Thanks for reading, friends! Leave a review if you like something...or hate something...or to inform me of inconsistencies (thanks again, person who caught my oopsies in the previous chapter!)...or to tell me your stripper name. Mine's Minty Magee :O
Time flew by faster now that I was with Jacob again. He was my best friend, still gorgeous and happy and charming beyond belief. And I managed not to dwell on my attraction to him-mostly. There was no point wasting all these perfectly good sexin' years on someone who didn't want me back. I started to date on a very limited basis. Jacob dated occasionally, too. We talked about our dates together, because we talked about everything together. But neither of us wanted anything serious. I at least was just looking for temporary fuck buddies. Hunting down leeches took up too much time to be easily explained to someone who didn't know the lore. I couldn't tell an outsider about the wolves, and I wasn't about to shit where I ate, so I ended up with townies and friends-of-friends whose expectations were as low as mine.
I kept in touch with Jean, and with every passing summer we lamented that a road trip was out of the question. But next year, next year, maybe... Until one day, six years after I'd left St. John's, when Jean called me with news.
"So, remember Will, right?"
"Duh've course. How's he doing?"
"Oh, he's good. And I'm good. In fact, he asked me if I want to be good together for the rest of our lives." It took me a second to unravel this news. 'Can you come? I was hoping you might want to be a bridesmaid...you know, if you can make it."
"Oh my god, Jean, oh my god! Of course? I'll come now! I can help you do everything!"
So I told Leah I was taking some time off. It was a sign of how things had changed since I first returned to Forks that Leah had no snide comment. She just leered toothily and told me to enjoy the bachelorette party.
I very quietly broke up with my current boyfriend-a sweetly hapless med student who took it in stride-and spent a day in the city with Alice, picking out clothes for the trip.
I didn't ask Jacob to come. I knew he couldn't take so much time off from the pack, of course, but there was a secondary reason: Jonathan would be at the wedding. Apart from wishing to avoid a confrontation or any unpleasantness, I wanted to see Jonathan again, and I wanted to see him away from Jacob. I had no illusions about rekindling a relationship; I had treated him heartlessly, and I didn't expect even to talk to him or ask for his forgiveness. But I had to see him, if only to remember what it felt like to be a human girl in love.
Jean and I hadn't seen each other in four years, not since she spent the summer in Forks. We had kept up with email, but it wasn't the same. I told my family I'd be gone for the whole summer; I wanted as much time with my friend as I could get, and besides, I missed St. John's.
Our meeting was just like it had been four years before. We shrieked and hugged and jumped around while Jean's fiance stood nervously behind her.
"My god you look good!" I squealed. Jean had filled out considerably and the curves settled picturesquely around her hips and breasts. She was glowing and pleased, quite proud of her catch.
"You don't look too bad yourself," she said admiringly. I had worried for a while that I would freeze at seventeen like my father, and I would have to watch all my friends age without me. But I seemed to be progressing along a fairly normal path of physical maturation, a dead ringer for a co-ed in her early twenties. I was a hot, young bridesmaid with a freakishly cool night job. The world was my oyster.
Jean's had only one hissy fit, and threatened to elope only four times, before the big day. She picked out baby-blue floor-length satin dresses for me and the three others-standard bridesmaid fare, really, but everyone looked pretty because everyone was happy. She was glowing. Will, the groom, looked like the cat that caught the canary.
Jonathan was there, sitting in a back row with a very pretty blonde. I tried not to stare but he drew my eyes and I thought about the three years when we'd been everything to each other-or nearly. Edward had wanted me to enjoy those years, to take advantage of them, and I had, insofar as I was able, but...
I wished there were some way, now, to tell Jonathan what he meant to me. At the time, when I was being separated from Jacob by force, it was only natural that my body should rebel. Stupid Edward: he liked to impose choices on other people and who could help but try to thwart him? But he wasn't here now; I was here of my own volition. The magnetic longing for Jacob wasn't exactly gone, but it was well blanketed under all the reasons and desires and hopes that had brought me out here in the first place.
I sneaked another look at Jonathan. He was holding hands with the blonde, with his eyes glued to the happy couple at the altar. She looked happy; well, of course she did. He looked determined. I felt acutely that it shouldn't have ended the way it did. The imprint was so obvious; it must have hurt him in every way imaginable to see it so vividly manifested. But the imprint wasn't everything. I wished I'd known that then.
He and the blonde danced a few times at the reception, but left before I could get close enough to say hello. I didn't have a date, myself, but I danced several times with a groomsman two inches shorter than me. He was handsome and funny and we flirted and drank champagne and I briefly considered going home with him, but Jonathan's face was still in the background of my mind and I couldn't quite do it.
Pathetic Renesmee. Always wanting what you don't have. Was I any different from Bella?
Having spent the last six years tracking down and killing leeches, I now saw St. John's with new eyes. I was seeing signs everywhere. The most telling was the news I heard-in back corners, behind bars, on the last page of the papers-of sex workers disappearing at a rate unusual even for that notoriously ill-documented trade. Mostly strippers, occasionally also call girls and escorts.
After the wedding, I called Jacob and told him I was going to stay in St. John's for a while.
"How come?" he asked me warily.
"I think there's a leech making hay around here. I want to check it out."
"Want me to come?"
I briefly considered it-that irresistible pull was urging me to say yes, yes, yes. But something held me back. I wanted to do something on my own, something that was just for me. No Edward here, cutting deals. No Leah to schedule me. No Jake, with all the power over me that the imprint gave him.
"No," I said. "I think I can do this. I at least want to track it on my own. If it's more than one, maybe you can send backup."
I started visiting every strip joint in town. The classy ones, the dive bars, the ones buried in the middle of industrial parks. My favorites were the mid-level strip-joints: not sleazy, but with no pretension, either. The girls were mostly co-eds and college graduates like me who couldn't find anything to do with their liberal arts degrees, or cheerful dropouts who found their bodies more lucrative than diplomas. It seemed that these were also the favored haunts of bloodsuckers. I never scented a leech around the upscale strip joints, or in the rural places where the floors never got mopped and the strippers had as many children as teeth. But there were three or four strip bars around St. John's where I could distinctly smell human-eater. In most it was old and stale; I judged it to be at least three months old, no more than a hint.
But one place was absolutely rank with it; the stink saturated even the cement floor. It smelled like a leech had been living here, and when I did a little research, I found the place had lost four different dancers in the last two months. So this was where I spent most of my evenings. For some reason, a leech or a group of leeches had decided to make Jezebelles their hunting-ground. I hoped it was only one. I didn't think I could take on more than that and be sure of victory. But a lone hunter who preyed among the young, the beautiful and the desperate might be outwitted.
I didn't want to be noticed, but I didn't want to be kicked out either. So I brought along plenty of ones and fives and twenties, and I wore well-fitted but not overly revealing outfits, and I bought private dances every hour. It was important to keep the performers on my side. I needed information from them. The first few nights at Jezebelles, I didn't try to ask the dancers anything directly. I pretended I was just there for a good time. I figured out who had been there the longest, who was chatty or taciturn, who got the biggest tips. I needed to learn what kind of place this was.
After about a week of this, one of the dancers, a wiry black bike-messenger type who went by the handle "Queen Bitch", asked what a nice girl like me was doing in a strip club every night. She asked me sexily, of course, because she did everything sexily. I had bought several private dances from her, partly because she had been around longer than most of the others and partly because I liked the cut of her jib. She had a no-nonsense attitude that came through even when she was nakedly gyrating on my groin. Her armpits and labia were fuzzy and she had enough interesting tattoos to illustrate a Shel Silverstein anthology. She always got right to the point.
"Are you a lesbo?" she asked me in her sultry voice, then pulled my face out of her boobs so I could answer.
"I'm not sure," I said flirtily. "I might try it on for size."
"Are you looking for a job? I could put in a good word. You seem like an alright bitch." The idea had merit. If I was a co-worker the girls might be more inclined to be frank with me. Of course, if they saw me as competition...
"Maybe...How are the hours?"
Queen Bitch laughed. "They're however you want them to be. If you're good, you can pick and choose. Are you good?" The timer buzzed, indicating the end of her dance. She immediately stood up and started pulling her thong back on.
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "I don't know how sexy I am..."
"Well, my shift ends in an hour. Why don't I introduce you to the manager after that? You can show her what you're good at and see if you're interested."
"Gosh, if you wouldn't mind..."
"Gosh, it's no trouble," she said, a half-mocking smile turning up one side of her mouth.
So I hung out for a while and, true to her word, Queen Bitch brought me to the manager who, against all expectation, was a woman. Middle-aged, wrinkled as a walnut, with bleached-blonde hair and a smoker's voice, she introduced herself as Blair.
"So you want to be a stripper, huh?" She glanced over me appraisingly. "You've got the body for it, and your face is all right. You should know, honey, that being fit and pretty is the least of what a stripper does. Do you know how to dance?"
"Sure! I know the Charleston," I quipped.
"Funny," she said dryly. "Okay, the bar's closed, why don't you hop on up there and we'll see what you can do. What kinda undies you wearin'? Never mind, just give us a tease and we'll see in a minute." Queen Bitch gave me a saucy smile and settled herself down to watch.
A song came on that was neither fast nor slow. I didn't recognize it, but it sounded vaguely country-esque. I stepped to the center of the stage and started swaying in a circle, feeling out the rhythm of the music. The song started to build and I started to get creative. I was wearing a wrap dress which I slowly began to unwrap. I untied it so my front was exposed. I was wearing what Rosalie would call "Come-and-git-it" underwear, completely sheer chiffon bra and thong in a poisonous green color. My swaying became more pronounced until finally, I was bent over completely backward, exerting all of my antichrist powers to keep my balance, and the dress slid from my shoulders to the floor. I placed my hands on the floor and did a slow backwards handstand that eventually placed me right-side-up again. I didn't really know what to do with the pole, which was still streaked with antiseptic spray, so I just hooked one leg around it and slid down it to the floor and back up again. The song was winding up, so I wriggled as sexily as I could out of my bra and dangled it from one finger as the last chords dies down.
I tried to look as composed as possible while awaiting Blair's judgment. She tilted her head to one side.
"I guess you can start daytimes," she said. "Lauren'll explain about fees and tips." Queen Bitch waved her fingers at me cheekily. "You can come in on Tuesday to start. Three o'clock to eight. I want you here at two-thirty to fill out paperwork. Bring photo ID and social security so we can make copies. And now I—" she stubbed out her cigarette aggressively—"am going to bed."
I couldn't help but be struck by how similar all this was to that time when Leah first started to let me run with the pack. Very different duties-but then, I was still only here to kill leeches, so what was the difference?
I told Jacob all about it when we talked on the phone, as we did every night.
"I got a summer job," I said cautiously.
"Why? Do you really need the money? I'd think Nedward would have that all sewn up."
"I don't really like to take money from him. I mean, I had an allowance before, and I sort of cheated by asking Alice how to invest it, but..."
"I can understand that. So what's the job?"
"Stripping."
"Come again? It sounded like you just said 'stripping,' but I must have some fur in my ears because I know that's not happening."
"It is, actually. It's kind of fun. I seem to have some exhibitionist tendencies I didn't know about."
"Nessie, you're thirteen years old. What the fuck?"
"Don't be a tit, Jake. I haven't been thirteen since I was three. I've been sexually active for eight years. I have a college degree. What part of me is suddenly too young to be a stripper?" Jacob cleared his throat nervously.
"Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it," he said hesitantly. I swallowed past a sudden rage that he wasn't jealous, not even a tiny little bit, that I was showing people my boobs for money. What the hell was wrong with him? What the hell was wrong with me? "You don't get hassled?" he added. I paused for a second, to let the silliness of his question sink in. "Yeah, I guess you probably do all right. Is this...like, some sort of daddy-issues thing?"
I made a conscious effort to swing back into a casual mindset, despite Jacob's maddening resistance to my wiles. "You mean, have I taken up stripping as a way of rebelling against my overprotective and sexually-repressive father who never treated me right, while still seeking to earn validation as an adult woman by enacting the myth of the female as an object of male desire?"
"That liberal arts degree is really paying off, huh?"
"You betcha. Don't worry, Jake. Stripping is fun, the girls are nice, the money's okay and I don't get touched anywhere I don't want to be touched. It's better than retail and I get to dictate my own rules." My voice was flat with disappointment, but he didn't seem to notice.
"Well, that sounds fun. If werewolfing weren't a full-time gig, do you think I could make it as a stripper?"
An image of Jacob in heels and a frilly apron popped into my head and I burst out in surprised laughter, although he'd said nothing of cross-dressing.
"Yeah," I gasped between guffaws, "you'd make wicked tips."
I pieced together from various overheard conversations that the vanished strippers from Jezebelles had all been fairly new hires, mostly green in the world of stripping. They hadn't been around long enough to make many friends, and it had taken a while for anyone to notice they weren't showing up. The other girls didn't read anything mysterious into this, however. They just assumed the disappeared strippers had been found out by parents or boyfriends and quit.
I could tell that most of the dancers were leery of newcomers. They were largely friendly with each other, but they were all in competition for money on the floor, and there was a certain edge to their interactions. Queen Bitch had been around the longest; at twenty-six, she was starting to plan for retirement, or at least a move to a job that didn't require so much physical upkeep. She wasn't overwhelmingly friendly toward me, but she didn't forget that I had always tipped very well, and I wasn't a good enough dancer to be a threat. If we had known each other in a less bloodthirsty field, maybe we would have been good friends. As it was, she at least included me in backstage banter, which went far with the other girls.
One afternoon when I arrived for my shift, the smell of leech was overpowering. By the strength of it, he'd been here late last night. After my shift I would try to follow his scent to see where he went. Until then, I needed to gather information.
Casually I asked one of the other girls, a full-bodied blonde named Monaco, about the regulars.
"One of my favorites was here last night," she said. "He comes in every now and then and just pours money at us. You don't even have to work for it. Well, not hard. He never asks for private dances, but he tips us more than that just for talking to him."
"Yeah?" I asked, heart pounding. "What's he look like? Maybe I'll get lucky."
"He's fucking gorgeous is what," she said, rolling deodorant onto her groin. "He's like, a model or something. He always wears dark suits. I think he might be like, a spook or something." Then she laughed at the absurdity of her statement-as if anyone so important would ever come here. "Tall, buff, black hair. He looks like that guy who was in Mad Men. And he doesn't even carry bills smaller than fifties."
"When does he usually come?"
"Late," she said. "After midnight, usually."
After that I did my best to get late shifts, and when I had early ones or days off, I hung around outside or just sat at the bar late into the night, sipping glasses of cranberry juice and sprite, chatting with the bartender. I tried to track the scent but it led to a river and I lost it. I would just have to wait to bump into him.
And finally, after three weeks, I found my zombie.
He came in near the end of my shift. I smelled him before I saw him, and Monaco hadn't exaggerated: even for a vampire, he was foxy. He appeared to be in his early thirties, with shiny black hair sprinkled moderately with gray that he parted neatly on one side. His eyes were garnet-colored-not vibrant, but not black either. He probably had another solid month before his eyes turned black and his thirst forced him to feed, assuming he didn't do anything too athletic before then. But then again, plenty of vampires didn't wait till they were black-eyed-hungry before feeding. Nomads, with hunting the only thing to amuse them, might feed every week, indiscriminate of their victims. It was the cultured vampires, the sophisticated ones who made their kills an art, who waited long between feeds. If I had my guess, this guy was one of those. He wouldn't drink the blood of any old human. He was willing to wait for just the right morsel.
He was sitting in a dark corner with those heavy lids half-covering his red eyes, and if I hadn't had supernatural eyesight I would have mistaken them for hazel. I slithered up behind him and draped my arms around his shoulders. He inhaled and stiffened in surprise.
"What are you doing all alone, handsome?" I asked him, pitching my voice a tone sultrier than usual.
Without turning to look at me, he reached up and stroked the soft skin of my forearm and said, "I thought I had met all the dancers, but your perfume is unknown to me."
"Oh, no," I said, and swirled around him to perch in his lap, "I'm new." His human-blood smell was strong and offensive, but underneath it I could detect the scent that humans got from him: intoxicating, luscious, virile. I tried to focus on that instead of the syrupy overtones. "You must have a very good sense of smell, to recognize someone by her perfume."
"Oh, I'm something of a connoisseur," he breathed. "Yours is...like nothing I've encountered." His hands had stayed at his sides this whole time; in this club, touching was allowed, but only with individual permission. I reached down, took his hand, and brought it slowly to my throat. As one mesmerized, he began to run his fingers slowly down from my jaw to my collarbone. He was breathing so deeply and slowly that if he'd been human he would have needed a paper bag soon.
I had spent my weeks here establishing a vintage persona. Tonight I was wearing a pair of green chiffon French knickers and a green silk bra that displayed every topographical detail of my breasts. My knickers had garters that held up black silk stockings, and my shoes were vintage stilettos that Alice had picked up somewhere.
"You seem out of place among these neon delights," he said. "May I know your name?" He had the cultured and eloquent tones that I heard from some of the leeches that lived in settlements. The Denalis and the Volturi and several other covens I knew of possessed it: inflection, perfected. His accent was flawless Queen's English, but I suspected from the slightly Asiatic slant to his eyes and the translucent umber of his skin that he had learned another language first.
"Call me Atalanta. How about you?"
"You've chosen a fine name, Atalanta," he said and leaned forward infinitesimally. "Please, call me Amoun."
"Well then, thank you Amoun, but I didn't choose it. It was given to me." Amoun leaned back and laughed luxuriantly.
"Surely not! Your parents wished an exotic life for you, to name you so."
"Oh, my parents didn't give me this name."
"A co-worker, perhaps? One fond of the classics?"
"A boy, actually. A long time ago. And I must say, it suited me so well I was inclined to keep it."
"Raised by wolves, then? Abandoned in the woods? Or was it the part about the golden apple you found so apt?" Amoun glanced down at my chest as he said this last part.
"In a way. I love the woods. I love their isolation. I love to get lost in them."
"What a poetic thought." Amoun's hands strayed lower, down across my sternum. With the barest pressure of one fingertip, he traced around the underside of my bra. "You must forgive me for what I am about to ask."
"That depends on what you say."
"So coy. I suppose you must be. Would you take mercy on me and tell me when you will be here again?"
"I don't see what mercy has to do with it, Amoun."
"Oh, but you do. You strike me as too intelligent to be blind to the effect you have." I shifted a little and felt his erection against my thigh.
"I see," I said laughingly. "Well, I'm on again Thursday night. I hope you can bear the wait."
"Two nights," he groaned. "I suppose I must."
I hopped off his lap and looked down to see him slide five crisp hundred-dollar bills into the waistline of my panties.
"Thank you, Amoun," I said sweetly, and danced away backstage.
I hurried through my dressing, and when I came back out he was gone. I followed his scent easily and tracked him all night, careful always to keep downwind, but he never even approached any humans. I was relieved. I doubted I could best him in a fair fight. I had to do this right; my only chance was to outsmart him, to trick him, to balance the odds.
And I had a strong hunch that he wouldn't kill anyone immediately. I thought I could guess who his next target would be.
I called Jacob to tell him the time had come.
"I found him," I said a little breathlessly. "He's coming to see me again on Thursday night."
"Ness, I don't like this. I don't think you should do this alone. I want to come out there."
"You know you can't leave the pack."
"I left them for a week to come to your graduation and they were fine. I'm serious about this. You can't try to take on a leech all alone. They fight dirty. You need backups."
"Okay, okay, I'm not trying to be a hero. Can you send someone?"
"Fuck that, I'm coming out there myself. I'll be on a plane tomorrow."
"Chill out, Jake," I said, "Just...get here when you get here. I'll still be here. Do you need me to wire money? I know last-minute flights are-"
"No, I've got it. Don't worry. I'll be there soon. Just...don't do anything without me."
"I'll do my best."
"See you soon, Stinker. Love you."
"Love you back, Dogbreath."