The Unfortunate Story of Roddy Mayhem, Julie Steimle [i can read book club TXT] 📗

horns for you to have ‘em.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know. I had never met my dad.

“Eh,” Tom muttered, as if it were irrelevant. “I never met my dad either—not until I was fifteen anyway.”

I stared. “You’ve met ‘em?”

Tom shrugged with a roll of his eyes. “Yeah. First of many worst Halloweens. He kept getting me into trouble.”

Eve snickered. There was something weird about Eve’s snicker. It resonated in my ear with an impish tone, just like Tom’s, but there was also an odd quality to it, like if she really wanted she could probably convince me to do anything she wanted me to. Very much vampiric. It was uncanny especially because Eve didn’t feel fifty-fifty imp and vampire in the same way Tom and I were fifty-fifty imp and human. It was more like she was one hundred percent imp and one hundred percent vampire put into one creature. Halfs were never quite imp. We never moved as fast as them, or were ever as invisible as they could get—but I had a feeling Eve could do it all.

“But isn’t your nickname Trouble?” I asked Tom.

Eve laughed, nodding. Apparently she too had heard that.

Tom moaned loudly, clearly not a fan of the nickname. “Oh man! Please! I know the imps love that, but no. I do not want to be called Trouble.”

I was surprised. The imps adored it. They adored him.

“Look,” Tom said, meeting me in the eye, “I choose my life and my nicknames. And I just want to be called Tom.”

I had to admit, I was impressed. The guy had managed to become normal.

“So,” Tom asked. “What’s your real name?”

“Roddy Mayhem,” I said.

He shook his head, leading me along to a shop where we could get new jeans and stuff, Eve giving us a bit of distance. “No. I mean the name you were born to.”

I cringed. “I don’t care. I am Roddy Mayhem.”

Eve and Tom exchanged looks. Eve said, “Roddy, we need this information for legal paperwork. Where were you born? Who was your mother?”

I cowered more, feeling the muscles in my back and neck get tense. I hated thinking about my mother. She had cast me off and called me a devil child. I didn’t care about her any more than she had cared about me.

“I don’t know her name,” I muttered. “She abandoned me at the hospital.”

Eve stared. Then she wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug. It was the freakiest, most terrifying hug of my life. I could feel that though she was a woman with current female arm strength, she had imp reflexes and vampire strength enough to break my neck if she so chose.

“Where were you born?” Tom asked, sounding more serious.

I shrugged.

They exchanged looks.

Eve rubbed my head again and sighed. “It’s ok. We’ll figure it out.”

“Or make something up,” Tom said.

She rolled her eyes, jabbing him in the side.

That’s when the conversation changed. Eve asked Tom where he was born, and he cheerily supplied whichever part of New York he was born at. I’d never heard of the place and I quickly forgot it afterward. Tom explained with a glance to me that his mom had gotten pregnant during a Halloween where she had hooked up with what she said at the time was a really cool guy who wanted to have fun. Then he listed all the minor felonies his mother then participated in with his father. She was trouble. Unlike with my mom, she had not been raped. And when she had gotten pregnant, instead of getting an abortion like she usually did—as she had slept around in her youth—she decided to keep the baby as a souvenir. And when she had him and saw his wings and eyes, Tom said, she just busted up and laughed. Tom had no horns though, just like Spastic. And honestly, except for his wings, eyes, and manic grin, he hardly looked like an imp. Most imps looked like me. He had taken after his mother.

As they made me try on some pants, they chatted outside the changing room, exchanging their own life journeys as a half imp being.

“Oh yeah. I heard imps since I was a kid,” Tom said. “What about you?”

Eve chuckled, shaking her head. “Nope. I didn’t hear imps until I was fourteen.”

“What?” Tom drew in a breath. “But you are more imp than me.”

In the following silence on the other side of the door I changing behind, I assumed Eve had shrugged, because Tom replied, “How is that possible?”

“I didn’t even know I was a demon until then,” Eve said. “I just thought I had a rare form of albinism.”

“But how is that possible?” Tom repeated.

I wanted to know also. I had heard imps from day one. They had kept me from losing my mind and giving in to despair.

“Well, my birth father was a vampire,” Eve said as if that explained it. “And my mother was an imp. He left me with a human family not long after I was born.”

“No. I mean how have you not heard the imps?” Tom begged.

“Just what I said,” Eve replied with long suffering. “My father was a vampire. And some vampires—the really old ones—practice a kind of magic. I learned this fact recently.”

I could hear Tom practically staring at her, waiting for more.

She said. “Anyway, he was gifted at it. And he protected me with it by making it so I was sort of sealed off to the supernatural world—closing my eyes and ears to all that so I led a pretty normal life.”

That made sense. It made sense at how balanced and grounded she was. She didn’t act like most halfs in that she seemed more human in personality. I was envious.

“The thing you need to remember is that vimps are despised by both imps and vampires, as we are the result of an ancient curse,” she said. “And when a vimp is born, the imps usually attack the newborn.”

“Ooh,” Tom listened, enraptured.

I was totally freaked, yet also intrigued as clearly there was more too all of this than even the imps had told me. She scared them was all I knew. I pulled on my usual pants again and stepped out of the changing stall with the pairs of pants that fit.

“And that infuriates the newborn vimp to the point that they usually destroy all the imps in their general proximity—including their mother.” Eve shuddered, taking the pants we were going to buy from me. “Which didn’t happen with me.”

Tom and I both gaped. We hardly exchanged a look as this was indeed something new for us both.

“But because my father—the vampire—actually loved my mother—the imp—and he made sure when I was born no imp knew about it.” Eve sighed, shaking her head, leading the way to the checkout. “I didn’t know this until this last year that that was what had happened. I mean, I figured out long ago that he had brought me to my dad and mom—human parents—and left me with them so I could have a real childhood. But I recently found out he had also sealed away my impish and vampire desires until my coming-of-age.” She laughed, wiping away a tear as she thought on that guy. “I mean, seriously, he saved my life in more ways than one.”

No kidding. I really envied her now. Eve McAllister had two sets of parents who loved her—one that was super dangerous and one set that was wonderfully normal. I was so jealous.

“My birth is part of a curse. And imps don’t generally fall in love with vampires, you see,” Eve explained to both Tom and myself—as we were both now entirely captivated by her tale. Tom paid for the clothes with a credit card which oddly had the name H. Richard Deacon III on it. “And the curse I am connected with is ancient. Like Egypt ancient.”

I stared more. The pants were now bagged and Eve pointed the way to a shoe store.

I looked at my shoes. They were held together with duct tape. I had stolen them a few years back, but had loved them so much I never wanted to replace them.

Tom looked even more fascinated as we followed her, setting the bag he was carrying down on the nearest bench inside the store where I could get my feet measured and try on new shoes we had no intention of stealing. He gestured for me to sit. I could tell he knew more to this story than even she was saying. He knew why the curse had been enacted.

“Rumor has it,” she murmured as she looked down the aisle and then tossed over a pair of new shoes for me to try on, “I will live for three hundred years—if, of course, I don’t give into my bloodlust and try to kill the Holy Seven… which is what I was born for.”

Tom drew in a breath. “No kidding?”

I wondered which part he was reacting to. The imps around me were shaking at the very idea of her living three hundred years. I was just trembling at the thought that she was born to kill a group of people—and for some nutty reason people were entrusting me into her hands.

She nodded. And she smiled. “I like them, you know. The Seven are decent people.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. But she was really getting frightfully interesting. And in a really weird way, I was no longer scared of her. She was choosing to go against her nature. Choosing it.

That was my biggest takeaway from this whole weird afternoon with her and Tom. Eve (this crazy powerful demon) believed that a person was the sum of their choices and not what they were born as. She actually, literally, chose to be who she was. She believed in free will. And she was choosing to live as a human being.

Basically, she hated identity politics.

“Everybody has challenges,” she explained, tossing over another pair of shoes. “I mean, I can hear the heartbeats of every person in the room. I can smell their blood, and I can feel myself getting hungry. I also hear all the temptations of every soul within imp-earshot.” (Which was pretty far. Imps shouted constantly.) “And I have just as many impulses to cause havoc for the mere fun of it.” (Which I also had.) Sighing, Eve stared at the other shoes on the rack. “But that is all irrelevant to what I really want out of life.”

I didn’t understand.

And she could tell. She nodded to Tom. “You know what I mean.”

Tom shrugged. “I’m not as in control as you are. But I get it.”

She laughed, nodding.

“I don’t,” I said, voicing what was really bothering me about their conversation. “How do you know what you want?”

Eve met my gaze. “You’re going to have to find that out. But for myself…?” She exhaled, thinking on it. “I want to keep my family. I don’t want death and hunters and horrors in my life. I want to fall in love.”

“And get married?” Tom chuckled, winking.

She cringed and sat next to him. “Marriage… I feel like the world would freak out if I asked for that one. I mean, the witches are already upset I won’t hunt down the Holy Seven and kill them. They say I am denying my destiny.”

“Not career minded, huh?” Tom asked, his smile crooking to weird angles. That was a freaky sense of ‘career’ too. Was Tom being silly? I was amazed they were talking like this. It seemed so… normal.

Eve laughed. “Career? I’m not a fan of that word. I will get a job, of course. But I will never get to be a mother, you know.”

Tom looked confused. He didn’t know. And neither did I.

“Why?” I asked, wondering why this topic came up. What did motherhood have to do with anything? My mother was a jerk.

“Vimps can’t,” she said, blinking at me as if I ought to already know.

But even Tom stared, still not