Mind the Thorns

Chapter 9

Regan turned the car off the highway and onto the long slow loop to the surface street.  As she had come over the bridge she had seen the place for the recruitment meeting: an abandoned Denny’s twenty-four hour diner.  The original sign had been blown out, probably destroyed a year ago in a good windstorm and never replaced.  There was a tarp over, presumably, one of the many “For Lease” signs that had sprung up like so much crabgrass during the recession.   It may have been a chain restaurant but it still had owners with hopes and dreams.  Now it was just an eyesore, a relic of better times.  She wondered, as she drove past it, what the former owners were doing now.

She had an eternity to recover.  How long did they have?  

Her mind wandered to her current state.  She had been granted the gift of immortality, and how had she spent the first week of it?  The last six nights had been one random stumbling to the next, doing this for that vampire of note, and then running an errand for another.  She thought that working would help, but all it had done was make her feel even more disconnected from her mortal life.  She still had not called her parents.  What would she say?  “Hi, Mom!  I’m totally fine, just came down with a slight case of the death, that’s all.  Oh, and I’m not sure I can make brunch on Sunday.  How about a midnight wine tasting?”

She steered the car, a sporty little two seater that Stacy had all but forced her to take, into a parking lot and turned it so she could see the diner.  There were lights on and people moving around.  The meeting was scheduled to start at midnight and she was still fairly early.  There was no sense being the first to arrive and risk someone noticing her lack of breathing or pulse while waiting for things to get underway.  She took out her phone and pressed a few icons on the flat display.  Regan sat, listening to the dull, ringing tone.

“Regan?”  Emma’s voice filled the silence.  Regan lifted the device to her ear.

“Hey.”  She did not know what else to say.  She did not want to be alone and she had no one else to talk to.  

Emma sounded worried. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m dead.”  Regan shrugged, despite being alone.  “Aside from that, I suppose ‘okay’ works as a descriptor.”

“Yeah,” Emma responded, drawing out the sound.  “I wish I could tell you what to do.  This is one of those few places I feel pretty helpless and you know that’s not normal for me.”

“I’m not sure that advice for your former-best-friend-turned-vampire is the kind of thing you can blog about and get help from your Army of Emmys.”  Calling Emma had been a mistake.  She needed to face this on her own and there was so little Emma could do.  

Emma’s voice was short, almost angry.  “Former?  When did you decide we’re not best friends?”

“I’m pretty sure that no longer being on the same side of the Predator/Prey slash means that our friendships is going to at least be strained.”  She should just hang up before she made things much worse.  Why had she even called?  Was it to start a verbal scrap?

“Well if that’s how you feel about me, no wonder you haven’t returned any of my calls this week.  Maybe you shouldn’t have called me at all if all you wanted was a fight.”  That was decidedly anger.  “Listen, Regan Fairchild:  I held your hair out of your face during the night of the Splat Heard ‘Round the World.  I was there to pick up the pieces of your heart left over after both Ronald Fowler and Trevor Bohr were done with it.  I gave you the thong off of my ass when you lost yours in Lake Huron and were too scared to walk the twenty feet to our towels.  I have called you or texted you every night since the wedding and I have tried to be there for you.  So, if all that means you don’t think you can trust yourself not to eat me the first time my guard is down, then fine, you can be my former-best-friend.”