By the time he left college to shadow under a mechanic in a town called Dogtrot, Maurice had accepted that he'd become a sort of an alien. His own age group didn't 'get' him and he didn't 'get' them. They spoke different languages. All he knew how to do was please superiors. He decided that going somewhere where no one knew him and edging in with the older crowd was what was best for him. People liked a 'good ole boy' and that was what he decided to become. He rented a trailer behind a man's house and offered to do manual labor for half the rent and then sold everything inside said trailer for beer. He lived this way for three years.
When his mother learned about his drinking, she begged him to get help but he denied it--he didn't want to interact with more any more than he had to. This crushed her and she understood why he behaved this way, but she never stopped trying. While his sister let their mother visit with her kids, Maurice was still the one who came around the most--even if it was to usually borrow money or wash his clothes.
[TIME FOR THE BOOK TO ACTUALLY START]
And here was Maurice, minding his own business, working at a gas station and TRYING to keep out of trouble. It was the middle of July. Hot. Terrible customers. He had himself a bad day. A really bad awful no good day. So he did what any alcoholic recluse does on a really bad awful no good day. He skulked off to his favorite way-out-of-the-way bar for a drink or twelve. As fate would have it, he stepped on a crumpled twenty dollar bill. And as fate would also have it, he encountered a cool funny lady far too pretty to be a dingy old bar with dead animals on the walls. She lured him outside, claiming car trouble, and knocked him out with a wrench. She and the rest of her undead posse drank him dry, buried his body in the woods, and skipped.
Maurice's life then proceeded to get a whole hell of a lot harder. After figuring out and acknowledging the fact that he was a bloodthirsty CREATURE OF THE NIGHT (and also that bloodthirsty creatures of the night did in fact exist), he had to keep it a secret. There were shenanigans and lots of hiding form the sun under several layers of clothes in the Texas heat. This lasted for about two weeks before he drove to Two Rock and spilled everything to his mom. She took it better than expected. They now had something to keep them connected again. With one person on his side, Maurice continued trying to do things as normally as he could in Dogtrot and didn't do a terrible job, all things considered. He managed to weasel a night shift out of his boss and worked that way for a while, picking off chickens and attacking nearby cattle to feed himself.
Unfortunately, improper nutrition started to get to him. Without human blood, Maurice's senses were dialed up to eleven and his twitchyness made him hard to deal with. His new co-worker, Meranda, was having a lot of un-spoken family issues of her own. When Maurice added his own aggression to their already hot-and-cold friendship, working at Fred's became a delicate ballet of dancing on eggshells for both of them. Naturally, neither knew why the other had their undies in a twist. Communication is for nerds.
Juggling two drinking problems was pretty hard on Maurice and after destroying a man's arm in a bar fight that he more or less started, he fled into the night, eventually losing himself in an unfamiliar part of town. He eventually ducked into a coffee shop. There, he shared a highly caffeinated drink with a bored clerk named Horas. Unbeknownst to Maurice, Horas was also undead and part of a little cluster of vampires that had been living in the city undetected for a good fifty years. He'd seen Maurice around before but only realized that night that he actually lived in town.
This upset Horas and the rest of the vampires in town because up until that moment they were completely unaware of him. Not only that, but around the same time Maurice was turned, a few other dead people had turned up in town. And they were actually dead. Murdered in grizzly ways and left to be found by police. It wasn't vampire-like work but the murders were weird enough to get the attention of a local self-appointed monster slayer who had started to make getting a bite to eat pretty damn hard.
Maurice the rookiepire wandering around town making sloppy livestock kills, people are turning up dead, the slayer is on the lookout for a monster to blame The Dogtrot Murder (the group of vampires. don't laugh it was a long time ago) doesn't want ANY monster to be found out.
What to do?
Well obviously either kill Maurice or get him an education so the slayer guy doesn't catch him and start looking for more. Vampires are sort of a cockroach situation. There's never just one.. Charlie, the leader of the Dogtrot Murder, liked that first idea, but Terri, an undead soccer mom, wasn't going to have any of it and Horas didn't think the the kid was half bad so they took him under their wing and started to teach him how to be a right and proper dead person. If this book were an 80's movie there would be an 80's vampire training/bonding montage right about here, but since it isn't, there isn't one. After a couple months of trial and error, Maurice adjusted. In order to stay hidden, Horas taught him how to turn into a bat, but after nearly getting eaten by a cat during his first flying lesson, Horas decided to teach him how to turn into a dog instead. Maurice became very good at the dog shape and was able to travel and hide.
He was also taught how to mug people in back alleys and feed from them without turning them. It's hard to turn somebody on accident but it does happen, especially if the vampires involved are inexperienced and unable to control themselves.
One night, while Horas was teaching Maurice how to feed properly, they were ambushed by the slayer and Maurice was stabbed multiple times. This threw The Dogtrot Murder into paranoia overdrive. Charlie instructed the members to only hunt in pairs until whatever was committing the weird crimes was caught. Not long after that, Maurice got kicked out of the trailer he'd been renting because dying and running around with a bunch of other dead people tends to make you forget about...y'know...human responsibilities. Like rent. And answering the phone. That bummed him out pretty badly, but Charlie agreed to let him to stay in the little bunker the lot of them met up at until he got back on his feet. She wasn't crazy about the idea but at least it'd be easier to keep an eye on him.
Jody, a human friend of Charlie's, pops up on the first of November to warn her that that M.O.O.N., this group of overpowered nerds with sticks up their asses but startlingly good magic skills, was pretty freaked out over the whole Jack-the-Ripoff murder count and are sending some drones by in the coming weeks to have a look-see. If they aren't detected, the drones will return and MOON will forget about Dogtrot. It's a speck of a town and nobody cares about it anyway. The plan was to keep off the streets as much as possible until then. After that they would relax and have themselves a good time.
Early Black Friday morning (aka Vampire Christmas) would be easy and safe hunting because it's easy to pick off people when they're fighting each other for five dollar crock pots. They could go dry until then.
A week and a half before Thanksgiving, Meranda accidentally hits Maurice with her car while he was in dog form. Mistaking him for a normal dog, she took him home and wrapped his leg with the intent to take him to the vet in the morning. During the night Meranda gets phone call and gets the news that her father has finally passed away. After watching her break down, Maurice understood why she'd been acting so crazy for months on end. He feels like a shit. Which he had been. You suck, Maurice. When Meranda leaves to go to the nursing home, Maurice shifts back into his human shape and escapes back to the nest. His arm is still broken. Terri gives him a makeshift cast. It's terrible.
Things were awkward at the gas station for the next couple of days and he noticed that Meranda's name was missing from the schedule. His boss tells him that she put in her two weeks and was planning to return to Chicago. Maurice decided to attend Meranda's father's cremation ceremony to support her and let her know that he was sorry for being a shit. He didn't want her to think she hadn't had any friends in Dogtrot. After actually making friends, Maurice couldn't stand the idea of someone else not having any.
Fate would have it that the day of the funeral was also the day the MOON drones were set to visit. Maurice knew that he risked getting caught and torn open (and probably the town being put under permanent watch) but he was a young person with a bleeding heart so he did the dumb protagonist thing and dropped the idiot ball. Maurice crept out of the nest with his guitar on his back just in case something happened to it while he was gone. Everybody had gotten paranoid at that point.
He missed the ceremony itself but caught Meranda outside the funeral home. After an apology from both sides, they made up. Meranda decided to hang around a little longer since there wasn't much waiting for her in Chicago anyway. Maurice offered to help Meranda box up old things to sell or give away. He and Meranda decided to go get something to eat but then THE PLOT showed back up in the form of a guy in a Braves hoodie with no face and horrible tentacle arms.
There are kind of a lot of them.
Maurice and Meranda fight back with broken wine bottles and debris from the alleyways before being rescued by Terri who had also snuck out of the nest. She told them that the MOON drones weren't really living creatures and were defective on top of that. They had to be killed and their cores had to be removed to insure MOON didn't come after them. Jody would make up some bullshit story on their behalf. She tried to usher them back to safety but the three of them are were caught by Charlie and Horas who had also slipped out to patrol the town. THERE IS A LOT OF COUGHING AND AWKWARD FOOT SHUFFLING. Charlie yelled at Maurice and ordered him to go the fuck back to the nest with Meranda. Maurice's broken arm made him almost useless for fighting. Meranda had taken the brunt of the damage and was flagging hard. They took an overly complicated back way to the nest and were almost home free.
Near the nest, they witnessed (or overheard, rather) someone being murdered. While they feraked out about it, the slayer popped up and mistook Meranda for the source of the yell and attacked Maurice. Instead of running, Maurice stood up to him and dared him to try and kill him, face to face. After all the crap he'd been through over the past few months he wasn't going to let some guy in a coat put him down. Luckily a severed hand landed between them from the building above. After some sassing, Maurice convinced him to investigate the source of the scream instead of heckling him and Meranda. They made it to the nest only to find the doors open.
A MOON drone had gotten inside and was waiting for them. Maurice and Meranda used up the last of their energy and killed it tag-team style because battle friends are the best kinds of friends. Maurice delivered the killing blow with the splintered neck of his guitar. Once that was over, things calmed down in Dogtrot. The scream in the alley had, in fact, been the cause of nothing more than a human murderer that the slayer apprehended. He was praised on the news much to the Dogtrot Murder's disgust but the less he bothered them the better.
Charlie pulled Maurice aside and regretfully told him that he could not live at the nest. He had helped them in defending it but had also disobeyed her (and not for the first time). Meranda flipped her shit at Charlie but Maurice understood and did not put up a fuss. Maurice grew to level: Semi-Responsible For His Actions.
Once they were patched up, Maurice drove Meranda home and apologized profusely for dragging her into the whole mess. She assured him that she would deal. They were friends. They could do stuff later. Like get absolutely shitfaced, watch Dune and not get strangled by starfish monsers. Maurice bid her farewell and drove off in his truck that was, for the moment, his new house.
3/???
When his mother learned about his drinking, she begged him to get help but he denied it--he didn't want to interact with more any more than he had to. This crushed her and she understood why he behaved this way, but she never stopped trying. While his sister let their mother visit with her kids, Maurice was still the one who came around the most--even if it was to usually borrow money or wash his clothes.
[TIME FOR THE BOOK TO ACTUALLY START]
And here was Maurice, minding his own business, working at a gas station and TRYING to keep out of trouble. It was the middle of July. Hot. Terrible customers. He had himself a bad day. A really bad awful no good day. So he did what any alcoholic recluse does on a really bad awful no good day. He skulked off to his favorite way-out-of-the-way bar for a drink or twelve. As fate would have it, he stepped on a crumpled twenty dollar bill. And as fate would also have it, he encountered a cool funny lady far too pretty to be a dingy old bar with dead animals on the walls. She lured him outside, claiming car trouble, and knocked him out with a wrench. She and the rest of her undead posse drank him dry, buried his body in the woods, and skipped.
Maurice's life then proceeded to get a whole hell of a lot harder. After figuring out and acknowledging the fact that he was a bloodthirsty CREATURE OF THE NIGHT (and also that bloodthirsty creatures of the night did in fact exist), he had to keep it a secret. There were shenanigans and lots of hiding form the sun under several layers of clothes in the Texas heat. This lasted for about two weeks before he drove to Two Rock and spilled everything to his mom. She took it better than expected. They now had something to keep them connected again. With one person on his side, Maurice continued trying to do things as normally as he could in Dogtrot and didn't do a terrible job, all things considered. He managed to weasel a night shift out of his boss and worked that way for a while, picking off chickens and attacking nearby cattle to feed himself.
Unfortunately, improper nutrition started to get to him. Without human blood, Maurice's senses were dialed up to eleven and his twitchyness made him hard to deal with. His new co-worker, Meranda, was having a lot of un-spoken family issues of her own. When Maurice added his own aggression to their already hot-and-cold friendship, working at Fred's became a delicate ballet of dancing on eggshells for both of them. Naturally, neither knew why the other had their undies in a twist. Communication is for nerds.
Juggling two drinking problems was pretty hard on Maurice and after destroying a man's arm in a bar fight that he more or less started, he fled into the night, eventually losing himself in an unfamiliar part of town. He eventually ducked into a coffee shop. There, he shared a highly caffeinated drink with a bored clerk named Horas. Unbeknownst to Maurice, Horas was also undead and part of a little cluster of vampires that had been living in the city undetected for a good fifty years. He'd seen Maurice around before but only realized that night that he actually lived in town.
This upset Horas and the rest of the vampires in town because up until that moment they were completely unaware of him. Not only that, but around the same time Maurice was turned, a few other dead people had turned up in town. And they were actually dead. Murdered in grizzly ways and left to be found by police. It wasn't vampire-like work but the murders were weird enough to get the attention of a local self-appointed monster slayer who had started to make getting a bite to eat pretty damn hard.
Maurice the rookiepire wandering around town making sloppy livestock kills, people are turning up dead, the slayer is on the lookout for a monster to blame The Dogtrot Murder (the group of vampires. don't laugh it was a long time ago) doesn't want ANY monster to be found out.
What to do?
Well obviously either kill Maurice or get him an education so the slayer guy doesn't catch him and start looking for more. Vampires are sort of a cockroach situation. There's never just one.. Charlie, the leader of the Dogtrot Murder, liked that first idea, but Terri, an undead soccer mom, wasn't going to have any of it and Horas didn't think the the kid was half bad so they took him under their wing and started to teach him how to be a right and proper dead person. If this book were an 80's movie there would be an 80's vampire training/bonding montage right about here, but since it isn't, there isn't one. After a couple months of trial and error, Maurice adjusted. In order to stay hidden, Horas taught him how to turn into a bat, but after nearly getting eaten by a cat during his first flying lesson, Horas decided to teach him how to turn into a dog instead. Maurice became very good at the dog shape and was able to travel and hide.
He was also taught how to mug people in back alleys and feed from them without turning them. It's hard to turn somebody on accident but it does happen, especially if the vampires involved are inexperienced and unable to control themselves.
One night, while Horas was teaching Maurice how to feed properly, they were ambushed by the slayer and Maurice was stabbed multiple times. This threw The Dogtrot Murder into paranoia overdrive. Charlie instructed the members to only hunt in pairs until whatever was committing the weird crimes was caught. Not long after that, Maurice got kicked out of the trailer he'd been renting because dying and running around with a bunch of other dead people tends to make you forget about...y'know...human responsibilities. Like rent. And answering the phone. That bummed him out pretty badly, but Charlie agreed to let him to stay in the little bunker the lot of them met up at until he got back on his feet. She wasn't crazy about the idea but at least it'd be easier to keep an eye on him.
Jody, a human friend of Charlie's, pops up on the first of November to warn her that that M.O.O.N., this group of overpowered nerds with sticks up their asses but startlingly good magic skills, was pretty freaked out over the whole Jack-the-Ripoff murder count and are sending some drones by in the coming weeks to have a look-see. If they aren't detected, the drones will return and MOON will forget about Dogtrot. It's a speck of a town and nobody cares about it anyway. The plan was to keep off the streets as much as possible until then. After that they would relax and have themselves a good time.
Early Black Friday morning (aka Vampire Christmas) would be easy and safe hunting because it's easy to pick off people when they're fighting each other for five dollar crock pots. They could go dry until then.
A week and a half before Thanksgiving, Meranda accidentally hits Maurice with her car while he was in dog form. Mistaking him for a normal dog, she took him home and wrapped his leg with the intent to take him to the vet in the morning. During the night Meranda gets phone call and gets the news that her father has finally passed away. After watching her break down, Maurice understood why she'd been acting so crazy for months on end. He feels like a shit. Which he had been. You suck, Maurice. When Meranda leaves to go to the nursing home, Maurice shifts back into his human shape and escapes back to the nest. His arm is still broken. Terri gives him a makeshift cast. It's terrible.
Things were awkward at the gas station for the next couple of days and he noticed that Meranda's name was missing from the schedule. His boss tells him that she put in her two weeks and was planning to return to Chicago. Maurice decided to attend Meranda's father's cremation ceremony to support her and let her know that he was sorry for being a shit. He didn't want her to think she hadn't had any friends in Dogtrot. After actually making friends, Maurice couldn't stand the idea of someone else not having any.
Fate would have it that the day of the funeral was also the day the MOON drones were set to visit. Maurice knew that he risked getting caught and torn open (and probably the town being put under permanent watch) but he was a young person with a bleeding heart so he did the dumb protagonist thing and dropped the idiot ball. Maurice crept out of the nest with his guitar on his back just in case something happened to it while he was gone. Everybody had gotten paranoid at that point.
He missed the ceremony itself but caught Meranda outside the funeral home. After an apology from both sides, they made up. Meranda decided to hang around a little longer since there wasn't much waiting for her in Chicago anyway. Maurice offered to help Meranda box up old things to sell or give away. He and Meranda decided to go get something to eat but then THE PLOT showed back up in the form of a guy in a Braves hoodie with no face and horrible tentacle arms.
There are kind of a lot of them.
Maurice and Meranda fight back with broken wine bottles and debris from the alleyways before being rescued by Terri who had also snuck out of the nest. She told them that the MOON drones weren't really living creatures and were defective on top of that. They had to be killed and their cores had to be removed to insure MOON didn't come after them. Jody would make up some bullshit story on their behalf. She tried to usher them back to safety but the three of them are were caught by Charlie and Horas who had also slipped out to patrol the town. THERE IS A LOT OF COUGHING AND AWKWARD FOOT SHUFFLING. Charlie yelled at Maurice and ordered him to go the fuck back to the nest with Meranda. Maurice's broken arm made him almost useless for fighting. Meranda had taken the brunt of the damage and was flagging hard. They took an overly complicated back way to the nest and were almost home free.
Near the nest, they witnessed (or overheard, rather) someone being murdered. While they feraked out about it, the slayer popped up and mistook Meranda for the source of the yell and attacked Maurice. Instead of running, Maurice stood up to him and dared him to try and kill him, face to face. After all the crap he'd been through over the past few months he wasn't going to let some guy in a coat put him down. Luckily a severed hand landed between them from the building above. After some sassing, Maurice convinced him to investigate the source of the scream instead of heckling him and Meranda. They made it to the nest only to find the doors open.
A MOON drone had gotten inside and was waiting for them. Maurice and Meranda used up the last of their energy and killed it tag-team style because battle friends are the best kinds of friends. Maurice delivered the killing blow with the splintered neck of his guitar. Once that was over, things calmed down in Dogtrot. The scream in the alley had, in fact, been the cause of nothing more than a human murderer that the slayer apprehended. He was praised on the news much to the Dogtrot Murder's disgust but the less he bothered them the better.
Charlie pulled Maurice aside and regretfully told him that he could not live at the nest. He had helped them in defending it but had also disobeyed her (and not for the first time). Meranda flipped her shit at Charlie but Maurice understood and did not put up a fuss. Maurice grew to level: Semi-Responsible For His Actions.
Once they were patched up, Maurice drove Meranda home and apologized profusely for dragging her into the whole mess. She assured him that she would deal. They were friends. They could do stuff later. Like get absolutely shitfaced, watch Dune and not get strangled by starfish monsers. Maurice bid her farewell and drove off in his truck that was, for the moment, his new house.
-END BOOK 1