Last...

"Okay, let's run through this again."

Seth rolled his eyes. "You newbies are pathetic. You are dead, a vampire."

Dryden nodded. "Got that."

"You are a vampire and not a pile of rotting meat about it be ground to kibble because Ash wishes it."

"Right."

"And," Seth repeated as though schooling a particularly idiotic student, "Ash is our leader and your mistress. You are her minion and will do what she wants with you. Got it, corpse?"

"Why me?" he asked. He had found a straight razor, the sort of blade he'd only ever seen in period movies, and carefully cut into his wrist so he could watch the wounds heal over. Seth snatched it from Dryden's hand, closing it before it reached his jacket pocket.

"Not a damned idea. You seem like a pathetic waste of time and space to me."

If Dryden heard this newest insult, he did not acknowledge it. "So, I have powers?"

"No, you are a minion. You do not have powers. You turn to dust if sunlight hits you. Well, technically you burst into flame and scream as the flesh chars from your bones and I laugh from a shaded distance. Then you turn to dust."

"Can a stake through the heart kill me?" Dryden asked. It was important to know all the liabilities.

"I must say, you are taking being postmortem well, but I suppose your type would consider this the fulfillment of a lifelong wish. A stake through the heart kills anything with a heart. Idiot."

Dryden walked around the room. "Where are we? Your manor house?"

"Manor house? We're vampires, not time travelers. This is a farm house we sublet."

"Sublet?"

"We have an option to buy with a big final payment at the end. We'll probably just rip the stupid landlord's throat out, to be honest, but we have another six months on our lease before it comes to that."

"So you aren't nobility or-"

He scoffed. "A generation ruined by Anne Rice. No, we're not nobility. I'm a former Catholic school teacher and Ash… well, she's a special case." He slapped Dryden's wrist from his mouth. He was biting it to again provoke wounds.

Dryden fumed. "What the hell was that for?!"

"You are full of my blood. That is the only thing allowing you to heal, the only reason you are alive. If you don't feed soon -- fresh, human blood --.you will die in agony. Every time you shed my blood because you think it is cute, you bring that moment closer. You'll need blood, unless you somehow think psychic energy and rainbows will be enough?"

"Well sorry," Dryden said. "I didn't know."

"You do now," Seth replied.

Dryden was glad he wasn't Seth's minion. He doubted he could spent his afterlife being treated like a moron because there were some finer points to being undead didn't instinctually know. As he pondered where to get velvet cloaks that would resist bloodstains, Seth returned with a small girl. She wore a tight blue cashmere sweater and khaki cargo pants that looked nearly painted on, the uniform of the Annandale slut who fell into The Gap and allowed anyone else the pleasure of sliding into hers. Dryden knew and hated the type.

He rose from the bed and looked her over. He might hate her as a member of a group, but had no harsh feelings toward her as an individual. He turned to Seth. "She's my victim?"

Her hand flashed up to his mouth before he could finish the final word, extending it to a long "immmmmmm." She pulled his face down, smiling and inspecting him. "No, I am your mistress." She squeezed his cheeks until his teeth cut into them, until facial muscles tore. His knees grew weak as the pain washed across him and he collapsed onto them.

"Look, Seth, he bows to me! Awesio!"

It was then that Dryden finally decided being a vampire might suck.

Roselyn had not heard from Dryden in two days. His cell phone was always off, no one answered at his apartment. Even his parents, when Roselyn got up the courage to call them, plead oblivious. But, from what Dryden had told her, his parents did not take kindly to her, his child bride who was clearly just after him for his $30,000 a year. She couldn't be sure they were telling her the truth, though they sounded kindly no matter what Dryden claimed they actually felt so she chose to believe them.

She searched for him several hours a day. His truck was still in the parking lot of the diner, but that didn't mean much. He had plenty of gothy friends who would have picked him up. Several of these friends were of the female persuasion and, while by and large they were bi and large, they still represented a threat on her feminine radar. She wasn't as jealous as Dryden, she would never have accused him of impropriety. By the same token, she left hickeys on his neck to mark him as her exclusive property. As far as she knew and as far as she cared to, no one else was leaving such marks on his body and she had certainly checked him more thoroughly than he did her.

She searched for him, despite Eliot and Shane's assurances that this was likely nothing. She understood why they said this. But it felt different this time, despite how little she felt able to convince her roommate about this. She worried if only for a moment that this had something to do with her spell, but dismissed this. Magick didn't work that way, no matter how much she sometimes wished it did.

She couldn't ignore the first week of classes, though, no matter how worried she was. She had done so well in her final show last year that she was almost exclusively in the most coveted art classes. It wasn't so much that she was talented, though she certainly was, than that she used Shane's ability to see and describe the otherworldly as her muse. It foisted her into the spotlight with more than just her teachers, but it was they who she feared more than the daemons who recognized themselves in her work. If she missed even one class so early, some pathetic bootlicker would usurp her spot in a slurp. She loved Dryden, but she couldn't sacrifice her future to what she prayed was only an outrageous tantrum.

She sat in the corners of the studios and the back of lecture halls, half-writing, half-sketching the things that she wanted to say to her errant boyfriend. Only one teacher had noticed and was impressed enough by the quality of the sketches to simply remind her to keep on the task of reading the syllabus. She wished she had some talent beyond drawing, some little psychic intuition that would tell her he was fine. But all she could see when she focused was the light through her eyelids.

He had been in this one room for days. Whenever Seth would leave for a few minutes - which he would do rarely, usually to get more blood for the both of them - Dryden would investigate the room. It looked to be a spare but typical room, not unlike the one he had as an undergrad. A mattress on the floor with no bed frame, a wooden desk with locked drawers, some posters on the walls, an ugly lighting fixture hanging from the ceiling, a window covered with heavy curtains in front of a blacked out window. He'd tried opening the desk, but the drawers were locked and he doubted he had the strength to pull them open. Could he do that? Shouldn't he have extra vampire strength by now or did he have to kill somebody first? He was careful not to disturb anything, if just to prevent Seth from noticing when he returned.

Dryden didn't understand why he was being kept in this room, why he had been turned at all. This wasn't what being a vampire was supposed to be like, drinking room temperature blood out of glass tumblers and coffee mugs, and staying in a room like a prisoner. He'd told Seth that he was keen to begin their dark work, but Seth just rolled his eyes and called him and idiot again.

He had to escape, but he had no idea how. Since the window was blacked out, there was no visual evidence of what time of day it was. He wasn't about to try opening the window to find out when doing so could mean his death but he didn't cotton to being kept here.

He needed to let Roselyn know what had happened to him, so she wouldn't worry. He checked his pockets and found a folded up flier and a pen. He willed his hands to move with vampiric speed, like they did in stories, but his fingers were as sluggish as ever. He wrote furtively nonetheless.

Roselyn Jacobs
113C Main Street
Red Hook, NY 12571

Roselyn,
I'm sorry for everything ever. I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, but I am being held prisoner by a horde of vampires. I'm not sure where I am, I could be hundreds of miles from you, moved by their preternatural speed, but I will find a way to get this letter to you. I fear they are turned me as well, into some unholy minion. The queen vampire, one called Ash, seems fearsome and wears the costume of a college student on her plunders. The one who keeps me in my cell, one called Seth, is violent and cruel. I think he fears the power I may hold. I love you and will find you soon. Perhaps you can join me in bearing the Dark Gift.

Yours through eternity,
Dryden

He heard the door rattle and hid the letter under the mattress.

"What have you brought me this time, Seth? Some coffee, a doughnut, maybe?"

He shook his head. "Blood, you slow-witted cretin. Get used to it."

"It was a joke," he said, accepting his travel mug. The truth was he wasn't used to it. He wanted the blood, definitely craved it above anything else, but he certainly wasn't used to it. It always tasted metallic and sour, sticky with coagulation from being left outside to warm or cool. He fumbled with the maroon mug's lid, trying to get it open. He could here the liquid sloshing within, but couldn't figure out how to get at it.

Seth pulled it out of Dryden's hands and slid a tab open. He shoved it back at Dryden, who thanked him. Dryden held his breath and swallowed it down in a big gulp. He quickly it, wiping his mouth clean of a blood moustache.

"So, what was this?"

Seth glared at him. "Blood."

"No, I mean breakfast, lunch, dinner?" Dryden asked.

"Breakf…" He caught himself. "Why?"

"No reason."

"Don't you be planning a goddamned thing, boy! You are safe here and are going to stay here until Ash has a use for you. Don't even think about leaving, this is for your protection and I promise we will hunt you down, drag you back, and kill anyone you ever cared about. Or we'll make you do it. You'd like that, right?"

Dryden shuddered. "I'm not going to escape."

"Because you don't know if it is daylight out there and I am sure as hell not telling you. You open that front door or that window and you are dust. Don't even consider it."

"I won't!" Dryden assured him.

"I did not waste my time making you just to have you screw up."

Dryden jumped from the mattress at Seth. "I'm really not as stupid as you are making me out to be! I have a college degree, a job, a girlfriend. I'm not some kind of moro-" but the end of the word was cut off by Dryden slipping on his pen, breaking the window, and tumbling out into the sunshine.

Darting out of the now lethal room, Seth grunted "idiot" once more.

Next...

Red Hook is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is published by Cave Drawing Ink and syndicated throughout the internet.