How Not to Vampire - Season 2

12. Just a Little Bit More

If you've never been blasted by a taser before, you have no idea how it feels. We all have this fantasy that we could withstand it somehow, but the truth is that 30000 volts of electricity renders the muscles completely useless, and the most you can do is flop like a fish and wait for it to be over. You also want to hope that you don't pee your pants, and that nobody is filming the encounter to put on YouTube later.

The bus pulled to a stop and Girl with Bangs-and-Taser hurried away down the steps and out of the bus leaving me twitching on the hard plastic seat.

If Claude had been there, he would have simply made a checkmark on his list: vampires are not immune to electricity.

***

Doreen raised her head to watch me from her little nest on the couch as I stormed in.

"Bad night?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"You have a package from your buddy Claude," Doreen said sleepily as she settled back down. "I put it in your room."

There was a brown envelope on my bed with way too much packing tape around it. It had been taped over so much, it looked like the envelope was made of mostly tape. I had to find a knife to cut it open, which I think was the entire point of all the tape, but it was ultimately worth it.

Six-thousand dollars in $100 bills doesn't sound like a lot, but when two thousand dollars is the most you ever have in your bank account at one time, before rent and utilities strip it away, six-thousand dollars might as well be a million dollars. Still, my point here is that even though it doesn't sound like a lot of money, most people could go their entire lives and never see that much cash together like that. I wanted to spread it out on the bed and roll in it, just so I could say I did.

There was a note inside.

"'Dude, you have a second chance at everything,'" I read aloud. "'Make it count.'" It wasn't Claude's handwriting of course, but he had pulled through for me from wherever in the world he was. My fucking guardian angel.

***

It was nice to return to some kind of normal. You remember normal right? It's that thing where you exist with the knowledge that nobody is actively trying to kill you.

Doreen shoved six hundred dollars into my hand when I asked her if she could go to the landlord's office to pay off my bill. It was a motley collection of fives, tens and twenties, all folded neatly with a rubber band around the middle. I instantly pictured her pulling it out of a sock stuffed into the back of a dresser somewhere.

"It's not much, but it will help," Doreen shrugged, and then headed across the courtyard to Oscar's office in the evening sunlight.

An hour later, when the sun had slipped below the horizon, we rode into town together, first on the bus and then the subway. We were one hell of an odd couple, the tall lesbian with the blue hair and the black vampire with the piercing blue eyes. I completely forgot I wasn't wearing my sunglasses and caught some looks from a couple of passing girls, who all turned to watch me, clearly impressed.

"You vampires have that whole instant sex appeal thing going for you, huh?" Doreen teased.

I frowned as I remembered Tazer Girl from the bus. "It doesn't work on everybody. You don't find me any more attractive do you?"

"If you were a girl, I might be into you," Dorren admitted with a shy smile. "Now Beatrice... hot damn! Just thinking about her does things to me..."

"Beatrice is dangerous."