My koo ka choo
I'll tell ya what I'll do
Take you just a little bit higher 

My koo ka choo
I'm standing next to you
Baby can you feel my fire 

She's a mystery
That girl's a fantasy

            Two vampires walked the sidewalks of Los Angeles, enjoying the newborn early summer night.  Despite their extraordinary natures, hey passed through the other people walking the sidewalks in this busy section of the downtown unnoticed; after all, what were two more guys with long black hair and dressed all in denim and leather in L.A.?  Those kinds of dudes were all over the place, so this duo was just part of the background noise.

For a great many of the people around them, the day was done, and it was time to go home to whatever awaited them, and leave the world to those that roamed the night, like these two guys, who weren’t ones to waste even a second of the evening.  Life was too short for that, even for an immortal.  Between the two of them, they had around 3800 years under their belts, but their great ages hadn’t bent them and made them bitter and cranky like it had many other vampires of advanced years; these two were as young and wild as any pair of 22 year-old troublemakers, except for the wisdom and knowledge they’d accumulated during their times on the planet.  They were young in a way that most mortal 22 year-olds weren’t, utterly free, their lives their own, and it was summer in the great city of L.A., and by damned, they were determined to have a good time.

            “So what’s this so-called ‘big sister’ of Clarisse’s look like, hmm?” asked Stacey, a lean, wiry fellow sporting a well-used Hanoi Rocks tanktop.  “I don’t suppose she’s another slender redhead with green eyes and an ass that would drive men to kill for her, is she?”

            Steele, Stacey’s best friend and lifelong partner in crime, gave his pal a grin and a shrug.  “Beats the shit outta me.  Clarisse didn’t tell me much, other than whoever this gal is, she could take on a Sherman tank and win, without breaking a sweat.  Said she’s the roughest, toughest lady vampire you’ll ever meet.”

            Stacey’s face twisted up in a look of anticipatory disgust.  “Sounds like an ogre chick to me.  I’ve seen some really super-strong girls in my time, and all of ‘em were troll bitches.  Janice is really tough, but she’s not up to troll-like power, at least, and she’s got a nice wiggle to her ass.  I suppose some weirdos would think that those monstrous ogre girls were the cat’s meow, but not this little black duck.”  He sighed.  “Sounds like this is gonna be the case of the little sister getting all the looks, while the big one got all the fugly.  Nothing I’d feel the need to hit.”

            Steele shrugged again.  “It’s not like you have to worry about it.  I doubt Janice would go for you hopping on somebody else anyway; hell, she gets bent outta shape when you go out with me.  Does she think you’re having a gay affair on the side or something?”  He looked at Stacey and gave him a limp-wristed whack on the shoulder, grinning at him around his cigarette.  “Too bad we didn’t wear our sailor suits, huh?”

            “Oh puh-lease,” Stacey groaned, rolling his eyes.  “Like I’d ever associate with a piece of common street trash like you when I’d be capable of getting someone so much better.  Let me tell ya, if I was gonna hop on the other side of the fence, I’d do it with gusto.  I’d go hammer the shit outta Pee-Wee Herman just to say I stole his innocence!”

            “Innocence?  Shit,” Steele snorted.  “That guy’s a ticking timebomb of depravity if I’ve ever seen one.  You mark my words,” the vampire said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and waggling it at Stacey to annunciate his words, “That guy’s gonna go off someday and woe be it to any poor fool who happens to be around him at the time.  He’ll probably go tear up some drag queen and get caught, or maybe be in some seedy porno theater and—“

            “Hey!” Stacey snapped, shoving at Steele with his shoulder.  “Don’t be talking shit about Pee Wee!  The guy’s as pure as the driven snow, so don’t go saying all that!”

            “Fuckin’ pervert, man, I’m telling you,” Steele said, his grin getting wider at his friend’s distress.

            “Pee Wee’s pure!  He’ll be entertaining little kids and throwbacks like me for decades, damn you, decades!” Stacey howled at Steele, flailing his arms about and making a few by-passers sidestep in fear of getting smacked.  “A guy tries to put together something that’s good and decent for kids, something that’s fun and on their level, and pieces of shit like you gotta go and tear it down!  You’re a sick bastard!”

            Steele raised an eyebrow at Stacey, calmly regarding the near-frantic vampire, “Well, you were the one that was talking about fucking him, not me.”

            “It was a for-instance, you moron!” Stacey screamed, which got a good solid chuckle out of Steele.  Stacey gave him a couple of punches on the shoulder, then sulked along for a few moments while Steele got the mirth out of his system.

            “You’re a prick,” Stacey informed him.  “A total prick.  And if you say one more word about Pee Wee Herman being some sort of bizarre pervert, I’ll kick your ass right here!”

            Steele laughed again as he flicked his cigarette into the gutter, loving how serious Stacey looked.  The guy didn’t fully exist on the same plane of reality as everybody else: he tended to leave enough of himself there to be able to interact with its inhabitants, but the rest of him was off running crazily through myriad other realms, and one never quite knew what they were going to get when dealing with him.

            They stopped at a corner for the traffic lights, and while they stood waiting, Stacey asked, “Now that we’ve established that you’re a heartless asshole, let’s talk turkey.  So we’re supposed to all meet tonight at Shady’s, right?”

            Steele nodded.  “Yeah.  Around nine o’clock or so, that’s when Clarisse said she told her ‘big sis’ to meet us all there.”

            “Ah, the ogre chick cometh,” Stacey snorted.  “I’m telling you, there’s something about super-strong vampire broads.  Whenever they hit a certain point of strength, they start to go all weird, at least the ones I’ve seen.  Hell, Janice ain’t no ogre, but even I’ll admit that she’s not all there …”

            “And I don’t know why you keep putting up with her,” Steele grunted.  Stacey started to say something, but Steele held up his hand and cut him off.  “I know, I know, ‘the sex is mindblowingly mindblowing and besides, she’ll probably beat the shit out of me.’”

            Stacey glowered at Steele.  “Well, it’s true.”

            “I suppose that’s what you get for going out with a girl that stalked you for almost all last year …” Steele said with a sigh.  There were times that even he couldn’t figure out certain aspects of his friend’s personality, and one of those things was Stacey’s choice of women.

The slim vampire was a relentless fiend for women of all sorts, and he always went for the most gorgeous ones, girls that made your eyes practically explode in their sockets, but the girls he always ended up with were the ones that had more than a few wires crossed.  Steele had seen him chase after heart-stoppingly beautiful women with incredible personalities, win them over, and then drop them almost immediately afterwards, only to end up with some pretty psychopath and stick with her for months on end.  It was either that or he’d settle for some notorious slut that had had relations with the majority of the area code and also just so happened to be cracked in the head.  Stacey always aimed high and then ultimately overshot the target and wound up in the mental ward or VD clinic.  Sometimes both.

His past girlfriend record read like a rogue’s gallery of whores and psychotics, and Janice definitely fit in with the rest.  She’d stalked him for almost the entire previous year, following him everywhere he went, hiding out in the bushes out in front of his house, and bugging all of Stacey’s friends as to his whereabouts when he wasn’t to be found.  She was also notoriously strong, and every time another girl had taken a shine to Stacey, the lunatic vampiress would none-too-gently scare them off, leaving the playing field nice and clear.

Stacey had finally relented, claiming he thought it was sweet that she’d spent so long chasing after him, and they’d been together ever since, much to the annoyance of Stacey’s friends.  But Stacey stuck with her, no matter how much she pissed him off, insisting that the sex was cosmically profound and professing fear of repercussions if he dumped her.  Steele also had sneaking suspicions that Stacey continued to stay with her because on some level he found the whole situation amusing and was curious as to see what kind of catastrophe it would ultimately result in.

“Actually, in all honesty, Stacey, she probably needs to be killed before she ends up killing you,” Steele added after a moment’s thought.

Stacey gave him a look that was about half offended and half in agreement, but his retort was lost when he caught sight of the most beautiful redhead he’d ever laid eyes on.

She was sitting astride a monstrous Harley Fatboy, waiting for the traffic light to turn green, impatiently rattling her fingers on her handgrip, her long mane of fiery red hair trailing down the back of her black leather jacket.  She was a big woman, Stacey’s estimate coming in at around 6’4”, and even sitting on a motorcycle, she had a definite Amazonian grace to her, and those legs!  Stacey’s eyes roamed over the woman’s long, shapely legs, which were tightly encased in a pair of ripped blue jeans, the rips giving him glimpses of the perfect flesh underneath, and he felt his heart start dancing the cha-cha.

He actually started to salivate when she revved the engine of her bike as she grew more impatient with the traffic light, drawing a deep, thunderous growl from her bike’s powerful engine that thrummed through the pavement and rang right up Stacey’s spine.  The drooling got even worse when he looked at the profile of her face, which showed ruggedly feline features.  It was the kind of face that was earthy and exotic all at once, and it was attached to a body of Amazonian beauty that was astride one of the baddest-ass bikes he’d ever seen.

“Homma homma,” Stacey mumbled, his tongue practically lolling out of his mouth as he felt his blood burning up in his veins as he decided right then and there that this babe, nay this superbabe, was the finest thing he’d ever seen.  Holy smokes, she looked like she should’ve been on the cover of a magazine … a really, really good magazine, at that.  Janice was cute, yeah, but she was nothing compared to this superbabe, absolute zero.  But then again, any girl was nada compared to this one!  Not only that, but from the way she held herself, Stacey could tell that not only was she beautiful, but she was a vampire as well, which put a flawless bow on an already-perfect package!  He slobbered shamelessly.

Then the light changed, and before he could blink, she’d rammed her accelerator forward and had shot through traffic, weaving in and out of cars with the skill and balance that only a true biker could manage, and that only endeared this nameless woman to him even further.  But then, just when he decided that he was definitely in love, she was gone.

Stacey’s jaw dropped and he pointed up the street in the direction of where he’d last seen her, making incoherent noises, and remained right where he was while the rest of the people who had been waiting for the light to change walked across the street.  Steele called Stacey’s name several times, but got no more response than he would have out of a particularly slow chimpanzee, so he grabbed his pal by the arm and started to lead him across the street.

“C’mon, Rainman, you can do it,” he said as he walked Stacey over to the next corner.  As they walked, Stacey continued to point and hoot in the direction of where the beautiful redhead had disappeared.

By the time they got across the street, Stacey was capable of speech again, and he grabbed Steele’s shoulders and shook him.  “Did you see her?” he demanded.  “Did you?!”

Steele, long accustomed to strange moments like this, didn’t bat an eyelash.  “Who?  Did you see Jayne Mansfield’s ghost or something?”

“No, no, not this time!” Stacey said, shaking his head.  “This was a redhead!  And she was gorgeous!”

“So was Jayne Mansfield.  Gorgeous, at least,” Steele quipped.  With a snarl, Stacey whacked him in the back of the head, which got his attention, because usually it went the other way around, with him delivering the whacks to the aft end of Stacey’s noggin.

“You don’t understand, you jackass!  This girl made Clarisse look like a fucking dog!” Stacey exclaimed, waving his arms around.

Steele scowled at Stacey, who quickly amended.  “All right, all right, that was uncalled for … I meant a really foxy dog!”

Steele let it slide, chalking it up to Stacey’s enthusiasm.  He then let Stacey rant and rave about how he had to find this incredibly gorgeous superbabe and hook up with her for a few moments before reminding him of Janice.

“D’oh!” Stacey howled, smacking himself on the forehead.  “And I told her that I was gonna be at Shady’s tonight with you guys!  Fuck!”

He kicked at the sidewalk and looked forlornly up the busy street where the 6’4” vision of supreme beauty had disappeared scant minutes before.  If he didn’t show up at Shady’s, Janice would give him utter hell, and he wouldn’t have any peace for days afterwards, as she would be sure that he’d been absent due to another woman, and then he’d have to apologize and do all sorts of nice stuff for her before he could get into her pants again.  Then there was the possibility that the woman wouldn’t even be interested in him, or that she had some humongous monster with two heads for a boyfriend, who wouldn’t take kindly to a little bastard like him trying to cut in on his fine action; he was pretty damn sure that a girl that looked that good wouldn’t be single, and that as big as she was, she probably had a boyfriend who was even bigger.

“Fiddlesticks!” he moaned, and Steele patted him on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry, my little chum.  We could always have Clarisse’s sis knock the piss out of Janice and you could move in on that.  Clarisse said that her sis didn’t have a guy, and thought she might introduce her to Wade while she was staying here.  But if this big sis were to take a liking to you …” Steele said, sounding almost like a salesman.

Stacey groaned.  “No way, let Wade have the ogre chick.  Janice may be loonier than Daffy Duck, but at least she’ll let me—“

            Steele cut him off.  “Don’t even say that. My skin hasn’t stopped crawling from the last time you ran your mouth about that shit.”

            “What?  Janice isn’t bad-looking, she’s actually rather cute,” Stacey said.

            “I hate Janice and Janice hates me, and the last thing I want is the thought of her naked and doing something fucked-up running around in my head.”

            “You’re no fun,” Stacey said, shoving him again, and Steele snorted.

            “I’m plenty of fun.  I’d give you a list of all the girls that have told me that, but we don’t have all night.”  He glanced up at the sky and took a second to figure the time.  “We’d better get back to my car.  I’ve got to drop you off where you can get your bike, go pick up Clarisse in Burbank, and then get back over to Shady’s so we can meet up with ‘big sis.’”

            “All right,” Stacey said agreeably, looking forward to running through the streets of Los Angeles on his Harley for a while before meeting the gang at Shady’s.  Maybe he’d get lucky and run into that redheaded superbabe while he was out and about.  Thinking of her again made his heart twitch in a way that Janice was never able to manage, and before he started walking with Steele again, the lean vampire cast one more glance up the street where he’d just seen the most beautiful vampiress in the world.

*     *     *

            The piece-of-shit stoplight finally changed to green and Brandi jammed her accelerator forward, ripping away from the light with a tremendous snarl of mechanized might, leaving the more pedestrian folks in her dust.  As soon as she was back up to speed, she impatiently weaved in and out of the traffic (there was so much of it here!), trying to get into a more open space so that she could really get going.

As she expertly danced her Harley Fatboy around the endless cars, so in tune with her bike and her own reflexes and instincts that she didn’t even think about what she was doing, she reflected on how different things were in this city compared to the places she’d gotten so used to during the last several decades.

During the years she had rode with the Sisters of Fury, a female vampire biker group, she’d rode up and down just about every highway there was in America, but Los Angeles threw her for a bit of a loop.  The Sisters had never hit the southern California metropolis during their travels, and Brandi found that this city was every bit the jungle that Axl Rose had proclaimed it to be.  She was an old vampiress of nearly two millennia, and she had more than enough experience and wisdom under her belt, not to mention her own natural resilience and adaptability, to be able to avoid any real problems in adjusting to this new environment.  Even so, after getting used to riding across long empty stretches of highway and tearing through little towns in the middle of nowhere, this sprawling, vast center of throbbing life was somewhat overwhelming.  But she was managing.

            “There isn’t anything I can’t handle,” she muttered to herself as easily threaded her way between a Volvo and a Hyundai, irritating the preppy college kid in the Hyundai, who apparently didn’t like sharing the road with two-wheeled traffic.  She caught him flipping her off from the corner of her eye, and without a second thought, she lashed out with her right arm and smacked his side mirror off.

The smashed remains of the mirror bounced off the pavement and exploded into pieces behind them, and Brandi gave the now-worried kid one of her more malevolent glares as she sped along next to him for a few moments, the wind of her velocity causing her long red hair to fan out behind her.

She turned her eyes from him and accelerated, pulling away from the twit, and as she did, she punched a considerable dent into his hood, and then shot away without a backwards glance.  Let the little prick explain that one to mommy and daddy.  Maybe next time he’d know better.

            She supposed that she could get used to this city and its native morons given time, but then again, she wasn’t planning on staying long.  The only reason she’d come to town was to be able to see Clarisse again, the vampiress she’d adopted as her little sister.  She’d missed the more diminutive redhead a great deal since she’d departed from the Sisters of Fury almost three years ago to come to this city, and was savoring every moment of seeing her again.  She loved the other three Sisters (Darla, Melissa, and Elizabeth), too, but there was a special bond between her and Clarisse that she shared with nobody else, and when Clarisse had rode off into the starry night that last time to seek out the big city and the wicked wonders that lay there, Brandi had felt a part of her leave, too.

They’d been an inseparable pair since the Sisters had first come together back in the late 1940’s, and though they differed greatly in almost everything, they’d been as close as friends can get.  After Clarisse had left, Brandi had come very close to setting out after her, but had ultimately decided to stay with the Sisters.  It’d somewhat embarrassed at the time that she’d become so devoted to someone that their leaving had caused her distress.  She’d long prided herself on not needing anybody for anything, and the revelation had unsettled her almost as much as Clarisse’s departure.

By her reckoning, she was one of the roughest, toughest, and most powerful vampires out there, and there was nothing that she needed from anyone else.  What she needed, she took, and she had a damn good time doing it.  It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the company of other people, as she had often spend hours upon hours talking science, philosophy, literature, and dozens of other subjects with mortals and humans alike, it was just that she didn’t feel a need to have somebody else beside her on a regular basis.  That was something she’d left behind years ago.  She came and went as she pleased, she did what she wanted when she wanted, and she didn’t need anybody to validate her existence.  But Clarisse, bless her electric soul, she was different.

Brandi had taken an instant liking to the other vampiress when they’d first met, and though their personalities were almost complete opposites, they got along famously.  Brandi had found herself looking forward to spending time with the bubbly woman, and had enjoyed the many long rides and conversations they’d shared, and still laughed at memories of the tricks and games they’d played throughout the years they’d had together.  It had made her feel good to step up and smash anything that dared to try to hurt Clarisse, and she’d loved how Clarisse called her ‘big sis’ and would often ask her questions about history (history was one of Clarisse’s most favorite things in the entire world) or for her advice when it came to a certain situation or another.  The last several years with the Sisters after Clarisse had left had been a great deal of fun, and she’d relished every moment of them, but there was something missing, and that had been Clarisse.

So one night, when the Sisters were riding through New Mexico and they’d stopped at a bar in a small town, she’d told them that she was taking off for California for a while, to go find Clarisse and see what she was up to.  Naturally, the other Sisters hadn’t had any problem with it, and had wished her well and sent their regards to Clarisse.  Having long ago sensed how much she’d missed Clarisse and had known that this trip would have come about sooner or later.  She’d told them that she’d be gone for a couple of weeks, and would then find them wherever it was they were at afterwards.  She was excellent at tracking, and so regardless of where their travels carried them to, it wouldn’t take her long to find them.  That very night, Brandi had roared out into the night atop Warhorse, her trusty iron horse, and now, almost a week later, she was in Los Angeles.

When she’d arrived in town, she’d set about searching for her little sis, and had found out that Clarisse’s wishes of becoming a guitarist had come true, as quite a few people, mortal and immortal alike, knew who she was and sang praises of her abilities.  Brandi had beamed with pride at the compliments that had been heaped upon Clarisse’s six-string skills, and had been able to give her some vague information on where Clarisse’s whereabouts were.  After some more searching, Brandi had located her old friend’s house in Burbank, and had sat on the front porch all last night waiting for Clarisse to come back.

Just shortly before sunrise, Clarisse had arrived, pulling into the driveway in her Monte Carlo, and she’d come very close to crashing against the frame of the garage such had her excitement been when she’d seen Warhorse sitting in the driveway and the big vampiress on her porch.  The reunion had been uproarious, and the two had spent the entire day in Clarisse’s eclectically-furnished home catching up on everything, and Brandi had felt that a part of her was whole again.

Another thing that she’d noticed about being with Clarisse again was that she felt trepidation at the thought of going back to the life on the road with the Sisters of Fury and leaving Clarisse behind once more.  The Sisters had been her life for decades now, and she’d been sure that was what she was going to keep doing for a great deal longer, but now she wasn’t quite so sure.  She loved living her life as a vagabond biker vampire, going somewhere new every night, but she also wanted Clarisse in her life again on a regular basis.

It wouldn’t have been fair to Clarisse to ask her to come back to the Sisters, as Clarisse obviously had quite a life going here and was having a great deal of fun with it, and she wanted Clarisse to be happy above all else.  But for Brandi to leave the Sisters … she didn’t know if she wanted to do that, especially in a noisy bustling city like Los Angeles.  She was used to wide open spaces, simple surroundings, and the great big sky over her head; she was not a complex vampire by any means, and the simplest things in life were often the things that pleased her the most, and L.A. might just be a bit more than she could put up with.

She shook her head with a grunt.  It was probably just the glow from being back with Clarisse again affecting her.  More than likely the old hunger for the open road and that great big sky overhead would get to her and she’d be going buggy in this city within a week or less.  She’d just cross that bridge when she got to it, she supposed.

For tonight, Clarisse had set up a little outing so that her big sis could meet her L.A. vampire friends, including her boyfriend, Steele.  Brandi grinned at the thought of meeting him.  Though Clarisse had spoken lovingly of him, and how good he was to her and how he was everything she’d ever wanted in a man, Brandi would be sure to give him a good rattling just to let him know that Clarisse had a particularly fierce she-lion looking out for her best interests.  After all, what kind of big sister would she be if she didn’t threaten to beat the shit out of Clarisse’s boyfriend if he took a misstep?

Brandi laughed into the night as she sped through the streets of L.A.  Yes, this was going to be a fun and interesting visit, and she was glad she’d come here, even if it was to an overpopulated, overlit, smoggy bundle of bustle that was likely more trouble than it was worth.  Nice place to visit, yeah, but she sure wouldn’t want to live here.

            After over an hour of fruitless searching for the vision of perfect beauty, Stacey was winding up his cruising route and getting ready to adjourn to Shady’s for the evening.

“This is a stone drag, man,” he muttered as he zoomed through neon-lit ravines of glass and steel, lined with people of all shapes, sizes, and colorations, neatly zipping among cars of numerous different price brackets.  The native foliage and fauna slipped into the background tonight, as Stacey kept finding his thoughts drifting back to the superbabe he’d seen at the stoplight.  It had been quite a while since he’d been distracted by a female like this, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself.

He found himself reluctant to go to Shady’s, as he didn’t want to bother with Janice or this big ogre of a sister of Clarisse’s: he wanted to keep looking for the woman, if only to be able to look at her again.  Unlike many, he didn’t find that a silly notion at all, he found it a perfectly logical thing to strive for.  Even if he couldn’t have her, he’d admire the bloody blue blazes out of her.

Besides, as good as she looked, she probably had the personality of a dead clam, which usually seemed to be the case with most knockout women (Clarisse being one of the few exceptions), and he was definitely going to stick with Janice for the time being.  She was fucked in the head, yeah, but she amused him with her psychotic tendencies and her inexhaustible sexual appetite.  He supposed that one of these days she was going to go full-bore haywire and try to kill him, meaning that he was going to have to cut her head off and bury her in a ditch somewhere, but until then, she was fun.  Annoying, but fun.  Still, he wished he could see that girl again.  She was a mystery and a fantasy all wrapped together in one, complete with a badass bike.  If there was a perfect girl for Stacey, she’d look just like that.  Well, maybe her tits would be a little bigger; she certainly had the frame to handle them.  He grinned at the thought.

Up ahead a stoplight shifted to red, and he brought his rumbling custom-built Harley to a halt.  As he had at every single stop, he looked up and down the busy intersection, trying to see if the superbabe would flash on by so, but as usual, the fates weren’t being cooperative.  Heartless bastards, tease him with a glimpse, and then snatch it away.  Damned whoremongering whims of the universe.

“And speaking of whoremongers …” Stacey muttered to himself, glancing at the cop car sitting on the right of his bike.  The cop, a fat individual who fit the beloved stereotype held up by haters of the law everywhere, kept giving Stacey the evil eyeball, which was really starting to piss him off.  For once he was behaving himself, and the Man still had to try to get him down.  Well, he was going to have himself a little bit of fun at the Man’s expense tonight, oh yes he was.

Stacey revved his engine several times, making sure that it was good and loud, which caused the cop’s eyes to narrow at him.  Then to top it off, Stacey looked him square in the eye and gave him the finger.  The narrowed eyes widened now and the face reddened to indicate the displeasure of the law enforcement officer towards this scraggly punk on the Harley.  Then Stacey unknowingly did Brandi one better when it came to arguing with people in cars: he leaned over and punched in the cop’s window, spraying glass all over the inside of the front seat, causing the cop to recoil and cover his face.

“You got a staring problem, fucko?  I was actually minding my own business for once!” Stacey yelled at the cop, who was bellowing with surprise and rage.

The people on the sidewalk and standing on the corners didn’t even bat an eyelash at this and went about their business.  If Stacey had been brandishing a gun, then everybody would have hit the deck, but he hadn’t brought his trusty .10 gauge, nicknamed “Justice,” along with him tonight, so nobody thought much of this little incident.  Except for the cop, who was a very unhappy camper.

He yelled and screamed at Stacey, then started to get out of his car to grab the cantankerous little bastard, but Stacey gave him the finger again and then scooted his bike forward so that he could deliver a debilitating kick to one of the cop car’s front tires, which violently exploded from impact of the vampire’s steel-toed boot.  The car rocked from the explosion, as did the cop, who stumbled and fell backwards into his car just as Stacey shot off on his bike, blatantly ignoring the red light.

“Yer mama oughtta be arrested as an accessory to a crime!” Stacey yelled at the cop, and threw him the finger again, and then the vampire slipped into the flow of cross traffic so neatly that he didn’t cause a single car to swerve or even slow down when he merged with the stream, and as he blasted away, he hollered, “Here pigpigpigpigpig!  Sooo-eeeeee! Sooo-eeeeee! ” at the top of his lungs.  The cop heard this, which made him even more angry, and he radioed in for assistance and gave a description of the punk bastard that had messed up his car, but the cops that followed up on this wouldn’t find Stacey … they never did when he pulled stunts like this one.  It was hard to round up and arrest a guy that had been dodging the law since before the fall of the Roman Empire.

Stacey wove through the downtown traffic at a rather dangerous speed, moving through it with the skill that only a vampire could muster, and now he was feeling pretty damned good.  Yeah, there was no bodacious redhead to be found, which still bugged him, but he’d just had himself a good laugh and he was sure that he’d be able to have some fun with Janice tonight.  She was always up for that, and coincidently, so was he.

On his way to Shady’s, he blew stoplights, broke all speed limits, and at one point, he even went the wrong way on a one-way street simply because it was quicker to do things that way.  And he was just so damned good at what he did that he didn’t cause a single accident.  He had always considered that to be a sign of a true master, to be able to go positively nuts and be so skillful about it that nothing got bollixed up, no matter how wild you got.

Yeah, that was better.  Stop that moping crap over some gorgeous redheaded Amazon and get on with it.  Don’t let what you don’t have ruin the fun you can conjure up with the things you do have, and while Janice was a bitch, she was a good way to pass the time and a faithful little nymphette, so he supposed it wasn’t all bad.  Nope, not bad at all.

By the time Stacey had gotten to Shady’s, he’d almost gotten all thoughts of the redhead out of his mind, and had reduced her to a very small, but somehow very cloying, nagging at the back of his head somewhere.  As he cruised around the parking lot trying to find a spot, he knew that he wasn’t totally finished with obsessing over the superbabe, he knew himself too well to doubt that for even a moment, and he’d more than likely go out looking for her again at some point or another, but for the moment, she wasn’t consuming his thoughts, and that was good enough for him.

He found a spot close to the front, and carefully parked his beloved bike, which he had named Jorge.  Stacey swaggered as he walked up to the building, and took a moment to laugh at some geek who was already heavily inebriated and barfing all over the parking lot.

“Geez, dude, get a life.  It’s only 8:30,” he advised the bent-over loser who, with his buzzcut and football jersey, looked like he played ball for one of the colleges in the area.  “You shouldn’t be doing this until at least after 11:00.  You hold your booze like a ‘lil bitch, you know that?”

“Fuck off,” the loser slurred at him in between bouts of hacking his guts out onto the pavement.  While still bent over, he tried to swing at Stacey with one of his big arms, but he had no chance in hell of connecting, and Stacey swiftly dodged it and then gave him a good kick to the gut, which caused a considerable spume of barf to geyser forth from the hapless dolt.  After the love-kick, the loser wasn’t in any condition to do much of anything, and he curled up on his side on the nice cool pavement, next to his rather impressively-sized puddle of vomit.

Stacey took a moment to admire the tableau, and then crouched down next to the twitching loser.  “Ah, what I’m missing out on by not being mortal.  Just think, at this very moment I could be guzzling mass quantities of booze in an attempt to show all my buddies how bad I was, and then blowing all of the money I’ve slaved away to earn in an attempt to buy all of these expensive clothes with the nice little tags to show that yes folks, I am cool.  Then when I was done with that, I’d go spew up my guts all over myself, then go back, drink more, and then make a lame attempt at taking some ugly chick home with me so that I could tell my bought-and-paid-for friends that I scored.  And people say I’m stupid.”

The slim vampire shook his head, stood back up, and then dealt another kick to the loser’s midsection, bringing forth more foul ichor.  Chuckling, Stacey walked away to the door of Shady’s and let himself in.

The interior of the big, two-level bar was quite the noisy place: full of people, music blasting from the jukebox, and a million conversations going at once.  The lighting was kept fairly low, to give the place a nice atmosphere, but not so low that all of those poor souls not equipped with vampiric vision started bumping into and tripping over each other.  The actual bar of the place, at the least the downstairs one, was of considerable size, and seated a great many people, and the rest of the patrons who didn’t sit at the bar made do with all of the circular tables covering the rest of the floor not taken up by booths, the jukebox, pool tables, or other game machines.

The main room, which was very large in and of itself, had several other game rooms that branched off of it, plus two staircases to get to the upper level.  Tthe more sober folk took the spiraling one in the center of the room, and the sauced ones took the straight one off towards the back.  At least, that was the way it was supposed to go; it was a hoot to watch someone who was totally skunked attempt to navigate the spiral staircase.  All in all, it was a nice place: it was more upscale than the dives that Stacey usually frequented, but it was still a good spot to hang out, and the atmosphere was amiable without being boring.

But at the moment, Stacey’s eyes weren’t on the spiral staircase, the patrons, the game machines, or anything like that.  Nope, they were locked on the female sitting by herself at one of the tables near the center of the room, idly working her way through a plate of french fries.

“What the hell is she doing here?” he asked.  When the female in question saw Stacey, she scowled at him and gave him the finger, then beckoned him over, looking disgusted.  A friendly greeting if he’d ever seen one.

He moved through the people milling about the floor and in between the tables, which was actually a bit trickier than navigating traffic in downtown L.A., at least to him, and when he reached his destination, he yanked out a chair and dropped into it.

“So what is your sorry ass doing here?” he demanded.  “I thought they didn’t let the nickel whores in here.”

Donita gave Stacey the finger again, then turned her hand upside down, waggled one of her fingers back and forth till it was a blur, and then smacked on in the center of the forehead with the tip, which drew an agonized howl.

“Don’t let your motormouth write checks your ass can’t cash, bitchboy,” the slender half-vampire informed him with a smirk as he angrily rubbed at his forehead.

Donita was dressed in her usual fashion, with a light purple bandanna on her head to keep her shoulder-length brunette and purple hair in place, golden hoop earrings that sparkled in any light, a loose-fitting gaily-colored blouse, and a long, flowing dark-bluish skirt.  She had bangles, bracelets, and rings adorning her wrists and fingers, and a choker with a bright purple jewel around her neck.  Donita had been a gypsy from somewhere in Italy back before she’d become a vampire, and to this very day, she still kept a great deal of her gypsy trappings about her.  Stacey wondered if her acidic and often-hateful sense of humor was a gypsy thing, or just something she’d developed because she was an asshole.  Well, not everybody thought she was an asshole, but she had the tendency to make a lot of people think that of her nonetheless.

“You’re gonna find out who the bitch is here in a minute if you don’t shut your cocksucker, ya hoor,” Stacey said, snatching some of her french fries and stuffing them into his mouth.  “So why the fuck are you hanging around?  I don’t recall hearing anything about you joining us.  I thought it was just gonna be me, Steele, Clarisse, her ogre sister, and Janice.”

“Janiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice?!” Donita wailed, her exotic feature twisting up into a look of revulsion.  “Why is she coming along?!  I hate that cunt!”

“And she hates you just as much, probably because she thinks that I’m cornholing you on the side, despite the fact I’m not into bestiality, but that’s not the point,” Stacey said smoothly as Donita smacked him on the arm at the notion of her having anything to do with him that was even remotely sexual.  Stacey smacked her back and continued.  “I told her where I was gonna be tonight, and I figured she’d show up.  I’d rather stay in her good graces so that I can get the goods whenever I want, without having to be a nice guy to her all the time.  It’s not like it’s something you haven’t deal with a million times before, you big baby.”

“And what’s this about an ogre sister?” Donita said, “From what Clarisse told me, Brandi’s very pretty.”

“Brandi, eh?  The last Brandi I knew of was a trailer-trash dumbass missing an eye and a leg, totally gross.  Something so bad that even you probably wouldn’t touch it,” said the vampire.

“Yeah? I’ll just touch you, then,” Donita said.  She grabbed his arm and squeezed it, and he yowled when an electric surge buzzed through his flesh.

He jerked his arm out of Donita’s hand and waved it back and forth, trying to get the tingling to go away.  “No fair using magick, hoor!  That’s not cricket, ‘cuz I can’t do it back to you!”  Being a half-vampire, Donita had the capability of utilizing magickal energy, which full vampires lacked, and as she was very skilled at it, she was able to use it in a vast number of ways, one of her favorites being harassing Stacey.

“Yeah, well your personality’s so repellent that it’s more powerful than anything I could use my magick to call up, so quit whining, you pussy,” Donita shot back, cackling, her earrings jangling back and forth as she laughed.  “Clarisse actually asked Katheryne and I to come along tonight, but Katheryne was nowhere to be found.  I think she wandered off with Wade someplace, so I decided to tag along for the festivities.”

“The new kid?” Stacey asked, referring to the big, highly mysterious vampire named Wade who had joined their little group six months ago.  He had just kind of popped up from out of nowhere one day, and within days, he’d become one of them.  They knew hardly a thing about the guy, but somehow he just seemed right with them, and they liked having him around, so there he was.

Katheryne, the blonde half-vampire witch that had been Donita’s lover and best friend ever since the days of the Salem Witch Trials, had taken a liking to the enigmatic Wade, and the two got along quite well, sometimes disappearing for a day or so, going nobody knew where.  Not even Donita knew if there was actually something romantic going on between them or not, as all Katheryne would tell her, in the gentle witch’s own enigmatic way, was that Wade was a good person.

“He says even less than Blondie does,” Stacey said, referring to how Katheryne tended to speak very little, and how Wade usually spoke even less.

“Yeah, but they’re cute together,” Donita said, “And if being around him makes her happy, then I’m all for it.  You need to find yourself someone you’re cute with.  Whenever I see you and Janice together, I want to throw up and make you eat it.  It makes me fucking sick.”

“Sick with jealousy,” Stacey quipped, waggling his eyebrows at Donita, and she groaned.

            “No, because Janice is one of the most hideously awful … things to ever walk this planet.  Whoever turned her into an immortal must have been a complete retard.  She’s stupid, she’s ugly, she’s obnoxious, she’s shallow, she’s got shitty fashion-sense, she’s got the personality of a week-old turd, she’s completely fucking nuts, and she’s walking, talking proof that some people just need to be killed,” the gypsy moaned.

            “She’s not ugly!” Stacey snapped.  Dammit, how many times was he going to have to put up with this tonight?  He may go out with psycho chicks, sure, but if there was one thing that he never did was get hooked up with an ugly chick!  “Even Steele admits that she’s not bad to look at!”

            “She is ugly, you fuckwit.  Ugly in mind, body, and soul, something that her parents should have drowned in a rain barrel back when they had a chance.”  Then Donita perked up.  “Let me put a curse on her!  I’ll fuck her up real good, so that she never comes back again.  I bet you that if I really put my mind to it and worked on it, I could even turn her into a man-hating lesbian so she wouldn’t even look at you!”

            Stacey snorted.  “Then she’d come after you.”

            Donita snorted right back.  “She should know I wouldn’t have anything to do with her.  Unlike some people around here, I have enough respect for myself not to lay down with something like her.”

            “Don’t act all high and mighty with me, hoor!  You get around as much as I do!  You get around more than I do!  At least I don’t write my name and number on bathroom walls!”

            “That’s for catching snacks, not long-term sadomasochistic relationships with nutjob skanks!” the gypsy shot back.

            “So that Hillary broad back in the 60’s was just an extended snack, huh?”

            “That wasn’t anything serious!”

            “You moved in with her!  Katheryne told me so!”

            “That was just a means to an end!  I liked fucking her, okay?”

            “Well, I like fucking Janice, and you don’t see me moving in with her!  I keep her at arm’s length, at least!  You lived with that nasty bitch for like a year or something!”

            “She wasn’t that bad … she was just stupid and talked too damned much!”

            “That’s not what Katheryne said!”

            “Oh, she just exaggerates because she hated Hillary.  You would’ve fucked her in a second.”

            “Not after you touched her!”

            “Whatever.  If I went and fucked a dead chick’s body and then let you have her, that’d be a higher caliber piece of ass than what you usually wind up with.”

            “Now what’s that supposed to mean?!”

            “What do you think it means?”

            “You’re a cold bitch, you know that?” Stacey growled.

            “At least I’m not a cold fuck!” the gypsy fired back.

            “Too bad you’ll never find out.  I wouldn’t put any part of my body on or in you for all the porno in California, you nasty gash!”

            “You’re so damned vulgar, you know that?!  Do you have any idea how fucking vulgar you are?!” Donita yelled at him, and several of her french fries leaped off her plate and speared him in the face, one of them connecting with his eye.

            He screeched, smacked the fries away, then reached across the table and gave her a good slap.  “I said no magick, dammit!  I may not be able to cast a spell, but I can damn sure hit!”

            Donita put a hand to her cheek where he’d slapped her, her eyes dancing gleefully.  “Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?  Back at you, peckerhead!”  She then slapped Stacey, causing his head to spin slightly.

            “You hit me!  I can’t believe you hit me!” he howled, slapping her back.

            “You better get used to it, ‘cuz I got a million more where that come from!”  Donita gave him another good one across the face.

            “Quit it!”  Slap.

            “Make me.”  Slap.

            “Stop!”  Slap.

            “No way.”  Slap.

            “I’m gonna kill you!”  Slap.

            “See you in hell, fucker!”  Slap slap.

            And so it went.

*     *     *

            “What time is it?”

            “Somewhere around 8:30, I’d wager.  Now come back here, doll.”

            “8:30?  We’re supposed to be there at 9 o’clock!  We’ve still got to go all the way there from Burbank and we’re not even dressed yet … quit that!”

            “Quit what?  You mean this?”

            “Eeep!  Yes, that.  Come on, Steele, we have to go.  I don’t want to keep Brandi waiting too long!”

            “If she’s as tough as you say she is, she should be able to take care of herself, and besides, Stacey can keep her entertained … at least until Janice gets there.  If Brandi looks like how you described her, Stacey will be falling all over himself to keep her busy.  Don’t worry about it, we can be late.  Now come here, eh?”

            “Would you quit!  You’re making this really difficult!”

            “Why do you think I’m doing it?”

            “And besides, Brandi doesn’t know what Stacey or Donita look like yet, doesn’t even know they’re going to be there, and neither of those two know what Brandi looks like, so nobody’s going to know who each other is.  We need to get going.”

            “Donita’s there, too?  Oh brother …”

            “What’s wrong with Donita?”

            “Absolutely nothing.  It’s just that you know how she and Stacey are going to be.  You put Stacey with Tommy, and they argue the whole time over everything under the moon, you put him with Dorian, they turn into a couple brain-damaged teenage boys, and you put Stacey with Donita, they beat the shit out of each other and make life miserable for everybody around them.  I hope Brandi doesn’t mind getting caught in that crossfire.  Which will probably only get worse when Janice shows up, since Janice and Donita hate each other.”

            “I think everybody hates Janice except for Stacey.  I know I do.  Ack!  QUIT!”

            “No way.”

            “Ohhhh, damn you!  It’s already 8:35 … we’re gonna be so late!”

            “What’s an hour?  Brandi’s a big girl, she can take care of herself.  Now let me take care of you.”

            “You always have to do this at the worst times … you’re worse than a little kid!”

            “Little kids can’t do the things I can do, babe.  For instance, a little kid would never make you late because he wanted to do this.”

            “ … Ooo.“

            “See what I mean?”

            “I suppose we can be a little bit late.  You’re a brat, though.”

            “You love it and you know it.”

            “Shut up and come here.”

*     *     *

            Brandi pulled into the parking lot of Shady’s and wasted no time in finding herself a spot to park her bike.  After shutting down the engine and getting off, she took a moment to stretch, and then slowly walked towards the building, her bootheels clicking on the pavement.  Even outside, her sharp hearing could pick up a great deal more noise coming out of the joint than what the little bars she usually visited would have been able to produce … but then again, Shady’s was the size of at least four or more of the bars she and the Sisters of Fury would drop by.  In the city, everything was bigger and louder, it seemed.  Fortunately, she was a big girl.

Her eyes idly scanned the cars neatly lined up in their parking spots, gauging what sort of clientele would frequent this place by looking at their vehicles; a lot can be said about a person by the kind of car or bike they have.  Mostly it looked like Shady’s was a place for those who had a decent amount of money to throw around, the folks that were on the outskirts of well-off, those that had a certain amount of class to them, but were still plenty rough around the edges when given the chance.  This definitely wasn’t a biker bar, but it wasn’t a sissy bar, either; it was somewhere in between, with a bit of middle-class thrown in for good measure.  It was far from her first choice for a place to hang out it, but it could have been a lot worse.  She half-wondered if Clarisse had chosen it just to get a rise out of her big sis.

            Her visual scanning of the cars came to an abrupt halt as she caught sight of what was one of the more magnificent motorcycles she’d ever laid eyes upon.  She was so pleased by what she was looking at that she actually let out a low whistle of appreciation.

            “Well, well, well, aren’t you a pretty one?” she murmured as she approached the object of her approval.

Brandi stopped by this bike, nestled into a parking space between two nondescript cars, which looked even more nondescript compared to this beast of shiny chrome and pitch-black, and dropped to a crouch so that she could eye its engine and get a good look at it from a different angle.  Whoever this bike belonged to, they knew what they were doing, and then some.

From the looks of it, the bike used to be some form of Sportster model, but it had been modified and customized to the point where it went well beyond what it used to be, leaving its true origins shadowy at best.  She lovingly trailed her fingers along some of the chrome and parts of the engine.  If there was one thing she admired, it was someone who knew how to take good care of their bike, and the someone who owned this bike could have written a book on how to do it.

The vampiress stood up and walked around the bike, taking it in from all sides, and she had to admit that this piece of machinery was a thing of beauty and class.  Well, except for one rather ridiculous little detail: on the gas tank there was a very nicely airbrushed image of some frizzy-haired fat guy getting his guts torn out by a beanie-wearing Grim Reaper wielding a weedwhacker.  She doubted she would have put something like that on her bike, though it was a very well-done piece of art, despite its rather bizarre subject matter.  She had to chuckle a bit at the manic grin the Angel of Death was wearing and at the jaunty angle at which the beanie was cocked.

Engraved on top of the chrome gas tank cap was “Stacey Loves Jorge,” which Brandi looked twice at to make sure of what she was seeing.  Stacey?  Jorge?  She wondered if this meant that this bike belonged to some girl who was so much in love with her man (what the hell kind of name was Jorge?) that she even incorporated it into her Harley.  To each her own, Brandi supposed with a shrug.  She eyed the bike for a while longer, seriously contemplating stealing it and making it her own, as this was one hell of a fine motorcycle, one she would have been proud to own, but she ultimately let it go, as this Stacey obviously had put a lot of love and care into this bike, and Brandi didn’t want to ruin the poor girl’s night by running off with it.

I’m mean, but I’m not that mean, she thought, and then after giving the bike one last look, she left it and resumed walking towards Shady’s.  As she got near the door, she approached the curled-up form of some drunken mortal passed out on the pavement with a considerable puddle of vomit next to him, and she wrinkled her nose in irritation.  She hated it when people were so sloppy they couldn’t take care of themselves, and gave the prone form a light kick as she walked by.  With a groan, the drunk rolled over, threw up again, and then passed right back out.  Served him right.

When she entered the bar, she stood in the doorway for a moment to take in everything, and the first sight she laid eyes upon was a couple slapping the living daylights out of each other at a table near the center of the room.  The woman would slap the guy, offering up some comment, and then he’d reciprocate with another comment, and the cycle would begin anew with no end in sight.  In fact, if anything, it kept heating up the longer they went at it.  A grin quirked the corner of Brandi’s mouth.

Gotta be husband and wife, she mused.  Maybe that’s Stacey and Jorge, as a matter of fact, she looks eccentric enough to have that goofy Grim Reaper painted on her gas tank.

She got a look at “Jorge” when he pulled back to nail “Stacey,” and Brandi hesitated for a moment.  Damn, the little guy was cute.  If that girl was Stacey, then not only did she know her bikes, she also knew how to get hold of a good-looking guy, too.  He wasn’t just cute, he was damned cute, and Brandi found herself staring at him for several long moments before she realized what she was doing.

She shook her head, and pulled her eyes away from the gorgeous “Jorge,” if that was, in fact, his name, and headed over to the bar, finding that the image of his lean features and long black hair was quite stuck in her head.  Damn, he may have a stupid name, but he’s got some kind of really strong animal magnetism going.  She hadn’t felt this attracted to a guy for quite a while now, and all she’d seen so far was him getting the stuffing slapped out of him by what was either his girlfriend or wife.  Not the best impression, to be sure, but she found it oddly … endearing.

Shaking her head again, she stepped up close to the bar and looked around for a seat.  There were a number of seats open, and she picked one at the end, so that there was only one seat on the side of her, which meant she wouldn’t get stuck between two idiots at any point in time.  And besides, she could look over at Stacey and Jorge this way

As soon as she realized that thought, she almost got up and changed seats at the sheer absurdity of it, but gave up and settled onto the seat.  What the hell, I’ll be changing seats whenever Clarisse shows up, anyway.

The bartender asked her what she fancied, and she asked for the largest water they had.  Vampires couldn’t ingest alcohol into their systems directly unless it was mixed or brewed with blood, as alcohol straight up tended to give them the vampiric equivalent of an upset stomach, so that was a no go.  There were times her choice of drink would draw the interest, and sometimes scorn, of other bar-goers, who thought she was going with water or soda because she was a lightweight, and therefore easy pickings.  The looks on their faces when the supposed “lightweight” literally put their heads through a wall was always worth the trouble of having to stick to specialized booze.

As a matter of fact, her arrival had indeed aroused the interest of several of the males sitting at the bar, who were quite interested at the arrival of a 6’4” redhead dressed in black leather and jeans, and she ignored the looks she was getting from them.  If they were interested enough, they’d come over, and if they annoyed her, she’d remove them, but until that point, they meant very little to her.  She glanced up at the TV suspended over this end of the bar and saw that the bartender had professional wrestling on, which very definitely pleased her.  The cartoonish action and over-the-top violence usually amused her to no end.  The bartender brought her the glass of water she’d asked for, and taking a sip from it, she settled in at the bar, watching wrestling, glancing over at Stacey and Jorge from time to time, and waited for Clarisse to show up.  Though as time went by, she found that the wrestling action wasn’t captivating her nearly as much as it usually was, and she was paying more attention to Jorge than she was to Sid Vicious’ latest bout.

After a couple of matches had gone by, someone sat down in the seat next to her and she looked up.  It was a brawny man almost as tall as her dressed in biker leather, with long, spiky blond hair and beard and mustache to match, and from being this close to him, Brandi knew right off that he was a vampire, too.

“Hello there, precious,” he said with an Australian accent, “We don’t much get beauts like you running around these here parts.  Not often we see a real woman, as opposed to all of the little Hollywood twigs that you see prancing around town.  By way of introduction, I’m Scorp.”  As he said his name, he tapped a scorpion patch attached to the front of his jacket … hmm, as if she couldn’t have figured that one out for herself.  Oh well, he was nice to look at, she had to give him that, and she’d always thought Australian accents to be charming.  “Not to sound like a sticky beak, but might I ask what you go by?”

“Brandi,” she said, dividing her attention between him and the wrestling match on the television screen, trying not to glance over in Jorge’s direction.

“Brandi,” Scorp repeated, apparently liking the way her name sounded.  “Like the drink that goes down smooth and burns like fire once it hits bottom, perhaps?”

She rolled her eyes almost imperceptibly at the obvious innuendo there, but let it go, as his accent and delivery managed to take some of the stupidity out of the line, then replied, “I usually just burn right from the get-go.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second, my lovely,” Scorp said, and Brandi almost chuckled.  He was really trying, she had to give him that, and there was an aura of obvious strength about him that she liked.  He was a tough one, she was sure, and that might prove to be interesting later on.

Brandi glanced over at where Stacey and Jorge were at, or at least the couple she supposed was Stacey and Jorge, and saw that there was another woman at the table now, sitting on Jorge’s lap with her arms around him no less, and the other woman (Stacey?) was glaring at this new arrival, who had long dark auburn hair and a loud voice, with obvious distaste.

What was the deal here?  So was this other girl Stacey?  Or did Stacey not love Jorge as much as her gas cap had indicated?  Or was this couple even Stacey and Jorge at all?  Regardless of who they were, the little guy was obviously taken, either by one of the women or both, and at that thought, she felt a little pang somewhere down in her stomach … disappointment?  Yup.  But why?  Because he was just so damnably adorable?  Brandi growled at herself for being silly, like a little schoolgirl, and with an effort, she turned her attention away from the trio at the table and went back to splitting it between wrestling and Scorp, the latter of which might prove to be amusing further on in the evening.

She caught herself glancing back over there once, and forced herself to look away, cursing for herself for being ludicrous.

*     *     *

“I swear if you hit me one more time, they’re gonna be digging six different graves for all of the pieces I’m gonna tear you into, you syphilitic whore!”  Slap.

“Promises, promises.”  Slap.

“You know what?  This doesn’t bother me at all, actually, I’m starting to get into it …”  Slap.

“You’re damned liar.”  Slap.

“Hey hey hey!  Hold on a second here!”  Stacey’s hand stopped in mid-motion, halfway between Donita and himself, as he caught sight of who was sitting at the end of the bar.

“You started it, so you’re nuts if you think anybody but me is gonna end it,” Donita snapped, slapping him again.

“No wait, I’m serious!  Stop!  It’s her!” Stacey exclaimed, his head swirling from just more than repeated slaps from the gypsy.

“Janice?” Donita asked, sounding almost fearful, her head snapping to and fro as she looked all around the interior of the bar, looking for the auburn-haired beast that was such a pain in the ass to put up with.  “Where?”

Stacey looked at Donita in exasperation, annoyed that the ever-resourceful half-vampire couldn’t read his thoughts so that he didn’t have to go through the trouble of explaining.  “No, not Janice!  Her!”  Stacey then grabbed Donita by the nose and aimed her head in the direction of the flawless redhead sitting at the bar, her eyes turned upwards to look at whatever was playing on the television.

“Ow ow ow!  Leggo by dose!” Donita growled, smacking Stacey’s hand away.  Rubbing her mildly-injured proboscis, the gypsy looked at the impressive redhead that Stacey was indicating and made an appreciative grunt.  “Hey, she’s cute.  Hotchi motchi!”

“Isn’t she, though?” Stacey replied, sounding almost dreamy.

“She’s got legs from here to ya-ya, damn!  I ought to go over and see if she’s up for a little bit of rolling around tonight,” Donita said, impure thoughts dancing in her head.  “Katheryne wouldn’t mind a bit, especially if I were to be able to set up an arrangement for a future engagement … party of three, if you will.”

When Donita looked back at Stacey with a lecherous grin, the look of total shock and horror on his face actually took her by surprise for a second.  Shock and horror were not things one often saw on Stacey’s face, after all.  Before she could think of anything pithy to say, Stacey went off.  “Don’t you dare talk about her like that!  You stay the hell away from her, you … you … you dirty gyppo!”

“Hey!  Don’t call me a—“

But Stacey was a freight train running out of control, and he wouldn’t be stopped.  “She’s the most beautiful, perfect flower on this face of this ugly, forsaken planet, damn you, a vision of purest beauty, and if anybody’s gonna talk dirty about her, it’s gonna be me!  You just keep your pointed snout away from her, because she’s gonna be mine!”  The slim vampire stopped, mentally rewound what he’d just said, and looked a bit stunned at his own vehemence.

Now that Donita could get in a word edgewise, she got in several.  “One, my nose is not a snout, and it’s not pointed … it’s elegant.  Two, if you ever, ever call me a dirty gyppo again, I’ll sock your sorry ass straight to Disneyland with extreme prejudice.  Three, Janice.”  After she’d said her part, she snatched a french fry off her plate and jammed it in her mouth, chewing it up vigorously while crossing her arms over her chest.  “So there.”

Stacey slapped himself on the forehead at the mention of Janice, his face twisted in a rictus of pain and frustration.  “D’oh!”

“Hard facts ‘o life, eh, loverboy?” Donita asked him while he cursed a bluestreak, resting her elbow on the table and leaning her head on her hand so that she could get a good look at the redhead again.  “Oh my, it looks like somebody else agrees with us on how good she looks, someone apparently unattached, too.”

“What?” Stacey demanded, and then turned his head to see what Donita was talking about.

He actually snarled when he saw a vampire with long blond hair dressed in biker leather sitting next to the beauty, talking to her with very clear intent to pick her up before the night was over.  Scorp!  Stacey had already built up a good store of hate for that overstuffed, arrogant prick bastard, but now he positively loathed him.  Scorp was one of those assholes that thought he was King Shit on Turd Mountain and was just one of those jerks that you would love to beat the snot out of for simply existing.  Stacey was also pretty sure that Scorp had stolen some bike parts from his garage, but didn’t have anything to prove it besides his intuition.  And not only that, Scorp was bigger and stronger than he was, which was yet another reason for Stacey to dislike him.

“That son of a bitch!  He can’t do that!”

“Why not?” Donita asked.  “He seems to be single, while you’re not, and she appears to be tolerating him at the very least, and they’re both grown-ups, so they can do whatever they want.”

“You don’t understand, dammit,” Stacey said, “He can’t because … “

Because why?  Stacey had just about mentally brushed this redheaded superbabe out of his mind, and now she had just happened to appear at the bar he was hanging out in for the evening.  Coincidence?  Perhaps.  Destiny?  Stacey didn’t believe in destiny, not usually, but in this case, if there was such a thing as destiny, this was probably it.  Maybe.  Maybe he was just so taken in by her incredible beauty that he was going totally irrational here, or maybe this was meant to be.  But did he dare give up a pretty good thing he had for a total unknown like her?

Even if she was single, who was to say that she’d even give him the time of day?  What if she was one of those women who preferred jackoffs like Scorp to a cuddly, oddball guy like him?  Did that really matter?  It would probably be better to just go balls-out and see what came of it rather than meekly sitting back and watching a bastard like Scorp put the moves on the girl he was drooling over.  Yes, that was the ticket.  He was not meek!  He would not sit idly by while this shit went down.  He was Stacey, dammit, he did not helplessly deal with shit, he stirred it up!  Yeah, that was indeed the ticket, piss on everything else.  Stacey stood up and cracked his knuckles, his eyes locked on the redhead, who looked to be dividing her focus between the television and Scorp.

“Rock ‘n roll,” he said.

“You’re gonna go for it?” Donita asked, obviously pleased.  “What about Janice?”

“Fuck the bitch, she can go hang for all I care,” Stacey boldly growled.

“What bitch can go hang?” a very familiar and unwelcome voice said from a few feet behind Stacey.  Both he and Donita jumped, and when Stacey spun around, he saw Janice standing there looking at him with that look of uncomfortably intense adoration she always wore when she was around him.  She cocked her head to the side, her long auburn hair falling down onto her dark brown fringed leather jacket, and repeated the question.  “What bitch can go hang, Stacey dear?”

Stacey mentally reviewed the situation.  If he told Janice to go take a hike right here, she’d spaz out on him, and probably try to kick his ass, if not kill him outright, which wouldn’t help him impress the superbabe at the bar.  He doubted that he’d get any serious damage done to him physically, because Donita would certainly jump into the fray on his behalf, if only to be able to get in a shot at Janice, but the fight wouldn’t come off very good to any onlookers.  It might even appear that Janice and Donita were fighting over him, as though Janice had caught him with his mistress, and the vengeful girl was trying to beat the tar out of both the piggish jerk and his nasty gypsy mistress.

Plus, it really wouldn’t look all that great to the redhead if Stacey needed Donita’s help in putting down Janice.  While it was true that among vampires, women could often be stronger than men, some vampires still had that little bit of leftover prejudice from when they were still mortal, where if you were a guy and got your ass pounded by a girl, or you beat the shit out of a girl, you were classified as either a pussy or a woman-beater.  No, there wasn’t going to be any way he could drop Janice now and try for the redhead: he’d have to bide his time and play the situation as it went.  Maybe Janice would just keel over dead out of the blue.  That would be nice.  By now, he was so absurdly set on the redhead, he didn’t even care if he got sex from Janice ever again.  All he was worried about was not ruining his chances before he even had a chance to speak with her.  So Stacey was diplomatic … he lied.

“Uhhh, ummm, Tipper Gore,” Stacey muttered.  “I hate her views on uhh …”

“Music,” Donita said, throwing him a lifeline.  “Total dumbass bitch, fuck her, let her hang.”  Stacey glanced back at Donita and never before had she ever seen so much relief and thanks mixed into one look.  She winked at him.  Though she wouldn’t verbally admit it, the gypsy thought of Stacey as a brother, someone she loved to abuse and rip the hell out of, but when the chips were down, she’d stand by the obnoxious son of a bitch to the very end.

“Oh,” Janice said, processing what Donita had said.  Then she gave the gypsy a frosty look.  “Hi Donita.”

The half-vampire gave Janice an equally cold look.  “Hi Janice.”

“Yeah, well, enough politics for the moment, let’s sit down and wait for everybody else to get here,” Stacey said quickly, before the two women started to duel with their eyes.

He slunk down into his seat, and Janice promptly dropped onto his lap and put her arms around his shoulders, leaning against him.  Inwardly, Stacey grimaced.  He really hoped the redhead wasn’t looking over at him right now.  Scorp was still hitting on her, and he actually hoped that was keeping her busy enough that she wouldn’t glance in his direction, at least not until he figured out some way to get Janice off his friggin’ lap.

The clock on the wall read 8:57, and still no sign of Steele, Clarisse, or this Brandi ogre yet, and Stacey fervently wished they’d hurry up.  With more people here, he might be able to finagle himself away from Janice long enough to get in some words with the superbabe.  Maybe he could even con Steele into pulverizing Janice out back or something … or maybe Brandi would be agreeable to it, since she was purportedly so strong.  Clarisse and Stacey got along fine, and if he asked nicely, she probably wouldn’t be against loaning out her big sister for a bit of brutality if it was for a good cause.  Now if only they’d get here!

While Janice nibbled on his ear, which usually got him going but wasn’t doing a thing for him now, Stacey glanced back over at the bar, and saw the redhead laughing at something that Scorp had said, and then the big bastard actually patted her on the shoulder.  What?!  No!  He couldn’t do that, not to her!  He had to do something, and fast, before Scorp won her over!  From seeing him in the past, Stacey knew that Scorp had that brute prick charm that was great for picking up women, and he had to put a stop to this travesty before it went any farther!

Giving Janice’s thigh a squeeze through her skintight spandex pants (which she fit into rather well, but at this point in time, Stacey couldn’t have cared less), he said, “Janice, babe, would you go put something good on the jukebox please?  Any more of this country stuff that some hick in here keeps playing, and I’m gonna puke all over the place.”

The auburn-haired vampiress nuzzled up against Stacey’s neck and cooed, “Why sure, honey!  What do you want to hear?”  Her voice, which was high-pitched and on the scratchy side, seemed especially annoying today, and Stacey wanted to howl.

He dug around in his pocket and gave her a five.  “Doesn’t matter to me, anything rock and roll … you know what I like.”

“Sure do, sweetums,” Janice said, and then she gave Stacey a very deep and passionate kiss, which made Donita turn her head and look at the ceiling and made Stacey screech in terror inside, fearful that the redhead was looking his way.  Finally, Janice broke the Liplock of Doom, and hopped off his lap.  She bounced over in the direction of the jukebox, shaking her ass and moving in such a way that just about every guy she passed stopped and gave her a long, appreciative look.  However, the guy she was jiggling for wasn’t even looking in her direction any more, as he had his eyes set on the redhead, who now looked to be in the middle of a pretty good conversation with Scorp.

“That’s just terrible,” Donita said, shaking her head.

“You’re damn right it is!  What am I gonna do about him?” Stacey moaned, running his hands down his face in frustration.

“No, I’m talking about her outfit.  The spandex leopard pants do not go with the go-go boots and bustier she’s got on, and none of it goes along with her jacket.  She looks like she got her clothes from a concert hall floor following a really good Motley Crue show,” Donita said, disgusted at Janice’s complete lack of stylistic sense.

“She’s got on a bustier?” Stacey said, looking at Donita questioningly.  “I didn’t even see that.”

“She practically had it jammed up in your face the whole time she was on your lap, you dumbass!  I don’t see how you could have missed it!” Donita exclaimed, and then she tilted her head and looked at Stacey.  “Wow, you really are set on that girl at the bar, aren’t you?”

“Verily,” Stacey agreed, nodding his head up and down rapidly.  “And I’ve gotta do something before that dildo gets her!”

“Yeah, Scorp does seem to have this trick about him that enables him to snag the girls pretty easy.  I don’t know why, I think he’s a complete loser,” Donita said.

“Thanks for the moral support, but if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s not doing me a damn bit of good at the moment,” Stacey grunted, and hammered his hand against his forehead and shut his eyes.  “Think think think think!” he mumbled, like some cracked version of Winnie the Pooh, trying to formulate some grand scheme to be able to get to that redhead.  He almost had a great idea boiling away in his mental cauldron, but then that all-too-familiar voice spilled it all over the place, losing the idea forever.

“Stay-cee!” Janice moaned, bouncing up to him like some insanely messed-up cheerleader.  “The machine doesn’t take fives!”

Stacey’s eyes shot open and he came extremely close to yelling at her about her inability to perform even the simplest tasks without explicit instructions and how it was amazing she’d survived as long as she had.  But he brought it all under control, with an immense effort of will, and said, very evenly, “Well, Janice, dear, honey pie, if the machine doesn’t take fives, why don’t you just go over to Mr. Bartender and ask him to make change for you?  And just in case the machine doesn’t take dollars, go ahead and ask him for five dollars worth of quarters.  That will make all of our lives much easier.”  The last part he had to grit his teeth to get through, but despite that, he managed to make himself sound normal and reasonable, which even impressed Donita.

“Oh, that’s a great idea!” Janice squealed, and she wrapped her arms around Stacey and planted a big wet kiss on his cheek.  Stacey didn’t even look over in the direction of the redheaded goddess, because he knew that with his luck, she’d be looking straight at him.

So he endured Janice’s affection, and then waited until she’d bounced off in the other direction, towards the bar, and once she was out of earshot, he said, “I don’t know how I’ve put up with her for this long.  I really don’t.”

“Because you’re such a lecher that you’d do anything to get into her pants, and because you’re such a pansy that you’re afraid she’ll kill you if you break up with her,” Donita answered, not very helpfully.

“Shut up, Donna Jo, I don’t need to hear the advice of a syphilitic gypsy whore right now,” Stacey muttered.

“Hey!” Donita snapped, “Don’t call me that!  Only Katheryne can call me that, and she’s lucky that I let her get away with it!”

“Why?  Because Donna Jo’s such a lame-ass name?” Stacey asked the gypsy, crossing his eyes at her and giving her the finger.  “Just shut up and let me think for a minute.”

“You better think fast, because there goes Scorp,” Donita said, and Stacey’s head whipped around to see Scorp walking away from the bar and moving towards one of the game rooms.

“Whoa!” Stacey yipped ecstatically.  “Did she tell him to fuck off?”

“I don’t think so,” replied the gypsy.  “He said something to her, patted her on the shoulder, gave her a little peck on the cheek, and then started walking.”

“A peck!” Stacey practically screamed, becoming incensed in under a second.  “He gave her a peck?!  I’ll fuckin’ break his peck!”  He managed to bring his newborn rage under control long enough for some rationality to creep in.  “Wait, since he’s gone, that means I can go talk to her, no problem!”

Donita hated to crush the hopeful look on his face, which was akin to that of a small child’s, but she felt she had to say something before he blithely walked into disaster. “Not hardly.  Look.”

Stacey looked up at the bar, and let out a long groan that ended with him putting his forehead on the table and pounding his fist a few times.  The cash register was less than ten feet away from the redhead, and there stood Janice, patiently waiting by it, practically standing next to the superbabe, who was paying Janice no heed and had her attention back on the television.

“You need to start carrying rolls of quarters around with you,” Donita observed, and Stacey bashed his fist against the table again.

“The universe is against me, Donna Jo, I swear it is.”

“Don’t call me—“

“Stifle yourself!” Stacey barked as an idea came to him.  This wasn’t as good as the one that Janice’s sudden intrusion had forever killed, but it had a simple, brutal, childish elegance to it that he found utterly irresistible.  “If I can’t have her tonight, neither can he,” the slim vampire said simply.

Donita waited for further explanation, but when she got none, she prodded, “And?”

“I’m going go to the back and I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” Stacey replied, standing up, a look of grim and gleeful determination in his eyes.

Donita’s eyes widened.  Stacey was an old vampire, true enough, and he was plenty strong, not to mention fast, but mere age didn’t necessarily mean that he was going to be able to take Scorp in a fight.  The older a vampire got, the more powerful they became, yes, but there were some vampires that developed high levels of strength almost from the moment they became immortal, and in a few hundred years, they might become stronger than even a vampire of over a thousand years.  Scorp wasn’t all that old, but he had a reputation around town of being a one hell of a very tough hombre, and she didn’t have an entirely good feeling about Stacey going toe-to-toe with the guy.

“You want me to go with you?” the gypsy asked.

Stacey shook his head.  “Nope.  You stay at the table and keep Janice busy whenever she gets back here.  Tell her I went to the bathroom to try to collect money from somebody or something like that, and if Steele, Clarisse, and the ogre show up before I return, pull Steele aside and tell him to come to the back to help me do some clobbering.  And see if Clarisse can get that Brandi chick to put Janice out of commission.”  He cracked his knuckles again, and turned to follow Scorp.

Donita waggled her fingers at him, said a few arcane syllables, and for a split second, her eyes glowed a brilliant purple.  But it ended even more quickly than it started, and Stacey didn’t even notice.  “You’re a brave little man, Stacey.  Not very intelligent, but brave.  It was sorta cool knowing you,” she said as he walked away.

She was pretty sure that no matter how mad Scorp got, he wouldn’t end up killing Stacey, and she’d keep her ears pricked up in case of trouble, though she doubted she’d really need to intervene.  She’d just put a useful little spell of good fortune in Stacey’s direction, one which might be able to help out in this situation, and even without that, Stacey was one wily bastard.  She was willing to bet that Stacey would come out of the conflict relatively unscathed … whether or not he got the girl was another question entirely, though.

Donita watched Stacey swagger away, and then turned her eyes to the bar where the coveted redhead sat, and an idea began to form in her mind …

Brandi watched Scorp walk away for a few moments before the wrestling match on the television drew her eyes back.  He was somewhat interesting to talk to, and that joke he’d told her about the priest and the astrologer was pretty funny, though he was a bit on the bland side.  Yeah, he was Mr. Tough Guy and all that, but he also wasn’t very different from a thousand other Mr. Tough Guys that had thrown themselves at her over the years, and while talking to him was mildly amusing, it also felt a lot like watching reruns.  She might allow him to pursue her further later on tonight if she was feeling generous, but then again, it wouldn’t have really bothered her much if he simply never returned from the back … no great loss.

He’d felt like a game of pool and had asked her to join him, but she’d declined, and so he’d gone to the game room by himself, though he’d promised he’d be back soon.  She’d almost slugged him at the pretentious way he’d kissed her on the cheek: when dealing with women, it was very dangerous to assume that you were allowed to kiss them when they’d made no motions to indicate that you could.  She certainly hadn’t given him any encouragement to kiss her, but he’d gone ahead and done it anyway.  She supposed to she could admire his boldness, but then again that same straightforwardness could end up causing him to overstep his bounds, which would earn him a severe beating, or worse, from her.  Now that would be interesting, she supposed.  If he returned, she might give him the time of day, then again, she might not.  A formal decision had yet to be made.

A glance at the clock above the bar told her that it was already 9:07, with no sign of Clarisse or Steele yet.  Clarisse had always been pretty punctual in the past, but that was also when she didn’t have a steady guy that she simply adored.  Brandi grinned.  Her little sis was probably caught up in a few carnal distractions.

The big vampiress looked over at the table where the couple she thought might be Stacey and Jorge had been sitting, and saw that the guy, not to mention the girl with the auburn hair, were both gone, leaving the brunette (Stacey?) behind.  She felt a twist of disappointment that the guy wasn’t there.  If she’d read the situation with the auburn-haired woman right, he was a bit of a womanizer, but he was still extremely cute.  Much better-looking than Scorp, as a matter of fact.

Normally, she went for the more rugged-looking fellows, but in this case, she’d found the slim, wiry guy to be quite the attractive one.  She’d also been able to discern that all three of them were vampires, which had meant that he was definitely someone she could have gone after … if he hadn’t already had two other women apparently competing for his affection.  She tried to never get in the middle of domestic disputes, and she definitely wasn’t into the concept for sharing a guy with another girl (or girls, for that matter), so it looked like this little guy was out of the question.

It wouldn’t have been much trouble for her to just walk up, plow over both women with her sheer strength, and claim the guy as her own, but who was to say that he’d even be interested in her?  From the way the other two women were dressed, he must have had something for eccentrics, and while she had her quirks, she wasn’t exactly an eccentric.  At least not the kind that would wear spandex leopard pants with go-go boots and a frilly bustier, sheesh.  She’d gotten a look at that one when she’d come up to the cash register to get some change, and Brandi had no idea why anybody would go out dressed like that .  The concept of fashion was pretty well bullshit as far as she was concerned, but a person should at least try to dress themselves with a little style, if not dignity.  She wasn’t the snappiest dresser in the world, but she had style to how she dressed herself, but that other girl, damn.  She had all the style of a buffalo, and why the guy would even want to bother with her was beyond Brandi.

Naw, to hell with that train of thought, she was just going to sit here and wait for Clarisse and Steele to show up, and maybe she’d let Scorp get lucky enough to share a little pleasure with her later, if she didn’t decide to cave in his skull first.  A little humility would probably do him good.  Or maybe she’d just do both: have some fun with him, and then bash him to bits.  Yeah, that was probably the ticket.

But still, she would have liked to have had a chance to get to know the now-gone guy at the table, even if only because he just had that look about him.  His name may have been Jorge and he may have been a womanizer, but even from a distance, he was unknowingly able to strike a chord within her, one that wasn’t struck very often.  She wasn’t sure if she liked that all that much, as it made her feel a bit sappy, but ultimately, what was wrong with feeling a trifle sappy?  She’d lived a good couple of millennia, so if she hadn’t earned the right to feel sappy once in while, who did?

Brandi looked over at the table again, and saw that the two women were once again sitting there, though there was no sign of the guy anywhere.  That sexy little jumpy guy, her mind whispered, and she told it to shut up.  There was obviously some sort of harsh feeling between the two women, as neither one was saying a word to the other, and they both kept sneaking dark glances at each other.  Some sort of domestic situation for sure.  The guy probably hightailed it so as not to get caught in the crossfire, as hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  But despite all this, she still wished she could get another look at him.

Oh, this was so maddening!  She forced herself to look at the television again and watch wrestling, and she managed to get halfway into the match that was going on.  For a little while at least.

Just as she was really starting to care who won the match, she felt a tug on the sleeve of her jacket, and when she turned, she saw that it was the gypsy-clad woman from the table.  “Sorry to bother you,” she said, “But I’ve got a few things to chatter at you about, if you don’t mind.”

Brandi shrugged, highly curious now.  “Have a seat.  And you are … Stacey?”

The brunette blinked and looked totally caught off-guard for about a second, then said, “Uh, nooooooo, but this involves someone that goes by that … how did you pick up that name?”

“Then that isn’t your bike outside?  The one with ‘Stacey Loves Jorge’ on the gas cap?  Or is owned by your ‘friend’ over at the table?” asked Brandi, motioning with her chin towards the table where Janice now sat forlornly by herself, occasionally shooting venomous looks at the gypsy woman.

The brunette followed the direction she was indicating.  “Oh hell no!” she spat, “And that bitch is no friend of mine, though she’s part of what I’ve come over here for …”

“So that’s not Stacey, either?” asked Brandi.  “Who is?”

The brunette gypsy girl took the seat next to Brandi, the one Scorp had been sitting in a short while ago.  “Okay, let’s see if I can get all these details out correctly in a short space of time.  You’re gonna love this, trust me.”

*     *     *

Stacey trailed behind Scorp at a decent distance, basically fading into the crowd and waiting for a good moment to make his move.  Scorp was definitely stronger than him, so he was going to have make what he got in count.  Stacey had the experience edge on Scorp, so he was pretty confident about his chances, just as long as he was able to work the situation to his advantage and get in some good thumps when he had the chance.

Scorp wandered into the relatively-deserted game room, as most of the heavy pool traffic didn’t start up until a good population of drunks had sprang up in the bar.  For some reason, drunks gravitated towards pool; come around 11 or so, this place was gonna be packed.  But for the moment, it was pretty quiet, with two games going at the moment, plus a few spectators idly standing around.  The room was pretty standard, with dim illumination from the ceiling and bright lamps hanging over the table, so things were in low shadow … perfect pool-playing ambience, really.

The big vampire idly walked around the room, eyeing the two games playing, and then went over to the three or four spectators and talked to them for a bit, probably asking them if they wanted to play a round or two with him.  They must have declined, as Scorp shrugged, walked away from them, and settled himself in a spot where he was leaning against one of the pool tables with a view that let him see both of the games currently in progress.  Stacey figured he was going to challenge one or both of the winners of those two games to a round with him, but what really mattered at the moment was that Scorp’s back was facing him, and he hadn’t yet seen the slim vampire.  Perfecto.

Stacey nonchalantly walked over to one of the several cue racks scattered around the room and selected a cue that looked good and solid and felt well-balanced in his hands.  Holding the cue in a very casual manner, he started to walk towards Scorp, using his vast experience in skulking around to move very sneakily indeed as he closed the gap between himself and his unsuspecting rival.

Okay, Charlie Brown, you can either be a winner or be a goat.  What’s it gonna be?  No blockheads allowed here, motherfucker, Stacey mentally coached himself as he got within striking range.  It’s now or never.  Goongala goongala, it’s go time!

Stacey swung the pool cue with practiced grace, and it cracked hard across the back of Scorp’s head, splintering into a thousand pieces in the process.  The force of the shot and the sheer suddenness of the attack caused Scorp to drop to a knee for a moment, but only for a moment, and he was back up on both feet and in Stacey’s face before the slim vampire had a chance to blink.  Everybody in the entire room, Scorp included, was looking right at him, and for once, he wasn’t relishing being the center of attention.

“You little dingo, what the fuck was that for?!” Scorp snarled, his face inches from Stacey’s, and he grabbed the other vampire by the front of his tanktop and hauled him up so that they could look eye to eye, which meant that Stacey’s feet were now a good five or six inches off the floor.  Scorp gave Stacey a hard shake, which made his head rattle and his teeth audibly clack together.

Stacey did his best to shrug in Scorp’s grasp.  “That was some other guy that did that.  You got the wrong man, pal.  And please don’t wrinkle Razzle and Sami,” he said, referring to the members of Hanoi Rocks pictured on his shirt, “They’re friends of mine.”

“I’ve seen you around town before … you’re that loudmouthed little drongo with the bonzer bike that you think is the best in the land,” Scorp growled, low and mean, and Stacey noticed that his Australian accent got much thicker when he was pissed off.

Stacey