Dancing With Werewolves Read Free Page A

worldview and ourselves. Maybe they were a positive, attracting rain and sun. Earth symbols. I tried to open the viewers’ minds. And my own.
    A big personal problem I had with the Millennium Revelation was that the vampires it had shaken out of the topsoil were a pretty debased breed. Where was Count Dracula in white tie and tails when you needed him? The real vamps were no better than human wastrels, for the most part: druggies, partiers, and cheap criminals. Even the few who rose to white-collar jobs sported a sleazy rusty ring-around-the-collar from the one-nighters they pulled with doped-out prostitutes to get a little blood on the hoof.
    And I took it personally. Let’s just say that, as a pale-skinned young human female, I was always a top target for vampire lust and late-night snacking.
    I tuned out the TV. I’d seen enough of my own news reports to forego another self-image fix. That vertical legless version of me, mike in hand, is old hat by now . . . unless I’m shown horizontal and naked, as on CSI just moments ago. I didn’t have much time to brood on this weird coincidence. I had to stay up way past the news anyway. That’s what happens when you date an anchorman.
    I observed the opening “Eye on Kansas” news show hype with half an eye tonight. Rapid cuts between sweeping helicopter film of downtown Wichita. Yippee. Then Ted Brinkman, the anchorman, unleashed his studied baritone and the games began. His name was perfect for the job. He had the anchorman trifecta: razor-cut helmet of dark hair, flashing bleach-white teeth, and red power tie.
    His slightly bloodshot eye-whites and the way his prominent canine teeth dented his lower lip at times was the just-right extra touch. Vampires were still a novelty on evening TV in Kansas.
    Ted had to take injections so he could come in early enough to do the six o’clock show before the sun had set. He used a George Hamilton product that pumped melatonin into his skin, giving him that golden glow. The extra effort gave him a ratings edge. A lot of vampires were selling out their heritage to “blend in” nowadays, though not all of them were out of the closet, or the coffin.
    Ted was coming over after the news to take me out to midnight supper. I insisted on all the old-fashioned time-consuming date moves because I was wary of vamps. Oh, not the literally oral sex thing. It was what women have had trouble with since Eve: the sincerity thing.
    Whoever my parents, whatever my missing background, I was one thing for sure: what they call Black Irish. No fiery hair and freckles for me. My hair was drop-dead black, my eyes sky-blue, my skin wedding-invitation-white. I’d been vamp bait since I was twelve.
    My natural pallor was catnip to them. That just-drained and ready-for-more look. I even shared their allergy to direct sunlight, though I could overcome mine with sunscreen. I cracked my first smile of the evening imagining Ted Brinkman slathered in sunscreen. All anchormen, vampires or not, are a bit too full of themselves.
    So why even bother? Because I didn’t have a life, at least a dating one. I kept hoping that someday I’d meet an exceptional vamp who grooved on my Ivory Snow skin and still treated me like a human being. Ironic goal, right?
    I’d brooded myself through twenty minutes of droning stories and screaming ads, so Sheena Coleman was already doing her nightly bump-and-grind against the studio blue screen. Of course she had to compete with the weather maps the viewers really wanted to see.
    Sheena was a weather witch. That meant she could control meteorological conditions to some degree, as well as report them. Actually, I found it admirable that she had a regular job. A lot of weather witches went into blackmail. You know, pay me or I drop a firestorm of hail on your harvest-ready crop. It was a crime to use weather witching for personal gain, but there were only so many government and corporate positions around for them. Sheena was tall, blond,