Throwback Thursday: ‘The Lord of Lawn Ornaments’ by Tyner Gillies

Jonathan Caron, third of his name, warlord of Wallachia, stood on the porch of his eleven-hundred-square-foot bungalow, stared into the twilight-darkened street, and hated himself. 

If anyone ever said being a vampire was glamorous, they were full of shit. 

“You gonna do something useful tonight, Johnny?” 

He turned and looked down the hallway of the small house at the bane of his existence, Lucinda. In 1988, he had found her outside of a punk bar. She looked, now, much like she had then: tall, lithe, with a blonde mohawk sticking off the top of her head in six-inch spikes. She was also as foul-mouthed and obstinate as she had been thirty years ago. 

He had needed a familiar, having lost the previous one in an unfortunate incident in Paris involving several priests and a mob with pitchforks. When he saw Lucy smoking in an alley and glaring at him, he had thought her just the thing. He had cast his will upon her and forced a drop of his blood into her mouth, as he had been doing to his familiars for centuries. He had failed, however, to fully understand the strength of her own will and the effect of heavy metal music on the minds of the youth of the last century. The result of his efforts left much to be desired; the power of their bond prevented her from harming or abandoning him completely, but she rarely did anything he asked and spent the better part of her time scorching him with withering abuse. 

He turned back to the street and ran a lean, pale hand over a full head of black hair slicked cleanly to his skull, then thrust both hands into the pockets of his black, bargain-rack slacks. 

How far he had fallen.