I did not write this Rachel caine did!! And i did not type this claireSalvatore did! i jst saw it and thought you guys would like it!! And i reapeat i did not write Rachel Caine did she wrote this story and put in book full of short stories called "Immortal love stories with a bite" Oh and srry this is not the whole story!
Living in West Texas is sort of like living in Hell, but without
the favorable climate and charming people. Living in Morganville,
Texas, is all that and a takeout bag of worse. I
should know. My name is Shane Collins, and I was born here, left
here, came back here—none of which I had much choice about.
So, for you fortunate ones who’ve never set foot in this place,
here’s the walking tour of Morganville: It’s home to a couple of thousand
folks who breathe, and some crazy-ass number of people who
don’t. Vampires. Can’t live with ’em, and in Morganville, you definitely
can’t live without ’em, because they run the town. Other than
that, Morganville’s a normal, dusty collection of buildings—the kind
the oil boom of the ’60s and ’70s rolled by without dropping a dime
in the banks. The university in the center of town acts like its own
little city, complete with walls and gates.
Oh, and there’s a secluded, tightly guarded vampire section of
town, too. I’ve been there, in chains. It’s nice, if you’re not looking
forward to a horrible public execution.
I used to want to see this town burned to the ground, and then I
had one of those things, what are they called, epiphanies? My
epiphany was that one day I woke up and realized that if I lost Morganville
and everybody in it . . . I’d have nothing at all. Everything I
still cared about was here. Love it or hate it.
Epiphanies suck.
I was having another one of them on this particular day. I was
sitting at a table inside Marjo’s Diner, watching a dead man walk by
the windows outside. Seeing dead men wasn’t exactly unusual in
Morganville; hell, one of my best friends is dead now, and he still
gripes at me about doing the dishes. But there’s vampire-dead, which
Michael is, and then there’s dead-dead, which was Jerome Fielder.
Except Jerome, dead or not, was walking by the window outside
Marjo’s.
“Order up,” Marjo snapped, and slung my plate at me like a
ground ball to third base; I stopped it from slamming into the wall
by putting up my hand as a backstop. The bun of my hamburger slid
over and onto the table—mustard side up, for a change.
“There goes your tip,” I said. Marjo, already heading off to the
next victim, flipped me off.
“Like you’d ever leave one, you cheap-ass punk.”
I returned the gesture. “Don’t you need to get to your second
job?”
That made her pause, just for a second. “What second job?”
“I don’t know, grief counselor? You being so sensitive and all.”
That earned me another bird, ruder than the first one. Marjo had
known me since I was a baby puking up formula. She didn’t like me
any better now than she had then, but that wasn’t personal. Marjo
didn’t like anybody. Yeah, go figure on her entering the service
industry.
“Hey,” I said, and leaned over to look at her retreating bubble
butt. “Did you just see who walked by outside?”
She turned to glare at me, round tray clutched in sharp red
talons. “Screw you, Collins, I’m running a business here, I don’t have
time to stare out windows. You want something else or not?”
“Yeah. Ketchup.”
“Go squeeze a tomato.” She hustled off to wait another table—or
not, as the mood took her.
I put veggies on my burger, still watching the parking lot outside
the window. There were exactly six cars out there; one of them was
my housemate Eve’s, which I’d borrowed. The gigantic thing was
really less a car than an ocean liner, and some days I called it the
Queen Mary, and some days I called it Titanic, depending on how it
was running. It stood out. Most of the other vehicles in the lot were
crappy, sun-faded pickups and decrepit, half-wrecked sedans.
There was no sign of Jerome, or any other definitely dead guy,
walking around out there now. I had one of those moments, those
did I really see that? moments, but I’m not the delusional type. I had
zero reason to imagine the guy. I didn’t even like him, and he’d been
dead for at least a year, maybe longer. Killed in a car wreck at the
edge of town, which was code for shot while trying to escape, or the
nearest Morganville equivalent. Maybe he’d pissed off his vampire
Protector. Who knew?
Also, who cared? Zombies, vampires, whatever. When you live
in Morganville, you learn to roll with the supernatural punches.
I bit into the burger and chewed. This was why I came to
Marjo’s . . . not the spectacular service, but the best hamburgers I’d
ever eaten. Tender, juicy, spicy. Fresh, crisp lettuce and tomato, a little
red onion. The only thing missing was. . . .
“Here’s your damn ketchup,” Marjo said, and slid the bottle at
me like a bartender in an old western saloon. I fielded it and saluted
with it, but she was already moving on.
As I drizzled red on my burger, I continued to stare out the window.
Jerome. That was a puzzle. Not enough to make me stop eating
lunch, though.
Which shows you just how weird life in Morganville is, generally.
I was prepared to forget all about Jerome, post-lunch, because not
even Marjo’s sour attitude could undo the endorphin high of her
burger and besides, I had to get home. It was five o’clock. The bottling
plant was letting out, and pretty soon the diner would be
crowded with adults tired from a hard day’s labor, and not many of
them liked me any better than Marjo did. Most of them were older
than me; at eighteen, I was starting to get the get-a-job-you-punk
stares.
I like a good ass-kicking, but the Good Book is right: It’s better to
give than to receive.
I was unlocking the door to Eve’s car when I saw somebody
behind me on the window glass, blocking the blazing westerly sun.
The reflection was smeared and indistinct, but in the ripples I made
out some of the features.
Jerome Fielder. What do you know, I really had seen him.
I had exactly enough time to think, Dude, say something witty,
before Jerome grabbed a handful of my hair and rammed me forehead-
first into hot metal and glass. My knees went rubbery, and
there was a weird high-pitched whine in my ears. The world went
white, then pulsed red, then faded into darkness when he slammed
me down again.
Why me? I had time to wonder, as it all went away.
I woke up some time later, riding in the backseat of Eve’s car and
dripping blood all over the upholstery. Oh, crap, she’s gonna kill me for
that, I thought, which was maybe not the biggest problem I had. My
wrists were tied behind my back, and Jerome had done some work
on my ankles, too. The bonds were so tight I’d lost feeling in both
hands and feet, except for a slow, cold throb. I had a gash in my forehead,
somewhere near the hairline I thought, and probably some
kind of concussion thing, because I felt sick and dizzy.
Jerome was driving Eve’s car, and I saw him watching me in the
rearview mirror as we rattled along. Wherever we were, it was a
rough road, and I bounced like a rag doll as the big tank of a car
charged over bumps.
“Hey,” I said. “So. Dead much, Jerome?”
He didn’t say anything. That might have been because he liked
me about as much as Marjo, but I didn’t think so; he didn’t look
exactly right. Jerome had been a big guy, back in high school—big in
the broad-shouldered sense. He’d been a gym worshipper, a football
player, and winner of the biggest neck contest hands down.
Even though he still had all the muscles, it was like the air had
been let out of them and now they were ropy and strangely stringy.
His face had hollows, and his skin looked old and grainy.
Yep: dead guy. Zombified, which would have been a real mind -
freak anywhere but Morganville; even in Morganville, though, it was
weird. Vampires? Sure. Zombies? Not so you’d notice.
Jerome decided it was time to prove he still had a working voice
box. “Not dead,” he said. Just two words, and it didn’t exactly prove
his case because it sounded hollow and rusty. If I’d had to imagine a
dead guy’s voice, that would have been it.
“Great,” I said. “Good for you. So, this car theft thing is new as a
career move, right? And the kidnapping? How’s that going for you?”
“Shut up.”
He was absolutely right, I needed to do that. I was talking
because hey, dead guy driving. It made me just a bit uncomfortable.
“Eve’s going to hunt you down and dismember you if you ding the
car. Remember Eve?”
“Bitch,” Jerome said, which meant he did remember. Of course
he did. Jerome had been the president of the Jock Club and Eve had
been the founder and nearly the only member of the Order of the
Goth, Morganville Edition. Those two groups never got along, especially
in the hothouse world of high school.
“Remind me to wash your mouth with soap later,” I said, and
shut my eyes as a particularly brutal bump bounced my head
around. Red flashed through my brain, and I thought about things
like aneurysms, and death. “Not nice to talk about people behind
their backs.”
“Go screw yourself.”
“Hey, three words! You go, boy. Next thing you know, you’ll be
up to real sentences. . . . Where are we going?”
Jerome’s eyes glared at me in the mirror some more. The car
smelled like dirt, and something else. Something rotten. Skanky
homeless unwashed clothes brewed in a vat of old mat.
I tried not to think about it, because between the smell and the
lurching of the car and my aching head, well, you know. Luckily, I
didn’t have to not-think-about-it for long, because Jerome made a
few turns and then hit the brakes with a little too much force.
I rolled off the bench seat and into the spacious legroom, and ow.
“Ow,” I made it official. “You learn that in Dead Guy Driver’s Ed?”
“Shut up.”
“You know, I think being dead might have actually given you a
bigger vocabulary. You ought to think of suggesting that to the U.
Put in an extension course or something.”
The car shifted as Jerome got out of the front seat, and then the
back door opened as he reached in to grab me under the arms and
haul. Dead he might be; skanky, definitely. But still: strong.
Jerome dumped me on the caliche-white road, which was
graded and graveled, but not recently, and walked off around the
hood of the car. I squirmed and looked around. There was an old
house about twenty feet away—the end of the pale road—and it
looked weathered and defeated and sagging. Could have been a hundred
years old, or five without maintenance. Hard to tell. Two stories,
old-fashioned and square. Had one of those runaround porches
people used to build to catch the cool breezes, although cool out here
was relative.
I didn’t recognize the place, which was a weird feeling. I’d grown
up in Morganville, and I knew every nook and hiding place—survival
skills necessary to making it to adulthood. That meant I wasn’t
in Morganville proper anymore. I knew there were some farmhouses
outside of the town limits, but those who lived in them didn’t come
to town much, and nobody left the city without express vampire
permission, unless they were desperate or looking for an easy suicide.
So I had no idea who lived here. If anyone but Jerome did,
these days.
Maybe he’d eaten all the former residents’ brains, and I was his
version of takeout. Yeah, that was comforting.
I worked on the ropes, but zombie or not, Jerome tied a damn
good knot and my numbed fingers weren’t exactly up to the task.
It had been quitting time at the plants when I’d gone out to the
parking lot and ended up road kill, but now the big western sun was
brushing the edge of the dusty horizon. Sunset was coming, in bands
of color layered on top of each other, from red straight up to indigo.
I squirmed and tried to dislocate an elbow in order to get to my
front pocket, where my cell phone waited patiently for me to text
911. No luck, and I ran out of time anyway.
Jerome came back around the car, grabbed me by the collar of
my T-shirt, and pulled. I grunted and kicked and struggled like a
fish on the line, but all that accomplished was to leave a wider dragpath
in the dirt. I couldn’t see where we were going. The backs of
Jerome’s fingers felt chilly and dry against my sweaty neck.
Bumpity-bump-bump up a set of steps that felt splinter-sharp
even through my shirt, and the sunset got sliced off by a slanting
dark roof. The porch was flatter, but no less uncomfortably splintered.
I tried struggling again, this time really putting everything into
it, but Jerome dropped me and smacked the back of my head into
the wood floor. More red and white flashes, like my own personal
emergency signal. When I blinked them away, I was being dragged
across a threshold, into the dark.
Shit.
I wasn’t up for bravado anymore. I was seriously scared, and I
wanted out. My heart was pounding, and I was thinking of a thouDead
sand horrible ways I could die here in this stinking, hot, closed-up
room. The carpet underneath my back felt stiff and moldy. What furniture
there was looked abandoned and dusty, at least the stuff that
wasn’t in pieces.
Weirdly, there was the sound of a television coming from
upstairs. Local news. The vampires’ official mouthpieces were
reporting safe little stories, world events, nothing too controversial.
Talk about morphine for the masses.
The sound clicked off, and Jerome let go of me. I flopped over
onto my side, then my face, and inchwormed my way up to my
knees while trying not to get a mouthful of dusty carpet. I heard a
dry rattle from behind me.
Jerome was laughing.
“Laugh while you can, monkey boy,” I muttered, and spat dust.
Not likely he’d ever seen Buckaroo Banzai, but it was worth a shot.
Footsteps creaked on the stairs from the second floor. I re -
oriented myself, because I wanted to be looking at whatever evil bastard
was coming to the afternoon matinee of my probably gruesome
death. . . .
Oh. Oh, dammit.
“Hello, son,” my dad Frank Collins said. “Sorry about this, but I
knew you wouldn’t just come on your own.”
The ropes came off, once I promised to be a good boy and not rabbit
for the car the second I had the chance. My father looked about the
same as I’d expected, which meant not good but strong. He’d started
out a random pathetic alcoholic; after my sister had died—accident
or murder, you take your pick—he’d gone off the deep end. So had
my mom. So had I, for that matter.
Sometime in there, my dad had changed from random pathetic
drunk to mean, badass vampire-hunting drunk. The vampire-hating
Living in West Texas is sort of like living in Hell, but without
the favorable climate and charming people. Living in Morganville,
Texas, is all that and a takeout bag of worse. I
should know. My name is Shane Collins, and I was born here, left
here, came back here—none of which I had much choice about.
So, for you fortunate ones who’ve never set foot in this place,
here’s the walking tour of Morganville: It’s home to a couple of thousand
folks who breathe, and some crazy-ass number of people who
don’t. Vampires. Can’t live with ’em, and in Morganville, you definitely
can’t live without ’em, because they run the town. Other than
that, Morganville’s a normal, dusty collection of buildings—the kind
the oil boom of the ’60s and ’70s rolled by without dropping a dime
in the banks. The university in the center of town acts like its own
little city, complete with walls and gates.
Oh, and there’s a secluded, tightly guarded vampire section of
town, too. I’ve been there, in chains. It’s nice, if you’re not looking
forward to a horrible public execution.
I used to want to see this town burned to the ground, and then I
had one of those things, what are they called, epiphanies? My
epiphany was that one day I woke up and realized that if I lost Morganville
and everybody in it . . . I’d have nothing at all. Everything I
still cared about was here. Love it or hate it.
Epiphanies suck.
I was having another one of them on this particular day. I was
sitting at a table inside Marjo’s Diner, watching a dead man walk by
the windows outside. Seeing dead men wasn’t exactly unusual in
Morganville; hell, one of my best friends is dead now, and he still
gripes at me about doing the dishes. But there’s vampire-dead, which
Michael is, and then there’s dead-dead, which was Jerome Fielder.
Except Jerome, dead or not, was walking by the window outside
Marjo’s.
“Order up,” Marjo snapped, and slung my plate at me like a
ground ball to third base; I stopped it from slamming into the wall
by putting up my hand as a backstop. The bun of my hamburger slid
over and onto the table—mustard side up, for a change.
“There goes your tip,” I said. Marjo, already heading off to the
next victim, flipped me off.
“Like you’d ever leave one, you cheap-ass punk.”
I returned the gesture. “Don’t you need to get to your second
job?”
That made her pause, just for a second. “What second job?”
“I don’t know, grief counselor? You being so sensitive and all.”
That earned me another bird, ruder than the first one. Marjo had
known me since I was a baby puking up formula. She didn’t like me
any better now than she had then, but that wasn’t personal. Marjo
didn’t like anybody. Yeah, go figure on her entering the service
industry.
“Hey,” I said, and leaned over to look at her retreating bubble
butt. “Did you just see who walked by outside?”
She turned to glare at me, round tray clutched in sharp red
talons. “Screw you, Collins, I’m running a business here, I don’t have
time to stare out windows. You want something else or not?”
“Yeah. Ketchup.”
“Go squeeze a tomato.” She hustled off to wait another table—or
not, as the mood took her.
I put veggies on my burger, still watching the parking lot outside
the window. There were exactly six cars out there; one of them was
my housemate Eve’s, which I’d borrowed. The gigantic thing was
really less a car than an ocean liner, and some days I called it the
Queen Mary, and some days I called it Titanic, depending on how it
was running. It stood out. Most of the other vehicles in the lot were
crappy, sun-faded pickups and decrepit, half-wrecked sedans.
There was no sign of Jerome, or any other definitely dead guy,
walking around out there now. I had one of those moments, those
did I really see that? moments, but I’m not the delusional type. I had
zero reason to imagine the guy. I didn’t even like him, and he’d been
dead for at least a year, maybe longer. Killed in a car wreck at the
edge of town, which was code for shot while trying to escape, or the
nearest Morganville equivalent. Maybe he’d pissed off his vampire
Protector. Who knew?
Also, who cared? Zombies, vampires, whatever. When you live
in Morganville, you learn to roll with the supernatural punches.
I bit into the burger and chewed. This was why I came to
Marjo’s . . . not the spectacular service, but the best hamburgers I’d
ever eaten. Tender, juicy, spicy. Fresh, crisp lettuce and tomato, a little
red onion. The only thing missing was. . . .
“Here’s your damn ketchup,” Marjo said, and slid the bottle at
me like a bartender in an old western saloon. I fielded it and saluted
with it, but she was already moving on.
As I drizzled red on my burger, I continued to stare out the window.
Jerome. That was a puzzle. Not enough to make me stop eating
lunch, though.
Which shows you just how weird life in Morganville is, generally.
I was prepared to forget all about Jerome, post-lunch, because not
even Marjo’s sour attitude could undo the endorphin high of her
burger and besides, I had to get home. It was five o’clock. The bottling
plant was letting out, and pretty soon the diner would be
crowded with adults tired from a hard day’s labor, and not many of
them liked me any better than Marjo did. Most of them were older
than me; at eighteen, I was starting to get the get-a-job-you-punk
stares.
I like a good ass-kicking, but the Good Book is right: It’s better to
give than to receive.
I was unlocking the door to Eve’s car when I saw somebody
behind me on the window glass, blocking the blazing westerly sun.
The reflection was smeared and indistinct, but in the ripples I made
out some of the features.
Jerome Fielder. What do you know, I really had seen him.
I had exactly enough time to think, Dude, say something witty,
before Jerome grabbed a handful of my hair and rammed me forehead-
first into hot metal and glass. My knees went rubbery, and
there was a weird high-pitched whine in my ears. The world went
white, then pulsed red, then faded into darkness when he slammed
me down again.
Why me? I had time to wonder, as it all went away.
I woke up some time later, riding in the backseat of Eve’s car and
dripping blood all over the upholstery. Oh, crap, she’s gonna kill me for
that, I thought, which was maybe not the biggest problem I had. My
wrists were tied behind my back, and Jerome had done some work
on my ankles, too. The bonds were so tight I’d lost feeling in both
hands and feet, except for a slow, cold throb. I had a gash in my forehead,
somewhere near the hairline I thought, and probably some
kind of concussion thing, because I felt sick and dizzy.
Jerome was driving Eve’s car, and I saw him watching me in the
rearview mirror as we rattled along. Wherever we were, it was a
rough road, and I bounced like a rag doll as the big tank of a car
charged over bumps.
“Hey,” I said. “So. Dead much, Jerome?”
He didn’t say anything. That might have been because he liked
me about as much as Marjo, but I didn’t think so; he didn’t look
exactly right. Jerome had been a big guy, back in high school—big in
the broad-shouldered sense. He’d been a gym worshipper, a football
player, and winner of the biggest neck contest hands down.
Even though he still had all the muscles, it was like the air had
been let out of them and now they were ropy and strangely stringy.
His face had hollows, and his skin looked old and grainy.
Yep: dead guy. Zombified, which would have been a real mind -
freak anywhere but Morganville; even in Morganville, though, it was
weird. Vampires? Sure. Zombies? Not so you’d notice.
Jerome decided it was time to prove he still had a working voice
box. “Not dead,” he said. Just two words, and it didn’t exactly prove
his case because it sounded hollow and rusty. If I’d had to imagine a
dead guy’s voice, that would have been it.
“Great,” I said. “Good for you. So, this car theft thing is new as a
career move, right? And the kidnapping? How’s that going for you?”
“Shut up.”
He was absolutely right, I needed to do that. I was talking
because hey, dead guy driving. It made me just a bit uncomfortable.
“Eve’s going to hunt you down and dismember you if you ding the
car. Remember Eve?”
“Bitch,” Jerome said, which meant he did remember. Of course
he did. Jerome had been the president of the Jock Club and Eve had
been the founder and nearly the only member of the Order of the
Goth, Morganville Edition. Those two groups never got along, especially
in the hothouse world of high school.
“Remind me to wash your mouth with soap later,” I said, and
shut my eyes as a particularly brutal bump bounced my head
around. Red flashed through my brain, and I thought about things
like aneurysms, and death. “Not nice to talk about people behind
their backs.”
“Go screw yourself.”
“Hey, three words! You go, boy. Next thing you know, you’ll be
up to real sentences. . . . Where are we going?”
Jerome’s eyes glared at me in the mirror some more. The car
smelled like dirt, and something else. Something rotten. Skanky
homeless unwashed clothes brewed in a vat of old mat.
I tried not to think about it, because between the smell and the
lurching of the car and my aching head, well, you know. Luckily, I
didn’t have to not-think-about-it for long, because Jerome made a
few turns and then hit the brakes with a little too much force.
I rolled off the bench seat and into the spacious legroom, and ow.
“Ow,” I made it official. “You learn that in Dead Guy Driver’s Ed?”
“Shut up.”
“You know, I think being dead might have actually given you a
bigger vocabulary. You ought to think of suggesting that to the U.
Put in an extension course or something.”
The car shifted as Jerome got out of the front seat, and then the
back door opened as he reached in to grab me under the arms and
haul. Dead he might be; skanky, definitely. But still: strong.
Jerome dumped me on the caliche-white road, which was
graded and graveled, but not recently, and walked off around the
hood of the car. I squirmed and looked around. There was an old
house about twenty feet away—the end of the pale road—and it
looked weathered and defeated and sagging. Could have been a hundred
years old, or five without maintenance. Hard to tell. Two stories,
old-fashioned and square. Had one of those runaround porches
people used to build to catch the cool breezes, although cool out here
was relative.
I didn’t recognize the place, which was a weird feeling. I’d grown
up in Morganville, and I knew every nook and hiding place—survival
skills necessary to making it to adulthood. That meant I wasn’t
in Morganville proper anymore. I knew there were some farmhouses
outside of the town limits, but those who lived in them didn’t come
to town much, and nobody left the city without express vampire
permission, unless they were desperate or looking for an easy suicide.
So I had no idea who lived here. If anyone but Jerome did,
these days.
Maybe he’d eaten all the former residents’ brains, and I was his
version of takeout. Yeah, that was comforting.
I worked on the ropes, but zombie or not, Jerome tied a damn
good knot and my numbed fingers weren’t exactly up to the task.
It had been quitting time at the plants when I’d gone out to the
parking lot and ended up road kill, but now the big western sun was
brushing the edge of the dusty horizon. Sunset was coming, in bands
of color layered on top of each other, from red straight up to indigo.
I squirmed and tried to dislocate an elbow in order to get to my
front pocket, where my cell phone waited patiently for me to text
911. No luck, and I ran out of time anyway.
Jerome came back around the car, grabbed me by the collar of
my T-shirt, and pulled. I grunted and kicked and struggled like a
fish on the line, but all that accomplished was to leave a wider dragpath
in the dirt. I couldn’t see where we were going. The backs of
Jerome’s fingers felt chilly and dry against my sweaty neck.
Bumpity-bump-bump up a set of steps that felt splinter-sharp
even through my shirt, and the sunset got sliced off by a slanting
dark roof. The porch was flatter, but no less uncomfortably splintered.
I tried struggling again, this time really putting everything into
it, but Jerome dropped me and smacked the back of my head into
the wood floor. More red and white flashes, like my own personal
emergency signal. When I blinked them away, I was being dragged
across a threshold, into the dark.
Shit.
I wasn’t up for bravado anymore. I was seriously scared, and I
wanted out. My heart was pounding, and I was thinking of a thouDead
sand horrible ways I could die here in this stinking, hot, closed-up
room. The carpet underneath my back felt stiff and moldy. What furniture
there was looked abandoned and dusty, at least the stuff that
wasn’t in pieces.
Weirdly, there was the sound of a television coming from
upstairs. Local news. The vampires’ official mouthpieces were
reporting safe little stories, world events, nothing too controversial.
Talk about morphine for the masses.
The sound clicked off, and Jerome let go of me. I flopped over
onto my side, then my face, and inchwormed my way up to my
knees while trying not to get a mouthful of dusty carpet. I heard a
dry rattle from behind me.
Jerome was laughing.
“Laugh while you can, monkey boy,” I muttered, and spat dust.
Not likely he’d ever seen Buckaroo Banzai, but it was worth a shot.
Footsteps creaked on the stairs from the second floor. I re -
oriented myself, because I wanted to be looking at whatever evil bastard
was coming to the afternoon matinee of my probably gruesome
death. . . .
Oh. Oh, dammit.
“Hello, son,” my dad Frank Collins said. “Sorry about this, but I
knew you wouldn’t just come on your own.”
The ropes came off, once I promised to be a good boy and not rabbit
for the car the second I had the chance. My father looked about the
same as I’d expected, which meant not good but strong. He’d started
out a random pathetic alcoholic; after my sister had died—accident
or murder, you take your pick—he’d gone off the deep end. So had
my mom. So had I, for that matter.
Sometime in there, my dad had changed from random pathetic
drunk to mean, badass vampire-hunting drunk. The vampire-hating