Page 36 of Clubs

Nothing too fancy. Not someone he could rob, Oliver feared. Just a little Jetta. The guy inside was put together enough, but he doubted well off. A button up, only buttoned to the middle of his hairy chest, a pair of dark washed blue jeans, a clean shaven jaw, pale blue eyes, and a balding, silvery blonde head.

“You sure?” Oliver asked.

Slowing to a stop, the guy reached across the interior and propped open the passenger side door. “Hop in.”

As restless as his legs were, this walk was not treating Oliver’s stomach kindly. So, he did as the man asked. Once he was settled in, Oliver thanks the man, who introduced himself as Tyler. While it may not have seemed like the best idea to get in the car of a stranger, Oliver could hold his own in a fight. Could tear a throw it out in the process. He wasn’t concerned. Didn’t have the strength to tear out of throat at the moment, but if adrenaline kicked in, he would do as he had to.

After asking Oliver which way he was headed, Tyler said, “Not such a warm welcome, huh?”

Oliver’s face surely showed his confusion.

“At that girl’s house. Brooke, I think her name is,” Tyler said. “I’ve got my eye on the two of them too. Not really sure what I think of them either.”

With a harrumph, Oliver took a long drag off his cigarette. “I think she’s a real fucking cunt.”

“No shit, really?” Tyler asked. “Seems like a nice girl. I’ve seen her around the bar and everything.”

Oliver was not about to open his mouth about what happened inside there. Brooke was terrifying in a way that Oliver had a hard time putting into words, but he believed her when she said she’d kill him. “Spades, you mean?”

“Yeah, nice little place,” Tyler said. “Got kicked out of there a while back though. Had a little blow on me, bartender didn’t like it, and there went my membership. Said he’d only let me back in on the word of another member. You don’t happen to be one, do you?”

Although Oliver knew about Spades, he got a similar message years ago. People like him, vampires, weren’t allowed inside. Not without someone to vouch for them. “No, they don’t let my kinda people in.”

“You know any members who might want to vouch for me?” Tyler asked. “Just a name, even. Maybe a number, or an address. I’d really appreciate it. I can make it worth your while.”

That piqued Oliver’s interest. Turning to Tyler, Oliver gave a smile. “How much we talking?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BROOKE

Oliver said the place was secluded, and that was putting it mildly. After traffic, it was almost a two-hour drive from my place. Since I lived pretty deep in the city, that didn’t say much. Getting stuck in traffic was a common enough occurrence. But even without traffic, it would’ve taken at least an hour to get there.

We were on Declan’s bike. That seemed like the better option. If it were deep in the city, my car would blend in. Out here, though? Declan needed to park deep in the bushes if we wanted to stay off the radar. But even from where he had parked, there was a bit of a walk ahead of us.

The old Victorian stood three stories tall. Although it was probably once a thing of beauty, it was like something out of a horror movie. But not because of whatever creatures lived inside. One of the windows was busted, covered by a piece of plywood. The gutters that still remained were half-fallen off of the roof. I couldn’t tell if the siding had once been white, or if it was intended to be gray. It was closer to brown now, covered in a thick layer of dust and soot.

The grass was more than knee-high. An old car with a broken window and two flat tires sat off to the side of the house. Even here, tucked deep in the pines, orange needle caps littered the ground. I imagined there were many more along the overgrown concrete pathway to the house. Beer cans decorated the decrepit porch. Trash bags full of gods only knew what blocked what could have been a nice place to sit with a newspaper and a cup of coffee.

That was the horror show here. Drugs. This house looked the way it did, not because it was home to a Vampire, or Demon, or Witch, or Werewolf. It looked like shit because the owner was a dealer getting high on his own supply, I imagined.

If Davey and his cohorts, whoever owned this place, were Vampires like Oliver, I didn’t understand them. There were much better things to do with a long, immortal life than get high. The number of books I wanted to read would take me at least a dozen lifetimes. Hell, I doubted I would ever get through my to-be-read pile as it was, and that was after narrowing it down to the books that I wanted to read the most. And what were these guys doing with their time?

Not exploring the literary minds of history. Not diving into a new world of wonder every time they opened the pages. Not curing cancer. Not solving the philosophical qualms of life. Not in any way bettering society, or even themselves.

Getting high. As if getting high was good for anyone.

That was the thing I never understood about addiction. Sure, you do the drug for a fun time, and it’s great. But then, it’s not. It becomes the center of everything. Nothing else matters. There is no life aside from it. I didn’t understand with my dad, and I didn’t understand it with Ria. It just seemed so silly, so nonsensical, to me. When everything revolved around a drug, around a short-lived rush, what was the point of being alive? Why would anyone want to live that way?

And the kicker was, every time I asked an addict that question, none of them had an answer for me.

And that inability to understand addiction infuriated me.

It infuriated me that—for whatever reason—these fuckers wrecked my house. They dumped a body at Declan’s favorite place in the world. And for what? I didn’t know them, neither did he, and they wanted to fuck up our lives? They wanted to destroy the life of the person I loved more than anything? What had we done to them?

Did it matter?

No. It didn’t.

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