by Vance, Ramy
He raised his hands like an orchestra conductor, and at his cue, the class sang out in harmony, “Thank you for believing in us, but it’s not enough. We’re leaving. Good luck.”
The gods’ last message to the world, and something every living creature heard at exactly the same time. I’d never forget where I was when I heard that voice in my head. How could I? That was the precise moment I reverted back to human. Vampire no more.
It was a strange transition, to say the least, and abrupt as all hell. I was turned when I was fifteen, and I’d spent the last three hundred years as a teenager trapped in an immortal body. An immortal body that needed blood to survive.
When the gods left, I happened to be drinking from the neck of my—ahem—my latest victim: a vicar I found wandering the fields alone at night in a Scottish meadow near the town of Oban. I was halfway through with him when the gods’ message rang in my head. In an instant, my fangs retracted. Unfortunately for both me and the vicar, I had bitten deep enough that my front and bottom teeth gripped flesh, and as said fangs retracted, a substantial squirt of his blood shot up into my mouth and down my throat.
I pulled away and promptly—elegantly, prettily even—threw up.
Only moments earlier, the taste of blood had been something I’d craved. Now it was something I detested.
I would later find out that when they left, the gods took most of their magic with them. And me being a creature made from that very magic, I became a magicless, boring human again.
Wiping away the blood from my mouth, I thought, “What the hell just happened?” Evidently I’d spoken this thought aloud, as per usual, because the old vicar was nodding at my question vigorously, also experiencing his own existential crisis. His face was painted with fear and his vestments were painted with his own blood, which still streamed from his neck. But the fear on his face wasn’t of me—it was fear of whatever that message was. In some odd comradery, we walked into town together, not speaking, not really acknowledging each other’s existence.
As we passed an old pub, its TV blaring, we glimpsed images from the local news with the big bright letters that confirmed we weren’t the only ones who had heard the message. In fact, everyone in the world heard it. The gods were gone. What we’d heard was true and my own newly grown human canines were proof of that.
But them leaving and me turning human wasn’t the strangest thing to happen that night. Not by a long shot.
No, the strangest thing was the appearance of the Others. Seems that when the gods left, they closed all their domains, forcing mythical creatures of all religions, fables and fairy tales down to Earth. Centaurs, dragons, mermaids, nasnas, encantado—you name them—all fell down. Fairy tales raining from the sky.
And to think—prior to that day, I’d thought I was the biggest and baddest monster to roam this Earthly plane. Sometimes my arrogance astounds me.
“That’s right,” Professor Hayes continued. “Thank you for believing in us, but it’s not enough. Not enough for what? To sustain them? To nurture them? To hold their interest? We’ll never know. All we do know is that whatever we once gave them, whatever it was that had kept them here for millennia, was no longer enough. Or perhaps it had never been, and it took them that long to realize it.”
Professor Hayes adjusted his glasses and let out a heavy sigh. “Will the Others in this classroom please stand up?”
A dust of pixies, an oni demon, a raiju, three fairies, two angels, an Incan apu and a gargoyle all stood up. I considered standing myself, but I wasn’t an Other. Not anymore, at least. My current human status—and my desire to not embarrass myself in front of Justin Truly again—compelled me to remain in my seat.
But if I’m honest with myself, that wasn’t the only reason I stayed seated. Truth was, I was ashamed of my past. When I think about all my victims—my human victims—I just want to rip out my own throat and watch myself bleed to death.
Morbid, I know. I’m working on that, too.
Besides, I used to be a freaking demon. Surely that counts for something in explaining my past … umm … indiscretions.
“Others,” Professor Hayes said to those standing in the auditorium, “I welcome you to my class. As your professor, I speak for everyone here when I say that I am proud to be part of the only university on this good green Earth that accepts Others as students.” He eyed those who were still seated. “For any humans who don’t approve, or who distrust them, this is what I say to you—they live among us now. Deal with it. Intolerance, hatred, fear—these happen outside of these hallowed halls. Those destructive ideologies have no place here. Do you understand?”
The auditorium was silent.
“I said, do you understand?”
A mismatched chorus of weak yeses could be heard in the lecture room. Not the most resounding acknowledgment of Professor Hayes’s ultimatum, but it would have to do. It had only been four years. Change takes time.
“Very good,” Professor Hayes said, motioning for the Others to take their seats again. “Let’s get started. History is not going to teach itself.”
The rest of the class went pretty much like you’d expect a history class to go. Dates, events … yadda, yadda, yadda. Given that this class focused on the Industrial Era and I’d actually lived through that, I was surprised by how inaccurate so much of the history was. I flipped through the textbook, reading about the rise of machines that forced farmers out of the fields and into cities to find work, about overpopulation and pollution that made day-to-day life miserable.
That’s not what I remembered.
I remembered people having more time to think, to dance, to sing. To play. Social classes were beginning to break down and, for the first time ever, the common man had a chance to do more than carry on with whatever menial profession his father had been in.
It was a good time. Not the best, but far better than what preceded it.
Not that I was going to say anything to Professor Hayes. I was a normal human girl in her late teens. Normal human girls in their late teens do not have firsthand experience of the early 1800s.
And to think that I thought this class was going to be a breeze. Now I would have to learn everything they claimed happened and use it to replace everything I knew had actually happened.
Arrgh!
The bell rang and everyone started to pack up and leave. I purposely took my time, hoping Justin Truly would come my way and talk to me. This time I would be more suave. Cool as ice. Act more my age. I’d be the bee’s knees—no, that’s not right. That was human vernacular in the 1920s. This was the new millennium, the GoneGod World. Unfortunately, I had lived through a ton of those eras, each with its own particular and peculiar vernacular—plus, I had a deeeep love for ’80s and ’90s TV—so I wasn’t really hip to modern slang. Yet.
What I did know was that in this era, humans didn’t use words like bee’s knees, groovy or rockn’. And one wasn’t in or down with it anymore.
Modern humans were now saying things like GoneGodDamn! and Empty Heaven. I’d even heard some idiot say Hellelujah! Probably thought he was being clever or something.
That’s what I needed to be—a modern human. But not all of me needed to be modern. I could use some of what I’d learned to lure him in. One thing I learned when stalking prey was that you didn’t wait for Justin to show up. You just happened to be in his path when he did.
I pretended to be engrossed in the class textbook. When he passed, he’d stop and say “Hi,” or maybe something cooler, like “Hey.” I’d lift a casual finger as if to say Give me a minute before looking up as if unaware who had been standing there.
Yeah—that was what a modern human looked like. Calculatedly casual.
Besides, I didn’t need to be too strategic, because—not to sound full of myself—I was cute. Not gorgeous, mind you, but cute. I had a kind of Reese-Witherspoon-in-Legally-Blonde or Sarah-Michelle-Gellar-in-Buffy vibe going for me. I had a cute, confident—yet somehow helpless—aura that I’d cultiv
ated over the centuries of being a vampire.
I had to. It was how I hunted.
During that time, I had two main shticks to lure in my prey. The first one I called Cute and Helpless, and it went like this: “Oh my, Mister Big-and-Strong, it is dark outside and I’m scared. Do you mind walking me home?” That was good when I wanted a quick meal without all the fuss of my prey screaming and running.
The second technique was reserved for when I was in a playful mood: Cute and Terrified. In that routine, I’d find some dark alley or secluded place and start screaming for dear life. Eventually, some macho guy would come running and, well, let’s just say there was some screaming and running on his part. I’d play cat-and-mouse with him for a bit before, you know … to work up an appetite.
I’ll admit it: I was a real bitch back then. But part of me being human again was atoning for all the bad I did when I was the monster who went bump in the night.
The other students shuffled out of the class, but no Justin. No worries—he had sat in the front of the class, so it made sense it would take him a while to get to me. But when the auditorium went quiet, I dared a glance and saw that everyone was gone. Everyone including Professor Hayes. I was totally alone except for the kid from Africa, who stared at me from two rows down.
Evidently, I wasn’t cute enough for Justin to stop and talk to me.
Disappointed, I packed my stuff and stood up. As I did, the kid—who was totally checking me out, by the way, and not in a cute kind of way, but in a creepy-stalker way—kept his eyes on me. It felt like he was looking through me, rather than at me.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I was human, but I wasn’t helpless. I knew things—like where all the major arteries were and which nerves crippled your prey versus the ones that absolutely paralyzed them. Plus, in my travels, I had studied a variety of martial arts. A lot. I figured I was probably one of only a handful of humans with such a wide range of styles, and I’d had hundreds of years to practice them. But although I knew what I was capable of, my heart still raced when I met his gaze and said in the harshest tone I could muster, “What?”
The guy didn’t flinch. He just sniffed the air and said, “You should have stood up.”
History is for the Hyenas
“What? When?” I said, looking the kid right in the eyes. Creepy guys tended to divert their gaze when challenged.
This creepy guy didn’t. He simply kept staring. “You know when.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a girl. A human girl.”
“Sure you are.”
“I am,” I repeated as I slung my bag over my shoulder, and realizing that this guy took creepy to whole new level, I opted to leave the room as fast as I could.
Out in the main hall, I saw Justin mulling about with his McConnell Hall buddies. They jokingly called themselves the Omega Omega Omega (O3 for short) Bros. Their little gang were legends on campus for throwing the biggest and baddest parties.
One of the things I learned while scoping out the place was that they got their name because the Latin letter Omega is mistakenly associated with the Apocalypse. You know—God saying He was the Alpha and Omega and all that. And given that the departure of the gods was an apocalypse of sorts, I guess they were tripling down on the rhetoric. I kinda wanted to tell them that Omega didn’t mean the end, but rather the concept of God being the Alpha and Omega was to give Him a cyclical, renewing nature. You know, circle-of-life kind of stuff. The gods leaving made that Biblical quote kind of meaningless, anyway. But these guys were teenagers on the cusp of adulthood—they were far more interested in the cool factor of the name than anything else. Who was I to burst their bubble?
Besides—Justin made the O3s cool. He made everything cool.
The O3 Bros were standing in a line, handing out flyers alongside an Incan apu who was in the history class with us. They were jostling each other, seeming to be having a good time. Professor Hayes’s warning that we should all get along turned out to be unnecessary. Here were three humans and an Incan apu—an Other belonging to a religion that was now ancient history—and they were getting on just fine.
I tried to position myself so that Justin would hand me one of the flyers, but instead I was intercepted by the apu. Apus were Incan nature spirits and were usually associated with a place—a forest, a river, even a town. These spirits were defenders. If you ever caused trouble in a place protected by one of these guys, you were in for one hell of a fight.
Up close the apu looked like a normal human except for one, eerie difference: he was made of rock. I don’t mean like the Thing in Fantastic Four, nor do I mean he was carved from stone like a gargoyle. His skin was the color of a cave floor, like it was made from slate, with tiny ridges that swooped along his forearm, giving it a weathered look.
But that wasn’t the strangest or most captivating part of him. No, that was reserved for his eyes. It is said that the eyes are windows to the soul—but this apu’s eyes were more like actual windows to the outside. Like I was sitting in a tunnel looking outside to the clear blue, endless sky. Beautiful, eerie, intense.
The apu handed me a flyer and our fingers briefly touched. His skin didn’t only look like a rock, it felt like it, too. Hard, rigid—like touching a moving stone. What’s more, he had dust on his skin, and as I took the flyer, a little bit of sand rolled down its front. This guy flaked sand like some humans flaked dandruff.
I read the flyer:
O3 cordially invites you to
THE END OF THE WORLD
When the gods left, they started an apocalypse.
We aim to finish it.
The O3 party—the first big party of the semester—was two days from now, on the anniversary of the gods’ GrandExodus.
And I was invited.
“So—you in?” His voice had an echo to it, like he was talking in a cave or something. It was a bit unsettling, because generally when one echo was present, all the ambient sounds echoed, too. But here, it was only him. The shuffle of students milling about was perfectly normal.
“Your voice …” I said.
He smiled, like his voice was something that got him a lot of attention from … well … the girls. I guess we all have a shtick—and his was to impress the impressionable with his resonance. “I’m a cave apu—caves have echoes, hence my voice,” he reverberated. “Actually, I was one of the twelve sacred apus of Cusco.” When I gave him a blank look, he followed up with, “Cusco was the capital of the Incan Empire in the fifteenth century.”
“Ahh, so a big deal. Five hundred years ago.”
“Oh, yeah—very big deal five hundred years ago,” he chuckled. Sticking out his hand, he said, “I’m Sal.”
“Oddly normal name for a guy like you, wouldn’t you say?”
He gave me a shy smile and said, “My real name’s Salkantay, as in the highest peak in the Vilcabamba mountain region. You know—the Peruvian Andes.”
I nodded. I’d been there. Granted, that was 180 years ago, but still, I’d seen the place.
Sal closed his sky-like eyes for just a second, but I swear it felt like night had suddenly fallen. Then, when he opened them, a light sky with big puffy clouds returned. “Anyway,” he said, almost embarrassed, “the guys thought it was best to give me a more, ahhh, human name. You see Nate over there—he came up with ‘Sal.’ ” He pointed at the shortest of the Bros, a kid with brown hair cut in a buzz, and I could see genuine affection in those impossibly beautiful eyes of his. “I think they meant it to be ironic. Something so average for someone who looks so different. But I can tell you that I am very honored to be given such a normal name. It means they don’t see me as an Other, but as a friend.”
“He’s right. The fact that those guys teased him by giving him such a boring name means they accepted him as one of them.”
“Boring name?”
Damn it—talking out loud again. I could feel my cheeks flush with embarrassment. “ ‘Sal’ certainly isn’t Algernon or Const
antine … so, yeah, boring.”
“Yeah, but these days I’ll take boring over the alternative.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“So, the party,” he said, tapping the flyer in my hands and sending another wave of sand down the paper. “It’s this Friday. Will you come?”
“Maybe …” I said, throwing in as much coyness as I could.
Evidently, the coyness didn’t take, because he said, “Great, see you then,” and went on to hand another flyer to three girls behind me.
I folded the flyer and put it in my purse. I waved at Justin. He gave me a subtle nod as he continued to play-wrestle with Nate without losing stride. If anything were to happen between Justin and me, it wouldn’t be now. And so, taking that as my cue, I headed out to the main campus, where I hesitated at the threshold. My foot nervously hovered just behind the line where the shade met the light. Like I said—old habits do die hard.
I took a deep breath and stepped into the light. Even though I knew I was human, I still breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t burst into a ball of flames.
Yay, me!
Beggars Evidently Can Be Choosers
& Even Cool Kids Can Be Awkward
The sun didn’t disintegrate me—so at least one thing was going my way today. I know it’s irrational for me to be scared of natural light, but you have to understand that I was a vampire one minute and then a human the next, while fang-deep in some vicar’s neck. It was like someone had flipped a switch. On—vampire. Off—human.