An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
'A grown man now, and he had still never succeeded in throwing away a single sliver of so-called ‘wisdom’ that had been relentlessly drilled into his mind up until he managed to move himself out of the home and out from under his Daddy’s thumb. Every word still stuck rattling around in his skull.'
BOOK REVIEW: Salt Heart Press's Confirmed Sightings Triple Feature
by Elizabeth Broadbent, Staff Writer.
Confirmed Sightings, out June 1st from Salt Heart Press, serves up the cryptid stories you’ve been waiting for. It includes three novellas: “A Piasa for Christmas”, by Bridget D. Brave; “eyeofmoth.exe,” by P.L. McMillan, and “Once Upon a Time in Turu,” by Ryan Marie Ketterer. All should be familiar from other HOWLS anthologies, including Aah! That’s What I Call Horror and Collage Macabre.
Each story offers a different tone, setting, and voice. In “A Piasa for Christmas,” airheaded Kaycee discovers the love of her life: an interdimensional, all-powerful god; the novella kept me laughing til the throat-punch. Brave’s innovative structure—series of blog posts, including complaints to the commentariat—and unreliable narrator lend themselves to some serious shenanigans.
Switch gears for “eyeofthemoth.exe,” where McMillan serves up a gory-but-heartfelt sci-fi. Elevator pitch: Mothman in space. She nails it, not only narratively, but emotionally. You’ll care about these corporate-slave spacemen. With an emotional wallop and some serious scares, the novella dishes out complex characters and non-stop action.
Switch gears again for a detective thriller set in a city of cryptids. Fans of both will enjoy this one from Ketterer. With a Bigfoot detective, a Mothman gang, and a jackalope victim, “Turu” twists to an ending you never saw coming.
Brave, McMillan, and Ketterer bonded over their love of Piasa, truly. Cryptid fans will love this novella.
Horror fans and cryptid lovers unite! Grab your popcorn and candy, settle into your seat, and make sure to silence your phone for this tripl
Read "Confirmed Sightings: A Triple Cryptid Creature Feature" by P.L. McMillan available from Rakuten Kobo. Horror fans and cryptid lovers u
Summary/Content Notes: Gay trans vampire and omnisexual human-male-presenting mothman meet cute, nothing spicy this time. Mentions of responding to suicidal ideation in others, allusions to Mo’s darker backstory, and talk about blooooooood.
Pairing: Mo Taiman/Theodore Holst (OCs)
WC: 6K (oops)
Theodore Holst didn’t intend to be a perpetual grad student, but becoming undead had taken a lot of the pressure off of things. Like needing to achieve his thesis on a mortal timescale. Or needing to get a job to make a living—you know. Undead and all. He was free to take his time and then some without the ticking desperation to accomplish something great before death came at its unknown hour to collect him.
Because it kind of had, and here he was, surrounded by books and still going. Still chipping away at that thesis.
Most universities—the major ones, anyway—had at least one vampire on staff, if not more. Not too many, of course, it would become too obvious how much the student and local population thinned out over time if you had a department full of nothing but vampires. But a decent little cabal usually would form to keep each other company. And when one of them decided it was time to fake their death and move on to the next thing, they usually picked a promising academic to turn to the scholarly vampire life.
This was not, however, how Theodore was chosen to be turned. Theodore wasn’t really chosen at all. He’d had the misfortune of circling back late to see if any snacks had been left out after a Friday night symposium in the history department (the person typically in charge of clean-up had gotten rather drunk with the visiting scholar, and Theodore had been pretty sure most of the leftover nibblies had simply been shoved in the department fridge to be dealt with at a more sober time), and had walked in on said visiting scholar deep in the middle of a most indecent activity with one of the undergrads. Not what you’re thinking, and not what Theodore thought at first either, hearing moans and seeing the scholar’s face buried in the young man’s neck.
“Oh,” gasped Theodore, trying to back up quickly and knocking into an end table of scholarly publications instead, their glossy pages smacking onto the floor.
The scholar’s head snapped up in shock, zeroing in on Theodore. That was when Theodore noticed the fangs—no, that was when Theodore noticed the unreasonable amount of blood all over her mouth and face, the crazed glint in the eyes, and then finally the fangs.
“Oh-I-should-go,” said Theodore in an apologetic hurry, nearly bending over to pick up the periodicals before realizing that was a stupid thing to be doing, and what he should be doing was running as fast as his heavy little legs could carry him in any direction that wasn’t towards her. But as he turned to leave the room at haste, he found her there, impossibly fast, slamming her hand into the wall in front of him, caging him in place.
“Look,” began the professor hesitatingly, “mi—“
“Mr. Holst,” Theodore interjected, heading off any room for doubt. Imminent death was no excuse for letting himself be misgendered.
“Mr. Holst. I obviously can’t let you leave now.”
“Sure you can. I won’t say anything to anyone.”
The scholar sighed apologetically. “No, you won’t. Because I have to kill you.”
“You do?” Theodore laughed nervously. “I don’t think you do.” His eyes darted around the room for some salvation, but the room’s wood paneling of the 70s had long since given way to arguably tasteful and austere sheetrock, the furniture all glass and cheap metals, and not a splinter of wood, not even a cheese toothpick laying abandoned among the tight industrial carpeting. What a terrible time to be a godless heathen, Theodore thought, memories of an uncomfortably delicate gold and diamond cross his mother had once given him flashing across his mind’s eye. He knew exactly where it was, buried like so many things he owned, and nowhere helpfully near.
“It’s not about—I mean, the dying is whatever,” Theodore pleaded, ”but I just…I mean, I just figured out what I think I want to do my graduate thesis on. I can’t just die like this and not get to do it.”
The visiting vampire scholar looked down at Theodore critically. “You’re in the history department, yes? Didn’t I see you earlier?”
Theodore nodded. The vampire licked the blood off her lips, considering. The head of the history department was also a vampire, and had been quite derogatory towards the main arguments of the presentation of her symposium earlier. It would absolutely annoy the hell out of him to have a junior vampire to deal with. And besides, she was full. That undergrad, now crumpled on the floor, had been blessed with an abundance of blood, and hadn’t taken the opportunity yet to dilute it with such follies as alcohol or charitable donations to the Red Cross.
Her smile curled wicked as she leaned in toward Theodore, her mouth hovering above the beating pulse of his neck. “Ok,” she said, “tell me more about this thesis.”
That had been about five thesis ideas ago, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Dr. Abriana Pierce kept up with what Theodore’s thesis was. Not her responsibility. No, that was his advisor’s problem. Dr. Mark Russo, a real vampire’s vampire of a man, all salt-and-pepper hair and beard, his face assembled from sharp and unforgiving planes. He hadn’t exactly been known for training up new vampires, but what choice did he have? Theodore had been his problem when he was just a mortal fumbling through the beginnings of grad school, Dr. Russo wasn’t going to abandon the lad now, just because he had the making of becoming his problem eternally.
For a professor, Dr. Russo wasn’t necessarily adept at teaching. Certainly not when it came to vampire things. But between them they managed, Theodore learning the requirements of this new hunger inside him, and Dr. Russo continuing to advise yet another topic change, even as Theodore’s interests veered more toward the anthropology department than strictly history. There would be time to nudge his topic back toward firmer history department territory when Theodore’s next spark of inspiration came. The vampire etiquette, Dr. Russo did his best to keep Theodore in enough of the know not to fuck things up for everyone.
“Think of the undergrads like fast food,” said Dr. Russo. “Quick, convenient, especially in a pinch, but you don’t want to rely on eating nothing but undergrads.”
“Oh. Are they like, bad for your cholesterol or something?”
“No they’re bad for being obvious if too many of them go missing, especially if you leave some kind of trail that can be traced back to you. You’ve got to keep a low profile, stay under the radar, and try not to get caught murdering people every week.”
“Can I just—“
“And don’t rob the Red Cross.”
Theodore sat in the cozy warmth of his apartment, his thick oak dining table buried in stacks of books—old books, new books, books of indeterminate age, books that were probably new but had been bound in respectable leather covers to look like they carried the sort of weight that meant they belonged with proper, authoritative old books. He was days deep into a research binge, his dark wavy hair pushed at all angles off his head as he thought, all considerations of feeding or sleep abandoned in favor of pursuing knowledge among his bookshelves and blackout curtains.
He liked the concept of being a historian, and played into the image of it not intentionally but by his natural proclivities. He liked to still wear glasses he now didn’t need, for example—sometimes a tiny older pair of pince-nez he’d stumbled on at a flea market antiques booth, other times a solid set of tortoiseshell patterned rectangles, or other times again a tasteful pair of wire-rimmed glasses that made him look quite thoughtful, in his opinion—well. As far as he could remember, anyway, sighing at an empty reflection before trying to hold his phone out far enough for a decent selfie to confirm the look. Selfies just weren’t the same as a proper look in the mirror, but it wasn’t the worst sort of trade-off. Just some extra steps to bother over, since it was just him and his penchant for sweatervests, alone in his book-filled apartment most days. The only part of his predilections that didn’t rigidly conform to the whole bookworm vibe were the dark cherry hints in his hair, which you could glimpse when the light hit it just right, and his fondness for keeping his nails painted in colors dark enough that unless you were staring at them intently, you’d take them for black.
No one spent their time staring at Theodore’s nails intently, or really staring at much of Theodore at all.
He just had a certain look to him that fit the general idea of “historian” without further examination needed, as far as most people were concerned. He managed to top out at five foot six on a good day, and carried his weight in all the softest, most comfortable places. It made him a world class hugger and cuddler, not that anyone was lining up for such things. No, most eyes slid over him with a passing thought of “there’s a soft little man in a sweatervest” and left it at that. And maybe if Theodore didn’t spend so much time on his studies, if he got out there and socialized—but there would be time for that later.
He was really, REALLY close this time to something that was absolutely going to shape up to be the perfect thesis topic. It had to do with the history of bugs both in relation to the development of civilizations throughout time, and how those developments became interwoven with the mythology of said civilizations, like the moth for example, what led to such differing interpretations of its omens between Native American peoples versus Northern European peoples? And this wasn’t even getting into other bugs like the beetle, and—
And….
And….
Something about them. Similar symbology to the moths, maybe. Life, rebirth. And lived in balls of shit. Yeah, there’s a metaphor for sure as far as beetles were concerned. No, that wasn’t it. Theodore groaned, and tried to remember the point he was trying to get to, and failing that, tried to remember the last time he’d fed. Too long, now that he thought about it. He was losing his focus.
He flipped open his laptop, and pulled out his phone. This was one of those fast food occasions. He didn’t have the energy to track down someone sufficiently safe to feed on far from home. Theodore opened up the spreadsheet on his laptop that kept track of all the different undergrad courses and syllabi of assignments, and thumbed open an app on his phone, starting a new chat thread. He hadn’t hit the psych department recently, he thought, scrolling through the spreadsheet for whatever paper or assignment in the department had the most imminent deadline.
“H e l p
I have a fifth of patrón and no idea what to do about suicidal ideation”
Now to wait for dinner to deliver itself.
Mo Taiman wasn’t the only therapist serving the magical-supernatural community, nor was he even the only one in New York City. But he was pretty sure he was the only unlicensed therapist who was also himself a cryptid, in New York and possibly the entire United States. A mothman, specifically—not THE mothman, that would be his cousin. But by birth, Mo was of the mothman species, and all that entailed, from giant wings to the ability to harbinge doom.
Young Mo, however, was not interested in any of those things. Not the giant green and brown wings, not his prescience and ability to foretell bad things but the familial insistence on doing nothing to help people. That’s what he wanted—to help people. Sure, his family didn’t understand or take kindly to Mo learning to shapeshift, to taking on a human form and seeking to help others control their own fates. That’s why he left them and West Virginia behind. That’s why he hadn’t spoken to them in a long time, and lived in a converted camper van driving around New York City, putting a lot of self-study and secretly attended college courses to good use helping a demographic that could rarely get the help they needed from typical human avenues.
Honestly, go on. Call up your regular therapist and ask THEM how to deal with the god of Chaos ruining your life by giving your ex the power to rewrite reality, which he used to craft an alternate timeline where he helped you kill everyone you ever loved. And sure everything is back to the correct timeline now, but you’re all fucked up over how much you enjoyed some aspects of that alternate life—let’s set a timer before your therapist writes the words “psychotic break” on the proverbial notepad and surreptitiously arranges an involuntary commitment for you.
Mo, on the other hand, had dealt with all these things and more. He knew all the major and minor gods that liked to wreak havoc in the lives of his clients. No need to dance around the problem in tortured metaphors. Or desperately try to convince your therapist that, no really, your boyfriend really accidentally summoned an actual, literal demon. He had heard it all, and knew with enough time, he would hear more. He kept himself connected to the magical community, both in person and online. He had helped a lot of people.
Unfortunately, that made it hard to find people left that he hadn’t helped to even begin to think about dating.
Just because he was unlicensed didn’t mean he didn’t have ethics! He couldn’t possibly consider becoming romantically involved with one of his clients—nor had he ever considered such a thing. Mostly, at this point, his schedule was so full between driving around town to in person consultations, attending regularly scheduled teleheath appointments with his clients, making time for impromptu sessions (that he did cheat and use his foretelling to know only to be ready for, scheduling-wise), and going to various magic practitioners guild-associated nightspots to dispense with sage wisdom and coping mechanisms, he didn’t have time to even begin to contemplate the idea of romance.
Ok. Maybe he had, on a rare empty night, begun to consider to contemplate to possibly think about the general concept of romance with himself as a participant therein. To hesitantly begin the idea of dating as something both existing and involving himself. But no further than that barest minimum of a beginning. Who would he even date? Not another of his own species—his life choices had made it pretty clear he was not welcome among them. No regular humans either—for all his shapeshifting ability, his human presentation wasn’t perfect. Some of it worked in his favor—being 6ft 6.6in was short among mothmen, but quite tall for a human, and the impression lines of his concealed wings looked like tattoos along his skin. The bangs sticking up like antennae from his forehead could be explained away as hair gel. But there was no concealing that where most people had irises and pupils and sclera, Mo had pure glowing red orbs encompassing all three. That was a pretty obvious giveaway that he wasn’t exactly human. He wore a pair of big round sunglasses made of dark green welder’s glass to help hide it, but you could still see the glow around the edges.
So no. No, no, no, Mo simply didn’t really much think about the dating scene in any way that had a place for him in it. He had a purpose in life that he was happy to satisfy, and a paid-off van he happily lived in. And a membership to the biggest chain of 24 hour gyms to maintain access to hot shower water. Even if he had no one he shared his life with like that, that was no reason to smell anything less than delightful. As long as you considered pistachio with a hint of rose water delightful.
Mo had just stepped back into his van, another day’s nightly shower complete. The December air was cold, but the van quickly warmed up enough to kick off his shoes and shuck off his puffy jacket, down to his comfortable white T-shirt emblazoned with his favorite admonishment—THEN PROSPER—and his soft dark green sweatpants. He prepped the next day’s cold brew in a pair of jars that he set in the cup holders up front, and then draped himself sideways in his office chair to check for any new messages in the guild app. He usually knew to some small extent when the services of the esteemed username lepidoptherapy would be needed, but he also tried not to overdo it with the foreseeing. The future is never set in stone until it’s become the past, and you could miss a lot of important things in the present if you spent too much time with your eyes only fixed ahead. Besides, life had a lot of fun to it if you let it surprise you, and Mo liked to.
No direct messages, but he checked to see what posts there were. Some people still didn’t know about the services he offered, especially if they were new to the community. They usually needed the most help. Learning about the magical world had at least a 50% chance (if not greater) of being a traumatic event, from what he’d seen.
Bingo, here was something promising. A post titled “H e l p” from a username—gustavsredplanet—he’d never seen make a post before. Mo nearly fell out of his chair when he read the post, hurrying to send the user a message.
lepidoptherapy: hey!! saw your post. I can help—you want to text, call, video chat, I’m here for you
gustavsredplanet: Can you come over? Sorry, I hate talking on the phone…
lepidoptherapy: send me the address and I’ll be there as fast as I can drive without getting caught and arrested for it
Theodore smiled, rubbing his forehead as he thumbed out the address in reply. Bless these undergrads. Nothing got them hustling faster than a promise of liquor.
Mo quickly made sure all the hatches were battened down in the van, the address keyed in to his phone and his phone placidly advising turns as he eased into traffic. It wasn’t far. And this wouldn’t be the first or last suicidal person he’d responded to, and yet every time it got his adrenaline racing in the worst possible way. It wasn’t far, and yet every second felt too far. Every word spoken would be loaded with terrible possibility, every move or lack thereof laden with consequence. A minefield of right and wrong answers that would only become clear in retrospect. But he had to do his best. As he often thought to himself, repeating something he’d seen said online, you become whoever would have saved you that time no one did. So no matter what the outcome, he had to try to help.
Theodore pulled his knitted toboggan—the one with the respectable sized pompom—down just over the tops of his ears, and zipped up his jacket before stepping outside to wait. He liked to catch his victims outside, maneuver them around, and above all keep them and their blood splatter far away from his books. The cloudy sky had just begun to scatter steady fistfuls of snowflakes in a continuous stream cast in all directions, adding a hushed layer of sound to the chaos of his typical city street. Sure, Theodore hadn’t been religious even before the vampire thing, but snow in December as the nearby storefront Christmas lights twinkled and glowed did stir warm feelings in his heart. That vague and appropriate feeling of “the season,” where you inexplicably smiled at strangers, and thought about wishing for peace on earth, if not also good will towards men. Didn’t men get enough good will wished toward them, Theodore idly thought through the haze of his hunger. Wasn’t it time to wish good will towards all the other genders?
A sharp honk broke his reverie as a departing car made its screaming way out of a parking space and into the flow of traffic. Oh, perfect, Theodore thought, hustling to stand in the vacated spot. He didn’t want to have to wait for his delivery to fight for a parking space, and sent a message.
gustavsredplanet: Got a spot for you out front
The message remained delivered but not yet read—probably for the best, texting while driving should not be lepidoptherapy’s deadly activity of the night. Theodore chuckled to himself, glanced up and down the street as if he had any idea what kind of vehicle he was looking for, and looked back down to pick back up reading one of the PDFs he’d started on before as if he could really focus right now. He couldn’t. Mindless social media doomscrolling then.
Mo’s attention darted from his phone—Your destination is on the right—to the buildings themselves, looking for numbers, to the line of vehicles up and down the sides of the street, to the phone, where a message from the guild app pinged, begging to be looked at, not right now, to the twinkle and shine of all the—damn him all to hell, the utterly alluring sparkle of Christmas lights in full force on all the windows of the street, accented by the beautiful drift and swirl of snowflakes coming down now as his van crept forward. It was only a stroke of luck that he happened to glance in his passenger side mirror and see an empty spot right there, throwing on his turn signal and shifting into reverse before the taxi behind him could ride up too close on his bumper. The taxi still cut around him without even putting in the effort of laying on the horn, and Mo took advantage of the opening, eyes on his mirrors, swinging his van fast back into the space and lurching to a stop when he felt something halfway into the space hit the back of his van, hard.
Oh. SHIT.
That was definitely something, Mo thought with a panicked jolt. Not only had it felt like something, it felt like something, you know. Meaty. Alive. Not a wayward bicycle or a fallen ACME safe or something that would be sort of ok to have backed into with accelerated force. Mo jabbed his hazard lights on and scrambled out of the van, narrowly avoiding a passing passenger mirror to the elbow as he hurried to slip between traffic and the side of his vehicle to see what he’d hit.
Oh shit I hit a person WHERE DID HE COME FROM?!
Theodore groaned softly, eyes closed, laying on his back on the damp and dirty asphalt where the van’s back bumper had thrown him.
“Oh shit,” Mo said, as if saying it out loud instead would jump start his brain to move past the swearing-and-panicking stage into the doing something helpful stage. So far no, but it was worth another try. “Oh shit.” There. Ok. He needed to deal with this first. He needed to send a message to gustavsredplanet. He needed to do both things at the same time, somehow. He hurriedly pulled his phone out, thumbs racing to tap out a message as he approached the man laid out by his carelessness.
lepidoptherapy: I’ll be right there it’s just going to be a minute something’s come up
On the ground above Theodore’s head, his phone buzzed with an incoming message, the guild app icon flashing on the screen.
Mo blinked, looking at the phone.
lepidoptherapy: oh my god
Zzzzt!
lepidoptherapy: DID I RUN YOU OVER?
Zzzzt!
Mo dropped to his knees, hands hovering over the swell of stomach, the gentle face, searching for vital signs, for the rise and fall of breath, for an outlet besides muttering “are you ok are you ok are you ok” like a prayer rather than a question, thinking to himself oh god what have I done he’s dead—
Theodore’s hands broke through Mo’s racing thoughts, grabbing Mo by the shirt front, pulling him down onto Theodore. All Theodore could piece together through the fog of hunger and the blinding pain of blunt force trauma was that someone was here, and that meant food. He was deliriously hungry, too hungry to notice anything unusual about this stranger, too hungry to care that he was about to feed right out in the open. Just a snack, just enough to get his bearings, just enough to get a little energy and get up off the ground and go from there. Mo yelped, struggling to plant his hands on the wet pavement and push away, but Theodore was stronger and more determined, fangs sinking into the warm neck that he’d yanked down to his mouth, taking a deep drink—
Of WHAT THE DEVIL WAS THAT? Theodore tried to shout, but in his condition all that came out was a slurred whimper of confusion. Mo broke free, pushing the slipping glasses back up his nose, the reddish light dimming as he did. He clapped a hand to his neck as he tried to scurry backwards on his ass, wary of a scurry too far planting him under the tires of a passing commuter bus, stopping before he could feel the whisper of tires peeling by. He took his hand away from the wound, looking at the pale greenish-yellow hemolymph on his fingertips, then looking at the man on the ground who was seemingly NOT dead, who had just BIT him, who was making sad sounds and little “bleh” noises to try to weakly spit the greenish-yellow liquid back out of his mouth, off his flickering pink tongue.
OH.
Mo shivered involuntarily against the cold in his t-shirt and crawled back over. Because dammit, he couldn’t help wanting to help.
“Gustav..?” Mo hazarded to guess.
“Nnnnnnnno-oh my god,” said Theodore weakly, “why do you taste so bad?”
“Because moths don’t have BLOOD!” Mo hissed in a whisper, close to Theodore’s face. Theodore moaned again. Blood. All he wanted right now was something to eat. He didn’t even make an effort to get up yet, the hunger leaving him too light-headed.
But Mo was incensed, his thin eyebrows creased in a hard line on his forehead, heedless of the traffic beeping at his waiting van. “Were you even…was this all just a ruse?!”
Theodore frowned up at Mo, the pieces starting to click together slowly. “Lep…lepido…pidop…therapy? You’re not—“ he frowned intently at Mo’s eyes, at the rim of glowing red peeking around the circles of glass, “you’re not in psych 102. Are you?”
“No!”
“…moths…?”
“Not the place to discuss this!” Mo let out a breath, and some of his anger with it, because he was right. This wasn’t the place to discuss any of this. “Let me guess, you need to …eat.”
“Oh that would be lovely,” Theodore said, doing his best to keep his words from slurring together, feebly waving Mo to come closer again, the memory of mere moments ago already slipping away.
Mo shook his head and stood, leaning down to grab Theodore by the hands, bracing his legs one ahead of the other for leverage. “Help me help you up.”
It wasn’t pretty, but between the two of them they managed to get Theodore up, his feet stumbling under him, all hope of reclaiming balance quickly lost as the momentum of the lift sent Theodore crashing into Mo’s chest. Only Mo’s superior stability saved them both the indignity of falling down again.
“Alright,” Mo sighed, hands firmly now on Theodore’s shoulders to keep the smaller man from wobbling out of alignment again. “You may have lured me here under questionable, if not totally false pretenses, but I’m going to help you anyway. So now it’s my turn to be the creeper here.” Mo turned Theodore around, and gestured expansively at the waiting vehicle with another sigh. “Get into my van?”
Once the icy chill had melted from Mo’s hands under the blast of the van’s heaters, idling in the most hard-won parking space he’d sat in to date, he held his now-warmed hand out to his lightly groaning passenger.
“What? No, yes, no, I mean,” Theodore shook his head, and took Mo’s hand, trying to keep his thoughts in order. “My name is Theodore. Yes, I’m a vampire. The username is…favorite composer…nevermind. Suicidal? No, no… I don’t understand.” He fumbled around in his pockets, looking for his phone, before Mo took back his hand and handed Theodore his lost phone in its place. Theodore tapped on the messaging app for the college, staring in confusion at a distinct lack of any post by him or one of his burner accounts. The guild app notification popped up on his phone—
lepidoptherapy: what don’t you understand?
Theodore looked up from his phone, over to Mo, who sat tapping his index fingers against the side of his own phone, gazing expectantly at Theodore. Theodore opened the notification, and looked at his post in the guild app.
In the wrong app.
“Ohhhhh pears,” said Theodore, the realization slowly coming over him. “You, oh I posted in the wrong, oh but you’ve got to take me to the dorms or something, help me find somebody—“
“Help be an accessory to a murder?” Mo interrupted incredulously. “Absolutely not!”
Theodore pouted. “I don’t…have…to kill them…”
“You’re a vampire, you don’t keep little emergency blood bags in your fridge?”
“I might not be a very good vampire,” Theodore admitted. “Oh, take me down to Central Park?”
“Not,” Mo repeated emphatically, “being an accessory to murder.”
“Are you kidnapping me?”
“I’m helping you,” Mo muttered. “What kind of blood can you have?”
Theodore gave a noncommittal groan.
Mo was busy typing search terms in his browser without success, hoping for some reason that there would be an online ordering option, perhaps, a vampire’s take-out shop. Did it have to be fresh? Did it have to be human? The searches piled up uselessly on Mo’s phone:
where to get blood (assumed he meant where to give blood)
free blood (a musical group, apparently)
purchase blood (fake corn syrup blood, in alarmingly large quantities)
human blood? (buy human bio specimens online! Ships worldwide! Lack of shipping timeline definitely seemed like this was not something he would have in hand tonight, before Theodore passed out)
pig blood (defibrinated animal blood! Blood meal products! Mo made a disgusted face, not entirely sure what defibrinated meant and in too much of a hurry to find out)
24hr butcher (a 24 hour meat vending machine in Rochester?)
butcher near me 24hr (a butcher shop simply called Carniceria, allegedly open 24 hours, concerningly unreviewed)
black market ordering?? (Did you mean “Back Market Ordering”? Mo didn’t think he did, and he was afraid to click on the links to find out)
buy cows blood (Best Buy)
“BEST BUY?!” Mo howled, holding his phone out, shoving the screen toward Theodore. “They can’t possibly actually carry COW’S BLOOD….at BEST BUY?!”
Theodore peered at the phone, where Mo had indeed searched “buy cows blood” and the algorithm suggested “Best Buy” in between a meat wholesaler and a farm.
“Maybe it’s an anime?” said Theodore, settling further into the seat. “Think I’ll have a nap. Or otherwise just be a little unconscious.”
“Maybe..” Mo winced, hesitating. “I could break into the Red Cross? Do they even store blood there?”
“DON’T,” said Theodore vehemently, “do NOT. Do not break into the Red Cross.”
Mo lapsed into silence, tapping on his phone. After a couple minutes he set the phone down between the jars of cold brew in the cup holders, the navigation cheerfully intoning, “continue straight.”
“Buckle up buddy, I’ve got something maybe.”
Theodore managed to get buckled before a nap—or the irresistible state of being otherwise a little unconsciousness—stole over him.
Theodore didn’t wake up again for the muttered swearing, the phone cheerfully offering up “recalculating” on more than one occasion, being left in the van idling in another parking space while Mo got out, nor Mo shaking him by the shoulder saying “hey, wake up. Theodore?”
He did wake up when something dreadfully cold was pressed between his lips, the flavor hitting his tongue like a wad of melted down pennies strained through a stale, crusty sock.
“Eugh!?” Theodore grimaced, trying to pull his face away. It wasn’t as bad as the hemolymph, in the same way that getting hit with a car wasn’t as bad as getting full-on run over.
“You need to eat. Right? Here,” Mo said, taking Theodore’s hand and guiding it to the thick wooden popsicle stick he was holding up, jammed into a wobbly wide cylinder of dark, frozen red liquid.
It tasted terrible, but it was marginally food enough for Theodore to survive on. He could feel the ache settling back down. Mo pressed a stack of napkins into Theodore’s other hand before shutting the passenger door, coming back around to slide into the driver’s seat with a relieved sigh. Theodore continued to pull a face as he ate, then slurped the puck of frozen pig’s blood, catching drips on the napkins before they dotted his jacket. Mo watched, curious, as Theodore downed what looked, by his expression, to be the most horrible freeze-pop of his life. Unlife? Mo knew there were vampires in the city, but he hadn’t encountered any of them intimately yet. Intimately! Mo blushed a little to himself, wondering why in the world his brain would choose to word it that way.
Theodore licked his lips and wiped his face on the least bloodied napkins in the stack. That had been the opposite of fast food. That had been slow food at the end of a long hike, and instead of it being anything that tasted good it was one of those cardboard protein bricks made of 50% half-translated theories of chocolate and 50% chalky imitation of soylent-is-people. But it was enough, the fog clearing from his head. He looked over at—Mo, was it?—finally able to appreciate that even after Theodore had pretty much tried to kill him, Mo had still gone out of his way to help him. And oh, oh no.
He was cute.
“Thank you,” said Theodore. “I needed that. Sorry about—“
“Trying to eat me?” suggested Mo with a grin.
“Yeah, that.” Theodore smiled sheepishly.
“Well, kind of fair. I did run you over first.”
“Only a little. They pretty much cancel each other out, don’t you think?”
“You sure they aren’t escalations?”
“Oh, if you’re wanting to escalate things,” said Theodore, the corners of his mouth twitching upward in delight. “Why don’t you take me back to my apartment for a drink that doesn’t consist of any bodily fluids, and we can start this over with a proper hello? I’ve got some really neat books, and the finest port wine that twenty bucks and the grocery store down the street had to offer the last time I remembered to actually buy wine.”
Escalate things! Oh, but by that little grin on his face, Mo could tell Theodore was only teasing him. But he didn’t like the idea of dropping Theodore back off, and continuing his night doing much of nothing, alone. Mo pulled Theodore’s address back up on his map, making a quick left turn under his phone’s guidance. “You’re a vampire. What did you buy wine for?”
“To celebrate my deciding on a thesis topic! I’m a graduate student in the history department, actually.”
“You can tell the past? Hm. I can tell the future—though I try not to, mostly.” He glanced at Theodore’s expression, looking at him expectantly, lip caught between his teeth as he waited to see if Mo would accept his invitation. Ha! Being invited in by a vampire. Mo glanced again, and dammit all to hell, felt the heat of another blush sweep across his cheeks as his eyes snapped back to the road.
Theodore was remarkably cute.
“Alright. Yeah, let’s go back and start this night over. With less violence this time, accidental or intentional. Tell me about your thesis on the way.”
Theodore wiggled excitedly as he sat up in the passenger seat. “You’ll love this, I think. Part of it, I’m studying the history of moths…”
How did this book come out without me ever hearing about it?!
This book (that came out yesterday, on the 9th) is marketed as a Stranger Things/Stand By Me-esque story about a group of friends in 1980s Niagra Falls, investigating cryptids and ghost stories 😍
