The Official tumblr of the West Coast Vampires Saga by Miss Melpomene, a long running the Lost Boys fan fiction originally published in 2009 on Fanfiction.net.
Hi, I don’t know if you are still active on here anymore but I just wanted to let you know that I just reread TBP and TTC and still absolutely adore it. I started to read this series when I was 16 or 17, now I’m 24 and I really hope that you will update someday. I love Missy as a character, she is so sassy and her internal dialogue is hilarious. Missy’s story helped me through some dark times in my life, it really means a lot to me. Your faithful reader from Germany :)
It's honestly so validating both as a writer and just as a person to hear that Missy's story has been as big of a part of your life as it has been mine. I started writing TBP when I was nineteen so Missy's journey and story will always be special to me, and it's nice to hear that it's helped other people too. I'm always writing, even though I struggle with productivity and writer's block often, rest assured that I won't give up on this story as long as there are still people out there who want to read it.
Thank you so much for the kind words, you have no idea how much they mean to me.
I am! I hit a pretty severe patch of writer's block a while ago but I'm working through it. I'm always writing, just not necessarily in the order I need to be. I know it's not much but please don't lose hope, I promise new chapters are coming!
As we approach the 10th anniversary of the very first chapter of The Breaking Point, I want to take this time to thank those of you who have been with Missy since the very beginning, those who began reading only recently, and those of you who stuck it out during The Breaking Point’s tumultuous eight year writing process. I would like to make a special thanks to my sister, without her persistent and sometimes frustrating support, The Breaking Point might never have been finished, and to my brother, from whose mind sprang the bones that became Raymond and Dutton.
I owe the success of The Breaking Point and the continued interest in Part 2 entirely to my readers, thank you for allowing me to tell Missy’s story.
The Ticking Crocodile (The West Coast Vampires Saga #2) —Chapter 1
This is the sequel to The Breaking Point, it is necessary to the enjoyment of this story to have read The Breaking Point first.
DISCLAIMER: The places and characters featured hereinafter are the property of Warner Bros., Joel Shumacher, Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam and no attempt is being made by the author to claim ownership or profit from the use of the aforementioned characters. The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the original authors and any character names or places mentioned in the original works belong to the copyright holders and are used in this story for nonprofit entertainment purposes by an amateur writer. The original characters used in this story are the creative property of MissMelpomene (parting writing credit goes to my brother) and are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
"Everything is so fragile. There's so much conflict, so much pain...you keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on. If happy comes along—that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy—I think you have to grab it while you can. You take what you can get, 'cause it's here, and then...gone."
(27 days until V-day)
"It's not as hard as you're making it out to be," Dwayne said, exasperated. It was hard to tell, but for him it was exasperated.
Missy threw her hands up and let her arms fall dramatically against her thighs with a loud slap. "It's flying, Dwayne." She yanked on the brim of the soft, worn teal Seattle Mariners baseball cap she was wearing with both hands, folding the brim like a rolled up newspaper. "If it was easy, everyone could do it."
"Everyone can do it," Dwayne said pointedly.
Missy sighed with her palate. She reached up and took off her baseball cap, tightened her ponytail, then replaced it with her bangs tucked underneath. It was supposed to keep her hair out of her face, Dwayne's idea, and whether it really helped at all her remained to be seen because all it had done so far was make her sweat. "Vampires aren't everyone, Dwayne." She was wearing a mustard yellow thrift store tee shirt that said: "Michigan: State of Champions" on the front and matching bruises on her knees and ass. Her knees were scuffed and there was dried blood on the edges of the holes in her jeans.
Obviously, her flying lessons were going great.
"Laddie can do it."
Laddie's giggle was drowned out by the constant clicking of the Rubik's cube in his hands. Three days and the only side he'd completed was the one she did for him and even that had taken her the better part of an entire night.
"Is this how David motivated you to learn how to fly?" She furrowed her eyebrows, pouting. "Because it's making me feel like crap." Dwayne went to the Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim school of motivation like David. Hurting her feelings and her backside was all he'd done, but no one said being a vampire was supposed to be easy.
That's not true. Paul said it was easy, like a hundred times.
"Why do you gotta make everything into math homework?"
"What?"
"More complicated than it has to be, brains."
That was a direct quote, and if Paul was calling her out for making things harder than they had to be of all people, maybe that was a sign she was doing something wrong. I mean, the bruises on her backside said that too.
"You want to see how David taught us?" Dwayne asked.
"Wait, no, Dwayne—" he grabbed her by the waist and flipped her over his shoulder, knocking the wind out of her. The brim of her cap hit his back and her cap popped off like the head of a dandelion under her thumbnail. It swung from her ponytail and fell off completely, landing in the dirt. "Dwayne!" She pushed on his back, turning her head and torso around like she was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. The Pacific wind was more violent the closer they got to the edge of the bluff. Her heart dropped into her mouth like Connect Four, and not just because she was upside down. The wind blew her hair into her mouth, "Dwayne!" her breath hitched. "You made your point. This isn't funny."
"I almost made my point," Dwayne said. He grabbed her by the ankles and lifted her legs so she slipped off his shoulder, holding her up effortlessly as if she weighed nothing at all.
"Dwayne," Laddie said nervously, looking over his shoulder in the direction of the wooden steps that led down to the cave under the bluff.
"You're too close to the point to miss the rocks."
Her lungs wouldn't expand all the way hanging upside down, it was like trying to breathe with Dwayne sitting on her stomach. "Dwayne," she gasped.
"Think happy thoughts, Missy."
"Dwayne, I can't swim!"
The expectation of drowning was optimistic, she thought. That was only if she missed the rocks, which as Dwayne pointed out was unlikely given her current trajectory. What was likely was that she'd die. Her body would be smashed on the rocks like a baby bird, her brief life as a half-vampire cut shorter because Dwayne couldn't take a joke.
She banged her elbow on the cliff face so hard she thought she broke it, throwing her arms out as if she could slow her descent that way. "Dwayne!" She tried to scream but the rushing air went down her throat and punched her in her empty stomach.
Happy thoughts, Missy.
"Dwayne!"
She couldn't see how close she was getting to the ground, every time she tried to look it was like trying to lift her head off the headrest on a roller coaster: impossible.
Dwayne wasn't going to let her die. Not like this, not after breaking all of the vampire societal rules like Ponyboy Curtis to save her life. He wouldn't risk pissing off Max and David by saving her just to turn around and throw her off a cliff a few weeks later, not even to prove a point.
She kept waiting for the punchline to hit. Or the ground.
But she didn't hit the rocks, or the water. She did hit something, though.
She should've known it was Dwayne right away because it felt like a truck hit her in the air. It still knocked the wind out of her when they caught her when she tripped, which still happened way too frequently, and nine times out of ten it was David who caught her because he always seemed to be around when she embarrassed herself, like a shark drawn to her shame in the water.
"You're really dramatic," Dwayne said. "anyone ever told you that?"
"You're a sociopath!" Missy would have punched him if she could physically take her hands off of him to do so. Dwayne held them both up in the air like they were treading water in a swimming pool and he was teaching her how to swim, which she had little context for because she didn't know how to swim and there weren't that many public pools in Queen Anne, but she remembered floating like this with her dad when she was five. Almost drowning put future lessons on permanent hiatus, and after her mother's second attempt, she couldn't even take a bath, let alone submerge herself completely. It was manageable these days. She didn't hyperventilate or cry if she got near water, which was a far cry from how she was twelve years and pre-therapy ago. She still couldn't take baths though.
"You're fine," Dwayne said. The arm holding her up cut into her lower back like a seatbelt.
"I am not fine." She kicked him as hard as she could with their legs dangling. "I could have died."
"You weren't even close."
"I could have had a heart attack!"
Dwayne very nearly laughed. "You're seventeen. I don't know many seventeen-year-olds that die of heart attacks."
Missy kicked her legs like she was trying to fix her covers without touching them. "Is that really how David taught you how to fly?"
Dwayne shrugged. "What do you think?"
"I think David's a sociopath." Dwayne laughed. Missy bit the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. "You know, the whole concept of sink or swim has been proven to actually be kind of counterproductive, not to mention dangerous, especially when it comes to flying!"
"We all swam," Dwayne said mildly.
Missy pursed her lips to the side. "Did you really let David throw Laddie off a cliff?"
Dwayne smiled roguishly. "No."
Missy didn't think so. Star, on the other hand, she would have paid to see David throw off a cliff, just to see the look on her face when he caught her.
Dwayne huffed. "Me too."
"Is it really not supposed to be this hard?" Missy asked. "Flying, I mean."
Dwayne shrugged again,
"I can't fly, I can't hear anyone else's thoughts but mine," Missy sighed, tightening her ponytail absently. "I must be the world's worst half-vampire." She picked up her baseball cap and smacked it against her thigh, shaking the dirt off. Laddie ran up to her and hugged her, the Rubik's cube stabbing her in the lower back. She swept his long hair out of his face with one hand and put her baseball cap on him. He giggled when she tugged on the brim, covering his eyes.
He tilted his head back, holding the top of her baseball cap so it wouldn't fall off his head. "Did you fly?"
Missy huffed. "No, Dwayne caught me again." The bruises on her legs and backside were a testament to just how ineffective a running start was when it came to flying, and jumping out of a tree, which sounded like a good idea in her head, was not any better than her previous attempts in practice. Luckily Dwayne caught her before she could hurt herself any more than she already had, putting the kibosh on her solo flight plans. It was probably a good thing he did, otherwise, she'd have more than bruises on her backside to show for it.
She didn't even want to be a vampire in the first place, but it was discouraging nonetheless that she couldn't even seem to conquer the basics. She didn't expect to be good at everything vampire right away, but she didn't expect to be bad at everything either.
"You're thinking about it too much," Dwayne said.
"Thank you," Missy said tartly. "that really helps me, Dwayne, thank you." Things had been better between her and Dwayne ever since Max let them off the hook for Patrick's death. She could tell that Dwayne was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but she'd been making an effort to move past it, and make the best of the bad situation she found herself in, even if she hadn't technically forgiven him, for the sake of peace, even if it was just her own peace of mind. She hadn't had much these past few weeks, of peace, that is, which wasn't Dwayne's fault either because she still hadn't told him about Patrick.
Patrick was dead, but no matter how many times she told herself that, she didn't really believe it. She was there when he died, she torched him herself, and even if he could have survived that, there's no way he could survive being turned into Hamburger Helper. But the fact remained that Patrick had been with her since he died.
"A part of me is gonna be inside you always, sweetheart." Missy clenched her jaw, but she couldn't get away from him without touching him, and touching him would be like acknowledging that he was really there.
"Who says I'm not?" Patrick pinched her cheek so hard her right eye closed. "You're not exactly the most reliable narrator, babe. And that stake went through both of us, remember?"
Maybe Patrick was right. When she died, she had Patrick's blood inside her, and now she was a half-vampire. Did that make Patrick her vampire dad or Dwayne? She needed vampire sex-ed. She didn't know how any of this worked, and she didn't know if she was embarrassed to tell Dwayne about her hallucinations like she just figured out how to masturbate, or afraid that he'd tell her she wasn't imagining it at all. At this point, she didn't even know what she thought, but Patrick planted the idea in her head and she couldn't let it go. Her mother was crazy too, maybe she inherited more than just her dimples.
Dwayne was right, she did think too much.
"What are you thinking about, Missy?" Laddie held her hand and swung their arms lightly.
Dwayne caught the panicked look on her face before she could mask it and gave her a strange look.
"Like Dwayne said." She swung their arms harder, making Laddie's shoulder go up and down. He laughed. "Happy thoughts."
RAYMOND
Concord, California
(83 miles outside of Santa Carla)
It would be an hour and a half before they reached Santa Carla and already —"An hour and twenty-seven minutes.", an hour and twenty-seven minutes, thank you, LYDIA, and already Raymond felt uneasy. This was news to no one who knew him, Raymond was usually on edge, it was the only reason he'd lived this long, but he hadn't felt fear like this in a long time.
To call this a suicide mission would be to drastically underplay the gravity of the situation. He fully expected all three of them to die, but probably Luther first. The vampire sitting behind them, a dark-skinned man in his very late thirties or early forties, with a broad hooked nose and a shaved head, and the personality of a lamb chop, didn't comment, and Raymond preferred it that way. He didn't bring Luther with him for the conversation, that much was obvious to anyone who looked at him. If it had been left up to him he wouldn't have come at all, but he definitely wouldn't have brought Luther of all people. Lydia, he could take or leave, but he didn't even know Luther personally, and he didn't like putting his life in anyone's hands, least of all someone he didn't even know from Adam. Why Simon picked him wasn't a mystery, he was 6'4" and as wide as he was tall, he wasn't here to provide shade. The upside of having Lydia with him was at least he didn't have to sit next to Luther or anyone else on the bus.
Lydia was an asshole. That wasn't an indictment of her personally, Raymond thought most people were, especially vampires, but Lydia was basically a Trapper Keeper with great legs, which was fine if he needed someone to memorize a bus schedule or nitpick his inner monologue, but in a fight? Which to be fair, was what he was expecting when they got there, but let's be honest, it wasn't going to be a fight, it was gonna be a slaughter, and there was more of Luther to hack through than there was Lydia. She didn't get where she was in Park's merry gang of psychopaths because of her good lucks —Raymond glanced sidelong at her, obviously, and he was too smart to underestimate her and too smart to think he was infallible, but that didn't mean he trusted her or even liked her either for that matter, which was hardly a surprise, he didn't really like anyone.
He liked public transportation even less, but he didn't pay for the ticket, and he didn't have a license (nor could he reach the pedals even if he wanted to), so he wasn't allowed to complain.
That didn't appear to be stopping him, but he was riding on a bus full of coughing humans toward his almost certain death, so he believed he was entitled.
Simon and the others may have thought he was exaggerating, that's fine, Luther and Lydia may not believe him either for all he knew, he didn't really care, they'd all die, and Max and his boys would too if they didn't listen to him, and that was gospel as far as he was concerned.
They had no idea what was coming, that much was clear, otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered with Simon's dog and pony show in the first place. It was just an excuse for Park to show his ass and for Sadie to show her teeth. All they wanted to talk about was Max, and Patrick's "suspicious" death at his boy's hand, if not necessarily Max's behest.
Fuck Patrick. They all wanted him dead, they were all just too self-righteous to admit it, so they pointed the finger at Max when what they should have been doing was planning their own funerals because they were all. Missing. The point.
Which was: the hell with Max. If they were smart, they'd all lay low and let the Reverend kill Max and lay waste to the rest of them, and divvy up his territory when it was over. This "diplomatic" bullshit was exactly that, and they all knew it. It was a smoke screen to hide what they really wanted, which was to turn Max into their little whipping boy for Patrick's murder and give him a slap on the wrist for doing what they all wanted but were too much of a pussy to do themselves, which was kill Patrick.
This was all about territory, they could say it was about Patrick but they didn't give a shit about Patrick, no one did, not even Max.
The Reverend's timing was almost too convenient. Patrick's murder and his return to the west coast for the first time in a decade came within five years of the next Shift. Typical that Sadie and Park would try to use Max's neck as a stepping stone to make a power grab during the unrest.
God, he hated vampires.
The bus slowed down as it came to the exit, and out of the corner of his eye, Raymond saw Lydia sit up like a bird dog. He let out a prolonged sigh. "What?" He asked.
They were sitting directly behind the driver so Raymond could be closest to the door, which was also why he was sitting in the aisle seat instead of Lydia. Lydia took the window seat without complaint, which as far as he was concerned, was her best quality, but he hadn't seen her look out the window once the whole time.
She leaned forward, reaching over the front of their seat to tap the driver on the shoulder. "This is the wrong exit," she said quietly, but not to Raymond. If he didn't know better he'd say she looked panicked. She touched the driver's shoulder to get his attention. "Excuse me, sir?"
"Don't talk to him." Raymond sank lower in their seat, groaning loudly with his head voice. Great, now he was going to talk to them for the rest of the ride. "I can't take you two anywhere."
"What?" The bus driver could almost see Lydia without turning his head, and he met her eyes briefly in the rear-view mirror. Raymond thought he seemed surprised that Lydia was talking to him, but no one was more so than Raymond. She'd been sitting in complete silence the whole time except to correct him, with an unpleasant look on her face that rivaled his own, so it came as a shock to hear her address the driver with such an effortlessly sincere tone of voice.
"This is the wrong exit."
"I know that," the driver said. He had a mustache that looked like a push broom that wiggled when he talked. "I gotta get gas."
Unable to stop himself, Raymond incredulously asked: "You didn't get gas before we left?"
The bus driver glanced at him in the rear-view mirror but addressed Lydia only, perhaps he, like most people, erroneously assumed that he was Lydia's unpleasant adolescent son and just ignored him. "The fella who usually drives this route called in sick last minute. We run a tight schedule," he pronounced it shed-jull. "just didn't have time."
Ignoring Raymond's now audible groaning, Lydia asked: "How long will it take?"
The driver lifted his baseball cap and scratched the top of his balding head absently. "'Bout fifteen minutes or so I figure, won't take long, and we'll be back on the road before you know it, ma'am."
"Thank you." Lydia leaned back again and didn't say anything else.
Raymond glared at her out of the corner of his eye as their bus pulled into the gas station. None of the humans on the bus seemed to notice or care, most of them were asleep given how late it was, and only one or two of them got off the bus to stretch their legs or pee while the driver pumped gas. Raymond, Lydia, and Luther remained in their seats, and Raymond stared petulantly out the window over Lydia's shoulder.
A brassy brown station wagon was parked next to them. The left front tire was a donut, and the back of the car was covered in bumper stickers, the only one of which that wasn't too faded for him to read had a cartoon owl on it and said: "Give a hoot! Don't pollute".
"Ugh."
The driver's side door was open, but Raymond couldn't see the driver. It was almost like he was daring someone to try to steal it.
Raymond thumped his forehead on the back of the seat in front of them, sighing. This was a waste of time. He was sitting here reading bumper stickers while Dutton was on his way to Santa Carla right now, and the longer they sat here, the likelihood that his imminent death was getting more imminent by the second increased. "This is ridiculous." He said, squeezing the top of the seat with both hands. Lydia didn't comment.
It felt like an eternity, which when put into the perspective of him being a vampire, said a lot. It felt like an eternity and an eternity had a baby and he just watched it drive off to college in that stupid fucking station wagon. Fear sat in his empty stomach like an anchor, but it was only ten minutes before the bus driver returned.
"Alright folks," finally, Raymond thought. "we got a full tank and about fifty miles to our destination. Get some sleep and I'll try to get you there as quick as I can. Next stop, Santa Carla."
If Raymond's heart could beat, it would be racing.
Originally posted on Fanfiction.net in January of 2009.
DISCLAIMER: The places and characters featured hereinafter are the property of Warner Bros., Joel Shumacher, Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam and no attempt is being made by the author to claim ownership or profit from the use of the aforementioned characters. The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the original authors and any character names or places mentioned in the original works belong to the copyright holders and are used in this story for nonprofit entertainment purposes by an amateur writer. The original characters used in this story are the creative property of Miss Melpomene and are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
Old habits die hard. It was an expression that Missy had always taken for granted, but she was beginning to think that in trying to get the Frog brothers to break some of their worse habits, that she had entered herself into a losing battle. She was learning quickly, and she'd only spent a day with the Frogs, that teenage boys were about seven times as horrible and poorly mannered as her mother had told her. Between chewing with their mouths open, and Missy was certain that she'd never seen two creatures with poorer eating habits in all of the animal kingdom, leaving their dirty clothes in the bathroom, and forgetting to put the cap back on the toothpaste when they were through with it, they'd effectively managed to drive her up the wall in less than twelve hours. There was also their infallible talent for popping up when they were least wanted, and invading the privacy of her room under the pretense of 'random vampire screenings'. She'd had to drag her armoire in front of the door just to keep them out of her room long enough for her to have a moment to herself.
"Missy?" She groaned into her pillow, but didn't get up. Nothing short of the apocalypse, complete with raining hell fire, could have gotten her off of that bed.
"What is it, Alan?" She heard him jiggle the handle and snickered when the door smacked against the back of her dresser.
"Did you…did you barricade your door?" She rolled over and sat up, smiling in the direction of her doorway.
"Uh-huh."
"…why?"
"To keep you and your brother out." She'd only spent a day with them, and already she wanted to throttle them within inches of their lives. "Look, I appreciate you both giving me a place to live, and for pennies, practically. And you're great, both of you, but I'm just not used to living with other people yet, and I'm just sort of trying to adjust. Plus your brother is driving me crazy!" She heard him chuckle, and she realized that she rather liked the older Frog brother. He didn't make her half as nuts as his brother did, and anyone who could be civil to someone who'd given them a split lip was someone Missy wanted to be friends with.
"Well, it's eight, just thought you might want to know. You know, in case you wanted to go out."
Moving the armoire was a lot harder in reverse, Missy realized, and she was sweating by the time she got it back against the wall. She opened the door, and found Alan on the other side of it, still. "You heard me struggling with that thing, you couldn't have helped me push it back?" She was grumping, sure, but she was grinning from ear to ear for some reason.
The darker haired Frog just shrugged. "It sounded like you were doing alright." Missy rolled her eyes at him and bumped his shoulder with hers on her way to the bathroom. She ran cold water in the sink, splashing it on her face until she felt composed again, and dried her skin with a towel. She winked at Alan as she hurried past him down the stairs, down into the store where Edgar looked up before her feet had even touched down, glaring at her.
"Alan said you'd barricaded yourself in you room."
"I did." Missy smiled at him, fluffing her hair with both hands and checking her clothes in the reflective glass of one of the display cases. "But I'm better now."
"Right, are you going out again?"
"Yep." She answered without looking at him, watching the surfers congregate near the door, roughhousing with each other. Alan was watching them too, she noticed, and she figured he must be expecting them to try and make off with something.
"Just don't leave the boardwalk." She glanced back at Edgar, and he was doing his serious face again. "Stay close to people. People and lights are safe, got it?"
"People and lights, got it. I'll be careful. If a stranger in a white van rolls up and offers me candy, I'll just say no." Edgar mumbled something about vampires not driving vans and disappeared into the backroom. Missy watched him go, shaking her head.
"He really doesn't let up, does he?" She asked Alan, who frowned at her. "I was afraid for a minute that he wasn't going to let me leave without a string of garlic around my neck."
"It's Edgar's way of showing you that he likes you." Alan explained. "That he doesn't want you getting eaten. Take it as a compliment."
"Right." Missy snorted. "I bump into Dracula out there and he'll probably throw a parade." She sighed and patted Alan on the arm. "See you later, alright?"
"Be in before one or Edgar will lock you out!" Alan called after her, and she waved back at him, jogging past the surfers and out into the busy night throng.
Missy stretched her arms up over her head and smiled, letting the colorful lights wash over her, taking a moment to smell the salt and the sand, the cotton candy and the corn dogs, and something else. Something else, she realized, that smelled better than anything she'd ever smelled before. More saccharine than the spun sugar, with the same warm, earthy smell of wood burning in a fireplace, and the spicy fragrance of fresh cinnamon and apple cider all mixed into one. It was like the rain hitting asphalt that's been warmed all day by the sun, or falling into a pile of wildflowers and letting the scent take over until all you can see is an ocean of flowers. It was sudden and alien to her, and she spun in confused circles, trying to figure out which direction the smell had come from.
"Hey, Missay!" She flung her arms out and stumbled, hitting the ground with a pained yelp. Whipping her head back, she glared up at the source of her present misfortune, and groaned. Of all things. Why not the Grim Reaper? Why not Renee and a cadre of armed policemen? Why not the almighty Count D himself? She begged for the plague, for a meteor to drop out of the sky and crush her into the center of the earth. Anything but…him. Him and his stupid smile and stupid hair.
"Why you?" She groaned, lifting her hands and wincing as she used the left to pick pebbles out of the heel of the right. The wiry blonde standing over her just smiled, and held out a hand to help her up. She glared at it and Paul pulled it back to join the other, raising both of his hands at her in supplication.
"Just trying to help."
"Don't need your help." She got to her feet without any of the leggy biker's help, frowning as she took in the state of her skinned knees. "Wonderful. I suppose I'll have to add gravity to my list of enemies now." Paul snickered at her, and reached out to brush something off her shoulder.
"You keep a list?" She shot him a glare, and he quieted.
"Do you set this time aside to make me miserable, or is this just fate's way of telling me I should've stayed in Seattle?" Paul didn't seem to hear anything but the end of her sentence, and he broke into another smile.
"So you're from Seattle, huh?" Missy frowned at him, gesturing to the boardwalk around them.
"Don't you have anything else to do?"
"Not until later." He smirked at her, and she thought it should have been illegal for someone as annoying as him to look so good while smiling. She turned her back to him, stalking in the opposite direction as fast as her sore knees and pride would allow. Persistence, she realized, as the blonde's steps fell into line with hers, was one of Paul's more predominant and far more irritating traits.
"It's not cute, you know." She told him, though his pace never wavered.
"What?" He asked, grinning.
"Stalking me." Missy replied.
"Just keeping you company." Paul told her simply, slipping his hands into his pockets.
"I don't need company." At least, she wasn't sure that it was Paul's company that she wanted. There was still the part of her brain that refused to be silenced, telling her that no matter how stupid and harmless he might have seemed, Paul was trouble. Maybe it was just her Seattle mindset acting up, or her father's warnings about boys like Paul and his friends that was making her nervous.
"Where're we headed?" Paul bumped her elbow with his, and she frowned at him.
"We?" She repeated. "Look, Paul, I'm sure you're a nice guy and all, but I don't really understand what you want from me."
Paul's smile was mischievous, and just a little dangerous. "Don't worry so much. Wanna ride the carousel? You like it right?"
Missy stopped walking and gawped at him. "How did you know I like the carousel?"
"Doesn't everybody?" Paul snagged her hand before she could reply, and as he blazed past a couple of schoolchildren to get to the head of the ticket line, Edgar's warning came back to her. Lights and people. Even if Paul was a threat, it wasn't like he was going to pull anything this close to the crowds and lights. She was safe, so she might as well try and enjoy herself. She stared at his hands as he wrapped them around her waist, lifting her as though she weighed no more than a bag of sugar, and depositing her sidesaddle on the back of a black horse with bright white teeth. He stood beside her horse, one hand on her waist, and the other on the pole that was set through the middle of her steed. He was watching the faces of the other riders, but Missy was watching him. It wasn't until about halfway through the ride that she got a whiff of the same strange fragrance she'd smelled in front of the comic shop, and leaned over to see if it was Paul. He turned to look at her the moment she moved, and smirked at something behind her. "Hey, man." Missy turned her head, the force nearly tossing her from her horse, if not for Paul's hand keeping her in place.
It was one of the other three boys that had been outside the video store with Paul the night before. It was the youngest looking one, with the curly hair. Missy thought he had a sweet face, and when his pale eyes focused on hers, he grinned, and Missy tried not to look as nervous as she felt. "Hey again." His hand reached out and wrapped around her horse's pole, and she stiffened. She was boxed in.
"Missy, Marko." Paul gestured at the curly haired boy, who waggled the fingers of his free hand in a wave that Missy wasn't sure was patronizing or not.
"Nice to meet you, Marko." She told him, but Paul and Marko were talking, and neither one of them seemed to be hearing her.
"You eat yet?" Marko was saying, and Paul grinned.
"Nah, thought I'd get something later." Missy wasn't sure, but she was almost certain that Marko's eyes had shot in her direction, if only for a second, at the mention of food. She couldn't imagine why.
"You like Santa Carla so far?" It took her a few seconds to realize that Marko was speaking to her, and she was so stunned when she finally figured it out, that all she could do was stare stupidly until her vocal chords started working again.
"It's different." She told them, but she was looking at something, rather, someone off in the distance as she spoke. "I didn't exactly get a good first impression." Paul and Marko followed her stare, down the line of people waiting to ride the carousel, to a man with a white streak in his black hair, and a blonde woman under his arm.
"Greg?" Paul snorted. "He's a piece of shit."
"I noticed." Missy said, and all of the sudden she didn't feel like riding rides anymore. Paul didn't seem notice her mood swing, but Marko was smiling sweetly at her.
"Wanna do something else?" She nodded, numbly, and it was Marko's hands instead of Paul's on her waist, turning her and helping her slide down from the saddle.
Paul stayed on her right, bobbing his head and tapping a beat out on his thigh that she couldn't hear. Marko was on her left, telling her about the history of the carousel. Apparently it had been built in the nineteen-hundreds. She ducked her head when they passed by Greg and his girlfriend, but her bad luck wasn't going to allow her to escape a second run-in with the man unscathed. "Hey, Dorothy!" He called, and she winced so sharply that Marko and Paul stopped walking to stare at her. "Lookin' good, Dorothy." Greg's eyes traced a line from her ankles, up her bare legs, all the way to her face. She felt the trail he'd left behind like he was a snail instead of just an asshole.
"Get a life." Missy sped away before she could hear what Greg had to say next, and three seconds later, Paul was throwing his arm around her neck and howling with laughter.
"You shouldn't have run off so fast, Miss! You missed Shelly smacking Greg upside the head with some kid's funnel cake!" Missy cracked a small smile, miniscule in comparison to Paul's full-face one.
Marko leaned in a little to whisper in her ear, and Missy shivered. "Guys like that get off on thinking they have power." He told her. "But guys like Greg wouldn't know real power if it bit them on the ass."
"You know about power?" Missy asked, sounding rudely incredulous, even if she didn't mean to. Marko didn't look offended, he just gave her a secretive sort of smile.
"Sure do." He said.
"Yeah!" Paul was grinning from ear to ear again. "Marko's a superhero, couldn't you tell? You're a real badass, aren't you, Marko?" Marko leaned past her and shoved Paul in the chest. One shove led to another, and before Missy could say anything, Marko had Paul in headlock, mussing his choppy blonde hair. She couldn't see what difference it was making.
"Boys, boys, boys. Aren't we being childish?" Three pairs of eyes turned, isolating, at the sound of a new voice, the source.
"David." Marko said, and released Paul's head, but not before messing his hair one more time.
So that was his name. David. He looked exactly the way Missy remembered him. Pale, imposing, with a smile that bordered on malevolent, and a glint in his ice blue eyes that promised cruelty. "Good to see you again, Missy." His voice was almost a whisper, and Missy couldn't help wondering if other people had half as much trouble understanding him when he talked. She supposed his voice was a little bit sexy, but she'd much rather be able to hear what he was saying properly. His eyes made her uneasy, like he was looking through her, no, at something deep inside her that only he could see. He made her feel like she was about to be devoured.
The last boy was as handsome as the rest of them, and Missy couldn't recall hearing him speak once in the two times, now, that they had been around each other. He was watching the crowd around them, his long, dark hair hanging in front of his piercing eyes. Missy noticed at once that for the second night in a row, he wasn't wearing a shirt beneath his jacket. She blushed, and the dark skinned boy's eyes shot to her face at once, and his eyes burned her with a hateful stare. "I have to go." She tore her eyes from the shirtless boy's face, frowning at Marko and Paul. "I'm supposed to be helping my roommates out tonight, I forgot." She could tell by looking at them that they didn't believe her, but she persisted anyway. "Thank you for riding the carousel with me."
"No problem, maybe next time we run into each other it won't be so, you know, literal." Paul winked at her, and she smiled. She heard David cluck his tongue, and she turned her head to frown at him.
"Wish you could stay." He was telling her. "We were just about to get a bite." Something about the way he said it made her skin turn to ice, and she took an unconscious step away from the platinum haired male. "Another time, perhaps. Since you and my boys are such good friends now." His icy eyes flickered, and she knew he was looking past her, at Paul and Marko.
"Goodnight." She smiled at Marko and Paul, and the genuineness of it surprised her, considering only yesterday she'd been calling Paul an asshole.
"Night." Marko called, but she had already run out of earshot.
Missy couldn't help but wonder, as she ran back to the comic store, if all of her dealings with the David and his strange boys would end with her running away from them like the devil himself was on her heels.
Edgar and Alan's glares seemed a little less angry than usual when she ran in, smiling, but out of breath. She gasped some sort of excuse about being tired at them and didn't stop until she had shut her bedroom door behind her. She flopped facedown on her bed, toeing one sneaker off, then the other, and sighing. Was anything about her new life going to be normal? She was living with a couple of teenagers who thought they were vampire hunters, and the only guys who hadn't tried to turn her into a missing person were weirder than the ones who had. David, Paul, Marko, and the silent one whose name she had yet to learn. Something about them was off, she was sure, even if she couldn't put her finger on it.
Who knows, maybe the Frog brothers were right about their insane theories. Maybe Santa Carla was crawling with the undead, and David and his boys were on the liquid diet. She laughed aloud at the idea, sitting up just enough to untuck her blankets, slip off her shorts, and crawl beneath them.
Sure, David and Paul and Marko were vampires, and she was the Wolfman.
She felt stupid even thinking it, and somehow the fact that their paranoia had even affected her slightly made her want to go downstairs and beat the living daylight out of the Frog brothers.
She'd sleep first, of course. She could deal with vampires, vampire hunters, and whatever else the world wanted to throw at her in the morning. She laid her head down on her pillow, felt the stake that Alan had stashed beneath it, and frowned.
Her dreams were filled with spinning horses and beautiful boys with demonic faces. Marko and Paul chased her around the carousel, and as loud as she screamed, no one but the two of them seemed to hear her. The lights blinked and flickered around her, threatening to go out, and the music sounded like a funeral march to her ears. Her funeral march. She tripped, as people so often did in times of great fright, sliding on the spinning floor until her body connected with something hard as stone. Trembling, she raised her eyes in terror to David's grinning face. "Wish you could stay." He laughed then, and her eyes were drawn to his teeth, unnatural, sharper than a human being's should have been, and her mind was filled with one, single, terrifying realization. Vampire.
She flew up in her bed, gasping and clawing at her throat. There was nothing on her neck but her locket's chain, and as she gazed around at her room, pitch black in the late hours, she felt insanely stupid. "Ugh!" She reached under her pillow and retrieved the stake, chucking it across the dark room. She heard it smack into the wall opposite with a satisfying clonk and she laid back down, staring up at her bedroom ceiling as she tried to still the beating of her terror-stricken heart, trying to assure the erratic organ that it had all been a dream.
"Stupid nightmare." She whispered, turning over and closing her eyes again, determined not to let her sleep be disturbed again by thoughts of nonexistent demons. "Stupid Frog brothers." She fought to regain control of her sleep, but try as she might to keep her mind from wandering to unpleasant things, her brain kept echoing a single phrase. Four words that the dream David and waking David had in common. She recalled the words, and shuddered.
TBP is one of my ALL TIME favorite fanfics and I've been reading for over a friggin decade. Missy is one of the best OCs ever and I love your portrayal of the rest of the boys. I've recommended the fic on Tumblr before but didn't know you had a blog. I'm going to link your account next time bc I know I'll be rec'ing it again and again. I'm also loving TTC and can definitely see the evolution of your skills over the years. Bravo my sweet! You're so very talented. Ty for sharing your work with us!
I honestly never get over reading messages like this, I read and appreciate every single review that I get, even if it’s something as simple as “Can’t wait until the next update!”, it means a lot to me, that you took the time to say something.
Missy will always be one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written, long after I’ve finished writing her story, I know I’ll miss her. She came to me in a dream, and I wrote the first chapter of her story before I even knew the boys would end up being in it too. Although the Lost Boys is my favorite movie of all time, I never expected to write a fanfiction about it, and I certainly didn’t anticipate the reaction it’s received, for which I am incredibly grateful.
I’ve had a personal blog for about six years, but I only started this one for the series a little over a week ago. I wanted somewhere to talk about the series with fans of the series in a more direct way than just author’s notes.
I’m glad you’re enjoying TTC so far, I knew it was going to be very different from TBP when I was finishing up the last few chapters of TBP, and boy is it! I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.
Your story The Breaking Point has really been an enjoyable read so far from the chapters I read on here. Your OC seems like a really likable character and easy to relate to (Love your face claim for her too). I do plan on reading more and checking out your other fics too. Just wanted to send some kudos on your writing on a movie I have loved since childhood!
Thank you so much! I started writing The Breaking Point when I was eighteen, right around Missy’s age, but by the time I finished The Breaking Point though I was actually 27, ten years older than Missy, so it was really important for me that Missy was still likable but also realistic, I wanted her to be relatable, event though she was in a completely unrelatable situation.
I will be gradually posting all of the chapters of The Breaking Point here on tumblr, as well as all of the published chapters of The Ticking Crocodile, but if you don’t feel like waiting, you can read both stories in their entirety on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org! Thanks so much for reading.
Originally posted on Fanfiction.net in January of 2009.
DISCLAIMER: The places and characters featured hereinafter are the property of Warner Bros., Joel Shumacher, Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam and no attempt is being made by the author to claim ownership or profit from the use of the aforementioned characters. The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the original authors and any character names or places mentioned in the original works belong to the copyright holders and are used in this story for nonprofit entertainment purposes by an amateur writer. The original characters used in this story are the creative property of Miss Melpomene and are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
"Missy."
It's a funny thing, waking up the first morning in a new environment. There's that first moment after opening one's eyes, when nothing seems familiar, and one's first instinct is to panic. It is never a wise decision, naturally, to be the person standing over someone when that moment of overwhelming, sudden panic strikes.
The first thing that Missy was aware of after opening her eyes wasn't that her blanket seemed to have fallen or been ripped from her body in the middle of the night. It wasn't that Alan was standing, well, was doubled over, beside her bed. It wasn't even that Alan's lip seemed to be bleeding.
No, the first thing she noticed was that she was hungry. That painfully deep, gnawing variety of hungry that can only come from being too frightened to eat for a day and a half. It turned her insides so viciously that for a moment, Missy mistook the feeling, and feared she was about to be sick. "You kicked me!" Alan's hand appeared in her line of sight, and his finger waved in front of her face.
"You shouldn't have been standing over my bed." Missy said, but she grabbed the hem of the shirt she'd slept in and lifted it away from her stomach. "It's already stopping." She dabbed at his lip, frowning. "You're going to have a split lip for a couple of days, though." Alan was adamantly avoiding looking at her, glaring instead at the wall behind her head. His face was red, and she thought he must have been embarrassed about a girl giving him a bloody lip. "Look, see, it's finished now." She let her shirt drop back down and smiled.
Alan just grunted at her. "Edgar's getting you up from now on." He turned around and headed for her door, leaving Missy to fight off a smile once his back was turned.
A good portion of her first night in Santa Carla was fuzzy, and the events of the night before were blurred together in her mind. She wasn't sure if skunk head or the boys in front of the video store had been real, or just a product of her exhaustion, but one thing was abundantly clear to her as she listened to her angry stomach snarl. The tour that the Frog brothers had given her hadn't included a kitchen. "Hey, wait!" She called out, and from the hall, past the door where she could no longer see him, Alan's voice came back.
"What?"
"Do you have a kitchen?" There was a moment or two of silence on Alan's part, and Missy worried he might still be sore about her hitting him, and was ignoring her . "Alan?"
"Sort of." Missy stared at the door across from her bed, her sluggish morning mind trying to process what it had just been given.
"Wait, sort of? Alan!" She rolled off the bed and ran through her door. Alan was at the top of the stairs now, and her hand shot out to grab his bare arm. "That doesn't make any sense!" He turned his head and glared at his elbow. Her eyes followed his to her pale hand on his darker skin, and she let him go. "How can you sort of have a kitchen?"
"I didn't say we sort of had a kitchen." Alan corrected her, and as much as he was frustrating her, she waited for him to continue without comment. "I said it was 'sort of' a kitchen."
That made, if possible, less sense to her, and Missy frowned at him. "What do you mean?"
"See for yourself." Stupid cryptic Frog brother. "It's in there." She followed his finger and found herself staring at the closed door to the Frog brothers' parents' bedroom. She heard the stairs creak behind her and knew Alan was gone without looking. She wasn't sure how she felt about going into the Frog parents' bedroom without their permission. She didn't want to walk in on them sleeping, or worse, awake. It was a lot easier, she was realizing, dealing with Edgar and Alan, who were closer to her own age. What if the Frog parents experienced a, from what she could garner, rare moment of lucidity and realized her for what she was? Would they throw her out, or worse, would they call the police who'd, in turn, call Renee?
"What are you standing in the middle of the hallway for?" Life with the Frog brothers was going to take some getting used to, Missy realized as for the second time since waking, she found a Frog had snuck up on her. Living with Renee, they had each of them done their part to avoid the other. It had been a lot like living alone, really. It wasn't the same with Edgar and Alan. She couldn't seem to shake them if she tried.
Edgar was standing in the bathroom doorway, watching her, with a blue toothbrush in his right hand, a tube of Crest in the other. He was glaring, an expression that Missy was becoming used to seeing on him. She was surprised to see him with a toothbrush, though, because from everything she'd heard about teenage boys, she hadn't thought that they had the initiative to brush their teeth without being told to. "Are your parents in there?" The younger Frog sneered at the word, and she made a note in her head not to use it around him anymore.
"They're down in the shop already." He disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. She heard the water in the sink start running and glanced at the parents' door again. No time like the present, she figured, and it was better that she learn the state of the sort of kitchen before she went grocery shopping. Her hand wrapped around the knob and she took a breath for courage before turning it. The door swung inward, and she felt along the wall for the light switch, flipping it. The room was only a hair bigger than hers, and she found it hard to believe, from the state of it, that anyone lived in the room. The bed was made, but the comforter was wrinkled like someone had been sleeping on top of it. The curtains were drawn, and made of a thick, heavy material that blocked out the light from the windows. If she had been half as paranoid as Edgar and Alan, she might have been concerned that the boy's parents were vampires.
To her a right she could see a short wall that jutted out from the other, only partway into the room. She walked around the partition and she realized at once what Alan had meant. It was a kitchenette, like the one that had been in their room the time that she and her father had stayed at a hotel to be closer to her mother in the hospital. There were two cabinets up high and a shelf beneath them, with a microwave on it. Beneath the shelf was a counter with a small sink on one side, and an empty box of cereal on the other. Set in the counter, closest to the floor, were two more cabinets, and a small white fridge. Kneeling, she pulled open the fridge and looked inside. A carton of milk, expired. A container of beef and broccoli, a half eaten burger with a handful of fries, and something fuzzy that might have once been a piece of fruit. Disgusted, she shut the fridge and turned to the cabinets instead. The two lowest cabinets were both empty, and between the top most ones she found an unopened box of cereal, and three bags of chips.
She shut the cabinets and left the bedroom, jogged down the stairs and cornered Edgar and Alan behind the counter. "You don't even have bread!"
They glanced at each other, and back at her. "What are you talking about?" Edgar asked her, and she turned and pointed up the stairs.
"How are you two still alive? You've got nothing at all up in that kitchen." Alan snorted and Edgar rolled his eyes.
"We're on the boardwalk." The younger Frog grunted at her and hoisted a box of comics up off the floor. "Go get something if you're hungry."
"You can't honestly expect me to believe that you survive on nothing but cotton candy and corn dogs." When neither of them answered her, she groaned in disgust. "Oh my god! I'm surprised you both are still breathing! It's not healthy to eat nothing but fried food all day!"
"Stop lecturing and go put some pants on." Edgar snapped at her, and she winced. Alan looked up from his box and zeroed in on her bare legs, turning red again. "This is a business, you can't be running around half naked."
Missy folded her arms over her chest and rolled her eyes. "Fine, do you have a pair of scissors I could borrow?" The boys looked at her like she was on something.
"What do you need scissors for?"
"It's hot." Missy said, slowly, like she was talking to a pair of five year olds. "I want to use the scissors." She made a cutting motion with her left hand. "To cut my jeans." She ran her hands down her legs to symbolize pants, and pulled them back up her thighs for shorts. "Into shorts." Edgar grunted at her and leaned over to open a drawer. He came back with a pair of scissors with black handles. He held them out to her, handle first, and she took them from him. "Thank you." He nodded and Missy turned away from the brothers and jogged back up the stairs, humming.
She dropped the scissors on her bed and opened the armoire. She wanted to see what Santa Carla was like in the sun, but first, she knew, she wanted a shower. Bad. She was grateful that as big a hurry as she had been in when she left the house in Seattle, she hadn't forgotten to take a few essentials from the bathroom. She doubted the Frog brothers even knew what conditioner was. She shook her head and threw a pair of jeans over her shoulder at the bed. She'd packed for cooler weather out of habit, and the balmy beach air was warmer than she was used to. She was sure a cool day in Santa Carla could rival Seattle's hottest scorcher, no trouble. While she had always been a summer sort of girl, and was certainly enjoying the new climate, it spelled bad things for her wardrobe. The only thing she'd brought with her that didn't have sleeves was a yellow, floral print camisole, and she weighed her options. She could cover up, and be miserable for the rest of the day, or she could show a little more skin that she was used to, and be somewhat comfortable. She tossed the camisole on the bed with her jeans and shut the armoire. Heck, she thought, when in Rome…
A shower had been just the thing she needed, she realized, to feel like herself again. No, she felt like a brand new person, and as she ran her brush through her hair, she was impatient to get out on the boardwalk again and see the world with the new Missy's eyes. Cutting the legs off of her jeans hadn't been as difficult as she had feared it would be, and when she was finished, she pulled on the edges until they frayed. "Perfect." She buttoned her new shorts right as her bedroom door came open, and she whipped around to glare at the intruder. "It's called knocking," she discovered that the intruder was Edgar. Figures.
"My house." He snapped.
"My room." She shot back, and he grunted. "Look, I don't want to fight you, Edgar, did you need something?" She didn't like how cranky the younger Frog made her. She wasn't used to being so disagreeable to someone who wasn't Renee, and she decided then that she would make an effort to be more amicable with Edgar from now forward.
If Edgar thought that her radical change in demeanor was unusual, it didn't show. "We wanted to know if you were going out."
"I wanted to see the boardwalk." Missy replied. "I didn't really get a chance to look around last night, what with the running around and trying to find a place to stay, and I think I'd really like to ride the carousel-"
Edgar waved his hands at her and stopped her. "If you're going out, can you pick up something to eat on your way back?"
Missy scoffed. "If you think I'm going to perpetuate your foul dietary habits you're crazy." Edgar made a face like he was either going to interrupt her, or ask her what perpetuate meant. Either way, she shushed him with a wave of her hand. "I wanted to go grocery shopping, anyway. There's tons of things you can make, even without a stove, and I'm not going to eat myself into an early grave just because you two don't know the difference between corn and a corn dog."
"Whatever, here." He tossed something at her, and when she bent to retrieve it, she realized it was a twenty dollar bill. "Try and get stuff that we're going to actually want to eat."
Missy just smiled. "Burgers and hotdogs are fine on occasion, Edgar, but not to live on."
"Yeah, well, we've survived just fine until now, Mom." He grunted the last word at her and walked away. She stared at her empty doorway for a few seconds before she let herself smile. Life with the Frogs was going to be difficult for all of them, she realized, but the twenty dollar bill in her pocket said that maybe, just maybe, Edgar and Alan were willing to try and make it work with her. She fished a fifty from between the pages of Oscar Wilde and it joined the Frogs' money in her pocket. She slipped her feet into her sneakers and laced them up, patting her thighs once and pushing off of the bed with a renewed sense of adventure.
She found Edgar behind the counter, ringing up a customer, and Alan, milling around the racks, putting out new comics. "I'm off." She called to them, her whole body itching with the excitement to be out on the boardwalk. Edgar looked up from his clipboard and she heard Alan stop. Edgar's eyes met hers, and he nodded once.
"Be careful."
Missy rolled her eyes at him and smiled. "Now who's the mom?"
Edgar glared. "You think we're kidding around with all the monster stuff, but we're not. Santa Carla is crawling with vampires."
Missy nodded her head, waving her hand dismissively. "I saw the memo, I got it."
"No, you don't get it." Edgar growled, and his sudden animosity paralyzed her. He came around from the counter and stopped in front of her. "You need to start taking us seriously, or you're going to get yourself killed out there." A shiver went down Missy's spine, and despite the fact that she was standing in the sun, she felt cold.
"Look, Edgar, Alan." She added, when she noticed that the darker haired Frog had snuck up behind her. "I hear you guys, I do, and I'll be careful. It's daylight, right? And vampires can't come out in the day." The Frog brothers stared out at the world beyond the door, bathed in sunlight, and visibly relaxed. "So I'm perfectly safe."
"Until sundown." Edgar amended, and Missy sighed.
"Right. I'm going now." She backed out the store, hesitating just outside the door. "If the Wolfman calls, take a message for me, would you?" She winked and turned away, but not quick enough to miss Edgar's last word.
"It's always funny until somebody gets eaten."
Missy wasn't going to let the Frogs' paranoia get to her. Vampires didn't exist, and even if they did, why would they come to California of all places? Wouldn't they be living some place where the sun didn't shine so vehemently?
The boardwalk was a different place during the day. It was like someone had flipped a switch, and Missy realized that things didn't seem quite as magical with the lights turned on. There was still something charming about the daytime boardwalk, and there were twice as many people during the day than she remembered there being at midnight. People heading to and coming from the beach, bathing suits everywhere she turned, and the roar of the roller coaster as it dipped and winded, its passengers screaming around every turn. She rode the carousel twice, and decided that she would try to ride a different horse every time until she'd ridden them all. Judging from the number of horses, and it was difficult to count them all when they were spinning, it would take her quite a while to ride them all.
The beach was packed with people. Adults with young children, and several groups of young men carrying surfboards under their arms. She walked the sand for ten minutes before she found a place that wasn't occupied, and sat down, undoing the laces on her shoes and wiggling her toes in the sand.
It was hard to relax. Even on a beach, with the sun warming her all over, all she could think about was what sort of progress Renee and the police might be making. She wouldn't be eighteen for another couple of months, and in the meantime, Renee could come along and take her back as soon as she was able to find her. Hiding was essential, she realized, but she wanted to enjoy her new life. How was she supposed to enjoy being away from Renee for the first time since she was twelve if she was constantly checking over her shoulder for her?
"Ugh!" She cried, kicking out at the sand and flopping onto her back, glaring up at the clear sky. Renee wouldn't give up, she knew that. Not until she turned eighteen, maybe not ever. How long would she have to keep looking over her shoulder until she finally saw Renee there?
She wondered if the Frogs had a television, she hadn't seen one, but it would be nice to be able to watch the news. By now, Renee had to know where her bus had been headed, and before long, the Seattle police would be in contact with the Santa Carla police, and they'd be looking for her. She would just have to hope that the local police wouldn't take the search for her too seriously.
Edgar and Alan didn't seem as happy to see her with grocery bags as she would have expected, and neither one of them seemed to appreciate the fifteen minute walk away from the boardwalk that she'd had to take to find a grocery store. She also noticed, as she struggled with the bags, that neither one of them seemed to have a chivalrous bone between them. "Um, help?" Alan was the first to react, coming around the counter to take the bags from her that were cutting the circulation off to her hands.
"You did see the fridge right?" Edgar asked her as she handed him a bag to carry. "All of this isn't going to fit."
"Oh, it's mostly dry or canned stuff, you'd be surprised." Missy led the way to the small kitchen and dropped the last few bags on the floor. "Okay, dry goods, top cabinets, canned goods, bottom cabinets. That way, if something falls out of the top cabinets and clonks you on the head, it won't be a can!" She chirped, and the brothers winced at her cheery nature.
"Did you get a lobotomy while you were out?" Edgar raised an eyebrow at her, and she glared.
"Shut up and help your brother put the groceries away."
"You're not helping?" He asked, and she scoffed.
"I carried them all the way here. But you two have fun!" Missy slapped him on the back and left, leaving them to stare after her back, and wonder what exactly they'd gotten themselves into.
A sneak preview of the next chapter of The Ticking Crocodile (The West Coast Vampires Saga #2)
Catch up on the first six chapters of The Ticking Crocodile now on Fanfiction.net or AO3.
RAYMOND
“I need another quarter.” Raymond held his hand out backwards with his palm facing up, holding the broken door of the payphone open with his shoulder and the receiver pressed between his cheek and shoulder. He moved his hand impatiently, watching a car go by with its headlights off carefully through the rain and fingerprint streaked glass. His anxiety made every passerby a potential threat, and the pay phone’s broken door felt like a bad omen. He felt exposed. There was nothing he could do about that right now, except make his phone call and get somewhere safe before dawn. He needed to get off the streets, even the implied protection of publicity wouldn’t protect him, and he knew that. Lydia was even less useful in that respect. Luther had established in his final moments how ineffective brawn was against a crossbow, and Lydia was half the man Luther used to be physically.
Hell, Luther was half the man Luther used to be now. More to the point, Raymond didn’t expect that Lydia would take a bullet for him if it came down to it, though the same could be said for him.
Lydia stood outside the phone booth, her greyish blonde hair plastered to the sides of her face as the wind blew the rain sideways against the side of the phone booth. She handed him a quarter without taking her eyes off the building across the street. There was a second floor window with the light on, and she hadn’t looked away from it once. Raymond didn’t know the range of a crossbow, but Lydia clearly wasn’t taking any chances after what happened to Luther.
The phone rang only once before Simon picked up. “Raymond,” he said. Raymond’s ears picked up the sounds of additional voices in the room. They were speaking quietly, and too fast for human ears to hear. He didn’t recognize either of them, though that wasn’t surprising, Raymond didn’t know many of Simon’s friends. There was also music playing, even more quietly. One of Simon’s guests courteously turned it down when Simon answered the phone. “if you’re calling me, I expect it’s not good news.”
Raymond huffed, glancing over his shoulder at Lydia. “Always happy to say I told you so, Simon, you know me.”
Simon chuckled, and Raymond heard him switch the handset to his other shoulder. The room Simon was in got suddenly quiet, and Raymond realized Simon must have gestured on the other end to his guests for them to leave the room. “What happened?” He asked after a minute.
“Bad news,” Raymond confirmed Simon’s earlier suspicion. “not surprising news.” He scratched at the peeling corner of a yellow sticker on the side of the phone absently. “Luther’s dead.”
Simon sighed. “Damn it.” Raymond stuck his hands in his pockets, holding the phone with his shoulder and waited. “I didn’t think Max’s boys were that stupid.”
“Oh, they are,” Raymond replied. “but it wasn’t them. It was Dutton.”
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