Blood Candy Read online

  “What?”

  “She looks so innocent. She didn’t deserve this. It’s a good thing you were there, Tinch.”

  “No, she didn’t deserve this,” Tinch agreed. “No one does, especially not a young woman. It boils my blood.”

  “How long has she been out?”

  “A few hours. That vampire bite did a real number on her. Maybe we should wake her up.”

  Candy slowly put her hand to her neck and felt several band aids. Holy Mother of God, this was it. No more games. She had finally attracted the worst of the worst. Her mother was right: If she didn’t stop flaunting her goods, if she didn’t cover up the little tramp stamp on the small of her back (what a mistake that had been), then she would eventually attract the sadists and the sinners.

  “I’m starving,” Jimmy said. “Can we stop somewhere?”

  Tinch slowed the car down and took them onto an exit ramp. They must have pulled into a town because the world lit up in an incandescent glow beyond the car windows. Candy wondered where the perverts were taking her as she lifted her head to look. There was a gas station, and a diner Tinch pulled the car into.

  “She’s awake,” Jimmy said.

  That was the trigger sending Candy into panic mode. She bolted upright and tried for the door. It wouldn’t budge. The interior lock had been broken off or filed down. She beat on the window, screaming at the top of her lungs. The car was old enough to have a window roller so she started pumping it. The window went down at an odd angle, one side faster than the other, and then it jammed. It was low enough for her screams to escape.

  She screamed for her life.

  Tinch muttered beneath his breath and Jimmy came halfway into the back seat, his face full of as much shock as her own. Candy freaked out even more, not bothering to pause for a breath. She expected Jimmy to cover her mouth, but he didn’t.

  “There’s no need to yell!” he said, wide eyed. “You don’t need to be afraid of us.”

  Candy continued screaming anyway. She didn’t know what else to do. Tinch rolled the car through the parking lot and then sped up towards the road. Candy rammed her shoulder into the door, trying to keep as much distance between herself and Jimmy as possible.

  “Listen!” Jimmy was trying to say over her screams. “We want to help you. We saved you!”

  Candy took in a deep breath and stopped screaming long enough to stare at him. He was definitely her age, and he looked familiar. She stared at him for a moment while she tried to catch her breath. She was sure she had seen his face before.

  “Calm down,” he said with his hands held up. “We only want to help you. Are you hungry?”

  “No I’m not fucking hungry! Let me out of the car!”

  Jimmy turned his head to Tinch and said, “I think she’s fine now. Maybe we should let her go here because she’s not going to cooperate.”

  Tinch pulled back into the parking lot.

  “That’s up to her,” he said. He parked in one of the spaces farthest from the diner, snatched the keys out of the ignition and turned in his seat as much as he could to face Candy. “You want us to drop you off here?”

  Candy couldn’t believe it. She wondered why they bothered bringing her all the way out here, wherever here was, in the first place. She nodded vigorously.

  “Okay,” Tinch said. “Me and Jimmy are going to grab a bite to eat. You’re more than welcome to join us.”

  Jimmy pushed himself back into the passenger seat to get out of the car and then he used a key to unlock the back door for Candy. She stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. She noticed her handbag on the back floorboard and grabbed it. She couldn’t recall if she had left the bar with it, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t. With her handbag in hand she was ready to make a run for it. That seemed the most natural course of action. She didn’t need to. Tinch and Jimmy sauntered over to the diner entrance.

  Candy dug out her cell phone and pressed down the button to turn it on. The low battery display came up and it shut itself back off. She cursed, having no idea where she was. She dug around in her handbag again for her wallet and noticed Jimmy standing at the door, holding it open and looking back at her. He stepped into the diner and let the door close.

  Candy opened up her wallet to find all of her money gone.

  “Shit!”

  She could cross a dark field to the gas station, but she figured there must be a phone in the diner. She hurried inside and saw the two jerks that had brought her out here sitting at a window booth. She ignored them. There wasn’t anyone else inside she could see other than a waitress behind the pickup window in the kitchen. Candy marched over to the counter and tried to wait as patiently as possible.

  “Care to join us?” Jimmy asked her.

  Candy turned to glare at him. That should have been answer enough. The waitress pushed through a door from the kitchen and made her way to Jimmy and Tinch’s table. Candy tried to catch her attention.

  “Can I use your phone?”

  The waitress walked on by as if Candy hadn’t said anything, pulling an order pad out of the pouch on her apron. Candy waited at the counter, but they were taking a ridiculously long time. She went over to the waitress with the intention of giving her a firm tap on the shoulder.

  “I don’t like onions,” Jimmy was saying. “You sure you can make it without onions?”

  “No onions,” the waitress said in a bored tone. She didn’t bother to write it down.

  “Does it have peppers?” Jimmy said.

  The waitress didn’t say anything. Tinch glared across the table at the younger man.

  “It doesn’t say it has peppers,” Jimmy went on, “but I got the breakfast skillet once at this other place and it had peppers. Can you make sure it has no peppers?”

  “No peppers,” said the waitress.

  “Do you fry the potatoes on the grill or in one of those grease baskets?”

  The waitress stared with blank eyes.

  “Jesus Christ!” Tinch roared. “Would you hurry up already?”

  “Fine,” Jimmy said. The waitress snatched the menus, apparently unconcerned if her picky customer had given his full order.

  Candy tapped the waitress on the shoulder as she walked away. “Can I use your phone?”

  When the waitress turned, Candy got a good look at her deplorable state. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face sagging, and her mousy brown hair jutted out in all directions from beneath a visor. She looked like a woman who didn’t care about her miserable existence anymore.

  “The phone?” the waitress said, looking the younger woman up and down. One of her brows went up when she saw the high cut on Candy’s dress, and then the other when she saw breasts nearly popping out of the top. “Five dollars to use the phone.”

  “Five dollars? That’s ridiculous!”

  The waitress shrugged and continued on her way. Candy turned to see Jimmy and Tinch jerk their heads away from her. She sighed and went over to their table.

  “Can I borrow five dollars?”

  “Borrow?” said Tinch. “When would you pay it back?”

  Candy looked at Jimmy who shrugged and said, “I don’t have five dollars.”

  “You have to be kidding me. You two assholes dragged me out here!”

  “Assholes?” Tinch said. “Do me a favor and try your hardest to remember what happened a few hours ago. Remember that guy you left the bar with? You know the one, he was about to do bad things to you until I came along. You may want to be more vigilant in which strangers you take a midnight stroll with through the woods.”

  Candy felt the band aids on her neck again. A slow realization she already knew at least in some small part settled over her. This Tinch guy had saved her from. . . . No, he was only a weird, British dweeb.

  “Calm down, Tinch.” Jimmy turned his brown eyes to Candy. “Why don’t you join us and we can figure everything out?”

  Tinch snorted.

  “What?” Jimmy said.

  Tinch looked at Cand
y; at the revealing nature of her dress, her blonde hair, the red lipstick, and all of the eyeliner. He shook his head.

  “Whatever.” Jimmy rolled his eyes.

  Candy ignored the insinuation of why Jimmy was so interested in her and she reluctantly approached the side of the booth where the younger man was sitting. “Scoot over,” she said.

  Surprised, Jimmy made room. His face flushed as she pushed in next to him. Candy put her bag on the table and waved her wallet in front of Tinch.

  “Where’s my money?”

  Tinch narrowed his eyes. “How should I know?”

  “God! That was all of the graduation money I had left.”

  “Listen, little lady.” Tinch focused his hard, cold eyes on her. “Missing money is the least of your concerns. Do you have any idea who you left that bar with? I’m guessing you do now.”

  “No, actually I don’t.”

  “You’re probably better off that way.”

  “He wasn’t a vampire,” Candy said rather unconvincingly.

  “Believe what you want.”

  Candy turned to Jimmy. He tried to play off his attempts to get a peep down the top of her dress, though he otherwise seemed as serious as Tinch.

  “Vampires aren’t real,” she said, even as the skin beneath the band aids on her neck itched.

  “It looked real when he was sucking on your neck,” Tinch said.

  Candy remembered Rupert’s embrace. She remembered the pain that had lanced down through her neck and the fire from everywhere else in her body. She blushed, remembering how good it felt. But he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t done anything other than. . . .

  He bit me!

  Candy recalled the odd way she had been attracted to him even though she could now clearly remember how unattractive and off-putting he had actually been. It didn’t make sense. Everything about him was repulsive. Something connected in her mind.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “His accent was terrible.”

  “Yup.” Tinch nodded his head. “No guy can pick up a girl with an accent like that. It sounds like a bear having its way with a goat. Only a vampire can pull the wool over a woman’s eyes like that.”

  Candy got up and headed to the bathroom. Jimmy asked where she was going, but her mind was racing and she didn’t pay any attention. She stood in front of a grimy mirror and took a hard look at herself. Her fingers touched the bandages on her neck.

  She thought she might be sick if she looked beneath.

  “Vampires,” she mumbled to herself.

  She peeled off the end of all three band aids. Slowly, one at a time, revealing two red punctures. She dropped her head. It couldn’t be. When she touched a finger to the wound, her breath caught in her chest as a spark of pleasure ignited within her.

  “What the . . . ?”

  She never considered herself smart, but she wasn’t stupid. The math written in her reflection on the mirror was simple enough: Two puncture wounds plus one poorly dressed loser plus her strange behavior equals . . .

  “Vampires are real.”

  Chapter Three

  Candy tore into her second plate of scrambled eggs, hash browns and sausages. It tasted terrible, but she was positively ravenous. Bitter coffee washed it all down, a taste she had never really became accustomed to but needed now.

  Tinch attributed her appetite to the blood she had lost. She was still silently berating herself for what she had done at the bar. Every time she thought about it she remembered the bite more than anything else, and that damned bite felt good. Thinking about it made her uncomfortable, considering her current company.

  “So, are you two like a father-son vampire hunting team or something?” she said.

  Tinch pulled his dark eyes away from his plate to look up at her. “No, on both counts.”

  Candy glanced at each of them. She still wasn’t sure she believed this nonsense about Rupert being a vampire, but it didn’t add up any other way. It didn’t make sense that she left the bar with such a loser.

  “So what’s your deal?” Candy said when neither of them offered up any information. “What are you if not vampire hunters?”

  “Never mind that,” Tinch said. “I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Consider yourself extremely lucky.”

  Jimmy had been quiet for the most part since Candy returned from the bathroom. It was obvious she turned him on; the signs were everywhere, most noticeably the fidgeting he did to get a better position to look at her. Too bad he was so shy; he was cute in a skinny, boy-becoming-man kind of way. She figured with some time and hard work she could take the shy boy out of him and turn him into something a woman might want, but those kinds of projects were a waste of time and only ever worked in movies.

  Tinch picked up the tab, throwing a twenty onto the table and a five for the tip. He eyed Candy for a moment and then he gave Jimmy a worried glance.

  “It’s nearly five in the morning,” he said, looking like he was running on coffee fumes. “We need to get home, Jimmy.”

  Candy didn’t know what to say. She felt out of place, unwanted by at least one of them, but the last thing she wanted was to go home. Jimmy gave her a comforting smile.

  “Where do you live?” he asked her. At Tinch’s clear look of displeasure, he sighed and went on, “What do you expect her to do, Tinch? She needs to get home.”

  “I don’t know,” Tinch said with a touch of both regret and sympathy. “I’ve never had to do this before.”

  “You actually have. Just never with . . .” Jimmy cleared his throat as if he was saying something he shouldn’t. “You may as well get used to it with the way vampires are running around our territory.” He turned his brown eyes to Candy. “Sorry. We should have probably just taken you to a police station or something.”

  Tinch shook his head and grumbled at the younger man’s lack of wisdom. “That’s the last thing we want to do. Exposure to people in any way brings nothing but trouble. Let’s just get her home.”

  Candy fidgeted with her thumbs. Home was the last place she wanted to be and not only because she was scared out of her mind thinking vampires were real, but because she didn’t want to return to her mundane life in small-town nowhere.

  “I don’t think I should go home,” she said. “Not after what I’ve seen—”

  Tinch shook his head again. “You need to be with your family. You need to go back to your life and forget about everything that happened.”

  “That’s not fair! You can’t tell me vampires are real and then send me on my way. ‘Oh, vampires are real, by the way. They snatch people up against their will.’ How’s that going to help me?”

  She noticed the waitress staring at them from behind the counter. The bell above the diner door jingled. She heard the waitress say, “Hello there, handsome.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?” Tinch said. “You can’t come with us, little lady. I’m not a babysitter. You need to go home.”

  Behind Candy near the counter, someone spoke in a British accent that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She froze as Tinch looked past her, his face shifting from the passive and relatively relaxed way it had been all night to fuming mad in an instant.

  “Fancy running into you here,” Rupert said. “It’d be my pleasure to give the young lady a ride home. As a matter of fact, I insist.”

  Tinch ground his teeth and a low growl rumbled in his chest. Jimmy turned and pushed himself up onto one knee so he could see over the high backrest, and then he grabbed Candy and physically switched places with her so she was next to the window. Snarling, Tinch stood up with clenched fists. He was a hard man, his tensed arms steely corded bundles of muscle etched with dark ink tattoos. The hatred on his voice when he spoke was palpable.

  “You’re one stupid bastard. This is lupine country.”

  “I think not,” said the British man, grinning widely. Leaning against the counter, he winked at the waitress, who blushed and then stared hatred at Tinc
h. A greasy cook came out of the kitchen with a meat cleaver gripped in one thick hand.

  “You wolves have been wanking around so much you haven’t bothered to notice what’s right in front of your snouts,” Rupert said.

  “Glamoured,” Tinch growled, his eyes moving between the waitress and the cook—more specifically, to the cleaver. “I’m going to break your scrawny, English neck.”

  Candy dared to prop herself up on the seat so she could sneak a peek. Rupert was still wearing the disco-era clothes. His eyes flashed to her, accompanied with a creepy smile. The wound on her neck throbbed.

  Rupert turned to the waitress and said, “Need a fix, beautiful?”

  The waitress nodded, crossing her hands over her heart like a love struck girl, offering up one of her wrists. Rupert grabbed her arm and tugged so violently she came halfway over the counter. Her mouth hung open and her head lolled back in anticipation.

  “That’s my lovely, loyal girl,” Rupert said. His eyes lingered on Tinch while he licked her wrist. “You’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you? She’d kill for me. She’d kill to have one more bite.”

  The waitress gasped and begged.

  “Bastard,” Tinch grumbled beneath his breath. “You fucked with the wrong wolf.” But he didn’t make a move, seemingly conflicted with the situation, with the waitress and the cook. He projected his voice towards Jimmy without taking his eyes away from the threats. “Get Candy out of here.”

  Rupert tisked and wagged a finger. “Hand the girl over and no one need get hurt.”

  The waitress screamed out in pain when he twisted her wrist. She then immediately begged for the bite. A sudden and uncontrollable pang of jealousy blindsided Candy.

  “Old boy with the cleaver there is itching for some action,” Rupert said with a nod of his head at the cook. “You going to kill him to get to me, mutt? You going to kill this woman?”

  Jimmy took Candy by the hand and tried to get her to the aisle.

  “Stay close to me,” he said.

  Candy stayed behind him, right at his back so she wouldn’t have to see Rupert as they edged down the aisle towards the door. She had the presence of mind to grab her handbag off the table. Rupert made a clucking sound with his tongue, the waitress moaned and begged even more. Candy screamed when a tall man crashed through a window, landing a few feet up the aisle in a crouch which cut her and Jimmy off from the exit. He was dressed in the same outdated clothes as Rupert and his black hair sparkled with glass. His dark eyes were wide and crazed, and Candy could see two menacing fangs behind his lips.