untidiness and shoe gazing, he had been just that, a puppy. Not anymore. His eyes were tinged with red and glowed like hot bronze at their centers. He had a way of standing frighteningly still between gestures, like a toy with the battery removed. Delia had been alternately fascinated and repulsed by the change in the five weeks since he’d returned to her employ. She hadn’t become inured to it yet. She wondered if she ever would.
“Standard biological processes have ceased, hon. You can’t argue with that.”
He pressed his lips together, then nodded. “I’m pretty spry, though. Hardly any shambling or muttering, ‘Brains.’”
“You’re not zombified, I’ll give you that, but you are light averse. We’re a daytime business.”
Sam folded in on himself, a hurt expression shadowing his features. Delia felt as if she were picking on him, perhaps even discriminating against him, though there’d been no push to make being undead a protected status. Legally, she had no responsibility to Sam at all.
That last idea really made her feel rotten. Be that as it may, she ran a convenience store. She sold food items. She wasn’t entirely certain that having a walking corpse stocking shelves was sanitary. It could even be a health code violation. Knowing the health inspectors, they had a law for everything from rat feces to squid-headed beings from another reality.
“Listen, Sam. I don’t want to come down hard on you. I know you’ve been having a rough time lately. It’s just that . . . aren’t you done with this stuff? Working a crap job and drawing the crap wages I can pay you? Shouldn’t you be, you know, skulking around in a castle somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains?”
“Don’t make fun of me, D. That’s not fair. I’m really trying here. This—it’s all I’ve got. This and my cousin’s basement.” Sam’s voice, raw with hurt, broke into a strange and haunting overtone. Chin to chest, he stood there, a single shiver going through his thin frame.
Delia’s heart clenched. She knew better. Everyone did. The Dracula gibe was cruel. “Your parents . . .”
“They couldn’t handle it. I mean, I was a disappointment, but I wasn’t a night creature, you know? It was just too far for ’em. They only let me in the house to get my stuff and go.”
“You never said. I didn’t know, Sam. I’m so sorry.”
“Right, right. Everybody’s sorry. Lots of hand wringing and shrugged shoulders. Not many who offer to help.” An alarm went off on his watch. “I have to, ah . . .” He hooked his thumb to the small office in the back. “Drink my lunch.”
Delia trailed behind him. She’d never had the courage to watch. He picked up a thermos with Scooby-Doo and company running around in a faded imprint. The old plastic faded to yellow, big scrapes where the image peeled away. A relic, something from when Delia had been in school. He twisted the top off and looked at her, going into that weird stillness of those who didn’t breathe. The guys on the news said something about that. Something about the vampires pulling oxygen right through their skin. Maybe they weren’t really dead at all, just changed. The world resisted magic, but that didn’t make magic impossible. Just darker and stranger than any children’s tale.
Delia smoothed her blouse, that old knot of pain in her upper abdomen flaring worse than it had been in weeks. She kept it off her face. She owed him this much, owed him a kind word and a little acceptance. “It’s okay, Sam.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, D. Not okay. It’s all wrong.” He pinched his nose, looking away into the corner of the cramped office. He clenched his fists, and a look of intense pain shot across him. The wet noise of tissue ripping and reforming made Delia’s bladder threaten to empty, but she forced herself to stay, to see it at least once.
Darkness like bruises spread across his skin in mottled spots and stripes. His mouth bulged, the muscles of his jaw creaking and flexing to far larger than their natural set. Cruel teeth like a baboon’s pushed his lips outward. His eyes flared, no hint of white in them now, only