I followed Louise down the driveway to the little house with the well-kept garden. A Black BMW with black tinted windows was sitting in front of the garage door, stylishly cool. It spoke volumes about the owner, saying that he was coolly efficient, confident and just rich enough to think that he was ten times better than you, and if you were richer than he was, then it wouldn't faze him one way or the other. He probably walked around the house in a pullover or something equally as metrosexual.

His name was Robert, and when he opened the door, he was wearing a pullover. I hated him on first sight. Pompous prick.

In hindsight, I probably realized that something else was off about this guy, but I couldn't pinpoint it at the time. There was just some other reason that I didn't like him, and maybe if I had spotted the way he had of flicking his incisors with his tongue whenever he saw blood, I would have figured it out. Or maybe not: vampires were not real, not then, and were not something I used to be on the lookout for.

"Is this him?" He asked Louise, indicating me.

I took my hand off my neck before Louise could reply and grinned. "I am him. He. Him. He..." How did it go again? Ahh, fuck it, it didn't matter anyway. "I'm the guy."

"Like he said. Robert this is Bob, Bob... hey wait a minute-I've got two Bobs." She looked back and forth at us, feeling clever.

"Let's just stick to Robert, what do you say?" Robert looked disgusted at that thought of being called 'Bob'. Nothing wrong with 'Bob'. I liked it just fine, thank you very much.

Louise shrugged an 'okay.' "You got the stuff right?"

"Yeah, come on in and let's get him fixed up and on the way."

Louise rolled her eyes at me as Robert opened the door wide. She could tell what I was thinking sometimes, I swear.

"Be nice, okay?"

"Being nice starting... now."

I stepped inside and instantly forgot my promise. "Holy fucking shit. It's Ikea!"

Robert's house was almost an Ikea showroom. Everything looked like it had been lifted wholesale from Ikea, every combination perfect and complimentary. I was almost expecting a big yellow shopping bag to be handed to me at any second before I was pointed towards the cinnamon buns and cheap 50-cent hotdogs.

"Sorry, about that Robert. I forgot to warn you that he's an idiot."

"It's quite okay. I get that reaction a lot."

I shrugged as Louise glared at me. "What?"

"You're lucky you're already bleeding."

That's when I saw it. The large Flarken Broj coffee table in the living room that was next to the Mjolnir combination couch and sectional had the largest Gudaam Fuuken pile of pills I had ever seen in my entire life. Tuinol and Seconal, Xanadrine and Setonicon, uppers, downers, anti-psychotics, pre-psychotics, cocaine, morphine... it was like walking into 1980's Stephen Tyler's wet dream or bathroom. Remember what I said about doctors and prescription pills?

"Have I told you recently how much I love you?" I asked Louise, my eyes drinking in the drugs and plotting a course of complete annihilation. The right cocktail of drugs could kill you dead, but if you got the combination just right, you could party for a week.

"No drugs for you Bob," she said and damn she was strong.

Louise grabbed me and steered me away from the drugs down the corridor behind Robert to the bathroom. I protested all the way of course. I mean, goddamn! That was a lot of drugs!

The artwork was at least pre-Ikea and looked pretty expensive. There was a piece that looked like what could have been an early Rembrandt, but it had been more than a decade since I had studied art history, so excuse me if I was a little rusty at the time. Claude could have been able to tell me after he had stolen it and sold it to the highest bidder of course, but he's good like that. He absorbs all of the details about important stuff, but me, I'm almost completely useless without Google.

The bathroom was (big surprise) another Ikea masterpiece. I just bit my tongue and sat where Louise instructed me to. Robert disappeared down the corridor.

"You could have warned me about the Ikea effect," I whispered to her. "How do you expect me to behave when I'm walking into something like this?"

"You know I've really, really missed you. We should make a point of going out for breakfast after this."

"Yay breakfast." It occurred to me that I was broke. "Um..."

"My treat."

Have I mentioned how much Louise ruled? It's true. She totally ruled.

She inspected the bite on my neck now, slapping my hands away whenever she touched something sensitive, and I reacted. The bite was beginning to throb the more I thought about it and what she was doing, so Louise had obviously been right about infection.

"For someone unable to get over their ex-girlfriend, you sure don't seem to mind the one night stands."

"It was literally the first time in three months that I've actually had real sex. I've masturbated so much that my hands are about to sprout hair and I'm going to need a cane and dark glasses pretty soon if I keep it up. You know, for when—"

"When you go blind. Yeah, I know the joke. You need to take better care of yourself, Bob. How am I supposed to torture you if you're not around?"

Robert returned and passed some very medical looking supplies to Louise. He raised an eyebrow at me as he passed me a drink.

Louise: "That's not alcohol is it?"

"You know I don't drink... alcohol..."

I think both Louise and I must have rolled our eyes, but it got the first real grin out of Robert that I had seen. And the first real look at his incisors. This was a guy who was born to be a vampire. He passed Louise a bottle of water.

"You want me to do that?"

I could only imagine the look Louise gave him from behind my back. It must have been a doozy because Sweater Bob looked a little disappointed.

"I've got it, Robert. Thanks but I'm good at bites, remember?"

Robert looked from the bite to me, and I knew I hated this dude. "You should try to avoid getting bitten, Bob." He almost spat my name. "It's very unhygienic."

So there we were in Robert's house, Louise cleaning my bite wound and fixing me up, Robert watching from the doorway, and me wincing on occasion as Louise performed some heinous act on my neck. At least she wasn't telling me about the diseases a person could catch from being bitten by another human being. Nope. That was Robert, and it was practically a repeat performance of Louise's earlier diatribe. I swear it must be a doctor thing.

So I was practically dozing, off in my happy place where Robert wasn't talking at me, or actually didn't even exist. When Louise's phone rang from her purse out in the Lack™ living room, and she ran out to get it, I didn't even notice.

I heard distantly as she picked it up and started to talk, but I was reliving the best moments of this evening's grapple in my car and didn't care at the time. I didn't even care when Robert stepped behind me, presumably to look at Louise's handiwork.

I was still at the part where Gloria's head was still in my lap, when Robert made an incision at the side of my neck and began to suck on it long and hard. It happened pretty quickly, but by that time I was beyond caring. I was relaxed and carefree, off in the drug induced haze of whatever drug had been slipped into my coke. Apparently, Sweater Bob was also good at roofies. One of the additional benefits of being a doctor I suppose.

The bastard.

There were additional incisions with Robert sucking on each one with a determination and enthusiasm that I had only recently experienced with Gloria in the car. One of the things I found out much, much later was that it was a pain in the ass to drink non-arterial blood. The blood will flow quite easily yes, but once your friendly neighborhood vampire puts his mouth on you, the saliva in his mouth will cause the blood to flow even faster. But the instant they stop sucking, that same saliva has a tendency to cause the cut to heal, and fast. And for all of you who are asking why he doesn't just drink from an artery: are you even listening? The aim here is not to kill your victim. Cut into an artery and three times out of five you will have a dead body on your hands, and you're fucking up the supply.

I didn't notice how many times he cut me, but I do know that when Louise eventually came back, I was barely able to hold my head up.

Oh yeah... Louise. I hadn't even thought to tell her to run. That Sweater Bob here thought he was some kind of vampire or something.

Her reaction wasn't exactly the one I had expected.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"Having a drink. We can share."

"Robert you asshole! I didn't bring him here for you."

"You didn't?"

"No, I didn't. Fuck. You drugged him didn't you?"

"You sure you don't want some?"

"He's my friend Robert. My actual friend. He's a bit of doorknob sometimes, but he's a friend. I do not make a habit of taking blood from my friends, especially without asking."

"Hey, how was I supposed to know?" Robert sounded a little drunk. He was slurring his words like a crackhead who'd just gotten a fix. He sucked on my back for a quick second.

"Stop that!"

"You sure you don't want some?"

Louise just looked sad. She looked away.

"Yeah, I'm sure. Now, will you please stop that?"

"It's really good blood. Type A."

Liar. I was type B Positive. So much for a discerning tongue.

Louise just looked tired, a look that I had seen before in the mirror. It was a look that usually followed an intense period of self-loathing and doubt, and sometimes one of my depressive states. It was a look that said, "I'm going to fight this for long enough that I can convince myself that I really, really tried." In short, it was the look of a junkie needing a fix.

One of the things that a junkie like me can tell you is that they can spot another junkie without even trying.

My friend Louise was a different kind of junkie, but she was a junkie just the same, as I was about to find out.

I didn't even know she was a vampire. I didn't even think of that. I was too drugged and too fucked up in my head to think clearly. I was in my happy place, and that was all that mattered.

Good roofies. Sweater Bob had access to some good shit.

"Hi Louise," I tried to say, but what came out was some weird and somewhat incoherent unintelligible mishmash of words that sounded more like I was drooling all over myself. Louise looked at me then, looked right through me, and I could see her thinking about it.

And her teeth... I could see them now.

When she started to suck on my neck, all I could think about was how pretty her teeth were.

After that, everything got kind of hazy.

I dreamed of teeth.

******************

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