be
with your family. You need to go back to your life and forget about
everything that happened.”

“That’s not fair! You can’t tell me vampires
are real and then send me on my way. ‘Oh, vampires are real, by the
way. They snatch people up against their will.’ How’s that going to
help me?”

She noticed the waitress staring at them from
behind the counter. The bell above the diner door jingled. She
heard the waitress say, “Hello there, handsome.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” Tinch
said. “You can’t come with us, little lady. I’m not a babysitter.
You need to go home.”

Behind Candy near the counter, someone spoke
in a British accent that made the hair on the back of her neck
stand on end. She froze as Tinch looked past her, his face shifting
from the passive and relatively relaxed way it had been all night
to fuming mad in an instant.

“Fancy running into you here,” Rupert said.
“It’d be my pleasure to give the young lady a ride home. As a
matter of fact, I insist.”

Tinch ground his teeth and a low growl rumbled
in his chest. Jimmy turned and pushed himself up onto one knee so
he could see over the high backrest, and then he grabbed Candy and
physically switched places with her so she was next to the window.
Snarling, Tinch stood up with clenched fists. He was a hard man,
his tensed arms steely corded bundles of muscle etched with dark
ink tattoos. The hatred on his voice when he spoke was
palpable.

“You’re one stupid bastard. This is lupine
country.”

“I think not,” said the British man, grinning
widely. Leaning against the counter, he winked at the waitress, who
blushed and then stared hatred at Tinch. A greasy cook came out of
the kitchen with a meat cleaver gripped in one thick
hand.

“You wolves have been wanking around so much
you haven’t bothered to notice what’s right in front of your
snouts,” Rupert said.

“Glamoured,” Tinch growled, his eyes moving
between the waitress and the cook—more specifically, to the
cleaver. “I’m going to break your scrawny, English
neck.”

Candy dared to prop herself up on the seat so
she could sneak a peek. Rupert was still wearing the disco-era
clothes. His eyes flashed to her, accompanied with a creepy smile.
The wound on her neck throbbed.

Rupert turned to the waitress and said, “Need
a fix, beautiful?”

The waitress nodded, crossing her hands over
her heart like a love struck girl, offering up one of her wrists.
Rupert grabbed her arm and tugged so violently she came halfway
over the counter. Her mouth hung open and her head lolled back in
anticipation.

“That’s my lovely, loyal girl,” Rupert said.
His eyes lingered on Tinch while he licked her wrist. “You’d do
anything for me, wouldn’t you? She’d kill for me. She’d kill to
have one more bite.”

The waitress gasped and begged.

“Bastard,” Tinch grumbled beneath his breath.
“You fucked with the wrong wolf.” But he didn’t make a move,
seemingly conflicted with the situation, with the waitress and the
cook. He projected his voice towards Jimmy without taking his eyes
away from the threats. “Get Candy out of here.”

Rupert tisked and wagged a finger. “Hand the
girl over and no one need get hurt.”

The waitress screamed out in pain when he
twisted her wrist. She then immediately begged for the bite. A
sudden and uncontrollable pang of jealousy blindsided
Candy.

“Old boy with the cleaver there is itching for
some action,” Rupert said with a nod of his head at the cook. “You
going to kill him to get to me, mutt? You going to kill this
woman?”

Jimmy took Candy by the hand and tried to get
her to the aisle.

“Stay close to me,” he said.

Candy stayed behind him, right at his back so
she wouldn’t have to see Rupert as they edged down the aisle
towards the door. She had the presence of mind to grab her handbag
off the table. Rupert made a clucking sound with his tongue, the
waitress moaned and begged even more. Candy screamed when a tall
man crashed through a window, landing a few feet up the aisle in a
crouch which cut her and Jimmy off from the exit. He was dressed in
the same outdated clothes as Rupert and his black hair sparkled
with glass. His dark eyes were wide and crazed, and Candy could see
two menacing fangs behind his lips.

“Nice entrance, Vivian,” Rupert said. “Willing
to cooperate now? Last offer.”

Vivian chomped his teeth and barked like a
dog. He said near unintelligibly and in an accent far worse than
Rupert’s, “Yeh din’ say she’s so fawkin’ ’awt!”

Jimmy put himself in front of Candy to shield
her from the two vampires. Tinch hurried forward in an attempt to
direct their attention to him.