Suck It Up and Die (4 page)

Morning did a full one-eighty as Clancy closed in on him. “One of the bravest, sir.”

“The bravest what?”

“The bravest fire knight, sir.”

Clancy’s face set in a scowl. “Prowler’s been giving your crew that bucket of bullshit about the knights of the fire table, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir. He told us about the spirit of fire.”

“I don’t care if he told you about the spirit of upchuck, why you still draggin’ your hose in my hallway?”

The question baffled Morning. “Ah, I’m going to my next class, sir.”

“You do that, and I’ll drop a POOP on your head.”

Morning figured it was another one of Clancy’s acronyms, but this one he’d never heard before. “A POOP, sir?”

“Probie Out Of Place.” Clancy rapped on Morning’s forehead. “Hello, McCobb. You’ve got ED, and I’m not talkin’ erectile dysfunction, I’m talkin’ early dismissal!”

“Right!” Morning had forgotten about his early dismissal to be in the Vampire Pride Parade. “Totally forgot, sir.”

Clancy crossed his arms and shook his head. “Mental screwups, McCobb, they can get you or another firefighter killed.” He fixed Morning with hard eyes. “But being immortal, you don’t worry about ending up a ten-forty-five, do you? Which makes you a probie with no respect for the dangers of the job.” He stuck a finger in Morning’s face. “You got ten minutes to get off the Rock, and if I catch you doing some vampire voodoo like shape-shifting into a bird, I’ll wash you outta here faster than you can say ‘back-draft.’ ”

Captain Clancy had never approved of Morning’s admittance to the academy. It wasn’t that he hated vampires, he was just sick and tired of the bar being lowered to make the FDNY an equal opportunity employer. First
the Physical Ability Test had been compromised to ease the way for women firefighters, and now the age bar had been lowered to admit some punk vampire. What was next? Letting arsonists be firefighters so the FDNY could keep a closer eye on them?

Before Morning could remind Clancy that he had signed an agreement to never use
any
of his vampire skills while training at the academy, a voice interrupted. “Hello, Clancy.” Prowler came out of the classroom carrying the metal bucket. “If you’d like to join the twenty-first century, vampires don’t ‘shape-shift’ anymore, they ‘cell differentiate.’ That’s ‘CD’ for you acronym freaks.”

Clancy chuckled with disdain. “In my book, the only thing CD stands for is controlled descent, which sums up your career move to Department Wizard.”

Prowler turned to Morning and put on an Irish accent. “Methinks the Irishman has a hankerin’ for me wand.” As Clancy flushed with anger, Prowler pulled Morning down the hall. “C’mon, you got a parade to catch.”

Morning waited until Clancy was out of earshot. “Why is he so set on washing me out?”

“Don’t mind him,” Prowler said. “Just keep your nose clean, your head down, and doin’ what a probie’s gotta do.”

“It’s not easy when I miss training for stupid things like parades. I mean, I don’t see why Birnam still needs me as his poster boy. It’s been a year, and not one Leaguer who’s gone mainstream has gone human bloodstream.”

“Not officially, anyway.”

Morning shot Prowler a worried look. He thought only goths and vampire racists believed the stories about backsliding Leaguers and willing Lifers partaking in consensual bloodlust. But then, Prowler had a way of knowing stuff most people didn’t.

“The point is,” Prowler continued, “there’s all sorts of fires to put out in the world, and your being in the parade will throw water on the friction between Lifers and Leaguers. If that friction ever sparks and burns down the house of peace Luther Birnam has built, Clancy won’t need to scrub you on demerits. He’ll put a hook through your chest and turn you into a live fire exercise.” He stopped at the door of the chief’s office. “Morning, you may be a fire knight in training, but you’re still a double-hatter.”

“What’s that?”

“Like it or not, you’re still a
Leaguer
knight, which comes with responsibilities.”

Morning didn’t want to hear any more about the fame that still hung around his neck like a rotting albatross. “Are you driving back downtown?”

“No, got another crew on the other side of the academy waiting for me to introduce ’em to the spirit of fire.”

As Morning went into the locker room to grab his backpack he knew Prowler was right. The battle over the Vampire Rights Act was heating up in the run-up to the vote. And if Morning was ever going to get the chance to marry Portia, the VRA had to pass.

It was another right Leaguers had been stripped of: Congress had passed a law defining marriage as the union between a mortal and a mortal. Intermarriage between a Lifer and a Leaguer was a crime punishable by ten years for the Lifer and a hundred for the Leaguer. That way, it guaranteed the star-crossed lovers would never meet again.

A bus took Morning over the East River to Manhattan. Getting off at 125th Street, he was surprised by a sign in the Duane Reade on the corner. It advertised cards for American Out Day. He didn’t think the day had been around long enough to merit a card. It also messed with his plans. He had hoped to give Portia a funny get-well card urging her to recover from mortality so they could live happily ever after. Now he wondered if her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t buy her an official Out Day card on the first anniversary. Normally, he would have trusted his instincts and gone with the get-well card, but Portia’s EB bomb echoed in his head.
Eternal beloved
. It was a game changer. And it’s not like he had dittoed the letters back. The EB ball was in his court, so she probably expected something more than a goofy card.

Luckily, the choice of Out Day cards was limited. He found one that was sort of funny and would set up what he wanted to say when he gave her the present he’d been
saving for more than a year. The front of the card said,
So much has changed between mortals and vampires
. When you opened it, there was a picture of a Lifer and a Leaguer drinking at a table loaded with empty bottles and glasses. The Lifer was drunk and passed out in her chair. The Leaguer was cheerfully consuming a blood drink. The caption read,
But we’ll always be able to outdrink you. Happy Out Day!

After buying the card, Morning headed to the subway that would take him to Delancey Street and the start of the Vampire Pride Parade. A loudspeaker announced that the trains weren’t running because of a small fire on the tracks. He went back up to the street and considered his options. Taking the bus all the way downtown would make him late for the parade. He didn’t have enough money for a cab. And he couldn’t CD into some kind of Flyer because he was a stickler about the rule he had learned at Leaguer Academy: Only CD in the face of a life-threatening emergency. Making the parade in time was hardly life-threatening. His only choice was to take the bus, be late, and join the parade after it started.

As he waited for the bus another option arrived in the form of an urban chariot driven by a two-legged dynamo. Morning recognized Zoë Zotz by her red helmet bobbing up and down as she rode toward him on her pedicab.

For a seventeen-year-old, Zoë was undersized, underdeveloped, but overwhelming. At LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, where she and Portia were seniors, Zoë had two nicknames: “ZZ” and “MM.” MM was a strip down of “mouth ’n’ motion machine.”

Her pedicab was the same bloodred as her helmet and it sported black gothic letters announcing
FANPIRE TOURS
. Fanpire Tours was an after-school and weekend business
Zoë had started. For sixty dollars, she wheeled couples around Manhattan to see the real and fictional sites related to vampires: from the stoop on the Lower East Side where Morning McCobb first came out as a vampire by turning into mist to the Broadway theater where Bela Lugosi took his first bite as Count Dracula in 1927. While pedaling between sights she entertained customers with a vampire version of
The Little Mermaid
song “Part of Your World”: “I wanna be where the vampires are / I wanna see, wanna see ’em feedin’.”

Zoë skidded her pedicab to a stop in front of Morning. She was dressed in her standard-issue tight black jeans and a black tee under a black leather vest she called her “goth padded bra.” She sported purple fingernails and her middle fingernails had little skulls on them. Anyone who gave her grief got “flipped the skull.” Ever since she’d picked Morning’s brain for everything he knew about real vampires, she had jettisoned her pierced jewelry and only wore rings and bracelets. In her words, she was “vintage goth.” She also defied cookie-cutter goth with her long blond hair and by not possessing a hint of the mopey ennui goths cultivated. How could she? She careened her pedicab around Manhattan like a Tasmanian taxi driver.

Zoë balanced on her pedals and flashed her sizable grille of teeth. “Hi, A.M.!” “A.M.” was the nickname she’d given him to avoid the weirdness of saying “Morning, Morning.”

He greeted her with a befuddled look. “What are you doing here?” Not only was Zoë supposed to be in school, but LaGuardia Arts was all the way across Manhattan on the Upper West Side.

“It’s my lunch period, I heard the subway was down,
and Portia told me you gotta get to the parade on time,” she said. “Besides, I’m more fun than a cab.”

“So you’re rescuing me.”

She nodded, bouncing the blond hair that poured from her helmet. “Yeah, it’s payback ahead of time ’cause one of these days you’re gonna rescue me from mortality.”

That was another thing about Zoë. Her greatest ambition was to become a vampire; she was constantly trying to get Morning to turn her. It’s not that she had a crush on him, she just liked the idea of being the blood child of the nicest vampire in the world, and the blood
grandchild
of the evilest vampire in the world, Ikor DeThanatos. DeThanatos was the vampire who had accidently turned Morning two years before. But even if Zoë’s dream came true, she would never be able to meet Ikor DeThanatos; Morning and Portia had destroyed him a year before in an epic battle in the Mother Forest. Because he had been slain, and because Morning and Portia didn’t want the world to know all the bloody details of that fateful night, only Zoë and a select few knew Morning’s fang father by name. The other reason Zoë was convinced she was destined to be a vampire was her name. After all, the diaeresis—the two dots over the
e
—was a sure sign she was destined to be bitten and turned.

Zoë raised her hands in a “no pressure” gesture. “But, hey, you don’t have to sip and flip me today. I can wait. Right now, the price for a ride downtown is super simple.”

Morning gave her a dubious look. “Which is?”

“You gotta hear my newest blood-obligate trivia.” Zoë was a collector of everything there was to know about critters that survived on blood alone.
Blood obligate
was the scientific term for “sanguivore.” Zoë was more than a vampire nut, she was a vampire wonk.

Morning climbed into the pedicab’s rickshaw seat. “Okay, that’s better than having to watch your latest blood-obligate impression and guessing what creature you are.”

“Go ahead, make fun.” Zoë stood on her pedals and got the pedicab moving. “But when I put my bloodsucker impressions on YouTube and they go viral, I’m gonna be as famous as you.”

“Right,” Morning scoffed, “then you’ll have to always wear a hat and sunglasses and shave your head.”

“Are you kidding? I’d do fame the way you’re supposed to do fame. I’d flaunt it!”

As Zoë caught the green wave of lights going down Lexington Avenue, Morning steered the conversation. “Okay, I’m ready to pay my fare. What’s your new blood trivia?”

She turned and shot him an excited look, like she was about to reveal the secret of time travel. “Remember when I was telling you how most bloodsuckers sink more than fangs? That they also inject their victims with a painkilling anesthetic so the victim doesn’t feel the bite, and an anticoagulant that prevents the blood from clotting?”

Morning gave her a behind-the-back eye roll. “Who could forget?”

“Well, I just read about another chemical that bloodsuckers inject into their victims. A vasodilator.”

“A vaso-what?”

“Dilator. It means ‘to widen.’ A vasodilator blows open a victim’s veins so they go from sippy cup to super Slurpee. Is that cool, or what?”

“Yeah, you’ve just given me a new line next time you ask me to turn you.”

“What?”

“I don’t do vasodilation.”

Zoë laughed. “Yeah, well, check this vasodilation out.” She pedaled hard to make another green light.

As the pedicab gained speed Morning watched Zoë’s boyish butt piston up and down. He realized that the day Zoë finally grew some hips and boobs, her Fanpire Tour business would have to change modes of transportation; she’d get too many customers more interested in Zoë’s sights than vampire sights.