Vampires Anonymous - Shane Barrett, Joey Quintero

Joey looks around the abandoned office-turned-Vampires-Anonymous and wonders how this night is going to go.
There’s about ten people scattered throughout the room. A guy playing a harmonica in a corner, some upbeat tune that’s probably actually a folk ballad about how some guy died in the old west, two heavily tattooed girls playing some kind of card game that involves a lot of yelling and smacking the top of the deck, a young guy with a frowzy shock of dark purple hair, an old man with cowboy boots and a weather-lined face apparently dozing off with his feet propped up on a battered desk, a guy who looks like he could have been a lawyer in his past life brushing off the seat of a wobbly spinning chair, and a woman with a dandelion poof of hair and a patch-covered jacket perched on top of a four-foot-tall filing cabinet. Then there’s Joey, and Shay, and the listing stacks of paperwork, file boxes, and busted chairs the previous tenants left behind. 
Part of what Shay’s doing as community service for his own mentorship is starting a support group for fledglings that’s connected to the mentor program. It’s one thing for young vampires to have a connection to someone who can offer advice and the wisdom of experience, but it’s also good to have people who are at the same spot, sharing the same struggles. 
Joey’s got her halfway house ‘sisterhood’, but she agreed to come anyway because Shay should have at least one person he knows to offer support the first few weeks. 
But if Shay’s nervous about his first night leading the group, he’s not showing it. 
Lawyer-guy looks around the room. “Shouldn’t we be, like, making a circle of chairs or something?”
“You wanna hold hands and sing Kumbaya, too?” Cabinet-percher asks. 
“This group is what we make it,” Shay breaks in, with the same authoritative calmness Joey remembers from the days when he drove off jerks harassing her. “In my experience, too much structure makes everyone feel too formal, or too put on the spot because we’re all looking at each other. We’ll try it this way first.” He looks around. “I would like everyone to introduce themselves but only as much as you’re comfortable with, and no last names right now. I’ll start. I’m Shay. I’ve been a vampire for a little less than two years, but I was bitten in college and it took me quite a while to actually die and turn. The reason I got picked to work with this group in the first place is that I was trying to deal with the chronic venom pain and got hooked on heroin. I’ve been in and out of mandatory rehabs and group therapy most of my adult life. The point being, I know something about what makes a group work or what makes them useless, and we’re going to try to be one of the better ones here.” 
Joey tries to pay attention as the others follow suit. 
Tattoos and Tattoos Two are sisters, Kai and Lia. They got turned the same night when they played a punk-rock gig at the wrong bar and ended up on the menu instead of onstage. The old man is Loren, a name that makes Lawyer-guy snicker until Harmonica throws a ball of crumpled paper at him. He’s a former rancher who ended up bled dry by both the banks and vampire loan shark he turned to in desperation. Purple hair is Francisco, whose story is disturbingly similar to Joey’s, except that the vampire who took him and four other people across the border decided to hang onto them for a while. He’d been the only one infected, and had woken up in the middle of a body dump in the desert. Like Joey, he’s on Chimera’s case docket for home earth citizenship. Harmonica turns out to be a very unassuming Jay, which feels like way too short and normal a name for his charismatic aura. He’d been a bit part actor in sitcoms until he tried to break up what he thought was a rape in the backlot and ended up surprising a hungry vamp instead. Lawyer-guy, whose name is actually Keith, really was a lawyer, apparently. A divorce lawyer whose less than above-board methods led to him crossing paths with a sleazy vamp offering PI services for his clients. One argument over payments later, his practice and his life were over. Cabinet-percher is Aaliyah. Former LA cabbie who got literally stiffed on a fare. Twice over, unfortunately for her. The first time by a vamp who bit her rather than pay up, and the second time by a desperate guy who was fleeing an armed robbery. When the radio gave out his description, and Aaliyah had looked into the mirror to confirm it was her passenger, he’d shot her in the back of the head and bolted.
Joey didn’t really mean to go last, but it kind of just happened. She’s not the sort to break into the conversation, and she was trying too hard to take in everyone else’s story.
“Uh, I’m Joey. I’ve been a vampire for about eight months. I was bitten when I was nineteen, by a border smuggler.” She kicks at a dust ball on the floor. “I spent the next six years in LA and when I died, my family buried me and I turned. Now I’m in the mentor program to get a chance at getting them back in my life.” It feels painfully slow. Two weeks is too long to wait for the physical visits, but if everything goes well, in another month she’ll get moved up into the once-a-week bracket. “I hadn’t told them I was going to become a vampire. Mostly because I didn’t actually think it would happen.”
One of the two tattooed girls (it’s going to take weeks for Joey to remember who’s who) scowls. “Let me get this straight. You didn’t know you had the venom in you?”
Joey laces her fingers together and looks down at her hands in her lap.
“Not for sure.” She sighs. “I didn’t want it to be true. I couldn’t afford it to be.”
“Didn’t you feel anything?” Aaliyah asks. “I felt like my skin was going to burn off whenever someone touched me. It hypersensitized me to everything. And my teeth were killing me.”
“I kept telling myself everything I felt made sense.”
She was driving her sister to appointments, working the fights at night, scared she'd be caught and deported because she couldn't get a visa. She’d figured the stomach pains meant she’d end up like Jorge across the hall, with a stress ulcer before thirty because he too had overstayed his legal welcome. She thought the hunger was from skipping meals so her siblings got more. 
She was ignoring the pain because Via came first.
“Everyone else in our neighborhood was just like me. Always tired, alert to anything that might be trouble, not enough in our pockets to put enough on the table.” Even the teeth had made sense. She’d always ground them in her sleep. Mauri used to complain about it in the camps, say she was keeping him awake.
The one thing she’d never felt was the aggression Shay had described, that drove him to the fights where she’d met him. Chimera’s been theorizing for a while that there’s a subclass of vampire in which the venom activates the victim’s flight instead of fight response, creating a stealthy, shadow-dwelling vampire when they finally turn, an ambush predator rather than one that stalks its prey actively. 
They still don’t know if it’s linked to the person’s inherent responses to traumas, or if it’s connected to a specific strain of sires. After all, one could argue that the vampire who turned her was the same sort. That kind of alert wariness would be an asset to someone in his line of work. 
“That’s messed up.” Jay shakes his head. “I can’t believe you just ignored that.”
Joey swallows. No one will blame her if she stops talking now.
She’s not sure telling anyone the specifics about her family is ever a good idea.
But that’s something born out of years of running and hiding and fear.
She doesn’t want to carry that with her into this place. 
“I wasn’t alone when I came across the border. I made the deal I did in exchange for him getting my siblings and me here, so my sister could get the medical help she needed. Via was always the brave one. Facing her pain with a smile even on her worst days. If she could be okay, how could I be anything else?” Joey swallows. “It felt like nothing compared to what she must have been living with. She needed me to be strong for her, and I had to make sure she could get to the doctor, that we could pay for her treatments, and that she felt safe.”
“Damn. You just ignored vampire venom poisoning because taking care of your family was the most important thing in your life. That is bad-ass,” Aaliyah says. “You told something killing you from the inside out that it was gonna have to get in line because your little sis needed you.”
Joey didn’t think what she’d done was that impressive. She’d just been getting herself out of bed every day for Via, like she’d done every day since their mother was murdered. But apparently, to a room full of vampires, she’s managed to pull off something extraordinary.
“Yeah. Don’t think I can top that,” Keith says with a shrug. 
“You literally got infected and died in the same day, of course you can’t,” Kai (Joey can tell now because she’s spun around in her office chair and there’s a big stylized K inked on her shoulder) retorts. 
“Beginning to think you should be the one leading sessions,” Shay says, a hand resting gently on Joey’s shoulder. 
She shakes her head. It was scary enough telling a roomful of vampires about her siblings even existing. She’s not someone who likes the spotlight. Ever. 
“No way.”
He gives her a smile. “Well, in that case…” He holds out a chipped bowl full of strips of paper and pens. “Write down your favorite vamp bar. Has to be a legal one though, and not a coven-members-only kind.”
“Okay, why?” Francisco asks.
“Because I think we’re going to have a much better time getting to know each other over drinks.” Shay says with a grin. “We’ll draw names every week, rotate through.”
“That seems like a weird way to run the vampire version of AA,” Keith mumbles.
“We’re not trying to stop drinking synth-blood,” Lia says. “We’re trying to learn how to cope with being vampires. I think it’s great.” She tosses her slip in the bowl. “Heads up Kai and I have the same pick and it’s karaoke so be prepared to sing for a round because there’s double the chances ours gets picked.” 
“Oh no,” Jay groans.
“What do you have against music? You were playing that harmonica for a solid ten minutes.”
“Music, fine. Me singing, so not a good idea.”
“Then you’d better start practicing and hope it gets picked a couple weeks from now,” Aaliyah says, tossing her own pick in.
Shay swirls a hand around the bowl. As the only member of the group without a suggestion, he’s the most unbiased picker. He pulls out a folded paper, opens it, and shakes his head. “Okay. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but who possibly suggested a dive like the Vein Drain?”
No one raises their hands.
“Well, it is a legal establishment, but can we at least try not to start a full bar brawl on our first meeting night?”
There’s a pretty mixed response of nods and shrugs.
Shay looks at Joey with the first really concerned expression she’s seen all night, but all she can do is shake her head. “You let them pick.”
“And I think I’m going to regret it.” Shay sighs. “I’m going to be really bad at this aren’t I?”
“I guess we’ll find out if Lawson has to read us the riot act and bail us out of holding in the morning,” Joey says. “In the meantime, I guess we’re going to find out why this place is one of our new friends’ favorite hangouts.”