Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [60]
It wasn’t a dead smell, not yet.
Ken, still balanced on the seawall, bent forward. “Am I on your list now?”
“Do you want me to call Sonia? The kids?” Claudia said. She knew what his answer would be.
“That wouldn’t do any good. She’d only come get me.”
Claudia squinted at him. “You don’t want her to?”
“No. No, I don’t. I don’t want her to see me again. It’s too hard for her.”
His voice was strained, and Claudia realized he was in great pain. “Are you . . . all right?” He tilted his head and looked at her properly. “You’ve always been kind.”
“My mum was kind. I guess it rubbed off.”
“Never lose that,” Ken said. “I wish I’d been kinder to everyone. Friends and strangers.”
Claudia didn’t say “It’s never too late,” because she could hear that it was.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said, vampire direct. She knew this answer as well, but he needed to say it. It was part of the process.
“Sick. Very sick. Pain ahead and long-drawn-out suffering for my kids. No kid should see a parent suffer. You shouldn’t have to see it.”
“What about the hospital? Can’t they help?”
“With the pain. But what’s the point? I want to pass quietly, peacefully, in control. Why can’t I have that?”
Claudia watched him for a while, then gazed out to sea. “Have you said good-bye to everyone? Tied it all up? Dying with a loose end is no good.”
He looked surprised. “Thanks. For listening, not trying to convince me.” His voice was tight, so full of pain Claudia could almost feel it. “I’ve tied it all up. I say good-bye, I love you, every day just in case. I’ve left special gifts for the grand-children and messages for the great-grandchildren. I’ve apologized to people. It’s sorted. But I just can’t . . .” He stopped, bent over, clutching his ears. “I’m too gutless to do what I need to do.”
Claudia felt her teeth tingle. “I can help,” she whispered. She snarled gently, then said it louder. “I can help.”
He turned, saw her teeth.
“The list? This is what you use the list for?”
She nodded. “I’ll be gentle,” she said, and she bent forward and drank deeply from the beautiful, pulsing vein in his neck. Drank till she was done, till he was; then she sat him on the ground, propped against the wall, and called an ambulance. She didn’t want him robbed, or his body stolen or damaged. His wife and kids needed to know quickly, to see him while he still looked close to life.
She watched from across the street until the ambulance arrived; then she walked home, feeling satisfied in her stomach and in the heart all the others assured her she didn’t have.
Best Friends Forever
by Cecil Castellucci
They both smiled at each other, the way that best friends do.
Their smiles revealed different things. Gina’s teeth were gray and almost translucent. They looked soft and loose. Amy’s teeth gleamed bright and white even in the dimly lit room. And of course there were the canines. Long and pointy. Hollow at the tip, perfectly made for the sucking of blood.
“Would you?” Gina asked.
“Would you?” Amy asked back.
The first time Amy and Gina met was two years prior. At night school.
Amy had gone there to feed. Gina was there to get her equivalency diploma.
Amy thought she could get her feed on easily in the tunnel that linked the parking garage to the campus. Gina was the perfect prey. She was walking, oblivious to everything around her. She was listening to music much too loudly on her iPod, the sound turned up all the way spilling over and echoing thinly in the tunnel. And she was singing along. Off-key.
Even the loud clicking of Amy’s go-go boots didn’t make Gina notice that there was someone else in the tunnel with her.
Best kind of kill, Amy thought. Easy and there’s no taste of fear in the blood. That’s the sweetest.
But as Amy began to change her gait from skulking to running to go in for the kill, she gagged.
At first she chalked it up to the terrible human smells in the tunnel: the stale air, the body odor, the cigarettes, and the pee. But as she moved in, it was clear that it was the girl