Here Be Sexist Vampires (17 page)

Denny’s mouth was hanging open rather unattractively. “Um…How…How do I do it faster? What am I doing wrong?”

“You’re not doing anything
wrong
with your gift.” I spoke to them all then. “You’re all making the mistake of thinking that this is the same as physical energy, but it’s not. It’s an
un
natural energy that started being produced when your body evolved and you Turned. It’s produced up here” – I poked my head – “and that’s where you have to dig for it.”

“But
your
power comes from your hands,” said Stuart.

“No, it does not. You have to think of a water tank and a hose.” I poked my head again. “This is the water tank. Your hands,
or
your breath” – I pointed at Chico – “can be the hose. Whatever hose you want. I even use my feet when I’m drawing energy from the earth beneath me. Denny uses his arsehole sometimes.” Nobody laughed – they didn’t want more skunk musk up their noses. “The outlet and the water tank are two different things.”

I saw a few of the recruits exchanging looks that said this made sense, that they couldn’t believe it was that obvious and yet they had never considered it.

“Commander Michaels never told us that,” griped David, like a kid looking to blame a teacher for his lack of knowledge.

“Don’t worry, you’ll still get your gold star sticker at the end of the session,” I told him patronisingly. He laughed just as the others did.

“What about people like me and David?” said Stuart. “We don’t use outlets, we just will it to happen.”

“And that’s exactly where your problems stem from. You’re limiting yourselves. Vampiric gifts don’t work off will power. You don’t
wish
it would happen and then it just
does
. David, you concentrate hard with your eyes when you send out that blast, right?” David nodded. “There’s your outlet you’ve been using without even realising it. Stuart, didn’t it occur to you that when you shred into tiny little molecules that
that
is how the energy is being released? That it bursts out of you?”

He tilted his head. “Huh.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that shredding could also serve as teleporting you around? That maybe you could learn to shred and then go from place to place as molecules?”

Stuart treble-blinked and then his head seemed to be working away.

“I suppose you didn’t.” I turned back to Denny. “Now, I want you to close your eyes.” He did. “Think about nothing but that water tank – all the water swilling around in there, wanting to get out so more can replace it. All it needs is a hose. Remember I told you that this was similar to Stuart’s gift. He has to feel the water bursting out of him.
You
have to think of it bursting
inside
you; filling you and filling you, drowning you into nothing but -” And then he was like a puddle of mushy peas in the space of a second. He even smelt a little like them.   “Mush,” I finished. Everyone was clapping for him and wooing. “Now, Denny, you need to think of the water filling you again, stretching you and stretching you until you might burst again. But this time, you don’t burst. You turn off that hose and leave the water in the tank.” It was strange talking to a puddle, and even more strange to think that the puddle could fully understand me. He was mush for a good ten seconds before speedily reforming – I took that as him concentrating on the water/tank metaphor.

Whole again, Denny glared at me with a cocktail of astonishment, gratitude and respect in his eyes. “Oh my God, I did it. For years I’ve been trying to control it. I could just kiss you right now.” His face turned serious. “I won’t.”

All the others reacted in much the same way when I took them aside individually as I had done with Denny. Chico learned that he could in fact use his palms to emit thorns, he just needed to work on emitting more than one thorn at a time and having a better aim. Butch was able to pop up his shield a couple of times, he just needed to learn how to form it at will and how to keep the shield up for the length of time that he wanted. Stuart was now able to shred in the space of three seconds and reform again just as quickly, his goal was to learn how to do it within the space of a second in order to avoid any power directed his way. He also wanted to master how to move around while he was only molecules.

Salem, being quite violent, decided that it would be much more fun and dramatic if his outlet for his psychic boom – that could knock you unconscious – could be his fist. After Reuben weakened his gift so that the boom felt more like a slap, I let him practice on Damien seen as he was being a lazy little sod. Damien’s low concentration span meant he was still having trouble with trying to project his astral self any further than a few feet. But after a while of getting psychic slaps from Salem, Damien – in utter desperation – was able to astral project away from the impact. Sometimes learning the hard way was the only way to learn.

David had decided that he wanted his outlet to be his palms, not his eyes, so he was working on that and doing excellently – Reuben had weakened his power in advance to ensure that David’s blast couldn’t do any more than give his victim a minor shock, and he practiced mostly on Denny who said he would happily practice with his own powers in his own time so he could help David today. Denny looked out for David a lot, which was good as I came to realize that David was very nervous of his power and by virtue of his young age.

It turned out that Reuben had a little trouble with controlling whether he strengthened someone’s gift or whether he weakened it, but by the end of the session he had a better hang of it. He was working toward increasing the degree to which he could affect someone’s gift and with being able to affect someone’s gift with minimal bodily contact as opposed to holding onto them for up to eight seconds.

Max and Harvey were hard work because both believed that they had nothing left to learn…So I paired them up, which they soon regretted. I first let Slap-head – he was back to that now that he was being a wanker – explore whether he could choose exactly what senses he wanted to affect (he didn’t believe this was possible until, one by one, I took each of his senses away and then left him to silently whine about it to the wall). It transpired that although cocky Harvey was able to send something zooming away with his telekinesis, he couldn’t make something come toward him, or rotate, or levitate so I allowed him to practice on a practically defenceless Slap-head. Slap-head of course stole every one of Harvey’s senses once he recovered his own just as payback.

Each time the recruits were successful in their attempts, I would give them a nod of approval, but after that would holler, ‘Again!’ And, to their credit, they did it over and over and over. I was tempted to loudly express how pleased I was with their efforts but I couldn’t afford to show any signs of compassion or kindness with these blokes as they would only view this as a weakness and start taking the piss. Coaches needed to have a tough exterior or they’d all end up being wankers again. Besides, as Max had said, they were big boys.

By the end of the night, they were all exhausted…but also optimistic. Proud to be tired because they were proud of their efforts. I was actually proud of them too. I showed this by simply saying in a flat tone, “You did good. You worked hard. But it doesn’t end there. You’ve got goals to hit, don’t lose sight of them.” Then as motivation I made them a promise. “Once you meet those goals and can master the formations that I have in mind for you to learn, I’ll let you practice an attack on one of the other squads.”

Every one of them cheered. I knew that the other squads teased the newest recruits. It was tradition. It was part of the tough love of the place; soldier sense of humour was somewhat different. But it pissed these blokes off all the same, just as it would piss me off. 

“Oh yeah I’ll send those shitheads flying through the air,” said Harvey. “Then we’ll see if still they want to throw eggs at my door.”

I smiled evilly. “Or…you could learn to levitate objects properly and levitate some eggs up to
their
doors…Tit for tat and all that. But you didn’t hear that suggestion from me.”

The recruits were all cooking up revenge plots as they left the arena, each sure to shout “See you tomorrow night, Coach.”

And they did see me tomorrow night. And the next night. And the next. Each time they put in maximum effort, never complained at the constant holler of ‘Again’, and the improvement was immediate. Jared never knew this as he never came to observe. Not even when I took them out to the rainforest to familiarise themselves with it and do some training there. As such, the night of the ‘bet’ came and went. Jared hadn’t mentioned it at all. Nor did he mention Antonio’s order that Jared and I lead the squad together during the attack on The Hollow. Antonio had assured me that Jared was aware of his ‘order’ so I’d decided that I would wait until Jared brought up the subject before we spoke of it. But he didn’t. He had barely mentioned
anything
to me. Toneless, polite greetings and farewells were all I got now.

“You’re going to have to tell me what’s going on because all the emotions swirling around that office are giving me migraines,” whined Fletcher one evening as he barged past me and into my apartment. As always looking like he had just stepped out of a fashion magazine. I felt even drearier now considering that I was waltzing around in my white fluffy robe and silk pyjamas.

“Well hello to you too, Fletch. I’m fine thanks.”

He spotted the three empty bottles of Vodka flavoured NSTs on my table in front of the sofa and sighed. His words were gentle but firm. “Spill the beans, lady.”

I sat beside him on the sofa. Well, I flopped down onto it. “Remember the night when Jared and I nearly had a fumble?”

“How could I forget? The pair of you were throwing that much heated passion around that I was sweating cobs and downright bloody horny. Not that Norm was complaining when I got back to the room, mind. I was like a bleeding jungle cat the way I -”

“Fletch I love you but could the record please show that I do not want to visualise my friends
doing it
so feel free to withhold those kind of details.”

He rolled his eyes. “Prude.” In vampire speed he retrieved a bundle of NSTs from my refrigerator and returned to the sofa. Taking a honey flavoured one from the bundle, he spoke, “So, you were saying...”

“He told me about his consort collection...and then asked me if I’d like to join it.”

Fletcher’s mouth fell open. “No!” As of this moment, he was absorbed in the conversation.

“Yes.”

“The randy bastard. You’d think three was enough. Well don’t keep me in suspense, tell me what you said.”

“I told him I didn’t want to be a consort again, and that I couldn’t sleep with someone who collected women – who all live in the same apartment, by the way.”

“No!”

“Yes.” I didn’t realise until now just how much this had all got to me. “He couldn’t seem to wrap his conceited head around that, and he wouldn’t let it drop. Then we had another kiss. I’d been absorbing some of his energy because I was wiped out from the blood link being broken with my Sire, but I couldn’t get him to let go of me before I took too much of his energy. So the idea of the kiss was to distract him.”

“That’d definitely distract randy ole Jared. I’m guessing from that look on your lovely face that it didn’t end there.”

“Oh no it did. I mean, we didn’t do anything more than kiss. But the kiss had gotten a bit...”

“Tongue-tastic,” he supplied.

“Yeah. So then Jared made his proposition again. I said no again and then we ended up arguing. I don’t even know how it got so bad. I mentioned that his brother didn’t have a consort and he seemed to take that as I liked Evan as well. And when I said he saw women as possessions like my Sire had, he got all pissed off telling me not to ever compare me to either of them again. He said he’d let it all go and I could get on with my ‘celibate lifestyle’.”

Fletcher tilted his head as he considered it all. “So, basically, he’s sulking over a bonk.”

“A bonk that I won’t have with him, yeah.”

He snorted and adjusted his glasses. “Half his problem is he’s too used to getting whatever he wants.”

“Have you noticed that Joy’s been turning up at the office at least once a night?”

“What? Who? Oh you mean that cross between a whippet and a witch. Personally, I don’t know how he can shag something that looks like it’s just escaped from Azkaban.”

I instantly burst into laughter. Thank God Fletcher had turned up. He always had a way of making everything not seem so bad. The truth was that it had it annoyed the hell out of me that Joy had been turning up the past few nights. She and I did the ‘hello’ and ‘bye’ thing but that was all. Once she brought the other two consorts along. Both were Kejas too and almost as gorgeous as Joy. Daniela had a very Mexican look about her and a bust that any woman would envy, which completed compensated for the fact that she was dopey beyond comprehension. Tammy was dark-skinned and very voluptuous but the devious expression that seemed to be fixed on her face kind of negated her beauty. They also hello-ed and goodbye-ed me. Daniela actually seemed sincere about it, as opposed to the other two; their dark grins always made it feel as though they were really saying, ‘We hate you, please die’.

Jared would watch me closely when they were around. No idea why. I took to focusing on whatever documents were in front of me, no matter what they were. I would sooner have left the office altogether but then it would have looked as though their presence bothered me in some way and I was not about to let Jared believe that. Even though it was true. I have to admit to having a lack of rationality where Jared was concerned, though it made no sense. As such, the whip nearly materialized in my hands a few times when Joy gave him them noisy kisses of hers. Whipping her into insensibility would have felt good.

“I wouldn’t let her or him bother you, luv. Spit him out of your mind. What about that Max bloke? He’s alright, and he likes you well enough. Luscious too.”