"What are you looking at?"

He flung a pebble at the raven, but missed. The bird didn't seem to care. It stayed on its perch without ruffling a feather. Sighing, Earl headed inside.

Duke's worn hiking boots squeaked with each step across the diner's worn linoleum floor. Earl's flip-flops mutely thumped. The diner was abnormally large given its desolate location. There were enough booths, tables, and barstools to service a small army. But the room was empty. The overhead lights hummed obnoxiously. Two cheap desert landscapes hung by the bathrooms. A potted fern hung from a support column. A cracked ceramic pot sat in a corner. These efforts failed miserably to add character, and the place was so devoid as to be almost vulgar in its blandness.

The most eye-catching detail was a brownish red stain, about a foot long at its widest, at the base of the column. A normal person wouldn't give it much thought, mistaking it for rust or mildew. But both Earl and Duke had sensitive noses. It smelled of blood. The stain looked old, but the odor, though subtle, was fresh.

A voice came from the back. "Be right with you."

They found seats at the counter. The odor of grease made Duke's stomach rumble.

Earl continued with his psychoanalysis. "Now me, I've got goals, and my mind acts upon those goals in an enlightened manner. I've achieved myself a state of clear. Whereas you just act on whatever impulse enters that fool head of yours."

"Least I got myself a shadow."

The vampire glanced at the floor. His shadow was indeed gone again. It did that quite often. Sometimes disappearing for hours or even days. Earl always hated that. He just knew that wherever it went, it was having a better time than him. And when it was in its rightful place, it had a tendency to move around against his will, taunting him and making a general nuisance of itself. Of all the problems of the undead (too many to list, really) the shadow was perhaps the most trivial, yet the most annoying.