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  We moved into the house over the weekend. I was really glad to get out of the dorms—my roommate was overweight and smelled bad, apparently allergic to soap, water, and deodorant.

  My parents hadn’t approved of my joining Beta Kappa—they didn’t approve of anything that remotely sounded fun. I was incredibly naïve when I went to Ole Miss. All I really knew of life, of the world, was my little corner of redneck Fayette County in northeastern Alabama, where everyone’s lives revolved around church. We were Church of Christ (pronounced as one word: churchachrist), which took great pride in being the only denomination of Christianity that worshipped Christ correctly. Anyone who worshipped differently was a blasphemous sinner with a one-way ticket straight to hell. The Church hated everyone who wasn’t white and straight—and women must be subservient.

  Growing up in that environment made me feel like I’d already died and gone straight to hell.

  I’d always been more interested in boys than girls—and was convinced I was the only one in Fayette County (if not the world) who felt that way.

  I’d chosen Ole Miss instead of the University of Alabama as a means of escaping Fayette County. University of Alabama was in Tuscaloosa, a mere forty-minute drive from my parents’ house, and I thought that was way too close for comfort. Ole Miss was far enough away that they couldn’t just drop in unannounced or intrude on my life, but not so far away they couldn’t be talked into letting me go there—and at that, it was a long, hard-fought battle.

  I was confident once I’d gotten away from them I’d be able to break away from the life they’d already mapped out for me. I didn’t want to go back to Fayette County and teach at the same rural high school where so many of my relatives also taught. I didn’t want to get married and have sons to carry on the family name and tradition of football, hunting, and Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior.

  But they tried to hold on. My father called the preacher at the Oxford Church of Christ, to let him know I was coming there, and the Sunday after Rush, that’s where I was on Sunday morning, being introduced to other college-age kids and being pressured into joining a college group called Rebels for Christ.

  The umbilical cord from Fayette County apparently could stretch all the way to Oxford, Mississippi.

  Jared was from New Orleans—a city my parents always dismissed as a city of sin, and that made him even more exotic to me. He understood my need to never go back there, to get away from my family. He gently made it clear to me he was straight and not interested in guys, but in such a way that I knew I could confide in him when I was ready. It was our sophomore year when I felt comfortable enough to tell him the truth. He understood; it didn’t make a difference to him, and he helped me keep it hidden from our fraternity brothers.

  The closeted existence I was living at Ole Miss was making me miserable. I hated going to visit my family. I hated summer vacations. I hated sitting in the house listening to my parents rant against the “queers” and the “godless liberals” and all the other people of different racial backgrounds who were dragging the country into the toilet.

  I didn’t understand how my parents, who were so kind and loving and giving, could be so filled with hate at the same time, thinking nothing of making racist jokes, using racist epithets. I didn’t understand how they reconciled what Jesus actually said in the New Testament with the vile, repressive hatred preached twice every Sunday at church. I was tired of dodging their questions about girls, of trying to get out of dates with daughters of other people at church. I was tired of the hideous boredom of life in rural Fayette County, where the highlight of every week was sitting in the heat and humidity on the banks of the Sipsey River, swatting mosquitoes while trying to catch catfish.

  And the day of reckoning was coming—graduation was a date that seemed to grow closer all the time with an astonishing speed. I was going to have to tell them I wasn’t coming back there. Maybe I wouldn’t have to tell them about being gay—if I moved far enough away.

  The thought had certainly crossed my mind any number of times.

  Maybe becoming a vampire and faking my own death was an extreme way of escaping my old life, but I wouldn’t go back for anything.

  The great irony, of course, was I had simply traded one closet for another.

  No one can ever know you’re a vampire, Jean-Paul had said, because humans aren’t evolved enough to coexist with beings they can only comprehend through the eyes of fear. They will kill you.

  Being a vampire was no different, really, than being gay in rural Alabama.

  One fear traded for another.

  I shook my head when I reached the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann, trying to push all the memories away. I hadn’t thought about any of this shit in years—I’d embraced being a vampire wholeheartedly. This Jared thing was making me remember all of this shit, I told myself. I leaned against the building on the corner and closed my eyes as another wave of nausea passed through me. I needed to feed and soon.

  “How you doing, baby? Everything all right?”

  I opened my eyes and forced myself to smile at the man standing there, friendly concern all over his face. He wasn’t unattractive. He was older, overweight, and was wearing a flannel shirt tucked into a pair of Wranglers. He was holding a big plastic cup full of beer, and a couple of men around the same age wearing the same clothes were standing a few feet behind him. One had a look of impatience written all over his face.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” I nodded at him, willing him to go away.

  “All right.” He backed away, the friendly smile never wavering. “You might want to not have another drink for a while.”

  “I think you’re right.” I nodded. “I thank you.”

  He nodded back at me before rejoining his friends. I watched them as they walked across St. Ann to the other side and disappeared around the corner onto Bourbon Street.

  You don’t know what a close call you just had, buddy, I thought as a beautiful young man walked past me and smiled. He had that thick bluish black hair I’d come to recognize as Cajun—well, French really. (Jean-Paul’s hair was that same thickness and color.) He was wearing a tight red collared pullover shirt tucked into a tight pair of jeans—he had a beautifully shaped ass. He crossed Bourbon Street and went into Oz.

  It was so much easier to feed inside the gay bars than in their straight counterparts on the eight blocks between St. Ann and Canal in the other direction. The gay bars were never well lit, favoring red or black lights. The dance floors always had flashing strobe lights that distorted everything. There was darkness everywhere inside the gay bars—in corners, bathrooms, and stairwells. And gay men were remarkably easy to lure into those dark patches. Gay men were remarkably trusting—willing to leave a bar with a total stranger whose name they didn’t know and go to a place without telling anyone.

  Often, they themselves didn’t know where they were going with the total stranger.

  This made them remarkably easy prey for vampires. Jean-Paul and the others had the ability to hypnotize humans with their eyes and the sheer force of their will. According to them, I was about fifty years away from developing that skill myself.

  I was, as they always reminded me, just a baby vampire.

  But that was fine, really. As long as I could find a dark gay bar, I could always find someone interested enough in my face and body to slip into an unlit corner with and feed from.

  I laughed to myself. It was always about having to wait, wasn’t it? It was the story of my entire life. I’d waited and waited to escape from Alabama and waited to graduate from Ole Miss, and then I became a vampire—the irony being that as a vampire, I still had to wait, but now decades rather than years.

  The wave of nausea passed, and I walked over to the curb, looking across to the Bourbon Pub. The downstairs shutters were already closed, the velvet rope set out for people to queue up and pay their cover charge. A thickly muscled man stood in the open doorway to Oz directly across the street, his arms folded and sunglasses hi
ding his eyes. Behind him, I could see the defined legs and Day-Glo bikini of a stripper dancing on the bar. What the hell, I thought, making up my mind. I crossed over to Oz, paid my five dollars, and got a hand stamp.

  It was still early in the evening for Oz to be crowded, but there was a decent amount of men inside. There were two strippers on the bar—the one I’d seen from across the street in the bright, glowing yellow bikini and one on the opposite side wearing white. The stripper in yellow had shoulder-length blond hair and a lean, smooth body, and he was kneeling, letting someone touch his smooth chest. He smiled at me over the man’s head, and his left eye closed in a wink. I walked around to the back side of the bar and caught my breath.

  The stripper in white had his back to me. I stared at his broad shoulders and the muscles rippling in his back. He was moving his hips and came around in a dance turn until he was facing me. His head was shaved—so was pretty much his entire body except for a goatee. His chest was heavily muscled, and his abs rippled as he moved his hips back and forth. He smiled and his entire face lit up, dimples deepening in his cheeks. His legs were thickly muscled. And when he turned to move down the bar away from me, I got a good look at one of the most incredibly perfect asses I had ever seen. It was thick and perfectly rounded and solid. The white material of his bikini stretched tightly across the muscles as he walked, flexing and contracting.

  I felt myself growing hard inside my jeans.

  I wanted to fuck him, bury myself inside those beautiful cheeks and tongue his hole until he screamed. I wanted to hold him down while I shoved my cock deep and hard inside his exceptional body.

  And I wanted to taste his blood.

  I walked up to the bar and ordered a beer from the shirtless bartender. I headed over to the back corner where the stripper was coaxing some dollar bills from an older couple. He was kneeling on the bar, muscles rippling in those amazing legs, and as one of the men stroked his leg, placing a dollar bill into the waistband of his white bikini, he made eye contact with me over the man’s head.

  I winked back, not sure he could see me in the gloom. That was when I felt . . . something.

  It was strange, and I stopped watching the stripper as I looked around the bar. A shirtless Latino boy carrying several buckets of ice went behind the bar. The other stripper was bouncing his dick inside his yellow bikini for the bemusement of a trio of college girls, who kept squealing and laughing. A guy with tattoos up and down his arms was playing the video poker machine. Five muscular guys were out on the dance floor, their shirts hanging from belt loops as they mindlessly moved their hips to the beat of a song I didn’t recognize.

  For a brief moment I caught a glimpse of a young woman in the corner by the ATM machine, but as my eyes focused on her, she vanished.

  I shook my head and looked around the bar again. I thought I saw her out of the corner of my eye over by the front door, but when I turned my head, she was gone again.

  “Looking for someone?” a deep voice purred.

  Startled, I turned my head. It was the stripper. Off the bar he was maybe five foot seven, but he was unbelievably sexy. His smile was infectious—he was absolutely adorable. Even with the shaved head, the big smile made him look boyish. I smiled back at him as he got closer to me than he probably needed to for me to be able to hear him. I could smell him—he smelled like a man, like he’d just worked up a sweat in the gym before coming into the club. “I thought I saw someone I know,” I replied, allowing my hand to brush against his muscular shoulder. His firm, hard flesh felt hot, and I could almost hear his heart beating.

  “You’re really pretty,” he said, taking one of my hands and placing it on his hard ass. He tilted his head to one side, still smiling, and I could see the carotid artery, pulsing in his neck. I looked around and no one was watching—if anyone was looking in our direction, their eyes were focused on his magnificent ass—so I bent my head and slid my teeth into his vein.

  He moaned and moved in closer to me, his big strong hands cupping my ass.

  “Oh, that feels good, damn, man,” he whispered, going up on his toes and pressing his crotch into mine. His dick was hard, but I didn’t care about that.

  His blood was delicious, satisfying. I kept drinking, allowing my hands to slide down his muscled torso until I was touching his big round hard butt.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” a woman’s voice whispered in my head.

  His hands gripped my ass tighter and I could feel his throat vibrating as he moaned.

  And I could see mountains in the background, in the not so far distance, but they weren’t tall mountains, and I knew exactly where we were. Palm Springs. But as I looked around, I didn’t recognize the yard, the pool, anything—and then I realized that this wasn’t one of my memories but one of the dancer’s.

  But when I’d fed from Jared, I hadn’t seen any of his.

  I’d been so blinded by the need that I hadn’t noticed.

  I pulled my mouth away from his neck and quickly nicked my index finger. I rubbed it over the wounds in his neck and they healed, closing until all that was left were two dark spots that could have just been hickeys.

  The way Jared’s were supposed to but hadn’t.

  The stripper swayed a bit as he stood there, the smile still on his face. “Dude, that was intense,” he said, and I noticed that his dick was hard. A wet spot was spreading where the head rested. He swallowed. “My shift is over at two,” he went on. His weight shifted from one foot to the other. “I mean, if you wanted to meet me here . . .” His voice trailed off.

  I reached over and tweaked his right nipple, and his head ducked down a bit as his eyes closed and a low moan escaped from his throat. “I’d like that,” I said. I meant it when I said it. I could keep Jared locked up in the front room. . . .

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” The same female voice cooed in my ear. “Isn’t it bad enough you’ve poisoned your fraternity brother? Do you need to compound the error by bringing a stripper back to the house?”

  He said something else, but I didn’t hear. I was looking for the woman the voice belonged to—but there was no woman in the bar other than the girls who were still giggling and laughing at the dick-bouncing antics of the other stripper.

  Maybe I was just going insane.

  “Two, you said?” I said.

  He winked and nodded before turning and walking away. I watched his oh-so-amazing ass as he headed across the dance floor and down the little hallway where the bathrooms were. He opened a door and disappeared behind it.

  I took a deep breath and headed for the front door.

  I really should check on Jared, I thought as I walked back out into the warm night.

  “Do you really think that door will hold him if he wants to get out?” the voice whispered into my ear again.

  I bit my lower lip and started walking quickly up Bourbon Street.

  CHAPTER 4

  I leaned against the street sign on the corner and closed my eyes. Who was this woman whose voice I kept hearing in my head?

  She had to be a vampire—but why couldn’t I sense her presence?

  I opened my eyes and looked around. There was a group of young men standing across the street on the corner in front of the pub, all holding plastic cups with alcoholic drinks in their hands as they laughed and joked. I looked down toward the corner at Dumaine Street, but other than a heavy-set man with a beard talking on a cell phone just outside of the Clover Grill, Bourbon Street was deserted as far as I could see in that direction. I looked up at the balconies wrapping around the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, just across St. Ann, but there was no one there. The bar on its first floor was blaring a remix of Kylie Minogue’s “All the Lovers,” but that bar, too, was completely empty.

  She had to be nearby, I reasoned. I didn’t know how far a distance the vampiric telepathy could work across—the only time Jean-Paul had ever communicated that way with me had been at circuit parties, but I never really knew how far away he was
from me in those vast spaces.

  And come to think of it, only Jean-Paul had ever talked directly to my mind. None of the others in our fraternity ever had.

  I’d always assumed it was a connection the two of us shared, as maker and creation, but maybe I was wrong.

  I’d never had any contact with a female vampire. Obviously, I knew they existed, but I’d never encountered one.

  For that matter, I’d never encountered a vampire outside of our circle.

  Maybe I could sense others only if they’d also been created by Jean-Paul.

  I just didn’t know.

  I scanned the crowd on the other side of St. Ann, on the “straight” side of Bourbon Street. There were plenty of women over there, but none of them were looking at me. None of them were alone—they were either with a man or in groups, laughing and drinking and clearly having a good time. I looked up St. Ann, but again, there wasn’t anyone to be seen.

  I need to get back to the house, make sure Jared’s still okay, I told myself. The stripper’s blood had sated my hunger, and I probably shouldn’t have left him alone for so long. I’d never witnessed a transition and had no idea what all it entailed.

  I’d been incredibly stupid in letting Jared drink from me, infecting him with my blood. I turned and looked back inside the bar. The stripper was moving his hips from side to side on the far side of the bar, his back to me. The cotton of the white bikini clung to that amazing ass, highlighting its extraordinary beauty.

  He truly had an exceptional body, but I could see where I’d bitten his neck. And there were no wounds there—nothing to show that just a few moments earlier I’d taken nourishment from him. I hadn’t done anything different with him than I had with Jared earlier on the street. So why had the stripper’s neck healed, when Jared’s had not?

  What had I done wrong? What was different about Jared?

  It didn’t make sense.