Work Text:
The Vampire Horse Whisperer
I studied the woman sitting at my kitchen table as I fixed her some coffee. It wasn’t often we had cause to spend time together in conversation. It’s not that we don’t like each other or anything, she’s okay. I’ve got nothing against her, and she’s become a surprisingly good friend to Sara over the years. But the two of us don’t really have much common ground, I guess. It seems like we’re in disagreement over most things. In any case, it was odd enough for her to show up on my doorstep asking for a chat that it piqued my curiosity.
“What can I do for you, Beth?” I asked as I handed her the cup and sat down across from her.
“Well…” she looked down into her mug before taking a sip. It gave her something to do and a way to stall. Then she looked up at me. “Chelle wants a horse.”
I’d had no idea what to expect out of her mouth, but even so, that was a non sequitur. “Uh, okay. A lot of little girls her age want one – so I’ve heard.”
“We’ve told her she’s too young, of course, but knowing her she’s not going to give up on the idea. At some point, she’ll be demanding riding lessons, at the least.”
“And this has to do with me, how?” I asked, mystified.
“Mick once told me that vampires…can’t be trusted around animals and that they don’t react well to vampires.” Beth glanced into her drink again. “It’s natural for children to want pets. I’ve heard you used to travel horseback all the time back in the eighteen hundreds while working as a bounty hunter.”
Ah, the mist cleared. I wondered which one of my beloveds I had to thank for leaking that little piece of information. I quickly narrowed it down to two most likely suspects. Josef or Sara naturally.
“So you want to know how I managed, in case you actually consider getting Mickey a horse someday.” Poor girl had a bunch of nicknames. Josef dubbed her Mickey and it had stuck with us; to Mick she was Belle, and her mother called her Chelle. Josef said it was good to have several names, that way when it was time to relocate she could just choose one of her nicknames to adopt and there was no new name to be getting used to. He had a point.
“I heard about, you know, horse and dog whisperers, and I wondered if it was true and you maybe had a way of…taming animals to vamps.”
“Horses can be skittish,” I agreed. “Of course, if it were really true that all animals reacted badly to us, it would’ve been noticed centuries ago as a great way to unmask vampires. They wouldn’t have had to use the other, less pleasant methods.”
“So it’s not true?” Beth said, brightening.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. There is a…way to…bond the animal to you if you need to.” I wasn’t anxious to talk about the subject. You have to understand, in the vamp world, especially these days; certain things are just… looked down upon. This was one of those things I didn’t really want to get out.
Beth sat up straight, looking as if she was preparing to take notes. “Okay, how do you do that?”
I groaned inwardly. “Do me a favor, please don’t tell anyone who this info came from. This is not the kinda thing vamps admit to.”
“I won’t,” she promised. “What’s your method?”
I squirmed a bit in my seat. “Well, you know how the bite of a vamp can be… pleasurable, and it helps strengthen the connection between vamp and human…”
“Oh,” she said in dawning understanding.
“So you take some of their blood and it bonds them to you,” I finished in an embarrassed rush. Drinking animal blood is low class among vamps. Kinda puts you on the same level as ‘trailer trash’ to humans, worse than drinking morgue blood. There are times when a vampire has to do drastic things to survive until something more nutritious is available, but otherwise, it’s just not spoken of in polite company. Even as just a way of calming down an agitated pet. At the very least you open yourself up to a lot of off-color jokes and ridicule.
“That makes sense,” Beth said, satisfied that she had her answer.
“It’s not something that we talk about,” I warned.
“I got that,” she told me with a smirk, draining the last of her coffee and rising. “I didn’t know vampires could blush,” she quipped.
I got up to see her to the door. “Just… if anyone asks, just tell them Josef told you,” I growled.
Beth’s chuckle was decidedly evil. “You got it.” We high-fived each other.
Maybe we had some common ground after all.
The end
6/7/09