The Bus

POV: Ricki

Ricki had run through a hundred versions of what prison might look like. A man across the aisle with fangs and a bored expression wasn't one of them.

The transport bus wasn't like the one that had hauled him from county to courthouse and back for five months of pretrial hearings. That one stank of burnt coffee and vinyl cleaner, windows scratched to frosted glass by a hundred fingernails before his. This bus was newer. Reinforced. The windows weren't scratched at all, and Ricki understood why about ten minutes in, when he leaned his shoulder against the glass and felt it hum under his skin, a vibration too low to be the engine.

His wrists were cuffed in front of him, chained to a loop welded into the bench. His ankles were shackled to a second loop bolted into the floor. Standard enough. He'd braced for that. What he hadn't braced for was the other eleven bodies riding with him, not one of them entirely human.

The vampire sat one seat up, directly across the aisle, legs stretched into the walkway like he'd paid for the extra room. His ankles were crossed, and the chains on his wrists hung loose enough to look decorative. He caught Ricki staring and let his fangs show when he smiled, slow, unbothered, more entertained than hungry.

Two rows back, a woman kept her chin tipped toward the window. Her eyes, amber-glass and unblinking, never once flicked toward the glass she was supposedly watching. Ricki told himself he'd stop looking at her and then didn't. Behind her, a man's shadow pooled wrong against the bus floor, dragging half a beat behind him, so that when he turned his head, the shadow kept staring the other direction.

Alone in the very back sat someone with a faint shimmer along his jaw, scales catching light that shouldn't have been there to catch. Nobody sat within two rows of him. Ricki didn't understand why until the man turned his head and the corner of his mouth pulled open into something that wasn't a mouth. It was a seam.

Ricki gripped the edge of the bench with both cuffed hands. "There's been a mistake," he said, voice cracking out before he could stop it. "I'm human."

The vampire looked him over slow, top to bottom, the way a man checks a used car somebody's trying to oversell him.

"Sure you are, fish," he drawled, amused, no bite in it yet. "That's what they all say the first time."

Two seats up, a man with wolf-yellow eyes lifted his head and turned it, nostrils flaring once, twice, an unmistakable scenting motion that raised the hair on Ricki's arms. The man frowned, a small crease cutting between his brows, like a smell had come back wrong. He didn't say anything. He just kept turning his head toward Ricki every few minutes, sniffing, frowning harder each time, and every time he did it Ricki's skin pulled tighter across his shoulders.

"Paperwork," the vampire said, laughing low in his throat. "Sweetheart, they don't make mistakes like this. Whole system's built so they can't. You got flagged, you're getting classified, and until they figure out what you are, you're riding with the rest of us freaks." He tilted his head, considering. "What'd they get you for?"

Ricki said nothing. His throat locked around the words, murder, second degree, my roommate, and kept them where they belonged. He still didn't understand what happened that night, couldn't force the pieces into a memory he could call his own, and he wasn't handing that confusion to a bus full of fangs and scales and eyes that didn't blink.

The vampire shrugged, like the silence answered enough, and let it go.

Somewhere toward the middle of the bus, a low conversation had been running under the engine noise the whole ride, two men trading words back and forth, and Ricki caught pieces of it without meaning to.

"Deep End," one of them said, barely audible. "Nobody goes down there."

"Heard a guy transferred in from west block," the second one muttered. "First week they put him on cleanup near there. Quit talking for a month."

The first man laughed at that, short and thin, an edge under it, the kind of laugh that covers something nobody wants said out loud.

"What's the Deep End?" Ricki asked, before he could stop himself.

The bus went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume. The two men stopped talking. The vampire's smile across the aisle didn't move, but something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone.

"You'll find out," he said, flat now, all the amusement drained out of it. "Or you won't. Depends how lucky you are, fish."

Nobody spoke again for a long stretch. Ricki watched the world outside blur from strip malls into open highway into nothing much, brown fields, gray sky, the occasional water tower standing alone against the horizon. He tried to summon something steadier than the courtroom's last image of his mothers, reached instead for a kitchen on a Sunday morning: Jules humming off-key over the stove, cinnamon thick enough to taste, Liz's hand warm on the back of his neck as she leaned past him to steal bacon off his plate, laughing when he swatted her away. He held onto the sound of that laugh the way he used to hold a rope swing over the creek behind their old house, certain it would take his weight.

The bus slowed and turned.

The kitchen went first, cinnamon thinning to nothing. Then Liz's hand. Then the laugh itself, until all that remained was the memory of trying to remember it. Ricki straightened, chains pulling taut against his wrists, and looked through glass that hummed faintly under his palm at a wall that hadn't been there a mile back, gray concrete rising out of flat scrubland like it had grown there instead of being built. Guard towers stood at intervals along the top, windows dark, and a chain-link perimeter fence ran the whole visible length of the property, topped with something that caught the light wrong, not quite razor wire, not quite anything Ricki had a name for.

The bus rolled under an arch of steel lettering bolted above the entrance road, and Ricki read it twice because the first pass, his brain refused to process it.

VALHALLA FEDERAL CONTAINMENT FACILITY, SUPERNATURAL DIVISION

The vampire leaned into the walkway, close enough now that Ricki could make out the fine edge of his fangs, the particular sharpness of them. Not costume teeth. Not effects. Real.

"Welcome home, fish," he said, grinning wide enough to show all of it.