snorting. The faerie keep to themselves unless they particularly want something, or someone, and he’s never met one willing to give a human (or anyone else, for that matter) the time of day on any equal footing.
Jack could have had him try and seduce a fae; compared to that, a gay vampire looks like nothing to sweat over. Right? At least Steve still knows just how he feels about doing that without worrying that the adoration is mostly just the allure?
He wonders what the town has been saying about fucking Swanston. Does Sophie call him a fucking fag? Does Swanston want to be drooling over a fae in public? Is everyone mocking him the way they mocked Steve? Does he just not care?
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” he says, still snorting. A little flattery, here, because he’s supposed to be a single dude looking for another single dude, and hasn’t Steve already kind of implied that he’s gay? Or at least that he’s the victim of homophobia, anyway? “You look way too smart to fall for that.”
Indeed, it’s not even a lie. The vampire’s complexion is as grey as every other white non-breather in the room, but he looks otherwise non-remarkable in jeans and a striped dress shirt underneath a black trenchcoat. His well-polished loafers shine in the strobe light. No leather jackets, no protruding fangs, no piercings, no lipstick. He looks like a businessman kicking back after a day’s work, not a gothed-up greyskin out to gather tourist leeches and revel in their underkingdom of darkness and despair, and while Steve knows it’s mostly an act to lure in tourists, it’s a relief to spot someone who doesn’t bother. He doesn’t even appear armed, although the flashing lights make it harder to pick out the tell-tale bulges and lines of a concealed weapon. Steve can almost call him boring, but there’s something appealing in the cut of a well-fitted shirt that isn’t flanno, pockets that don’t bulge with fish lures and jeans that are so crisp Steve wonders if they’re new. He smells good, too: sandalwood, not even a hint of fish or seaweed.
A pretty boy, sure, but he is pretty, with a clean-shaven face and a slightly-lopsided smile.
The vampire angles his head and looks at Steve in much the same considering way. “I wish,” he says, the words rueful. “It’s the truth. I didn’t—it never happened again, though. Fuck Stoker, I swear.”
“Makes emptying a F88 into a feral look like an easy dare, then,” Steve says, thinking. Jack’s birthday is next month, and while nobody has seriously discussed what dare they should offer him, Steve now has an idea too good not to mention in front of him, just to scare him a little. He won’t insist on it—best mates don’t hand their mates over to the fae—but Jack deserves a little revenge for this horrific dare.
“Dare?”
“Birthday dares,” he says, shooting Sophie a deliberate glare. If she says anything about the date, she’s so undead and dismembered. “One of them was for one of my friends to camp out in the old graveyard overnight. You from around here?”
The vampire shakes his head. “I moved down here last year.” He gestures towards the gyrating vampires occupying the dance floor. “There’s so few of us in the city, so you get shuffled between humans who—no offense—stare at you oddly and then write protest letters to the paper when zombies uproot their rose bushes trying to get at their buried pet dog. Never mind it happens once a year, perhaps.”
Steve can’t help a snicker, imagining outraged gardeners expecting the coppers to protect their gardens and Mum’s reaction to such a prospect, and nods. Old Sian MacGillycuddy had an awesome old English-style garden, and she protected every inch of it with the help of her granddaughter, two glaives and a pair of matching wakizashi. She didn’t ring the cop shop every time a feral popped over her back fence!
True, he’s seen one feral zombie on campus in two years—and one or two undead folk in his classes, if any at all. If city folk don’t know what to do with a carrier, how will they react to the actual undead?
“There was a job opening with the council for a town planner, and Port Carmila doesn’t specify the requirement for employees to have a heartbeat.” The vampire shrugs. “So here I am.”
“Good job?”
“Designing aquatic spaces in the CBD is a bit of a challenge. We need to widen the canals so there’s space for four-lane swimming channels and access to the market...”
Steve hasn’t paused to consider how difficult it would be to plan all town structures in order to accommodate several different species; he’s just taken it for granted that someone will provide dark passages for the photosensitive. “There’s going to be moaning if you have to narrow the road.” He can just see the letters-to-the-editor now; the thought is enough to make him shudder. He looks up, somewhat discomfited to discover that he is being stared at again, and not by Sophie, who’d drifted further down the bar to stare at the fae, apparently bored by talk of town planning. The vampire, and while Steve has certainly been hit on by men before, there’s a surprising amount of interest in his gaze. “Okay, what? Too much hair gel? Those fucks down the other end of the club who keep on pointing and laughing at me? Ignore them. They’re idiots.”
“Well, I was wondering about the hair gel,” the vampire replies with a suitably straight face before breaking into a grin. He has small, barely-noticeable fangs, and the thought occurs to Steve that if he refuses to think about what it is he is going to embark on, this might actually be the sort of vampire—sort of man—he can pull it off with. In point of fact, it’s not the vampire part that bothers him. “Actually, I was wondering why you’re here. You don’t look like a leech or a faefapper, and guys into breather guys usually hit the bars inland. Not that I wasn’t wondering about that guy with the fishhooks, though.”
For a moment, Steve doesn’t know what to say, and it’s not because he doesn’t think his moves, honed on girls from here to Sydney, aren’t going to work. Flirting with a guy can’t truly be much different, can it? No: this vampire, he feels certain, is sitting at the bar cursing Ares and his admirers because he isn’t looking for some flirtatious one-night stand. He’d be out on the dance floor, getting his grind on in the company of one or more people, otherwise. He’s actually here to meet someone—someone real, long-term. Someone who isn’t a straight guy on a dare.
There are leeches aplenty, their make-up resembling corpsepaint, all looking for someone to fuck them, bleed them, turn them—as if there’s some kind of hot, attractive, erotic danger in an ambulant corpse. Summer tourists: breathers come down from the city to spend a week gawking at the Mer and the vampires ... and usually leave about the time they met their first zombie. Tour boats above Mere Illara are the town’s second-highest cause of income, after the fishing trawlers, never mind the fact that there’s nothing to see but a few well-paid merfolk smiling at the tourists and calling them obscene names in Merish. Plenty of quick fucks abound, if one is fortunate enough to be one of the “acceptable” undead; real dates, though, might be somewhat harder to find.
Steve wonders, if he survives death as one of the twenty percent, if he’ll sitting at a bar hoping to find someone willing to look at an often-not-all-that-hot zombie.
“If you were really after a vampire,” Steve says, quite truthfully, “the last thing you’d do is dress up like a leech and have every vampire in the room trying not to laugh at you.” He pauses. “Okay, the hair gel was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
He nearly jerks away and curses his ridiculous nerves when the vampire offers his hand. For fuck’s sake, he’s not doing anything! Not even Swanston has reason to think this conversation a flirtation, yet, so why is he looking over at Ares and his harem out of fear that Swanston’s looking?
“Abe Browning.”
Steve raises his eyebrows, silently praying that Abe is not as old as his name sounds—because that would be way too weird for him to handle, no matter how young Abe looks. Late teens, early twenties? Younger than he sounds. “Your mother was born in the 1700s?”
“No, but my great-great-great aunt was, and she talked my parents into naming me after her father.” Abe rolls
his eyes. “Everyone else was being named ‘Adam’ or ‘Erin’ or ‘Shane’ when I was born. Not Abraham.”
That sounds like Steve can place his birthdate—it’s never polite to directly ask an immortal’s date of birth, and the problem with most vampires is that they were turned hundreds of years before most breathers had even been born—somewhere in the 1980s. It’s stupid, he knows, but he gives a huge sigh of relief: the bloodsucking doesn’t bother him, but the thought of banging a dude old enough to be his grandmother should be disturbing, shouldn’t it? Not that it seems to bother Johanna… “If it makes you any feel any better,” he says, “Sofu—my grandfather—still can’t figure out how to tune a radio. He’s also controlling enough Chichi vowed that he wouldn’t return to Ni—Japan until he was dead, and he doesn’t have the excuse of being five hundred years old.” Telling himself that reluctance is pointless, he takes the offered hand. “Steve Nakamura, and, no, I probably shouldn’t have been named Akira or Hiro or ... something. Don’t ask me to write my last name in kanji, either. I failed high school Japanese.”
Abe laughs. He has a firm, but not crushing, handshake, and he’s apparently more than content to let his grip linger.
Shouldn’t this be a little more difficult?
“If you don’t mind my asking, what was it like growing up with a vampiric great-aunt?”
Abe’s smile, for all that his lips have that cyanotic, bloodless quality, is quite appealing; amusement almost negates the fish-like quality of his dead eyes. “You know all the ‘back in my day things were so much better because we conveniently forget that people died of chicken pox and anyone who was not a white cishet man had no rights’ stories? I swear, every time she tells me that life was simpler in the 1800s, I want to beat her over the head with the collected works of Oscar Wilde—except my phone isn’t going to hurt her.” His smile broadens. “One time my cousin Valentine sat down with his Famous Five books, read out half-a-dozen passages describing George, and told Lizzie that if this is how a white breather trans boy is treated in the 1940s, how can she dare say to his face that life was better way back when? It silenced her for about, oh, half an hour.”
Oh, he knows those tales, all right. Sofu pulls one out every time he asks one of Steve’s aunts to get him on Skype, apparently oblivious to the fact that the technology he despises is the only thing that enables him to chat with his son and daughter-in-law in Australia. “When I was young, it was a time-honoured occupation to look after one’s grandparents and honour one’s ancestors, and all we ever ate was rice and seaweed, and we were so much the better for it … compared to today’s wild, spoilt and disrespectful youth? Who run off to Australia and shack up with blonde broads?” He grimaces. “My best mate’s girl lived in a hut in the bush for about a hundred and fifty years because when she died, it was fucking law to dismember and burn all zombies on sight. Sure, shit was so civilised then!”
“Times a factor of about a hundred for all the extra years she’s lived, of course.” Abe shrugs, still grinning. “It scares me stupid to think that one day, I’ll be doing that to my sister’s great-great-great grandchildren while they sit there, roll their eyes, and later talk about me to some stranger they meet in a gay bar ... if they have gay bars, then.”
Along with age, Steve learnt in prep—before he learnt how to write his own name—never to ask a vampire how they were turned: it is just good manners, quite aside from not really being anyone’s business. Steve can’t help a little curiosity, though: Abe’s assumed age suggests a recent turning. Perhaps while he was at university? Did his aunt turn him? At least his family are comfortable around vampires, when most humans aren’t—which is probably why he chose to be turned in the first place, come to think of it.
It occurs to him that there’s something quite racist and lifeist, if not also homophobic, in the nature of Jack’s dare. One thing to have a bit of fun with ferals, given that they’ve lost everything that defines them as human—something Steve never much likes to think about, given his carrier status—but it’s somewhat another to make vampires into an object like that, even if the vampires don’t treat the tourists a whole lot better. Then again, how often has he really gotten to talk to a vampire? His neighbours are the Johnstons, a pair of cheerful and utterly-normal zombies, and he’s served plenty of vampires, fae and zombies at the bookstore, but they don’t really hang around with breathers. Steve, at least when he’s home from university, spends his weekends fishing and zombie hunting with Phil, Jack, Johanna and Izzy, and while he’s had plenty of discussions with the zombie-head Benjamina Bakersfield and the vampire surfing-instructor Henry down on the beach, most of his time is spent with humans. Breathers.
He wouldn’t have met Izzy if not for Johanna’s dare, two years ago—and would the town have gossiped so much about Johanna’s zombie girlfriend if there weren’t that division between the breather tourists obsessed with the novelty and the breather locals who lived and worked with vampires, zombies and fae, but still somehow kept to themselves while laughing at the tourists and the vampires?
For Steve, Jack’s dare isn’t very funny, but it occurs to him that it’s not-so-hilarious for a whole heap of other reasons as well.
“In a space station somewhere because we’ve blown up the Earth, probably,” Steve says, an instant too late. What does he do, then? Go through with it anyway?
“Or zombies took over, if the media has anything to say about it.”
“You mean like Brooks?” Steve snorts as Abe nods. “Never going to happen. There aren’t enough of them. We humans will fuck up the world long before the fucking zombies get to it. People forget that, though. It’s the stupid bullshit ACPIZ pulls—which does fuck all for the hard-working zombies out there who need the basic right of having their existence legitimised and protected—by pretending they actually care about sapient zombie welfare, despite protesting deathside dismemberment by claiming that zombies find it offensive. They blame everything on the fucking zombies, you see. Then get everybody trembling in their boots about the hordes of feral zombies at the same time—fuck, I wonder why sapient zombies get run out of town, right? Meanwhile your conservatives are too busy being scared and refuse to pass legislation because they reckon that means the mindless murderers will be running government and the zombies will take over the fucking world. Never mind that the only reason zombies ever want to do that is because breathers treat zombies and carriers like fucking shit. It’s not like the difference between ferals and sapients isn’t obvious. A test would do it. Then my mate’s girl and my neighbours can have the rights we all take for granted, and ferals can still be shot on sight the way every fucking sapient zombie would prefer because they get torn apart by fucking ferals like the rest of us—”
He stops, only because he realises a moment too late that Abe has allowed him to talk for more than five sentences before groaning, rolling his eyes, slapping Steve with a newspaper or fishing rod, and interrupting in order to call Steve a Sydney socialist wanker and change the topic of discussion to snapper.
“Sorry. Nobody lets me fucking talk, so…”
Abe raises both eyebrows, but there’s nothing mocking in his smile. “So what do you do, then?”
“Journalism with a minor in Political Science—I’m starting my third year next year. Just back for the summer.” Steve blinks, surprised. Nobody Steve knows, besides Johanna—as long as Steve returns the favour with regards Port Carmila’s history—is interested in listening to him talk about the politics of sentient awareness. Whether revolvers with big-game shells or semi-automatic handguns are more useful in terms of efficiency versus practicality in taking down ferals, yes, but not politics. The Johnsons are great people despite being dead and the ferals need to be shot, dismembered and frozen, duh, and why are they even discussing this when it is so fucking obvious? “And I probably just bored you.”
Abe shakes his head. “Do you know what most people talk about around here?”
“Fishing, footy, water polo, unde
ad soccer, fishing, feral plagues, fishing and how much the city sucks?” Steve grins. “There wasn’t a reason why I chose to go to uni as far away as I could get, no. Not at all.”
“You forgot fishing.” Abe’s lips curl up into a broad grin and he jerks an elbow in Jack’s direction; Steve can’t help a laugh. “Don’t get me wrong. I love working and living in a place where nobody stares at me, where I can drink blood in the office and no one complains to the boss—hell, where I can be employed without someone thinking up a reason to hire the breather without it sounding like discrimination—but at times, well.”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Steve understands. It’s nice to be in the company of someone who doesn’t think you’re an overeducated douche and listens to what you say, and that realisation makes his stomach twist in ways that have nothing to do with Adam Swanston and small-town gossip. He sits there for a moment, glancing towards the half-full shot glass. Abe’s a nice guy. He deserves to find someone interesting, but more than that, he deserves to find someone that isn’t going to use him and lead him on for the matter of a dare. He deserves someone who is actually interested in him.
He deserves someone who isn’t scared of the thought of what people are going to say.
He wonders if gay vampire town planners have it harder or easier than not-so-gay breathers in high school.
Johanna seems to deal with the gossip about her and Izzy, enough that they’re out there tonight, whirling across the floor; it doesn’t seem to be enough, whatever it is, to keep Swanston away from Feeders, even if it makes him the most flaming of all flaming hypocrites.
Maybe it matters, for Johanna, that she and Izzy have always got somewhere to go where people don’t stare and mutter—her family, her friends, her job.
He wonders why it never occurred to him to ask her.
“Look.” He meets Abe’s fish-like eyes, decided—although that too feels a little odd. Steve has spent the last few years chatting up girls, sometimes with the sole intention of getting laid, and while he doesn’t lie, he has omitted a few things here and there when he thought he needed to. There’s a good chance a few of those girls thought or hoped he wanted something more, and sometimes he knew that for sure—at least until he admitted his carrier status, anyway. Then, of course, he got to watch it all fall apart: admitting it straight up only meant he didn’t get to have fun