FIC: Socorro (AtS, Fred/Harmony)
Fred Ficathon story is done, done, done! No more ficathons for a while, now.
Title: Socorro
Fandom: Angel: The Series
Pairing: Fred/Harmony
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 3,074
Spoilers/Continuity: AU from "A Hole In the World."
Summary: Harmony rescues Fred, and then things go all Thelma and Louise.
Disclaimers: Angel: The Series is the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy, Kuzui, Sandollar, Greenwolf, and Fox Television. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2005 Mosca, and I wrote it for free. Therefore, this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. If you can't get to heaven, try to get to Texas.
Notes: Thanks to distraction77 and callmesandy for beta reading. Written for the Fred Ficathon, for sangerin, who wanted femslash and mention of the novel A Little Princess.
Fred pulled off the I-10 near Phoenix, hoping for a taco stand. It was 9:30 in the morning, but she'd been driving since just before sunrise. Road trips with vampires were really efficient: she'd drive till dusk, and then Harmony would take over again.
Fred had found the only freeway exit in the American Southwest that didn't lead to tacos. Resigned to giving up and driving a little farther, she turned the car around. There were no tacos, but there was a sign for a yard sale. Sometimes they had lemonade at yard sales, or coffee, or creepy old toys. She followed the signs through a subdivision of identical fake adobe houses until she found one with a few folding tables set up in the driveway. She double-checked the blanket in the back seat to make sure Harmony wouldn't catch fire.
Under one of the tables, there was a box of books, warped and dog-eared, personalized with stickers and glitter markers. The kind of books that parents thought kids grew out of, but they were wrong. She left behind the scattered and non-sequential selections from a series about girls who loved horses, and those Anastasia Krupnik books she'd always hated, but she took the rest: Encyclopedia Brown and Artemis Fowl, Bunnicula and The Indian in the Cupboard, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. And best of all, a copy of A Little Princess, so worn that it was almost a real bunny. She had already been to Pylea and back by the time half of them were published, but they looked up at her like homeless puppies, like they were already hers. The heavyset matriarch in the lawn chair sold them to her for 25 cents each and gave her directions to a Mexican restaurant that might be open mornings.
She couldn't convince the guy at the restaurant to serve her a taco, so she made do with a breakfast burrito. Harmony was still undead and immobile in the back seat. Fred sat across the front, leaning her back against the door; she spread a napkin across her belly and balanced A Little Princess on her knees. This was just another road between the way things were and the way they should be, another episode in the heroine's quest.
*
Fred woke up in the back seat of a car. Her hands and feet were bound, and she'd been gagged with tape. She kicked at the door near her feet. Some obviously improbable outcomes need to be tested anyway, she thought. An SUV at this velocity, eventually they would run out of gas.
"Oh, good, you're awake." The person driving was a woman. "I was afraid I'd hit you too hard."
Fred struggled and tried to scream. Improbable outcomes again.
"I'm really sorry I had to do this," the woman said, "but I had to save your life. I mean, you were nice to me. Not that many people are nice to me."
So this would be the second time that Harmony had knocked her out and bound her. It was disturbing to know that Harmony was consistently good at anything other than matching her shoes to her purse. Fred tried to get past knowing what kind of girl Harmony had been, tried to treat her kindly and fairly in spite of it, but there was revenge in believing that the meanest girl in high school never amounted to anything.
"Listen," Harmony said. "Just listen, and you'll understand and you won't be mad at me, and then I can untie you. And maybe you can even drive for a while, because I'm getting tired and I think the sun's coming up? But okay. I got this e-mail yesterday. Like, someone meant to hit 'Reply' and hit 'Reply All' instead? Or I don't know. But it said, like, there was a package coming. And it was all cryptic and whatever, but it said the package would be your best gift ever because it would be your last. So I kidnapped you and stole this car, and now we're driving to Texas so you won't die. Okay?"
Fred tried to say okay, whatever, just take the tape off her mouth and don't bite anyone, but it sounded like muffled screaming.
"The next exit's two miles away. I'll pull over and untie you there, okay?" Harmony said. "And there's another thing - I kind of left a little note on Angel's desk saying you feared for your life and were leaving town for a few days, and I kind of signed your name?"
The tape pulled at Fred's lips when she tried to laugh. Harmony had kidnapped her, knocked her unconscious, and trussed her up like a turkey, but she was apologizing for forgery.
Harmony pulled into a gas station at the next exit. They were in the middle of the desert somewhere, and it was freezing. Harmony started filling the gas tank before she untied Fred. "Thank you," Fred said. "Unless you're, you know, lying."
"I printed out the e-mail," Harmony said. "Hang on a sec."
It wasn't that hard to forge an e-mail printout, but this one looked more real than Harmony was probably capable of faking. Also, if Harmony was taking her out into the middle of the desert in order to kill her, she'd probably be dead by now. Harmony wasn't really a thrill-of-the-kill vampire.
Fred rubbed her wrists. "We should go back," she said. "If people are in danger, I need to be there to help, I need to - "
"You're not listening to me," Harmony said. "People aren't in danger. They're trying to kill you. Everybody else is going to be fine."
"Then I should-I don't know," Fred said. "But you don't think I should be there?"
"I think if you go back to L.A. right now? I think you'll die."
Fred had gotten out of the habit of running away, she realized. In Pylea, she did it all the time: ran at the first sign of danger. But Angel was so convincing when he told her to hold fast, to fight things that seemed unbeatable. She felt like a coward. But sometimes things were just stronger than her, and even Angel hadn't been able to save Cordelia.
"This isn't a company car, is it?" she said. "Because, you know, Wolfram and Hart can track those. They've got these little GPS sensors. You can even tell what speed people are going. They're really cool, actually, but - but not that cool for us."
"Yeah, I know," Harmony said. "That's why I stole it from this guy in my building. He's really annoying. He hangs out in the mail room handing out pamphlets from his church. The one time I took one, it totally burned my hands. So I beat him to a bloody pulp and stole his keys."
Fred walked around to the back of the car. Its bumper stickers showed its owner's support for the president's re-election and proclaimed that Real Men Love Jesus. Fred didn't know if Harmony realized what a good choice of vehicles she'd made. "I don't suppose you brought my purse, did you?" she said.
"Of course I brought your purse," Harmony said. "I'm saving you, not, like, torturing you. Here, let me unlock the trunk."
"Is it still a trunk on an SUV?" Fred mused.
"I packed you an overnight bag, too," Harmony said. "Thanks for saying I was welcome to drop by anytime, so I could break into your apartment, and um, should I apologize for that, too?"
Fred found her purse and dug her screwdriver out of the bottom. She never knew when she was going to need one. "What are you doing?" Harmony asked.
"Switching the license plates," Fred said. "We'll be harder to follow." There was a pickup truck with Colorado plates parked next to one of those air hose machines, and its plates looked almost normal on the back of the stolen car. All those hours she'd spent watching true-crime shows on cable at the Hyperion hadn't helped her much at Angel Investigations, but they were coming in handy now. It was starting to look romantic, the idea of running away and never being found. She thought that maybe, after getting lost for a few times, a person started wanting to disappear on purpose.
The sun was starting to rise, thin slices of pink and powder blue over the crimson desert. "I can start driving," Fred said, "if you need to not be on fire." Harmony finished pumping the gas, then lay down across the back seat, shrouded in a wool blanket. Fred started the engine and headed for the highway. It wasn't hard to get to Texas: drive towards the dawn, and don't look at the desert.
*
Harmony's skin was delicate as linen, her breasts white like a girl in a Victorian novel. They'd left the road and driven into the desert. The rocky ground was cool, and the air smelled like the old accelerator lab in the basement at Rice, chalky and vaguely magical. The stars fought to outshine the moon, which was nearly full and glowed like a floodlight. It was waning, diminishing like the distance between them and home. Harmony lay her blanket on the ground and took off her shoes. She stepped onto the blanket and stood there in her bra and ruffled skirt, a backlit silhouette in the white light.
"I thought you didn't go for straight girls," Fred said.
"I guess I go for whoever's nice to me," Harmony said.
Fred was too cold to take her clothes off. She sat down Indian style on the blanket, leaning back on the palms of her hands, and looked up at the sky. She'd read somewhere that old science fiction shows stuck rhinestones to velvet to simulate fields of stars. The New Mexico sky looked like someone spent all day with a glue gun. It was hard to believe that every one was a massive thermonuclear explosion capable of engulfing worlds. The universe looked like gems she could hold in her hand, but most of the interesting parts could vaporize a small physicist in nanoseconds. Fred worried that Harmony was like that: that she only seemed safe because she felt faraway and shiny.
Harmony eased into Fred's lap. She snapped Fred's ponytail holder, and it whizzed into the desert. Things looked so happy when potential energy converted to kinetic, Fred thought. Happy like people kissing, and she was one of those people. Harmony's skin was cool like sand. She was careful to only kiss the right side of Fred's neck.
When Harmony had packed Fred's overnight bag, she'd picked out all the things that made Fred feel sexy but a little uncomfortable: the shortest skirts, the lacy underwear that rode up. Harmony was rubbing Fred's clit through the lace. Fred ground against Harmony's fingers, feeling herself swell. She whimpered.
Harmony produced a sample-size bottle of KY from her cleavage. "They had it in a fishbowl on the counter at that one gas station," Harmony said. "I bought one because it was the only cute thing in the whole place." Harmony rolled Fred's panties down to her knees and slipped the tip of one finger just past the opening of Fred's vagina.
Fred pushed her own hips forward and made Harmony's finger go in deeper. It was the tiniest, softest thing. "Put in another one," Fred said. "I'm pretty stretchy. I mean, not like abnormally, but you know."
"You shouldn't apologize for being a slut," Harmony said.
Harmony put in another finger. "More," Fred said. She might have said it a few more times, but after that, she didn't hear herself, because she had an edge and she was over it. She heard someone screaming, a good scream, ecstasy, and it wasn't until the scream stopped that she realized it was her own voice.
If she was going to get lost again, it was a smart idea to start by hollowing herself out. She limped back to the car, fixing her underwear, wiping the stickiness off the insides of her thighs. The ache in her belly felt clean and hazy. She went back to the car to sit down with A Little Princess and her flashlight until her knees felt solid. There were flashing red lights on the other side of the windshield, coming closer. Fred opened the door. "Harmony, cops," she shouted. "Put the blanket away and let's go." But by the time Harmony had thrown everything in the trunk and started the car, the police were pulling up beside them.
"A neighbor reported that she heard screaming," the cop said. "Are you ladies all right?"
Fred was busy wondering how the desert could have neighbors. Harmony snatched the book from her hand and clocked the cop on the forehead with it. "We should stop at more yard sales," Harmony said.
*
Harmony spoke Spanish. It seemed like an unlikely skill for her, but everyone had a few unlikely skills. Charles could bowl a 200; Wesley could knot cherry stems with his tongue. And Harmony could convince the owner of a butcher shop in Tucson to sell her two Tupperware quarts of fresh blood. "Goat," Harmony said, hugging the grocery bag to her chest. "I've never had goat's blood before. What do you think it'll be like?"
"I don't know," Fred said. "I mean, does pig's blood taste like pork? Or does it taste like pigs are - like, essence of pig?"
"Both, I guess," Harmony said. She got a funnel and a thermos out of her overnight bag. "But I've never eaten a goat, either. I petted one once, at Knott's, and it, like, liked me. It totally wigged me out. I was, like, six."
"Goats are creepy," Fred said. "They have weird eyes." Eyes like vampires, when they have their monster faces on, Fred thought. Yellow and glassy.
"I didn't realize the desert was so big," Harmony said. "Like, I always thought of it as something you fly over to get to Aspen. But it's, like, it's like a big red blanket that you want to lie down on or something. Or have sex on."
"I had sex in a desert once," Fred said. "Or, not quite a desert. But there was this place outside of town where there wasn't anything-like, someone owned it, but it was just a mile of dirt with nothing on it. My friends and I, when we were in high school, we used to go out there to smoke pot and stuff. And there was this guy Brian, and one night I got really baked and blew him. But it wasn't really a desert, so never mind."
"Oh my God!" Harmony said. "I didn't know you were such a slut."
"I think I'm gonna go read now," Fred said. "I shouldn't have - I shouldn't have told you that stuff."
"Slut in the good way," Harmony said.
"There's a good way?" Fred said. She got in the car, found her flashlight and her book, and tried to tune out Harmony. But the words were like shapes on paper. No matter how well she knew the story, they didn't make sense.
"We should do it," Harmony said, getting behind the wheel.
"Do what?"
"Have sex in the desert," Harmony said.
"If you want to pick up guys, you should do it now," Fred said. "There's nothing between here and El Paso."
"Who needs guys?" Harmony said.
"You know what?" Fred said. "I'm reading."
"Okay. Whatever." Harmony got them back on the highway.
Half an hour later, Harmony said, "When I said you were a slut, I meant that you're fun. I mean, not boring like people think you are. You're... complicated, or something."
"Thanks. I think."
Without pulling over or even slowing down, Harmony leaned over the seat and lifted Fred's book from her hands. She kissed Fred's lips gently. "I was thinking we could pull over when we're really deep in the desert. Maybe near a cactus."
Fred put her fingers to her lips. "All right," she said, feeling complicated.
*
They were about two hours away from Fred's parents' house, on the freeway above downtown El Paso. They'd just come out of the first traffic they'd seen since LA, the first traffic that Fred remembered on this trip, an accident in the other direction. There was no law of physics to account for gridlock due to lookylous, but physics didn't generally account for stupidity. Fred stuck her hand blind into her purse. She was close enough to home that it would be a good idea to tell her folks she was dropping by for a visit.
They weren't awake, or they were out of the house already, or they were screening their calls again. Fred left a message. She said over her shoulder, "I think I'm gonna pull over in Socorro and get some donuts." There was no sense in hurrying.
"Socorro?" Harmony's voice was muffled under her blanket. "Is that a town?"
"It's the next one after El Paso."
"I don't know if I'll be safe there," Harmony said.
"Even if they've posted a Slayer there or something, she's not patrolling at seven in the morning," Fred said. "Also, you're under a blanket."
"A blanket that now reeks," Harmony said. "But Socorro means "help" in Spanish. Like, help from God. I've heard about towns named after religious stuff not being safe for vampires. So maybe we could just pass through?"
"Los Angeles is named for the Virgin Mary," Fred said.
"No, it isn't," Harmony said. "It means 'the angels.'"
"That's just a nickname," Fred said. "The real name's much longer. You have to use it in spells, sometimes."
"Really?" Harmony said. "I guess people are messing with me again."
"If you have a bad feeling, we can skip it," Fred said. "Go on to the next town."
"No, it's nothing. You should have donuts. I mean, people who can have donuts and not gain a million pounds should totally have donuts."
There was a place right off the freeway. When Fred went in, everything was quiet. When she came out, there were helicopters circling and a ring of armored vans around the car. Fred put her Coolatta and bag of donuts on the ground, then stood up and held her hands above her head.
The problem with getting lost was, there was always someone trying to find her.
Title: Socorro
Fandom: Angel: The Series
Pairing: Fred/Harmony
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 3,074
Spoilers/Continuity: AU from "A Hole In the World."
Summary: Harmony rescues Fred, and then things go all Thelma and Louise.
Disclaimers: Angel: The Series is the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy, Kuzui, Sandollar, Greenwolf, and Fox Television. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2005 Mosca, and I wrote it for free. Therefore, this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. If you can't get to heaven, try to get to Texas.
Notes: Thanks to distraction77 and callmesandy for beta reading. Written for the Fred Ficathon, for sangerin, who wanted femslash and mention of the novel A Little Princess.
Fred pulled off the I-10 near Phoenix, hoping for a taco stand. It was 9:30 in the morning, but she'd been driving since just before sunrise. Road trips with vampires were really efficient: she'd drive till dusk, and then Harmony would take over again.
Fred had found the only freeway exit in the American Southwest that didn't lead to tacos. Resigned to giving up and driving a little farther, she turned the car around. There were no tacos, but there was a sign for a yard sale. Sometimes they had lemonade at yard sales, or coffee, or creepy old toys. She followed the signs through a subdivision of identical fake adobe houses until she found one with a few folding tables set up in the driveway. She double-checked the blanket in the back seat to make sure Harmony wouldn't catch fire.
Under one of the tables, there was a box of books, warped and dog-eared, personalized with stickers and glitter markers. The kind of books that parents thought kids grew out of, but they were wrong. She left behind the scattered and non-sequential selections from a series about girls who loved horses, and those Anastasia Krupnik books she'd always hated, but she took the rest: Encyclopedia Brown and Artemis Fowl, Bunnicula and The Indian in the Cupboard, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. And best of all, a copy of A Little Princess, so worn that it was almost a real bunny. She had already been to Pylea and back by the time half of them were published, but they looked up at her like homeless puppies, like they were already hers. The heavyset matriarch in the lawn chair sold them to her for 25 cents each and gave her directions to a Mexican restaurant that might be open mornings.
She couldn't convince the guy at the restaurant to serve her a taco, so she made do with a breakfast burrito. Harmony was still undead and immobile in the back seat. Fred sat across the front, leaning her back against the door; she spread a napkin across her belly and balanced A Little Princess on her knees. This was just another road between the way things were and the way they should be, another episode in the heroine's quest.
*
Fred woke up in the back seat of a car. Her hands and feet were bound, and she'd been gagged with tape. She kicked at the door near her feet. Some obviously improbable outcomes need to be tested anyway, she thought. An SUV at this velocity, eventually they would run out of gas.
"Oh, good, you're awake." The person driving was a woman. "I was afraid I'd hit you too hard."
Fred struggled and tried to scream. Improbable outcomes again.
"I'm really sorry I had to do this," the woman said, "but I had to save your life. I mean, you were nice to me. Not that many people are nice to me."
So this would be the second time that Harmony had knocked her out and bound her. It was disturbing to know that Harmony was consistently good at anything other than matching her shoes to her purse. Fred tried to get past knowing what kind of girl Harmony had been, tried to treat her kindly and fairly in spite of it, but there was revenge in believing that the meanest girl in high school never amounted to anything.
"Listen," Harmony said. "Just listen, and you'll understand and you won't be mad at me, and then I can untie you. And maybe you can even drive for a while, because I'm getting tired and I think the sun's coming up? But okay. I got this e-mail yesterday. Like, someone meant to hit 'Reply' and hit 'Reply All' instead? Or I don't know. But it said, like, there was a package coming. And it was all cryptic and whatever, but it said the package would be your best gift ever because it would be your last. So I kidnapped you and stole this car, and now we're driving to Texas so you won't die. Okay?"
Fred tried to say okay, whatever, just take the tape off her mouth and don't bite anyone, but it sounded like muffled screaming.
"The next exit's two miles away. I'll pull over and untie you there, okay?" Harmony said. "And there's another thing - I kind of left a little note on Angel's desk saying you feared for your life and were leaving town for a few days, and I kind of signed your name?"
The tape pulled at Fred's lips when she tried to laugh. Harmony had kidnapped her, knocked her unconscious, and trussed her up like a turkey, but she was apologizing for forgery.
Harmony pulled into a gas station at the next exit. They were in the middle of the desert somewhere, and it was freezing. Harmony started filling the gas tank before she untied Fred. "Thank you," Fred said. "Unless you're, you know, lying."
"I printed out the e-mail," Harmony said. "Hang on a sec."
It wasn't that hard to forge an e-mail printout, but this one looked more real than Harmony was probably capable of faking. Also, if Harmony was taking her out into the middle of the desert in order to kill her, she'd probably be dead by now. Harmony wasn't really a thrill-of-the-kill vampire.
Fred rubbed her wrists. "We should go back," she said. "If people are in danger, I need to be there to help, I need to - "
"You're not listening to me," Harmony said. "People aren't in danger. They're trying to kill you. Everybody else is going to be fine."
"Then I should-I don't know," Fred said. "But you don't think I should be there?"
"I think if you go back to L.A. right now? I think you'll die."
Fred had gotten out of the habit of running away, she realized. In Pylea, she did it all the time: ran at the first sign of danger. But Angel was so convincing when he told her to hold fast, to fight things that seemed unbeatable. She felt like a coward. But sometimes things were just stronger than her, and even Angel hadn't been able to save Cordelia.
"This isn't a company car, is it?" she said. "Because, you know, Wolfram and Hart can track those. They've got these little GPS sensors. You can even tell what speed people are going. They're really cool, actually, but - but not that cool for us."
"Yeah, I know," Harmony said. "That's why I stole it from this guy in my building. He's really annoying. He hangs out in the mail room handing out pamphlets from his church. The one time I took one, it totally burned my hands. So I beat him to a bloody pulp and stole his keys."
Fred walked around to the back of the car. Its bumper stickers showed its owner's support for the president's re-election and proclaimed that Real Men Love Jesus. Fred didn't know if Harmony realized what a good choice of vehicles she'd made. "I don't suppose you brought my purse, did you?" she said.
"Of course I brought your purse," Harmony said. "I'm saving you, not, like, torturing you. Here, let me unlock the trunk."
"Is it still a trunk on an SUV?" Fred mused.
"I packed you an overnight bag, too," Harmony said. "Thanks for saying I was welcome to drop by anytime, so I could break into your apartment, and um, should I apologize for that, too?"
Fred found her purse and dug her screwdriver out of the bottom. She never knew when she was going to need one. "What are you doing?" Harmony asked.
"Switching the license plates," Fred said. "We'll be harder to follow." There was a pickup truck with Colorado plates parked next to one of those air hose machines, and its plates looked almost normal on the back of the stolen car. All those hours she'd spent watching true-crime shows on cable at the Hyperion hadn't helped her much at Angel Investigations, but they were coming in handy now. It was starting to look romantic, the idea of running away and never being found. She thought that maybe, after getting lost for a few times, a person started wanting to disappear on purpose.
The sun was starting to rise, thin slices of pink and powder blue over the crimson desert. "I can start driving," Fred said, "if you need to not be on fire." Harmony finished pumping the gas, then lay down across the back seat, shrouded in a wool blanket. Fred started the engine and headed for the highway. It wasn't hard to get to Texas: drive towards the dawn, and don't look at the desert.
*
Harmony's skin was delicate as linen, her breasts white like a girl in a Victorian novel. They'd left the road and driven into the desert. The rocky ground was cool, and the air smelled like the old accelerator lab in the basement at Rice, chalky and vaguely magical. The stars fought to outshine the moon, which was nearly full and glowed like a floodlight. It was waning, diminishing like the distance between them and home. Harmony lay her blanket on the ground and took off her shoes. She stepped onto the blanket and stood there in her bra and ruffled skirt, a backlit silhouette in the white light.
"I thought you didn't go for straight girls," Fred said.
"I guess I go for whoever's nice to me," Harmony said.
Fred was too cold to take her clothes off. She sat down Indian style on the blanket, leaning back on the palms of her hands, and looked up at the sky. She'd read somewhere that old science fiction shows stuck rhinestones to velvet to simulate fields of stars. The New Mexico sky looked like someone spent all day with a glue gun. It was hard to believe that every one was a massive thermonuclear explosion capable of engulfing worlds. The universe looked like gems she could hold in her hand, but most of the interesting parts could vaporize a small physicist in nanoseconds. Fred worried that Harmony was like that: that she only seemed safe because she felt faraway and shiny.
Harmony eased into Fred's lap. She snapped Fred's ponytail holder, and it whizzed into the desert. Things looked so happy when potential energy converted to kinetic, Fred thought. Happy like people kissing, and she was one of those people. Harmony's skin was cool like sand. She was careful to only kiss the right side of Fred's neck.
When Harmony had packed Fred's overnight bag, she'd picked out all the things that made Fred feel sexy but a little uncomfortable: the shortest skirts, the lacy underwear that rode up. Harmony was rubbing Fred's clit through the lace. Fred ground against Harmony's fingers, feeling herself swell. She whimpered.
Harmony produced a sample-size bottle of KY from her cleavage. "They had it in a fishbowl on the counter at that one gas station," Harmony said. "I bought one because it was the only cute thing in the whole place." Harmony rolled Fred's panties down to her knees and slipped the tip of one finger just past the opening of Fred's vagina.
Fred pushed her own hips forward and made Harmony's finger go in deeper. It was the tiniest, softest thing. "Put in another one," Fred said. "I'm pretty stretchy. I mean, not like abnormally, but you know."
"You shouldn't apologize for being a slut," Harmony said.
Harmony put in another finger. "More," Fred said. She might have said it a few more times, but after that, she didn't hear herself, because she had an edge and she was over it. She heard someone screaming, a good scream, ecstasy, and it wasn't until the scream stopped that she realized it was her own voice.
If she was going to get lost again, it was a smart idea to start by hollowing herself out. She limped back to the car, fixing her underwear, wiping the stickiness off the insides of her thighs. The ache in her belly felt clean and hazy. She went back to the car to sit down with A Little Princess and her flashlight until her knees felt solid. There were flashing red lights on the other side of the windshield, coming closer. Fred opened the door. "Harmony, cops," she shouted. "Put the blanket away and let's go." But by the time Harmony had thrown everything in the trunk and started the car, the police were pulling up beside them.
"A neighbor reported that she heard screaming," the cop said. "Are you ladies all right?"
Fred was busy wondering how the desert could have neighbors. Harmony snatched the book from her hand and clocked the cop on the forehead with it. "We should stop at more yard sales," Harmony said.
*
Harmony spoke Spanish. It seemed like an unlikely skill for her, but everyone had a few unlikely skills. Charles could bowl a 200; Wesley could knot cherry stems with his tongue. And Harmony could convince the owner of a butcher shop in Tucson to sell her two Tupperware quarts of fresh blood. "Goat," Harmony said, hugging the grocery bag to her chest. "I've never had goat's blood before. What do you think it'll be like?"
"I don't know," Fred said. "I mean, does pig's blood taste like pork? Or does it taste like pigs are - like, essence of pig?"
"Both, I guess," Harmony said. She got a funnel and a thermos out of her overnight bag. "But I've never eaten a goat, either. I petted one once, at Knott's, and it, like, liked me. It totally wigged me out. I was, like, six."
"Goats are creepy," Fred said. "They have weird eyes." Eyes like vampires, when they have their monster faces on, Fred thought. Yellow and glassy.
"I didn't realize the desert was so big," Harmony said. "Like, I always thought of it as something you fly over to get to Aspen. But it's, like, it's like a big red blanket that you want to lie down on or something. Or have sex on."
"I had sex in a desert once," Fred said. "Or, not quite a desert. But there was this place outside of town where there wasn't anything-like, someone owned it, but it was just a mile of dirt with nothing on it. My friends and I, when we were in high school, we used to go out there to smoke pot and stuff. And there was this guy Brian, and one night I got really baked and blew him. But it wasn't really a desert, so never mind."
"Oh my God!" Harmony said. "I didn't know you were such a slut."
"I think I'm gonna go read now," Fred said. "I shouldn't have - I shouldn't have told you that stuff."
"Slut in the good way," Harmony said.
"There's a good way?" Fred said. She got in the car, found her flashlight and her book, and tried to tune out Harmony. But the words were like shapes on paper. No matter how well she knew the story, they didn't make sense.
"We should do it," Harmony said, getting behind the wheel.
"Do what?"
"Have sex in the desert," Harmony said.
"If you want to pick up guys, you should do it now," Fred said. "There's nothing between here and El Paso."
"Who needs guys?" Harmony said.
"You know what?" Fred said. "I'm reading."
"Okay. Whatever." Harmony got them back on the highway.
Half an hour later, Harmony said, "When I said you were a slut, I meant that you're fun. I mean, not boring like people think you are. You're... complicated, or something."
"Thanks. I think."
Without pulling over or even slowing down, Harmony leaned over the seat and lifted Fred's book from her hands. She kissed Fred's lips gently. "I was thinking we could pull over when we're really deep in the desert. Maybe near a cactus."
Fred put her fingers to her lips. "All right," she said, feeling complicated.
*
They were about two hours away from Fred's parents' house, on the freeway above downtown El Paso. They'd just come out of the first traffic they'd seen since LA, the first traffic that Fred remembered on this trip, an accident in the other direction. There was no law of physics to account for gridlock due to lookylous, but physics didn't generally account for stupidity. Fred stuck her hand blind into her purse. She was close enough to home that it would be a good idea to tell her folks she was dropping by for a visit.
They weren't awake, or they were out of the house already, or they were screening their calls again. Fred left a message. She said over her shoulder, "I think I'm gonna pull over in Socorro and get some donuts." There was no sense in hurrying.
"Socorro?" Harmony's voice was muffled under her blanket. "Is that a town?"
"It's the next one after El Paso."
"I don't know if I'll be safe there," Harmony said.
"Even if they've posted a Slayer there or something, she's not patrolling at seven in the morning," Fred said. "Also, you're under a blanket."
"A blanket that now reeks," Harmony said. "But Socorro means "help" in Spanish. Like, help from God. I've heard about towns named after religious stuff not being safe for vampires. So maybe we could just pass through?"
"Los Angeles is named for the Virgin Mary," Fred said.
"No, it isn't," Harmony said. "It means 'the angels.'"
"That's just a nickname," Fred said. "The real name's much longer. You have to use it in spells, sometimes."
"Really?" Harmony said. "I guess people are messing with me again."
"If you have a bad feeling, we can skip it," Fred said. "Go on to the next town."
"No, it's nothing. You should have donuts. I mean, people who can have donuts and not gain a million pounds should totally have donuts."
There was a place right off the freeway. When Fred went in, everything was quiet. When she came out, there were helicopters circling and a ring of armored vans around the car. Fred put her Coolatta and bag of donuts on the ground, then stood up and held her hands above her head.
The problem with getting lost was, there was always someone trying to find her.