A Single Impulse [Clover]

[Peter Parkman]

Peter’s intention at the mall was to visit Jersey – to finally see the place where she worked. And she still worked there, of course, regardless of her change in lifestyle. There were perks when one’s own boss was a vampire. One didn’t have to hide and lie. Peter himself had had to slowly back out of his job at the University. Maybe he’d go back, one day, when he felt more confidence in himself. For now, however, he was content to stay at home and read. And read. And read some more, before writing a little bit. He would become an academic. He would publish papers. He could do all that from behind a computer screen, and didn’t have to talk to anyone, face to face. He’d be forgiven the eccentricity of his sleeping patterns.

The Mall wasn’t somewhere that Peter had been before. He disliked behemoth shopping centres – he always had. There were always too many people, too many things, too much going on. Mainly, it was the people. A man who was supposed to be in hiding didn’t willingly step into a crowd. He preferred to keep his head down and keep to work, or to home, and maybe the smaller, less busy cafes and shops in between. Shopping centres could be avoided, when needed.

He’d finally overcome his anxiety, however. He had visited Jersey, and then had allowed her to get back to work. And now that he was inside the complex, he was intrigued. What shops had he missed, all this time? Was there anything in here that would catch his eye? Anything that he would just have to have? Probably not. Peter wasn’t an impulsive man. But he thought he’d have a look anyway. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to keep him occupied.

Soon enough, he stumbled across the Pet Emporium. Unable to resist, he stepped inside. If nothing else, he could things for the dogs. A fresh set of new collars, maybe. Some new treats – a different flavour, just to mix it up a bit. He wondered if this was where Jersey came, when she wanted to spoil the dogs. She bought enough for them – Peter didn’t really need to buy them anything else. But they were like the children that he had never had, that he would never have, and so he succumbed to the desire to spoil them.

Although he did browse for a minute or two, he was inevitably, interminably drawn to the cages. He wasn’t expecting this. A wave of remorse and anger rolls through him; he hated seeing animals in cages. Maybe that was why he had so many dogs already, but those that he currently had he’d rescued from the shelter. They’d have been put down, otherwise. But as Peter gazed at the poor creatures kept in the cages here at the pet shop, he couldn’t help but feel sad for them. A deep sorrow that had him wanting to buy them all, to take them all home. The cages were brightly lit. Too bright. And they were small. There were toys scattered around, and water dishes, sure. The cages at least looked well-tended to. But still. Still. They were cages.

Peter would stand there, for long minutes, just contemplating the animals. He didn’t know whether he could walk away. A deep frown was etched into his brow, as his fingers clenched and unclenched in his pockets—they were always in his pockets. No, Peter wasn’t an impulsive man, not at all—but he feared, if he caught the attention of one of the employees, if they asked him whether they could help him, he’d be very impulsive indeed. He’d give in. He’d buy them all. And so he stood, still and silent, almost hoping to blend as he tried to make up his own mind.

[Attire]

[Clover]

The blood clung to her clothing and to the bottom of her shoes. Red stained her pale palms to a cross between red and brown, the color of rust. She had taken bits of snow to clean the droplets and smudges from her face, leaving blood-stained snow in her wake. She had run when she should have stayed and waited for the authorities. She couldn’t recall making the conscious decision to flee, but her feet carried her away.

She left Gullsborough for Wickbridge and circled around the streets, unable to decide between left or right. The doors to Grosseto’s repeatedly opened and closed, but the people were smiling or laughing. She couldn’t put herself in such an environment. Just the thought of the food made her stomach churn.

Instead, she dragged her feet along the pavement, leaving a line of black markings right down to the concrete. No one noticed the blood staining her clothing, not in the night. She looked disheveled, but not to the point of attracting attention. If anyone looked in her direction, she forced a smile or nodded. She knew she had time before her face appeared on the news and her description hit the newsstands. And then she would bow out gracefully, probably by her own hand rather than at the hands of a stranger.

She never meant to stumble upon the Eighth Dimension Mall, but that’s where she finally stopped her wandering. The indoor lights bled out into the night, seeming to flicker or pulse with the aid of the handicap-accessible automatic doors. The music sounded almost nonexistent from where she stood, but she knew one step into the mall would have her lost in a swirl of elevator music and cheap perfume.

Pressing a palm to one of the long glass windows, she leaned in until her nose almost touched the cool surface. Her breathing left circles of moisture that expanded over and over again to show smudges forgotten by the cleaning crew. There were so many people inside. There were so many shops. If she went inside, she wondered if she’d meld with the crowd.

Clover jerked away from the window when she heard the echoes of sirens. Ambulances. Someone had called for ambulances. Darting over to the doors, Clover followed a mother and daughter into the mall and then moved around them to a nearby clothing store. The fluorescent lighting made the bloodstains on her clothes look like black ink, but the smell gave her away.

Normally one would have had to enter the store to lift merchandise, but there were racks upon racks of shirts, pants, and nightwear. She grabbed a handful of clothes and inched her way through the doorway of the store, going directly to the changing rooms. The store clerks had been distracted by a group of teenagers, so she had no problem slipping the clothing on and walking right out the doors.

The white t-shirt fit fine, but the jeans were a little baggy and the blazer hung from her shoulders and dwarfed her form. She would have gone right out the door if it weren’t for the security guards that had gathered near the exit. No. She couldn’t go that way. Clover quickly turned and jumped on the escalators, fleeing to the second floor. She felt surrounded, trapped, and she wasn’t sure how she ended up outside of the pet store, but she went along with her instincts. If her wanderings were instinct at all.

“The Pet Emporium!” The clerk snuck up on her and mumbled a greeting, but the last part, the name of the store, came out enthusiastically. The guy practically chirped the name of the store. Clover jumped and stumbled into a few of the cages, causing most of the animals to start barking or squeaking or squawking.

"Jesus! Don't do that to someone!" Clover might have been a little louder than necessary, but her heart was pounding out of her chest.

[Peter Parkman]

Peter may as well have been one of those animals, timid and easily frightened. The general hum of the shopping centre was almost soothing; there was soft music playing through the speakers, and the squeak of sneakers on marble flooring somewhere outside. There were the sounds of voices all around, echoing against the walls and bouncing off the roof to come sweeping back down through the entirety of the mall. Somewhere, there was a food court where everyone gathered to eat; that’s where the majority of the hubbub came from, but it was distant and muffled to Peter, who stood in front of the cages, and who was surrounded by a bubble of serene silence.

It wasn’t so much the man who’d greeted the other customer that startled Peter, but the woman’s reaction. He, too, might have squawked as his entire six foot frame jumped, as he veered sideways. Although the scent wasn’t very strong, he could still smell it – blood. It clung to the human like the smell of fish clings to a fisherman, even long after he’d come home and showered. A vague hint of old blood that was on top of the skin rather than gushing below it. It immediately put Peter on edge, his green eyes gleaming as he witnessed the scene in front of him.

The store clerk was about as startled as the rest of them; he threw up his hands in surrender and mumbled an apology. Poor guy was probably embarrassed as he wandered off to go and attack some other customer with his enthusiasm. Peter watched as he disappeared between the aisles; he was left with the human, whose clothes were far too big for her, and who smelled faintly of blood. Peter was filled with foreboding. He cleared his throat, his fingers twitching into anxious fists in his pockets. His shoulders were still hunched forward. Even over the din of the excited creatures, Peter could hear the sound of the girl’s heart thundering in her chest. At least, he reminded himself, he had already ‘fed’, if sucking blood through a straw pushing into a thick Styrofoam cup could be called ‘feeding’. Still, he was completely aware of the stark difference between himself and the girl; the fact that she was appealing if only because he wondered, curiously, whether her blood would taste anywhere near as good as Jersey’s had.

”I should thank you for scaring him off,” Peter said with a quick, sidelong glance at his fellow customer. ”He seems like he’d be far too persuasive,” he added, by way of explanation, before turning his furtive eyes back to the cages—and the poor animals—in front of him.

[Clover]

Clover almost felt bad about her reaction to the store clerk. Yes, he seemed like a complete tool. Yes, he probably spent his time scaring or irritating his customers. He still had feelings, even if those feelings resided deep below his thick, inhuman skin. She watched the man as he mumbled an apology and wandered off in another direction. For a moment, she felt like calling him back and asking for his assistance with some made-up dilemma, but she quelled the desire.

She stood there, awkwardly, and tried to ignore the sounds of the animals. The kittens and puppies had moved toward the bars of their cages and looked out with such an intensity--she wasn’t sure whether they craved attention or violence. Blues and greens and browns. Oh my.

Someone had addressed her and she missed most of what the man said. “He did seem persuasive,” she mumbled in response. Turning away from the cages, she watched the man’s attention shift back to the animals. He was an animal lover, or at least he looked like an animal lover. Clover didn’t share the sentiment.

She rolled up the sleeves of her black blazer, first the left and then the right, but she still felt hot and clammy. The lines like fine webs over her skin looked darker along her knuckles, the only places she couldn’t remove the blood. She had scratches and grooves from the punches she threw at her friends.

“Are you looking for a pet?” Clover quickly shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and moved closer to a cage of kittens. The animals were small and dotted with orange and white and black, definitely not purebred. One particularly colorful kitten brushed its face and side against the cage. Clover took a step back to distance herself.

The fish tanks looked more promising, but she’d already spoken and didn’t want to wander off in the midst of a conversation. Even if she didn’t enter the shop to talk or shop, she had a choice between the two.

[Peter Parkman]

Although there were perks to being a vampire, sometimes Peter wanted none of it. It wasn’t that he was overly hungry. The mild curiosity about the taste of this girl’s blood was banished as soon as he realised it was there; it was shameful, and was hardly a question that he’d ever, ever seek to answer. No, if he reacted to the smell of blood it was because he hated it so much. It was a fear that he had; he’d seen too much blood in his lifetime. And every single time he caught sight of a violent slash of red he was forced to remember the things that he had witnessed; the lives that were lost. The people that he had loved. The sight of blood doesn’t inspire much by way of hunger; the smell of it isn’t all that appealing either, but only because it precludes the sight of it.

Anyway, as the human shifted nearby, pushing her sleeves up to her elbows, Peter caught another whiff of blood. He didn’t want to look at her; didn’t want a sweep of his gaze to find some bleeding wound from which he would have to stumble and flee. A cursory glance sideways, however, did not reveal any garish slash of red. Olfactory knowledge was trying to tell him that the blood he could smell was dead and old and dry. Still, however, still – he hated that he could smell it. That his senses were so heightened that such a thing were immediately obvious.

He tried to ignore it, instead focused on the pets.

The woman asked if he was looking for a pet, before promptly stepping away from a kitten seeking attention. Peter frowned and closed the distance between himself and the cage of kittens – a mistake, no doubt – and pushed his fingers through the bars to try to awkwardly pet the kitten. The small, precious body immediately started to vibrate with a purr that seemed far too powerful for such a small animal.

”I wasn’t. But I hate seeing them all caged up like this. I shouldn’t. I can’t. I have five already…” he said, more to himself than to his company as he canted his head to the side, a small smile playing at the corners of his lips as he watched the antics of the kitten – it pushed its small head up against his splayed fingers, before playfully biting the tip of his finger, before tumbling around next to the bars, trying to pull his fingers through.

How goddamned adorable.

Reluctantly, he pulled his fingers away and glanced at the other customer.

”What about you?”