"This is going to be amazing," Rafael said as his neck spines itched with anticipation. "It took months to get a reservation."

Isabella bared her fangs in a grimace. "I have no idea why. Humans know nothing about good food."

The other chupacabras in the neighborhood certainly didn't agree. Their scales shined like emeralds as they lounged under the patio's umbrellas with Bloody Maries in hand.

This was a far cry from their old hunting grounds in Mexico. Rafael missed the way the moon had caressed his scales as he and Isabella hunted goats with the rest of their pack. Still, Texas had its fair share of conveniences. Here in San Antonio, chupacabras didn't have to worry about earning a bullet in the brain just for eating dinner.

With a prime spot on the riverwalk, the Crimson Goat was the perfect place to watch boat tours cruising by while dining on San Antonio's finest sanguine cuisine.

Dull crimson lighting welcomed them into the restaurant's interior. The chupacabras removed their sunglasses with sighs of relief, blinking their wide-pupiled eyes in the soothing darkness. Rafael tried his best to adjust to humanity's quirks, but even he had to admit the glaring brightness they normally filled their buildings with burned in ways that the stars' soft glow never did.

After confirming their reservation, the hostess led them to a table in a quieter corner of the restaurant, away from the noisy slurping of the other diners. She barely glanced at Rafael as he forced his legs under the table with a wince. "Your waiter will be with you shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy your complimentary mice."

Isabella curled her lip at the cage full of rodents as the hostess scampered away. "What do they think we are, bats? Even a hatchling wouldn't waste their time with these pathetic pests."

"Humans don't like to eat their whole meal at once, remember?" Rafael plucked one of the mice out of the cage, careful not to pierce the squirming morsel with his claws so as not to waste any of its precious blood. He sank a fang into its hammering heart and drank, humming with pleasure as a warm, iron taste tinted with the faintest hint of wildflowers rushed over his tongue. "This isn't half bad, actually. It might be nice to taste a little bit of everything."

"Oh yes, how could I forget? Tonight we get to try a variety of what only humans would ever think we would enjoy." The spines along Isabella's neck rose as she read the menu. "The blood sausage is an absolute atrocity. Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to completely ruin the texture? And the ticks! Truly we deserve better than parasites scraped off of prey."

Rafael busied himself with emptying the rest of the cage. He even tried crunching on one of the mice after he'd drained its body. His teeth pulverized the tiny bones much like how his sister was crushing any hope of this being a pleasant evening.

Isabella hadn't always been such a pessimist. Back in Mexico, she'd led the pack in its hunting song as they'd cornered herds of goats. She'd always been the first to kill and the last to feed, hanging back until everyone else had drunk their fill even as her spines had sagged and her scales had dulled to gray.

The others had gradually adapted their ways until, while still not entirely comfortable around the bare-skinned creatures, they could at least enjoy a sense of normalcy and peace living among humans. But not Isabella. No, she still hunted for pleasure, lurking through alleyways in search of some lost pet to feed on even after culling coyotes with the others and exchanging their pelts for the green paper that the humans loved so much.

It pained him to see her getting left behind. There had been some good to the old ways, but the world was changing.

He was changing.

"Please at least try something," he said. "If you don't like it, I'll hunt you something myself."

Her lips curled into a grimace. "I suppose the duck blood soup sounds edible."

A man with light brown skin and a smile as bright and easygoing as the full moon approached the table with glasses of water. "My name is Alejandro, and I'll be your waiter this evening. Have you decided what you'd like, or do you need a few minutes?"

"We'll start with the duck blood soup," Isabella said, rolling her eyes at his choice of words.

"After that, we'll share tonight's special," Rafael said. He raised a clawed finger to stop his sister from protesting. "I've heard great things about it."

"Excellent choices. Would you like me to refill your mice?"

"We'd rather not fill up on vermin," Isabella said.

Alejandro laughed good-naturedly. "I'm the same way when it comes to bread. Your soups will be ready shortly, but in the meantime feel free to let me know if you change your mind."

As the waiter went off to tend to his other tables, Rafael ran a hand over his spines. "Did you have to be so rude to him?"

"The humans are making a mockery of our culture, hermanito." She let out a low hiss of frustration. "Surely even you can see that."

"They're getting better," he said. "It used to be impossible to find anywhere with blood on the menu, let alone anything live. We had to settle for steaks or buy straight from the farmers." He bared his fangs at the memory. Chewing on dry slabs of meat beat the cold bite of a bullet any day, but those first years among the humans had been difficult.

"I just hope their aim doesn't get better."

Rafael winced. He was no stranger to human weapons. His right leg still ached whenever he moved it wrong, and rain filled the old fracture with a dull throbbing that lingered for hours.

The waiter returned with two steaming bowls. A sweet, syrupy scent wafted off of them, mingling with the blood's iron tang in a way that was surprisingly pleasant.

"What are those?" Isabella prodded the small, brown chunks floating in the broth, hissing as the broth left a sticky residue on her claw.

"Sorry, I didn't realize you might not be familiar with fruit," Alejandro said. "We use dried plums and cherries in our duck blood soup. They use other fruits and noodles in Poland, but we limit our ingredients to let the blood stay the star."

Rafael lifted the bowl to his lips and drank. The blood's taste was as rich as always, but there was a sweetness to it, too. It reminded him of the delicate blood of a calf that had dined on nothing but its mother's milk. "This is a strange combination, but it actually works," he said after draining the broth.

"It's the owner's secret recipe," Alejandro said. "His grandmother brought it with her from Poland. Well, not this recipe exactly, but something like it."

"You can tell him that he and his grandmother have made me a very happy chupacabra!" Even the fruits were delicious. Soaked in the broth, they broke against his fangs with a burst of rich sweetness.

Isabella was less impressed. As soon as the waiter left to deliver Rafael's compliments to the chef, she frantically scrubbed her claws with her napkin. "How can you stand this dreck?"

"You've barely tasted it," he said.

"And I've never tasted goats' leavings, but I know better than to put something so foul in my mouth."

It was no use arguing with her once she'd started letting venom drip from her fangs. The tablecloth sizzled as the corrosive liquid melted into the wood below.

Rafael finished the rest of the soup in silence. Its sweetness did little to quell his bitterness at her unwillingness to realize the old ways had only ever brought them trouble.

Isabella's eyes widened as bleating echoed through the restaurant. "Is that what I think it is?"

"The special," Rafael said. Venom burned in his fangs as his stomach growled.

"Was the soup to your liking?" Alejandro asked as he led the doomed goat to the tableside.

"It was lovely," Rafael said, careful to keep the venom pooling on his tongue from leaking out with his words. "I don't know much about human food, but if even half of it is as delicious as that, then I'll have to try my hand at cooking sometime."

"Mr. Kaminski has been looking for a little extra help in the kitchen," Alejandro said. "The reception of some of our dishes has been... mixed, to put it lightly. We could really use someone with more experience with sanguine cuisine in the kitchen."

"I don't exactly have much experience with cooking so much as, what do you humans call it, fast food?" That was one of the human euphemisms for hunting, anyway. Nip and sip, grab and stab, he'd heard them all.

"That's still more experience than we have." Alejandro's smile exposed a set of moonbeam white teeth. Pretty as they were, they were not built for digging into veins. "I can check if Mr. Kaminski is okay with you sticking with the live dishes until we can get you some training. What do you think?"

That would beat chasing after mangy coyotes any day. "I'd like that very much."

"Enough of your yammering," Isabella hissed, sending venom running down her jaw. "I'm hungry!"

She plunged her fangs into the goat's neck, humming with pleasure as its panicked bleating filled the restaurant.

Her enjoyment didn't last long.

With an outraged cry, she pulled her head back and spat the blood out.

Rafael clamped his hand over the wound to avoid wasting the precious blood. His long, serpentine tongue flicked out as he lapped at the crimson staining the creature's fur. Beneath the familiar tang of iron, there was something light. Something fragrant.

Something delicious.

With Isabella's venom liquefying the goat's insides, Rafael bit down and drank the floral accented blood.

"What did you do?" Isabella screeched. Both chupacabras and humans alike turned to watch as her venom burned through the table in a sizzling rain.

"I should have explained earlier, but I got a bit distracted talking to your friend," Alejandro said apologetically. His trembling hands betrayed his fear, but he met her eyes like an oak tree standing firm in the face of a hurricane. "We cater our goats from a different farm each night, each one feeding them a different diet to give their blood a unique flavor. Tonight's special is lavender."

"You tainted it, just like your kind taints everything else it touches!" Isabella's spines rose into rigid points as she stood. "I'll show you how to make a proper meal."

She pounced.

Unclasping his jaws from the remains of the goat, Rafael leaped between her and Alejandro. The familiar scent of iron filled the restaurant as her claws sank into his chest.

She pulled back, gaping at her crimson-coated claws as Rafael grabbed the table to keep his bad leg from betraying him. "You would protect one of those monsters?"

"Not monsters," Rafael said through gritted teeth. "People."

A pair of diners pushed their way past panicking human staff and grabbed Isabella with scaly hands. "You'd better leave. Now."

She did not resist as they dragged her out the door.

Alejandro pressed a napkin against Rafael's bleeding chest with a trembling hand. "I didn't mean to upset her."

Rafael quirked his lips upward into what he'd heard humans call a smile. "She's been upsetting herself since we left Mexico. The change has not been easy for any of us, but especially not her."

"I miss it too, sometimes. My parents and I moved here when my father got a job as a translator. Texas isn't bad. It's just..."

"Different," Rafael finished for him. "Speaking of different, what do I need to do to apply for that job? I'm not exactly used to this sort of thing." He doubted presenting the owner with the corpse of a coyote would work this time.

When the check came, the only numbers that weren't zeroes were a phone number and part of the address of a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away. "Call me when you get the job," Alejandro said. "We can celebrate with a taste of home."

Word Count: 2086

It's so surreal rereading this. This story changed a lot from its first draft (most notably, Isabella used to be Rafael's date, not his sister!), yet I still can't get over how much even this version differs from what eventually became the first two chapters of my paranormal romance story, The Taste of Home. For starters, Rafael's name is now Miguel, the way his leg got injured is completely different, and Miguel's pack left Mexico generations before he was born.

I still remember when I decided to expand this into a longer story. I thought to myself, "Gee, the way he's fixating on that waiter's smile sure reminds me of a certain lovestruck teenager. Guess this is going to have a small romance subplot."

Small, my foot! If you're interested in seeing a greatly expanded version of this story with lots of cooking and cuddling, make sure you check out The Taste of Home on my profile.