Free Young Forever by Lola Pridemore Page A

to ignore it. But they persisted and began to threaten us. So we decided to let them “lure” us into the basement so they could make mince meat out of us. So rude. Seriously. But after about five minutes, there were all on the floor dissolved into the black tar looking mess that they were.
    And why had we been able to do that? To completely mop the floor with them? Because we were old. We’d been around for centuries. I was old and Gerta and Aloiki were older than me. With our combined strength, we were as strong as an army. Well, maybe not that strong but as strong as a good-sized group. Humans weaken with age, but vampires gain strength. We get more tenacious, more agile. Our minds get sharper and, soon enough, we can do stuff like run up the sides of buildings—which we rarely do as that would draw a crowd—and, sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can read minds, which I refuse to do because it’s rude and classless and I don’t really want to know what people think of me. We’d been around a while. We had a lot of experience and this wasn’t our first rodeo, as they say. This usually made all the difference in the world because we didn’t make rookie mistakes. We looked at killing other vampires as a necessity to survival, if they posed a threat. If not, we left them alone. We don’t attack every vampire we see, either. No. Some vampires are nice, just let me say. We have vampire friends all over the world.
    This would not be the case for these vampires, the ones on front of us now. We couldn’t make nice with them. They were, in a word, just plain dumb. They had no idea what they were up against. They thought they were going to bully us. They were young and too used to dealing with humans. They thought they were invincible. They thought they were going to be our undoing. They were dead wrong.
    After we got started, it didn’t take any time at all to do what we did best. The baseball bat came in handy and one hard swipe to the head of a large thug and he was out, as were his friends, one at a time. Stake, stake, and a few more stakes and we were done. (Most of the time, we all carry a small, wooden stake with this. It’s like a gun for vampires.) It wasn’t that hard. We just used our cunning and our strength to overcome them and we even took a prisoner, a younger girl with red hair who begged us for mercy, who told us that if we spared her life then she would show us how “they” did it. She told us that if we worked together, we could get even more blood by posing as nurses for hospitals and, in her words, “stuff like that.”
    “What do you think?” Aloiki asked us, holding fast to her arm and not allowing her to run away.
    I glanced at Gerta , who shrugged. “She could be helpful,” I said. “And, really, what choice do we have?”
    “Yes, let’s spare her,” Gerta said. “She is small and looks frightened like a feral cat.”
    I stared at Janelle. She did, sort of, remind me of a cat, a feral one at that. “So, how do you do this?” I asked and jerked my head towards the blood bank.
    “You go in and eat,” she said. “But that’s not the easiest way to get blood. In fact, that’s one of the hardest ways to get it.”
    I was intrigued. “What can you do?”
    “It’s easy,” she said and removed her arm from Aloiki’s grip. “You can do all sorts of things. You can take people’s blood like you’re a phlebotomy tech.”
    Like a what? Then I thought about it.Oh. Ohhhhh !
    “What an intriguing idea,” Gerta said and smiled at the young woman up. “What is your name?”
    “Janelle,” she said.
    And that’s how we got stuck with her.
     
    * * * * *
     
    One good thing about vampires is that they don’t hold grudges. We’re usually a pretty well laid back group of paranormals. Janelle seemed to fit this mold pretty well because she didn’t seen too broken up over her boyfriend, the one I took the baseball bat from and to. For some reason, I thought she’d be pissed. But she