“Seriously? They want to kill me just because I’m being a decent person?”

“No.” She stepped around her desk, sat upon it, and crossed one shapely leg over the other. It wasn’t much, but in that one movement she made Eliza’s nearly naked body look like a frump in comparison. “Being a decent person is just ticking them off.”

“So then...”

“Losing their respect and coming across as a weak pansy-ass is what’s making them want to kill you.”

“How? As far as they know, I wiped the fucking floor with Jeff. Hell, then there’s all that Freewill bullshit you’ve been spreading.”

Freewills were supposedly legendary warriors of the vampire race, but before I showed up it had been more than half a millennia since one had been born. As a result, the vast majority of the vamps I’d met knew little to nothing about them – most of the coven being far under a century in age. To them, Freewills were legend and myth with no basis in reality. Sally had used that to her advantage. Working with James, the vampire we reported to in the grand scheme of things, she’d spread enough rumors to ensure that most of the coven gave me a wide berth during those first few nights of my existence. She’d spread bullshit like a master chef making a plate of gold-covered truffles and it had worked.

“I’m well aware.” She shook her head. “But then you had to go and fuck it up tonight.”

“Wait. I haven’t done anything tonight. I stopped by the Loft for a few minutes and then came here.”

“And who was there?”

“Eliza and Dipshit Reaper.”

“They weren’t the only ones. Dread Stalker was in the other room with Vanessa.”

Of course. Why wouldn’t he be? Jeez, was I the only guy in this place who wasn’t getting any? “Okay, so?”

“So, you pussed out in front of Dusk Reaper.”

“I didn’t puss out. I was gonna hang there, but then I saw that he was making a fucking mess. So I left.”

“Oh? He didn’t get in your face about anything?”

“Well, yeah a bit...”

“He didn’t openly defy you?”

“Okay, he might have done that a little.”

“And did you kick the ever-unliving shit out of him for it?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“I told him to clean up his mess and then I walked out.”

“Yeah, well guess what, mighty Freewill, that’s what’s known as pussing out in the vampire world. You do not let an inferior give you lip and get away with it ever.”

“I told him not to do it again.”

“Did your parents ever tell you that when you were a kid?”

“All the time.”

“Did it work?”

Hmm, she may have had a point there.

Sally stared me in the eye, her gaze softening ever so slightly as if she felt some pity for my situation. Unfortunately, her tongue didn’t get the memo. “Here’s the deal: Jeff could get away with telling us to never do something again because he was always making an example of someone. It didn’t matter who. We all got a taste of it. Bottom line was we were all...” She hesitated for a moment.

“Afraid of him?”

Her eyes narrowed at me and I realized maybe that hadn’t been the ideal choice of words. “I was going to say wary of getting on his bad side. During his reign, he didn’t have any issues with using the tools given to him – fists or compulsion.”

At least she didn’t say brains, because from what I’d known of the guy he hadn’t exactly been packing a lot in the intellect department. Even so, when you’re the six-hundred pound gorilla in the room you don’t really need to be a Rhodes Scholar.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I let our discussion sink in for a few moments. Crap! And here I thought that the bullshit was behind me. I now saw that I’d merely crested a rise and found a whole new valley of it to traipse through.

At last I swallowed my pride, knowing Sally would probably skin me alive for it. “How badly did I fuck up?”

“Star is a good person to use for judging these things.”

“She was definitely giving me the stink-eye tonight.”

“Exactly,” she replied, deadpan. “She’s the type who wears her emotions on her sleeve. You’ll notice she’s been tiptoeing around you the past few months.”

“Not tonight. I saw nothing but contempt on her face.”

“Probably an act. Don’t tell her I said this or I’ll rip your nuts off, but she actually likes you.”

I perked up a bit. “Oh?”

“Not like that, Romeo. You and she are a lot alike ... outside of the minor difference that she’s gorgeous and you’re you.”

“Thanks for the ego boost.”

She ignored me and continued. “You’re both ... well, more or less human. She’s not an abusive asshole like most of the membership. After Jeff, you’re practically a ray of sunshine for someone like her. When the rumors started flying, though, I have little doubt she realized she had to make a choice. Unfortunately, for you ... and that means us ... she’s just smart enough to know which way the odds are leaning.”

“Rumors? Wait, what did Reaper do, start texting everyone the second I left?”

“More or less.”

What an asshole! See, that’s one of the things about the vampire lifestyle that drives me batshit. You’d think they’d all be a bunch of technology shunning monsters, content on skulking in dank tunnels until sunset hit and they swooped forth to prey upon the living. The reality was, in many ways modern covens more closely resembled high school cliques than anything. “So what now?”

“Now I try my best to do damage control. If they think you’re weak, then they’re gonna think your second-in-command is weak too.”

“I’ve always favored the term concubine.”

“And I’ve always favored the term eunuch, if you get my drift. Regardless, I can try to handle some stuff from my end. I’ll kick a few teeth in for show, that’ll slow things down. I can also keep sowing bullshit for you. Before he left, James shared with me a few extra tidbits about Freewills from our archives. Not much, mind you. Most of this shit is above even his pay grade. But enough that I can maybe spin a few more stories.”

“Have you heard from him?”

“Nope.”

That sucked. James was in charge of all vampire covens in the Northeast, a powerhouse of a vamp over five hundred years old. He was also a pretty cool dude from what I’d seen, which seemed to be a rarity among the undead. He could have ended this nonsense with a single appearance. Sadly, he’d been called away to Asia by his superiors. There was no telling when he’d be back and his stand-in, Colin, wasn’t the type to give low-level schlubs like me any help at all.

“You think anyone will make a move against us?”

“Definitely a possibility.”

“Dusk Reaper?”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Not at first. He’s older than me, but too much of a coward deep down to try anything unless he thinks the others will back him up. The real danger is going to be if he can convince folks like Dread Stalker and Victor. They’re a lot tougher than him and they know how to fight.”

Uh, yeah. Goddamn. I really needed to take notes on who was sticking with their stupid coven names and who was dropping them.

“That’s the bigger problem. If that happens, they might decide to move on us in force. If so, we are fucked with a capital F.”

“So how do we rein things in?”

“We don’t. You do. Like it or not, Bill, you’re gonna have to do something to earn back their respect. Believe me when I say our lives depend on it.”

♦ ♦ ♦

I needed time to think. It looked like most of the coven had departed for the evening to go about their own business, probably killing the shit out of people to spite the rules I’d recently laid down. That was fine by me – them being gone, not the killing people part. Sally was encouraging me to pick one of them as a sacrificial lamb and then ice their ass with extreme prejudice in a way the others would be able to respect. Sadly for us, I wasn’t particularly big on the idea of casual murder, not even if the person was a monumental asshole.

I also wasn’t entirely certain I could pull it off. I was easily the youngest vampire in the coven. Youngest equaled weakest for the undead. Sure, I might have more strength than a bodybuilder, but human standards didn’t really apply in this case. By vamp standards I was ... well, what I’d been for most of my life: a pudgy guy with very little muscle tone.

Sally had finally stopped badgering me when I promised to come up with something. Though I was loathe to admit it, she had a point. Having seen enough vampires in action, I knew that talk was cheap among their kind. They’d kill a person or another vamp without a moment’s hesitation. I still wasn’t certain whether living for all eternity appealed to me or not, but I had to admit I definitely didn’t relish the prospect of dying young.

If there was an easy answer to all of this, it eluded me. What could I do that wouldn’t end with me either as a pile of ashes or having turned into an icy-blooded sociopath like the rest of them?

Go figure. On a night when my only plan had been to find a few pairs of tits on pay cable, I’d somehow stepped into a heaping pile of bullshit instead. Sadly, the suckage of the evening wasn’t quite finished with me yet.

On the way home, I racked my brain for a good hour, but couldn’t come up with jack or shit. Unfortunately, the whole mess had me so distracted that I ended up missing my fucking transfer.

I ended up sitting on the A train for several more stops than I’d intended, taking me into Queens. That was verboten territory as it was home to the HBC and they weren’t overly fond of me at the moment.

It was late, though, and I didn’t feel like hanging around and being accosted for change while I waited for the train on the opposite track. The beauty of vampire physiology is that distances which might be worth a cab ride for a human are a pretty easy run for a vamp. Considering the late hour, I figured I’d have a pretty good chance of walking into my apartment sooner if I made the journey on foot. All in all, it seemed worth the risk.

As it turns out, much like so many other items that night, I was wrong.