He's a pretty thing, and his arrogance shows in his face. Jerry swabs at his bottom lip with a thumb and the boy Charley clenches his jaw. He's young, and arrogant, and healthy, when his elderly friend couldn't even make it until morning. It had been insulting, really.

Jerry wipes off his hand on a handful of Charley's shirt. "Take these things off; you won't need them any more."

Charley stands at the edge of the bed, watching him mutely while a muscle batters away in the corner of his cheek. The bed was one of their better acquisitions, dark varnishy Old World wood with soft sheets and an expensive mattress, and he's barely gotten any mileage out of it. He'd had Amy on the floor.

Of course, his young neighbor would rather watch.

The boy's hands must be shaking. He doesn't even make it down to his undershirt before Jerry loses patience with him. Pressed-plastic buttons scatter — they don't make clothes like they used to, not that Jerry isn't appreciative of an era where everything is soft and synthetic and stainproofed — and Charley flinches back, back up against the edge of the bed. He's on the brink of doom, and you have to wonder whether he even knows it.

When he lowers him down against the mattress, Charley's dark eyes remain fixed on him — his gaze doesn't skitter across the furnishings looking for breakable chair-legs and conveniently cross-shaped candlesticks, it remains locked on Jerry's face, his eyes, his mouth. It's a mute animal look — like a deer trembling from exhaustion, pursued to the brink of collapse and with nothing better to do for itself than to stare stupidly at the hunter. He's a nice suburban American boy who's never killed a thing in his life, but Jerry will teach him how.

Just a cowardly teenage boy in blue jeans and socks; he's lost his jacket some time before, and his white collared shirt is freckled with blood. Just a limber young body with all its parts intact. His body goes stiff beneath Jerry's weight, the cords in his soft neck stand out when Jerry brushes close, they throb with blood under his tongue — his whole body is hammering with blood, stinking with fear, and oh, to be young again.

Wrenching him back against the bedcovers — his thin soft throat makes a convenient place to grip and Jerry can hold him there with one monster hand while he situates himself.

The pressure spooks him; his pulse quickens. "You're hurting me—"

"But I don't have to be, Charley. Think how easy it was for your girlfriend, for Amy. She slipped into it as easily as changing clothes. You just need to want it, Charley."

The boy jerks up off the mattress, hammering away uselessly at Jerry's chest with his sharp balled fists — the muscles in his legs seem to spasm as Jerry strips him down, easy as a knife. He doesn't have anything nicer to put him in when they're done, but boys are lower-maintenance than girls on most levels already. There's no pretense of courtship and precious little persuasion necessary when all their fears and desires are so close to the surface — you could taste them on the air if you didn't mind the swirl of mediocrities. Most of them have pimples, dreaming of cars and summer jobs, and no greater fear than that of being laughed at by pretty girls. There are no great beauties, and he's never met the same boy twice across the decades, or wanted to.

Charley's is not a familiar face. He's shivering now, naked to the waist and then some, white-shouldered in a dark dark room. Jerry tugs his jeans down past his hips.

(Gone are the clothes his mother bought him — throw them on the fire, you won't need them any more.)

Jerry's grip releases. The boy doesn't try to sit up, which is wise; his chest rises and falls like a bellows, shuddering for breath. His own hand presses to the raw place on his throat where he'd been touched, in a gesture that might be exploratory as much as self-protective.

"You're a freak," he spits in a wheeze without opening his eyes more than halfway, dark slashes in a flushed face.There are scratches on his neck from Jerry's fingernails — he hadn't even meant to do that, and they're only shallow. Hardly any blood. "You're an honest to God freak. Why would I ever want to be like you? After what you did to Amy?"

They both know why. Jerry will give him the abbreviated version.

He cups Charley's shoulders in his hands to offer a reassurance. The bones in his face are itching to shift into their most natural shapes, to sprout fangs and furrows and heavy angles, but not yet. At first it has to happen easily. "You'll be stronger this way. None of them will be able to resist you. You can have any girl you want. Any woman you can think of. Doesn't that sound good to you? Doesn't that sound reasonable?"

He'd been inside Amy, Jerry had seen inside her and known — all of Charley's clumsy school-night overtures and over-the-blouse groping hadn't gotten him anywhere, and they never would, at least not anywhere worth going. She resented him more than she'd ever want him, she was afraid every time she told him no — some part of the boy knows this, that his fearless vampire-killer trick was really a trick on her and that he's failed Amy deeply. But he won't live to be be ashamed of it much longer.

Charley is blinking rapidly, as if to clear the sweat from his eyes, but his skin is cool and dry from shock and the thin salt-smell in the air makes it clear he's fighting tears. Jerry can taste him at the back of his throat already — he's haloed in a thin layer of soap-smell and clean laundry, cheap cologne from last Christmas, long before he'd ever seen Jerry's face. He smells like sweat, and youth, and sex, and blood.

The boy turns away against the bedsheets, straining to hide his face and not be seen, but all it does is expose more of his throat. His voice comes out strained, pathetically offended: "You said you were giving us a choice. Give me another choice."

"There is no choice, Charley. It's better this way."

After that it's easier. Jerry has him completely and entirely, without the effort of staying in a single shape or reining in his enjoyment.

*

He comes back harder than before, all the adolescence is burned out of him — the wounds in his throat and chest and thigh have knit up again and all that's left is mess and muscle, rueful eyes and swollen bones beneath the skin. The teeth are there already, newly made fangs as his new body rearranges itself — cutting their way up through changing pink tissue and splitting his lips bloody.

Charley doesn't giggle and lash out like Ed initially had, and he doesn't start off his new life by complaining about the unfairness of it all. He slips back into his ruined white shirt. Jerry can loan him a sweater or something.

Charley's mother should come looking for him any minute now — such a lovely woman. No point in bothering the police about a boy who was old enough to take care of himself — but Jerry will help her look for her son in all the usual haunts. Maybe they'll find him.