Lucy’s knife scrapes across her plate, making a massacre of her soggy mozzarella sticks. For the fourth night in a row, it’s the only sound either of them makes. Larry doesn’t say anything. His eyes follow the path of a fly buzzing through fan blades on the misty smoker’s patio, glazed with sleep.

Lucy pulls out a cigarette. She doesn’t light it.

“Thank you for the dinner, Miss Lucy.” Larry says and smiles.

She grunts, her fingers tapping restlessly along the cigarette. Larry is surprised it hasn’t caught on fire of its own accord. But she reaches into her breast pocket…then her side pocket…then finally up her sleeves…until she lays a rumpled wad of dollar bills on the table. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, alright!” he says with an enthusiastic smile. The waitress comes to clear their table and doesn’t bother with receipts because, well, look at them. A tall man with clown makeup and a slept in suit carrying a shopping bag that smells of baby powder, and a girl who barely looks old enough to drink with a badly hidden array of knives on her person.

Larry stumbles out from the table, humming a snatch of an old Shirley Temple melody, and Lucy follows, looking over her shoulder every few seconds with poor subtlety. There’s an ugly silver rental car in the fenced lot, which the two of them climb into, Lucy in the driver’s seat, Larry first in the passenger, then climbing out and into the back. There’s a piece of tarp vaguely resembling a circus tent stretched over the rear windows, and bottles lined with dark red residue litter the seat. With a man plaintively staring from a car window and a woman swearing at a suburban intersection, the couple is on their way out of this town.

Larry Love had been claustrophobically close to forty a century ago, with a name that screamed identity theft, black ringlets well washed but never combed and the faint bulge of fangs beneath his full lips. His clothing had been picked out by his mother for much of his life and he’d never really stopped looking like it. A penchant for florals and frills that didn’t much fit together gave him the perpetual appearance of a lost first grader, just a little too tall for his age, or an acid fried vampire. He often smiled, but was careful of his teeth.

No one was quite sure how old Lucy was, probably because she had enough open warrants that she might actually need the fake ID’s for non-alchohol-related reasons. Probably not though. At five foot one, with pixie-like features, she sometimes seemed able to shapeshift from thirteen to thirty at a moment’s notice. Most likely she was somewhere in between. Old enough to drive, quite possibly young enough to count her parent’s income on financial aid.

By now they were on the highway and the suburban outcrops were growing more and more spread out. The mom and pop shops morphed into Arbys and K-Marts, which Lucy appreciated for the anonymity their locale provided but dreaded as Larry’s stream of commentary on the merits of different brands of onion rings and the relative hygiene of their sellers became more and more frequent.

“You don’t eat, man.”

“I still like to be an informed consumer.”

“Hey, does Walmart blood taste better than Target blood?”

Larry sniffed primly. “That was uncalled for.” He ran his tongue over his teeth as if they were new, never having completely adjusted to his supernatural state. “I was too polite to ask a lady for a meal, but we really must stop soon.”

Lucy checked the ratio of dead grass to cars outside; they were in country radio territory. “Rest stop. I get his wallet.”

He blanched, face turning as pale as his powder. “I…I would never do that sort of thing with a man. No matter how I may-”

“Cry at the thought of being loved and content?”

“Allergies!”

“You’re dead, Larry.”

“Well I simply will not sneak up behind a man in a dark alley and sink my teeth into his soft, creamy skin! I will not feel the ecstasy of his life-blood leaving his heart to become my sustenance! I will accost a beautiful, young woman, and drink her blood,” and further he continued with the finality of an equation “As God intended.”

“Okay, you can stop talking now. Like, really. Before I run over a deer and make you drink it.”

When they did stop, he scrambled out of the car, long legs tangling together, but closed the door gently. Lucy leaned her head back on the cracked vinyl of the seat, wondering if there would be a scream this time. There was, and after it there was a pitchy giggle, before the ugly slurping started. It really did sound like sucking a county fair slurpee with a broken straw. What an undignified end.

But when Larry emerged from behind the graffiti scarred port-a-potty, he somehow looked cleaner than ever, his shirt unrumpled and unstained, with only a smear of red on his chin revealing the nature of his midnight snack.

Lucy was plenty used to the sight of blood (with enough proof that it might seem indelicate to ask), but something about the machete-mouthed manchild set her on edge, so her “get in,” sounded a bit harsher than usual. Larry made no reply, except to lick his lips gloatingly as she glared, and he returned to the back seat.

He’d been trying for some time to make his old Victrola work in the car, however jumpy, but antique wax pairs badly with worn highways, so finally he’d been given a fifty dollar smartphone that he could fill with as much music as he liked, none of it newer than the great war. Lucy occasionally growled complaints or sang Led Zeppelin with the melodiousness of an air raid siren, but Larry could have sworn he caught her mouthing the words along to “I Got You Babe” at least twice.

Today it was nineteenth century ragtime, with a frenetic energy that jangled Lucy’s nerves in the stillness of the car. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, spat curses at slow signallers, did anything she could to drown it out with something fucking normal.

Suddenly, without taking her eyes from the road, Lucy asked, “What does it taste like?”

Larry blinked. “Blood?”

“No, chocolate milk. Of course blood. It’s always blood, with you.”

Larry hesitated. In that moment between moments, as he sucked a pointless breath into his pointless lungs, he looked very very old. “It’s like velvet in your mouth. Peaches and cream. Milk and honey. Water and the Word. The Word made flesh. The forbidden fruit, and yet the sweetest and most sacred thing. Carnal desire. Like the kiss of a young…” He trailed off, his fingertips touching his lips, just barely. The buildings and billboards rushing by outside the window were reflected in his glassy eyes. And by the time the rising sun rays drenched his curls through the tarp meant to protect him, he was dreaming of sweet, forbidden things.

by C.G.

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