Henry introduced me to almost all of my first real musical inspirations and all of the events that shaped me as a person. His advice provided the soundtrack to my universe in my teens and early twenties. Together we burned through so many tapes and cd’s looking for the next thing that would inspire us. Long nights and long days of doing the important work of growing up, and having that reflect back to us in the music we chose to listen to. It was a silly time really, but Henry was my best friend. My first real friend.

and I killed him.

When I drug him into the house I had no desire to do anything but protect him. When I saw the bite marks my mind filled with rage. Rage isn’t really the best word for it. Rage doesn’t really sum up the fire that burned through me at the thought of what they did to him. They most likely being Isabelle and her crew. I wept from the volume of madness dripping off of me. I shocked myself by how much he meant to me. It reminded me that he was closer to being the only thing I had that felt like family, even if we had been estranged a bit as of late.

My thoughts exhausted themselves by running the circuits of my brain trying to think of how to get my revenge. I collapsed onto him a final time. My head rested on his chest looking up at his neck, at the typical vampire placement for bite marks and I was about to get angry all over again knowing that Isabelle would of done that just to piss me off more, when I saw it.

Just a little twitch in the skin. Almost something to write off as a phantom, it was so small. A piece of dust in my view for a second. Then it happened again. The skin around the wound twitching. As if it was trying to do something on it’s own, moving without the control of Henry. I sat up. Opened his lips and looked at his gums. In the cracks between the teeth and along the flesh line, residual blood.

My scream was a neutron bomb. One that destroyed what was left of my paranoia and reasoning. I busted into the room Lucy and I had been sharing and kicked her hard enough to break something on a real person. Waking sleeping vampires is not easy. I was screaming still, ranting about what was happening, and that she needed to wake the fuck up and do the right thing, which was help me load Henry into his car. Which she did, and quickly fell back asleep in the front seat covered in a blanket.

Which in hindsight is interesting because I didn’t remember to put on pants and she remembered to grab a blanket?

I drove that car like it was a rocket trying to gain altitude. I don’t recall the drive except the odd instance when I must of been going almost ninety in a sixty five and flew past a cop with a radar gun out trying to catch people speeding. He didn’t even blink at me.

Suzannes house is an old house. It’s located in North East Kansas City, pretty close to the old KC museum (is that thing still open?). From what I can tell the few times I’ve been there is that a bunch of upper middle class and moneyed people decided the houses in the area were too cool to let fall into the decay of the surrounding area. When I say decay I just mean forced poverty. Where there is poverty there is crime, plus it is hard to take care of your neighborhood when you have to work three shifts a day at McDonald’s. I could be wrong. Her house was old and slightly run down but not enough to draw it out in the area.

We pulled in and I punched Lucy in the face to wake her up and help me get him in the house. I really didn’t care who saw us. Lucy the goth and the person wearing only a shirt and underwear hauling someone who was wounded into the house. I don’t give a fuck when I’m worked up. The key Suzanne had given me opened the house up and we were not breaking any laws, so the neighbors could go fuck themselves if they complained about my butt hanging out.

Suzanne always treated me like an honored guest, putting me up in one of the guest rooms, but I had no time to think about Henry’s comfort. We dropped him on the couch in one of the houses sitting rooms and I went into the basement to find what I was looking for.

Vamp-b-gone. I had no clue what it was, I just knew what it looked like and the container that Suzanne kept it in every time she brought it to me. I had seen her come up the stairs from the basement with it, so down I went.

It wasn’t a basement, it was a library. A small library for sure, with every wall home to cases for books. Cases that mean ‘don’t touch’, or ‘really important’ because of the way they had glass panels in front of them. Serious metal lined glass panels. There were two desks also, with paper and pins for writing. In one wall was the metal door of a walk in freezer. I flung it open. It wasn’t freezing, just cool and on it’s shelves were just a couple of jars of what I was looking for. That liquid that when ingested would stop you from being a vampire. The rest of the space was devoted to storage of blood. Not really, just empty bags that could hold blood, but hadn’t been used. The racks where blood would of been were empty.

I didn’t have time to contemplate that. I ran back up to the kitchen and mixed up my favorite cocktail, vamp go bye bye, which is a nice blend of Vodka, and Vamp-b-gone. At the last second I mixed in some simple syrup to help mask the taste, which must of helped because Henry drank most of it after about ten minutes of trying to wake him up. He then quickly fell back asleep.

With that I fell on the floor next to the couch as my adrenaline started to leave me. The room was like a museum, all the furniture and paintings had to be pre 1950, and excellently preserved. The gold leaf on one of the lamps appeared to be actual gold, and most likely layered by hand, lovingly. I’m not sure why I thought that word, lovingly, about the detail of that lamp base, but that was what I was thinking as I accidentally drifted off to sleep.