I was, half my life later, still doing it. I couldn’t help but wonder when it was going to be time to think about me and what I wanted. What I needed.
The turn for the gravel road came up sooner than I would’ve liked and I turned off, driving until the gravel stopped. A sense of urgency prickled the back of my neck. Shit. I’d left Vlad alone for too long—and he wasn’t nicknamed “the Impaler” for nothing.
He might have fucked his love pillow through the wall by now. Or my easy chair. Or who knew what else? He fell in love quickly and extra hard with inanimate objects, and made sweet love to them multiple times a day. It was a side effect of his vampire status, poor little guy.
Thank goodness his love centered on the inanimate.
Except for my neighbor, Presley, the Cornhole Queen.
Just the sound of her voice got him ready for action and all of the obedience school training I could afford had done little to mitigate that effect. Although, it did keep her from talking to me as often as she would’ve liked—a bonus in my book—so I’d admit, I hadn’t been working too hard on a solution. I wasn’t usually outright mean to her, but she’d been part of the Cuntrag Crew who’d made my life hell in school. I didn’t see the point in pretending we were friends simply because we’d happened to move in next door to each other.
It was darker than dark out in the country with no street lamps or other artificial light. Luckily, not only did I have vampire strength, I could see in the dark like a vampire, too. A normal human wouldn’t have been able to see their own hand in front of their face out here at midnight. But me? I blinked several times, and the path down to the pond through the foliage became clear. I could see a couple of those wildcats I’d mentioned quenching their thirst. They’d make short work of Fucko McGee.
Opening the trunk, I dragged the corpse out of the trunk. It was unusually heavy. Heavier than when I’d shoveled him inside.
Or, maybe I was just getting old and my powers were failing? I was the first slayer who’d ever made it to middle-aged, so no one was quite sure how it worked. My powers, I mean. No one knew what slayer aging looked like. Of course, the all-male council thought there was a reason for that. That their aging slayers had gotten slow and useless.
“Shit, lift with your knees, dumbass,” I mumbled to myself as I repositioned my grip on the plastic-wrapped fuckhead.
I strained and lifted, but didn’t get anywhere.
Wheezing, I tried again. That’s when I realized his foot was caught on the lip of the trunk. Taking another deep breath, repositioning my feet, and tightening my grip, I heaved again, and dragged him from the trunk. The change in his weight really hit me then as I lost my grip and he hit the ground with a wet, crinkly slap. That didn’t bode well, I was sure.
“Ope, sorry about that,” I murmured.
Jesus Christ, I was so Midwestern, I was apologizing to a corpse. A corpse that, when alive, had tried to hurt my family. I really needed to work on that. So I made the conscious decisions to kick him.
“Yeah no, not sorry. Motherfucker.”
I was about to kick him again when another wave of awareness prickled down the back of my neck. My body tensed, my muscles coiled ready for a fight. I looked up to see a pair of red eyes blinking at me from the trees. A low, yet familiar growl emanated from the shadows just as my big, dumb dog emerged from the brush.
Vlad, who was supposed to be locked in the house, making sweet love to his pillow, was big—bigger than any other pit bull I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure if he had some mastiff in him, or the Turning had made him bigger, or both. But if I hadn’t known he was the bestest, sweetest, goodest boy, (like all dogs must be) I might have been a little intimidated. He was stocky, built like a mini ox, with a smooth and shiny black coat, and red eyes that glowed like the pits of hell.
When he looked at me, his mouth fell open and his long, red tongue lagged out as he sniffed the air. A long stringer of bloody drool dripped down and then