Need by Todd Gregory

kind of post-traumatic stress thing, triggered by being back in New Orleans and being on your own for the first time in your life—or else it’s just your imagination working overtime, that’s all. You’ve fucked up, Cord, and you know you’re going to have to call Jean-Paul for help.
    Which, of course, was the last thing in the world I wanted to do—and wouldn’t do until I’d exhausted every other possibility.
    And once I’d replenished, I could undoubtedly think of some options.
    The nausea passed and I opened my eyes. I felt better. I probably had at least a few hours before the desire became need again, and surely I could find someone to quench my thirst long before—
    Before you fuck up again.
    I shook my head and stood up. I breathed in deeply. I could hear the crazy woman who lived in the carriage house next door screaming. I rolled my eyes. She was smoking crack again—my heightened senses could smell it—and sure enough, the man she lived with started screaming back at her. Every night, like clockwork, they’d get high and start their little sideshow. It was annoying to say the least, and when I was trying to relax in my own courtyard or watch something mindless on TV in the living room, it was incredibly distracting. Several times, I’d considered putting them out of my misery.
    Crack-laced blood, though, tasted terrible, like it was rotting, and I didn’t like the effect it had on me.
    Then again, I didn’t have to drink their blood to kill them.
    But that wouldn’t be a smart thing to do, I reminded myself. Vampires don’t kill. That brings attention to us, and—
    â€œWhatever,” I said out loud.
    Someone was coming—I could smell their blood. It was two people, a man and a woman, and they were almost to the corner at Burgundy. Young, from the scent. I could almost taste it, it was so strong. They both were wearing perfumes from Calvin Klein—Obsession, maybe. It barely masked the stale sweat under his arms and inside his shoes. I could also smell their pheromones—they were terribly attracted to each other and certainly at some point in the evening ahead he would be mounting her.
    I turned my head to the right and watched for them. A few moments later, they came around the corner. I looked back in the other direction toward Bourbon Street. Orleans Street was deserted from my stoop all the way to where the fool in the hand grenade costume was dancing on the corner, trying to get people to go inside the Tropical Isle Bar for one of those lethal green drinks. A car drove through the intersection at Dauphine—a United cab with several women in the backseat. I looked toward the young couple. Cars were rushing by on Rampart Street a block and a half in the other direction.
    The only people on Orleans Street all the way back up to Rampart were this couple and me, standing on my stoop.
    There were no witnesses, no one anywhere to hear or see anything.
    They were perhaps in their early twenties; she was a petite young woman who probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet and needed heels to top five feet. She was wearing a denim miniskirt that barely covered her, her tan, shapely legs teetering on heels so high her back had to hurt. She was wearing a spaghetti strap top with no bra—I could see her nipples through the thin cotton top. Her light brown hair was streaked with blond. He towered above her at well over six feet and over two hundred pounds. His long sandy blond hair tumbled out from beneath the backward LSU baseball cap on top of his head. He was wearing an oversized white LSU football jersey with the gold and purple stripes on the shoulder. His jeans were baggy, faded, and torn at the knees. His arm was draped loosely but proprietarily over her thin shoulders. They nodded at me as they walked past me—both were carrying the large green plastic cups in the shape of a hand grenade with a long