tsn fic: untitled vampire au excerpt (774 words)
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It takes all of five seconds - the five seconds during which Mark slides into the booth across from her - for Erica to realize what has happened.
“Oh, Mark,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Across the sticky, scratched table, Mark smiles. He tilts his head back, looking down at her, and that smile is almost the same - cool and sure of itself - except that its confidence doesn’t seem feigned anymore. Mark feels in control of this exchange.
Under the table, she slides her hand into her purse to wrap her fingers around a wooden stake. She understands, now, why he emailed her. She doesn’t yet understand why she agreed, except that perhaps her curiousity got the best of her.
“ ‘Sorry’,” he parrots, like he’s taken aback by the idea. “What for?”
There are a few answers on Erica’s tongue - sorry I have to kill you, sorry you’ve lost your soul, sorry this miserable state shattered your dreams of success - but she stays quiet. She could predict Mark Zuckerberg’s reactions, but she doesn’t know what to expect from this creature that looks like him.
She shrugs.
“Shall we get something to drink?" he suggests. "I’d love to catch up.”
He smiles at her again, this time with teeth, utterly un-Mark. She had no real doubts, before, but now she knows it with such certainty that she swears she can feel how cold his body is, how empty his insides. She tightens her grip on the stake.
“Is anything here really to your taste?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.
He blinks twice, his eyelids flicking up and down across empty eyes. She swears she can hear the sound of it, like an insect’s clicking. She doesn’t shudder, but he smiles like he can see the revulsion in her face.
He’s not attacking, even though in this shadowy corner of a crowded, filthy bar in the worst part of town, no one would look twice. He’s playing the Bond villain - so confident that he has her cornered, that he’s stronger-better-smarter - he’ll slip up. She can work with this.
“So I hear you’ve gone through some life changes,” he says, folding his arms on the table and leaning forward like a concerned parent. Clearly, he still flits from one topic to another with the same fickle attitude.
“Got a haircut,” Erica agrees, tucking a strand behind her ear. She doesn’t mention that the jagged, layered bob she’s adopted was less for fashion and more for self-preservation. Long hair might look pretty, but it’s the easiest thing to grab in a fight.
Mark laughs. “And some self-defense lessons.” He tilts his head to one side, looks down at the place where her arm disappears under the table, and narrows his eyes. “Of a sort.”
“I’ve always been more of a match for you than you thought,” Erica says, bristling at the condescension in his voice. Maybe this vampire is more like his original than most. Or maybe Mark has always been more like a vampire than most humans.
Mark shakes his head. “Not back then. But now, maybe. You might be a decent fight.”
“I’ve killed seventy-eight of you, Mark,” Erica says, leaning forward to mirror his position. She’s close enough now to see the individual tones of blue and gray in his eyes - more gray now than she remembers, last she saw him, like the colour’s been drained from them. Every muscle in her body is tense because this close to him that primal force in her is trying to come out.
She wants to go into fight mode. He wants to put on his gameface. She can feel both these things with perfect clarity.
“Really,” he says, widening his eyes in exaggerated alarm. Every inch of him is patronizing. “Jesus. What did seventy-eight computer programmers do to you?”
“Seventy-eight, Mark.” Erica doesn’t bother to respond to his pathetic joke. Instead, she repeats herself slowly and clearly.
Then she leans back to slip her hand back into her purse. The stake is warm and solid in her hand. “Do you really think you’ll be any more of a challenge?”
Mark stares at her. The lighting in the bar is dim, but his pupils are pinpricks in the washed-out gray of his eyes. He can see her more clearly than she can see him.
When he speaks, it’s in a familiar tone. She remembers it from the dozens of times she couldn’t quite keep up with the shifts in their conversations or his rapid-fire computer babble. It’s a tone which tells her he’s disappointed; he expected more from her.
“Do you really think I’m going to fight like other vampires?”