to Chicago to hunt vampires, but there were always a couple weeks at the beginning when she did pretty simple recon. It wouldn't be too dangerous for her mom to be around.
After dinner, her mother hugged her and went off to bed, since she had to get to the hospital at four the next morning. Tanya and her father wandered out to the garage and talked about nothing and everything while he messed around with the engine on the old 66 Camaro he had been "fixing up" since she was in high school. Eventually, it got late enough that he wanted to turn in, too.
"Sure you don't want to stay over?" he asked. "We can pull out the hide-a-bed from the couch."
She made a face. That old thing was so lumpy she'd have better luck sleeping on the floor. "Nah. Thanks, Dad, but I'd like to get back to my place and get some laundry done." She yawned.
For a moment it looked like her father was going to offer to let her do her laundry there too, but last time she had insisted that doing laundry at your folks' house was for jobless moochers. He must have remembered because he closed his mouth and smiled. "All right. Drive safe, there's idiots out there."
Tanya smiled back. It was his usual goodbye, even though they both knew there were worse threats than idiots out in the night. She gave him a hug and then walked out to her Beretta, the same car that her dad had fixed up for her sixteenth birthday. He still fixed it up whenever it (frequently) broke down. One of these days, she was going to need to get something more reliable, but that would require a steadier source of income than she had right now.
The drive from her parents' house to the apartment she rented was short, so she rolled down the windows and breathed in the Missouri night air. The breeze carried a host of memories in its wake, and she indulged herself in a little bitter-sweet nostalgia. Driving at night always gave her a wild sense of freedom tinged with anxiety, carried over from teenage years when she and Jake would 'explore' the moonlit back roads. It was good to be back home, but at the same time she was antsy to get working on the next hunt.
Once she unlocked the front door and got her things inside, though, she knew she had made the right choice. The whole place smelled like her Nana—lilacs and homemade bread. Nana was her great-aunt Ulyana. As a baby, Tanya hadn't been able to pronounce ‘Ulyana’ and had shortened it to ‘Nana’ and it stuck. Nana, in turn, continued to call her Tatiana long after everyone else shortened it to Tanya, in the Russian fashion.
Sometimes she wondered how Nana would have reacted to the attack. Would she deny it, like her mom? Tanya would like to think she would be as supportive as her dad, but it was hard to imagine Nana encouraging her to kill anything. Still, it was nice to have some normal memories to fall back on when her adult life got too freaky.
Locking the door behind her, she smiled. "Hi, Nana," she whispered. It was an old habit she never had the heart to break.
She dumped the laundry on her small kitchen floor—it could wait until tomorrow—and collapsed on the bed, which still had the same old crazy quilt, patched by her inexpert hand a dozen times or more. She had meant to get up and change into her PJs, but the smell of the quilt had her eyes fluttering shut. She hadn't bothered to turn on the lights, so she just kicked off her shoes and climbed under the covers.
In the parking lot below, a lone figure gazed up at the darkened windows of Tatiana's apartment. It is truly a shame that she lives on the third floor, he mused. It would be much easier to keep an eye on her if she were on the first. The lights had never come on, so he assumed she had gone straight to bed. For a moment, he imagined what she must look like while sleeping, her beautiful face relaxed and untroubled.
He would have liked to stay there all night, but he knew she would soon move on to Chicago. She liked to keep moving, and it kept him on his toes. He would need to get there before her, in order to make the proper preparations.
The radio did little to soothe his nerves as he drove the long stretch of I-55. He loathed being away from her for any length of time and usually spent it imagining all sorts of horrible things that might befall her. It was foolish, he knew. She was an incredibly capable young woman, and not as susceptible to the dangers of the world as she had once been.
Still, the distance between them tugged on him like a lodestone, and he fought to ignore it. Soon, very soon, she would be near him again. What were a few days when he had waited this long? And then, in a month, perhaps two if she was overly cautious—which he doubted, knowing her—she would at last be his.
Tanya rolled over in her sleep, bringing her legs in close to her stomach. She moaned softly as the familiar tug of memory pulled her down into the darkness.
"Ungh... Tanya..." Jake grabbed Tanya's hips and pulled, making their jeans rub together harder.
She smiled at his reaction and tugged off her sweater, knocking her hand against the dome light of his Corolla in the process. To make matters worse, her long curly hair was now a static-filled mess. She felt like a dork, but he hardly seemed to notice, grabbing her breasts as soon as they came into view. They had been sneaking out for the last two months, and he still couldn't get enough of her shirtless. It was a hell of a high for her.
"Oh yeah, babe," he grinned, and she grinned back, leaning forward to kiss him.
He started fumbling with the button of her jeans, and she put a hand on his to stop him. "Did you bring it?" she asked.
Jake slumped against the back door. "No, I forgot. I don't see why it's such a big deal, anyway, it's not like we've been with anybody else," he argued for the millionth time. "Right?" There was just enough hesitation in his voice to make her feel insulted, but she didn't bring it up.
"It's not about that! What if I got pregnant?" she whined. The week before, her PE teacher had put the fear of god into her by making her health class watch a video of a real live birth. She wasn't going to budge on this subject.
"I love you, Tanya, I'll take care of you," he offered, sitting up and wrapping his arms around her.
"Jake, you're eighteen. And I'm not going to be one of those horrible drop-out teen moms." She leaned back and rummaged in her purse. "Lucky for you, I thought ahead," she rattled the little foil packet at him. Asking him had only been a test, and she had been pretty sure he would fail.
He made a face.
"C'mon, it'll be fun." She grinned and began to unbutton his pants.
There was a sound outside the car and they both jumped. "What was that?" Jake asked, turning around to look out the fogged-up window. "I think there's someone out there!"
"Shit!" Tanya grabbed her sweater and yanked it back over her head, before scrambling into the front seat. If it was the cops, she was going to be in serious trouble. A sharp rap on the driver's side window made them both jump again, and Jake climbed into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window.
But instead of a cop, it was just a girl, maybe a couple years older than them. She smiled, and she was very pretty, despite her teased-out blonde hair.
"Hey, you guys got any reefer?" she asked. When she leaned down to talk, they could see down her baggy sweatshirt. She looked like something straight out of The Breakfast Club.
"Um, no?" Jake answered nervously.
Tanya snorted. He probably doesn’t even know what that is.
Leaning forward, she leveled a glare at the intruder. "We don't smoke that shit," Tanya told her. "But I know a guy in town who does." She hoped the offer would make her go away. Jake finally stopped staring at Retro Barbie's cleavage to give Tanya a shocked look.
"Really? Gnarly, man. Where?" She loudly cracked the bubblegum she was chewing.
Gnarly? Tanya thought. What kind of loser chick is she? "He lives over in Montreal, by the gas station. The big white house with the boarded up windows."
At that the girl pouted, and then stood up, speaking to someone outside the car. As the fog faded from the windows, Tanya saw that someone was standing on her side of the car. It looked like a guy in a jean jacket. She could hear his voice, low and deep, but she