Recipe for Disaster

“Delilah, Delilah, wake up.”

Delilah opened her eyes, froze for a moment, remembering her new name. Yes. I’m Delilah. She thought.

The darkness around them was more pristine and absolute than it had been when they fell asleep. The sun had gone down. Vincent was crouched precariously by the doors peering out into the night, moonlight carving the features of his profile, pale grey, except for his glowing, green eye.

Delilah was sore from the day spent on the garden hose, “Where are we going?” She asked, following him out of the shed.

“I need to find wifi.” He whispered, “So I can check the DVLAA website for an update.”

Delilah noticed the phone in his hand, “Then what?”

“We’ll go home.” Vincent said.

They walked along the street, he looked at the luminous screen. When they finally stopped they stood in the shadow of a tree. Delilah stared up at the house, it was white, bigger than most of the others, two stories. It was still in bad condition, peeling paint, shaggy lawn sprinkled with children’s toys, a tricycle, a basketball, a jump rope. The porch was crumbling, although, in its glory days it might have been called stately. Delilah did not bother asking what the update was about; she had the uneasy feeling that she already knew. She consciously decided she would rather stare blankly at this house, at the bleak unknown of her future, than try to fight or ask questions.

The DVLAA’s website was a recipe blog, with lots of human subscribers and real recipes. In an emergency, a vampire could request information about the situation by sending a private message to the admin requesting a link to the recipe for chicken marsala which the website never actually posted and closing their message with the signature “Betty Kellogg, from Akron Ohio.”

Vincent sent the message and waited. He watched Delilah watching the house. He felt an ache he had been trying to ignore since the previous night. A gnawing, futile ache. That ugly little house was all he wanted out of life. Everything he had lost when his mother died. He shook his head, tried to expel these thoughts. They had no place in this moment. Danger of this magnitude requires absolute focus.

Vincent had never met another vampire who showed any sign of tenderness or concern for anyone. They were normally callous and stoic. He remembered the blank looks they gave him when he mentioned subjects like love and sympathy. It singled him out as a half-blood among a race who despised humans. Even an explanation of how he was conceived did nothing to thaw their glares of silent contempt. Vincent had adopted a facade of closed indifference among other vampires.

He thought, as he watched her, that this was why he liked Delilah. She was selfless and sweet. The ache returned, bolstered by empathy, as he considered how out of place she would feel among other vampires. He allowed himself a moment to wish he could leave her there, in the care of the simple, toothless rednecks who owned this house and save her from all the terror they were about to experience. The moment was cut short, though, by the chirp of his phone notifying him that he had received a new message. 

He scrolled to the bottom, held his breath and told himself that good things still happen sometimes, even to cursed vampire girls. The message back, a real recipe for chicken marsala, ended with the innocent suggestion that it is best to use real butter. Every vampire reading that message, remembering a code they had been taught since childhood, would begin assuming new names, abandoning their current addresses, shredding documents and destroying credit cards. To Vincent, those words meant two things: threat level nine, war.