Here's the thing about Claude and me: we never actually manage to talk about anything serious. We may have had a total of five serious conversations, but that wasn't what the friendship was about. It was that we could talk about absolutely nothing, and it was cool because it didn't matter how bad things were. For a while, we could forget about the rest of the world. I could forget about my particular problems and just pretend for a while that I was normal.

"Pancakes," he said as I slid into the booth opposite him.

"Why pancakes?"

"Pancakes. They've got to be the perfect food. Well, not entirely perfect since they don't provide any actual nutritional value, but if you take it in combination with something else, scrambled eggs with ketchup, or bacon-"

"Gotta have the bacon."

"Exactly. You take it in combination with all of that, and you've got your salty and your sweet all right there on your plate, and it doesn't even trigger your taste buds too much."

"Have you ordered yet?"

"No, I was waiting for you."

"Really?"

"Nah. I got hungry, so I ordered some bacon. Love the bacon."

"Then I'm glad I'm not Jewish or anything." That made me think of something. "If I was Jewish, would that mean I couldn't take blood from people who eat bacon? And how would I tell? Do I go up to some chick I'm about to bite and ask her if she's Kosher?"

"Does biting hurt?"

"What? Yeah, of course, it does. You got some fangs in your neck, it's gonna hurt some."

"You know Kosher doesn't just mean "no pork" right? For example, for beef to be kosher it means the cow was killed without feeling any pain, and then the body is checked thoroughly to make sure it had no diseases. So if the bite hurts or the person is sick, then biting anyone at all is definitely not Kosher."

"Then I'm glad I'm not Jewish. How do you know all this anyway? You dating some Jewish chick something?"

"Nah. 'Hogan Knows Best' was on this weekend, and he was throwing a party where some Jewish people were going to be at, so he had to learn about Kosher, so by extension, I had to learn about Kosher."

"You're a fucking sponge for the oddest little factoids. You hear me over there? You're a sponge."

"And you suck. Literally." He grinned. "Pun definitely intended."

"Har-de-fricking-har."

It was one of our more intellectual conversations. There were times when we could go on for hours at end, but that was when some form of alcohol was involved. The amount of time between getting turned into a vampire, and me telling Claude? About three days, but that was only because I was so sick during the first two days.

"Have your fangs grown in yet?"

"No. See?"

My family was cursed with extremely short incisors. Seriously. They're about as short as the rest of the teeth in my mouth, not long like you see on some people, and I'd thought that one of the benefits of being a vampire, was that I would finally get some decently sized incisors. Nope. That was one battle where genetics won out over vampirism. My teeth had remained obstinately short, and I was forced to carry a little knife with me. I consoled myself with the fact that it was probably more efficient and definitely more hygienic.

"I thought you said all of the other vampires have like these massive fangs?"

"Not all of them. Just a lot of them. At least their teeth come to points, and they look the part if you know what you're looking for. Personally, I blame my dad."

"What does your dad have to do with this? He's not a vampire too is he?"

"Genetics. Short teeth. There's a whole conversation I was having in my head where this all makes sense."

"This is where you open your mouth, and sounds come out, and you tell me what you're thinking. It's called 'conversation.'"

"Still working on the brain to mouth thing. Is there a waitress around? I'm starving. And whatever smartass comment you're going to make, you can save it."

"I had a couple of good ones lined up. Instant classics."

"Uh huh."

I can't say this enough: breakfast food has been my salvation. It was probably the one thing that had shattered my perceptions of what it meant to be a vampire. Someday I'm going to make a list of every single thing that the movies and stories have lied to us about. Okay, maybe not lied, maybe they just got it wrong, but somehow I think that the guy who was making up all of these stories had himself been a vampire. It seemed very much like something a vampire would do.

We tend to be cocky like that.

"There was a Russian guy in the shop the other day," I said after I'd finally gotten the waitress' attention.

Claude went from relaxed to a state of alert relaxed. Nobody else but me would have noticed the difference between his two states of relaxation though.

I continued: "He was a lot gay though, like stereotypically over-the-top gay, so I don't think he's the kind of Russian you're looking for."

"Like movie gay or just flamboyant gay?"

"Just flamboyant and definitely not shy about it. Spent about three hundred bucks. Good quality stuff too."

"This Russian situation isn't a joke dude. You seriously gotta keep your eyes open."

"Dude, I see a Russian, any Russian at all, I'm going to let you know about it. You did say these guys were sneaky."

Claude had been away on the kind of job he always tried to avoid taking and had come back home with a justified paranoia of Russian assassins looking for him. That was the extent of what he'd told me about the Russians, and I'd never actually seen any of them, so I'd fallen into a basic routine of just watching for possible Russian assassins as a matter of routine.

It was kind of almost exactly like how Claude had fallen into the routine of looking for vampires, so turnabout is fair play I guess.

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

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

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