Free An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel

certain that the young woman had not recently conceived and so assumed the boy was using the word in a medical context.
    “A nurse where?” he shouted.
    “Shepherd’s Crook Hospital,” Simon answered. “Why?”
    The eight-year-old received no reply. In fact, for the rest of the evening, Simon could not help but note that the vampire was unusually quiet. Not that he lost too much sleep over it.
    He was too busy building a forge in the backyard.

Chapter 8
    Rusty Olsen rode the bus home at 2:00 a.m., sure that everyone was staring at him.
Everyone
may have included only the bus driver, who was staring at the road, a homeless man, who was staring at the back of his own eyelids, and a waitress, who
was
staring at him and had a good grip on her mace. It didn’t matter, though. Rusty was always sure that people were watching him. Sometimes, it was because they were judging him; other times, it was because they were jealous of him. Sometimes, it was his red-orange hair or his acne or his stubble. 16
    In this case, it was because he was wearing purple-and-black velvet robes.
    The robes hung off Rusty like a person hangs from a ledge—desperately. Custom-made, the robes gave off the illusion of not fitting, quite possibly because they didn’t. They had been tailored twelve years ago for a teenager hoping to grow another six inches and shed a few pounds. This had not happened, and so the middle was too tight, the ends were too long, and the hood, big enough for three heads, fell well past his eyes, making it impossible to see.
    Rusty tapped his rings impatiently against the bar in front of him. Each finger had a ring, including clawed ones on both pinkies. While this made getting his bus card out of his wallet a ten-minute ordeal, Rusty refused to do without them. Better to go all-out than be seen as a half-assed poser. And besides, he couldn’t get the rings off without large amounts of Vaseline. The only concession he made when traveling among “normal” people lay in a black velvet pouch attached to his waist. The items resting in that sacred space were more valuable than gold to Rusty, and losing them would mean utter disgrace and another couple hundred bucks.
    They were his fangs.
    To be honest, he would have much preferred to wear them, as well. Fewer people openly gawked at a pair of enlarged, sharpened veneer canines. Fewer still tried to mug him for whatever was in his purse. 17 As a weirdo, he was vulnerable, but as a freak, he was fine.
    That being said, there had been an incident, of sorts. It had been an innocent-enough mistake. The little old lady had simply needed help getting on the bus. Rusty, black clothes and fangs aside, was actually a very nice boy. So he’d given her a kindly smile and tried to help her up the stairs. The problem hadn’t been that the fangs made him look particularly dangerous or threatening, it was that the little old lady, while little and old, was also a kendo master, one who suffered from bouts of dementia.
    Following the shame, the police report, and the physical therapy, Rusty now carried his fangs in a pouch while in public. 18
    Rusty pulled the cord to signal his stop. With an awkward amount of effort, he extricated himself from his seat and walked to the door. As he did, he passed the twitchy waitress.
    Hiss,
his mind hissed, filling her with fear, respect, and just a bit of lustful desire.
    Yeah, you keep walking, freak,
her mind replied, without any fear, respect, and absolutely zero lustful desire.
    Rusty exited the bus and began the long and uncomfortable march home. Sauntering through the city, visiting the bars he did, in the parts of town he did, that was one thing. Taking the bus out of the city, that was another. But walking through a quiet suburban neighborhood, with lawns and gnomes and swing sets, while dressed as a dark lord of vampirism was something else entirely. Plus it was cold, and surprisingly, the velvet robes were not warming.
    As he walked, his mind