A Beginner's Guide to Fangs Read online

  A Beginner’s

  Guide to Fangs

  Vampire Innocent Book 2

  A Beginner’s Guide to Fangs

  A Novel

  Book 2 of the Vampire Innocent series

  © 2018 Matthew S. Cox – All Rights Reserved.

  No portion of this novel may be reproduced without written permission from the author. This novel is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real vampires, mortals, other supernatural creatures, or events is unintentional.

  Table of Contents

  Blood and Teddy Bears

  Samoas

  High School

  The Archive

  Debut

  Glim

  Waiting Tables

  Free Ride

  Attachments

  Super Powers

  Thin Mints

  Too Much Information

  Lifting Spirits

  Unseen

  Nothing Suspicious

  Taking the Mick

  Abaddon

  The Vampire’s Pantry

  Filching The Stash

  Just Say No

  The Darkness Watches

  Priorities

  Two Cougars and a Tiger

  Interested Party

  Dumpster Diving

  Favors

  A Life Left Behind

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Links

  Other books by Matthew S. Cox

  Blood and Teddy Bears

  1

  Emotional barely begins to describe what I’ve been for the past few days, and it’s really damn annoying―more so than being dead. I mean, don’t get me wrong. All things considered, if somehow I ran into a genie who could wind back the clock and I had the choice to let things go as they went or change it so I didn’t get murdered by my asshole ex-boyfriend… I’m not sure what I’d choose.

  Being alive is cool, but… vampires can fly.

  And, yeah, there’s that whole living forever thing even if this new all-protein diet I’m on kinda sucks.

  On one level, I’m still in awe over these powers and everything. So much so, I can’t really say for sure one way or the other I’d do it if I could ‘wish’ myself back to normal. Like, who would give up immortality, flight, reading people’s thoughts, and the best: being able to soak in a warm bath while totally underwater.

  As in, I don’t have to breathe anymore.

  And maybe… just maybe, I’ve been abusing that lately―for excessively long amounts of time. Like right now. My nose is three inches beneath a layer of foam from a ‘peaches and cream’ bath bomb. It’s probably been about an hour and a half, and I haven’t broken the surface since I got in except for reaching a foot up to run a little more hot water every so often.

  No, I’m not hiding from the world. I’m trying to figure shit out.

  It’s not every day a girl has to deal with her boyfriend flipping out and murdering her in the middle of breaking up with him. Well, technically, most girls don’t have to deal with that since getting murdered is usually a ‘game over’ moment. There’s not much ‘dealing with’ anything after the fact. I’d had the luck (good or bad debatable) of having wound up on the dinner menu for a vampire by the name of Dalton Ames. The guy’s nice, I guess, but I wouldn’t trust him with anything seriously important or involving heavy machinery. Anyway, he evidently has this thing about kids being hurt, and he mistook me for like a fifteen-year-old or something.

  Instead of being his dinner, I wound up being the second person he’d turned into a vampire. Scott, the ex-boyfriend―very ex-boyfriend that is―had jammed a knife into my chest far enough to pretty much kill me in seconds. My dad always called me a bleeding heart, but he had no idea. Nothing like a giant Rambo knife to make that whole thing literal.

  And yes, I do know who Rambo is. My dad’s obsessed with eighties movies.

  I still have the scar, though fortunately, it’s only a tiny white line. Dalton decided to do the only thing he could to ‘save’ me, which he called the transference. He hasn’t told me how it works, only that I basically had three or four seconds left to live when he started it.

  At least Dalton didn’t get upset with me when he learned I’m eighteen, not a ‘kid’ like he thought. Even if my transformation changed how I look a little bit. As best I understand, when someone becomes a vampire, their body changes appearance based on the lineage they inherit. I’d call it a bloodline but that’s not really true. It’s not automatically passed down from sire to newbie. There’s some kind of cosmic decision-making process that for all I know consists of gnomes tripping on LSD while spinning carnival wheels. Whether or not my age or the circumstances of my Transference (an act of mercy instead of me craving immortality) made the difference, I wound up as what other vampires call an Innocent.

  Consequently, I got younger and cuter looking.

  Sigh.

  Like, the Old Guard become really beautiful and elegant, Furies go all buff and scary, and Shadows… well, umm, never mind them. Let’s just say that people who do manage to see them will never forget it―or maybe they will, with a little help. That’s so damn handy.

  But, back to the appearance thing. At least in the face, I could pass for sixteen again. My mother certainly seems to think so. Great. I get to be the ‘cute kid next door,’ not like Aurélie. She’s so damn beautiful I think she could make a robot drool. Heck, I’m CIS, and if she suggested we go mess around, I might actually do it. Though, only some of that is actual physical beauty (or cuteness in my case―ugh) and at least half a mental effect. Especially for Aurélie’s. She’s constantly radiating some kind of energy that makes people around her believe she’s the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen.

  What do I get? Cute and harmless. But, I suppose it could come in handy. People don’t pay me as much attention, and they’d never expect how dangerous I can be. It’s the hand I’ve been dealt, and no amount of complaining will change anything, so I’m gonna use it to my advantage as much as possible. And hey, the best part is, I can tolerate sunlight in small amounts. Only the Innocents can function during the day from what I’ve learned, and it’s costly. As one might expect, vampires have to drink blood. For anyone who’s ever played a video game, the best metaphor I can think of for it is mana points. The more stuff I do that’s über, the faster I burn up my blood reserves and get hungry. Standing in sunlight and not going Roman candle takes up a lot of power so to speak, and I still can’t tolerate bright sunlight, only moderate or gloomy.

  Good thing we live in Cottage Lake, Washington. Rain is our state animal.

  “Oh, dammit. Who left the tub full?” asks Dad.

  Despite lying under a layer of opaque foam, I blush like hell. My father just barged in on me when I’m in the bathtub naked. Fortunately, he doesn’t lean into the tub to pull the stopper, and continues past me. Okay, no worries. Stay calm. I’ll just wait him out. And… if he does find me hiding here, I can wipe any memory of seeing me wearing nothing but soap foam from his head.

  Unfortunately, I can’t wipe my own memory of being mortified.

  The toilet seat clanks and a belt buckle jangles.

  Oh, no.

  Dad grunts as he sits down.

  Damn. I am not going to just lay here while my father reenacts Hiroshima.

  I lean just my face up past the surface of the water. “Dad, you mind―”

  “Gah!” shouts Dad. “Jesus Christ!” He wheezes and gasps. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  Sometimes, having a vampire’s keen sense of smell is a curse. That old adage ‘scare the shit out of someone?’ yeah… It’s got some basis in fact. I gag and duck back underwater, trying not to listen to the s
ounds of battle going on out in the world of air.

  “How long have you been in there? What are you doing totally under the water like that. Good grief, Sarah…” Dad breathes hard a few times. “Well, this is awkward.”

  Ya think?

  “Hang on a sec. I’ll get outta here as fast as I can. Don’t sit up.”

  As if he had to tell me that. I raise an arm and give him a thumbs-up.

  “Geez, that’s unnerving. I kept checking the room thinking you or your mother drew a bath and never got around to hopping in. You’ve been in there for over an hour.”

  I tilt my hand back and forth in a ‘yeah about that’ gesture.

  “That’s not normal.”

  That’s Dad. Master of understatement. And cheesy eighties movies.

  A flush happens. “Okay, hon. Sorry about that. Next time, lock the door. Thought the room was available.”

  I raise another thumbs-up.

  Dad walks out and shuts the door behind him. The sound of his footsteps grow faint for a few seconds, then the rumble of him going down stairs follows. I give the air about ten minutes to clear, but still hold my breath when I sit up and take a quick warm shower to get rid of suds. Another perk of vampire-ness? I can ‘heal’ the wrinkles from soaking so long.

  I throw on my robe and hurry back downstairs to my basement room. That’s another thing this whole transformation caused: loss of bedroom. Well, loss of that particular second-story space. My old room had been my sanctuary my whole life, until I developed a sun allergy. Though if I want to split hairs, saying it had been my sanctuary for my whole life is not wrong. Technically, I’m no longer alive. We moved all my stuff downstairs to a side room off our finished basement that’s about the same size as my former room. I set everything up by memory, recreating the layout as much as possible. The only real (and important) difference is solid cinder block walls without windows. Mom stole some resources from her job, using one of their big-ass printers to spit out a life-sized picture of my old bedroom window during a sunny afternoon, which I hung over my desk where it used to be when I lived upstairs. Only, I can’t stare out at my younger siblings playing while doing homework anymore. Or sit at my desk watching it snow.

  If I try really hard, I can pretend nothing’s happened. Still, staring at that photo of a window triggers memory after memory of a life I no longer have. Yeah it’s sad in a way, but I wouldn’t have stayed a kid forever. I had been planning to move out to go to school in California so I would’ve said goodbye to that bedroom anyway. And, now I can fly!

  Once I shut my door, I fling the robe off and grab a towel. Soon, the body’s dry and the hair’s wrapped up in a separate towel. I pull on sweat pants and a T-shirt, then flop on my bed amid my army of stuffed animals, including the teddy bear I got for Christmas when I turned five. At the time, he had been slightly taller than me. He’s enormous: about the size of a seven-year-old kid. His fur isn’t perfect snowy white anymore though, but he’s not damaged.

  At some point when I was fifteen or sixteen―as opposed to looking it―I packed all my stuffed animals (they are legion) in a box and put them in my closet. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them, but having them out in sight was ‘uncool.’ Two days ago, I randomly decided I needed them, and spent a good hour clinging to them all and crying into Mr. Snow’s face. (That’s my teddy bear.)

  It really freaked me out. Kinda like I’d imagine those weird pregnancy mood swings would be like―not that I’ll ever know. One minute I’m sobbing, the next I feel embarrassed for doing so. Five minutes later, I’m clinging to them again.

  No, I’m not regressing to an actual innocent. And yes, I had been worried about that and called Dalton right away. It’s incredibly difficult to ask about that while simultaneously trying not to say anything he can hold over my head as embarrassing blackmail material for the next several centuries. So, I basically wound up telling him I’d gone full emo, crying at every little thing. And no, for the record, I am not doing the ‘oh poor me, I miss the sun and want to be mortal’ thing. Being a vampire is pretty damn cool. Even if it didn’t exactly come with an instruction manual. No, what’s happening here is my raging emotions all decided to jump in a rollercoaster cart and throw themselves over a cliff. I get sad for no reason at all, then happy, then terrified, then I feel like I rule the world. It’s really annoying.

  The mood swings threw me off. He didn’t really know what to tell me, and blamed it on ‘girl stuff.’ Fortunately, Aurélie had a better grip on it―and no, ‘girl issues’ have nothing to do with it. I don’t even have ‘girl issues’ anymore.

  That alone is probably worth the price of admission.

  Anyway, Aurélie thinks some kind of subconscious grieving process for the life I might’ve had is crashing headfirst into the general shittiness of being eighteen. As in, I’m an adult and a kid at the same time, and whenever I see something (like the teddy bear or my bedroom) that reminds me of my childhood, I get nostalgic. As if. It hasn’t been that long. And I’m not looking back fondly on being told to go to sleep at like nine, or not being able to drive, or not being allowed to watch the good movies. One minute, I’m happy to still be around my family, the next I feel like I’m a ghost haunting the place I used to live, watching my childhood run away without me. This has nothing to do with being undead, and everything to do with another sort of transition: not being a kid anymore.

  Granted, Dad had always been a bit liberal in regard to the ‘good’ movies. Except for gratuitous sex scenes, he pretty much let me watch R-rated movies from like eleven up. Now, Sophia? She’s stuck on PG. Mostly because she can’t handle scary or gory. Major nightmares. Even a scene with guys screaming at each other gets her uneasy. Sierra on the other hand yawned through Friday the 13th. She’s seen worse gore in some video games.

  So yeah, I’m quite done with being a kid.

  But my stupid brain still won’t let it go.

  Hence, I’m sitting cross-legged in an army of stuffed animals in my room at almost-midnight. I have no explanation for this clinginess to my old bedroom, my bear, or the part of my life that’s over. Okay, sure, I had been terrified of leaving home to go to college. As much as I hadn’t wanted to admit it even to myself, and covered my nerves by acting over excited about going to California, deep down inside I’d been a giant chicken. In a way, part of me is relieved that I get to stay home with the parents and don’t have to deal with a thousand mile move away from familiar surroundings. Unfortunately, it’s simultaneously frustrating. Wimping out and staying home for the free ride is one thing, but not having a choice kinda pisses me off. I mean talk about literally dying to stay home. But, no, I’m lying to myself again. I could leave if I wanted to.

  I just don’t want to.

  Maybe I’m still freaking out over what happened with Scott. No, not that he killed me. More that I killed him―again. Dalton had already killed him for what he did to me, but Scott’s the kind of guy who doesn’t take failure well at all, and he really had a problem with the word ‘no.’ I dumped him, so he jams a giant knife in my chest. Dalton killed him, so he gets back up. Real reasonable guy, right? Apparently, something went wrong with the whole Dalton-killing-Scott deal, and a bit of supernatural energy leaked unintentionally. The bastard got back up as a half-vampire creepy thing. Talk about not getting the message: I tore his head off (not a figure of speech) but that still didn’t stop him.

  I thought sitting there watching his ‘unconscious’ body burn up in a car fire would’ve given me a sense of catharsis or whatever. Maybe it did. It also gave me nightmares. I mean, sure. I’m a vampire, and he kinda-was a vampire too, but nowhere near as human as me. (Not that he really ranked that high on the humanity meter before.) My destroying what he’d become had been a kindness, even for him, and a definite help to the world at large. Eventually, he would’ve advanced from feeding on deer to people, and I’m told creatures like he was―other vampires call them Scraps―don’t have the control necessary to feed without
killing.

  So, yeah. He deserved it and I’m not sorry I did it. I’m not really sorry I watched him burn up either, even if it is going to take me a while to get over that. I’ve always kinda been the ‘good girl,’ but nowhere near as to the degree my sister Sophia takes it. Maybe bashing a guy’s head open with my bare hands and then lighting him on fire crossed the line of what my psyche’s capable of laughing off. Who knows?

  Bottom line is: Scott’s beyond dead, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I’m a badass.

  A badass clutching a giant white teddy bear.

  Both arms and legs wrapped around Mr. Snow, I rest my chin atop his head and pout at myself for being a huge marshmallow chicken. What vampire in their right mind clings to their old life like this? I couldn’t do it to my family. By ‘it,’ I mean let them think I’d died. Yeah, so I’m a big softie. Maybe that’s why the gnome’s carnival wheel came up on ‘Innocent’ for me. Something tells me I’ll never really understand why that happened. I’m also not sure if I should be jealous of the other vampires. Some of their powers sound cool, but the downsides can be pretty brutal. Example: Shadows. They look like ghouls.

  I cuddle my bear for a while, going back and forth between missing my old life and feeling über. At least at this hour, none of my family will see me hugging stuffed animals. Eventually, it occurs to me that I probably look like a giant child. My emotions swing once more from wistful to ashamed of myself for acting like a kid. Before I can let go of the bear, my stomach growls.

  Great. I need some blood.

  I play bite Mr. Snow on the head, not hard enough to puncture his fabric. Bleh. Mouth full of fake fur. Teddy bears don’t have a circulatory system.

  So yeah. I’m a vampire. I’m stuck living at home with my parents, and I’m trapped on an emo rollercoaster without a seat belt on.

  Bah, screw it. I’ll figure it out, and I’m not worried.

  Did I mention I can fly?

  Samoas

  2

  The next afternoon, I wind up getting roped into escorting my sisters to the nearest supermarket: the Safeway in Woodinville. The day’s not exactly gloomy, but it’s overcast enough that it only feels like it’s a hundred degrees to me. In actuality, the temp’s in the low sixties, fairly average for the first week of July. With the help of a hoodie, sunglasses, and Dad’s Nissan Sentra, I’m good to go.