chalked it up to UPS or the postman. I patted my bedhead into place and made for the door.
Being greeted by a wall of ghoul before ten was not what I expected.
Ghouls were human servants who did their vampire master’s dirty work during the day. It wasn’t that vampires couldn’t go out, more that they shouldn’t. Post dawn, their powers were diminished: they were lethargic, got terrible sunburns, and—funny enough—they were as blind as bats in bright light, cliché totally intentional. They functioned better at night, so they kept a stable of humans to run around and do their vampire business for them when the day star burned. In this instance, vampire business entailed two strangers standing shoulder-to-shoulder in my doorway looking weird and intimidating respectively.
To be fair, I didn’t immediately know they were ghouls. It’s not like they wore signs around their necks or scratched it into their foreheads, though I should have guessed what they were by the way they looked at me. It was an amalgam of pity, intensity, and curiosity, like they had a vested interest in me. Considering I was about as interesting as three-day-old bread, it should have set off alarms.
The guy on the left, the previously mentioned weird one, was tall and thin, with a helmet of black curly hair, dark skin, and a series of strange marks peppering his face and neck. They weren’t zits or measles, more like chicken pox that had been scratched until they scarred. He wore big clothes on lean bones, so both shirt and pants looked precariously close to falling off if he moved the wrong way.
The other was a woman with shoulders as wide as a refrigerator. Her hair was bleached shock platinum, a kerchief covering her dark roots. A sweatshirt, jeans torn before they saw a store rack, and a smear of thick makeup completed her look, which was... I honestly don’t know. Fashionable hobo? Hooker-chic? Admittedly the only thing trampy about her was the cosmetics: eye shadow as blue as a summer sky, red lips that would have done Bozo proud. It looked out of place on such a big lady; she wasn’t fat, just huge. One of her hands could have palmed my face like a basketball. She had to be six and a half feet tall.
“Is Janice home?” She asked with a thick accent my television education suggested was Russian. She didn’t bother to smile or look me in the eye, instead using her impressive height to peer into the house over my head. The only way I could have stopped her was to jump up and down like a hyperactive poodle, which I was not about to do. Besides, I was too full of Lucky Charms to bounce anywhere.
“Uh. Who are you?”
“Does not matter. You are Maggie, yes?”
Anyone unwilling to give their name was not someone I wanted or needed to talk to. I started to close the door, intending to double bolt it and find myself something explodey or pointy, but the woman jammed her booted foot in at the last second, her hand gripping the side.
“Let go!”
“I am sorry, but you need to come with us now.” She pressed forward, and my feet slid over the hallway tile. Not only was she enormous, she was strong like bull .
“Screw you!”
“Please. This is nothing bad, just a meeting. Let us do this easy. We will have you home by supper, I am promising.”
“Fuck. Off.” I didn’t have a lot of time to mull my options. The weapons were all in the breezeway, I was losing ground, and the skinny guy swiped for me with his spindly arms. My brain filtered through six zillion Janice-teachings, trying to pick the right one for the given situation, but none of them resembled ‘giantess shoving her way into your house and demanding you go for a joy ride.’ The best I could do was ‘any encroaching enemy should be sized up, and if you’re feeling out-manned, run like Forrest Gump.’
Considering I’d developed a justifiable fear of huge Russian women, I felt pretty confident turning tail and screaming through the house like my underwear were
Being greeted by a wall of ghoul before ten was not what I expected.
Ghouls were human servants who did their vampire master’s dirty work during the day. It wasn’t that vampires couldn’t go out, more that they shouldn’t. Post dawn, their powers were diminished: they were lethargic, got terrible sunburns, and—funny enough—they were as blind as bats in bright light, cliché totally intentional. They functioned better at night, so they kept a stable of humans to run around and do their vampire business for them when the day star burned. In this instance, vampire business entailed two strangers standing shoulder-to-shoulder in my doorway looking weird and intimidating respectively.
To be fair, I didn’t immediately know they were ghouls. It’s not like they wore signs around their necks or scratched it into their foreheads, though I should have guessed what they were by the way they looked at me. It was an amalgam of pity, intensity, and curiosity, like they had a vested interest in me. Considering I was about as interesting as three-day-old bread, it should have set off alarms.
The guy on the left, the previously mentioned weird one, was tall and thin, with a helmet of black curly hair, dark skin, and a series of strange marks peppering his face and neck. They weren’t zits or measles, more like chicken pox that had been scratched until they scarred. He wore big clothes on lean bones, so both shirt and pants looked precariously close to falling off if he moved the wrong way.
The other was a woman with shoulders as wide as a refrigerator. Her hair was bleached shock platinum, a kerchief covering her dark roots. A sweatshirt, jeans torn before they saw a store rack, and a smear of thick makeup completed her look, which was... I honestly don’t know. Fashionable hobo? Hooker-chic? Admittedly the only thing trampy about her was the cosmetics: eye shadow as blue as a summer sky, red lips that would have done Bozo proud. It looked out of place on such a big lady; she wasn’t fat, just huge. One of her hands could have palmed my face like a basketball. She had to be six and a half feet tall.
“Is Janice home?” She asked with a thick accent my television education suggested was Russian. She didn’t bother to smile or look me in the eye, instead using her impressive height to peer into the house over my head. The only way I could have stopped her was to jump up and down like a hyperactive poodle, which I was not about to do. Besides, I was too full of Lucky Charms to bounce anywhere.
“Uh. Who are you?”
“Does not matter. You are Maggie, yes?”
Anyone unwilling to give their name was not someone I wanted or needed to talk to. I started to close the door, intending to double bolt it and find myself something explodey or pointy, but the woman jammed her booted foot in at the last second, her hand gripping the side.
“Let go!”
“I am sorry, but you need to come with us now.” She pressed forward, and my feet slid over the hallway tile. Not only was she enormous, she was strong like bull .
“Screw you!”
“Please. This is nothing bad, just a meeting. Let us do this easy. We will have you home by supper, I am promising.”
“Fuck. Off.” I didn’t have a lot of time to mull my options. The weapons were all in the breezeway, I was losing ground, and the skinny guy swiped for me with his spindly arms. My brain filtered through six zillion Janice-teachings, trying to pick the right one for the given situation, but none of them resembled ‘giantess shoving her way into your house and demanding you go for a joy ride.’ The best I could do was ‘any encroaching enemy should be sized up, and if you’re feeling out-manned, run like Forrest Gump.’
Considering I’d developed a justifiable fear of huge Russian women, I felt pretty confident turning tail and screaming through the house like my underwear were
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