Yes, And

Inspirational song: Date With a Vampyre (Screaming Tribesman)

It was a clear, dark night under a full moon. The man and I wanted to take a few risks. We never were afraid of Friday the 13ths. Time to gamble. Was it too cold to ride with the top down on the Jeep? Probably. Do we do stupid things? Frequently.

There is a limited amount of patience to be had for slow drivers, and even less in the mountains. Passing lanes are scarce, and gaps are small. We had just cleared a bottleneck of flatlanders when we saw them. A couple of kids next to a car sporting a flat tire. I live with a road angel, so I expected it when we pulled over to investigate. It was soon apparent that the spare was no better than the tire sandwiched between the rim and the ground. The young man and woman would need a lift.

Neither kid was dressed for the weather in the canyon. The young woman, who introduced herself as Elspeth, was wearing a oversized hoodie over ripped leggings, and she kept tucking her hands under her arms, her fingerless gloves doing nothing to ward off the chill. The young man wore a long purple coat styled like one from centuries past, with what looked like a little froth of lace peeking out at his neck. I made him introduce himself twice, disbelieving it the first time when he said his name was Scissor. His long, roughly cut hair gleamed pewter in the moonlight, and his delicate blue eyes were lined in precisely drawn wings. They climbed into our back seat, and we set off once again for the gambling town in the hills.

Elspeth and Scissor huddled together for warmth as the Jeep sped up the canyon. I couldn't tell whether Elspeth was nervous at the speed at which the man drove through the turns, or was it just how pale her face was normally. We cranked up the radio when the extended cut of "Rock Me, Amadeus" came on, and I looked back to see the wind whipping Scissor's hair. In that moment he looked just like Mozart himself.

The kids wanted to be taken to their home near the top of Central City. They said they were renting one of the oldest houses in town, a ramshackle Victorian just past the ruins of the brewery. We found the house in the dark, and let the kids off. They thanked us for the ride and waved as we drove away.

We played penny slots all night, bouncing between Buffalo Stampede machines all around the casino, including one with a seventy inch screen hung vertically above a two person bench. The man ended the night with almost two hundred dollars in his pocket, while my wallet was thinner by about a hundred and thirty bucks.

We saw that Elspeth had left her fingerless gloves in the back of the Jeep, and although they seemed like a totally worthless piece of clothing, they belonged to her and not us, so we went back to the house to leave them on the porch rather than wake the kids up. The road past the old brewery was rougher than we remembered, and the house looked smaller and more run down than it had just hours earlier. The man took the gloves and walked up to the front of the place. I saw him look at the door, and then peek in a window. He turned around with a perplexed expression, and came back to the car. "There's no one in there. That place is completely empty. I don't think anyone has lived there in decades."

We looked at each other a moment, and then I reached over to touch the gloves, to be sure they were real. The hair stood up on the back of my neck as without another word, we started driving back down the canyon. We got to the slow car pull-out section where the kids' car had been broken down, and there was nothing, except the Jeep's tire tracks in the snow. We went home.