to stab me in the back.
I smiled. “Much better. Now get on home. It’s a school night.”
Keeping the stake, I kicked her feet out from under her, then took off. She tried to follow, of course. Tenacious, as I said. But a quick flip onto another fire escape and through an open window left her behind.
I made my way up to the rooftops and headed home, rather pleased with myself. We’d come quite a ways in our two weeks together, and now, having finally made face-to-face contact, I was sure we could speed up the learning curve.
The girl was misguided, but I blamed popular culture for that. She’d eventually learn I wasn’t the worst monster out there, and there were others far more deserving of her enthusiasm.
Even if she chose not to pursue such a profession, the supernatural world is a dangerous place for all of us. Self-defense skills are a must, and if I could help her with that, I would. It’s the responsibility of everyone to prepare our youth for the future. I was happy to do my part.
THE BETTER HALF
Melanie Tem
Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards, and a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She has published numerous short stories, eleven solo novels, two collaborative novels with Nancy Holder, and two collaborative novels and a short story collection with her husband Steve Rasnic Tem. She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and a playwright. Solo stories have recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Crimewave, and Interzone, and anthologies such as Black Wings and Darke Fantastique. Her novels The Yellow Wood and Proxy will soon be published ChiZine Publications.
The Tems live in Denver, CO, where Melanie is executive director of a non-profit independent-living organization. They have four children and six grandchildren.
Her most notable vampire fiction is the novel, Desmodus (1995), in which isolated matriarchal vampire clans consider the males of their kind as nearly useless. Her otherwise humanoid vampires are also unusual in that they possess wings and other characteristics of bats.
To say the vampire in “The Better Half” is nothing at all like those in Desmodus is probably an understatement…
Kelly opened the door before I’d even come close to her house. The opening and closing of the red door in the white house startled me, like a mouth baring teeth. I stopped where I was, halfway down the block. Kelly was wearing a yellow dress and something white around her shoulders. She stepped farther out onto the porch and shaded her eyes against the high July sun.
For some reason, I didn’t want her to see me just yet. I stepped behind a thick lilac bush dotted with the nubs of spent flowers. A small brown dog in the yard across the street yapped twice at me, then gave it up and went back to its spot in the shade.
I hadn’t seen Kelly in fifteen years. I’d thought I’d forgotten her, but I’d have known her anywhere. In college we’d been very close for a while. Now that I was older and more careful, I’d have expected not to understand the ardor I’d felt for her then; it distressed me that I understood it perfectly, even felt a pulse of it again, like hot blood. Watching her from a distance and through the purple and green filtering of the lilac bush, I found myself a little afraid of her.
Later I learned that it was not Kelly I had reason to fear. But my father had died in the spring, and I was afraid of everything. Afraid of loving. Afraid of not loving. Afraid of coming home or rounding a corner and discovering something terrible that I, by my presence, could have stopped. I cowered behind the lilac bush and wished I could make myself invisible. I wondered why she’d called. I wondered savagely why I’d come. I thought about retreating along the hot bright sidewalk away from her house. I could hardly keep myself from rushing headlong to her.
Slowly I approached her. It was obvious that she still hadn’t seen me; she was looking the other way. Looking for me. I was, purposely, a few minutes late. Then she turned, and I knew with a chill that something was terribly wrong.
It wasn’t just that she looked alien, although she was elegantly dressed on a Saturday morning in a neighborhood where a business suit on a weekday was an oddity. It wasn’t just that I